perfidy

Fox News is reporting that Afghanistan is on the verge of unveiling its new draft constitution. For most of the last year, the constitutional commission has been working to write the constitution, but this bit was heartwarming:

The commission sent 460,000 questionnaires out to the public this year and held meetings in villages across the country seeking public input.

"So many people replied, including women who said they wanted more rights and good education," Constitutional Review Commission spokesman Abdul Ghafoor Lewal said. "The illiterate sent cassette tapes and we got tens of thousands of letters."

When the elections are held next June, we can hope that it will be the beginning of a prosperous and peaceful future. If that many people participated (however indirectly) in creating their future, I think they might even have a good shot at it.

As I read this article, I am reminded anew of the crazy shit men will do in the quest for record sales.

(Oh, it's for a cause, I hear you say? What about the rats in a blender? Was that for a cause too?)

China... well ahead of the rest of the world.

(And I refuse to use the word "chinkonauts," though a certain sophomoric glee won't stop me from typing it here.)

As I read Neal Stephenson's "Quicksilver," I am reminded anew of the crazy shit men will do in quest for knowledge.

Well, I don't see what's so remarkable about this. Did it all the time during grad school, and I'm fine.

via Drudge, this quote from Bob Novak, author of the article back in July:

"Nobody in the Bush administration called me to leak this. In July I was interviewing a senior administration official on Ambassador Wilson's report when he told me the trip was inspired by his wife, a CIA employee working on weapons of mass destruction.

"Another senior official told me the same thing. As a professional journalist with 46 years experience in Washington I do not reveal confidential sources. When I called the CIA in July to confirm Mrs. Wilson's involvement in the mission for her husband -- he is a former Clinton administration official -- they asked me not to use her name, but never indicated it would endanger her or anybody else.

"According to a confidential source at the CIA, Mrs. Wilson was an analyst, not a spy, not a covert operator, and not in charge of undercover operatives."

This, to me at least, sounds less like Machiavellian scheming than what many people are making of it.

[Update] Dan is pretty sure it wasn't Rove. "There's still a lot of smoke at this point -- but I don't see a fire just yet."

Instapundit has a roundup which links the Drezner post I mentioned above. Insty makes the comment that, "the excessive gleefulness and point-scoring of the anti-Bush bloggers in general on this topic, only serves to make this matter look more political, and less serious, than it perhaps is. More and more, these guys remind me of the anti-Clinton fanatics of the 1990s. Which doesn't necessarily make them wrong, any more than the anti-Clinton fanatics were always wrong. It just makes them a lot less persuasive."

Also, I heard on (I believe, I was channel surfing) CNN that the CIA request to the Justice Department is not exactly an uncommon thing. Fifty or so of those go to DOJ every month, to check out possible revelation of classified information. Apparently, it is a relatively pro-forma inquiry process.

[Moreover] This whole thing doesn't make sense. If, as he seems to be, Novak is telling us that he was just providing background for his story on Wilson's efforts in Africa, what is the deal with the supposed hit job? This is the most ridiculous political hit I've ever heard of. Revealing that Wilson's wife works at the CIA, and thus used her influence to get him appointed by a Republican administration for this job? The fact that his wife may or may not have been outed does nothing to damage Wilson's credibility, or his conlusions - which everyone except the Brits seem to agree with. I would think that if someone wanted to do real damage, they would have released, you know, damaging information. It seems more like Wilson's a bit paranoid, though he is apparently backing off his accusations against Rove.

I don't know, but it doesn't seem terribly likely to me. Read this for more skepticism. See Ross, I was just early with my skepticism. Now I have people at my back. Including the one you linked in your earlier comment. I may have been slow to judge harshly, but many have been altogether too quick to assume guilt.

We'll have to wait and see.

[Update Update] Apparently, the WaPo has altered the wording of its story, downgrading "Top White House Officials" to "White House Officials" and the like.

Attentive readers will have noted that immediately to my right is a brand new perfidy logo. This stunning piece of artwork was created by John Karapelou, who is an award winning and stupendously compentent Bio-Medical Illustrator. The Ministry was forced to use ...persuasion... to convince John of the importance of the project, and to point out the consequences of failing to act with generosity and goodwill towards the Ministry. Happily, John recognized the need for a new Ministry logo, and his pets are as a result unharmed.

Lest you think the Ministry composed of unfeeling, nekulturny brutes, the unknowing contributors of our previous logo, the 1108th US Army Signal Brigade are given a plug here. They truly do set the standard.

From Peter Diamandis, head of the X Prize Foundation:

"We expect to have a winner within the next nine to 12 months.''

Diamandis says that the two front runners are Burt Rutan's Scaled Composites effort, of which I have spoken previously, and John Carmack's (inventor of Doom and Quake) Armadillo Aerospace.

