I've been meaning to write a little about Bigelow Aerospace since before Christmas but just never could get around to it. There always seemed to be some Earth shattering events of war or liberty lost to soak up my limited writing time.

I'll state right up front that I am not a disinterested party. The space community is incestuous beyond belief and everyone knows everyone else or a friend of theirs... or something. You would be hard pressed to find two people with more than one degree of separation. And so it is with myself. I've known the VP of Bigelow for over a decade, since back when in his own words "he drowned astronauts for a living". Greg Bennett was one of the EVA planners at NASA Houston Manned Space Flight Center back then, and involved with dunking suited astronauts in the big tank they used for mission training. He was the founder of the Artemis Project of which I also became a part. And when I started my own company, the commercial side of the project got a sliver of ownership and Greg a board seat in it.

So I've bared all. Now for the interesting parts. Bigelow intends to kick start space tourism. He's put $500M of his own money on the line, and there is little risk he won't carry through because his low profile fortune was earned from Budget Suites of America, a company wholly owned by he and his wife. Decision making is rapid and final. He can plan in terms of decades.

Space was his dream from when he began his business career some thirty years ago. He is now in a position to actually do something. Unfortunately for those on the outside, this total control means he doesn't have to publish information. He is playing this venture quite close to the chest because he can. I know most of the people named in one of the links below and I know of their travails. I do not blame him for doing his work behind guarded doors.

I do not know "Mr Big" and I am not one to pump old friends in high places (ie Greg) for proprietary information. All I can say is, Bigelow Aerospace are up to some interesting things in their desert version of the "Fearing Island" compound. You will want to read this and this to learn just about everything there is about the venture in the public domain.

I have liked many of Mark Steyn's articles in recent months but in The Falklands War is a model of fierce good sense, he has outdone himself. he draws many useful parallels between the Falklands War and the impending war with Iraq's Ba'athist regime.

Why would anybody think, faced with economic catastrophe, that invading a string of distant islands is the answer? Dictators don't behave rationally. Indeed, one reason they become dictators is precisely to escape the tiresome constraints of rationality. There may be valid arguments for not going to war with Iraq, but not the ones that begin, oh, even if Saddam has weapons of mass destruction, he'd never use them against the West. Never bet on a dictator's rationality.

This is Steyn at his best... read the whole article!

What's the last thing you need while desperately trying to survive as your country is mercilessly bombed by a state-of-the-art US Air Force? How about a bunch of Western pacifists who can't speak Arabic and don't know their Dinars from their elbows standing around getting in the way?

The 'human shield' left for Iraq yesterday. In three Routemaster buses (the kind they stopped making around 1946, you see them in all the old movies). So at least we can assume it will take them several months to get there, which will be a relief to Baghdad because, as Adriana Cronin noted a few weeks ago, Baghdad residents like the always-interesting Salam Pax don't actually want a 'shield' of pointless woolly Westerners making a burden of themselves. They would actually rather have proper help, like food and first aid on the border crossings, if anyone happens to feel like a bit of charity Gulf war work.

But this pack of doves' real enemy is not American bombers or Western politicians: it’s you and me, the public. Although insistent that, "Nobody really wants this war except those who stand to gain from this by selling guns," (well of course, there’s a stash of rifles ready and waiting up in my airing-cupboard right now) they are actually attempting to hold ordinary Western members of the public to ransom. Former US marine Ken Nichols-O'Keefe, founder of "The Truth Justice Peace Human Shield Action Group" is going on hunger strike, not until the war is stopped, but until more people join his cause.

Ten thousand supporters is the exact price he stuck on his own head.

"If we don't get 10,000 people, I think this is a world that will be hard to live in for all of us" said Ken.

Well, at least he won’t be living in it; that should help a little bit.

"This conflict will lead to World War Three,"

...he went on, presumably in a burst of wishful thinking...

"We need to stop this war first and foremost, if we don't, shame on us all and pity on us all."

Shame and pity it is, then.

So, comrades, get yourselves out there with the Shield of Confusion, or the war vet snuffs it. What a choice. As shieldster Ube Evans said:

"Somebody’s got to save humanity from themselves. I’m very scared."

Baghdad: be very afraid. These people are trying to help you.

Although, as the hunger strike isn’t scheduled until Ken arrives in Iraq, and as it will take them all so long to get there in the double-deckers, my guess is that T.T.J.P.H.S.A.G.’s (say it loudly with enthusiasm and people will think you’re speaking Arabic) real secret plan is to trundle up some time around Christmas when the war is over, have a little holiday, buy a few carpets, and fly back home again. Let’s hope so, for the Iraqi people’s sake.

Whether one thinks government is a necessary thing (if only for fighting other, worse, governments) or not, it is well to remember that one should not place great trust in government.

A recent reminder of this in the British context:

A few years ago the mobile telephone (cell phone) companies paid the British government many billions of pounds for licences.

It is now widely agreed that the companies that got the licences went a bit mad during the auction process and grossly overpaid - but at least they thought they had an asset (even if it was an asset they had paid too much money for).

They were quite wrong. They forgot about the government's power to regulate (although the very institution of a 'licence' should have reminded them of this power).

Now the government regulators have demanded that the mobile telephone companies cut the price of telephone calls.

In short the mobile telephone companies paid many billions of pounds for nothing. The powers that be can come along and regulate their profits away.

The "close working relationship" they had with the government was a sham, their trust in Mr Blair and Mr Brown with their "support for British high tech business" (like the late Harold Wilson's "white heat of technology" back in the 1960's) was quite mistaken.

Now the companies are screaming and going to court - but I bet they wish they had not got involved with the government in the first place.

If money does not matter to you, you do not have much imagination
- Tania Emery

We have lately been hearing the question "Why Iraq when we know North Korea has the bomb?" The official answers we have been given so far have not been truly satisfactory. I will posit this is due to an (perhaps justified) unwillingness on the part of US officials to state the threat equation in its' purest Machiavellian form.

