perfidy

Peter Diamandis, founder of the X-Prize, has been awarded the Heinlein Prize for his contributions to the commercialization of space. A good choice, I think. Rutan may have built SpaceShipOne, but Diamandis got hundreds of companies working toward the goal of private space enterprise. We need more like him, and hopefully there will be cause for more Heinlein Prizes to be awarded soon.

Only 36 percent of common spiders are capable of laying eggs under human skin.

In a move long hoped for, NASA is taking a serious step towards supporting the growth of the commercial space industry. As I have often argued here, one of the best models for space development would be that of the early commercial aviation industry. In its infancy, commercial aviation was given a crucial boost from the Post Office, which gave contracts for airmail delivery. The Post Office in effect created the first networks of airports and air routes as proto-airlines set up networks to deliver the mail. Thanks to Post Office encouragement, passenger travel grew, following these smae routes. Money from Air Mail contracts also spurred developments in aircraft design, as these companies took advantage of the opportunities made available. The Post Office became a lever that boosted the aviation industry past the first hump of development. Once it was seen that the government believed that aviation was possible, other means of support (like bank loans and other investors) became possible as well.

The golden age of flight was created in part by two outside factors - Air Mail and the collection of prizes for achievements in aviation. We have already seen the positive effect of lever - the Ansari X-prize. There are other prizes already waiting and more being created, and I am convinced that these will prove to be a powerful stimulus as well. This move by NASA puts in place another lever. By offering the modern equivalent of the old Post Office Air Mail contracts, the govenment and NASA will be doing the most useful thing they could possibly do. By underwriting development, they can help private space industry get over the big first hurdle. More to the point, they will do it in a way that (for the first time in NASA history) that development will serve as a platform for further development. In almost fifty years of space travel, we have never made a serious effort to develop a space transportation infrastructure. But now, government money might actually do us some good.

"Traditionally, Uncle Sam has done this many times before," said van der Linden. "Prove it can be done, help business get involved and when business can make money, you step back and everybody benefits."

I am well pleased with NASA.

[wik] Bob van der Linden, the Smithsonian curator mentioned at the end of the article, works with my dad. He's a cool guy, buy his books.

[alsø wik] I was shocked, shocked, that Transterrestrial Musings hadn't already posted on this. I hope to see some commentary on this from him.

[alsø alsø wik] And my being well pleased with NASA is of course predicated on NASA actually following through and actually, you know, spending that money in the way described. However, this is the most concrete statement of this kind I've heard from them, so I actually have some hope. $500 mil is real money. Rutan did SpaceShipOne (I still think that name is seriously lame) for a fraction of that sum. This could do some real good.

In our continuing series examining the possibilities for alternative state mottoes, we turn the unthinking eye of our regard to the Grand Canyon State:

• The Pacific Coast State!
• It's Not the Heat, It's the Stupidity
• It's hot. Real hot. Damn Hot. Hot.
• Now with fewer illegal aliens!
• Home to the World's Largest Hole in the Ground
• The parbroiled lizard state.
• Yes, you can grow grass in the desert.
• The once and future northernmost state of Mexico
• It rarely ever gets above 115 degrees. Really.
• Not as hot as the inside of your oven!

[wik] Bonus Slogans!

• Where the Sole Source of Gun Control Is Your Trigger Finger
• Where All Those Old Mustangs and Camaros Wound Up
• Peccaries. Pecadilloes. Armadillos.
• Our Landscape Looks the Most Like a 'Roadrunner' Cartoon
• We Actually HAVE Roadrunners
• Just Protect Your Eyes, and the Vultures Can't Really Hurt You
• Like Alaska, but Hot Instead of Cold

Over the last almost five years, there have been many comparisons between the current War on Terror and the Second World War. (Along with many comparisons to other wars, to be sure.) One manifestation of this has been the recurrent - at least within the blog world - recasting of media coverage of WWII events in the style and with the biases of our current media. Most of these are rather blunt, though often amusing. Jay Tea of Wizbang has come up with, I think, a masterwork of this genre. Lest he get a big head, this is a very, very small genre. Read the whole thing.

