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Others may be interested in my evening reading: Apparatus of Lies, a recently published White House document. It’s the first time I’ve read a full story on the bomb shelter filled with civilians we hit in Iraq during the last war. It turns out there was a lot more to this than met the News camera’s eye. January 26th, 2003 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
 I’ve been meaning to write a little about Bigelow Aerospace since before Christmas but just never could get around to it. There always seemed to be some Earth shattering events of war or liberty lost to soak up my limited writing time. I’ll state right up front that I am not a disinterested party. The space community is incestuous beyond belief and everyone knows everyone else or a friend of theirs… or something. You would be hard pressed to find two people with more than one degree of separation. And so it is with myself. I’ve known the VP of Bigelow for over a decade, since back when in his own words “he drowned astronauts for a living”. Greg Bennett was one of the EVA planners at NASA Houston Manned Space Flight Center back then, and involved with dunking suited astronauts in the big tank they used for mission training. He was the founder of the Artemis Project of which I also became a part. And when I started my own company, the commercial side of the project got a sliver of ownership and Greg a board seat in it. So I’ve bared all. Now for the interesting parts. Bigelow intends to kick start space tourism. He’s put $500M of his own money on the line, and there is little risk he won’t carry through because his low profile fortune was earned from Budget Suites of America, a company wholly owned by he and his wife. Decision making is rapid and final. He can plan in terms of decades. Space was his dream from when he began his business career some thirty years ago. He is now in a position to actually do something. Unfortunately for those on the outside, this total control means he doesn’t have to publish information. He is playing this venture quite close to the chest because he can. I know most of the people named in one of the links below and I know of their travails. I do not blame him for doing his work behind guarded doors. I do not know “Mr Big” and I am not one to pump old friends in high places (ie Greg) for proprietary information. All I can say is, Bigelow Aerospace are up to some interesting things in their desert version of the “Fearing Island” compound. You will want to read this and this to learn just about everything there is about the venture in the public domain. January 25th, 2003 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
I have liked many of Mark Steyn’s articles in recent months but in The Falklands War is a model of fierce good sense, he has outdone himself. he draws many useful parallels between the Falklands War and the impending war with Iraq’s Ba’athist regime.
This is Steyn at his best… read the whole article! January 25th, 2003 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
What’s the last thing you need while desperately trying to survive as your country is mercilessly bombed by a state-of-the-art US Air Force? How about a bunch of Western pacifists who can’t speak Arabic and don’t know their Dinars from their elbows standing around getting in the way? The ‘human shield’ left for Iraq yesterday. In three Routemaster buses (the kind they stopped making around 1946, you see them in all the old movies). So at least we can assume it will take them several months to get there, which will be a relief to Baghdad because, as Adriana Cronin noted a few weeks ago, Baghdad residents like the always-interesting Salam Pax don’t actually want a ‘shield’ of pointless woolly Westerners making a burden of themselves. They would actually rather have proper help, like food and first aid on the border crossings, if anyone happens to feel like a bit of charity Gulf war work. But this pack of doves’ real enemy is not American bombers or Western politicians: it’s you and me, the public. Although insistent that, “Nobody really wants this war except those who stand to gain from this by selling guns,” (well of course, there’s a stash of rifles ready and waiting up in my airing-cupboard right now) they are actually attempting to hold ordinary Western members of the public to ransom. Former US marine Ken Nichols-O’Keefe, founder of “The Truth Justice Peace Human Shield Action Group” is going on hunger strike, not until the war is stopped, but until more people join his cause. Ten thousand supporters is the exact price he stuck on his own head.
Well, at least he won’t be living in it; that should help a little bit.