North Korea is no where near the threat Iraq is. Even with nuclear weapons they are not in the same league. This may seem strange to the reader. They have nukes, they have missiles, they have half a million artillery pieces facing across the border, they have troops enough to flood across the border like a mile wide horde of cockroaches against a single can of Raid.

That is true. Next question. After they take over South Korea, what next? They are on a peninsula. Their neighbors are China, Russia and Japan. Japan is far across the water. So in the worst case, what do we lose? South Korea. That's it.

What happens after they finish the rape, pillage and burn? After they've wrecked the South Korean infrastructure in pitched battles against the large and well equiped South Korean military? Is a nation that can't feed itself going to rebuild the South Korean economy when it couldn't build it's own in the first place? What are they going to do with a large enemy population which has just been brutally awakened to the fact they can't go out and shop in the trendy stores any more? That there is going to be no choice in the next election? That their future is the image of a boot heel stamping on their faces, forever?

Is North Korean going to go North and take on the Chinese Peoples Army? Are they going to build massive numbers of ships and attempt to cross the straits into the the teeth of a "Made in America" Divine Wind?? Will the three Korean soldiers who survive to wash up on the northern shores of Japan proceed to conquer it?

Not bloody likely.

You say, but they have nukes! They have missiles. This is true. But the missiles cannot yet reach the caribou herds in Alaska, and it is unlikely North Korea would retain the infrastructure for building them immediately following a very difficult victory. The entire Korean peninsula would be in ashes. By the time they rebuild with the help of fresh slave labour battalions from the South, America will have shipboard missile defense systems just outside their territorial waters ready to stop short range missiles aimed at Japan - and permanent facilities in the Aleutians to defend North America.

North Korea would find itself in a situation similar to where it started, only worse. It would take decades to fully digest the liberal South Korean society and bury the bones of it.

This is a "best case scenario" for North Korea. It is also highly unlikely and that is as apparent to the North Koreans as it is to me. A more likely result of such a miscalculation is a replay of the first Korean War... but without hordes of Chinese troops and experienced WWII Russian pilots storming across the Yalu to push back the American counter offensive.

Now compare the situation to Iraq. It is a large and strategically located asian nation. It is surrounded by far weaker neighbors. Only Iran seems capable of standing up to them. So he'd leave them for desert.

Look at a map with the jaundiced eye of an experienced Risk player. Jordan and Kuwait are obvious snacks. The Saudi's are a pushover. The Emirates are nice people but are very small; Yemen wouldn't last very long either. If left to his own Xerxian dreams, Saddam would very quickly reinstate most of the ancient Assyrian empire. He'd own the middle East from the Turkish border to the Indian Ocean.

Then he'd take on the nuclear powers. He's got enough people and desert to take whatever Israel or Pakistan could mete out. He might leave Iran for Oday's generation. Future conquests require going through Egypt, and once that is managed what is going to stop him in Northern Africa?

All the while, he's got an economy far more effective than North Korea. There are shopping malls and consumer goods in Baghdad that would dazzle the eyes of a North Korean. He's an old style conqueror, not an ideologue. He doesn't have to control everything. He'll use terror and random killings to keep the population sufficiently cowed, but beyond that they may work and create wealth.

This is why Iraq must be dealt with and North Korea may be left to moulder.

Note: Thanks to Mark G for pointing out a blooper on my part. I've corrected 'Abyssinian' to 'Assyrian'.

Blogger Russell Whitaker has spotted a truly iniquitous case regarding legitimate self-defence in the United States

Ronald Dixon moved to Brooklyn, New York, from Florida not too long ago. The 27 year-old softspoken network engineer, a US Navy veteran naturalized from Jamaica, did not expect to have to defend the lives of his infant children from a vicious scumbag home invader. But defend them he did. Now, he finds himself in jeopardy, not for the defense itself (yet), but for the use of an unlicenced handgun in that defense! I've written a longer piece on this issue on my own site.

This is about as clear-cut a case of righteous home and family defense as I've seen recently in the U.S. This is also an unusual opportunity to overwhelm the Kings County (Brooklyn) District Attorney's office with correspondance, demonstrating the reach of Anglosphere libertarian outrage.

Russell Whitaker

This story is already a little old but I thought I'd give my two pennies' worth on the situation facing Danish statistics teacher Bjorn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, which was published over a year ago.

In a nutshell, Lomborg uses the evidence on which Greens rely to point out that by many yardsticks, life on planet Earth is getting better. As one can imagine, this has sent large parts of the Green movement and the anti-globalistas into a collective funk...

"You mean the world is getting greener, healthier and wealthier? But that's just terrible! Heretic! Heretic!"

The response from many quarters has been nothing less than childish. A self-selected and rather Orwellian group calling itself The Danish Committee for Scientific Dishonesty has denounced Lomborg root and branch for the temerity of writing such a book and has sought to smear him and his academic credentials. So it is good to see the man himiself fight back. Check out the article by Lomborg in the online pages of the Wall Street Journal for his rebuttal of many of their claims.

Of course by writing in the WSJ, Lomborg has proved he is a mere lackey of the global free market capitalist conspiracy, so no doubt the doomongers will not pay a shred of attention. It might influence saner counsels, though.

And in the meantime, take a look at www.lomborg.com for an ongoing discussion of his book and associated issues.

A little anti-fascist sentiment brought to you by Samizdata.net

Sic semper tyrannis

I can't help believing that it was the British decision to abolish and thereafter actively campaign against the slave trade that first introduced moral concepts into foreign policy.

Whether or not that is the case, it is the popular expectation that all foreign policy will be at least partly based on moral imperatives as opposed to the uncomfortably amoral calculations of national interest.

Nowhere is this more evident than in Europe where the various heads of state are forever delivering nauseatingly self-righteous lectures to the rest of the world from their bully pulpit in Brussels. Aside from switching off whenever I am so able I have also taken refuge in the suspicion that M'lady doth protesteth too loudly, a view which has been in some small sense vindicated by news of the French extending a hand of welcome to Robert Mugabe.

"France has confirmed that it is inviting Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe to take part in a summit of African Heads of State next month.