I have not read all the details yet regarding the intelligence program that was revealed by the Times. But it strikes me that while freedom of the press is important - and there weren't, to my knowledge, any threats of censorship - discretion is also something that we used to admire. It seems that the program was legal. Disclosing the nature of the program could only help our enemies. What possible purpose could publishing this article have save doing exactly that? Why do they hate our freedom?

Ministry Crony NDR posts a lengthy (for blogs) excerpt from The Life and Times of Mexico, by Earl Shorris that I find very interesting. The three years mentioned in the title of this post are three decisive years in Spain, whose repercussions can be felt today. At least one of the events of 1492 should be obvious even to a fifth grade drop out. The other two are equally important - the end of the reconquista in Grenada, and the expulsion of the Sephardic Jews. These last two set the Spanish monarchy on a course of intolerance and rigid dogmatism that would infect two other continents, and play a major role in the religious wars that bedeviled Europe over the next two centuries. The first, by way of American silver, provided the means to finance this.

1521 is not a date I was familiar with. Rather than rewrite, I will excerpt the excerpt:

"The events of 1521, the third date, were to establish New Spain and set the pattern for its government. In that year the urban center of the Mexican world, Tenochtitlan, fell to the Spaniards and their Tiaxcalan allies, but of almost equal importance, the comuneros (townspeople) of Castille rose up in revolt. Fifteen Castillian towns gathered to petition the king for democratic reforms, perhaps a constitutional monarchy.

But there was to be no Spanish Magna Carta. The nobles joined their king in putting down the rebellion. The comunero leaders were executed, and as they died, the idea of democracy in Spain and its colonies died with them. There were no more democratic uprisings during the three centuries of Spanish Empire. The effective democratic movements of 1776 in the American colonies and 1789 in France did not spread to New Spain. The separate political paths of Mexico and its neighbor were set 250 years before Jefferson's Declaration. The deaths of the comuneros had ended the democratic rebellion, and the tightening of the connection between the king and his nobles had begun an absolutist and centralist tradition in Spain, old and new.

Well, that seems to have great world-historical importance. Many in the United States have wondered why American political traditions and institutions often fare so poorly in the nations to the south. Well, it seems we have a concise answer right there.

The last date, 1588 is again a well known one, the year of the Armada. The year that everything went south for Spain. The weather was more to blame for Spain's defeat than the English, but it did mark the beginning of the end. Spain would remain a power in fact for a good while more - Spanish tercios played a major role in the Thirty Year's War, but their role grew ever smaller.

Fascinating. I think I shall have to buy the book.

Our US Navy and other Pacific forces have been on a tear lately.

That's "tear", like what our stuff does to our enemies' asses, and not "tear", which is what falls from hippies' eyes when we do it.

Following on the heels of recent Ministry coverage of exciting and dangerous Pacific developments here and here, not to mention massive training exercises covered here and here, comes news that the Navy is more determined than ever to show how deep a bench it brings to the game.

Sure the Navy already brings the great big warships and a muscular aviation branch. But it goes without saying that all those pilots and sailors are at least human. The Navy's so bad, it has other species working for it. Some might argue that the Navy already had another species working closely with it, the Marines. But for all their evident and obvious badassitude, Marines are mostly human. And while the Air Force sends in the big bombers and the nukes and the orbital death rays, those too are piloted or directed by people. (With the notable exception of previous experiments) .

Included in recent Pacific exercises were America's battle mammals, the Navy's Marine Mammal Program. Dolphins. Sea Lions. Perhaps, someday, even ambitious otters. They work in teams to find mines- dolphin locates the mine through its echolocation; sealion swims down to attach a marker or retrieval line. They are also trained at finding enemy swimmers, sitting on and drowning them, or stoving in their ribcages with their armored battlesnouts.

Not surprisingly, hippies had something to say to rain on everyone's parade:

"These animals are highly sensitive, deeply intelligent creatures, and to use them for warfare is to abuse them," said Wayne Johnson, who is on the board of Animal Rights Hawaii. "These animals need to swim free."

