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A retaining wall in the Upper West side of New York at the Hudson River, just up-river from the George Washington Bridge has collapsed and buried several parked cars at the very least. I was unable to find out if anyone had been caught in the collapse: no one seemed to know at the time I was asking around.
Since I am on the same side as the collapse, I was unable to get into a position to get a picture. There is nowhere one could do so without standing on part of the hillside which has just collapsed and the NYPD has the cliffside cordoned off in both directions for many blocks. I know. I tried.
I do know that the Henry Hudson Parkway is closed and traffic in NYC is a royal mess right now.
I ha ve never in my life heard so many sirens and seen so many emergency vehicles. Lines of them filling city block after city block and off into side streets. Broadcast vans from every station in New York with a news program. Talking hairdo’s smiling into TV cameras every which way you look. Police smiling and saying absolutely nothing about what is going on. Lots of the folk thought it must be a terrorist threat because there was nothing but rumour floating through the gathered crowds.
You will get the details on the News at Eleven… but I will start uploading some of my on the scene photos. So, here goes… Dale Amon reporting Live and On The Scene in New York City…. Roll ’em!
Move along now, nothing to see here…
 Photo: D.Amon all rights reserved
The line of emergency vehicles fades off into the distance.
 Photo: D.Amon all rights reserved
Notice the herd of cameramen down on the edge of the hillside where they can all go down together. Somewhere along there and below is my best current guess as to where the collapse occurred.
 Photo: D.Amon all rights reserved
Gee, Perry, when can we get one too?
 Photo: D.Amon all rights reserved
The talking heads were out in force.
 Photo: D.Amon all rights reserved
A newsgirl and her cameraman.
 Photo: D.Amon all rights reserved
This is a couple blocks upriver. Beautiful view but still cordoned off. Note the hardhats and police near the hillside.
 Photo: D.Amon all rights reserved
This shot is from about three or four blocks upriver. Obviously you cannot see the collapse, but it does give you an idea where it happened. That is the George Washington Bridge.
 Photo: D.Amon all rights reserved
Coffee break time I presume…
 Photo: D.Amon all rights reserved
Update: No one was hurt; cleanup will probably take through the weekend; traffic on the Henry Hudsen Parkway is being diverted at 181st St.
Morning Update: I was able to get to a location from which I could get a photo of the actual collapse area and it was not where I’d thought it, but a block further upriver. The big worry yesterday was whether or not some apartment buildings had been undermined. Engineers determined they were safe so this morning it was easy for me to get within telephoto range.
 Photo: D.Amon all rights reserved
This morning I ran full tilt into a journalistic conflict of interest issue. I had to pull half of a story because my official position within an organization gave a subcontractor contractual clout. Their rules required a veto over publication of information on the event. The story items were neither earth-shaking nor of great import. Nonetheless, I was not allowed to use information I felt important to my article.
I feel it necessary to state this publicly as a matter of integrity. I do not claim that all blogs and bloggers should or must always do so. It is a matter of their individual choice. You, the reader, will place your trust accordingly.
I know such issues have been discussed here and there in both main stream and the practically main stream of major blogs. I certainly do not think there is any problem that most bloggers have real lives and work with real organizations doing real things. Or that bloggers make little or no pretence of being unbiased angels in white, pure mindless beings with no belief or ideals, capable of weighing ideas as the Egyptian God Ma’at weighed souls. We are not. We have no interest in being boring and unopinionated.
Here at Samizdata we attempt a reasonable level of professionalism in our writing and presentation. I am certain we do not always meet the full level of our aspirations, but we do indeed try. What we can promise is that our biases and conflicts are out on the table for all to see.
I am on the road once again and sit in an upper Manhattan Starbucks as I write. I face another string of busy days; Saturday morning I fly to San Francisco where I will be doing my usual Wizard of Oz impression as a backstage magician for a JP Morgan technology business conference. Then, after a week of 6am crew calls and 12+ hour workdays, I will be off on a red-eye flight to Washington DC.
In DC I put on my National Space Society hat. Within that organization I am the overseer of conferences, The One Whom All ISDC Chairs Must Fear… which brings me around to why I am writing this article in the first place.
The National Space Society’s 24th International Space Development Conference starts on Thursday May 19th and runs through Sunday afternoon at the Sheraton National Hotel. It looks like it will be quite a show this year.
