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Yet another intellectual gem from a senior member of the Church of England:
The Rt Rev Stephen Venner called for a more sympathetic approach to the Islamic fundamentalists. The Church of England’s Bishop to the Forces said it would be harder to reach a peaceful solution to the war if the insurgents were portrayed too negatively. […] “We’ve been too simplistic in our attitude towards the Taliban,” said Bishop Venner, who was recently commissioned in his new role by Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury.
“There’s a large number of things that the Taliban say and stand for which none of us in the West could approve, but simply to say therefore that everything they do is bad is not helping the situation. The Taliban can perhaps be admired for their conviction to their faith and their sense of loyalty to each other.”
Could not the same have been said about the formidable soldiers of the Waffen SS? But how is ‘conviction’ and ‘loyalty’ in the service of evil somehow admirable? And how is noting this quality in an enemy going to “help the situation”? And what if the nature of the enemy simply precludes any possibility of a “peaceful solution”? This is the Taliban we are talking about.
Well in a way he is right I suppose… we should note that they are loyal to their faith and to each other, and understanding this, it should be understood that no accommodation can possibly be reached with fundamentalists, be they Nazi ones or Islamofascist ones. They need to be confronted, culturally, politically and when needed, militarily when they wander “off the reservation”… precisely because of their “conviction to their faith and their sense of loyalty to each other”.
Getting that set in people’s minds would indeed “help the situation”.
If you intentionally invented a mechanism to damage the future of the american Aerospace industry you could not do better than this.
The State is NOT your friend.
The period of speeches and such is an unavoidable but necessary part of the game and the team present for this event was quite high powered. First in the batters box was Will Whitehorn, the President of Virgin Galactic. I first met Will when he joined in a small circle of New Space entrepreneurs late at night after a Gala at the Udvar-Hazy Center. The group of us were trading hanger tales of the space age and doing our best to empty the hospitality suite bathtub. All I can say is, how could you not like a beer drinking kilted-Scot who flies commercial jets and can hold his own in such circles?
Will Whitehorn, President of Virgin Galactic, did the introductions. Besides being a quite nice bloke to share a drink with, he has been known to show up in formal kilt.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
There were many speakers but I think Burt Rutan was the one most of us were ready to really cheer for. Burt is the one who created SpaceShipOne and now SpaceShipOne. Few would disagree that he is the most creative aircraft designer alive today. On top of that his views on many topics would fit right in here at Samizdata. He misses no opportunity to point out how he has created a manned space program totally in the private sector and done it for a small fraction of what the government programs cost.
Burt Rutan, Hero of the Revolution..
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
The most important people on the stage this day was the team that actually designed and built the world’s first commercial spaceship. They are the ones who took up tools and laid out the design.
The ones who made it so.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
Sir Richard was another member of the cast of on stage characters who helped make it all real. He is the one with money, guts and vision and I suspect shares ‘the dream’ with as much intensity as any of us. He is also a fairly approachable person in the right circumstances, but that is another story.
Richard Branson: the man who sold the suborbit .
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
Oh, I almost forgot… there were a couple politicians there also, and I discovered that the California politicians are somewhat jealous that New Mexico is building Spaceport America near Las Cruces. It will be the initial home port for Virgin Galactic’s fleet of WhiteKnightTwo’s and SpaceShipTwo’s.
Arnold Schwartznegger, Governor of California.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
Bill Richardson, Governor of New Mexico.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
In the next episode our adventurers stand in freezing high winds to watch the new spaceship taxi out of the gloom and stop close by.
The previous episode is here.
“The upgrading of the G20, Gordon Brown’s plans for planetary financial regulation, and the Copenhagen climate summit (whose inauguration of a transnational bureaucracy to facilitate the multitrillion-dollar shakedown of functioning economies would be the biggest exercise in punitive liberalism the developed world has ever been subjected to) are all pillars of “global governance.” Right now, if you don’t like the local grade school, you move to the next town. If you’re sick of Massachusetts taxes, you move to New Hampshire. Where do you move to if you don’t like “global governance”? What polling station do you go to to vote it out?”
– Mark Steyn.
Just in time for the Season of Festive Cheer, The Times (of London) reminds us all again of what is likely to be the biggest foreign policy issue for the next few years. There appears little likelihood that a future possible Conservative administration will have much of an idea of what to do about it, and of course we have a Nobel Prizewinning Chicago-machine politician in the White House. Not an encouraging state of affairs.
I yesterday went shopping for an LCD television for a friend of mine. I went to Richer sounds (a splendid and rather uncharacteristic British retailer known for selling high quality electronic merchandise at low prices from relatively unfashionable locations where the rent is low, providing fine customer service and treating employees well), and I ended up buying a Sharp TV. Interesting company, Sharp. People sometimes think the name is a little odd. For what it is worth, the company originally made mechanical pencils for engineering purposes, and they wanted to make it clear that they were very sharp (true story).