Mr Mugabe is currently banned from entering the European Union because of doubts about the legitimacy of his re-election last year."

I suppose it would be bad form to have 'doubts' about his democidal marxist policies. And that is rather the point, for whilst I do not expect the enarques in Paris to rain down 'Les JDAM's du Francais' on the former Rhodesia, it is nonetheless a reasonable expectation that the foreign policy decisions they make should reflect the 'humanitarian' principles they claim to live by.

Instead the French continue to do what the French have always done and pursue their own national interests in Africa under a cloak of Sartrean altruism:

"But French President Jacques Chirac was convinced that the Zimbabwean leader's presence at the summit would help promote justice, human rights and democracy in his country, foreign ministry spokesman Francois Rivasseau told journalists."

When the language of 'human rights' can be employed with such spectacular mendacity in an attempt to mask a nefariously machiavellian agenda then we know that it is a coin which has become irredeemably debased.

But this move by the French tells us that the mask is beginning to slip and, whilst I daresay the language of Brussels (which is not synoymous with France but heavily influenced by it) will not change in the short term or even the medium term, the polite fictions which underpin that language are close to being unsustainable.

The ugly, old ogre of national interest is being prodded awake from its slumber and invoked to stalk the world again. To accompany it on its travels we will need not just a whole slew of new ideas but a whole new language in which to express them.

By now, quite a few Samizdata readers will have learned of the infuriating plight of my good friends and fellow bloggers Andrew Ian Dodge and his lovely fiance Sasha Castel. They were able to spend just a few days in the UK owing to officials carping about (alleged) glitches in Andrew's paperwork. Andrew and Sasha were forced to fly back to Maine earlier this week.

What is obviously incredible, considering that these are two citizens from Britain's No 1 ally, is that they were treated in this way while, of course, thousands of folk enter this country successfully on false papers, or with no papers at all. Often many such folk disappear. Such people may even pose a security risk. The contrast between the treatment of Andrew and Sasha on the one hand and that of folk possibly entering Britain with hostile intent hardly needs to be stressed.

I guess this shows that as far as rules about emigration and immigration are concerned, we need a thorough overhaul in ways that encourage enterprising and good folk to live here like Andrew and Sasha. On a more positive note, may I recommend readers to look at Jim Bennett's An Anglosphere Primer, which sets out ways in which these issues might be resolved.

In the meantime, my best wishes to two of the feistiest bloggers in the business. Britain has lost the chance to be host to two fine writers, not to mention two of the biggest heavy rock and opera nuts around!

"I hate Uncle Sam - I'm so over older men."
- Jack (Sean Hayes) in Will and Grace, discussing his income tax situation.

Bill, an arts student, has never donated blood to the NHS. It is not for lack of opportunity. Quite regularly, the Town Hall is opened for donations amid a fanfare of publicity. Other students say, "You simply must go and donate blood." Must he?

The reason why the NHS has such a shortage in blood is because the government is not prepared to pay for it. Medical schools teach that buying and selling blood is unethical. Blood, because it is necessary to human existence, shouldn't be left to the marketplace. Instead people should give it for free. So goes the argument. The problem is that it applies equally well to food. Thank God there isn't a ban on buying and selling food, or there would be famine.

Despite the shortage being government-caused, shouldn't he give blood anyway? The logical consequence of him not giving blood may be that someone will die. He doesn't like that prospect. But it reflects his choice – and the choice of most other people – not to spend all of his time sacrificing himself for others.

He doesn't like the idea of giving blood. There's a cost involved and it is mainly emotional (to do with fear of needles etc.). On the other hand, he supports several charities. They are ones that he considers important. (Egoists would argue that his is in fact not acting altruistically by giving helping these charities, because it is pursuing his aim that these charities should get more cash.)

But despite supporting charities, he chooses not to give all of his money to charity. Like 99% of the population, he spends most of it on himself. If it is immoral for Bill not to give blood, is it not equally immoral for him not to give £10 a month to Christian Aid? He could do without the blood, and he could still exist without the money. What's the difference? The logic of those who say it is immoral not to give blood is simple. Any resource that you have that is not required for survival should be given away.

Perhaps a more reasonable conclusion would be that it may be virtuous to give blood, but that there is not a moral obligation. Neverthless, greater reserves of blood is good for society. Those keen to increase blood reserves would be wise to advocate markets. Markets are much better at benefitting society than calls for altruism. In countries where the government leaves food production up to markets, the poor get to eat. In countries where markets are blocked by government, they starve. Blood is too important to be kept out of the marketplace.

If you have a spare half hour, you might consider reading a long essay by Bill Whittle entitled CELEBRITY (on Eject! Eject! Eject!) about silly Hollywood stars mouthing off about politics and not being challenged by the media but just being allowed to say it and get clean away with it. Power without responsibility, the prerogative of the whore throughout history, as I seem to recall a pre-WW2 British Prime Minister once saying about the media themselves, of his time.

Example: Viggo Mortensen. He played a good guy in Lord of the Rings, but is now, it seems, batting for the bad guys, arguing for "peace", that is to say for the rights of despots not to be knocked off their perches, and the duty of the victims of despots to just go on suffering indefinitely. Apparently Mortensen recently said that many more people died in Afghanistan as a result of the US bombing there than the (just under) 3,000 who died in 9/11 attack on New York, when the true Afghanistan number is generally reckoned now to be about 500. As Whittle says, this person should most emphatically be allowed to say such things, but only in a world where the Viggo Mortensens of it are used to being worshipped, regardless of what they say, do such things get said by them so loudly.

There are many interesting responses one might have to this long essay of Whittle's, but one of the more interesting things about it for me is that it is indeed long, around twenty or so scrollings-down of my computer screen. But since Whittle was nailing down a whole cart-load of thoughts that many others were three-quarters of the way to nailing down for themselves, many people, including me, found it great reading, and just kept reading and reading until they finished it. When I started work on this posting there were already 68 comments, and now as I'm giving this its final polish there are 73, so I definitely am not the only one to have read this thing.

