Gee, remember when everybody was frantic because AOL and Time/Warner were going to take over the known universe? Kind of like everyone thought that Japan was going to buy up America.

I don’t usually engage in schadenfreude, but I’ll make an exception in this case, because it’s so poetically just.

The AOL meltdown has busted Ted Turner. Guess no more big giveaways to idiotic causes for him.

And I found this sentence most amusing:

His ex-wife Jane Fonda was much luckier and escaped major damage from the wipeout. In her prenuptial pact with Ted, she got a maximum of $10 million in AOL stock, but in the past year she gave away most of it to environmental causes and liberal Democrats running for public office.

I hope they held and didn’t sell.

It’s not looking good for the miners in Pennsylvania–the drill that they were using to make a new shaft broke its bit, and they’re losing valuable time flying in a new one (one wonders why they didn’t have a backup already there).

But it seems to me that there’s another problem that I haven’t seen discussed. They’re pumping compressed air in to force back the water. Presumably the air pressure down there is pretty high, and they’ve been down there a long time, so they’ve got to be pretty nitrogen saturated. When they rescue them, how are they going to keep them from bending, perhaps fatally, when they come up to surface pressure? Are they just going to medivac them to the nearest hyperbaric chamber?

Margaret Wertheim laments the passing of Futurama. Me, too.

But she also has an interesting article on the next frontier in robotics–artificial digestion.

The government continues to go out of their way to avoid investigating anything that might show a Middle-East connection to Oklahoma City, even when it could bolster their case against Moussaoui. In fact, they may not only have avoided evidence, they may have deliberately disposed of it.

The motel owner said he and his staff reported this information to the FBI in 1995. “We did have an ATF agent come out and collect the originals of the room registrations for that period, but we never heard back from them. And I never could get the registrations returned.” He added that his previous experience with the FBI made him reluctant to contact them about Moussaoui. “But I decided it was my duty to tell them what had happened. So I did.”

Former Oklahoma City TV reporter Jayna Davis also interviewed motel staff and former guests. In the process, she collected signed affidavits about their contacts with McVeigh and the Iraqis. She tried twice to give the Bureau this information, but the FBI refused to accept her materials.

I don’t understand why Jim Crogan and Paul Sperry are the only reporters following this story. It could turn out to be a blockbuster, but most of the press seems to want to avert their eyes along with the FBI and the Administration. Perhaps because they too were all too eager to pin OKC exclusively on the evil right wingers…

This was just posted to sci.space.* newsgroups by Jeff Greason, head of XCOR.

FYI, the EZ-Rocket flew a flight, exactly on the plan, exactly on time, at 3:04 PM local time, at the EAA’s Oshkosh “AirVenture 2002” today.

Quite an audience (~1E5 people), and the team and I are all very, very happy.

I’m mostly out of contact but there’ll be more info later

— Jeff Greason
XCOR Aerospace

This should be very helpful in raising funds. There are a lot of wealthy aviation enthusiasts present.

Paul Sperry has a pretty ugly indictment of the Clinton Administration’s war on terrorism. As we’ve seen in stories continuing to come out about the OKC bombing, they directed the FBI (and other agencies) to focus on homegrown terrorism (you know, the evil right wingers) and to basically ignore anything from overseas.

No wonder they didn’t want to allow all the evidence to come out in McVeigh’s trial. It would have made it harder to hew to their political agenda.

The Clinton-era emphasis on “right-wing” terrorism wasn’t limited to the FBI. Other federal law enforcement branches also focused on the domestic threat from militia groups over the foreign threat from Islamic groups.

The head of security at the Commerce Department, for one, sanitized a Y2K counterterrorism report distributed to the Census Bureau by removing Islamic threats. Only threats from white “right-wing” groups were included in the report, Commerce security officials told WorldNetDaily.

A classic Jewish story I just got via email

***********************

Standing on the shore, a Jewish lady watches her grandson playing in the water.

She is thunderstruck when she sees a huge wave crash over him. When it recedes, the boy is no longer there — he had vanished!

Screaming, the woman holds her hands to the sky and cries, “Lord, how could you?”

“Have I not been a wonderful mother and grandmother?”
“Have I not scrimped and saved so I could give to the temple?”
“Have I not always put others before myself?”
“Have I not always turned my other cheek and loved my neighbors?”
“Have I not–!!”

A deep loud voice from the sky interrupts. “Enough already, give me a break!”

Immediately, another huge wave appears and crashes on the beach. And when it recedes, the boy is there smiling, splashing around as if nothing ever happened.

The deep loud voice continues. “I have returned your grandson. Are you satisfied?”

The grandmother responds, “He had a hat.”

I’ve known about this deal for a while, but this is the first story I’ve seen that includes an artist’s concept of the vehicle. It’s a pretty bird. There are some more pics at the XCOR site.

Basically, the story is that XCOR and Space Adventures have teamed up to raise funds to develop a suborbital passenger vehicle.

In which I discourse on emergent stupidity.

A man is suing several fast-food chains, blaming them for his obesity.