Monday, April 28, 2008

SPACE DRAGON?

I'll start my post-repaired blogging with a note about this item at CNN, which strikes an alarming tone about China's ambitions in space. I found it via Mark Whittington, a space activist and blogger who is one of the few writers I regularly read who doesn't seem to get how deeply flawed NASA's Constellation program is, and who also seems to sound the "space race with China" song fairly often. It's another thing he's wrong about.

As I've noted here before, the glacial pace at which the Chinese space program is progressing is no accident. It's a function of the deeply conservative and risk-averse political culture that pervades the Chinese government. In that culture being wrong is a lot worse than being right is good -- in other words, it's a lot better to be safe than sorry. The people who work in the Chinese aerospace world are very, very competent people, but they simply aren't going to take the kind of risks that it would take to "overtake the US in space" any time soon.

Could the Chinese tortoise win the race? Yes, but only if all of the American hares get grounded or sidetracked. If the pathetic Constellation project was the only thing China was competing against, I'd be worried. But they're competing against LockMart and Boeing and, far more importantly, SpaceX and Blue Origin and Bigelow.

GB, THHotA

posted by Greg 6:40 PM

Sunday, April 27, 2008

FIXED IT!

I finally got around to looking at the microscopic level at the settings in Blogger's control panel and found the problem that's been keeping me from being able to post. The question is how it got busted in the first place.

... gremlins, I guess ...

GB

posted by Greg 2:25 PM

Saturday, April 19, 2008

TEST

I'm having chronic problems getting posts up. There doesn't seem to be anything wrong with FTP on the server side ... aaaargh ....

posted by Greg 9:53 AM

Wednesday, April 16, 2008

LINK SPEW

After a few very intense days at work, I need to clear out the browser tabs, so here's a big link dump:

Space Stuff: The people who will actually make humanity into a space-faring species continue to steadily make progress. Here's a short, non-technical interview with Elon Musk, in which he describes the real progress he's making toward creating a real space transportation system. More showy and reality show-y is the Rocket Racing League, which has reached the threshold of its birth now.

More Race: Speaking of race, here's a left-ish, uncomfortable and critical review of Bill Cosby's crusade to reform African-American culture. It makes uncomfortable reading, because the author, young and "liberal," flinches from Cosby's hard message and looks everywhere for reasons to reject it. In the end, though, he can't help but find a lot to like. And then, on the other side of the world, we see a refreshingly frank assessment of how the Australian left's love affair with the myth of the Noble Savage has ruined the lives of Australia's aboriginal population -- all in the name of "authenticity" and expurgation of white guilt. Sound familiar?

War Notes: Janet Levy provides a good overview of China's Islamist problem with its Uighur population in Xinjiang. Meanwhile, on the Central Front, here's a transcript of a speech by a Hamas leader who makes clear what the real goals of those "authentic" oppressed Palestinian people really want. Elsewhere on the Central Front, here's a note about how conditions in Basra have IMPROVED since the recent action against the Sadrist militias. You can bet you won'tbe hearing about this from our guardians in the mainstream media.

OK ... coffee break's over; back on your heads!

GB, THHotA

posted by Greg 4:55 AM

Friday, April 11, 2008

TEST

posted by Greg 7:06 PM

Thursday, April 10, 2008

LINK-O-RAMA

Obama, King: A belated link to Christopher Hitchens' ruminations on how those who claim the mantle of Martin Luther King, Jr. don't deserve it.

More Black: Two fascinating links from AvLeak -- here and here -- that make a pretty good case that there is near-flying hardware already in the Air Force program for a "next generation bomber."

War Notes: Some more or less random notes on things going on in the war that most people don't acknowledge exists: The UK courts won't let the government deport a known al Qaida operative. At the same time, prison officials in England may be about to allow Muslim sex offenders opt out of the mandatory treatment program for such perverts because it's "offensive to Islam." Meanwhile, the US news face that Al Jazeera English recruited speaks about why he finally quit in disgust at the gross anti-American bias there. At the other end of the spectrum, i.e. the micro-level of daily life in Muslim countries, stories like this don't even attract notice in the West: A member of the Hindu minority in Pakistan is beaten to death by his factory coworkers because he said something they didn't like about old Mo. Finally, here's a long review of a book that tackles something that I've often thought of in my Arab and Muslim studies: That tribalism is one of the main roots of both the actual social and political dynamics in the Muslim world, and also is a key element of Islam itself.

GB, THHotA

posted by Greg 5:02 PM

TAKING UP SPACE

Three quick notes on the aerospace front this morning:

Space Dragon: Obviously, the Chinese Shenzhou program combines two of my most ardent interests, just about everything to do with China, and just about everything to do with space development. Here's an article containing pretty much rank speculation about how the EVA ("spacewalk" to the masses) might go on the upcoming third Shenzhou flight (Called "Shenzhou VII" because it's the seventh flight of the spacecraft, but only the third manned flight.) This article is notable for the fact that it really is just about completely guesswork. The Shenzhou program has no particular direct military or "national security" import for China, so the secrecy surrounding the way it is being developed and carried out is a perfect example of how sensitivity to perceived failure in Chinese institutions in general and the Chinese government and Communist Party in particular breed this kind of secrecy. They have to keep things like this secret because any change from announced plans involves loss of face, for which people have to pay a heavy price, and which the governing regime perceives as a threat to legitimacy. While there is very impressive technical competence displayed in the Shenzhou program, the lack of flexibility inherent in the way the program has to be carried out will ensure that things go very, very slowly for the Chinese manned space effort.

State of the Industry: Here's a link to Rand Simberg's comments on another post (both very worth reading) about the state of the suborbital alt-space industry. Note, though, that the real elephant in the room not identified or addressed in these items is SpaceX.

Black Ops: Here's an amusing collection of "intelligence" on the US "black" aerospace world via an unusual avenue.

GB, THHotA

posted by Greg 7:17 AM

Wednesday, April 09, 2008

TOO GOOD TO PASS UP

I wasn't going to blog any more this morning, but this is just too deliciously juicy to pass up. This person, a Democratic Party member of the Illinois state legislature, had something to say to a fellow who was testifying in a hearing dealing with the state's Deputy Governor's efforts to make a $1 million grant of state funds to a Baptist church. Here's a transcript of the proceedings:

Davis: I don’t know what you have against God, but some of us don’t have much against him. We look forward to him and his blessings. And it’s really a tragedy -- it’s tragic -- when a person who is engaged in anything related to God, they want to fight. They want to fight prayer in school.

I don’t see you (Sherman) fighting guns in school. You know?

I’m trying to understand the philosophy that you want to spread in the state of Illinois. This is the Land of Lincoln. This is the Land of Lincoln where people believe in God, where people believe in protecting their children.… What you have to spew and spread is extremely dangerous, it’s dangerous--

Sherman: What’s dangerous, ma’am?

Davis: It’s dangerous to the progression of this state. And it’s dangerous for our children to even know that your philosophy exists! Now you will go to court to fight kids to have the opportunity to be quiet for a minute. But damn if you’ll go to [court] to fight for them to keep guns out of their hands. I am fed up! Get out of that seat!

Sherman: Thank you for sharing your perspective with me, and I’m sure that if this matter does go to court---

Davis: You have no right to be here! We believe in something. You believe in destroying! You believe in destroying what this state was built upon.

... I dunno ... I suppose the Idols of the Tribe still have a few defenders here in the land of the Great Satan.

GB, THHotA

posted by Greg 8:00 AM

LINK-O-RAMA

A crowded browser and little time means it's time for another edition of Link-Dump:

Space Cadets: I've got lots of catching up to do on space blogging, but not enough time to do all the great stuff justice. Here are some quick takes. The European Space Agency's Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV) has now docked with the International Space Station. Although it had a few relatively minor glitches, it and the ESA have performed at an extremely high level. It's a very impressive vehicle, but hugely expensive and, as currently funded, only this one and three others are intended to be built and flown. The PR available at various sites talks about how the ATV is "unmanned but man-rated," which is true. But right now the unwieldy and hyper-politicized ESA structure (which makes NASA look svelte and nimble) has near-zero chance of turning the ATV into any kind of manned vehicle. Which is to say nothing of the fact that it's one more ruinously expensive and complex piece of throw-away hardware. All of which goes to the problem with "Space Programs:" A "program" has a beginning, middle and end. A real space infrastructure doesn't.

