Sartre said “Hell is other people”, and as usually he got it wrong. Hell is a foreign keyboard.
– Perry de Havilland
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August 19th, 2006 | 24 comments - (Comments are closed)
 I received a press release from my old drinking buddy Rick Tumlinson at the Space Frontier Foundation last night. NASA has announced the winners for the ‘Commercial Off The Shelf’ (COTS) space launch program:
Many of us in the space field applaud this. Whether we like government involvement or not, it is there. This puts more money into the pot at just the right time and pretty much guarantees success of the SpaceX Falcon. A commercial manned orbital capability might now arrive in time to save NASA’s bacon: the sell-by date on the Space Shuttle fleet is rapidly approaching and their ‘CEV’ (Yesterday’s Space Program Today!) does not seem to have progressed past the view graph thus far. The next SpaceX launch test from Kwajelein is due in the November-December time frame. August 19th, 2006 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
Someone close to me recently lectured me on this fact. It appears to makes sense prima facie, but such an enlightened-sounding utterance falls apart as an empty truism with the addition of a little perspective. The Middle Eastern conflict must be viewed from a long-term angle, whilst attempting to countenance the ramifications of the alternative tactic mentioned. Those who might be attracted to the deceivingly pacific fog shrouding the above statement would benefit from realising that by strategically not responding in kind to a belligerent act by zealots like Hezbollah is no silver bullet to the problems of the Middle East; on the contrary, such a strategy may well carry consequences that could ultimately be unthinkably awful. A powerful expression of the quote I provided above can be found in Steven Spielberg’s recent movie, Munich. The moral of that tale is identical to the one pronounced by my close relative; if one hunts down and kills those who planned and carried out the kidnapping-murders of the Israeli athletes at those fateful Games, all one does is inspire a new and more brutal generation to rise up in its place and start spreading increased chaos. In response to this assertion, I ask; was this same generation not destined to pollute the earth with their hatred and intolerance in one form or another? Israel, by its relatively frequent, um, non-diplomatic actions, may well have inspired many, many Muslims to embark on violent jihad over the course of its existence. However, if Israel left – for example – the horrors of the Munich Olympic Games unanswered, it is perfectly conceivable that the people who reacted to Israel’s subsequent blatant retaliatory assassination programme by joining Islamic militant movements would readily join the same sorts of organisations (or even Arab state militaries) when inspired and emboldened by a flaccid Israeli reaction to a travesty of this kind, or perhaps an aura of weakness created by such a profound act of Israeli inertia in the face of this sort of crime. Long and rambling sentence, sorry. Considering that the existence of Israel is an anathema to so many Middle-Eastern Muslims, Israeli inaction and the perception of Israeli weakness is plausibly just as strong an inspiration to take up arms against the relatively tiny Jewish state as a hail of super-potent Star of David-marked precision-guided missiles. The overarching problem – and this extends beyond Israel and into the international arena – is Islam and its unique propensity, amongst the major religions, towards radicalism. It seems more than likely that Israel will defeat Hezbollah in the future, however I have no doubt that some other radical Islamic organisation will fill any breach left expeditiously. If radical Islam’s nature is hydra-like, as those urging Israeli restraint imply from the above quote (and I believe they are correct), chopping off the heads of the hydra when they appear until the organism is exhausted through struggle or circumstance seems a perfectly logical grand strategy for the enormously durable West to pursue over the decades. The ideal that lasting peace could reign in the Middle East if Israel would simply act passively towards its aggressors when she comes under attack is delusional nonsense. Israel is (again) biblical territory in Huntingdon’s oft-quoted, prescient – and surely by now undeniable – Clash of Civilizations, and ultimately the conflict between the liberal West and conservative Islam is a fiendishly complicated, opaque and unpredictable game of strategy that will be played out over many, many years. Every move in this game has the potential to yield both highly predictable and confoundingly unpredictable consequences. It is predictable that when Israel neutralizes an external threat using its military, a certain kind of person will be motivated to fight this force. Conversely and equally predictably, if Israel fails to respond adequately to an external threat, the enduring pan-Arab desire to drive the Israelis into the sea will stir in the heart of the same sort of person, provoking a similar outcome. I fear Israel, due to its location, will suffer negative long-term consequences emanating from the actions of the armed belligerati of conservative Islam, regardless of whatever strategy Israel chooses (ranging from rank appeasement to overwhelming military retaliation) to deal with blows bestowed by these aggressors, for that is the nature of the consolidated foe. Hence, Israel needs long-term support from the Western world. Israel may not be a liberal place itself in many ways, but in many ways it is the (somewhat unlikely) vanguard of liberalism. August 19th, 2006 | 24 comments - (Comments are closed)
I wonder whether anybody was naive enough to believe that the animal ‘rights’ thugs would be appeased by the abolition of fox-hunting?
