Charles Krauthammer has a piece in this week’s Time about why we’re winning the war against Islamicism. It was always pointless to ask “Why do they hate us?” They hate us for reasons that we can do nothing about, and still remain ourselves–they hate us because we are not radical Islamicists. The question we should have been asking instead is “Why don’t they respect us”? Well, now they do, and the “Arab street” has been silenced.

We can now, however, carry on with a confidence we did not have before Afghanistan. Confidence that even religious fanaticism can be defeated, that despite its bravado, it carries no mandate from heaven. The psychological effect of our stunning victory in Afghanistan is already evident. We see the beginning of self-reflection in the Arab press, asking what Arab jihadists are doing exporting their problems to places like Afghanistan and the West; wondering why the Arab world uniquely has not developed a single real democracy; and asking, most fundamentally, how a great religion like Islam could have harbored a malignant strain that would rejoice in the death of 3,000 innocents. It is the kind of questioning that Europeans engaged in after World War II (asking how Fascism and Nazism could have been bred in the bosom of European Christianity) but that was sadly lacking in the Islamic world. Until now.

Charles Krauthammer has a piece in this week’s Time about why we’re winning the war against Islamicism. It was always pointless to ask “Why do they hate us?” They hate us for reasons that we can do nothing about, and still remain ourselves–they hate us because we are not radical Islamicists. The question we should have been asking instead is “Why don’t they respect us”? Well, now they do, and the “Arab street” has been silenced.

We can now, however, carry on with a confidence we did not have before Afghanistan. Confidence that even religious fanaticism can be defeated, that despite its bravado, it carries no mandate from heaven. The psychological effect of our stunning victory in Afghanistan is already evident. We see the beginning of self-reflection in the Arab press, asking what Arab jihadists are doing exporting their problems to places like Afghanistan and the West; wondering why the Arab world uniquely has not developed a single real democracy; and asking, most fundamentally, how a great religion like Islam could have harbored a malignant strain that would rejoice in the death of 3,000 innocents. It is the kind of questioning that Europeans engaged in after World War II (asking how Fascism and Nazism could have been bred in the bosom of European Christianity) but that was sadly lacking in the Islamic world. Until now.

Charles Krauthammer has a piece in this week’s Time about why we’re winning the war against Islamicism. It was always pointless to ask “Why do they hate us?” They hate us for reasons that we can do nothing about, and still remain ourselves–they hate us because we are not radical Islamicists. The question we should have been asking instead is “Why don’t they respect us”? Well, now they do, and the “Arab street” has been silenced.

We can now, however, carry on with a confidence we did not have before Afghanistan. Confidence that even religious fanaticism can be defeated, that despite its bravado, it carries no mandate from heaven. The psychological effect of our stunning victory in Afghanistan is already evident. We see the beginning of self-reflection in the Arab press, asking what Arab jihadists are doing exporting their problems to places like Afghanistan and the West; wondering why the Arab world uniquely has not developed a single real democracy; and asking, most fundamentally, how a great religion like Islam could have harbored a malignant strain that would rejoice in the death of 3,000 innocents. It is the kind of questioning that Europeans engaged in after World War II (asking how Fascism and Nazism could have been bred in the bosom of European Christianity) but that was sadly lacking in the Islamic world. Until now.

Loon^H^H^H^Hanalyst Joel Skausen has the real scoop on why Bush is abrogating the ABM Treaty. He wants to force Putin into a decapitating first strike before it’s too late, so that the Trilateralists can then institute a World Government. You’ll never get this story from the Grey Old Lady.

Sometimes I wonder if Republican operatives pay people to publish this kind of stuff to keep Bush in the center, under fire from both sides…

I had a weird experience this morning in browsing Nasawatch (a recommended site, by the way, for those interested in space policy and doings–Keith doesn’t always get it right, but it’s a good source for scuttlebutt that often turns out to be quite correct). I clicked on a link to a story at Spaceref, and got a long delay as it tried to access the server. Like watched pots boiling, watched browser windows never load, so I gave up and switched to a different one momentarily (I run Opera, which allows one to have multiple windows open simultaneously). When I went back to check progress, I saw a simple message–“HTTP/1.1 Server Too Busy.”

I backed up to the main page, and tried the link again. This time, without delay, I got the same message. Theorizing that I was possibly looking at a cached page, I hit the reload button. This time, it came back with the same message, but in a font at least ten points larger–“HTTP/1.1 SERVER TOO BUSY.” I could almost have sworn that it was shouting at me.

OK, OK, I’m sorry. I’ll try later.

Did someone really anticipate that someone might do a reload in such a situation, and deliberately write code that would up the font size? Or has the combination of Moore’s Law and the interconnectivity of the net finally hit critical mass in servers, and intelligence (and irritation with us lower, less-intelligent life forms) is becoming an emergent property?

Theories welcome.

