perfidy

It seems that Joe Wilson has something of an agenda. Wilson said:

"Neo-conservatives and religious conservatives have hijacked this administration, and I consider myself on a personal mission to destroy both."

So why was this guy accepting a secret mission from the Bush administration to go to Nigeria in the first place? A lot of people who were aghast at the idea of independent counsels a half decade ago suddenly seem enamored of them now.

And Bob Novak has written another piece, here, that pokes some more holes in the scandal in waiting. But, go ahead, investigate, we need to be sure. But this looks less and less like a story with legs to me.

MIT has expanded significantly the course offerings through its
OpenCourseWare program. Over 500 classes in 33 academic disciplines are now available.

I'm diving into two courses, Systems Analysis of the Nuclear Fuel Cycle and Numerical Methods of Applied Mathematics I. Exciting and stimulating material. Oh, and I'm going to take Mechanical Assembly and Its Role in Product Development and Beginning Japanese I.

Actually, I think I'm going to check out some of the political science and history stuff. Pretty cool.

In response to Johno's post about Sterling's Luddite screed:

Bruce is an insightful and clever guy, mostly. What he is willfully ignoring here is the provisional nature of all technology. As the Connestoga wagon was relentlessly consumed by the recreational vehicle, so all technologies are on death row, waiting for their final appeal to fail. Then they are replaced by something cheaper, more efficient, or better. These ten technologies are no worse, or better than hundreds of others. What he is offering is a purely aesthetic evaluation of the technologies he'd most like to see replaced by their more advanced descendents.

For example, coal, while not an optimal solution to our energy needs, is a good enough fit that it provides for a quarter of our energy requirements. Certainly, orbital solar power satellites or the perennially twenty-years distant cheap fusion power would be better in most respects. Less environmental impact, cheaper, less waste, and fusion reactors look really cool on the back of a DeLorean. However, the primary stumbling block to the adoption of these superior technologies is that they do not yet exist.

All technologies, with certain exceptions, are awkward compromises between cost, performance, and safety. Like the joke about NASA, "Better, faster, cheaper: pick two." We could all wish for the inhead, superultramegahigh definition tv with the dolbyphonic 9.3 3D surround sound that comes straight from the ether directly into your cranium. And it won't scratch like a DVD! But the premature destruction of these technologies would not advance the process of getting their replacements. With coal, most obviously.

But as a space nut, I take particular exception for his call for the immediate demise of space travel - just as it looks like the whole thing might be going somewhere. Given Sterling's general political leanings, I would think that he would be happy that private grass-rootsy space exploration endeavors are on the verge of actually working. Killing what little we have now would make it impossible to get to the next, better stage.

I have gotten so tired of entering my name and address for interweb registrations that I went to the post office website to look up the zip code for 1060 W. Addison, so that I could consistently enter the same incorrect information for all these nosy marketroid dungbreros. In fact I encourage, nay, insist that from now on everyone should enter the following personal information:

Dick M. Stickrod *
[a valid email address]
1060 W. Addison
Chicago, IL 60613

If they ask for more info:

Female
birthdate - 01/01/1901
Income Range - as close to zero as possible, or the highest.
For the rest, whatever feels right.

* An actual person. I sold him five triple pane vinyl replacement windows with the optional low-E coating for ultraviolet protection. It took me three days before I could look at the name without breaking into laughter, or tears. Three abortive attempts to call before I got through without choking. Nice guy, a bit defensive about his name. But, it's Dick, not Richard, Rich or Rick.

I hadn't looked at the Onion in a while, but this made me titter:

*

I have been guilty of #1, 2 and 5. My favorite part of the Onion has always been the headlines on the right sidebar. Couple good ones in the most recent issue:

• Wildfire Somehow Rages Back Into Control
• Eiffel Tower Washes Up On Delaware Beach

Fun, fun, fun

[wik] From the distant vantage point of the far-future Ministry, the nature of that image is entirely unknown, and unknowable.

The ever expanding story about espionage amongst the translators at Guantanamo has, well, expanded. Johno's favorite TV station, WCVB-TV channel 5 (modestly self described as the "Boston Channel") has a report that a third person was arrested at Logan airport, right under Johno's nose. And he says he's serious about the war on terror.

That American military personnel are passing information to the enemy is a very serious problem. This is treason. If they are guilty, the constitution is very specific about what the penalty is.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We'll have to wait and see.

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

From Peter Diamandis, head of the X Prize Foundation:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This image shows the four possible designs:

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

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

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

Or something. Drudge has linked to an article by Clifford May in the National review online, which suggests that the fact that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA was not exactly, well, secret. If this is the case, then there was no "outing" of a CIA agent, and therefore no treason and no reason for getting our collective panties in a bunch.

