Saturday, June 19, 2004
Let's Roll
Friday, June 18, 2004
Bone-headed Attack
There is something different between voting down a child porn law for some moronic reason that someone actually believes in, and actually supporting child porn. "Artistic merit" my ass. "Supports child pornography" double my ass.
One of the rare times in my life that I'm going to agree with Andrew Coyne on a social issue. As he puts it:Essential point: where the state should draw the line is not between possession and distribution, or whether the material has artistic merit, but whether any verifiable harm resulted from its production or consumption ie, whether actual children were involved.There is, after all, a difference between reading Lolita* and looking at a picture of, um... ...well you know what I mean: I'm not going to spell it out in graphic detail.
I must point out that I expected some sort of this statement to be coming, although not as crass. During the debate, Harper (quite honourably) noted that he would consider employing the Nonwithstanding Clause against child pornography, if it comes to that. It would only seem reasonable to point out the less rigourous positions of the other parties on this.
But again, the other parties are not supporting child porn.
Because I was sorta expecting it, the Holly Jones connection didn't come up right away in my mind (plus I lived in Vancouver when it happened, so it's not quite as mentally etched in my brain). But to say these things now is, yah, twice as bad as saying it at another time.
(A personal note on Lolita: I never did finish the book, despite several attempts. There is something incredibly boring about a narcissist describing himself. I did manage to watch the last film version of it, starring Jeremy Irons, and found the second half just way too bizarre to compel me to finish the novel.)The 60,000 Word Monster
As I reflected on in a previous post, this is going to probably be a hard fight. I expect most governments on the Continent to pass this thing without much of a fight: if the pols there knew any better, they wouldn't have drove the voters to the Eurosceptics in the first place. The biggest hopes for quashing this thing are in the British Isles: the UK and Ireland will hold referenda on the question.
How far this goes is hard to say. Failing to ratify the Constitution would essentially mean that a country would either end up dropping out of the EU, or be in some sort of diplomatic limbo. How many countries are willing to make such a bold move is hard to say, but it's quite possible that if more than one country fail to ratify, then the EU-philes have a real problem on their hands.
But if just one country doesn't toe the line, then expect the Nice Treaty scenario: "Don't like it? Wrong answer: try again."Thursday, June 17, 2004
Israel Is Still Fighting
Some excellent Israeli sites for updates in the region:
Ronnie: There Is No Substitute
So thank the Almighty for Mark Steyn, 'cuz he puts it together in so well in his latest Spectator piece.
President Bush understands the threat of militant Islam, and he is obviously working towards eradicating it, but he certainly does not have the philosophical clarity, foresight, and eloquence of Reagan. Granted, Ronald Reagan grew up at a time when communism was already a menace to the world, but considering the conventional "wisdom" of the day when he was first elected President, how he single-handedly moved America towards victory was a feat few will be able to repeat.But even FDR couldn’t have done it without the help of Wall Street and bread lines. What makes Reagan the most impressive president of the century is that he shifted the landscape without any external assistance — no Depression, no 9/11, no nothing: like the Queen and Comrade Bishop, everyone was in 'Can’t we all just get along?' mode vis-à-vis the Soviet Union as it gobbled up more and more real estate. Reagan got a notion to win the Cold War at a time nobody else had. And he made it happen.
What a great man we lost.
And speaking of Ronnie, consider this gesture by the Parliament of Grenada (via Neale). After 21 years, the first tiny patch of land liberated from Communism by Reagan still hasn't forgotten. Reagan, of course, would move on to even bigger prizes, to the benefit of millions.Next Step: Actual Candidates!
Tuesday, June 15, 2004
Post-Debate Analysis
But some things I noticed:
Jack Layton is as fake as ever: his opening statement was a rip from his own campaign ad. He's the only guy that openly used the President of the United States as an insult. And oh, Jack: you said that "choice" means private delivery in health care discussions. Then what does "choice" mean in social issue discussions? Or are you too chicken to say the a-word?
One gets the feeling that Gilles Duceppe just doesn't really give a damn about the English debate.
There was a point where Jack and Paul were supposed to be debating each other, and Paul gestured over to Stephen. It's pretty obvious who was the man to beat at that point.
They devoted a whole half hour to health care. *Yawn*
Stephen was explaining his plan to purchase hybrid (i.e. helicopter) carriers, and Paul tried to deride him by suggesting that troops use airplanes, not ships, to get around. Okay, Paul, where are the airplanes? You know, the ones that will let us move troops ourselves, instead of hitching rides with the Americans. And as for helicopters and ships, well, it's only useless when the chopper crashes on the ship 'cuz we're too cheap to buy new birds.