I had a weird experience this morning in browsing Nasawatch (a recommended site, by the way, for those interested in space policy and doings–Keith doesn’t always get it right, but it’s a good source for scuttlebutt that often turns out to be quite correct). I clicked on a link to a story at Spaceref, and got a long delay as it tried to access the server. Like watched pots boiling, watched browser windows never load, so I gave up and switched to a different one momentarily (I run Opera, which allows one to have multiple windows open simultaneously). When I went back to check progress, I saw a simple message–“HTTP/1.1 Server Too Busy.”

I backed up to the main page, and tried the link again. This time, without delay, I got the same message. Theorizing that I was possibly looking at a cached page, I hit the reload button. This time, it came back with the same message, but in a font at least ten points larger–“HTTP/1.1 SERVER TOO BUSY.” I could almost have sworn that it was shouting at me.

OK, OK, I’m sorry. I’ll try later.

Did someone really anticipate that someone might do a reload in such a situation, and deliberately write code that would up the font size? Or has the combination of Moore’s Law and the interconnectivity of the net finally hit critical mass in servers, and intelligence (and irritation with us lower, less-intelligent life forms) is becoming an emergent property?

Theories welcome.

I had a weird experience this morning in browsing Nasawatch (a recommended site, by the way, for those interested in space policy and doings–Keith doesn’t always get it right, but it’s a good source for scuttlebutt that often turns out to be quite correct). I clicked on a link to a story at Spaceref, and got a long delay as it tried to access the server. Like watched pots boiling, watched browser windows never load, so I gave up and switched to a different one momentarily (I run Opera, which allows one to have multiple windows open simultaneously). When I went back to check progress, I saw a simple message–“HTTP/1.1 Server Too Busy.”

I backed up to the main page, and tried the link again. This time, without delay, I got the same message. Theorizing that I was possibly looking at a cached page, I hit the reload button. This time, it came back with the same message, but in a font at least ten points larger–“HTTP/1.1 SERVER TOO BUSY.” I could almost have sworn that it was shouting at me.

OK, OK, I’m sorry. I’ll try later.

Did someone really anticipate that someone might do a reload in such a situation, and deliberately write code that would up the font size? Or has the combination of Moore’s Law and the interconnectivity of the net finally hit critical mass in servers, and intelligence (and irritation with us lower, less-intelligent life forms) is becoming an emergent property?

Theories welcome.

Dr. Patrick Collins, one of the foremost experts on the subject, has an editorial in Aviation Week on the value of space tourism to the future of the space industry in the 21st century. Definitely worth a read if you’re interested in space, and your own prospects for going.

Speaking of terrorists, and Marxists, Gerry Adams finally made his trip to Cuba and had a little love fest with the guy who runs the place–demonstrating his Fidelity to the cause, so to speak. Hmmm…does this make Sinn Fein an organization “of global reach”?

I’ve been reluctant to get into the silly food fight between Jonah Goldberg and the various flavors of libertarians, because I have little confidence that I can make a useful contribution.

But, what the hey–if I let that stop me, I’d probably never post anything.

It seems to me that everyone is arguing past one another, and that Jonah in particular is kicking the stuffing out of strawmen. Jonah seems to think that being libertarian means never having to say, “I judge.” He also thinks that all libertarians are supposed to be of like mind, and that they claim to have a simple philosophy, and then feigns shock to discover that they come in various flavors, some of which he finds less distasteful than others, but all of which put the lie to the (straw) notion–(his)–that libertarianism is a single, coherent ideology. Also, like many conservatives, who confuse libertarians with libertines, he suspects that the libertarian position is not a valid intellectual one, but rather, that all of this talk about freedom and liberty is just a thinly-veiled cover for people who like sex, drugs, and rock and/or roll.

As to the first point, few libertarians are non-judgmental. They can be, and often are, quite intolerant, perhaps even more so than Jonah Goldberg. The point that Jonah seems to miss is that libertarianism isn’t about making judgments per se, it’s about whether or not such moralizing should become encoded into actual law. I can think that lots of things are morally wrong without necessarily thinking that they should therefore be illegal. At the risk of making the mistake of attempting to speak for most libertarians, I suspect that what most people who call themselves libertarian object to is the notion that, if someone finds something objectionable, that “there oughtta be a law” (though to be consistent, they don’t think that there should actually be a law against people saying that).

With regard to the second point, it just shows how silly and useless labels are (even though Jonah seems to think that anyone who objects to labels is a “leftie”). Is conservatism really that much more coherent than libertarianism? Most people would (correctly or not) call both Pat Buchanan and William Buckley a conservative. Yet I think that one could find them farther apart on many individual issues than most libertarians. Any single issue of National Review itself will reveal a broad spectrum of thinking–on drug legalization, on foreign engagement, etc., yet it is considered a “conservative” magazine. I think that Jonah is kicking an empty pillow here.

And finally, it is just as insulting to accuse a libertarian (or conservative, for that matter) who wants to end the War on (Some) Drugs of being a drug user as it is to accuse someone who is opposed to affirmative action of being a racist. In both cases, the accuser refuses to recognize the possibility that someone might take a position on principle–he thinks that they can only be doing it out of some amoral need to indulge themselves.

‘Nuff said.