Speaking of throw-away hardware, I managed to catch yesterday's launch of the Soyuz carrying the ISS Expedition 17 crew and South Korea's game-show-winning "Spaceflight Participant" (NASA's euphemism for people who ride Russian rockets to the ISS for mere money). (The flight also included another first: The first second-generation space traveler.) Now, if you're going to chunk everything in the garbage after every use, there's no better example of how to do it right than the Soyuz. It's dead-simple and as reliable as a Chevy small black V-8. (I estimate that the all-in marginal cost of building and flying a full Soyuz mission is well under $100 million and may be as low as $50 million.) Question for the reader: If this facility exists, why in the world would anyone pay orders of magnitude more to simply recreate this same capability???

At the other end of the garbage-can-vs.-re-use spectrum is this relatively recent study from Northrop I came across about just what would be involved in building a reusable, "combined cycle" air-breathing Mach 7+ technology demonstrator. If NASA were being true to the mission it had at its founding (which was just the old NACA's mission "on steroids"), it would get out of the rocket booster and orbit-shuttle game and concentrate on something like this -- something industry is simply not going to do on its own because it involves too much work at the intersection between engineering and science. Remember the X-15? THAT'S what NASA's supposed to be doing, not building commuter buses and 18-wheelers.

Imaginary Friends: In Malaysia, that so-called "moderate Muslim nation," fundamentalist implementation of draconian theocracy continues unabated. Here's a local Malay comment on the state of play. Stop by to get a feel for what's in store for the world's most populous Muslim country. Meanwhile, in the hot war against the world's most petulant Imaginary Friend, the question is posed who's really winning in the war among the armed Shiite groups in Iraq. Although it's now over a week old, this piece from a retired US spook has a good perspective on how to gauge the answer to that question. Finally, here's an interesting short philosophical note about life without Imaginary Friends, something it seems most people really don't understand at all.

That's all I have time for this morning -- there will likely be more short notes over the next week or so as work-work is heating up.

GB, THHotA

posted by Greg 6:49 AM

Monday, April 07, 2008

SPACE CYNICISM

Here's a post from the Space Cynic blog that quotes Warren Buffet about investing in airlines as a cautionary tale for those who would invest in alt.space companies:

The worst sort of business is one that grows rapidly, requires significant capital to engender the growth, and then earns little or no money. Think airlines. Here a durable competitive advantage has proven elusive ever since the days of the Wright brothers. Indeed, if a farsighted capitalist had been present at Kitty Hawk, he would have done his successors a huge favor by shooting Orville down.

The airline industry’s demand for capital ever since that first flight has been insatiable. Investors have poured money into a bottomless pit, attracted by growth when they should have been repelled by it. And I, to my shame, participated in this foolishness when I had Berkshire buy U.S. Air preferred stock in 1989. As the ink was drying on our check, the company went into a tailspin, and before long our preferred dividend was no longer being paid. But then we got very lucky. In one of the recurrent, but always misguided, bursts of optimism for airlines, we were actually able to sell our shares in 1998 for a hefty gain. In the decade following our sale, the company went bankrupt. Twice.

"Cynic" is right: Shoot down Orville Wright? Yes, airlines are pains in the neck as investments. So, by the way, are restaurants, by and large. If all you care about is making money then, by all means, play arithmetic games on Wall Street and stay the heck away from actually doing anything real in the real world. Your fickle money is the last thing that's wanted by visionaries who want to build something useful. You'll have to care about more than how many score-counters you have in your bank account if you want to be counted as someone who has actually contributed something to human life.

A better illustration I could not imagine of mistaking an instrument -- capitalism -- for a goal -- human progress and happiness. Fortunately, there are people who know what money is for. But Warren Buffet isn't one of them.

GB, THHotA

posted by Greg 9:10 AM

Saturday, April 05, 2008

PHASE TRANSITION IN CHINA

A couple of days ago, a friend sent me a link to this article in National Geographic about life in the Wenzhou region of Zhejiang province. He asked for my reactions, and this is an excerpt from my reply:

... the "Wenzhou Phenomenon" is as the author describes -- even more than the Shenzhen economic zone near Guangdong that started the new industrial revolution in China, the Wenzhou region of Zhejiang is known for its dymanism and cut-throat, Dickensian capitalism.

That's one weakness of the Wenzhou Model. Entrepreneurs produce goods that require little capital and low technology, which makes it easy for neighbors to jump in.

This is one of the crucial factors in the current era in China. What's worked for the last 25 years just isn't going to work from now on, and everybody knows it. There's a feeling of unease settling in among both the "new capitalist" class and the Party about this. But there's not a very clear notion of how to bootstrap into the next stage.

From my own point of view, the biggest problem is the lack of a legal infrastructure and culture of legality to serve as a foundation for moving into the next stage. As the anecdotes in the article make clear, each enterprise succeeds in its own little world of personal relationships, and doesn't really depend on any protecting sheath of legal rights and duties for its survival and growth. That's fine for the crib-stage of industrial capitalism, but it can't possibly wok when you have to have a longer time horizon for investment and enterprise development than the next few days or weeks.

And speaking of the lack of legality and "The Wild, Wild East," this story very well illustrates just how fractured and extra-legal life in China has become:

One week, the Red Star Acrobatic and Artistic Troupe came to town. Their battered truck had side panels that unfolded to reveal a marquee with photographs of half-dressed women, along with bright slogans (Passion! Perfection!). The truck's body converted into a box office; they pitched a tent in back. Admission was 60 cents, and 160 people bought tickets—almost all men. Troupe members sang songs and performed skits; one man acted out the heartbreaking story of a migrant imprisoned for theft. Another man popped his shoulder out of its socket and writhed on stage while his brother took up a collection. At the end, a woman stripped.

It was all illegal. Nude shows are banned in China, and the troupe wasn't registered; no one even had a driver's license. They were an extended family from Henan Province, bouncing their way south—in succession, they'd been kicked out of Nanjing, Hangzhou, and Yongkang. When I asked Liu Changfu, the troupe leader, why they included nudity, he said, "Before people buy tickets, they often ask if we have some 'open entertainment.' We need to be able to say yes." The task of stripping fell to the wife of the most distant cousin. Liu told me they were profitable as long as they kept moving, and there was always another half-built development zone down the road.

A phenomenon like this would have been unthinkable in the truly totalitarian days of the Maoist past, when everyone was attached to a work group under close, personal supervision of the Party hierarchy. This anecdote could have come right out of the China of the 1920s or 1930s, the so-called "Warlord Era."

In such an environment, everybody gambles on growth. Most of the city's massive investment in infrastructure had been borrowed from state-owned banks, which also loaned money to the developers—Yintai had borrowed over 28 million dollars for its Jiangbin venture. If the real estate market went cold, the whole system was in trouble, and the central government had recently instituted new laws intended to slow down such expansions. But the money kept pouring in—during the past five years, the average price of a Lishui apartment had risen sixfold.

And here returns the specific specter that was haunting "the Chinese miracle" a few years ago -- a banking melt-down. While in a sense, China just outgrew the particular issue that people were talking about back in the early '00s, the more general problem persists: China hasn't really experienced a real downturn in the general economy since the miracle began. The big question is whether the over-all social and economic fabric can withstand the shock when an inevitable downturn comes. And that downturn could be triggered by the issue mentioned above, the need to move beyond the initial stages of "personal factory" capitalism.

The problem, expressed in the kind of terms I usually use when thinking about the issues, is that China is still a "low-trust society" in the framework Fukuyama developed. An institutional and legal infrastructure has't developed to buffer the shock of economic contraction and social dislocation it will bring. Can the web of personal "guanxi" (literally, "relationships," but really the general network of personal obligations upon which Chinese society still operates) withstand a nation-wide economic contraction? That is the question.

After the hard times of the 20th century, the average citizen is willing to tolerate unfairness as long as his living standard improves.

Bingo. This is fundamental formula upon which the CCP has been betting for going on 30 years now. Everything depends on it.

Initially, the bosses had moved with remarkable speed, but now they paid for the lack of a system. Such institutional weaknesses are becoming more apparent in Chinese businesses because of the increasingly competitive environment. And the nation's next desired economic stage—innovative products and the creation of international brands—will require more creativity and logical organization.

Which brings the matter full circle. "Creativity," yes. And, as I've written before, the basic timidity inherent in Confucian social conservatism, which is caught up with the way "face" ("miandz") and guanxi work, is problematic in encouraging creativity in large Chinese institutions, while the lack of a legal infrustructure and a culture of legality plague the world of the New Capitalists. Crunch-time for these problems is coming.

