Nature is telling us that those wacky scientists have developed a laser that can zap individual mitochondria inside a cell, leaving the rest of the cell unharmed. Using laser bursts .000000000000001 of a second long, they are able to destroy very small things indeed. Femtolasers! Sadly, they are little use in fighting off Martians.
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The ever-useful space.com is reporting that the consensus among those who watch these things is that the Chinese will launch their first manned space mission sometime in the next couple weeks. The article is well worth the read, as it examines some of the political and strategic considerations that many be prompted by a successful Chinese mission.
Many observers feel that the space flight program is merely a cloak for Chinese military development. Others feel that the mission is a prestige building exercise designed to reinforce the legitimacy of the Communist goeverment. Personally, I think it is both.
China is in many respects like Columbus, Ohio. Columbus is a decent sized city in a populous state. But it is alway overshadowed by Cleveland and Cincinnati. When I lived in Columbus in the nineties, there was constant talk of becoming a "major league" city. Much of this centered around efforts to acquire by any means necessary a pro baseball or football team. Of course, lying halfway between the Reds and the Bengals on one side, and the Indians and Browns on the other made this unlikely in the extreme. So, they got a Hockey team. But there were other efforts as well - all aimed at putting Columbus "on the map." When the number of people inside the Columbus city limits surpassed for the first time the number in Cleveland, Columbus cried, "We're the biggest city in Ohio!" Of course this completely ignored the fact that the Cleveland metro population is four times larger, and also that Cleveland has been less, well, assiduous in annexing neighboring communities.
China is convinced that does not get the respect that it deserves. So, this space mission is in some sense like Columbus' NHL team. But unlike Columbus, the Chinese have been making a strenuous effort over the last decade plus to modernize their armed forces. This space mission has obvious relevance to that effort. That China feels the need to pursue both of these ideas could be taken to indicate that China envisions for itself a grander role on the world stage.
And just remember the last time somebody had that set of ideas.
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The President and his staff are re-thinking how they manage the reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq. Condi Rice will oversee the "Iraq Stabilization Group," which will be an interdepartmental force to get shit done in-country. Read the article for the details, but it appears that it's an effort to cut across the bureaucratic boundaries and work on managing, you know, the little details, like roads, schools, security, power, the Taliban, and all that. Hope this works.
From the article: "'The president knows his legacy, and maybe his re-election, depends on getting this right,' another administration official said. 'This is as close as anyone will come to acknowledging that it's not working.'"
Well, they don't have to acknowledge it, as long as they do something about it.
[moreover] Does anybody else think that Condoleeza Rice sits home at night, practicing her signature, "Vice President Condoleeza Rice"? I mean, I'm not saying that's her ambition, just that if there's one person in the Bush administration ideally situated to take over from Dick Cheney, it's her. And I think she'd be good at it. Besides, she's a hardcore Cleveland Browns fan, so she can't be all bad.
[moreover] Go Browns! Beating the Steelers for the FIRST time since coming back from the dead! In! Your! Face!, John Cole!!
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Kevin Drum asks questions about Valerie Plame's husband, such as "what's his deal?" "Was he always anti-war?" "Was he qualified to go to Niger?"
Read. Doesn't sound like much of an unqualified lib'rul antiwar dove to me. At least not when he was in Niger. Quite the opposite, in fact.
Hmm.
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In response to Johno's recent post:
I worked for several years for Citizen Action, an enviromental lobby group. Concern for the environment has always been something important for me, going back to the days when I was in the Boy Scouts and spent a considerable amount of time in actual nature as opposed to volvo station wagons with "Think globally act locally" bumperstickers.
CA and similar groups are the "sane" side of the environmental movement. While they eschew the violent or property damaging methods of Earth First and other wackos, their politics and beliefs are scarcely different.
My time at CA was a constant struggle - while I wanted to do something positive for the environment, do my part so to speak, the ideological fanaticism of the leadership and most of the other people working there was hard to deal with. At the time, I was significantly less conservative than I am today - and that experience was a major part of why I moved rightward.
At base, I cannot agree with people who think that technology is inherently evil, and that the world would be a better place if all but maybe a million environmentally conscious people were to depart it. Taken to its logical conclusions, the "sustainable development" ideology is a recipe for the death by starvation of billions.
Most environmentalists would of course stop short of advocating this path. But they are strangely tolerant of those who don't. The prejudices of the environmentalist and the antiglobalization crowd amount to a kind of condescension, where primitive peoples and nature are to be kept pristine, so that they may be properly appreciated by enlightened, blue-goretex-wearing ecotourists. Those primitive people are rarely consulted as to what their wishes actually are. (Usually, TV and a new wardrobe from a lot of the documentaries I've seen. Most people do not like poverty, even if it is a traditional lifestyle - that's why so many move to the cities.)