Remember that the primary focus of this is still the uraniumgate pseudo-scandal, and that the British still insist that their intelligence was correct, and that Saddam was trying to buy Uranium somewhere in Africa. Also, Wilson, by his own admission, spent several days drinking mint tea and talking to people, and on the basis of this thorough investigation concluded that Saddam wasn't trying to get the fissionable materials. It sounds as if Wilson, who was a vocal opponent of the administration before his mission, was doing a decent job of discrediting himself before any of this happened, which makes you wonder why someone like Karl Rove would go to this effort to do it himself. If Karl Rove is the satanically brilliant Machiavel with his hand working the strings controlling marionette Bush, why would he be so stupid as to commit an easily discovered treasonous act? We have a problem with conflicting conspiracy modes.

Unless I hear a lot more evidence, or at least a significant amount of convincing evidence, this goes into my unlikely at best folder. It tastes a lot like the BUSH LIED!!! story we've been hearing so much of lately.

I offer, without commentary, this post from Right Wing News that features a quote from Ted Rall, the focus of a recent thread on this here website thingy. As an added bonus, it has a similar quote from Jonathon Chait, a senior editor at TNR.

From the comment thread on my recent France post, Johno said about the Anglosphere concept and the split in the west:

Buckethead, I think that may be true only insofar as it's always been true.

When the GI's went into France back in Dubya Dubya Two, there was considerable culture shock on both sides. Although the US and Western Europe have grown familiar with each other on a day-to-day basis, there are both systemic and current reasons why they won't necessarily see eye to eye. You know that as well as I do.

I wouldn't make too much of this grade-school crap. The US and France have been at odds before, and will again and again. At least we're both Constitutional Republics.

It wasn't the deck of cards exactly that prompted the anglosphere comment, but rather the trends we see in Europe that are most visible in the growth of the EU bureacracy, and in the language of the proposed EU constitution. England was always distinct from the general political climate on the continent. The United States, and to a lesser extent Canada and Australia, have focused on the very things that made England different, and are thus more different. The unparalleled success of the United States in, well, damn near everything is dragging the other English speaking nations in its wake, while the continent is pursuing its dream of a thousand year socialist Frankenreich. The two political natures of the west, once more or less evenly distributed seem to be settling into a kind of geographic division. This might actually drive further separation in the core of the west.

Others, such as Huntington, have already suggested that the West has already split twice - that Russia and Latin America are already distinct, though related civilizations. Is it that farfetched to imagine that a similar process could be dividing the west again?

The Don has a post over at the Post about nation building in Iraq and elsewhere. This is an interesting piece, for several reasons.

He examines, as too few people have done, the different results of different types of nation building - in Europe after WWII, Kosovo, and East Timor.

Also, he focuses on the efforts to involve Iraqis in the reconstruction - physical, moral and political - of the their country.

Back in the day, before the libervasion, I thought that we could make a go of civilizing Iraq, and helping them build a republic of law. And that the key would be setting up the institutions of local government before letting them have a go at national government. It seems that we are doing that, and that makes me happy for two reasons. One, I'm right; and two, the Iraqis will have some experience with how democracy works before the training wheels come off.

The contrast that he points out between the current efforts in Iraq and the UN led efforts in Timor and Kosovo are significant. The fact that our desire to leave is obvious will I think contribute to our success.

The french author of the book that claimed that no plane ever hit the pentagon has produced a deck of cards intended to mock the deck that the US military produced to aid in the hunt for the top leaders of the Baathist regime in Iraq.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is the ace of spades, and President Bush is the king of diamonds. Thierry Meyssan, the man behind the French deck, said, "We thought this card game would allow us to ... explain why we consider the government of George Bush a threat to international security."

Words fail me.

Space.com relates that Xinhua News Agency reported that China's Science and Technology Minister Xu Guanha stated that the preparations for the Middle Kingdom's first space launch were going smoothly. While no specific date has been set (and the communist government is notoriously tight lipped about such matters, talk around the campfire has settled on two possibilities: Oct 1, China's National Day and the anniversary of the founding of the state in '49, or later in the month. Obviously, weather, technical difficulties, solar radiation levels and acts of God (or acts of nature for you atheistic commie bastards) could interfere with the plan.

I hope that the mission goes well, not because I look forward to a lifetime of servitude to our new ant, I mean Chinese masters, but because hopefully this will light a fire under someone's ass here in the good 'ol U S of A. Either get serious about government funded space travel, or get the hell out of the way and let us do it.