NASA is running some programming tracks of their own in conjunction with the Society this time around and we also have our usual strong private space showing. Our speakers include such luminaries of the private road to space as Burt Rutan, President of Scaled Composites and SpaceShipOne designer; Dr. Peter Diamandis, Founder and Chairman, X Prize Foundation as well as Chairman and CEO of Zero Gravity Corporation; Will Whitehorn, President of Virgin Galactic; Elon Musk, President of Space Exploration Technologies Corporation; Jim Maser President and General Manager, Sea Launch Company LLC; Jim Benson, Chairman and CEO of SpaceDev; David Gump, CEO of Transformational Space LLC; Eric Anderson, CEO of Space Adventures; Brian Feeney, Team Leader of The da Vinci Project (a Canadian based suborbital space venture); and many more.
But, as the late night TV commercials say, “Wait! There’s more!” This year we have an absolutely unforgettable and unmissable event: a Gala banquet in an exciting location whose management will not allow me to disclose to you. Go through the conference agenda and see where Hugh Downs is speaking. It is a great event and who knows? Maybe you will run into me there.
Jim Babka, President of DownsizeDC has more to report today:
The Senate is supposed to vote on REAL ID Act this afternoon. “Roll Call” reports yesterday that governors are protesting the creation of a national identification system. Plus, we know of other organizations that are now rallying their forces. We’re not alone in this fight.
It’s traditional for the Senate to vote unanimously in favor of Conference Committee Reports – to rubber stamp them. As a result of all the voices they’re hearing, I’m not so sure that’s how this is going to play out. Let’s keep up the pressure all the way to the finish line.
The REAL ID Act could signal the end of real privacy in America, as this article suggests.
And I told you yesterday about my experience on an Omaha, Neb. radio show. Well the host might not have gotten it, but his local paper certainly did! Did our interview influence the following editorial? {Registration required} Who knows? But it’s well worth reading to get a clear understanding of this issue. And when you share our campaign with your friends, encourage them to read this article for a clear explanation.
Send another message to the Senate right now, asking them to vote down the appropriations bill containing the REAL ID Act. Tell the Senate to send the appropriations bill back to the Conference Committee to remove the REAL ID Act. Send your message by Clicking here
This item is in from the folks at DownSizeDC:
TIME IS RUNNING OUT
I’m sending out today’s Downsizer-Dispatch message earlier than usual. The Senate may vote TODAY on the “emergency” appropriations bill and the REAL ID Act. Hammer them. And do it now.
Let them know that you know that they can vote down this bill and then come back and do the spending bill again (that is, if they really must take another step toward national bankruptcy), only next time they should do it without the REAL ID Act. Tell them you know it won’t be easy, but you want them to show some backbone on this vote. Tell them you will remember what they do. The REAL ID Act must not be passed.
Send your message by clicking here.
It is time to Loose The Blogs of War and make some bureaucrat lives absolute hell. It seems the State is being even more annoying than I had imagined possible. I should have known better.
US Government idiocy is delaying Virgin Galactic; it is bureaucratically effing Richard Branson around and it is delaying the time at which you and I will be able to fly into space.
“At this point we are not able to even view Scaled Composites’ designs for the commercial space vehicle,” Mr Whitehorn (Virgin Galactic President) testified before the House committee.
“After US government technology-transfer issues are clarified, and addressed if deemed necessary, we hope to place a firm order for the spacecraft,” he said.
Mr Rutan added that the regulations have already affected financing for the project, which originally was to come from Mr Branson’s London-based Virgin Group.
“We have had to move away from the basic concept of this being a foreign-funded development,” he said.
I myself had believed that a UK company would not be treated so shabbily. As Burt Rutan quipped in a recent US Congressional hearing about commercial space flight:
“I thought Britain was a relatively friendly nation,”
So did I. Brothers-in-arms and all that? Remember who else is in Iraq? Anglosphere and all that rot? Hmmm?
PS: If you can be in the DC area May 19-22, drop by the International Space Development Conference. Burt Rutan and the Virgin Galactic President are both on the program. See you there!
According to The Australian, Richard Branson wants an Australian site for his new suborbital space planes. That in itself would not be particularly unusual: others before him have seen and considered the Australian launch advantage.
A final design for Virgin’s flagship spacecraft, the VSS Enterprise, is expected to be signed off on this year. A US base is expected to be training 3000 astronauts for the $US190,000 sub-orbital flights in as little as three years.
Sir Richard said in Sydney that the plan was to build sufficient spaceships to allow the establishment of separate bases around the world.