But they ARE swimming freely- they freely swim 100 fathoms into the briny deep to find mines, or freely swim as they patrol a harbor. And I'll tell you something else, just because a species is intelligent it doesn't follow that it then must be averse to war. Humans invented war, and prosecute it enthusiastically. And I'd love to know how he knows that our interspecies allies are "highly sensitive". Because I don't think he means sensitive by virtue of super-attenuated senses; I think he means in the sense of prefering Emily Dickinson to Too $hort. And that's just goofy, because he obviously has not spent much time with them.

All of the ministers have worked to some extent with our dolphin allies. Johno and Buckethead have written on cetacean history, and I was a minor functionary in the first Inter-Species Defense Council so many years ago. Between meetings and plenty of fresh mackerel, I found dolphins to have not only a compelling sense of duty, but a very grim sense of humor. Sure they seem to laugh and enjoy themselves at Sea World, but that's only because they know that a quick flip of their tail could break any human neck, or a short burst of speed can turn their whole body into a torpedo. They laugh at us, not with us, and think that drowning an enemy combat swimmer is really quite hilarious. As a matter of fact, dolphins are probably among the least sensitive of the swimming species, at least regarding the fate of homo sapiens. They assist us out of their own self interest.

Nevertheless, they still train with our forces as we continue to refine inter-species doctrine and planning.

The Ministry is engaged in a never-ending and ultimately fruitless effort to improve the knowledge, understanding, education and sang froid of its readership. To that end, we continue our series of alternate state mottoes to deepen your understanding of American politics and culture. In today's installment, we deal with the largest state, Alaska. Officially, the Alaskans say, "North To The Future." Some think otherwise:

• The Fucking Huge State
• It's Cold. Damn Cold. Real Cold. Cold.
• Alaska, Gateway to Siberia
• 11,623 Eskimos Can't Be Wrong!
• Come 'Cause It's Pretty. Stay 'Cause You're Lost
• Oil-slick-free for 15 years
• We're cold and lonely: LET US HAVE OUR POT BACK!
• We Get to Kill Whales and You Don't!
• Nobody Exciting Lives Here
• God It's Cold Up Here
• Come freeze your Alaska off!
• We'll let you club a seal
• Remember Attu, Agattu and Kiska!

[wik] Bonus slogans!

• Because Daylight's for Sissies
• Not Penguins, Polar Bears and Orcas
• The Only Things Harder Than Our Rocky Coast Are Our Nipples
• A Suicide Rate not Nearly as Bad as Norway's
• Our Most Dangerous Animal's a Rutting Moose
• Imperial Russian Firesale!

Our own Minister Johno has achieved undying fame as the winner of an honorable mention in the most recent OTB Caption contest, for this smooth bit of wit:

No hands?!? What kind of cockamamie rule…?

Picked up from Matt Yglesias, this Post op-ed from two former Clinton officials recommending that we don't just shoot down the missile, but that we shoot down the launch site. Before we get into the meat of the story, I find it amusing that Matt had this qualifier for the raging warmongering suggested by mssrs. Carter and Perry:

And, of course, Carter and Perry are veterans of the Clinton administration so one shouldn't dismiss them out of hand as know-nothings.

I am much less partisan in my warmongering. I take it as a given that warmongerging is a viable solution, and work backwards from there.

But on to the op-ed. They suggest that waiting would be bad. First, even if we shoot it down successfully, the North Korean engineers will have already obtained much of the flight test data they need to make more of these. Second, and as we discussed in the previous post, the downside of a failed intercept is really, uh, down. A cruise missile strike on the launch facility would destroy the missile, and little else. It would guarantee that the missile launch doesn't happen - as our precision strike capability is not in the least an unknown quantity. And, it would send a message. A good one, I think.

The South Koreans would oppose any strike on the North, however limited in scope. Given their vulnerability, that is understandable. To do nothing would be imprudent, though, as we have been trying a carrot approach to the North, and that is only half a viable strategy. Hitting the missile after launch avoids the problem of striking the actual territory of a hostile nation, but at some risk to our future credibility of our deterrence. All in all, I think that hitting the launch site seems the most reasonable, in terms of probability of success, and lack of serious downside. Unless the North freaks out and invades. But that, I think, is unlikely no matter what the provocation. The Chinese won't allow it if for no other reason than that they aren't ready for a confrontation with the US.