Hilarious (H/T, Glenn Reynolds).
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December 21st, 2009 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
 Mr Rudd made it clear that the deal had been an exercise in saving the international climate change process. “As of 24 hours ago, these negotiations stood on the point of total collapse … at midnight last night, we were staring into the abyss,” he said. He said the “big step forward” in the talks came with rich and poor countries agreeing to the goal of containing global warming to 2ºC. Hmmm… Staring into the abyss… and then a big step forward. Not often you hear a politician speaking the truth! (via Francis T, quoting The Australian) December 21st, 2009 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
I occasionally come across comments, usually expressed with a sort of “how terrible!” undertone, that more people recently voted in the X-Factor singing talent show on the ITV station in the UK than voted in the 2005 General Election. But there is another way of looking at it: the fact that more people care to vote for their favourite singer than the various types of authoritarian statist twerp in fact shows that the Great British public have a healthy set of priorities. In case any commenter sniffs at my possibly making nice comments about the X-Factor, I don’t like the show, although I find that there is something gruesomely compelling about Simon Cowell and some of the acts. December 20th, 2009 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
December 20th, 2009 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
Rand Simberg posted the news that XCOR has closed a deal with Yecheon Astro Space Center to provide Lynx II flights. The Lynx I they have been working on will now only be used as a test article to work out design issues before moving on to the fully suborbital Lynx II. Previously their plans were to fly passengers in the Lynx I at a price and altitude somewhat comparable to adventure flights in advanced Russian fighter planes. The income was to have been ploughed into the development of the Lynx II, the true suborbital spaceship. Thus there will be at least two companies flying passengers into space in the near term, Virgin Galactic and XCOR. If you are reading my posts in expectation that I am a neutral observer of this industry rather than a deep insider passing on tidbits of info then you must be a new reader. Lessee… Rand Simberg and I are in business together in Wyoming Aerospace. I know a bunch of the Virgin Galactic High Command and work with them through the National Space Societies ‘Space Ambassadors’ program. As to XCOR… well, not counting that I have known some of them for up to 30 years… I wrote software under contract to them which was used by their aerodynamics guy for the initial rough planform design of the Lynx. So yeah, I have dogs in this race. All of them. And I am damned proud of whatever tiny contribution I have made to the industry over my lifetime and ecstatic that I am actually around to see it all come to fruition. Ad Astra and Merry Christmas to all of my aerospace family. May you reverse the adage about aerospace and fortunes and break the surly bonds of gravity and self-induced poverty. And while we are at it… may a now minuscule Wyoming aerospace company also make a bloody fortune for its owners! December 19th, 2009 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
Declaration of interest – I know a guy who works on an oil rig. That’s my credibility shot then. – Bishop Hill muses on how any link to Big Oil however tenuous means that your climate scepticism can be ignored by the AGW True Believers. December 19th, 2009 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
After the speeches finished I headed up to the stage to take a photo or two. We were supposed to wait for the speakers and the press to go outside first so I intended to put my wait to good use. To my surprise, I was nearly run down by the group of very very important persons and had to squish back against the edge of the stage as Arnold hurried past inches away. Once they were all outside I joined the rest of the merely VIP filing out onto the tarmac at the side door . It was cold outside, at least down into the twenties. That would not have been so bad except for the rather brisk wind coming down the runway into our faces.  There were a lot of media folk freezing their tuckus off in the Press Stand. Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved There was music and a deep percussive bang as each of the huge images on the left of the runway flashed to on, starting from the direction in which we could hear the sound of distant engines. Then a white line became visible in the distance, the wing of WhiteKnightTwo. It lengthened as the singing jets grew louder… and then I could see it: the underslung SpaceShipTwo.  It came from out of the dark of a Western night… the first commercial Space Ship. Am I really here? Is it really here? Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved  Is it just love in the eyes of the beholder or is she just plain gorgeous? Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved  Ship and mothership came to a stop in front of us. Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved A group of four persons went up to the ship for the Christening and the Governors simultaneously smashed bottles of champagne. I had expected the woman with Richard, his daughter, to do this as it seems more in line with centuries of British and American naval tradition.  Left to Right: Holly Branson; Sir Richard Branson on the mike; Governor Richardson; Governor Schwartznegger. Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved To my great surprise, we were allowed to move forward right up to the dual vessel. I might say I was almost shocked that in this day of lawyer-induced destruction of our quality of life something as cool and wonderful as this would be allowed. Of course, now that it has been done I am sure they will realize people got to directly experience something amazing and you can not have things like that, now can you?  You would almost imagine this was still a free country: we were allowed to walk right up to her. Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved  A crowd formed around the nose of SpaceShipTwo. Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved  It even had sexy nose art like American warbirds of WWII. Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved There were too many people at the starboard side of the nose so I started working my way counterclockwise around WhiteKnightTwo. My fingers were numb well before this and when I was taking these photos I could quite literally not feel my finger depressing the shutter button. I could only tell it had happened by watching for the still image to show on the preview screen. It seems that not very many folk did what I did, so there are not a lot of other photos floating around showing the business end of SpaceShipTwo.  Portside of SS2 nose. Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved  Like any old spacehand, I went around the other side to look at the most important part of any spaceship. Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved  Two ships and four vertical stabilizers. Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved  As I had hoped, the crowd had mostly headed for the relative warmth of the tents and Absolut vodka by the time I got back to the nose. Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved  I framed one last shot of the huge ship as I left the tarmac. Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved In part six our crowd of future space travelers party on until dire storm warnings force an emergency evacuation. The previous section of this tale may be found here December 19th, 2009 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