The Buckethead clan was at Taco Bell the other day, thanks to the lack of power at casa de Buckethead. After several days of blessed silence, we were subjected to some stupendously banal pop music. My dear wife asked, "will they publish anything?" Johno's point that the emphasis is on industry rather than music makes it clear that the answer is "yes."

I've been thinking, in my charmingly non-musical way, about music. Especially the pop music that causes me so much pain. Take sampling, for instance. A recent Janet Jackson song doesn't just sample America's Ventura Highway, it hijacks the entire thing. It's one thing to take a small bit of something, and combine it with other small bits from something else, and create something new. A lot of electronica does this without seeming completely derivative and lacking of originality. But the bits have to be small, I think. Rule of thumb - sampling should not consist of ripping off an entire song.

And the lyrics, dear Jeebus help us. Certainly, popular songs are about sex. They always have been. But as far as I can hear, innuendo is dead. Sex is no longer mentioned obliquely, let alone subtly. It's embarrassing to listen to. Granted the innuendo in the early days of rock, let alone blues, was thin. But at least it was there. Many people complain about the misogyny of rap music, but in a way, this is worse. Love is dead, we now sing about sex. And Brittney Spears' singing style sounds as weird to me as old songs from the twenties, nasal and grating.

The fallen state of modern music might be a sign of the apocalypse, or merely a sign that I am in my mid-thirties. But every time I hear this pabulum, I creep closer and closer to Plato's condemnation of music in the Republic. I remember music being terrible in the 80s. But it was awful in a completely different and better way. It was awkward, and used primitive synth too much. It was mawkish and saccharine. But they were trying, it seemed. Then as now there were gems, and you hoarded them. But the vast sea of mediocrity was merely mediocre, not offensively coarse and unoriginal.

There is good new music, and I listen to it. But you don't hear it on the big stations, and you don't see it at the top of the charts. Perhaps if the forces of light defeat the RIAA and a new era is born, the internet will allow a thousand flowers to bloom. But the bastards and beancounters in alliance are a powerful enemy. And one that, sadly, the musicians must collaborate with. 

Barbra Streisand says she finds listening to her own songs is so boring that it was one of the reasons she gave up public performing three years ago.

Well, that makes two of us.

Late last night, power was finally restored to the Buckethead Mansion in Lower Alexandria. The linemen, a team from Georgia, were highly competent and helpful, even fixing some problems left by the electrician who "upgraded" the electrical system in the house. Thanks to Lowell and Champ and their team good work. Hopefully, they will be able to take a break and see their families soon.

And keep in your thoughts the linemen have died in the process of restoring power to the states hit by Isabel.

AP is reporting that an 11-judge panel has unanimously overturned the decision to postpone the California recall election.

This leaves the door open for the ACLU to appeal the decision to the Supreme Court, which would have to then revisit the Bush v. Gore decision of a few years back. Hopefully, this will not happen. If you're going to have a recall, do it an be done with it, don't let it drag on in a nightmare of partisan legal and judicial wrangling. I had enough of that back in 2000.

Btw, the 9th circuit is notoriously liberal, so put your tin foil hats away.

[Update] The ACLU has decided not to appeal the decision. It is to be noted that the panel's decision did not rule out the possibility of post election shenanigans. So if there are more hanging chads and disenfranchised confused old Jewish women, we can still see a replay in miniature of the post-2000 fracas.

In the meantime, however, we have avoided a potentially very harmful constitutional issue, which Johno so astutely noticed the potential for in the comments. The problem of Court intervention in elections is indeed a big bag of stinking poo looking for a home. Nevertheless, we should remember that the alternative is worse. The last seriously contested election was resolved by a smoky room bargain - you can have the presidency if you end reconstruction. What similar bargains can we imagine today? The mind quails in fear.

An extra, double-plus evil possibility (though unlikely in the extreme) is total disgust in elections, leading to assumption of power or voter repudiation of the results. Court action, however distasteful, is still within the bounds of the system. We all think or even scream out load the Shakespeare quote, "First thing, we'll kill all the lawyers," but I believe that they save us from worse.

[Moreover] the Supreme Court action in Bush v. Gore merely ended the endless recounting, and restored the intent of the Florida Legislature. And Bush won every recount that was made. You can't, in a moderately honest republic, continue counting untill you get the result you want.

While the case in California was expected to result in a test of Bush v. Gore, I think it is a very different situation. Preventing a election mandated by the CA Constitution on the mere possibility of ambiguity in the election results is different than arguing over the results of an election that was actually held.