Lindbergh made his solo flight across the Atlantic in 1927 in pursuit of the $25,000 Orteig prize. He was not the first to fly across the Atlantic, not by a long shot. He was the first to fly solo, non-stop across the Atlantic.

According to the Space.com article, Diamandis said Lindbergh's flight "was a mind-shift breakthrough'' for the public. Within 18 months after that daring flight, the number of people boarding airlines rose from 5,700 a year to almost 200,000. Demonstrating that private companies can build and fly spacecraft can be a major step toward making human spaceflight as routine flying on an airliner is now."

Diamandis and many others hope that an X-Prize winner will light imaginations as Lindbergh's flight did, and lead the way to a new golden age of aerospace development.

Given the troubles that NASA has found, I can only say it can't happen soon enough.

Andrew Sullivan's reader email of the day:

"Maybe I am just getting older and don't get it or it could be the fact that I grew up in a small Midwestern burg and understand how hopeless my friends and family are who stayed there. Either way these people are jerk-offs. Two things came to mind when I read this. The first is these people would get their asses kicked if they threw a half-full can of beer at someone at a party. Not just because of the action, but because it is a waste of beer. Secondly, these "hipsters" would not last five minutes in any of the number of small towns in this country where this kind of culture really thrives. Any real goat roper who grew up drinking Pabst will tell you it is skunk beer and small town people know this. The only way to make it better is to add salt to it, I mean how wrong is that? My point is rural Americans don't need condescending pricks in New York to tell them they are cool. We already knew it and embraced it years ago."

Fucking A! That whole dipshit trucker-hat and Midwest chic thing (which, by the way, has been covered in the Times and is therefore officially over) really pissed this Ohio boy off. Whenever I see an "ironic" trucker hat around town, my arm automatically does this sort of Dr. Strangelove jerk, and I must physically restrain myself from knocking the ironic hat off the dimwit's head in a decidedly un-ironic, looking-to-kick-ass fashion.

The one silver lining is that, as of a couple years ago, one could step into Welcome To The Johnsons on the Lower East Side and get hosed on PBR for under $20. The same could also be said of Joe's Bar on E. 6th, but Joe's doesn't have tabletop Ms. Pac Man, and the bathroom door doesn't actually close.

Also, we prefer the term "briar hopper."
Original post is here, excerpted:

I went to my first white-trash theme party three years ago. I felt cool because John Bartlett was throwing it. We had corn-dogs and twinkies and malt liquor and wore half-mesh ball-caps. Maybe the "bear" trend is also a throw-back to '70s white trash culture. Ditto South Park Republicans, where the politics of the Red Zone has become the politics of the Blue-Red Set. Is all this hopelessly condescending? Maybe. But part of the refreshing nature of these trends is exactly their unconcern with whether they're forms of condescension or not, or even whether they're ironic or not. They're just cool and insensitive. It took only one generation of political correctness to fuse the two. As Rolling Stone editor, Joe Levy, puts it, "If you have a bohemian neighborhood full of people drinking bad beer and wearing ugly T-shirts and trucker hats and dressing the exact same way as Justin Timberlake, it's real and it's ironic, and it's cool and it's uncool at the same time." Exactly.

The Browns are 1 and 3 after losing to the Bungles.

It's so nice to be back on familiar territory. I'm a Browns fan and a Red Sox fan, primarily (with minors in Steelers and Pirates/Indians) so I KNOW how incredibly reassuring, in fact psychically necessary, perpetual disappointment can be.

As China prepares to launch her first chinkonauts, and Europe launches a nifty new lunar probe, the United States is preparing to retro-60s style plan for American manned space flight. NASA is so, like, hip.

ABC is reporting on the push to design an orbital space plane to supplement the space shuttle. NASA is cleverly calling the designs "next generation shuttles" but the fact is, the Air Force had something very similar in mind when it was designing the X-20 Dynasoar back in the fifties.

This image shows the four possible designs:

The vehicle on the upper left is functionally identical to the X-20, a lifting body glider. The one on the lower left is basically a reusable Apollo capsule. All four of these contenders would be launched atop a disposable launch vehicle like the Delta 4 or Atlas 5. The ABC piece quoted John Junkins, Professor of Aerospace Engineering at Texas A & M University:

"The Space Shuttle is 25-year-old technology that has not kept up... But it has done everything asked of it — carry people and carry huge amounts of cargo. No other space vehicle can do that. But it is time to separate the responsibilities."

So, to replace a twenty five year old technology, NASA is reaching back fifty years. We very nearly had a Orbital Space Plane in 1964, with a design going back to the late fifties. While I am not averse (certainly!) to NASA developing new space vehicles, trumpeting this as a next generation shuttle reveals the fundamental vacuum at the heart of a once great institution.