GB, THHotA

posted by Greg 5:37 AM

Friday, April 04, 2008

TRAIN WRECK ON THE WAY TO SPACE

The number of posts I've made about the problems with NASA's new "Constellation" program is too great to try to link up to here. But it looks like the storm is gathering force. This article from "Space Coast" newspaper, the Orlando Sentinel, points out that a report from the GAO to Congress is bringing the chickens home to the political roost. More technical is this item that reviews the details. You can't expect the Congress Creatures to understand the sort of thing discussed in the latter, but what they will get is that the Ares I rocket design is a dangerous and expensive mess. Now that this has been brought to their attention, there's no way the politicians are going to avoid their "fight or flight" instinct to keep away from what has to seem to even the most scientifically illiterate politicians as a potential nightmare in a few years when NASA has to come back with their hands out to finish the project, and in a way that barely achieves any kind of flight, much less the ambitious goals of the "Vision for Space Exploration."

If I'm sitting in Congress, especially if I'm a Democrat, I ask this question of the administrator of NASA under an unpopular Republican president: "You mean to tell me that there are two working rockets -- Atlas and Delta -- that with only slight modifications could have done the job you've defined for Ares I, but instead of paying to modify them to do the job, you've wasted billions so that NASA could do the work in-house?" And then I might be tempted to add another question: "And, meanwhile, an internet billionaire has gotten farther along in developing his own rocket than you have, all out of his own pocket?"

What a nightmare.

GB, THHotA

posted by Greg 7:05 AM

Thursday, April 03, 2008

POVERTY AND THE MARGINAL UTILITY OF MONEY

Here's a VERY interesting article about the work of economic philosopher Charles Karelis. His thesis is that below a certain key level, money doesn't incentivize poor people to spend their money "rationally" to improve their condition, i.e. that they "blow" the money rather than spend it on incremental improvements in their lives in terms of pulling themselves out of poverty, and that they do this because, unless they can solve a sufficient number of the problems they face at a given time, there's little utility in fixing one or just a few of them. The analogy is made to dents in a car. If you already have many dents in your car, you're unlikely to spend money to fix just one, if that's all the money you have, but if you have only one dent, you'll fix the one dent if you have enough money to fix just the one.

The insight seems simple, but I think it's profoundly important. It comports with common sense experience. To look at it in terms of quantity and quality, what Karelis is saying is that below a key limit, units of money are something qualitatively different than they are above that limit. The classical notion of the marginal utility of money seems to offer this insight, but I think that, in fact, it does more to mask the truth than to reveal it. In fact, all the classical theory of the marginal utility of money does is substitute a curve for a line in terms of describing the value of money or wealth.

I've written about this before: here and here, for instance. In those posts, I was thinking mainly about the kind of person who seems to experience a POSITIVE marginal utility for money: The more they make, the more they want, even in instances where it doesn't seem to correlate to social value for the person. Thinking about Karelis' work, though, I think a mirror-image difference in the qualitative FUNCTION of money in the lives of the people under consideration comes to light.

The problem is that the reaction from those who accept the seeming truth of this insight appears to be to advocate simply providing a basic level of income to poor people. I remember a former acquaintance of mine -- who was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party of the USA -- used to say that the solution to poverty was simple: "Give them money," he used to say. This unfortunately reflects the same kind of "hedgehog" thinking that is condemned when it comes to the classical economic notion of the marginal utility of money: It's unidimensional and doesn't attack another key element of the problem, which is much more difficult to get a cognitive handle on: culture.

I actually agree -- and agree profoundly -- with Karelis, but I strongly disagree with those who respond to his insight by simply advocating a minimum income support for the poor. How does "structural poverty" happen in the first place? How do pockets of our society that seem utterly resistant to the American dream form and persist over time, when one can point to myriad examples of both individuals who rise above poverty and also social groups who do the same? Income support is only part of the solution. Addressing deep cultural maladaptions to the individual liberty that is the key element of the American formula for prosperity and happiness is just as, if not more, important. But it's more difficult and, unfortunately, it requires breaking out of the deep strain of anti-bourgeois sentiment that infects the left.

Returning to the notion that there is a truly qualitative difference in the value -- and function -- of money below (and, in some cases, above) certain limits, it shouldn't surprise us that this is the case. It's often true that in complex systems, quantitative thresholds mark the boundaries between qualitative state transitions. This is usually the case, it seems, when a complex system is part of and is interacting with a larger complex system. That may well be the case with money and culture.

GB, THHotA

posted by Greg 6:33 AM

Wednesday, April 02, 2008

TSTO NOTE

Here's a 2-degrees-of-separation item with one of my favorite blogs, Space Transport News (whose permalink doesn't seem to be working): My note the other day about Boeing's 1980s study for a very slick two-stage-to-orbit spaceplane design got picked up by Music of the Spheres. The latter is a fellow of about my age who also spends way too much time fiddling around with the Orbiter space flight simulator and has taken kind note before of some of the Orbiter projects with which I've been involved.

GB

posted by Greg 7:27 AM

Tuesday, April 01, 2008

APRIL (SPACE) FOOLS

The crew launch vehicle, "Ares I," of NASA's post-shuttle manned program, "Constellation," is nearing a watershed. For months, word has been out that there is a fundamental problem with Ares I: The design has an inherent mechanical vibration problem, a shaking so severe that it would kill the crew riding atop the rocket, even if the rocket and spacecraft could survive the vibration. A report in AvLeak yesterday puts out the official NASA line that the problem is fixable.

Others don't buy this. Here's one blogger's view that seems pretty well informed:

... ARES 1 will not be able to lift itself off the ground. The latest attempts to dampen its inherent oscillatory modes are falling far short of the goal. Additional weight is required just to strengthen the basic structure of the rocket to withstand the rigors of the rocking and rolling being generated by the solid rocket motor. That weight is being added even before the dampers are added to keep the crew within the Orion capsule (itself drastically overweight) from suffering unrecoverable damage to their chest cavities and bladders caused by the rocket's natural frequencies aligning with those of the vital organs.

More and more engineers are coming to realize that ARES 1 has become unviable as the crew launch system. ...

You will soon start to see the results of this calamity become more evident as apparently disconnected scapegoats are constructed to cover for ARES/Orion misfortunes. Late external tanks for the shuttle will delay the Hubble repair mission deep into the fall. Until that mission is completed, and the need for a back-up rescue launch is put to bed, the launch facilities at KSC can not be modified to accommodate ARES test flights. An unnecessary swap to a new launch abort system, the ill-contrived MLAS, will cause a one-year redesign cycle to collect wind tunnel data and to buy time for ARES 1. Already in hand for ALAS, this data needs to be regenerated to determine the loads on the integrated launch vehicle.

All of which makes this look pretty foolish, indeed.

GB, THHotA

posted by Greg 5:04 PM

APRIL FOOLISHNESS 2

And, sadly, all the foolishness doesn't derive from just one imaginary friend:

A couple whose church preaches against medical care are facing criminal charges after their young daughter died of an infection that authorities said went untreated. Carl and Raylene Worthington were indicted Friday on charges of manslaughter and criminal mistreatment in the death of their 15-month-old daughter Ava. They belong to the Followers of Christ Church, whose members have a history of treating gravely ill children only with prayer. Ava died March 2 of bronchial pneumonia and a blood infection. The state medical examiner's office has said she could have been treated with antibiotics.Dr. Christopher Young, a deputy state medical examiner, said the child's breathing was further hampered by a benign cyst on her neck that had never been medically addressed.

On the other hand, for every story you see of the "Christian Science kills another kid" kind, there are countless more like this:

A young Saudi Arabian woman was murdered by her father for chatting on the social network site Facebook, it has emerged. The unnamed woman from Riyadh was beaten and shot after she was discovered in the middle of an online conversation with a man, the al-Arabiya website reported. The case was reported on a Saudi Arabian news site as an example of the "strife" the social networking site is causing in the Islamic nation.

Saudi preacher Ali al-Maliki has emerged as the leading critic of Facebook, claiming the network is corrupting the youth of the nation. "Facebook is a door to lust and young women and men are spending more on their mobile phones and the Internet than they are spending on food," he said.

GB, THHotA

posted by Greg 1:30 PM

APRIL FOOLS

It'll only take seven minutes to watch this video. A very eloquent fellow talks about some foolishness on the day when we celebrate it.