Japanese companies seem to divide into two kinds. There were pre-WWII monoliths – the so called zaibatsus. American policy after the war was that these were far too powerful and that they were to be broken up into smaller companies. This American policy failed. They zaibatsus were theoretically broken up into smaller units, but they retained a complex arrangement of holding companies and cross shareholdings in which management control largely remained in place even though the companies had theoretically been split up. They evolved into post war industrial groupings known as keiretsus. These companies remained politically well connected, and when Japan attempted to grow its exports through government directed industrial policy, these were the beneficiaries of it. These keiretsus included Mitsui/Toshiba, Mitsubishi, Hitachi, Matsushita (Panasonic), and others.
As I said, these well connected companies were recipients of government largesse, and those who would wish to praise government industrial policy would tend to construct a story that this led to Japan’s industrial success in the 1970s and the 1980s.
But of course, the story is more complex than this, There is a really good book about this, We Were Burning: Japanese Entrepreneurs and the Forging of the Electronic Age by Bob Johnstone. The interesting part of the story is that although the keiretsus did benefit from the growth of the Japanese electronic industry, they were not where its innovation came from. The companies that were the heroes in this regard were small, non-existent or unfashionable in 1945, or were discarded or disdained pieces of broken zaibatsus, In particular, we are talking companies like Seiko-Epson, Canon, Yamaha, or even Sanyo or Honda or Suzuki (the Japanese government tried to micromanage the car industry, but the motorcycle industry was seen as less interesting, and so that is where the interesting companies ended up coming from).
In electronics, in the 1970s, Sharp’s research was led by Sasaki Tadashi, whose enthusiasm earned him the truly glorious nickname of “Dr Rocket” – personally I would almost kill for such. In that era Sharp pretty much invented the electronic calculator and the LCD display. Sharp remains a leader in LCD display technology to this day.
To the extent, that in this day of LCD television, Sharp is the only Japanese company worth mentioning in this market. Sony – a company that rode a totally unique route between the keiretsu and the post war upstart, but which in the end did a better job of selling itself as a brand than an innovator – was the undoubted leader in the era of CRT televisions, but (perhaps as a consequence) totally missed the transition to flat screens. A lot of fancy televisions are sold today under the Sony brandname, but these were generally actually made by Samsung, or (in certain high end cases) by Sharp. The only Japanese company that actually makes televisions today is Sharp. The company that always was the great innovator: the company that Sony pretended to be.
Which is why I was happy to buy such a set for my friend.
Early vegetarian brings home a kill
It’s not enough to be rich and famous if you’re not somehow “relevant”. Whether it’s Prince Charles or Al Gore or Leonardo DiCaprio or any of these other guys, they all have the same message: “Hey, I deserve to live like this. Now shut up and shiver in the dark, you peasants”.
– Simon Scowl
I had planned on visiting the Masten Aerospace hanger as well, but as we ran into Dave at XCOR I got business out of the way and did not really have an excuse to sandwich that much desired visit into our schedule. Time had slipped by far too rapidly and Rand was due at the Mariah Hotel to get his Press credentials.
Since I was also doing articles and had not yet had any guarantee of getting into the event as I was still just wait listed, I chanced showing up at the press desk, egged on by some Press friends. It did not work and in fact a woman named Jackie looked like she was about to turf me out of the building on my ear and thereafter seemed to glare at me every time she saw me.
My main chance at getting in was more official and as it turned out, it was successful. After Rand left on the press bus I tried the VIP desk. They were much more helpful and after showing a key email and talking with a few people in Virgin Galactic I was presented with one of the last of the stainless steel VIP badges and told to hurry on board the last bus.
The VIP registration desk.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
The busses were the only way onto the field and even they were held up waiting for obeisance to red tape. All the buses, whether from LA or the hotel, were held in a queue and all were released to the taxiway at once.
The party site was at the end of the runway, hard up against the exhaust deflector and far from the hanger area. There were large signs which I correctly took to be part of the night time light show and a grouping of tents, one very large clear plastic covered structure and
The main tent.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
two smaller inflated balloon structures. It was all very 21st Century.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
Inside of the tents was the sort of environment you would expect from a party held by Richard Branson for a few hundred friends. The first tent held the coat and bag check and was the point at which we were given our very nice Puma ‘VirginGalactic’ jackets and ski caps.
OCST Director George Nield deep in a conversation inside the first balloon tent.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
The interiors of the two balloon tents were quite nice looking
Interior of second balloon tent.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
The second balloon tent exits at the jet exhaust deflector.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
Outside the second tent I found a sculptress still at work carving a space-suited figure out of a block of ice. As it turned out one of the sponsors was Absolut and carved ice played a big part in the night’s festivities. I do suspect at the planning stage they did not think it would be so cold that there would be no melting to worry about.
It was in no danger of melting.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
There was another bar inside the main tent and then the main auditorium area. People were collecting there as the speeches were due to start soon. There were little knots of conversation as people made contacts of opportunity or met with old friends.
