perfidy

You just ad hominemed him. I just thought the quote was funny. Didn't think that the article was quite that bad - and it is a normal thing to try and analyse what the opposing camp is thinking, from your own perspective. And do you deny that there are a lot of people in the world who are just batshit crazy? I think suicide bombers would fall into that subset of humanity.

And speaking of batshit crazy, Gov. Dean was asked if the Iraqi people are better off now than they were under Saddam. He said, "We don't know that yet. We don't know that yet, Wolf. We still have a country whose city is mostly without electricity. We have tumultuous occasions in the south where there is no clear governance. We have a major city without clear governance." Aside from the tortured english, how anyone can imagine that a nation might not be better off without someone like Saddam murdering, torturing, raping and oppressing them is beyond me. It is natural that immediately after occupation, and after the removal of an odious regime, there would be disorder. However, the power is coming back on, and order is being restored. I think Dean is a little to eager to jump on the "Oh sure, we won the war, I always knew we would. But now we're screwing up the peace" bandwagon. It is simply to early to tell.

Not today, because I am working on a secret project.

"Joey is aware that there are a lot of people, especially in the Arab world, who are just batshit crazy. "

- From an article by David Brooks in the Weekly Standard

is interesting. In the latter part of the article, Goldblatt talks about his comment on America being the most benevolent world power in history. Apparently, this got a lot of people exercised. I had a similar (though smaller scale) experience. On another website, the Cocula Muffin Research Kitchen, I posted a poll asking, "what is the most ruthless empire in history?" I included "American Global Hegemony as an option. As of today, it has 21% of the vote. For quite some time, that number was closer to 50. I find this rather amazing, just as Goldblatt did, and for the same reasons.

Fair enough. Heh.

He may have something there... An excessive concern for secrecy on the part of the church certainly kept those kid-diddlin priests in parishes, where they could continue to do harm. The bishop's concerns for the privacy of the child molesting priests led to more molested children.

Santorum represents a significant fraction of the American population, one that believes that the family is the essential foundation of a good society. They believe that many recent legislative and judicial actions act to undermine that foundation. And, there is reason to believe that they may be correct. Lack of a two-parent family has the strongest correlation to crime, teenage pregnancy, and a host of other social pathologies. The structure of welfare for the first thirty years of its existence encouraged single parent families. While I do not agree with the good senator on outlawing homosexuality, on the other hand the government should not be going out of its way to hasten the demise of the traditional family.

This is a good article. Mackubin Thomas Owens teaches at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I.

The other day, Mavra Stark, the head of the Morris County, CA NOW branch announced, in regard to the double murder charge against Scott Peterson, "If this is murder, well, then any time a late-term fetus is aborted, they could call it murder." Later the national organization distanced itself from these comments, "out of respect for (Peterson's) family and what they're going through."

Apparently, Stark and other pro abortion figures believe that fetal homicide statutes will give anti-abortion advocates ammunition for their fight to overturn Roe v. Wade. At least 23 states have passed fetal homicide laws, all of which exempt more traditional abortion techniques.

I have a few thoughts about this.

One, in light of my earlier posts about constitutionalism, is that there is no right to abortion in the constitution. It ain't there. And given the text of the tenth amendment, that means that the power to legislate on this issue is reserved to the states, or to the people. Even many supporters of Roe agree that it is bad law. Roe is an unwarranted imposition of federal power on a matter that should be regulated by the states.

Two, the body of a "fetus" washed up on the shore. That doesn't sound right, does it? Laci Peterson and her unborn son disappeared on Christmas Eve. Two bodies are discovered months later. All Mavra Stark can think about is how this will give ammunition to her political opponents. Laci Peterson had chosen a name, Connor, for the fetus; but Stark said, "He was wanted and expected, and (Laci Peterson) had a name for him, but if he wasn't born, he wasn't born. It sets a kind of precedent," adding that the issue was "just something I've been ruminating on." This is heartless.

Three, if a baby is born prematurely, even by months, that child is "viable" and can survive with the aid of incubators and other medical technology. Connor Peterson was about as old as my unborn son John Christian when he and his mother disappeared. I know personally, as I have felt him move, that my son is not a lump of tissue. He is not something that can be disposed of on a whim, or because a baby would represent an inconvenience to someone's lifestyle. Connor Peterson would have survived if he had been delivered by c-section last Christmas Eve, so it is right that his death be the cause of a murder charge.