…he went on, presumably in a burst of wishful thinking…
Shame and pity it is, then. So, comrades, get yourselves out there with the Shield of Confusion, or the war vet snuffs it. What a choice. As shieldster Ube Evans said:
Baghdad: be very afraid. These people are trying to help you. Although, as the hunger strike isn’t scheduled until Ken arrives in Iraq, and as it will take them all so long to get there in the double-deckers, my guess is that T.T.J.P.H.S.A.G.’s (say it loudly with enthusiasm and people will think you’re speaking Arabic) real secret plan is to trundle up some time around Christmas when the war is over, have a little holiday, buy a few carpets, and fly back home again. Let’s hope so, for the Iraqi people’s sake. January 25th, 2003 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
Whether one thinks government is a necessary thing (if only for fighting other, worse, governments) or not, it is well to remember that one should not place great trust in government. A recent reminder of this in the British context: A few years ago the mobile telephone (cell phone) companies paid the British government many billions of pounds for licences. It is now widely agreed that the companies that got the licences went a bit mad during the auction process and grossly overpaid – but at least they thought they had an asset (even if it was an asset they had paid too much money for). They were quite wrong. They forgot about the government’s power to regulate (although the very institution of a ‘licence’ should have reminded them of this power). Now the government regulators have demanded that the mobile telephone companies cut the price of telephone calls. In short the mobile telephone companies paid many billions of pounds for nothing. The powers that be can come along and regulate their profits away. The “close working relationship” they had with the government was a sham, their trust in Mr Blair and Mr Brown with their “support for British high tech business” (like the late Harold Wilson’s “white heat of technology” back in the 1960’s) was quite mistaken. Now the companies are screaming and going to court – but I bet they wish they had not got involved with the government in the first place. January 25th, 2003 | Comments are closed
January 25th, 2003 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
We have lately been hearing the question “Why Iraq when we know North Korea has the bomb?” The official answers we have been given so far have not been truly satisfactory. I will posit this is due to an (perhaps justified) unwillingness on the part of US officials to state the threat equation in its’ purest Machiavellian form. North Korea is no where near the threat Iraq is. Even with nuclear weapons they are not in the same league. This may seem strange to the reader. They have nukes, they have missiles, they have half a million artillery pieces facing across the border, they have troops enough to flood across the border like a mile wide horde of cockroaches against a single can of Raid. That is true. Next question. After they take over South Korea, what next? They are on a peninsula. Their neighbors are China, Russia and Japan. Japan is far across the water. So in the worst case, what do we lose? South Korea. That’s it. What happens after they finish the rape, pillage and burn? After they’ve wrecked the South Korean infrastructure in pitched battles against the large and well equiped South Korean military? Is a nation that can’t feed itself going to rebuild the South Korean economy when it couldn’t build it’s own in the first place? What are they going to do with a large enemy population which has just been brutally awakened to the fact they can’t go out and shop in the trendy stores any more? That there is going to be no choice in the next election? That their future is the image of a boot heel stamping on their faces, forever? Is North Korean going to go North and take on the Chinese Peoples Army? Are they going to build massive numbers of ships and attempt to cross the straits into the the teeth of a “Made in America” Divine Wind?? Will the three Korean soldiers who survive to wash up on the northern shores of Japan proceed to conquer it? Not bloody likely. You say, but they have nukes! They have missiles. This is true. But the missiles cannot yet reach the caribou herds in Alaska, and it is unlikely North Korea would retain the infrastructure for building them immediately following a very difficult victory. The entire Korean peninsula would be in ashes. By the time they rebuild with the help of fresh slave labour battalions from the South, America will have shipboard missile defense systems just outside their territorial waters ready to stop short range missiles aimed at Japan – and permanent facilities in the Aleutians to defend North America. North Korea would find itself in a situation similar to where it started, only worse. It would take decades to fully digest the liberal South Korean society and bury the bones of it. This is a “best case scenario” for North Korea. It is also highly unlikely and that is as apparent to the North Koreans as it is to me. A more likely result of such a miscalculation is a replay of the first Korean War… but without hordes of Chinese troops and experienced WWII Russian pilots storming across the Yalu to push back the American counter offensive. Now compare the situation to Iraq. It is a large and strategically located asian nation. It is surrounded by far weaker neighbors. Only Iran seems capable of standing up to them. So he’d leave them for desert. Look at a map with the jaundiced eye of an experienced Risk player. Jordan and Kuwait are obvious snacks. The Saudi’s are a pushover. The Emirates are nice people but are very small; Yemen wouldn’t last very long either. If left to his own Xerxian dreams, Saddam would very quickly reinstate most of the ancient Assyrian empire. He’d own the middle East from the Turkish border to the Indian Ocean. Then he’d take on the nuclear powers. He’s got enough people and desert to take whatever Israel or Pakistan could mete out. He might leave Iran for Oday’s generation. Future conquests require going through Egypt, and once that is managed what is going to stop him in Northern Africa? All the while, he’s got an economy far more effective than North Korea. There are shopping malls and consumer goods in Baghdad that would dazzle the eyes of a North Korean. He’s an old style conqueror, not an ideologue. He doesn’t have to control everything. He’ll use terror and random killings to keep the population sufficiently cowed, but beyond that they may work and create wealth. This is why Iraq must be dealt with and North Korea may be left to moulder. Note: Thanks to Mark G for pointing out a blooper on my part. I’ve corrected ‘Abyssinian’ to ‘Assyrian’. January 24th, 2003 | 31 comments - (Comments are closed)