What I think this demonstrates is that blogging is not a particular way of writing; it is just a technology to enable writing. How you do the writing is up to you. Samizdata has half a dozen postings or so per day, of Samizdata type length. That's us. Whittle has pieces of very variable length, from Samizdata-short to massive, every day or two, with absolutely none of those rat-tat-tat fusillades of very short postings that Instapundit specialises in. That's him, and that's Instapundit. Blogging doesn't have to be done any particular way, except that, I would say, it helps a lot if you can find a way of doing it that suits you, and you then stick to it. Sustainability is all. But I guess if you're good enough you can even break that rule. I seem to recall writing here about this before. Yes. Do I now contradict myself? Somewhat.

One final thought. Those 68 rising to 73 comments included some interesting speculations about the possibility that saying things which are way to the left of regular public opinion might actually harm an actor's career by making the regular public stay away from his/her movies, with, in particular, Alec Baldwin's recently faltering movie progress being put under the spotlight. So, I wonder what will now happen to Viggo Mortensen's career. Will all those working stiffs on aircraft carriers whom Whittle writes about so vividly and respectfully, and their millions of land-locked ideological brethren, want to see Mortensen pretending to be someone like them (or like they'd like to be), when he has now so plainly declared that actually he isn't one of them in any way except physiology (or physiological aspiration)? I genuinely don't know, and will be genuinely interested to see.

Heard this rather good gag at a financial conference this morning:

A parish vicar dies and goes up to the Pearly Gates where he is greeted by St Peter. St Peter bids the vicar to step aside and sit on a wooden bench and wait for some formalities to be dealt with.

About half an hour later a farmer comes up, dressed in his overalls. "Ah, Mr Jones, welcome to Heaven! Please do step through the gates," St Peter says. The vicar looks on, a mite baffled, but keeps quiet.

An hour later, a hospital surgeon of brilliant renown comes up, and again St Peter joyfully waves the good doctor through. Again, the vicar bites his tongue and waits to see what happens.

Suddenly, a sleek young man in a suit carrying a copy of the Wall Street Journal steps in. "Wonderful to see you Mr Gekko!" shouts St Peter. "So good to see you at last."

At this point our vicar can contain himself no longer. "Why have you let in that capitalist pig through the gates while I, a humble servant of God, have to sit outside on a wooden bench?" the vicar exclaims.

"Well," St Peter replies, "We let folk into Heaven these days because of results. You see, the farmer gets in because he produced food. The surgeon got in because he healed people. And you, dear vicar, produced no results. In your sermons most of the congregation fell asleep."

"What sort of results did that hedge fund manager give, then?" asked the vicar.

"Well, that guy produced money for his clients. And unlike you, vicar, when he was at work, his clients were praying."

After playing some excellent games like tongue-in-cheek No One lives Forever 2 and the the awesome & ultra slick Splinter Cell, I was starting to get the impression computer games were starting to really enter another era: an era in which equal attention is paid to scripts, story flow, voice acting and the ability to interact other than by shooting someone.

Splinter Cell: ultra cool
Shoot people, be stealthy, climb, jump, sophisticated interaction...
take hostages and extract information without saying 'please'!

Boy was I wrong! Having just played Soldier of Fortune 2, I realise that even quality companies like Raven can produce clunkers. SoF2 is as linear and predictable as the original Doom, the cut scenes are filled with flat and indifferent declaiming and the characters are cliches (in itself sometimes amusing but in this case, not). Even the graphics are nothing to write home about. Level design ranged from uninspiring ("Ah, yet another blind corner... I might as well chuck a grenade as there is bound to be a bad guy lying in wait like the one before. And the one before that. And the one before that...") to the idiotic (as in 'my allies will try and kill me if I get too far ahead or behind the patrol I am helping to defend'.... riiiiiight) to the baffling ('so I shot the guard dead with a silenced weapon, he was nowhere near the bloody alarm button and the alarm goes off anyway instantly? And the logic behind that is...??').

Soldier of Fortune 2: suspect moustache
Shoot people, occasionally push buttons, try to hide (almost impossible)
plus shoot some more people... and then some more. And again...

I guess that the SoF & Raven brand names are responsible for the game's excellent sales and I gather that multiplayer in reasonable in SoF2, but I would certainly urge anyone who likes a good plot line, thoughtfully designed scenarios or snappy dialogue in a single player game to look elsewhere and give this by-the-numbers First Person Shooter a miss... Deus Ex or Half Life this game ain't.

After watching the news tonight, I am coming around ever more to David Carr's way of thinking. Perhaps sheer irritation by the Bush Administration about the obscurantist stance of the French and German governments regarding the use of force to depose Saddam Hussain may achieve something I have long wanted to see... the end of the fiction in American minds that either France or Germany are in fact US allies in any meaningful sense.

This is the first step needed to de-couple the Anglosphere Atlantic Alliance from the legacy of World War Two and the Cold War. The first clear step that this process is under way will be the permanent withdrawal of most US forces currently stationed in Germany, a situation which is a costly anachronism in the post Cold War world. Maybe the opportunity will be immediatly post-Gulf War II, with the US troops currently based in Germany which are going to be involved in Iraq going back to bases in the USA instead.

I just hope the pompous Chirac and the buffoonish Schroeder keep plucking on the eagle's feathers... sooner of later Blair, or his successor, is going to have to decide if they want to be on the side of history's winners or history's losers.

Hell, changing the name of N.A.F.T.A. to North Atlantic Free Trade Area would not even require reprinting all that stationary with the acronym on it!

"...it rests on the assumption that your kids belong to the state. If we buy that assumption then it is for the state -- not for parents, the community, the religious institutions or teachers -- to decide who shall have what values and who shall do what work, when, where and how in our society. That assumption isn't a new one. The Nazis thought it was a great idea."
- Ronald Reagan in Human Events, February 1979

(Quote via Nolo Consentire)

"The music industry has current employment opportunities for photo retouchers", Joe S Tallin, a music industry representive, stated in Moscow today. "We're looking for experienced people, and we've found most of our best people over here. They've got many years of experience in history modification and were thoughtlessly thrown on the scrap heap to fend for themselves. Those of us doing this in the West are just beginning to learn the art".