When you read this passionate denunciation of the sheer intellectual cowardice of the Conservative Party over the issues of tax, public spending and the banking sector, ask yourself again: who gives a brass farthing as to whether David Cameron and friends win power next year? Who? December 18th, 2009 | 40 comments - (Comments are closed)
… people are beginning to be afraid of the state – but they are also afraid to be without the state But I think, in fact, it is worse than that. There are many people – and you can often tell them by their fierce, defiant pronouncements that they have nothing to hide, they have done nothing wrong – who are in a dependant, abusive relationship with the state. They feel the bullying and their fear itself as evidence they are wanted and have a place in the world. Being pecked is reassurance that you are somewhere in the pecking-order. Seeing people who are outside the hierarchy of subjection as evil, a threat, and pleading one’s own inoffensiveness at every turn is a way of legitimising one’s own pigeonhole. It is a nasty tendency. The feeble people who are trying to hide in the mainstream make up the lynchmob. And it is entirely equivalent to the morality of the prison-house, where violent gangsters are at the top and sex offenders are brutalised at the bottom, of an alternative chain of being. “You may think I’m scum, but at least I’m not one of them.” (Hat-tip: Iain Dale, even if he was only advertising his magazine) December 18th, 2009 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
“There is no reason to doubt that Mr Brown’s statement that he went into politics because of his horror at the effects of unemployment. Unfortunately, he forgot one of the few laws of political economy: that the road to unemployment is paved with work creation schemes. He is likely, therefore, to go down as something like the patron saint of unemployment.” – Theodore Dalrymple, from “Not With A Bang But A Whimper”, essays on current affairs, page 79. The whole chapter from which this paragraph is taken is a brilliant summary of everthing that is wrong about the current prime minister. December 18th, 2009 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
When an argument is being won and lost, the retreating team does not issue statements saying: By gad, you were right and we were wrong, sorry and all that, we’ll try not to let it happen again. No, the way you spot a victory and a defeat is when you see bits of bullshit (linked to rather admiringly, on account of the piece not being complete bullshit throughout, from here) like this from the Los Angeles Times:
Actually that is pretty much exactly what the real scandal was, except that they missed out the bit about sabotaging the entire world economy. But allow me to draw your particular attention, just in case you missed it, to this bit:
Position one: Our guys are right and your guys are wrong. Position two: Yes, it’s true that our guys are wrong, but … but … so are your guys! “If we have the decency to admit that our bad guys are bad, now that your good guys are proving it, can’t you at least be a sport and say that your good guys are bad also?” No. How, exactly, do the AGW sceptics “continue to claim political authority derived from a false ideal of pure science”? How has their conduct earned them the insult of being part of a “charade”? How have the sceptics been undermining science? Or democracy? There has been a charade. But the sceptics are busily unmasking it, and replacing it with truth. This is a classic retreat from fraudulent moral superiority to fraudulent moral equivalence. Once again, as so often in this ruckus, I’m thinking: Cold War. “Yes indeed, Communism is not working very well and many of the communists are very bad people, but capitalism and those who support it are no better …” No, communism was indeed a catastrophe, but capitalism was and is colossally, world-transformingly better. I despised the fraudulent army of anti-anti-communists then, and I despise the fraudulent and soon-to-be-huge army of anti-AGW-sceptics now. December 17th, 2009 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
Richard Castle of the Burton Mail wrote the following story about a recent act of vandalism: Vandals deface the town war memorial :
The Burton Mail would like you to think that what was removed in the manipulation was swear words or something like that. Actually, no. A picture of the graffiti has been posted by “OldWarDog” of the “4 Freedoms Worldwide” blog. It shows that the censored words were… …Before I tell you, see if you can guess. Not the exact words, but the general idea. You can make a guess based on this gnomic comment from the vice-chairman of the Burton branch of the British Legion: “What I would say to them is there are other ways of expressing your anger about certain issues.” (What issues? Why are you talking in this strange, indirect way?) You can make a guess from the otherwise inexplicable involvement of the chairman of East Staffordshire Racial Equality Council, and his guess – unsupported by any evidence – that “someone from the far right was responsible”, when the British Far Right are usually all too anxious to muscle in on displays of support for the armed services. You can make a guess from his further comment, which only starts to make sense when you realise that something is being hidden, that “Just two nights ago … we were talking about the harmony between communities in the borough.” Did you get it? Here is the picture. And in case that link goes dead, let me just tell you. The graffiti says “Islam will dominate the world. Osama…” The next few words are difficult to read in the picture. Never mind, you guessed the general thrust of them anyway. Now read Kathy Shaidle’s post :When media bias becomes media malpractice. What is the Burton Mail playing at? I was about to write, “you can’t get away with that sort of thing now we have the internet” until half a second’s more thought told me that you couldn’t get away with that sort of thing in the days before the internet either. Hundreds of people in Burton must have seen the graffiti, even if it was removed quickly by the council. When even one or two of these hundreds saw that report in the Burton Mail they will have instantly realised they were being lied to, and will have become far more likely to spread the news about what they really saw. The graffiti on its own will do harm to race relations. The graffiti plus the cover up will do far worse. (Via House of Dumb) December 17th, 2009 | 28 comments - (Comments are closed)
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