Technology could make things much better for the rest of the world, as could the economic liberty that makes advanced technology possible. A classic example is the golden rice, enriched with vitamin A that could prevent blindness in millions of children a year (it's all about the children, of course) even though it is an eevilll frankenfood. Kneejerk opposition to technological solutions, mystical environmental marxism, and constant doommongering are not a recipe for saving the whales, or anything else.
If we are going to preserve our natural wonders, and not go careening into self created disaster (at various times one or more of the following: new ice age, malthusian population collapse, utter depletion of natural resources, global warming, systemic collapse of the ecosystem, or just choking to death on pollution) we don't need more of the "woolly-headed crypto-Marxist claptrap that totally ignores reality in favor of impossible solutions."
Real solutions rely on an enlightened regard for self interest. If we refrain from screaming that the sky is falling, and point out that it is in everyone's best interest to avoid drowning in PCBs, we begin to make progress. (And using market based mechanisms for pollution control is a good start.) We are ever so much cleaner than we were even thirty years ago, and most new factories and what not are designed with environmental protection in mind. (The Cuyahoga River hasn't caught fire since before I was born! Go Cleveland!) In time, we'll have hydrogen cars, and maybe even clean fusion power (Cold Fusion Now!) or solar power satellites. The world will be cleaner, at least where sensible democratic people live.
But the worst polluters and environment rapers are totalitarian governments and poor nations. There is a clear connection between wealth and environmental awareness. People who have the luxury to think about a clean environment (rather than the next meal or whether they will be tortured by the local gestapo) will take steps to clean things up.
The trend is clear in the industrialized world - ever stricter standards and an increasingly park-like world outside the cities. We don't really need to worry much there. I don't think we are approaching ecological holocaust. We just need to calm down and stop firebombing apartment complexes and shouting "Free the Mink!"
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Buckethead's cute li'l heartwarmer about cannibalistic mink (below) seemed funny on Friday, but it's Monday and my bile is up. This kind of crap does irreparable damage to the cause of actually reasonable environmental crusades by making us all seem bugfuck crazy.
You see, I am inherently inclined to view favorably the causes of nutball environmentalists. It's part of my bleeding-heart centrism. That's not to say that I endorse them, their means, or their crackpot theories, but I really, really agree that it's a good idea to, for example, reduce fossil fuel emissions worldwide, manage the clearing and cutting of forests, explore alternative fuel solutions, and work towards getting more people to accept a low-animal-product diet as a healthy and tasty alternative.
However, asspots like these here ruin the whole party. In fact, asspots like these are the whole damn party, if you write off (as I do) the birkenstock-and-black-sock "concerned liberal" crowd who write small checks to the WWF, ride in bicycle rallies, compost their trash, and live in small rural college towns. So many of the real environmentalists live on the Chesapeake or in upper Maine, wear gumboots, hunt, log, and trap, and actually see, and give a shit about the actual world we live in. But these guys never make it on the news, because they never blow things up.
When I was in college, the Monkey Wrench Gang and "ecofeminism" was all the rage. Somehow all that stuff just seemed to me to be... how do I put this...bullshit... and left me wary of far-left crusades like environmentalism, campus "free speech" crusades, antiglobalism, and Dennis Kucinich. So much of it is woolly-headed crypto-Marxist claptrap that totally ignores reality in favor of impossible solutions. And we've seen what good Marxism has done for the world.
You know, not to ramble or anything, but I guess this kind of well-meaning mink-slaughter is just the kind of thing you'd expect from a demographic who put Che's sexy mug on tee-shirts and angrily defend Stalin against those slanderers who think murder is a big deal -- "You don't get it! Those were mistakes! We'll get it right next time!" Leaving it unclear whether getting it right means that soon we'll all live in the Worker's Paradise, or soon we'll all be dead. Personally, I'm not sure which would be worse.
So fuck them. Although shenanigans like this mink-slaughter are only a tragedy for a few mink and some farmers, plenty of environmentalists are more sinister. The San Diego arsonists, tree-spikers, and the rest of their radical ilk are petit terrorists, plain and simple, and they make it really fucking hard for the rest of us concerned citizens to be taken at all seriously.
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Behold the breathtaking idiocy of the soi disant animal rights movement.
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This makes Jimmy at Welcome to Rantville want to "vomit." I think it's the system working like it's supposed to.
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is how we say it in Ohio.
And via Blogcritics I see that the five major labels have agreed to provide health insurance to their entire artist rosters. Fucking finally.
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