Qatar, the country in which we’ve built up new logistics bases, and from which our attack on Iraq will most likely be launched, may present a model for a modern Middle East (link for subscribers only, unfortunately).

In the past seven years, this tiny emirate has gone through a social revolution that has given women — and men — freedoms unheard of in most of the Arabian Peninsula. From lifting the prohibition on alcohol to abolishing censorship, Qatar has gone to great lengths to underscore just how different it is from Saudi Arabia. In the capital of Doha, which the Lonely Planet guidebook called the “dullest place on Earth” just a few years ago, nightclubs advertise happy hours and women cruise down the palm- tree-lined boulevards at the wheels of oversize sport-utility vehicles.

and

Even relatively liberal Saudis voice frustration with the tiny emirate. “A small country will always be a small country, and influence can only be gained by cultivating ties with neighbors and working with them as a team,” scoffs Abdelaziz al Fayez, a member of the foreign-affairs committee in Saudi Arabia’s appointed legislature, Majlis al Shura. The Qatari social reforms, he adds, just “show a willingness to uproot their roots in order to please outsiders.”

That makes some Qataris both angry and proud. “It’s not important whether our reforms bother the neighbors, it’s important whether they satisfy the Qatari society,” says Ahmed Ali, editor of the biggest of Qatar’s three Arabic- language dailies, Al Watan. “Maybe change in this entire traditionalist region will start right here, in the smallest country.”

OK, it looks like they caught the guy(s).

Hmmmm…an African-American fellow by the name of Muhammed. Nope, no Muslims here, folks, nothing to see, move along.

The disappointment among the press corps that it wasn’t an evil right-wing white militia type is almost palpable. Now they don’t get to talk about the culture of hate, and blame Rush Limbaugh, and talk radio, and all of us evil right-wing bloggers. In particular they don’t get to do it two weeks before a mid-term election, in which they can paint Republicans as bigoted enablers of right-wing violence.

But of course, they could talk about the Saudi-funded maddrassas and mosques, and the Nation of Islam, and screwie Louie Farrakhan (one news report indicated that he was a body guard for the (less-than-a) Million Moronan March), and how all of their hate speech incited this evil and weak-minded man to violence.

I’m sure they’ll start any minute.

Any minute now.

[crickets chirping]

[Update on Thursday night, about 10 PM PDT]

Jonah Goldberg says the same thing I do, except he uses a lot more words. And he has a lot more data, which I didn’t have the legwork or time to gather. And it’s a lot more interesting and entertaining read.

Go read it.

NASA may, thankfully, be about to make major changes in its vaunted “Space Launch Initiative,” known in acronym shorthand as SLI.

A major review of the program scheduled for November has been rescheduled, with no definite new date. Its future is in flux, as policy in space transportation (particularly reusable space transportation) is clearly being rethought.

There are a number of factors that drive this. The current plan is based on the (in my opinion, flawed) doctrine from the Clinton Administration that NASA would be responsible for reusable vehicles, and the Air Force would take the lead for expendable ones. But with the shakeup in the military space program being instigated by Don Rumsfeld, the assumptions behind this philosophy, to the degree that they were ever valid, are becoming more dubious by the day.

The Air Force, if it is to exercise the sort of “space control” envisioned by the new Rumsfeld policy recommendations, is going to have to have routine access to space, perhaps with crew aboard. This will only be accomplished (at least economically) with fast-response reusable systems. It is pointless to move forward with SLI in its current form until its relationship with military space activities, currently non-existent, can be resolved.

But the more significant policy revisit is driven by recognition of the fact that the program was incoherent, and directed by space-agency agendas not necessarily congruent with low-cost access.

The original idea of SLI, started in the wake of the disastrous X-33 program, was that NASA would take the lead in developing technology for “next-generation” launch systems. This was code word for new reusable space transportation systems.

More importantly, hijacked by various factions at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, and the Marshall Spaceflight Center in Huntsville, it was really a plan to build a replacement for the current Space Shuttle, to be developed and operated by NASA, and thus preserve the current empires and fiefdoms that make the present Space Shuttle so costly and inefficient, and ensuring a continued costly monopoly of manned space by the agency for decades to come.