GB, THHotA

posted by Greg 9:01 AM

Monday, March 31, 2008

WARLORDISM IN IRAQ

The period of the 1920s and 1930s in China is often called "the Warlord Period" because the reality on the ground in the country was a patchwork of zones under more or less firm control of local armed strongmen. The Guomindang government fought some, and made alliances or absorbed others, so that, at any one time, it was difficult to tell who was in charge where, and how.

This eye-witness account of the fighting in Basra last week reminds me of the Chinese warlords. The analogy is definitely imperfect, though, because with few exceptions, there was no ideological or religious element to the power of the warlords. They were just gang leaders, really; usually dolled up in Gilbert and Sullivan uniforms. In Iraq, there's obviously another dimension, since at least some of the warlords claim divine support for their power. But within the internecine conflict among the Shiite gangs, the dynamic is similar. This includes the "national" government's role as primer inter pares among the warlords, and the internal diplomacy of shifting alliance between the national gang and local gangs.

It was a miserable time in China, and the warlord period in Iraq is similarly miserable. The big losers are the people who just want to live their lives. But the basic logic of "nation-building" in the modern era may well be fundamentally tied up with this phenomenon. The simple logic of "pre-political" power combined with the technology of modern small arms may well dictate that something like a "warlord period" is all but inevitable in the process of national transformation in "low-trust societies" like China and Iraq.

GB, THHotA

posted by Greg 7:11 AM

Sunday, March 30, 2008

ANOTHER VICTIM

You probably don't know who Taslim Nasrin is. That's a shame, because she is a perfect example of what we're up against. Born in 1962 in what was then East Pakistan, she became a medical doctor and a successful writer. Unfortunately, she wrote about how fundamentalist Islam made the lives of women in Bangladesh (the country East Pakistan became after Pakistan broke in two) miserable. Her life was threatened, and she was charged with the crime of "offending Islam." She had to leave Bangladesh, and has lived in exile ever since.

Nasrin lived in India for 14 years. But now she's had to leave, because Indian Muslims have stepped up their efforts to kill her, and this is trouble for the Indian government, which is sitting on a population of 150 million Muslims, and which therefore can't and won't protect her.

Nasrin now joins Ayan Hirsi Ali as yet another brave, brilliant woman without a country, and a walking time-bomb, living in constant threat for the simple act of expressing the basic concept of liberty.

WHERE IS THE OUTRAGE? These two women are known to us -- at least some of us -- because they are articulate and surpassingly courageous. But there are tens of millions of other women who suffer in silence in the Muslim world. Shouting their cause from the rooftops would be the sign of true liberalism and true feminism.

I'm listening ....

GB, THHotA

posted by Greg 5:15 PM

Saturday, March 29, 2008

ISLAMIC IRONY DEFICIT

By now, you'd have to be completely unplugged not to know that Dutch MP Geert Wilders' film, Fitna, premiered on LiveLeak, but was taken down after just one day, with this message from LiveLeak:

Following threats to our staff of a very serious nature, and some ill-informed reports from certain corners of the British media that could directly lead to the harm of some of our staff, LiveLeak.com has been left with no other choice but to remove Fitna from our servers.

This is a sad day for freedom of speech on the net but we have to place the safety and well being of our staff above all else. We would like to thank the thousands of people, from all backgrounds and religions, who gave us their support. They realized LiveLeak.com is a vehicle for many opinions and not just for the support of one.

Perhaps there is still hope that this situation may produce a discussion that could benefit and educate all of us as to how we can accept one another's culture. We stood for what we believe in, the ability to be heard, but in the end the price was too high.

"You're violent!" "No, I'm not -- and if you say that, I'll kill you!."

Case closed.

GB, THHotA

posted by Greg 11:10 AM

Thursday, March 27, 2008

LINK-O-RAMA

I've been preoccupied with non-bloggish things, so here's a big link-dump to clear the browser:

Space Cadets: Plucky little XCOR Aerospace has announced their first "consumer" commercial product, a 2-place rocketplane that will reach an altitude of 200,000 feet. The design is very cleverly modest. I'm sure they'll get this little guy off the ground quickly, since it represents only a slight scaling up of what they've been doing for years now. Meanwhile, Chair Force Engineer gives a slight compliment to NASA's bloated, under-ambitious Constellation program: It could always be worse. Finally, alt.space rocketeer Mark Whittington writes one more fond farewell to the Master, whose vision was never modest.

Imaginary Friends: Here's a brief article on what I call "the God Project," another modest undertaking, a 2 million Euro program to study the actual science of religious belief. But over here at the typically muddle-headed Guardian is yet another "backlash piece" against "the New Atheists." This one's noteworthy because it speaks from the stance of the utterly desolate and morally bankrupt postmodern point of view: "The problem with the secular narrative is not that it assumes progress is inevitable (in many versions, it does not). It is the belief that the sort of advance that has been achieved in science can be reproduced in ethics and politics. In fact, while scientific knowledge increases cumulatively, nothing of the kind happens in society." Since there's no such thing as moral progress, we might as well recline in the comforting fables of our species' childhood -- and none of those fables are any better than any other. [Cue spitting sound.]

Progress: But in the real world, here's a note on some insights into tissue regeneration.

OK, coffee break's over ... back on your heads!

GB, THHotA

posted by Greg 8:15 AM

Friday, March 21, 2008

EMPTY

Take a moment to read this relatively brief comment on the recent spate of ex-jihadi memoirs. This item holds some very important insights about what these works tell us by what they say and don't say. The main point of the piece is to draw attention to the extreme shallowness of the ideology to which the authors fell prey:

What is striking here is the utterly marginal place given to politics, to history and ideas. Nobody – well, nobody serious, anyway – would have dreamed of “explaining” the actions of, say, IRA or Ulster Volunteer Force militants purely in terms of their psychological instabilities, sexual frustrations or warped childhoods. No doubt many such people did have all those but it was always known that, nonetheless, their actions were motivated, and must be explicated, in political, ideological, historical terms. For jihadists, though, crude psychologistic or reductive culturalist “explanations” seem far more often than not to be thought adequate – and most disconcertingly, that seems to go for the published self-analyses of former Islamists themselves, not just for hostile or ignorant outsiders.

Perhaps still more astonishing is the ex-militants’ apparent total lack of intellectual inquisitiveness outside the narrowest of politico-religious tracks (though Husain’s book is a partial exception here). Reference to “the West” or indeed, among the British Islamists, to British society itself is limited to a few weary clichés, whether about sexual promiscuity or about racism and Islamophobia. Time after time, it is exposure to the horrors of Bosnia, Chechnya or Gaza which is claimed to explain conversion to jihadist Islamism, or at least to initiate sympathy for it. But this “exposure” seems almost always to have been limited to viewing gruesome videos of Bosnians, Chechens or Palestinians murdered or mutilated – and all in their turn are seen simply as Muslims victimised by others.

I think the intellectual poverty of the jihadi world-view is actually a key element of its appeal: It's simple, it's easy and it provides quick, clear solutions to all the world's problems, from a global level down to the individual young jihadi's personal sexual frustrations. Those who advocate that war against Islamism be limited to only combat of ideas often fail to realize that a more rational and humanistic alternative will always suffer from being the more complex and less clear-cut alternative. To the hormone-inflamed mind of the "humiliated" young male jihadi, complexity and nuance are most certainly not appealing. The kind of intellectual patience and reservation of commitment required by the liberal world-view is the last thing a passionate young man seeks. As the young, male Jim Morrison said, "We want the world, and we want it now!" Now that's appealing to a young man.

GB, THHotA

posted by Greg 7:11 AM

TSTO

More or less random surfing of launch vehicle concept links took me to this page, which contains some very nice renderings and explanations of what looks to me to be one of the better-thought-out two-stage-to-orbit (TSTO) designs of the post-shuttle era. Depicted is a Boeing proposal from 1989 for a two-element vehicle that looks surprisingly like this.

GB

posted by Greg 6:45 AM

Thursday, March 20, 2008

SPRING BLOG

The all-too-brief glory of the azeleas along the front of our house.

posted by Greg 9:23 AM

Wednesday, March 19, 2008

OBAMA, RACE and WRIGHT -- FINAL (?) THOUGHTS

I was just listening to NPR as I was getting ready to go into the office. Their story on Obama's "race speech" took the predicable line of focusing on the "black church experience" and stressing how whites don't understand the history that has lead to a figure like Wright. This is so wrong, and so typically post-modern: the powerful subtext is to forbid moral judgment of "the other" and to warn white people not to tread into the racist ground of making a judgment of a black tradition or a black institution.

