If people who run a regime like this cannot be called evil, then no one can.

Which is, of course, the goal of many of our “allies.” It’s gruesome reading, and bear in mind, while reading it, that the organizers of Saturday’s “peace” marches support this regime.

T. L. James has a thoughtful post on the space program as the outcome of a mass movement.

Jay Manifold has a post on nanotech and its implications for space, and vice versa.

Jay Manifold has a post on nanotech and its implications for space, and vice versa.

Jay Manifold has a post on nanotech and its implications for space, and vice versa.

The White House has pointed out that, in attempting to persuade the world that we shouldn’t go after Saddam, France has essentially admitted that he has WMD programs.

Also,

In a backhanded slap at France, Fleischer also said the president wasn’t terribly surprised that some countries are advocating going easy on Iraq. Fleischer said the president has often viewed his own role as one of “putting spine” into the U.N. and the international community.

Boy, for all of supposedly being the people who invented diplomacy, the Frogs are sure off their game. And being outsmarted by a retarded cowboy, too. That’s gotta hurt.

Derek Lowe has an interesting post about bacteria that may hold the key to long-duration space travel. Unfortunately, it won’t be of much use to any of us, other than Bacterium-Americans…

But what about keeping spares around in a spare nucleus – a sort of “break glass in case of emergency” DNA vault? That would require biological engineering beyond our current capabilities, but if and when we get there, I can think of a good use for such an organism. For some years now, Freeman Dyson (yep, him again) has been advocating what he’s called an “astrochicken” space probe. That’s a part-living device that is hardened to survive in vacuum, use solar power, furnish its own propulsion, obtain its fuel from local sources, and so on. A satellite that needs to eat, in other words. (You can find one description of such a device in his book Infinite in All Directions)

I think he’s got a very good point, and that biotechnology might well turn out to be a key for space exploration. What better way to package such an organism’s DNA than to follow the durable example of Deinococcus radiodurans?

Mathematician John Allen Paulos (author of Innumeracy) has the numbers that show why Total Information Awareness won’t work, and will have a tremendous cost in both money and freedom.

…the system will arrest almost 3 million innocent people, about 3,000 times the number of guilty ones. And that occurs, remember, only because we’re assuming the system has these amazing powers of discernment. If its powers are anything like our present miserable predictive capacities, an even greater percentage of those arrested will be innocent.

Andrew Stuttaford points out that despite the popular perception, there’s very little about Arianna Huffington that could be properly labeled “conservative.” I don’t know if there’s this perception of her as right wing because of her history (a bizarre one, in which she was married to a rich Republican liberal who almost beat Diane Feinstein in her first Senatorial election, and then divorced him after he came out of the closet about his sexual preference for men), that’s simply hanging on from inertia, or what.

One possibility is that the press likes to have liberals who they can label as conservative, so that when the supposed “conservative” opposes some Republican position, they can say, “Gee, this must really be an egregiously neanderthal policy if even the conservative Arianna Huffington is against it…”

I was thinking about this the other day while listening to a radio program on KCRW (the LA NPR affiliate) called “Left, Right and Center.” It’s hosted by Matt Miller (former Clinton budget guy), with Arianna and Robert Scheer. I guess the idea was that Scheer was left (no question about that), Huffington was “right,” and that Mr. Miller represented the center. It was always kind of laughable, but today it just seems ridiculously so.

In fact, to demonstrate how sinister-tilted they all are, they had David Frum on to defend the Administration’s policy on affirmative action in general and the Michigan case in particular. All three sides of the supposed political spectrum proceeded to gang up on both him and the Administration (though Miller at least was willing to acknowledge that the Administration might have some merit in some of its arguments).

The show’s title should be “Left, Lefter and Loony.” But then, it’s NPR, where they have both kinds of politics–liberal and progressive.

[Update on Tuesday morning]

N. Z. Bear informs me that I’m behind the times–Frum is now a regular, and that he is the right. OK, that still begs the question, what the heck is Arianna?

Los Angeles has many restaurants. It even has many good restaurants.

I once wondered how long it would take to try them all. I started by estimating how many there were, and then calculating how many breakfasts, lunches and dinners I would have to consume to get through the list. But then I realized that it was almost certainly impossible to do so, because many of them would close before I had a chance to get to them, and others would open that I hadn’t gotten to yet. There simply was not enough time in a serial process (and I have only one mouth, so there’s no way to parallelize it) to accomplish the task.

I was reminded of this little mental exercise by the current discussion of whether the inspectors in Iraq are doing their job properly, or even can.

In my fury over Mr. Tisdall’s blatant lie, described in my previous post, I failed to get to the end of his article, in which I found this gem:

But the fact remains that proof of serious, serial deception is so far lacking; that there has been none of the predicted Iraqi obstruction; and that the inspectors, backed by Kofi Annan, want much more time to do their job properly. And even if a “smoking gun” were found in some Basra bunker, so what? This would be a success, meaning the investigations are working.

Let’s not even bother to point out that the first sentence is blithering nonsense, as both Rumsfeld and Powell pointed out on the Sunday talk shows this weekend.

This is the latest disingenuous tactic of those opposing the removal of Saddam from power. Heads I win, tails you lose.

If the inspectors fail to find anything, it means that there’s nothing there to find, or that they aren’t looking hard enough, so the inspections must continue for months, or years.

If the inspectors find something, it means that the “inspections process is working,” and so the inspections must continue, for months, or years.

It depends, of course, on continuing to misrepresent both the clear language of last October’s UN resolution, and the purpose of the inspectors. As Rumsfeld pointed out, they are inspectors, not “finders.” They are supposed to be inspecting and verifying weapons described and displayed by a cooperative Iraqi government (weapons, that is, that the Iraqi government declared in December didn’t exist). They are not supposed to be playing cat and mouse, and “catch me if you can.”

If it is their job to find weapons, in a country the size of Iraq, that the Iraqi government continues to try to hide, often in a shell game of moving them from one palace to another, they don’t have enough “inspectors” and even if they did, they will all be old and dead before the job is complete. They’ll never “eat at all the restaurants,” per my example above. Saddam will have ample time to develop not just nukes, but fusion weapons, and even photon torpedos and planet-busting death rays.

Purely and simply, “the inspections must go on” is the mantra of those who want Saddam to go on as well, because under such a scenario, short of natural causes, there will be no means to remove him, any more than there has been over the past decades.