This agenda is revealed by the wording in popular accounts of the program’s purpose, in which the definite article is generally used to describe the desired outcome.

“The next-generation vehicle.”

“The ‘Shuttle II'”

“The Shuttle replacement.”

Note the implicit assumption–there will be a replacement for the current Shuttle and it will be a replacement, not replacements (plural).

In the space community, the question is often asked, “What will the next Shuttle look like?” Popular articles about space similarly speculate on the nature of the “next Shuttle.” The question is often asked “can we get a Shuttle to the Moon?” (The answer is no).

Clearly, “Shuttle” has become synonymous in the minds of many in the public with space vehicle.

In his great work, Analects, the ancient Chinese philosopher Confucious wrote that if he was ever asked for wisdom by the government, the first thing he would tell them was that, before he could provide such advice, a rectification of names would be required.

If names are not rectified, then language will not be in accord with truth.

If language is not in accord with truth, then things cannot be accomplished.

It would be well for the government in general, and NASA in particular, to heed this admonition.

As a humble beginning to such a rectification of names, I hereby propose that we purge the word “Shuttle” from our national space vocabulary. As applied to space vehicles, it is a word from a different era. It was an era still in the Cold War, when few could imagine a space program without NASA in charge, when few could imagine free enterprise offering rides into space. It became a symbol of a national space program, one size fits all–a vehicle that could build space stations, resupply space stations, and indeed (as a fallback position, in case the funding didn’t come through for space stations in the future) be a space station itself.

Shuttle was dramatically overspecified. Its payload capacity was too large. Its ability to change direction on entry (called cross range), which made its wings much larger than otherwise needed, was dictated not by NASA’s requirements, but by the Department of Defense, whose blessing was necessary for program approval. It wasn’t just a truck, but a Winnebago, capable of acting as a space hotel and science lab as well as a delivery system. These, among other reasons, are why it is so expensive, and such a policy failure.

Yes, while Shuttle is a magnificent technical achievement, it truly is a catastrophic policy failure–a failure made almost tangible, in half-billion-dollar increments each time it flies, a few times a year.

And the failure is not in its design–it is in its requirements, its very philosophy, the very notion that a single system can be all things to all people, or even all things to all parts of our space agency. Anything that replaces the Shuttle, in terms of those requirements, will suffer from the same flaws and failures.

We don’t need a replacement for the Shuttle.

We need a space transportation industry.

It should be like our air transportation industry, or our ground transportation industry, competitive and flexible, to meet the needs of individuals and large corporations, and it should be based on the principles of a market economy–not the wish list of government bureaucrats.

We don’t have a “national airplane.” We don’t have a “national truck,” or a “national bus.” We have a variety of vehicles, tailored to a variety of markets at variety of prices for different customers and desires.

Three decades ago, with hope in our hearts, fresh from our lunar success, we initiated the first Space Shuttle program. If we wish a vibrant future in space, one in which thousands of people will venture off the planet in pursuit of their dreams, we should hope, even more, that it’s also our last.

[Update on Friday night]

Frank Sietzen at the Space Transportation Association has responded to the column.

I’ve responded to his response.

Billy Beck is (more than) upset about this.

Me, too. We all need to defend Remington.

The headline to this story is mistitled. It should instead read “Most Americans Ignorant Of The Facts About Bullet ‘Fingerprinting’.”

It says that most Americans believe that bullet fingerprinting would solve the shooting spree in Tidewater country.

So what? What are we to make of this? What is the point? Scientific subjects, and matters of fact, are not fit topics for opinion polls. The public, in its hysteria and lack of knowlege, may have such an opinion, but there’s no basis for it, and it shouldn’t be used as a basis for public policy.

Here’s a NASA employee who isn’t impressed with the new NASA Information Technology czar.