It may not have done so for many of you, but this sets off tinkling bells and flashing lights for me. If you are at all close to the space industry you will know there is an excellent near equator site in Australia where there has long been interest for a Spaceport. I have not been following it much lately, but I do remember there was an intent to launch Russian rockets from there. The current status is neither here nor there: Australia is the only Anglospherian country with existing space infrastructure and near equatorial lands.
When a spaceship takes off it gets an extra boost from the Earth’s rotational velocity. The further from the equator you are, the less advantage you get. Imagine you were at the North Pole. The Earth is rotating your spaceship on the pad once every 24 hours and when you launch, your engines have to supply 100% of the velocity required for orbit.
If you are at an intermediate geographical location, like KSC at Cape Canaveral, the rotating planet is moving your spaceship at a significant eastward velocity before it even leaves the ground.
If you are at the equator, you are already traveling at a rate of 1/24 the Earth’s circumference per hour. An equatorial or near-equatorial site is ideal for a first generation orbital spaceship . It gives a starting velocity of a little under a half km/sec eastwards on your fully loaded spaceship before it even leaves the ground. This is a big win. You need roughly 7.5 km/sec to make orbit: you may think of the Earth’s equator as a free, reuseable first stage.
So. Inference one: Branson is already looking ahead to orbital flights.
Now notice he is considering more than one spaceport location. He is not talking of abandoning the US launch site in the Mojave. He wants to add another site for suborbital fares. He would have two sites at which he could operate suborbital space ship take offs and landings.
Branson is in the airline business and knows better than I what the size of the market is for people who want to take a short suborbital tourist hop… versus the number of high value business people who would pay extraordinary fares to reach the antipodes in 45 minutes. British Air refused to sell him the Concordes, but Richard might just laugh last and best.
Inference two: I expect we will at some point see a proof of concept flight of a Rutan vehicle which leaves the Mojave on a suborbital intercontinental ballistic trajectory and lands in Australia. If he has a vehicle capable of carrying 6 paying passengers for tourism, that same vehicle with a lone pilot can probably boost onto a trans-Pacific trajectory.
Branson, Rutan and Allen are smart cookies. They are not going to advertise their plans ahead of time. But if you are going to go into space and make it pay, this is the way to do it:
Step 1) Fund a suborbital test vehicle and get it partly paid for by winning the X-Prize. [DONE]
Step 2) Build a suborbital joy ride vehicle that mostly pays for itself going up and down. [IN PROGRESS]
Step 3) Fly the first intercontinental suborbital flight with that vehicle in a stripped down single pilot mode.
Step 4) Build a slightly larger vehicle that mostly pays for itself via trans-Pacific flights.
Step 5) Use that American built vehicle in a stripped down, single pilot mode to fly from an equatorial base into orbit. Perhaps it will be necessary to build a special vehicle to deal with higher re-entry heat loading, but there are now two revenue streams on line, not to mention Bob Bigelow’s $50M America’s Space Prize.
Step 6) Add another revenue stream. Sell astronaut transport services to NASA about the time the Shuttles are sent off to museums. Perhaps also sell delivery services to Bob Bigelow’s inflatable orbital facility for yet another stream.
Step 7) Earth orbit is “half way to anywhere”. The solar system is now your oyster.
As they say in the tech business, “It’s a plan!”
It is late but I simply must share this tale with you.
The MP’s crossed the kill zone and then turned up an access road at a right angle to the ASR and next to the field full of enemy fighters. The three vehicles, carrying nine MPs and one medic, stopped in a line on the dirt access road and flanked the enemy positions with plunging fire from the .50 cal and the SAW machinegun (Squad Automatic Weapon). In front of them, was a line of seven sedans, with all their doors and trunk lids open, the getaway cars and the lone two story house off on their left.
The battle results are described later:
Those seven Americans (with the three wounded) killed in total 24 heavily armed enemy, wounded 6 (two later died), and captured one unwounded, who feigned injury to escape the fight. They seized 22 AK-47s, 6x RPG launchers w/ 16 rockets, 13x RPK machineguns, 3x PKM machineguns, 40 hand grenades, 123 fully loaded 30-rd AK magazines, 52 empty mags, and 10 belts of 2500 rds of PK ammo.
The story has probably been covered in the US. We all know how knowledgeable most journalists are about military matters… so read a real battle report. It is really quite an awesome little vignette. It shows just how good our military folk are at their job.