Johno has accused me of being a strict constructionist, and to an extent this is true. I am even somewhat of an originalist when it comes to matters constitutional. This does not mean that I think that there is no place for interpretation - the constitution is an awfully short document considering that it is the operating manual for a nation of almost 300 million people. The authors of the constitution could not have imagined every situation that would arise in the future, and they designed flexibility and even some careful ambiguity into their work.

This does not mean that the constitution is a "living document" subject to reinterpretation like Hamlet to every new generation. The constitution is not merely a text to be deconstructed, it is law, the law. When the constitution plainly states, for example, that "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people" it means that the government cannot do anything not specifically granted the power to do in the constitution. In this and in other cases, I am a strict constructionist.

Mike, it's remarkable to see you embracing life in this manner. You should put a daisy behind your ear before the feeling passes. heh.

"I'm invincible!"

"You're a loony."

Mike, Johno: Shut the hell up you stupid wankers! I'm right and you're going to hell!

As Mike sort of was pointing out, I was describing Ad Hominem discourse on the left with the welfare thingie. I could have included examples of the right doing this in regards to the Drug War, but instead just described how stupid the policy was.

Coulter is, indeed, a meatsack for advocating the murder of 3000 Muslims (now she might say Mohammedans). One of the things that I thought while watching the war on TV was this: our moral superiority was evident in the way that Iraqi forces planned their actions. They put civilians near military targets because they knew that we would not intentionally cause the deaths of innocents. They marched women and children in front of them, because they counted on our restraint. They could depend on our sense of jus in bello and attempted to use it against us. Happily, it availed them not. Despite the claims of some, the world is aware that we are not a loose cannon, cowboy nation - that we attempt to deal fairly and justly even with our enemies.

I agree with Mike (and the courts) that speaking is not treason. But what do you think about Taliban Johnny and Jose Padilla? These two are accused of doing more than protest. They, so to speak, had Saddam on their living room futon. If they are guilty, I think they should hang from the neck until dead, dead, dead.

There have been some articles floating around lately announcing that the French are in serious trouble. (Loyal reader #00008, Aziz Poonawalla has a list of them here.) Some of this may be wish fulfillment, seeing as how we all want the perfidious French to suffer for their weasely backstabbing. But there are some indications that the French do have some serious problems.

However, all of that segues into the other thing I wanted to write, about the upcoming EU constitution. So it will all wait for tomorrow, because I have to go to an Red Cross Infant First Aid and CPR class. Ciao til tomorra.

Ah Love! could you and I with Him conspire
To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire,
Would not we shatter it to bits---and then
Re-mould it nearer to the Heart's Desire!

Gotta love Omar.

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it

I've been thinking about this for a bit, as I wrestle with my partially completed novel. In my world, genre killing is when an author (usually science fiction) writes a book that destroys a sub genre for every subsequent author. If you think of the realm of possible science fiction novels as a vast, unexplored continent - some writers are like explorers, their novels open up new territories for development. Their ideas create places where others can settle and develop. Heinlein was probably the biggest explorer in this sense. He wrote important early novels or stories that opened up new terrain for others.

But other authors don't just explore, they discover and lay waste to huge tracts of land, and no one but the insane would ever be able to live in the wasteland they leave behind. David Brin is like this, his Uplift series makes it almost impossible to think of writing stories about genetically engineered smart animals. Charles Pellegrino and George Zebroski leveled the once rich region of alien invasion novels by writing Killing Star. This novel debunks nearly every possible motivation for invasion, and then caps it off by introducing relativistic bombing. The only way that you can write about a topic in the wake of a genre killer is to devote extraordinary effort to overcoming, outthinking, and resisting the influence of your predecessor. And even if you succeed, your work will bear the stamp of the genre killer.

The interesting thing is that this process is not merely about writing, it is also largely about the ideas that are at the center of science fiction. Dune, by Frank Herbert, largely killed the interstellar empire sub genre by interweaving it with ecology, politics and religion (wrapped in superb writing) and the only survivors are barely literate pulp sf war porn novels.