Obama explicitly claims the mantle of "racial healer" who offers himself as a vessel for "racial transcendence." But as I listened to the NPR piece, I couldn't help but imagine how they would be covering the story if a Republican candidate had been for twenty years a faithful follower of a religious leader who repeatedly preached racist, paranoid, anti-Americanism. It would be the absolute death of any such candidacy, and NPR would certainly not be working to have its mainly white, liberal listeners "understand" how such talk might be grounded in history.

Until we apply the same standards to people, regardless of race, we are not engaging in "racial healing" and we certainly aren't "transcending race."

GB, THHotA

posted by Greg 8:42 AM

MORE ON ARTHUR CLARKE

I can't stop thinking about the passing of Arthur Clarke. In many ways, he was my "intellectual father," more influential on the development of my mind than any other person, so it's not surprising that his death has shaken me to the core. I was struck by the thought last night that I am now, at age 50, about the same age Clarke was when I was first devouring his works at the age of 10.

One of the blogs I read almost every day, Space Transport News, has a link roundup of requiems to the Master. As Rand Simberg notes, people of my generation are feeling old when they realize that it needs to be explained to young people today just what a seminal figure Clarke was.

Early this morning, I remembered a relatively recent personal experience that actually brought this home to me in a big way. Early last year we dumped our crappy cable provider and switched to satellite. When the satellite system was being installed (a more complex project than usual in our unusual house), I shadowed the technician who was doing the work and chatted with him and served as a guide to the confusing network wiring in our home. When he was pointing the satellite dish antenna, he referred to needing to be lined up with "the Clarke Belt." I'd actually never heard that specific term before and it took a moment for it to sink in. The tech had continued talking and I had to stop him and asked, "What's the Clarke Belt?" -- although I knew what the answer would be. "It's what they called it in the school I went to to learn how to do this work. It's the line of satellites that stay in the same place in the sky all the time," he said, gesturing to an arc in the sky southward above the equator.

"Ahhh," I said. "Do you know why it's called that -- 'the Clarke Belt'?" I asked. "Nope," he said. Naturally, the professor in me took this as a "teachable moment," so I explained how it was Arthur Clarke who had figured out how geostationary communication satellites would work -- way back in the 1940s. I ended the little lecture with the familiar story of Clarke's chagrin at failing to patent the idea, and the young tech seemed to get a kick out of that.

But he'd never heard of Arthur Clarke. Or 2001: A Space Odyssey. We moved on, continuing to connect my home to the Clarke Belt, and integrating my computers with the world-girdling digital computer and telecommunications network ... all things that Clarke saw so early, so long before they were real.

GB, THHotA

posted by Greg 7:21 AM

WAR BITS

Meanwhile, the war goes on, even if the mainstream media can't seem to focus on it any more, in the face of the undeniable drama of the Obama-Clinton conflict. My browser's clogged with tabs holding items related to the Long (and no Longer Interesting) War, so here's a "martial dump:"

How Long? Here's a typically diffident and non-committal report found at the BBC a few days ago from a recent international conference on "anti-terrorism." The take-away quote:

...I spoke to an American military man who had helped produce the US Counter-Insurgency Manual.

How long did he think the "long war" - as many now call it - would last?

It is the kind of question journalists ask, and I did not expect that he would put a number on it.

But he did. "Thirty years if we get it right," he said. "A hundred years if we get it wrong."

That seems about right on the long end, although 30 years seems too soon on the short end.

Unmasked: Sometimes the mask slips on the reality of Saudi fundamentalist Islam. Here's a good example: An "influential cleric" calls for death to be dealt to those who publish heretical views about Islam. When the mask slips like this, you can't kid yourself about the fact that Saudi Arabia is one of the principle incubators of the ideology that seeks to destroy civilization.

Clear View: Here's an interview in the "mainstream" Middle East Quarterly with an Algerian Muslim who renounced Islamism, but then went undercover to infiltrate a French al Qaida cell. Two exchanges are well worth noting:

MEQ: Would you use the term Islamo-fascism to describe this threat?

Sifaoui: I certainly am one of the first Muslims to consider Islamism to be fascism. This is not a subjective decision but rather a serious, academic argument. Fascism and Islamism are comparable in many aspects: Fascism, without evoking all its particularities, bears similarities to trends also present in Islamism. I am, of course, making a reference to their will to exterminate the Jews. On this point, the Islamists may go even further in their doctrine than the Nazis did, considering that the end of the world could only occur when there are no Jews left on earth. In the three monotheist religions, apocalypse, end of the world, and doomsday exist and are liturgical events invested with a high degree of spirituality. Hence, the Islamists interpret the end of the world in a very special way. Whereas it is written nowhere in the Qur'an, exegetes describe the end of the world as the day when even the trees and rocks will be able to talk and tell the Muslims: "Come here, there is a Jew hiding behind me. Come and kill him." And this would go on, until there would not be any Jew left on earth. This ideology is pure fascism.

MEQ: Are there other similarities?

Sifaoui: The will to exterminate or do harm to homosexuals is another similarity between Nazism and Islamism. The Islamists, also, say that they are the best community in the world, a superior race thanks to their beliefs. They use political means to arrive at this erroneous exegesis. I do not fear to call it fascism. And there are many more similarities between fascism and Islamism.

MEQ: Given the Islamists' vision of apocalypse, do you believe that Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would fear reprisal should Iran attack Israel? Should Western analysts rely on Iran's rationality?

Sifaoui: Too many Western analysts look at any adversary through a Western lens. Western analysts believe that Al-Qaeda is as rational as the Basque separatist group ETA [Euskadi Ta Askatasuna] or the Irish Republican Army. My personal history, culture, and investigative journalism work allow me to understand what Westerners cannot see: Iran will attack Israel as soon as it can.

MEQ: Doesn't Iran take into account the eventuality of its own destruction?

Sifaoui: No, it does not. Martyrdom is exalted in Iran. Iranians view annihilation positively. The Islamists' main purpose is to create the conditions for the West to believe that chaos is possible. The argument that says that Iran will not attack Israel because of immediate and massive retaliation from Israel and the United States is absolutely wrong. The Islamists would welcome such retaliation in order to cement coalitions among Muslim peoples and to encourage riots in the Arab street. U.S. military action, or even its prospect, coincides with Islamists' interests. That is the reason why I was against the war in Iraq.

Missile Defense: As I've written repeatedly, developing effective missile defense across the complete spectrum of missile threats is a crucial element of our effort in the Long War. Here's an article pointing out some important shortfalls in Israel's "Iron Dome" short-range anti-missile system. Iron Dome is intended to intercept the shortest-range "Qassam"-style "garage-rockets." The article points out that the minimum target-acquisition time that Iron Dome needs will make it ineffective against attacks against targets very close to Israel's borders, such as Sderot. There's discussion about the relative merits of laser defenses in these kinds of "quick draw" missile attacks, and I can't disagree. But that criticism doesn't serve as a completely convincing argument for abandoning systems like Iron Dome. Effective missile defense will surely end up being a wide mix of missile and directed energy weapon systems, many of them with overlapping capabilities.

The Enemy Within: Finally, here's a web page devoted to collecting some of the more outrageous lies and frauds perpetrated by the current US anti-war movement in the name of reproducing the success of John Kerry's "Winter Soldier" assault on the US war effort in Vietnam. The irony here, of course is that the people who do these things surely rationalize such things with an "ends justify the means" mentality -- exactly the same mentality they condemn on the other side.

GB, THHotA

posted by Greg 6:44 AM

OBAMA, RACE and WRIGHT

So Obama gave his big "race speech" to deal with the "crazy uncle" problem. I've read the speech, and it's brilliant and, from the snippets I've heard, it was delivered very well. As a professional rhetorician and public speaker (i.e. lawyer), my admiration for Barak Obama is undiminished: He's among the very best speakers (probably tied for second place with Ronald Reagan, behind MLK) we've had in in public life in this country in my lifetime.

But his speech certainly didn't "win me over" -- I'm still deeply troubled by the fundamentally leftist stance of his overall positions. On its own, the speech engaged in tropes of moral equivalence across inappropriate scales, and was definitely premised on a one-sided condemnation of problematic capitalist institutions, glossing over to a great extent the lengths to which individuals who belong to "victim groups" are given a moral pass.