Joe added, unofficially, future projects will include replacing John Lennon with Robbie Williams on a number of old album covers. "It's just like the Lenin Mausoleum, or dead Russian Cosmonauts" he added. "You have to continuously update the past to reflect the market of today".

For those who have not run across the story, new copies of the Beatles famous Abbey Roads album cover have had a cigarette digitally removed.

It is a rare thing indeed when I trawl through the pages of the Subservient only to emerge with a smile and a jaunty spring in my step but today is just such an occasion.

Since the credentials of both the author of the article, a Liberal Democrat MP, and the organ in which the article appears, are impeccably federast I think it is safe to say that dire warnings of a split between the UK and Europe is not merely a product of wishful thinking.

"But there are two more profound reasons for the plunge in Britain's status within the EU that should give Tony Blair real cause for concern. First, there is the euro. Last month, the Portuguese Prime Minister, Jose Durao Barroso, voiced in public what EU heads of government have long whispered in private – why should the UK be granted a leadership role as long as it is unwilling to sign up to one of the central tenets of EU membership? As long as EU leaders believed Tony Blair was merely biding his time before putting the issue to a referendum, there was sufficient goodwill to forgive Britain's procrastination. But, as the Continent looks on with perplexity at the gridlock between the Prime Minister and the Chancellor, fears have deepened that Mr Blair has missed his chance.

And then, most important of all, there is Britain's special relationship with the United States. It is difficult to capture the conflicting reactions which Blair's ostentatious loyalty to George Bush's foreign policy elicits within the rest of the EU."

As I have indicated previously, our strategic alliance with the USA is something which the EU cannot tolerate alongside it's new-found ethos of being a rival to the US and not an ally. The day of British liberation is not at hand and may not even be close but it is just a little bit closer than it was a year ago.

Tony Blair has turned out to be a love-rat; forever declaring his affections for Europe while flaunting his high-profile affair with George Bush. The question is how long he can go on two-timing them both? Surely one of these girls is going to put her foot down and demand Tony's fidelity before much longer and who can resist the heady romance of being a war-time bride?

I didn't vote for Blair and I do not count myself among his fans but I find myself being forced to concede that he is doing more to pave the way for British independence than any number of phoney, careerist Tories.

Capitalism Magazine's article, Abortion Rights are Pro-Life, has convinced me that my position in the debate on abortion is weak. I used to take the view that abortion violated the rights of a child, and that therefore it was immoral (in most cases). On the other hand, I didn't believe the government should do anything about abortion. As Milton Friedman said: "The government solution to a problem is usually worse than the problem." The last things I want to happen are backstreet abortions, mothers killing themselves and so on. It would be morally acceptable for government to protect the rights of the fetus, but not practicable.

The fundamental shift in my thinking is that I no longer believe that a fetus has individual rights - or, at the very least, I'm not so sure as I once was. As the article says:

"what it actually is during the first trimester is a mass of relatively undifferentiated cells that exist as a part of a woman's body. If we consider what it is rather than what it might become, we must acknowledge that the embryo under three months is something far more primitive than a frog or a fish."

I'm very happy for fish and cows to be killed to provide me with food, and the reason is that I do not believe they have the same rights as humans. If a fetus is more primative than these, how can I justify saying its rights are greater?

All is not well in the Golden State of California these days as the citizens of that fine place continue to struggle under the governorship of Gray Davis, the man who helped acquaint Californians with the sort of power blackouts we Brits used to get in the unlamented 1970s.

This article (link courtesy of Virginia Postrel) shows how bad the tax revenue situation is on the West Coast, but also points out that the public sector there is as bloated as ever.

My recent trip to California last year confirmed such reports. One thing I was struck by was the poor quality of the freeways, in contrast to the smooth fast roads of neighbouring Nevada.

California could certainly use someone like Ronald Reagan, its last great governor, to shake it up and kick some ass in that state. Many political and economic trends seem to start on the West Coast, like the internet and tax revolts. A place for we Anglospherists to watch.

Perhaps it is better to be irresponsible and right, than to be responsible and wrong
- W. S. Churchill

There is an interesting post by David Kenner over on An Age Like This complete with pictures he took, of the pro-Saddam Hussain protests in Washington DC. It is good to see a bit of blog primary reportage.

Also David has a picture of Protest Awards!: Most Offensive Banner.

Here is a fascinating comment from Sunday Fox News by DefSec Rumsfeld:

Rumsfeld: It -- it certainly is not an act of peace or an act of cooperation. The coalition forces our -- U.K. planes and our aircrews are constantly subjected to being fired at by the Iraqis. It's been going on for some years now. It's the only place in the world where we're being fired at, as a matter of fact, on a regular basis, except for Afghanistan.

Snow: So, we're already at war?

Rumsfeld: Well, technically, the state of war that began in --

Snow: Was never --

Rumsfeld: -- 1980 -- 91 -- has never ended. I mean, the -- that has still -- there is currently a state of war with Iraq that has not ended.

I was just catching up on some of my technical reading. There's a lot of exciting and original work going on at DARPA. There always has been but the stuff coming down the pike now is just off in the realms of Science Fiction, as you can see from these words of the current DARPA Director, Tony Tether:

"Now that is terrific, but that is not the chilling part. We took the joystick away from the monkey at Duke. The light came on. Who knows what the monkey really thought, but it knew what it had to do. But it had no joystick. However, the mechanical arm at MIT moved the joystick just like it did before. It was thought at first that the motor signal was being transmitted to MIT, but it turned out that the probes had tapped into the monkey's thoughts for moving the joystick. In other words, the monkey thought about moving the joystick, and the joystick at MIT moved. "

Fascinating in and of itself. But it leads to ever wilder things in the future, as he says in a later paragraph:

"Imagine 25 years from now where old guys like me put on a pair of glasses or a helmet and open our eyes. Somewhere there will be a robot that will open its eyes and we will be able to see what the robot sees. We will be able to remotely look down on a cave and think to ourselves, "Let's go down there and kick some butt." And the robots will respond, controlled by our thoughts. It's coming. Imagine a warrior--with the intellect of a human and the immortality of a machine--controlled by our thoughts. "

I'll go one further. Imagine a whole bunch of these as semi-autonomous robots slaved to master robots "inhabited" by Marines. Let them shift their viewpoint and control moment by moment from one to another of the uninhabited warbots as needed... If you ever played the old PC game, "Hulk" you'll know he origins of the idea and how it works.