The timing is about right to ensure a Labour Party manifesto promise to outlaw angling by, say, 2013. August 19th, 2006 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
The way I heard the adage long ago, was “you are not a member of the club until you have blown one up”, as a NASA KSFC engineer is reported to have said when he called up Gary Hudson after Gary’s first big bang on Matagordo Island in Texas. Whatever the quote, Masten Aerospace became a full member a couple of days ago when their engine test resulted in an uncontrolled engine self-disassembly. I am curious if they will still be entering a vehicle in the NASA Challenge at Las Cruces in two months. I know at least several of the guys at MA. But then, I know a lot of the guys (and gals) at most of the rocket companies. Commercial space is a small world. August 19th, 2006 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
The reliably entertaining, if not reliably sane, Ann Coulter pens a column this week with a pretty high libertarian quotient:
Hard to argue with any of that. Her views on ethnic profiling (you get one guess whether she is pro or con) are likely to be more controversial. August 18th, 2006 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
You may have thought that the recent search orgy at British airports was triggered by a genuine fear that passengers might bring something explosive on board. Apparently not, because the same regulations apply to air crew too. It is of no consequence to the official mind that a pilot can destroy an airliner without any technical assistance. (9/11 didn’t change quite everything – even where it might be thought to be relevant by us untrained civilians.) Here is an extract from the security briefing from the BALPA (pilots’ association) website:
How thoughtful they insist crew are not searched in front of passengers. One would not want them humiliated any more than is strictly necessary. Creating artificial privileges is in any case good psychology to keep the recipients of privilege loyal to the heirarchy. It also helps to avoid anyone getting the idea that the whole rigmarole is ludicrous. August 18th, 2006 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
Michael Totten has another interesting and well illustrated dispatch from Northern Israel, describing the situation in Kiryat Shmona, which took the brunt of Hezbollah’s Katyusha rocket attacks. August 18th, 2006 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
Bigelow Aerospace made a rather interesting announcement on August 11:
If I were a betting man, I would guess the reason for no further fly-your-stuff opportunities is that Bigelow is going to jump to the full scale station next year, assuming the next larger size test article, Genesis II, is also successful. I think the 2012 time line for a manned private space station has just been pulled in by a couple years.  August 18th, 2006 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
Can it be true that UK mobile phone company Orange has suspended an employee, Inigo Wilson, for a non-work related entry on a blog? What seems to have caused offence is him making jokes in his ‘Lefty Lexicon’ such as:
Unless there are other factors at play here (I will be see what I can find out), I am about to become an ex-Orange customer and will start urging others to do likewise. If Orange is concerned about one of their employees ‘upsetting customers’, well I think they need to be told that pursuing this course of action against Inigo Wilson, they are doing precisely that. I do not dispute their right to hire and fire whomsoever they wish, but I intent to try and make them suffer some economic consequences as a result if this is as egregious as it appears. Update: I received an e-mail from Stuart Jackson at Orange telling me:
But as the ‘facts’ are not in dispute, that does not really answer my question, which was:
The ‘facts’ are not the issue. The issue is why Orange feels it has to do anything about them. Frankly even requiring Mr. Wilson to ‘apologise and not do it again’ would be wholly unacceptable given that his off-the-clock non work related remarks should be none of Orange’s business and if they think otherwise, they can do without my business. August 17th, 2006 | 45 comments - (Comments are closed)
American judge Alex Kozinski, interviewed recently in U.S. magazine Reason, is roughly billed as a ‘libertarian’ judge. He is asked, among various things, for his views on the infamous Kelo eminent domain decision, which relates to the case in which a local municipality in the States won the power to evict people from their own homes in order to redevelop a site for commercial and tax-raising reasons. It is a decision which has scandalised classical liberals and defenders of property rights. Yet Kozinski thinks the decision is fine, and comes up with the following jaw-dropper:
“We live in society”. And so what? This judge is using ‘society’ as a sort of mystical incantation to shut down debate. His argument seems in broad terms to be a sort of utilitarian one: if the interests of a supposed majority are served by seizing the property of some people, then this is okay so long as ‘fair’ compensation is paid. His argument seems not to accept that though certain outcomes may be desirable, that it is necessary for the state to be constrained by certain long-term rules and institutions, most emphatically, by the existence of property rights. The judge’s position seems to be “property rights be damned”. If we imagine there are alternate uses of property that might put a gleam in the eye of a politician with property developers in his back pocket, then there is no limit to the assaults on property rights that could be permitted under the Kozinski formulation. Eminent domain – what we Brits call compulsory purchase – can be justified, if at all, for creating certain facilities like a road, military base or law court that are essential for the peaceful ordering of a society, essential for human life and in the interests of all, and not just because it makes life a bit nicer for some or most of us, whether we be motorists or whatever. What is terrible about the Kelo decision is that it was driven by commercial gain, not a clear public interest such as defence of the realm. After all, if the economic pie really is swelled by people selling their homes for new development, then that would happen in a market, albeit perhaps not in the neat and tidy way favoured by power-grabbing government official. Yet this ‘libertarian’ judge cannot see that. May we be preserved from ‘libertarian’ judges like this. For an excellent book about this subject, see this work by Timothy Sandefur. As an aside, I should point out that the reason I keep focusing on this issue is because American legal rulings and arguments have a habit of travelling across the Big Pond. August 17th, 2006 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
I appears that the Blair government has created over three thousand new criminal offences during its nine bleak years in office, almost one for every day they have been our political masters.
No doubt everyone will sleep a little safer knowing that England is protected from Polish potatoes. So on the (very rash) assumption that David Cameron’s Tory Party actually noticed any of this happening in Parliament over the last nine years, are we going to see ‘Dave’ campaigning on the basis that a Tory victory will mean a massive roll-back of the intrusive powers of the state? Okay, you can stop laughing now. August 17th, 2006 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
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