In this regard, this article in this morning's Houston Chronicle about how pastors of black churches have reacted to the Wright controversy is emblematic of the real problem that Wright stands for. Yes, the traditional black Protestant clergy served a very valuable service to black Americans during the times of the worst racism in America. But they have also become an institutional source of "identity politics" that have come to hold back black Americans. Maybe you can see this message in Obama's speech, if you really want to. But it seems more like wishful thinking to me to think that Obama is really saying that the rhetoric of the 1960s has outlived its usefulness. Instead, I think it's more likely that what he's doing is cleverly repackaging it.

GB, THHotA

posted by Greg 5:38 AM

Tuesday, March 18, 2008

ARTHUR C. CLARKE

I knew it had to happen some day ... Arthur C. Clarke is dead at age 90. I can't overstate the influence Clarke had on me. In many ways, he was the first person to really open up my mind.

Clarke saw it all. And he knew how it would go, if we would just not be so stupid as to kill ourselves off first. Here's a link to a post I made to a mailing list back in 1996 about what may be the most moving thing he ever wrote - at least for me.

What a loss ... There was a time, ten years ago and more, when I thought Clarke might actually "make it" -- might just survive long enough to live into a time when progress in anti-aging technology would have advanced to the point that he might live to see more than just the most mundane of his visions come to pass. But he didn't -- like Moses, he could see the Promised Land, but was fated to not enter it.

... there's another possibility ... but I haven't heard anything to indicate he ever took the final steps to take advantage of it, although there was good evidence he took some of the first steps.

Anyway, words can't express how empty I feel over the passing of Arthur C. Clarke -- he saw farther, first, and he showed me.

GB, THHotA

posted by Greg 6:05 PM

Monday, March 17, 2008

UNIVERSALIST TOTALITARIANISM vs. NATIONALIST IMPERIALISM

Over the last few days I've been haunted by the thought that those who criticize me for an overly-zealous condemnation of Islam and Islamism will take my relative silence on the matter of China's suppression of Tibetan nationalism as an instance of inconsistency and hypocrisy. "This proves your opposition to Islamism is based on a fear founded in ignorance, since you do not fear or condemn Chinese political violence nearly as much, and you know so much more about, and have so much more personal familiarity with China and Chinese culture," I can hear them saying.

While I can obviously understand such a critique of my stance, I think it's wrong, and this is why: What's going on in Tibet is essentially an expression of nationalism and, at worst, of good old-fashioned imperialism, while Islamism is a very real form of totalitarianism. Over the last thirty years, since the end of the Cultural Revolution and the ascendancy of Deng Xiao-ping and the moderate reformers and modernizers in China, the Chinese Communist Party's role in Chinese society has become less and less totalitarian. Yes, they still demand and enforce a monopoly on political power, and do intrude far too much into the cultural life of the Chinese people, but it would stretch the definition of "totalitarianism" to the breaking point to call the CCP "totalitarian" today. Huge areas of personal life for the vast majority of Chinese people have been released from the yoke of "total control" and it is all but impossible to see a return to the truly totalitarian days of the Cultural Revolution and before.

Islam, on the other hand, purports to be a formula for the guidance of every aspect of human life, and Islamists aim to impose that totalitarian formula upon the whole world. In this regard, it makes the same kind of totalitarian and revolutionary universalist claims that communism did in its day as an active state system. Those in power in China are not motivated in their actions in Tibet by a revolutionary ideology that seeks to impose itself upon the whole world. No one who really understands China's modern history or the current state of the CCP believes that China's policy in Tibet is seen by those who formulate and implement it as a step on the road to some kind of ultimate goal of world dominion. As I explained in this post, I feel very sure that what's happening in Tibet is the CCP carrying out what it perceives as its Han Chinese nationalist mandate. Islamists, on the other hand, by their words and deeds, are motivated by a universalism that seeks to impose their world-view on the whole world, and that world-view can be called "totalitarian" with no risk of doing violence to the meaning of the word.

So, in summary, I condemn what's happening in Tibet because it runs afoul of basic principles of self-determination and liberty, but the case of Tibet is unique to the fact that Tibet sits on the border of China and is subject to an arguable case for Chinese sovereignty. There is a near-zero threat of Chinese intervention in affairs outside its border motivated by anything other than very mundane and non-ideological considerations of national interest (viz. Sudan). And there is no threat of waves of Chinese suicide bombers infiltrating the West to commit mass murder in the name of "Chinese-ism." Islamism, on the other hand ... well, you get my point.

GB, THHotA

posted by Greg 7:29 AM

Sunday, March 16, 2008

THE NIGHTHAWKS GO TO SLEEP

The F-117 Nighthawk (erroneously called the "Stealth Fighter" -- erroneous because they are exclusively bombers) is being retired. The Nighthawk was a splendidly successful program: It was developed all the way through to deployment in absolute secrecy, and in operation it was a genuine game-changing technology. As the linked article at AvLeak explains, retirement of the F-117s will leave a gap in US capabilities, although the Air Force is doing its best to publicly slur over this. The truth is that the budget stress of F-22 procurement and F-35 development is stretching the Air Force to near the breaking point. I hope it turns out to be worth it, because mothballing the Nighthawks, while being publicized as a reversible move, really isn't. The money to put them back into operation simply won't be around, and the kinds of missions they are uniquely capable of performing require operational swiftness, as well as stealth.

Meanwhile, the AvLeak piece contains a link to this interesting item that addresses the general question of the aerospace "black budget." (Give this a moment to load -- it's in some kind of weird Flash-based PDF-like format, but is worth it.) Like many aerospace geeks, I'm endlessly fascinated by this subject, and it gives a good overview of how decent estimates of the size of the aerospace black budget are made, and also an outline of what's probably in there. Alas, no "Blackstar" or "Brilliant Buzzard," it appears.

GB, THHotA

posted by Greg 12:25 PM

CONSTELLATION SETTING

A link at Defense Tech took me to this article about the growing moves to scuttle the entirety of NASA's "Constellation Program" -- the Bush Administration's program to return to the moon with an "Apollo on steroids" set of vehicles. The piece is a good summary of how "respectable" the criticism of Constellation as whole has become, with The Planetary Society's Louis Friedman (ever the diplomatic foe of NASA's manned space program) not surprisingly leading the charge.

Since it seems highly probable to me that an Obama Administration would simply outright cancel Constellation, and a Clinton Administration would likely slow it to the kind of budget-toxicity that plagued ISS, I've begun to think about what might be salvageable from the wreckage. There's irony here, because I've been critical of the program since its inception but, now that its death can be seen clearly, I'm sickened by the thought of yet another disastrously wasteful false start, such as happened with DCX, the NASP, X-38 and many other programs in the 1990s.

It seems to me that the politically most difficult cancellation would be the most sensible, from a systems and engineering view, i.e. Ares I, a/k/a "The Stick." The political problem will be that, by the time a new administration takes power, Ares I will be the closest of Constellation's elements to a flyable piece of hardware. But redirecting development of the Orion CRV/CEV to something that could be launched on one or both of the EELV "heavies" would make a lot of sense. It would keep NASA in the spacecraft development and operation business in the short and medium term, but would be a move to get it out of the business of designing, building and operating the kind of launch systems that few but NASA bureaucrats, their Congressional pork patrons and all but the most blinkered NASA enthusiasts must now admit are better handled by non-governmental entities. An Orion redesigned to be able to hitch rides on a wide variety of privately developed, built and operated boosters (perhaps including the SpaceX Falcon 9 Heavy), would be the kind of compromise between economic and engineering common sense and political reality that even I could support.

Beyond this, a new direction for Constellation could still support the Ares V heavy lifter and the Altair lunar lander, albeit on a likely much-slowed development schedule. Since there's no real economic justification for a vehicle with Ares V's lift capacity, even dyed-in-the-wool "privateers" like me can shrug and accept it as a government program, if its managed as well as such a pork-magnet can be. And, even though I HATE Altair's wasteful, non-reusable architecture, I could support a commitment to a program committed to an "Altair I" as a first step toward the long-term goal of developing a reusable cislunar architecture.

All of which is to say that a new president may well feel compelled to make changes to Constellation, will find many who support change AND that there's a pathway forward in which real changes could be made without throwing away ALL of the expensive development work NASA's done on the program over the last four years.

GB, THHotA

posted by Greg 11:00 AM

CHINA and TIBET

My views on China and its relationship to Tibet are complex, and probably not suited to the kind of brief blog post I have time for this weekend. But a couple of quick takes can illustrate that complexity. For instance, here's a quote from the Dalai Lama:

The Dalai Lama said China, as the world's most populous nation, deserves to host the Olympics but it must look seriously at repairing its human rights record "in order to be a good host."