This is a small version of the effect that great writers have on all who follow them. Harold Bloom, in The Western Canon talks about this in great depth. Bloom focuses on how Shakespeare, at the very center of Western Literature, put the thumb on every writer who followed him, and will do so to every writer for as long as we have an English language. Shakespeare, more than anyone, killed the Sonnet by perfecting and transcending it. After the Bard, who could even attempt to best Sonnet 130, or Sonnet 123, or whatever your favorite is?

Since I am writing a novel about war, set in the near future, I must wrestle with Tom Clancy. Happily, he isn't a genre killer, which means that I am not wasting my time. But I must be aware of him, always in the back of my mind, so that I don't end up writing a dull Clancy pastiche of a novel. Hopefully, that will make me a better writer.

You may now return to your regularly scheduled kvetching

Some of the things that NASA has resisted in the past forty years: 

Orion and NERVA 

Nucklear propulsion technologies that had successfully reached scale model tests for Orion, and static testing of a prototype for NERVA before being cancelled by NASA. The prototype NERVA (Nuclear Energy for Rocket Vehicle Applications) prototype was twice as efficient as the most advanced chemical rocket ever built, the SSME, or Space Shuttle Main Engine. With a little practice, this could have been improved. (BTW, my dad in his role as Air and Space Museum curator helped save the prototype, nicknamed kiwi.) 
Air Force Manned Orbiting Laboratory  

A small (mobile home-sized) space station that could have been launched in the mid sixties, and would have had a crew of two.

DynaSoar  

Short for dynamic soaring, the X-20 was the result of a different evolutionary line than the Apollo moon rockets. It evolved from the German Sanger-Bredt Silverbird intercontinental skip-glide rocket bomber from WWII, and was the first space vehicle ever actually constructed - back in the fifties. NASA cancelled it eight months before drop tests from a B-52 and a manned flight in '64. This spaceplane, launched atop a Titan II or other disposable rocket, would have led to a series of more advanced follow on vehicles. 

Skylab  

The Skylab program was cancelled by the ingenious expedient of having the space station fall from orbit on 11 July 1979. Although there were several proposals that might have saved America's first space station, the freeze on non shuttle launches left NASA with no means of getting there. 

NASP  

The National Aerospace Plane, a space plane that would take off and land horizontally, was unceremoniously cancelled in the early nineties. Granted, there were doubts whether the vehicle was feasible, and some research continues. 

DCX 

I've talked about this one before, on this site, though that week doesn't seem to be in the archive. 

NASA has also consistently resisted additional alternative methods of propulsion like solar sails and tethers, any use of Shuttle External Tanks other than throwing them into the Indian Ocean, going back to the moon for any reason, and any means of going to Mars that doesn't take fifteen years and sending Pittsburgh into orbit to supply the mission.

In response to the comments on my NASA post of yesterday, here are some extended thoughts on the situation. I do not think that the formula for success in NASA lies in control of spending. NASA wastes money, and this is a concern. It is also a concern that NASA has no real means for even determining how much money it spends, and on what. But this is the least of their problems. Overspending was the third and last problem that I mentioned, and in the interest of brevity I didn't explain what I meant by that. The overspending that I had in mind is a NASA-specific kind of waste. NASA wastes billions of dollars on designing, planning, redesigning and yet more redesigning. The ISS was redesigned, what, five times in the twenty years before it was built? NASA seems to have a distinct aversion to actually building things.

But this is really only a small part of the total problem that is NASA. There is nothing really that can be done to fix it, because NASA is a government bureaucracy and therefore largely immune to change. Further, even if the Public, the President and Congress gave NASA an inspiring, all-consuming mission, and a butload of cash to achieve it; they still would have all the same problems. Lack of vision is inherent in bureaucracy. Lack of innovation and NIMBYism is par for the course. People go on and on about what a stupendous success Apollo was, usually so they can set up a stunning indictment of the current NASA. But the history of Apollo was one of political motives, awkward technical and mission compromises, and general rhetorical grandstanding. (It was also a stupendous achievement, but all of the seeds of NASA's current problems began in the sixties.)