Quite honestly, I'm in no position to say who "won" the debate. Because I was yelling at the TV whenever Jack and Paul opened their traps, I'm probably not the fairest judge. ;-)
But if Stephen Harper's goal was to look somewhat more composed than the others, I'd say he did a pretty good job.Now It's Personal
A New Westminster high school student has launched a "non-partisan" web site attacking Stephen Harper for his "stance" on abortion, which is really not a stance at all: the Conservatives will not initiate abortion legislation, nor will it prevent individual MPs from doing so.
Somehow, this idea really offends said student, but it probably wouldn't offend most people, so she hauls out the straw men and starts whacking away.
But the real kicker is that this "non-partisan" organization is getting support through connections through Young Liberals of Canada and all sorts of Liberal-affiliated individuals.
Thankfully, John Reynolds has pretty much shown how ridiculous the arguments are, and how insidious the Liberals can be.
You can read about it in the Vancouver Sun, or online (until CanWest shuts the page away) (via Neale).Now on to why this is all personal: the high school student in question, Cassandra Parlee, got in touch with all these fine Liberal connections through her brother, Forrest, president of the Young Liberals of BC.
Forrest Parlee was my high school classmate: we graduated in the same year (2001).
From what I recall, even back then, some of us in our school were politically inclined in various directions. There were some of us on the right, and others closer to the left. Now all this is not unusual: young people can get pretty convicted about things and start getting active about it.
Forrest, too, was politically involved. But there's a difference: Forrest, for all that I can tell, seemed to be passionate about the political equivalent of vanilla ice cream. The bland, centrist middle line, the political philosophy defined by its very indefiniteness.
So here we are, three years after that summer of entering the "real world", and I have become more politically active on a small scale, doing various things in university groups and so on. Forrest, meanwhile, has evidently rocketed to the presidency of YLBC... ...some people that knew him better would probably say they're not surprised at all. I don't know him well enough to say anything more.
And oh, to address the issue at stake: I personally would like to see the gradual legal end of abortion in Canada, but I'm not stupid enough to think that the political climate is anywhere near ripe for this sort of thing. Nor do I think that Stephen Harper will be the one leading the way on this issue: on this, most social conservatives are in agreement.
But there is a difference between a reasonable, civilized minority in a democracy voicing their opinion in a free environment, and that minority being clobbered by demagogue at the slightest sign of veering away from the so-called "consensus". That's why I support the Conservatives, and not the Liberals or NDP. I'm agnostic, and I never did consider myself much of a social conservative, but the choking smog of liberal dogma often makes me sick.
Note: I'm not sure what compelled me to write this post, whether it was the personal relation I have with this event, the relentless straw men attacks that have finally blown a fuse in me, or a combination of both: me realizing that political mudslinging can be a lot closer to home than one realizes. Therefore, I'm not sure on what sort of a note I should be ending this post. Let me just say that politics can seem a lot closer than the TV screen at times, and that when low-handed methods are used to smear and distort, the "people" that are affected are not an abstraction. Frank, honest, and intelligent political discourse is virtuous, and my vote is partly dependent on this fact.Monday, June 14, 2004
Fly Me To The Moon
It's been popping up on the news only occasionally, but the Cassini-Huygens space probe is days away from arriving at Saturn, and has already began taking pictures of Phoebe, an outer satellite of the ringed planet.
I find this mission noteworthy and fascinating not only for the simple fact that it is the first spacecraft that will orbit Saturn, but more of the strange anachronistic nature of the mission.
Cassini, in a sense, is the last of a long line of grand US interplanetary missions, the successor to the major NASA missions of the late 1970s. As some might recall, this was a stagnant era in US manned spaceflight: the last Skylab mission was in 1974, and the Space Shuttle was seven years away. Meanwhile, NASA launched some of its most ambitious unmanned exploration probes to date: the Viking Mars missions in 1975 and the Voyager outer planets "Grand Tour" in 1977. There was also the Pioneer Venus mission of 1978.
In some sense, the missions set a standard for "big" interplanetary missions. When the Space Shuttle arrived in 1981, and with space station plans on the works and an emphasis on defense research in space, planetary exploration moved to the back burner. But there were still plans being made for a few missions, such as the Galileo Jupiter probe. Those plans, though, were stopped dead in their tracks by the Challenger accident of 1986.
So it was not until 1989 that NASA's planetary missions revved up again, with the launch in that year of the Magellan mission to Venus, and the Galileo mission to Jupiter. Incidentally, the delay in NASA's return to space was a factor in the failure of the deployment of Galileo's high-gain antenna, designed to communicate with Earth; the spacecraft was forced to use a weaker low-gain antenna instead.