This statement must come as a surprise to the Richard Geres of the world, who see the question of Tibetan independence in simple black-and-white moral terms. The Dalai Lama is likely being politic here. He knows that 1) China simply will not "let Tibet go" and 2) that the better part of valor here is to do and say things that can lower tensions and decrease violence in the short term, while 3) preserving his position as someone with some influence over events.

Playing the role of chief advocate for and protector of the hugely powerful reservoir of Han Chinese nationalism is one of the key foundations of power for the Chinese Communist Party today, and has been since its founding in the days of China's most abject humiliation in the face of Western and Japanese imperialism. Since the time of its long contest with the Guomindang in the 1920s through the 1940s, the CCP has attracted support from a broad swath of the Chinese population by promoting itself as the best and most effective expression of Han Chinese national power. The actual record certainly has and continues to support that claim to preeminence as a nationalistic force.

While there may well have been "revolutionary" communist motivations among some Party ideologues in the initial seizure of power in Tibet in the 1950s, and its suppression of the power of the Buddhist lamas was couched in "anti-feudal" ideological terms in the 1960s and 1970s, the CCP's mandate there is based today on the expression of Han nationalism. Given the state of Han Chinese nationalist sentiment today, China abandoning its control over Tibet would be like the United States ceding control over strategic areas of the western part of the country to Native Americans in the late 19th or early 20th century. In other words, it's inconceivable.

In this regard, there's a huge disconnect between the rhetoric of Western "pro-Tibet" campaigners and the perceptions of both the CCP and the huge majority of Han Chinese people. Although there is a proportionately tiny cadre of Chinese people who have a real grasp of contemporary Western views about human rights and cultural and ethnic self-determination, the vast majority of Chinese people and the CCP's leadership are simply not that cosmopolitan. Richard Gere speaks in terms of human rights and political self-determination, but the Chinese HEAR anti-Chinese Western imperialism. They hear, "Blah, blah, blah, blah, Chinese people should give up some of its territory because we know better than you what's right and wrong, blah, blah, blah, blah, we Western people support China's enemies, blah, blah, blah."

GB, THHotA

posted by Greg 9:28 AM

Saturday, March 15, 2008

TURNABOUT

Cue the descending triplet, played on a muted trumpet -- hold the last note: whah, whah, waaaaah.

Now they know how we felt these last eight years.

GB, THHotA

posted by Greg 7:29 PM

MORAL RETARDATION

Want to get sick? Read this: An interview at ever-idiotic and reliably soft-headed Salon with former New York Times Middle East correspondent (a clue?) Chris Hedges, about his new book, I Don't Believe in Atheists. Apparently Hedges engaged in debates last year with Sam Harris and Christopher hitchens, and came away believing that they are "secular fundamentalists" and "neocon shills."

Now, whether you're religious or not, you should wait out the mush-brained "it's all true and let's not offend anybody (i.e. non-American and non-white people)" tripe to get to this absolutely diamond-like gem of moral clarity:

You say at one point in the book that the New Atheists, "like Christian fundamentalists, are stunted products of a self-satisfied, materialistic middle class." But I wonder what you would say to someone like Ayaan Hirsi-Ali, a victim of genital cutting who fled her faith-based homeland for the secular West, when she says that the secularism of Western society is better than the religiosity of her native Somalia?

It was better, for her.

She doesn't qualify that. She says it's better.

Well, she's speaking out of her personal experience, and it was better for her. I mean, look, I covered conflicts in Africa, in the Middle East, and in Central America, where Western society rained nothing but death and destruction on tens of thousands of people, which is of course what we're doing in Iraq. So, is Western society -- American society -- better for Iraqis? And I think part of the problem is people who create a morality based on their own experience, which is what of course the New Atheists and the Christian fundamentalists have done.

There it is, in a nutshell: No matter what, you can't express a moral judgment that really has any practical meaning in the world if, in doing so, you run the risk of condemning another culture. Now, the Salon interviewer seems to appear "tough" by following up on this. maybe they wanted to give Hedges a chance to dig himself out of the hole he'd put himself into:

If we're afraid to privilege Enlightenment values, don't we run the risk of sanctioning religious rituals that discriminate against women and minorities?

But I would never argue that! I mean, I think genital mutilation is disgusting. I'm not a cultural relativist. I don't think that if you live in Somalia, it's fine to mutilate little girls. There is nothing wrong with taking a moral stand, but when we take a moral stand and then use it to elevate ourselves to another moral plane above other human beings, then it becomes, in biblical terms, a form of self-worship. That's what the New Atheists have, and that's what the Christian fundamentalists have.

Here we have the absolute end of any shred of reason in the name of total subjectivism: "I'm not a cultural relativist," says Hedges, "But you can't take a moral stand that 'elevates' you above other human beings." MORAL REASONING IS ABOUT MAKING JUDGMENTS ABOUT GOOD AND BAD, BETTER AND WORSE. That means being able to say: People who do good things are better than people who do bad things. It means being able to say: If people do bad things in groups because of some aspect of their culture, then their culture is bad to that extent.

But Hedges and the hoards of people who have been morally crippled by relativism and post-modern cultural self-loathing cannot see this. Their blindness to the fact that they have made themselves INCAPABLE of making real, practically effective moral judgments is complete.

GB, THHotA

posted by Greg 1:45 PM

THE PIG TROUGH

Apparently the former treasurer of the National Republican Congressional Committee embezzled as much a million dollars. Friends and regular readers will know that this news comes as no surprise to me: The actual people who DO politics in America have nauseated me -- as human beings -- for years. The sole exceptions have been some elected judges who loathe politics as much as I do and endure its horrors as a necessary evil required to be able to engage in an honorable profession, or some who have been all but drafted into the service of elected officials and have felt compelled to serve in appointed positions as a matter of civic duty.

A comical side-light on this are the comments to be found at the Washington Post's website following the story linked above. The knee-jerk "what do you expect from Republicans" comments from the majority of WaPo readers who took the time to comment is one of those "pot/kettle" moments not to be missed. Apparently these folks have no memory of the deeply corrupt city-machine politics that characterized Democratic Party politics for generations during their long ascendancy in legislative and executive power in this country, nor the even more insidious corruption of victim-group-based pork that has been the hallmark of actual Democratic service in government since the revolution of the New Deal and Great Society was complete. The Republicans were certainly no better during their years in power, but there's no meaningful ground for distinguishing the Democrats, if you just take off the partisan, ideological blinders.

GB, THHotA

posted by Greg 1:10 PM

SPACE BABE OF THE DAY

Working on work-work for the day in the Batcave, I've got NASA TV on to watch the STS123 mission. I just saw an interview with the "Orbit 3" ISS Flight Director, Ginger Kerrick. Check out the portrait posted at NASA of her from a couple of years ago when she was promoted to the Flight Director job. This is the best pic I could find of her, but it doesn't do justice to how attractive this very smart young lady is.

I think she's still an astronaut candidate. I hope she makes it.


GB

posted by Greg 12:08 PM

FROM THE MINISTRY OF TRUTH

It seems there is a common thread among a number of the items in open tabs in my browser from the last few days: The irrational distortion of obvious truths, proffered with a kind of bald-faced defiance. Take, for instance, Barak Obama's increasingly absurd denials that he was aware of the racist, virulent anti-Americanism preached in the "Afrocentric" church he's attended for years in Chicago. The stance he's taking here, in which he seems to expect that his denials that he knew what was being consistently said from the pulpit in his church, is premised on the idea that if you just say something in a straight-forward enough manner, political reality will overcome natural human reason.

Obama's supporters can't accept that he tacitly endorsed what was going on in his church and still mouth the notion that he's a "transcender of race" and a "uniter." So they are invited to participate in a mutual process of self-delusion. Which seems to be a particular instance of what's addressed in this review of yet another new book about the seemingly general spread of irrationality and anti-intellectualism in America. Being an item in the New York Times, this piece naturally focuses on the dynamics of irrationality arising from the religious right and the Bush Administration. There's only a subdued gesture at the equally harmful rivers of irrationality that have flooded our culture from the post-modern, "everything's true except what's said by white men," left.

A more sensible view is undertaken in this article in Skeptic magazine about how the news media consistently gets just about everything wrong, and the systematic biases that cause it. I highly commend it, not least because Skeptic can't be accused of being some kind of outlet for right-wing, neocon crankery. If there's any kind of political or ideological slant to the editorial content of Skeptic over the years, it would be in a leftward direction.