In the early days of aviation, NACA (The National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics) was a government body that published basic and practical research on aeronautics, and on aviation. Private firms hoping to get funding from banks and venture capitalists could point to a NACA study and say, "See, the government says it can be done, it's practical." Then they'd get their cash, and build an airplane or whatever. NASA needs to do this for all the companies that would dearly love to get into space transportation, rather than jealously guarding its space monopoly with the connivance of the FAA and the DOD.

NASA could quite successfully send out robotic probes, do solar and deep space astronomy, and publish bleeding edge research on aerospace science and engineering. Especially if they weren't saddled with the economic, budgetary and political albatross of running the space shuttle program. The only way to get around the deeply ingrained institutional problems of NASA is to, well, go around them.

The preverts are going to drag civilization down.

The two major touchstones I have in thinking about the role of government in our lives are 1) Is it Constitutional? and, more fundamentally, 2) Leave me the hell alone. #1 is the first line of defense, because many bad things are unconstitutional. But even if it passes that muster, the government must show a really compelling need to interfere with lives of citizens before a law is "good." I can see that laws against theft, which interferes with my desire to take things that I want, is good for society. Similar thoughts give a pass to many laws we have. What consenting adults do in the privacy of their boudoir is, properly, there concern and theirs alone. Therefore, sodomy statures and similar laws are bad.

Where Santorum is wrong is in positing a slippery slope between sodomy laws and the other things that he mentioned. Slippery slope arguments are overrated and overused, and inapplicable here. Bigamy, gay marriage and adultery are different issues. Regardless of what you feel about these, they are societal concerns, and in a different category. They may be "antithetical to a healthy, stable, traditional family," but overturning a sodomy statute won't make them legal. 

It is a huge question whether the government has a role in implementing "the Good Society." Some weep and gnash their teeth at government legislating morality - but that is certainly what the government does with murder and theft laws. I weep and gnash my teeth at the liberal attempts to legislate a good society with "risky schemes" like welfare and so on. All of these things infringe on our rights to do just what we please, or at least leave us less cash to fund doing just what we please. We need to look at these things somewhat pragmatically, and somewhat strict constructionistally. 

We need first off to pay more attention to the Constitution, as it is written, because it is the rule by which we live. Many, many bad things come from ignoring this. There are no umbras and penumbras and eclipses and occultations in the constitution. If you don't like what it says, what it allows and permits, there is a mechanism for changing it. The rule of law is the most fundamental requirement for civilization, and we ignore it at our peril. The RICO statutes, and the RIAA and the Patriot II that Johno has been exercised over recently are all the result of a failure on the part of our legislators to ask the question, what part of the constitution gives us permission to pass this law. Deferring that judgement to the courts results in many other evils, as the courts end legislators who cannot be voted out of office. While we may be happy with one decision or another, the situation is bad for us all. 

On the pragmatic side, we need to look at individual cases, and ask, "Is this law doing what we want it to?" When Congress passed the welfare reform act back in 96, the left was having fits of apoplexy, crying and whining that we would have children starving to death because of the callousness and heartlessness of Republicans. This was an ideological reaction. The result was much happier. Welfare rolls are down by almost half, and there are no children starving to death. This was a situation where someone took a long look at a program that was supposed to end or at least ameliorate poverty, but ended up institutionalizing it. The law of unintended circumstances hits government programs harder than anything else - largely because government programs are so hard to change, much less kill. Social Security is clearly heading for disaster unless something is done to fix it - yet many oppose any kind of reform because it offends their leftist aesthetic sensibilities to kick this particular sacred cow. There are other situations where conservative sacred cows could use some kicking as well, most notably the drug war nightmare. Instead of reducing the amount of drugs in use, it has lowered prices, increased purity, given billions of dollars to very bad people, ruined Columbia and is ruining Peru and Venezuela, savaged civil liberties in this country and wasted hundreds of billions of dollars that could have been spent on an all expense paid vacation for 12 on Mars. 

On some issues, my instincts say, "that shouldn't be allowed." Or, "Those greenpeace fucks should be in camps." Others will have similar thoughts with different targets. But my other instincts say, we live in a rather nifty Republic, with constitutional safeguards, and we shouldn't screw it up. We best avoid screwing things up by avoiding action. The best government governs least. Anyone who feels differently is invited to look at the former Soviet Union, or even France for a counterexample.