I don't really think you are going to go into battle with just Remotely Piloted Soldiers, but I can see the idea as an absolutely huge force multiplier for the troops on the spot.

It's getting really spooky out here near the singularity.

It is often said that technology is developing far more rapidly than would have predicted at such-and-such a time. But there is another point of view.

And it is still being claimed that we live in a period of exceptionally rapid technical progress and one in which the time elapsing between invention and application tends to get shorter whereas it seems to be true that ours is really an epoch of comparative technological sluggishness when there are not very many authentically new things about and even these, for many different reasons, are being developed rather slowly. (How much longer, for example, will we have to wait for efficient battery-operated motorcars which will enable the pounding, smelly reciprocating engine to be thrown on the scrap-heap; or the typewriter which will type as one dictates, which will release hundreds of young women for other more interesting tasks; or audio-visual cassettes which will enable us to break away from the tyranny and the interminable boredom of modern television; or a cure for the common cold; or much cheaper and efficient ways of digging tunnels so that the surface of the earth could reoccupied by people instead of being overrun by machines; or really substantial cuts in costs of desalination rendering it possible to turn deserts into gardens. This list could easily extended.)

John Jewkes, Government and Technology, Third Wincott Memorial Lecture, 31st October 1972.

Well we have audio-visual cassettes now, and instead of typewriters that do not take dictation we have computers that still (in spite of the endless "computer that understands the human voice" inventions reported regularly since the 1960's) have problems taking dictation. As for such things as cheap desalination (promised in California as long ago as 1956) we are still waiting - I would also mention nuclear fusion (we have been promised that since the early 1950's).

The oft voiced claim that ours is the age of the most rapid technological development can certainly be contested.

Sure I am of this, that you have only to endure to conquer. You have only to persevere to save yourselves
- W. S. Churchill

...or how to ensure your kids are more technologically literate than you.

One of the best ways to motivate someone is to present the person with a challenge. For children, forbidding something works equally well, if not better. So when I came across this product in one of those little catalogues that come with Sunday newspapers, I immediately realised its potential to do an amazing service in further advancing the technological awareness of the young generation.

Achieve total control over TV time

Worried about the hours your children spend watching TV or playing computer games? This remarkable new British invention hands back control to parents. Using the electronic Parent Key, you program the child's daily viewing allowances into Screenblock - say, 7-8 am and 5-7 pm. As the TV mains cable is routed via the locked compartment, Screenblock controls the power supply, turning it on and off at the times requested. But here's the best bit! It also comes with two electronic cards which act like a football ref's cards. Wave the yellow one at Screenblock and today's allowance is reduced by 15 mins - and red means the TV stays off until tomorrow. The all-important Parent Key also overrides all settings when the kids are in bed and it's time for grown-up viewing.

So far, so good. But if parents led by the desire to curb their children's TV-viewing habits succumb to the advertising and purchase such devices en masse, pretty soon many a technologically gifted whizkid will be popular, spots or no spots. Not only ways to disable the screenblock will be devised, but kids will be 'instructed' in how to do that themselves without their modifications being detected. Part of the solution will have to be the inability of parents to notice the 'adjustment'. Aren't you just grateful to the screenblock inventors for broadening your children's technological horizons?

Although attention is focused on the nightmarish regime in Iraq, please spare an angry thought for the vile rulers of Zimbabwe, who are still starving and murdering sections of the population felt to be 'disloyal' to Robert Mugabe.

George Bush, supported by Tony Blair, will clear up Daddy's (and Donald's) mess in Iraq by spending several billion dollars and sending a few hundred thousand troops to see the end of Saddam Hussain... Blair could do something about tyranny in Zimbabwe for a fraction of that price if he had the moral fortitude. For all his many and varied sins, Saddam is not (currently) killing and dispossessing British subjects, which cannot be said for Robert Mugabe.

Will the British state please stop spending my appropriated tax money on funding the comforts of former Taliban asylum seekers and, given that I suppose it is too much to expect my money back, start sending crates of rifles and ammunition to opposition groups in Zimbabwe.

Glenn Reynolds put me on the trail of this one: EMP weapons.

I personally don't know what all the fuss is about. New Scientist published an article a year or three ago which shows how to build one of these in your garage. Perhaps getting things right for targeting from a moving cruise missile and accurately controlling the output energy are the special part... but the main concept is dead easy.

If you are interested, go dig it up yourself. I'm not going to tell you how.

Once WWIII is over with... perhaps.

Sir John Stevens, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner warned the British public today in a television interview that Islamic terrorists linked to al-Qa'eda remain at large in Britain and pose a continuing security threat. He believes that Osama bin Laden and his henchmen are seeking to make use of existing terror networks in plans for further attacks.

"We know that there are certain links with al-Qa'eda and, of course, the link with North Africa is proven."

Presumably, this has nothing to do with Britain's policy on asylum seekers that allows a Taliban soldier who fought British and American troops in Afghanistan to be granted asylum here because he fears persecution from the new Western-backed government in Kabul (as already mentioned by Perry in the post below).

Although this is the first known case of a Taliban soldier being granted asylum in this country, I have no doubt that many have entered Britain with false documents and identities. They may need not bother anymore. Unless the policy changes, the successful application may open the doors to hundreds of other similar requests.

I wonder whether in few months' time the police chief will insist that his officers are 'on top of' the situation. It seems that the left hand does not know what the right is doing.

Indeed, the state is not your friend.

