Those Gauche Americans

A little news on the space tourist front. Well, it’s not news exactly–more of an editorial. From a Moscow television station. The translation was passed on to me by a reliable source, and it provides an interesting view into the mindset of some Russians toward the whole thing.

The following is a translation of a segment on the 9 PM July 29, 2002, news program of ORT-TV, one of Russia’s leading television networks.

“The Avia-Space Agency of Russian Federation has just concluded a preliminary space travel contract with Lanz Bass, a member of the pop band N ‘SYNC. However, it’s a little bit early to think that the third chair in the ‘Soyuz’ that will depart this Fall to the International Space Station is already taken.

“The final decision about the pop-star’s participation will be made only after the sponsors of the project will have paid at least some of their financial obligations. The 23-year old Lanz Bass, born in a small town of Mississippi, says that he has dreamed of flying to space since he was a little kid. Now his dream is very close to its fulfillment, but the pleasure will be an expensive one. This time around, NASA executives did not express their discontent with Bass’ flight, but in general, their attitude towards space tourists is complex: they cause too much trouble.

“But the pop-star has another major difficulty right now: how is he going to pay 20 mln dollars for his flight? As some media says, Bass is supported by a big fan of commercial space flights, Walter Anderson, the president of MirCorp. and by some other sponsors, including the music TV-channel ‘MTV’ and a Hollywood company ‘Destiny Productions’. Sponsors are the key problem for the N’SYNC singer: MTV and ‘Destiny Productions’ have Napoleonic plans for this occasion – they’ve already inked some agreements for producing a feature film and a series of shows about the singer’s training period and about the flight itself, of course. Sensing great profits, they forgot a simple thing: before you get a profit, you have to make an investment. They’ve invested nothing thus far – they don’t have enough money.

I suspect that by “Napoleonic,” the translator meant grandiose. Of course, Russians probably still have a thing about Napolean, even two centuries on…

“President of ‘Destiny Productions’ David Krieff stated in Los Angeles that ‘the money will be there’. It isn’t hard to imagine what kind of money it will be: the money made on sex and violence, aggressiveness and stupidity.

Since the middle of 1980’s, David Krieff supplies MTV and other TV-channels with vulgar, harsh, filthy, degenerate shows. They present young idiots making weird performances, telling rude stupid jokes, showing to the viewer their genitals, setting themselves on fire. The top of the class has become
a Sunday MTV show ‘Jackass’, where its perverted guests jump into a load of dung and throw excrement into each other. Even the senators lost their tolerance and expressed their negative attitude towards the show ‘Jackass’.

Another imperfect translation, no doubt, though I might actually pay to see some of the jackasses throwing “excrement into each other.”

As the protocol says, the training period for the flight to the International Space Station has to endure no less than six months. The Avia-Space Agency of Russian Federation asked NASA to make an exception for Lance Bass – they really need money and this project offered to them by the show-business investors seems to them quite appealing.

“It is said that in America money doesn’t smell. It looks like it’s the same way in Russia now. While Lance Bass is undergoing his training period in Star City, David Krieff and company are busy making money for the contract payment. Many people here think that this money is dirty. And nonetheless does smell.”

Sounds like some folks who long for the good old days when such crude unsocialist materialistic entertainment types were just shipped off to the gulag.

Peace Is At Hand

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…

Lies, Damned Lies And Statistics

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.”

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