Virgin Galactic President Will Whitehorn.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
The fellow in orange is Dick Rutan, the man who along with Jeanna
Yeager flew the first non-stop flight around the world.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
The global media were out in force. Note Peter Diamandis, founder of the X-Prize Foundation in the lower right. He is the man responsible for this explosion in commercial manned space flight.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
Brett Silcox from NSS was busy chatting with targets of opportunity..
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
I walked around the tent to get a feel for the territory.
This is the tarmac area where I expected we would see SpaceShipTwo
after dark.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
The media were everywhere and interviewing everyone.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
There was a full scale replica of SpaceShipOne, the craft whose first flight I live blogged from here some five years ago.
The X-Prize Foundation arranged for the creation of replicas of SpaceShipOne.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
The main stage was ready for occupation and speechifying.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
Tomorrow I will cover the speeches.
This is the third in a series of articles. The previous one is here
A few of my photos also appear in Rand Simberg’s Popular Mechanics article.
Within a few seconds of cranking up my computer this morning I was reading this posting by Steve McIntyre, which I got to via Bishop Hill, who says of it:
McIntyre has posted his first analysis of some of the emails. It’s not looking good for the Hockey Team, with their scheming to remove the divergence problem and “hide the decline” from the IPCC reports laid out in horrifying detail.
There are going to be months of revelations like this.
So that’s two links to the McIntyre posting in this already. The internet already contains a lot more. Watch it go viral, much as this just did.
A commenter on McIntyre’s posting, Jonathan Fischoff, says:
Every time I hear people say “the emails are out of context!” I think, be careful what you wish for.
Chris S says:
People are now beginning to realize how “so much was owed by so many” IPCC Summaries, “to so few”.
Indeed.
What of Al Gore‘s other argument (beside the taken-out-of-context argument), that all these CRU emails are ten year’s old, so, really, what the flip? As thousands have already pointed out, many of the CRU emails, which Gore has clearly not read or even read very much about, are far more recent. But yes indeed, the emails scrutinised in this latest McIntyre posting do indeed go back a decade. But what that shows is: so does the scientific dishonesty. Gore is saying: “Relax, it goes back a long way, these guys have been conning us for a decade.” This doesn’t really work as a put-down, does it?
Will “the media” give this McIntyre posting the attention it deserves? I am increasingly thinking that it doesn’t matter what these people say or don’t say about this story, or about anything else. McIntyre’s posting, one of the many fragments of this far bigger mega-story, is now out there, for anyone with internet access who wants to read it, and read about it. Tens of thousands of comments on it, attached directly to it, and such as this one that you are reading now, are even now being concocted, by and for all who care. Whether the old-school journos join in (Delingpole is a good example of that trend) and thereby become part of the new media, or prefer to keep looking away (see Delingpole’s excellent recent posting about the pathetic Climategate non-performance so far of Private Eye) this says more about their own future than it says about the story itself. As with the named and shamed CRU scientists, the exact motivation behind each particular item of old-school media deception, neglect or misdirection is a matter of debate. The fact of it is not, and any who want to can now see this.
Michael J just emailed me this link to a piece by a scientist. The point is, guys like this can now can now say all this. He no longer needs any journo to open the door for him.
After hanging out in the SSI office for awhile, Rand and I headed over to the XCOR hanger, the next after the Scaled Composites one shown here. I am sure caffeine was flowing like water inside as Scaled staff got everything ready to roll.
You could almost feel the coming buzz from the Scaled Composites hanger.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
We were let into XCOR through the front reception and found yet another crowd of which we knew practically everyone. It is not a big industry so practically everyone knows everyone else. Rand and I were there for business as well as saying hello. You know, just making sure people remember us when they suddenly have money and need someone to help spend it!
California does not yet require listing Rocket Scientists and Hanger Cats as potentially Hazardous Materials.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
XCOR was the host of the local get together. The crowd there traded thoughts on rocket engine design, control systems, who currently has money and who does not… all of the important things in life. Well, some of them at least. See how many people you can name from this crowd.
XCOR and Masten folk talking about rockets
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
XCOR and Masten folk talking about rockets
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
I had a long chat and traded stories with Aleta Jackson who besides being one of the leading lights of XCOR is also someone I have known for…. well perhaps I should not say how long, but the light had definitely been separated from the dark by then.
Aleta has lots of good stories.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
There are bits and bobs of rocket planes, rocket engines and test gear all about the hanger the XCOR folk have called home for much of this decade, but the real eye-catchers are these beauties:
The Rocket Racer looks fast just sitting there.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
And they have two of them sitting there!
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
Aleta saw me drooling and smitten at the cockpit door and demanded I sit in it. On the serious side, the controls of this baby are pretty much what you would find in any General Aviation aircraft, although I suspect the glass cockpit part of it has a few other twists. At Alamogordo two years ago I heard they are to have a Heads Up Display to superimpose an image of the racing ‘gates’ on the external view.
In any case, I got a brief ground stint in the left hand seat and held its throttle in my hand.
I will remember to ask Aleta for the keys next time.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
Part 1 of this series is here. The next article will show our intrepid rocket renegades making their tortuous way to the most historic party of the decade.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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