Apparently, Mr. Strassmann recently took a tour of the Information Technology aspects of NASA and described it as like “an archaeological expedition”; not an entirely flattering remark, but perhaps he said it to a crowd of employees summoned to a parking lot somewhere, which would bring it up to NASA’s standards. One thing Mr. Strassmann might want to educate himself on is the small budget issues that have been eating NASA alive for the last few years: it is something of a challenge to revamp a center’s computing strategy while the space station is moaning “Feed Me!” Also, he might interrupt his chanting of “One NASA, Good NASA” long enough to notice that NASA is, in fact, quite diverse, with quite diverse computing needs.

We range from the people at the Cape who fill the tanks with fuel and push the big red button to the folks in Cleveland who are trying to figure out how to get the blue light to come out of the warp nacelles. The same dumb terminal fiber-coupled to his new computing center at Marshall is not going to meet all those needs. And finally, I have to wonder just who Mr. Strassmann visited on his archaeological expedition. I can state for a fact that he didn?t visit me: if he can look at what I am doing and see it as fossilized footprints in the creek bed of computing, then one of us has our plug out of the wall, and it is not me.

Iain Murray, in drug-warrior mode, is upset at Reason magazine for saying that a family whose house was torched by a drug dealer whom they’d been trying to get out of the neighborhood were more casualties of the drug war. He compares the drug dealer to the sniper, and accuses Reason of a double standard because in the case of the former, they say that the sniper is solely responsible, whereas in the case of the latter, they pin part of the blame on drug policy.

I don’t see the double standard, because the two cases are different. There’s no discernable policy that caused the sniper to snipe (at least not based on evidence seen to date), but clearly, if drugs were legal, it’s unlikely that that particular person would even be a dealer, since he’d probably be off engaged in some more lucrative (illegal) activity. The dealer has a reason for his action (though not an excuse or justification) that stems from the brutal incentives put in place by drug laws. At least it can be said of him that there is a rational (albeit evil) purpose to his targeting those individuals. The sniper is killing people randomly. There is a difference.

But in the comments section, some related issues came up. Iain claims that there’s no problem with outlawing drugs, because “society wants it.” I disagreed, stating that I thought that most or all federal drug laws are unconstitutional under (among other things), the Tenth Amendment.

The reason that we have the Bill of Rights is to protect us from things that society may “want,” like rounding up people of a certain ethnicity and interning them, or silencing a group of people with a certain point of view. The “interest of society” is not sufficient to deprive people of their rights, and while I have no desire to do so, I have trouble seeing how I don’t have an intrinsic right to burn vegetation and suck it into my lungs. They’re my lungs. If I go out and commit some actual crime as a result, then justice should be served, but the simple act of ingesting a substance is not, or at least, should not be, a crime.

One of the problems with federalizing this (and indeed, in federalizing many crimes, as currently seems to be the trend, unless we can get a Supreme Court that will roll back this overreach) is that there’s no way to do any social experiments.

The drug warriors take it as a given that drug laws minimize drug use and harm, purely on a theoretical basis, since there’s little empirical evidence to support it. There is an assumption behind them that drug laws suppress drug use, and that absent them, many more would take drugs. They may be right, but it’s difficult to know, because we dont have any labs in which to test the proposition in any kind of controlled way.

One of the beauties of the original concept of federalism was that the states would serve as such social laboratories, and could try different policies in accordance to their culture and the will of their own people. It probably is constitutional for a state to regulate (and even outlaw) drugs–the liquor and tobacco example provides plenty of precedent.

But because Washington has taken away the prerogative, we have no opportunity to do such experiments, and see what really is the best solution to this pressing social problem. Regardless of their opinions on the effectiveness and justice of drug prohibition, self-identified conservatives should be concerned by the fact that, as in many other policies, we have an overbearing government in Washington that has decided that one size fits all.

There’s now no question that this is terrorism. The only question is the nature and purpose of the terrorist(s).

There’s now no question that this is terrorism. The only question is the nature and purpose of the terrorist(s).

There’s now no question that this is terrorism. The only question is the nature and purpose of the terrorist(s).