perfidy

Read.

Like Red States and Blue States, the books we read are separated by a unbridgeable cultural divide. Valdis Krebs, a man with entirely too much time on his hands, has taken some data from Amazon, and created a network map of books on current politics. Books are linked if they were purchased simultaneously. 

[ Bigger image here]

hat tip: Marginal Revolution, via The Volokh Conspiracy

[wik] While this phenomenon no doubt holds for explicitly political/current affairs books, it becomes a lot less true once you move away from that arena. I'm not sure about Ross, but I know that the difference between Johno's and my taste in, say history, lies solely in the areas of history we are interested in rather than the political labeling of the title. Where our interests overlap - we start running into the same titles.

TL Hines has begun what is sure to become legend in the annals of political reporting. In a selfless quest to increase our knowledge of the issues; and more importantly the people who will never have any impact upon them, TL is interviewing the Dark Horse presidential candidates. No not those candidates - the real Dark Horses. Like Kenneth Oliver Miller, Jedi candidate for the most powerful office in the free world.

TL, one question I have, and maybe you can forward it on to Mr. Miller - his stat sheet on Project Vote Smart lists his date of birth as 1/3/65. He will turn forty after the election. Is he even eligible to run for President?

The leader of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, had this to say in a rally back in August of last year:

"The resistance movement [against the U.S. in Iraq] may not be able to remove the U.S. from Iraq within a year, but it will be able to remove Bush, [Defense Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld and [National Security Adviser] Condoleezza Rice, together with their Zionist friends, from the White House," [editorial notes in the original Haaretz article]

The article has a lot of detail on the relationship between Hezbollah and Syria, and both groups activities in Lebanon, Iraq and elsewhere. Read the whole thing, as they say. But this quote is interesting. At least one terror group is convinced that a new administration in Washington would lead to a more salubrious climate for their activities. That is a strong argument for voting against whoever ends up the Democratic nominee.

hat tip: Insults Unpunished

As a sort of follow-on to my earlier post, we have this interesting article by Thomas Lifson in the American Thinker. (hat tip: Chris Hall's Spacecraft)

Ronald Reagan is 93 today. 

I shamelessly stole this graphic from Max Jacobs at Commonsense and Wonder. But then, he shamelessly stole the graphic from someone else, likely these people.

Rocket Jones links to Rocketman, who has a reader's guest post on how to get into space for cheap. It's a long one, but very informative and chock full of space goodness.

I've talked about the DCX here before - it was the one moment in my life when I thought real space travel was around the corner. Then NASA killed it and I went back to my normal, existential despair. Kelly does an excellent job of putting it all in perspective, and gives us his own ideas on getting to orbit. 
 

Or maybe not: 112,000 new jobs added to the economy, and the unemployment rate is down to 5.6 % - lowest in over two years.

[wik] A later version of the AP story adds this tidbit:

Some economists think hiring really is occurring in the economy, but it is not being reflected in the Labor Department's monthly survey of business payrolls. In the separate survey of households, employment jumped by 496,000 last month.

The household survey counts self-employed workers and contract workers, which are increasing. The survey of businesses does not.

Space.com is reporting that NASA plans to give $227.4 million to Kistler Aerospace for a test launch of the company's K-1 reusable launch vehicle. NASA is looking (finally) to the private sector to provide launch services for support of the ISS. Given that the Shuttle is out of service, they really don't have much choice - but this is still a positive development. Kistler originally began development of the K-1 to meet an anticipated large demand for satellite launches to low Earth Orbit. When that never quite happened, the company hit a bad stretch, and filed for Chapter 11 reorganization last summer. So, their lobbying efforts have probably paid off just in the nick of time.

The K-1 is designed to be a fully reusable, two-stage liquid-fueled rocket.
NASA expects to get flight data from the test launch for its money, and expects that if the K-1 pans out, it could have applications beyond Space Station resupply missions.

I'm not sure how much a vehicle like this will actually lower launch costs - much will depend on how expensive and difficult it is to prepare the vehicle for subsequant launches. (That's a major problem for the "reusable" shuttle orbiter, which costs millions of dollars to recondition after every flight.) There are two very good things about this news - it may set a precedent for going to private space companies for launch services; and it will give us good feedback for developing new launch vehicles. The United States has not introduced a new launch vehicle since the Shuttle, and we need to get moving.

Wretchard over at the Belmont Club draws an interesting analogy between the hunt for Columbian druglord Pablo Escobar and the hunt for Saddam and (hopefully) bin Laden. Our efforts to nab Escobar through traditional law enforcement methods were stymied by the thoroughly whipped Columbian government. Using Columbian intermediaries was equally futile. Then:

the Americans had a flash of inspiration. Since they could not get to Escobar because he stood atop a "mountain" of corrupt retainers, including many in the Colombian military, they would "tear down the mountain".

They retasked intelligence to build up a map of Escobar's empire: the lawyers he used, the identities of his key lieutenants, the location of his family, the names of his key enforcers. Armed with this information it is suggested, but it was never proved, that the US facilitated the formation of a paramilitary group called "Los Pepes" (Perseguidos por Pablo Escobar) which embarked on a program of tearing down the mountain. Escobar's retainers were killed at the clip of a half a dozen a day. His palatial villas were torched. His lawyers were liquidated until in desperation, some not only publicly resigned but took to living the life of beachcombers in isolated areas, the better to stay out of the line of fire. Burned out of every home, Escobar's family eventually sought quarters under Colombian government protection. Their phones were tapped. They attempted to flee to Germany, only to be turned back due to US diplomatic pressure, upon landing, and returned to their wired guesthouse in Colombia, spending nearly three days in an airplane. Eventually, Escobar, who once lived in villas with artificial lakes, serviced by harems of prostitutes and surrounded by hundreds of bodyguards, was reduced to camping out in mountain cabins with a village laundress for company. He was shuttled around, towards the end by a loyal bodyguard in a taxicab (presaging Saddam's fate), cornered at last in a small townhouse and summarily executed on its roof.

These methods worked again with Saddam, and administration officials seem ever more confident that the net is closing on bin Laden as well. For those who still think that traditional law enforcement methods are sufficient to fight the war on terror, this is one more slap to the head.