I have long known that the world is essentially a madhouse with no locks on the doors, but when I read that a former Taliban soldier who fought against British and US forces in Afghanistan will be given asylum in Britain because the pro-western government in Kabul is 'persecuting' him, I start to really wonder at what the word 'asylum' really means. Did rational people object to former members of the National German Socialist Workers Party being 'persecuted' in the aftermath of World War Two?

A few days ago, American bloggers Andrew and Sasha arrived in Britain, neither of whom have ever fought against British soldiers, or called for the death of Christians and Jews, or joined any organisations like Al-Muhajirun which aims to make Britain a muslim caliphate...

...and yet they were nevertheless detained at the airport upon arrival in the UK on Thursday and grilled for nine hours before being provisionally allowed into the country. In fact Sasha's blog was examined by the Immigration agents and its content used as the excuse to initially deny her entry. It is strange that the content of Sheikh Omar Bakri Muhammad's website does not seem to get him kicked out of the country.

The state is not your friend.

Sometimes the lads at NASA are slow learners. Back in 1989, George Koopman of AMROC offered to replace the dangerous Solid Rocket Boosters (SRB's) of the Space Shuttle with a safe, throttleable hybrid version. NASA wasn't interested and not long after George's tragic death in a car accident, AMROC folded.

But never fear! Fourteen years later, NASA has discovered hybrids! Better late than never I suppose.

Why, you may ask, am I making such a big deal about a hybrid replacement for the SRB's? They fixed all the problems on the Shuttle after the Challenger didn't they?

No. They did not. Not because they didn't want to, but because there is one problem inherent in the STS design which can't be fixed without a big change: SRB's cannot be shut down. Once those candles light, there is no survivable abort until they have burned out and SRBSEP has occured. (That's "Solid Rocket Booster Seperation" in laymanese). You can't do an early SEP either. I'll try to explain why.

The current SRB's are basically very large skyrockets. So large they have to be built in segments (with O-ring sealing gaskets in between the bolted together sections) because quality control on pouring the fuel/oxidizer mixture inside would be a nightmare on something that big. The stuff must be perfectly regular inside and have no voids (bubbles). There is a shaped void down the centerline which must be of the right shape. The SRB's are ignited from the top and since the mixture contains both the fuel and the oxidizer, once they start burning, there is no stopping them until the gunk is all gone.

There is a way to stop the thrust however; there are explosive charges that blow the endcaps at an appropriate time so that dropped SRB's don't go flying off on their last legs somewhere they shouldn't; opening the tube can also act as a brake. The recovery chutes are up there as well.

Now for the scenarios. Let's assume some pending Cat1 (category 1, failure leading to loss of vehicle, loss of payload, loss of crew) shows up on the consoles of the commander or ground control.

1. Before launch. The crew open the hatch, run out along the gantry, jump into escape baskets that whisk them to ground level and an armoured vehicle some distance from the pad.
   
2. At launch. The shuttle is too low to reach a landing attitude, let alone an ET (External Tank) and SRB SEP, and get on a glide path to the runway. Either the whole stack collapses back onto the pad in a big fireball or it blows at low altitude or falls into the sea and then blows. Survivors? Are you joking?
   
3. During ascent. The SRB's are at thrust and cannot be shut down. If you do a premature SEP, the odds are rather high the shuttle will be ripped apart by aerodynamic stresses far above design limits. It wasn't built to ride the wake of two hot SRB's passing beneath its' wings. If they blow the endcaps to "put out the fire", the stress of the sudden deceleration rips the ET apart and we get a Challenger type cloud in the sky with bits falling out of it. No survivors.
   
4. After SRB burnout. They can throttle back the SSME's (Space Shuttle Main Engines), do an ET SEP, drop out from underneath (they fly upside down to orbit), do a half roll and proceed with an RTLS abort. (Return To Launch Site).
   
5. Too far for RTLS, too low for Spain... If they can't make the runway and have to ditch in the Atlantic, they get into parachutes and extend a long pole out the hatch which guides the jumpers away from the wings. The commander has to keep the shuttle flying level and make sure everyone gets out. He also may not have time to escape himself, but that's Pilot's Burden and acceptable to most who understand the responsibility of being a Pilot.
   
6. Just a close call. If an SSME or two is shut down, they may still be able to Abort To Orbit (ATO) or Abort Once Around (AOA), depending on what low orbit they can reach. This is much preferable because it gives valuable time to work through the situation. There has been one ATO so far. The engine shut down was due to a faulty sensor and most of the mission was completed in the lower, less than optimal orbit.
   

You are wondering, "Why can't they eject or bail out?" Well... at least two ideas were examined years ago. They could put in ejection seats for the flight deck. But what do you do about the lower deck? On the other side of the pressure vessel from them is the ET; nowhere to eject to. So only the flight deck crew could eject. The idea was dropped. No pilot was going to want to be in a position of abandoning the people they'd trained with for years. They simply wouldn't eject.

Another idea was a B-70 or B-1 like crew compartment seperation. Blow the entire pressure vessel off and put a big frigging parachute or parasail on it. This was dropped as being not very feasible. Removing payload capacity from an already overpriced and unecomical vehicle was a non-starter. Payload mass is a terrible thing to waste.

Now we get to the point. Why are hybrid's so great? And what the hell is a hybrid anyway?

A hybrid is superficially like a solid rocket. It has fuel coating the inside of the tube in a way that looks just like the solid. The difference is this coating is only fuel, not a fuel/oxidizer combination. The oxidizer is usually LOX (Liquid OXygen) that is fed from the top in gaseous form. Things burn in pure Oxygen like you would not believe. AMROC's hybrids used butyl rubber for a fuel. That's basically a truck tire. In pure oxygen the stuff burns very cleanly. No black smelly smoke, just water and CO2. The nice part is you now have control. Slow the LOX flow and the thrust goes down; increase the LOX flow and the thrust goes up; cut it off and the fire goes out.

