Month: April 2007

Recreating Vietnam

Last time the Democrats took us down this stop-funding-the-war road, it ended with Cambodian killing fields and 444 Americans in an occupied embassy in Tehran.

It also gave us disco.

God help us all.

Locked in a worldview

Harry Reid[*1] thinks all is lost in Iraq.

The president of the Iraqi Red Crescent[*2] aid organization wants to see the American Congress back off on withdrawal timetables.

Who’s right, and who’s just trying to support their preconceptions and previous worldviews?

Space is getting crowded

Japan is getting ready to launch a lunar orbiter.

AXA says the SELENE project is the largest lunar mission since the U.S. Apollo program. It involves placing a main satellite in orbit at an altitude of about 60 miles and deploying two smaller satellites in polar orbits. Researchers will use data gathered by the probes to study the moon’s origin and evolution.

India has its sight set on Mars[*2] .

“A mission to Mars might seem a distant dream at this juncture but it is not impossible given our considerable expertise and experience,” a retired ISRO scientist told Asia Times Online. “An India-made rocket like the GSLV [geo-synchronous launch vehicle] can carry over 500-kg payload and reach Mars without a hitch,” Nair had pointed out last week.

China and Russia are teaming up on a Mars mission[*3] as well.

According to the agreement, a small satellite developed by China would be launched along with “Phobos Explorer,” a Russian spacecraft, probably in October 2009, the administration reported.

After entering Mars’ orbit — 10 to 11 months later — the Chinese satellite would be detached from the spacecraft and probe the Martian space environment, it said.

In the U.S. on the other hand, private space programs are where it’s at.  Burt Rutan and Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic[*4] space tourism effort and Robert Bigelow’s space station program[*5] are only two of the rapidly growing private space exploration efforts.

Space is still hot.

Massacre at Virginia Tech

Gunman at Virginia Tech kills 32[*1] at a residence hall and at a classroom.

The university reported shootings at opposite sides of the 2,600-acre campus, beginning at about 7:15 a.m. at West Ambler Johnston, a co-ed residence hall that houses 895 people, and continuing about two hours later at Norris Hall, an engineering building.

Some but not all the dead were students. One student was killed in a dorm and the others were killed in the classroom, Virginia Tech Police Chief W.R. Flinchum.

Not good at all.

Image via Instapundit[*2] and Rocky Top Talk[*3] .

Missing the point on Imus

Now I’ll admit that I never paid a huge amount of attention to Don Imus even before he said despicable things about the Rutgers women’s basketball team.  That’s because Imus has made a career of saying a variety of despicable, “edgy” things while at the same time keeping his job by sucking up to various powers-that-be in media and government.

But the whole ‘Imus is a racist’ thing that everybody seems to be leaping toward completely misses the fundamental point.  Imus may or may not be a racist, but he is indisputably a boor.  if you say boorish things on national radio (and a cable tv network) you deserve to get fired.  His advertisers appear to agree, and are beginning to desert him.

Booking

As you can tell from the block over to the left, I’m slogging through the book “The Singularity is Near” by Ray Kurzweil.  And I mean slogging.

Oh, it’s all very, um, futuristic, with all it’s hype about the coming merger of man and computer.  See! the world where you replace your brain with a PC!  Feel! billions of nanobots surging through your veins, killing off cancers and eating nasty free radicals and making you LIVE FOR EVER!!!!

Actually, you can almost buy Kurzweil’s argument . . .

Baghdad curfew eased

We’re winning[*1] .  Despite Nancy Pelosi, the defeatist know-nothing Democrats and their ideological allies in the western press . . .

BAGHDAD, Iraq — Citing improved security, the Iraqi government said Tuesday it was shortening the Baghdad curfew by two hours and would let citizens be on the streets until 10 p.m.

The A.P. article of course goes on to attempt to minimize this transparently good news.  Almost as if they have a vested interest in failure.  We know the Democrats do.

Nancy Pelosi, International Woman of Mystery

The Washington Post editorializes about Speaker Nancy’s Austin Powers-esque journey to Syria:

After a meeting with Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad in Damascus, Ms. Pelosi announced that she had delivered a message from Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert that “Israel was ready to engage in peace talks” with Syria.
. . .

Only one problem: The Israeli prime minister entrusted Ms. Pelosi with no such message. “What was communicated to the U.S. House Speaker does not contain any change in the policies of Israel,” said a statement quickly issued by the prime minister’s office. In fact, Mr. Olmert told Ms. Pelosi that “a number of Senate and House members who recently visited Damascus received the impression that despite the declarations of Bashar Assad, there is no change in the position of his country regarding a possible peace process with Israel.” In other words, Ms. Pelosi not only misrepresented Israel’s position but was virtually alone in failing to discern that Mr. Assad’s words were mere propaganda.

In case you were wondering why I continue to consider the entire Democrat leadership to be a bunch of Know-Nothing buffoons who are held together only by their common hatred of Republicans and their religious fervor to convert Iraq 2007 into Vietnam 1974.