It was in this atmosphere that the Cassini mission was born: the idea of large space probes crammed with instruments, the way NASA has designed these missions since the 1970s. But politics and science would have other plans.
In the 1990s, much of the wrangling that NASA found itself doing against Congress and the President was over the Space Station (remember the name Freedom?), an idea that was conceived at the same time as the Shuttle itself. It was imagined that the Shuttle would serve as a cheap and reliable transportation system to and from a permanent US presence in space. As things would turn out, the Shuttle was anything but cheap, and after Challenger, not all that reliable as well. Cost estimates for the station shocked Congress, but the pork barrel that it served for several important regions helped it stay alive, despite the close shave of June 1993. Eventually, Russian participation saved the project, but what we now know as the International Space Station became the central policy-deciding issue in NASA in the 90s: everything else was planned with the massive budget drain of the Space Station in mind.
So with the budget for interplanetary missions squeezed, NASA looked to different, cheaper ways of studying the Solar System. The first attempt was the Mars Observer, which maintained the "big probe" philosophy but seeked to cut costs by adapting commerical satellite construction techniques. The attempt failed: the mission costed $1 billion, and the probe was lost days before reaching Mars, precisely because commercial satellite were not designed for the long transit that the Mars Observer took.
So we arrive at what we have today, summarized by former NASA head Dan Goldin's principle of "faster, better, cheaper." Probes are smaller and less ambitious, with an emphasis on smaller, specific objectives instead of broad goals. Results are mixed: early successes with Mars Pathfinder and the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous on one hand, lost probes like the Mars Polar Lander and the Mars Climate Orbiter on the other. But overall, the steady stream of planetary/cometary/asteroidary missions seem to have been sucessful in captivating public interest and the success rate is increasing.
Meanwhile, after some delay, Cassini was launched in 1997. Even by then, Mars Pathfinder was already on its way to the Red Planet to herald a new era in planetary expedition.
To put things in perspective, Cassini (below left) is approximately the size of a school bus and cost $3.4 billion.
On the other hand, Stardust (above right) is about the size of an office desk and cost $166 million.
Besides the anachronism of the design of the Cassini mission and spacecraft, its objective is also somewhat behind the times.
The Huygens probe, built by the European Space Agency, is hitching a ride off NASA's Cassini and is to parachute into the atmosphere of Titan, the largest satellite of Saturn. Back when I was younger, Titan was considered to be one of the most likely places in the Solar System where life may exist (besides Earth): its atmosphere, rich in nitrogen, methane, and other organic compounds, was considered to be similar in some ways to Earth's early atmosphere, and some hypothesized that oceans of liquid nitrogen covered its surface where a primordial soup may be mixing. Since then, though, the idea has been eclipsed by the prospect of liquid water oceans under the surface of Europa, one of Jupiter's Galilean satellites (although I haven't heard of any literature definitively refuting the Titan life hypotheses; it's just that people seem to care less about it).
Speaking of Huygens, with ESA's Mars Express mission, a slew of other interplanetary missions being planned, and a locally developed heavy lift booster in the Ariane 5, I feel that the European Space Agency will probably pursue its own path in space exploration independent of NASA in the future: co-operation on the level of Cassini-Huygens will probably come by less often with time.
So, as we see Cassini arrive at its destination and the possible launch of the first private manned spacecraft this year, it is certainly a unique and special time in mankind's journey out of the cradle.Powell Talks Tough
On NBC's "Meet The Press," Mr. Powell called the security situation "long and hot and bloody right now," and answered "yes," when asked by host Tim Russert whether Iraqis must "be willing to kill fellow Iraqis if need be to put down the insurgency."
If the United States is going to be serious about transferring Iraqi sovereignty to a local government, then there must be no illusions that this is a impediment to total control over waging the War on Terrorism.
Now, the cost-benefit analysis might prove that this is worth it: employing Afghan militias to do most of the fighting against the Taliban reduced US casualties during the October-November 2001 campaign. Although the unexpected cost of high-level Al Qaeda leaders slipping away blunts the argument somewhat, the plan was still beneficial in avoiding a slow military build-up and allowing a quick response in the aftermath of 9/11.
But the point is that an increased indigenous Iraqi role in eliminating the terrorists in that country is pretty much undeniable. But the question of whether they are willing to kill to achieve that objective is still uncertain. Secretary Powell's remarks have the dual benefit of reminding the Iraqis that sovereignty doesn't come cheap, and reminding Americans at home that we cannot leave our job to others if they aren't willing to pick up the slack.
