The State Department is apparently in charge of long-term planning for human space exploration. That certainly sets my mind at ease.
It would be nice if we could take space seriously on a policy level, but I don’t expect it to happen any time soon. As long as the politicians are in charge, it will serve primarily as a playground for pork and foreign policy.
The Toronto Star says that Bill Clinton has a plan.
It’s very simple, really. Just establish a Palestinian state. Now.
And he’s serious. At least as serious as Bill Clinton ever is about anything (other than getting even with his enemies).
But this was my favorite part:
Clinton drew applause for his own commitment to Israel when he stated that should the Iraqis ever cross over the Israeli border for aggression, “I would personally get in a ditch, grab a rifle, and fight and die.”
It’s not clear if the applause was because they actually believed the old draft dodger (possible, in a Canadian audience that was apparently there voluntarily), because it was such a side-splitting joke, or because the image itself was so hilarious.
Anyway, it’s obvious that Mr. Clinton has no military experience (though he finally managed to learn how to salute after eight years of practice). One doesn’t generally find rifles in ditches. But it wouldn’t be surprising to find Bill Clinton in one…
I missed John Stossel’s ABC special on the War on (Some) Drugs last night, but I heard that he made Asa Hutchinson look like an ass, and it apparently hit a nerve. Bob Weiner has gone after him with a lot of unadulterated Bravo Sierra.
…Stossel pushes his inaccurate points that the drug war ‘creates crime’ when it is precisely the opposite: drug use generates murders, domestic violence, and date rapes. He soft pedals marijuana use, with assertions by an archetypical long haired user that ‘marijuana hasn’t killed anyone,’ but has no one pointing out that marijuana is the second leading cause of car crashes as well as the primary drug in teen drug treatment…
Of course, he provides no evidence that drug use, per se, generates murders or domestic violence. I certainly can’t imagine marijuana doing that.
And I’d wager that most date rapes are caused by alcohol.
As for marijuana being the second leading cause of car crashes, I’m aware of no data on that subject. I think he’s probably just making it up. And as for the teen drug treatment story, there’s no context to describe what such “treatment” might be or why it might be necessary (though it’s often basically a Kafkaesque imprisonment, in which denials of drug use are taken to be proof of drug use).
The drug warriors are getting desperate.
[Update at 9:40 AM PDT]
On the marijuana causing traffic accidents thing, he was apparently repeating an old lie of Barry McCaffrey’s. From Jacob Sullum’s Reason article on the subject:
“Marijuana is now the second-leading cause of car crashes among young people,” McCaffrey wrote in USA Today a couple of years ago. This claim surprised Dale Gieringer, California coordinator of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, who called McCaffrey?s office for the source.
Gieringer was referred to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. A NHTSA spokesman confirmed that marijuana is the second most common drug detected after fatal crashes but emphasized that it is not necessarily a cause of those accidents.
As Gieringer noted in his newsletter, a 1990-91 study by NHTSA found that 52 percent of drivers in fatal crashes had alcohol in their blood, compared to 7 percent with traces of marijuana. In analyzing the role that drugs played in the crashes, NHTSA found “no indication that marijuana by itself was a cause of fatal accidents.”
I want Mr. Weiner to write on the chalkboard a thousand times, “Correlation is not causation.”
Ronald Bailey suggests that humanity is Gaia’s immune system.
I think he’s right. And it’s a lot more flattering (and accurate) analogy than calling us a cancer.
Jim Traficant’s name in prison will be “Dirtbox Demon.”
John Walker Lindh’s will be “F**k Stick.”
And if the Justice Department had actually done its job, Robert Torricelli’s would have been “Fruit Loop.”
At least, that’s what this web site says. When they start coming after bloggers, what will your name in the Big House be?
Is there no aspect of American life that federal politicians think they shouldn’t be managing? The Senate is contemplating a bill to address obesity. I wonder what the average body mass index of the upper house is?
I doubt that these guys are in a position to lecture anyone else on healthy diets. But then, these same people who bloviate on and lie about things like Social Security “lockboxes” think that they’re qualified to criticize corporate bookkeeping.
I’ve got an article up at TechCentralStation today on (what else?) the potential ethical implications of cryonics for the medical establishment.
There’s a good story in USA Today on progress in vitrification, which is freezing animal tissue into a glasslike state. This is the best near-term technology for reducing the damage caused by freezing cryonics patients.
The article makes it sound like Fahey and Wowk are part of the mainstream cryobiological community (which in fact they are), which will have some members of it grinding their teeth.
There’s a project to port Linux to XBox. Since Microsoft is almost giving the hardware away, with the idea that they’ll make money on the gaming software, this would blow a huge hole in their business strategy.