This is all assuming, of course, you have heaters on your valves. If you don't they'll freeze in position and nothing will happen. Don't laugh: it happened to AMROC on the pad at Vandenberg AFB. The valve stuck partially open during the start up and would neither go to the full open or the full closed position. Their rocket sat there pouring black smoke out the bottom. When enough fuel burned to upset the balance - there was a payload on top - the thing fell over ala Firesign Theatre ("She's no fun, she fell right over"). Afterward the AMROC guys walked up to the used and now empty rocket laying on the ground and retrieved the payload.

The fuel was so safe AMROC were legally allowed to drive a fully fueled rocket through a city centre at rush hour. It was no more explosive than the tires of the trucks beside it. Technicians could smoke cigarettes while working on it on the pad any time until the LOX was pumped in during the countdown. Their cigarettes were more dangerous to them than the rocket.

The only thing better for a manned rocket is an all liquid booster. The problem is the cost to develop a complex reuseable engine whose plumbing gets dunked in salt water after every use. I don't know about you, but the idea scares the hell out of me.

I must admit I like the image the new NASA hybrid gives me though. We really will be lighting candles. The fuel, you see, is paraffin.

Note: I have vastly oversimplified and glossed over detail. One could write books on this topic. I haven't the time to write enough to really cover it accurately; most of you neither would care nor have the time to read it; and those of you who know what I've left out or simplified don't need to read it anyway.

Julius Blumfeld, a home educator himself, believes that it may be a while before the right to home educate in Britain is seriously eroded. ("Ask me again in ten years time.") But I recommend also this rumination by Michael Peach about the future of home education in Britain, and on how to defend it. Says Peach:

Currently in England, although most Local Education Authorities would like you to think otherwise, we are pretty free to educate our children as we see fit. School is not compulsory, there is no legal obligation to inform the LEA of your decision to take your children out of school, you don't have to let LEA representatives into your home, you do not have to let them see any of your child's work, and you do not have to complete a pile of forms just to satisfy them that you are doing a good job (A statement of educational philosophy should suffice). From what I can tell we currently enjoy probably the most freedom in this regard anywhere in the western world.

So far so good, in other words. Which is also pretty much what Blumfeld had said:

At the moment, home education in the U.K. is off the Government's radar. It's just a quirky thing for a small minority. It's nothing to worry about and it's not worth bothering with.

But as Blumfeld had gone on to say:

… as more parents home educate their children, it will become increasingly visible. And as that happens, the pressure will grow for the State to "do something" about "the problem" of home education. The pressure will come from the teaching unions (whose monopoly it threatens). It will come from the Department of Education (always on the lookout for a new "initiative"). It will come from the Press (all it will take is one scare story about a home educated ten year old who hasn't yet learned to read). And it will come from Brussels (home education is illegal in many European countries so why should it be legal here?).

As I say, Blumfeld preceded that by saying that in in ten years time things may have changed, and home-education might have become a "libertarian issue", i.e. a political battleground.

Ten years? Peach thinks that things may be about to get nasty a lot more quickly than that.

However, these freedoms are coming under attack. A new directive from the DfES to LEAs has come to light. Apparently this directive has been widely discussed with home education groups, however the largest of them, Education Otherwise has never been consulted.

The directive contains several passages that are in direct contradiction of the existing law but this does not seem to have been taken into consideration when it was issued. Why is this?

Of course it could just be ineptitude on the part of the department but I do not believe this to be so. This is the start of a long and winding road that leads to new legislation and restriction of the rights of parents.

Peach believes that home-educators should adopt a totally hard-line and uncompromising attitude towards all this, but fears that many of them won't.

Daryl Cobranchi agrees vehemently with Michael Peach, and disagrees very vehemently indeed with Julius Blumfeld. Alice Bachini will also be keeping an eye on things, both here (at her personal blog) and, I would assume, now here (at Rational Parenting).

For the wider libertarian movement, all this is both very depressing or a possible opportunity, depending on how you look at such things. Personally, I would infinitely prefer the home-educators to be left alone to do what they want with their children, within the limits only of the criminal law. But the kind of libertarians who think that recruiting new libertarians to the libertarian movement is the only sure way to save the world will welcome these developments, because lots of hitherto (see Blumfeld) mostly Green and/or Pink home educators are, it would seem, about to get a severe political education at the hands of the state. It may, in other words, be the gun hobbyist story all over again. The gun hobbyists, to simplify that story only somewhat, started out as gun hobbyists with guns, and ended up as libertarians without guns.

Until now, Britain's home educators have mostly tended to rely on keeping their heads down and not criticising the State Monster so rudely that he stirs himself and decides to go on the attack. But if the Monster is now attacking anyway, silence no longer makes sense. A campaign may now be needed to explain to Britain and its rulers just how important is the right to educate one's children as one sees fit, and just how damaging would be the ending of this right. Again, following on from the gun example, it might help a lot if the Americans got heavily involved with the debate over here, in the manner of Daryl Cobranchi, and I dare say, already, quite a few others.

I don't care how hungover you are. Get thee hence to the newsagents and buy, yes buy, a paper copy of the Mail On Sunday today. They have a story about some TV chick the German Chancellor is shagging. You care not about the paramours of foreign potentates? Buy it anyway. The point is that it's a test case about whether British courts are supreme or whether the EU can over-rule them. Apparently Lover-boy Gerhart has got an injunction to suppress the story in Germany and is claiming that under EU law that means he can suppress it here too.

The stories are circulating. President Bush will announce backing for the NASA Prometheus Project during his January 28th State of the Union Address. This is an effort to design and build an advanced, nuclear based rocket engine for manned solar system missions.

It is a major step forward for those of us who have spent our lives fighting to open the high frontier. My preference is for everything to be commercial and private, but I recognize there is simply no way on Earth this kind of propulsion system can be privately built in the political reality we live in.

If built, it suddenly makes the Moon an economically feasible place to do business and Mars a place that is reachable for settlement within our life times.

Given what I know of some of the people whom the Bush administration brought in for space policy, I expected good things. Even though I have been aware of such ideas being floated for over a year now, I was not prepared for goodness on this scale.

I intend to buy one of them a pint the next time I'm in DC.