Ronald Dixon moved to Brooklyn, New York, from Florida not too long ago. The 27 year-old softspoken network engineer, a US Navy veteran naturalized from Jamaica, did not expect to have to defend the lives of his infant children from a vicious scumbag home invader. But defend them he did. Now, he finds himself in jeopardy, not for the defense itself (yet), but for the use of an unlicenced handgun in that defense! I’ve written a longer piece on this issue on my own site. This is about as clear-cut a case of righteous home and family defense as I’ve seen recently in the U.S. This is also an unusual opportunity to overwhelm the Kings County (Brooklyn) District Attorney’s office with correspondance, demonstrating the reach of Anglosphere libertarian outrage. January 24th, 2003 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
This story is already a little old but I thought I’d give my two pennies’ worth on the situation facing Danish statistics teacher Bjorn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, which was published over a year ago. In a nutshell, Lomborg uses the evidence on which Greens rely to point out that by many yardsticks, life on planet Earth is getting better. As one can imagine, this has sent large parts of the Green movement and the anti-globalistas into a collective funk…
The response from many quarters has been nothing less than childish. A self-selected and rather Orwellian group calling itself The Danish Committee for Scientific Dishonesty has denounced Lomborg root and branch for the temerity of writing such a book and has sought to smear him and his academic credentials. So it is good to see the man himiself fight back. Check out the article by Lomborg in the online pages of the Wall Street Journal for his rebuttal of many of their claims. Of course by writing in the WSJ, Lomborg has proved he is a mere lackey of the global free market capitalist conspiracy, so no doubt the doomongers will not pay a shred of attention. It might influence saner counsels, though. And in the meantime, take a look at www.lomborg.com for an ongoing discussion of his book and associated issues. January 24th, 2003 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
January 24th, 2003 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
I can’t help believing that it was the British decision to abolish and thereafter actively campaign against the slave trade that first introduced moral concepts into foreign policy. Whether or not that is the case, it is the popular expectation that all foreign policy will be at least partly based on moral imperatives as opposed to the uncomfortably amoral calculations of national interest. Nowhere is this more evident than in Europe where the various heads of state are forever delivering nauseatingly self-righteous lectures to the rest of the world from their bully pulpit in Brussels. Aside from switching off whenever I am so able I have also taken refuge in the suspicion that M’lady doth protesteth too loudly, a view which has been in some small sense vindicated by news of the French extending a hand of welcome to Robert Mugabe.
I suppose it would be bad form to have ‘doubts’ about his democidal marxist policies. And that is rather the point, for whilst I do not expect the enarques in Paris to rain down ‘Les JDAM’s du Francais’ on the former Rhodesia, it is nonetheless a reasonable expectation that the foreign policy decisions they make should reflect the ‘humanitarian’ principles they claim to live by. Instead the French continue to do what the French have always done and pursue their own national interests in Africa under a cloak of Sartrean altruism:
When the language of ‘human rights’ can be employed with such spectacular mendacity in an attempt to mask a nefariously machiavellian agenda then we know that it is a coin which has become irredeemably debased. But this move by the French tells us that the mask is beginning to slip and, whilst I daresay the language of Brussels (which is not synoymous with France but heavily influenced by it) will not change in the short term or even the medium term, the polite fictions which underpin that language are close to being unsustainable. The ugly, old ogre of national interest is being prodded awake from its slumber and invoked to stalk the world again. To accompany it on its travels we will need not just a whole slew of new ideas but a whole new language in which to express them. January 24th, 2003 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
By now, quite a few Samizdata readers will have learned of the infuriating plight of my good friends and fellow bloggers Andrew Ian Dodge and his lovely fiance Sasha Castel. They were able to spend just a few days in the UK owing to officials carping about (alleged) glitches in Andrew’s paperwork. Andrew and Sasha were forced to fly back to Maine earlier this week. What is obviously incredible, considering that these are two citizens from Britain’s No 1 ally, is that they were treated in this way while, of course, thousands of folk enter this country successfully on false papers, or with no papers at all. Often many such folk disappear. Such people may even pose a security risk. The contrast between the treatment of Andrew and Sasha on the one hand and that of folk possibly entering Britain with hostile intent hardly needs to be stressed. I guess this shows that as far as rules about emigration and immigration are concerned, we need a thorough overhaul in ways that encourage enterprising and good folk to live here like Andrew and Sasha. On a more positive note, may I recommend readers to look at Jim Bennett’s An Anglosphere Primer, which sets out ways in which these issues might be resolved. In the meantime, my best wishes to two of the feistiest bloggers in the business. Britain has lost the chance to be host to two fine writers, not to mention two of the biggest heavy rock and opera nuts around! January 23rd, 2003 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
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