I often do not see eye to eye with James Taranto but he does point out some good stories in his “Best of the Web” email newsletter. He highlighted this Drudge Report today. Drudge reports Michelle Zipp, editor of Playgirl magazine, was fired for being a Republican. It contains an e-mail from Ms. Zipp:
After your coverage of my article about coming out and voting Republican, I did receive many letters of support from fellow Republican voters, but it was not without repercussions. Criticism from the liberal left ensued. A few days after the onslaught of liberal backlash, I was released from my duties at Playgirl magazine.
After underlings expressed their disinterest of working for an outed Republican editor, I have a strong suspicion that my position was no longer valued by Playgirl executives. I also received a phone call from a leading official from Playgirl magazine, in which he stated with a laugh, “I wouldn’t have hired you if I knew you were a Republican.”
I just wanted to let you know of the fear the liberal left has about a woman with power possessing Republican views.
I would go further. The currently constituted Democratic Party is based on victimology. ‘Minorities’ must be victims. Victims must be helped. The only way to help victims is through regulation, law and massive Federal spending. If a member of a Democratically important minority breaks ranks, they are endangering the core beliefs which bind the party together. Thus that individual must be silenced or put in their proper place as a victim.
Minorities contain intelligent, hardworking and resourceful people. You can not keep them ‘down on the farm’. You can not pretend to speak for all of ‘them’ because they are not really a ‘them’. As any libertarian will tell you, there is no such thing as a Class. There are only individuals with temporarily aligned self-interests.
This is a problem for the Democrats. As soon as the underlying self-interests of their pet victim classes were met, those classes began to dissolve. The Democrats do not have an acceptance of this, let alone a plan to understand and deal with new alignments. All they can do is individually lash out against ‘class’ defectors. It solves nothing, it wins them no friends… but perhaps it makes them feel better.
According to the New York Sun, most if not all of the Iranian exile organizations have come together at a Los Angeles meeting.
“After 20 years, this is the first time all Iranians are together,” said Sirus Sharafshahi, the owner of a Farsi-language daily newspaper for Iranian expatriates, Sobh Iran (Iran Morning). “We want to tell the administration of the United States, all Iran is together. If you want to change the government, come to us.”
Some of the delegates feel the current US diplomatic carrot and stick approach to Iran and its nuclear program are a mistake:
Several attendees at yesterday’s meeting of Iranian dissidents said Mr. Bush’s decision to back the European approach of offering concessions to Iran was a mistake. A leader of the Iranian Freedom Front, Dariush Hashempour, gave a PowerPoint presentation yesterday that highlighted Mr. Bush’s pro-reform remarks in his State of the Union address last month. In an interview, Mr. Hashempour said he was startled by the president’s new stance.
“All of a sudden he just flip-flopped and was willing to work with Iran,” Mr. Hashempour said. Asked if it was a mistake to try the carrot-and-stick technique the Europeans have advocated, he answered, “Definitely, for any period, even for 10 seconds. … Their approach not only didn’t help, it was a disaster for the last 20 years.”
This meeting and sense of co-operation is an important development for pro-freedom Iranians. The words of Benjamin Franklin, “We must indeed all hang together, or assuredly, we shall all hang separately”, are as applicable to Iranian Patriots’s today as they were to the signers of America’s Declaration of Independence two and a quarter hundred years ago.
Thanks to Glenn Reynolds for pointing me to this horrid little tale:
Reformists Ali al-Demaini, Abdullah al-Hamed and Matruk al-Faleh are also accused of “using Western terminology” in demanding political reforms. They also allegedly questioned the king’s role as head of the judiciary.
There is more to it. Much more. The Saudi’s have changed trial dates to keep reporters out; they have arrested the defense attorney… read the linked article above for more of the long litany of stupidity.
I really wonder how long these people can survive in the modern world. A friend and sometimes co-worker of mine, a member of the old Hashemite line, does not think the Saud’s are among the brightest lights in the Muslim Times Square. This ham-fisted approach to democracy activists seems to show the truth of his belief.
As Glenn and others suggested several years ago, we would all be better off if the cultured and educated Hashemites were once again in charge of Mecca.
This NASA PSA works on so many levels I hardly know where to begin.
It does not at any point say “only socialist space programs can get us there”. You could infer that if you saw it in certain contexts, but then again, if you saw it at a space entrepreneurs get together you would not. The underlying message is a good one and I thoroughly applaud it. We will reach for the stars. We will colonize the solar system. We will leave the cradle.
The infant is a young Paul Allen or Bob Bigelow or Burt Rutan… not a future employee of the State.
Ed: You may need to down load the mpg and play it locally.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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