GB, THHotA

posted by Greg 11:40 AM

Thursday, March 13, 2008

LINK-O-RAMA

It's time for a quick link-dump to clean up my browser. There's lots of really good stuff here, so don't discount it just because it's in the "anthology" edition of Burchismo:

1984: Out in the "real world" there seems to be a substantial sentiment that the absurd, ideologically-driven warping of our culture known by various rubrics such as "PC" and "rights talk" somehow peaked in the 1990s and is now receding, leaving an irrelevant remnant stranded in academia. Think again. I strongly recommend this article in The American, that describes the feminist assault on university science education and research. The very powerful moves being made by the most radical academic feminists to fundamentally alter advanced education in math, science and engineering -- to guarantee that more women will end up in these professions -- is a real and menacing threat. As the article points out, the absurd, ideologically-driven destruction of academic departments in the humanities in the 1980s and 1990s ran up against a barrier in the "hard sciences." The cultural revolutionaries who ruined US higher education in the humanities have regrouped now, and are beginning an assault on the last bastion of sense and reason in our schools. Think you see a lot of Indian and Chinese faces in the medical and scientific fields now? Just wait until we've completed the lobotomy of our civilization in the name of identity politics.

Carbon Footprints: Here's an interesting piece about a scientist who revisited one of the most fundamental equations underlying the central tenet of the theory of human-caused global warming. In just about any other arena of science, this work would have been greeted as a fascinating and potentially fruitful new insight. But the fellow who did this work encountered a very different result. Why? Speaking of energy (?), here's a good, short piece about "energy futures," i.e. how our energy technology may develop over the next 20-30 years.

So Open-Minded His Brains Fall Out: Here's a review of a book that purports to question the moral foundations of the Allied war effort in World War II. As painful as it is to read about this kind of garbage, it's necessary. It's far too easy for educated, rational people to dismiss the effect of morally bankrupt cultural inputs like this book. Their cumulative effect is real.

Hate Speech: Speaking of cultural toxicity, here's a report on a study of school books used in Iran. This kind of thing has been going on for almost 30 years, and over half of the population was born after the mad mullahs seized control of the country. Draw your own conclusions.

Space Cadet: And, as I watch video of the first day of docked operations of STS 123, here's an article from Aviation Leak about an announcement that the first flight of China's proposed heavy-lift launcher, the Long March 5, has been delayed until 2014. One of the most interesting elements of the Chinese space program is its pacing -- so different from both the government and private projects in the West.

That's all for this morning. I'm outta here.

GB, THHotA

posted by Greg 7:34 AM

Wednesday, March 12, 2008

GETTING CHINA WRONG

Here's a review of a book by a Western leftist that appears to get absolutely everything about everything (but especially China -- past, present and future) as wrong as you possibly could. The book is called Adam Smith in Beijing, and it is written by one Giovanni Arrighi who, we are told,

is one of the leaders in world-systems theory. This school has extended Marx's idea of exploitation within societies to international relations. Trade between rich and poor countries is not equal exchange, according to this view, but instead systematic exploitation of the poor. Arrighi's earlier books, particularly The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times (Verso, 1994), are widely cited. This latest work, however, illustrates why world-systems theory has found little purchase except in the most intellectually undemanding environments (including, apparently, sociology departments).

According to the review, the premise of Arrighi's book is this:

In 1800, China, before being overwhelmed by the military might of the West in the 19th century, had attained as high a level of economic development as Europe, Arrighi argues. But unlike Europe, Chinese growth did not depend on the exploitation of subordinate classes and countries. Militarily defeated, however, late imperial China was forced into subordination, and thus impoverishment, by the hegemons.

The Communist Revolution in China eventually created "extraordinary social achievements," as Arrighi puts it, in literacy and health care in the Mao era that laid the foundation for recent economic growth. China has now returned to its earlier, noncapitalist, nonexploitative economic system: "accumulation without dispossession," in Arrighi's parlance. As its income has risen, China has emerged as an economic and political competitor to the United States in international relations. It now offers to poor societies, he says, "attractive alternatives to the trade, investment, and assistance of Northern countries."

As I read this, it was everything I could do to keep from spitting out the mouthful of coffee I'd just gulped. The only thing that is even close to factually correct here is that, indeed, there were great advances during "the Mao era" in literacy and health care for large numbers of the Chinese people. The rest of this is the worst sort of projection of an ideological ideal onto an "exotic other" -- just the sort of thing the post-modern left in the West decries among "Orientalists" like me.

The society and economy of pre-modern China was as dependent on "the exploitation of subordinate classes" as any has ever been in the world. (A footnote must be dropped here that the subject of slight potential upward class mobility through the Confucian civil service examination system presents an interesting, but statistically insignificant exception -- at most no more so than the similar potential class mobility provided by the Catholic Church's hierarchy in Medieval Europe.) The depiction of China's contemporary growth as presenting a fundamentally alternative model to that of Western development is similarly wrong -- so wrong that it takes my breath away. Anyone with eyes to see will perceive that there is a huge amount of "accumulation WITH dispossession" going on in China today, and plenty of good old-fashioned capitalist exploitation.

Here's what's telling to me. My friends on the moderate left continually chide me for my seeming obsession with the radical nonsense spouted by academic leftists. These people have no real influence on our culture or politics, they argue. But consider this: In mainstream academia in the West, people like this Arrighi moron are a commonplace in the humanities -- the academic departments that year after year churn out our cultural and political leaders. Figures of equivalent radicalness and deeply ideological stupidity on the right are simply not found in academia. My friends who claim that the radical left doesn't really have a meaningful influence on our culture must maintain that these academics have no influence on their students, and that the fact that they are present, but that their nut-case counterparts on the right are not, has no significance.

They're wrong. It's true that the tens of thousands of "culture workers" (journalists, film-makers, lawyers, politicians) produced every year by the academic humanities certainly don't turn into automatons who spout every particular detail of the leftist theories to which they are exposed in our educational system. But they do absorb a fundamentally left-leaning world-view that seeps into the values they express in the work they do for the rest of their lives. If they transcend the Marxist theory to which they are exposed in their college years, it is DESPITE their formal education, not BECAUSE of it. The entire apparatus of culture of the pre-Marxist Enlightenment must be re-learned by educated people in our societies after academia has the first and most influential access to their minds.

GB, THHotA

posted by Greg 7:22 AM

CHINA PICS 5

These are scenes from a Buddhist monastery and temple nestled in a crook of a street in Hutong. The core of this place dates back to late Yuan Dynasty days, i.e. the second half of the 14th century. But most of the facility appeared to have been an artifact of the late imperial period, i.e. Ching.

I was fascinated by this place. It was not a tourist destination, by any means. I was the only non-Chinese person there, and the only person who didn't seem to be there for the purpose of participating in its activities, either as these monks, or as worshipers, who looked to be folks from the neighborhood, who were there to do what the vast majority of practicing, "low" Buddhists do at such temples throughout Asia: Seeking the intercession of the various incarnations of the Buddha in their everyday lives.

Here's a view from the back of the temple complex, which appeared to be the actual monastery itself, where the monks live.









And here's a scene that captures, as much as any picture I took, the contradictions and dynamics of contemporary China. In the front courtyard of the temple, a brisk business was being done by vendors of sacred paraphernalia, mainly incense in various sizes and grades at various prices. As it does at most such temples, actual worship consisted for most people of buying one or more sticks of incense of a size and quality appropriate to the supernatural task at hand, lighting it at a common, large iron brazier, and saying a prayer while solemnly offering it up to the Buddha. The fellow on the left was interrupted in his supplication by a call on his cell phone, and he engaged in a little modern multitasking, chatting away happily on the cell phone as he continued to interact with the Higher Power.

posted by Greg 6:37 AM

CHINA PICS 4

A street scene in the busier parts of old Hutong. Many of the streets are far too narrow for the passage of cars, so the rule in this neighborhood is pedestrian traffic jostling for space with bicycles.

posted by Greg 6:34 AM

CHINA PICS 3

Here's a shot of the headquarters of the Communist Party internal publishing enterprise. This building is on the graduate student campus of the Central Communist Party School, discussed in this post, below.

posted by Greg 6:28 AM

CHINA PICS 2

Here's a snapshot taken through the windshield of a car in Beijing's massively jammed traffic. US Basketball has become a national passion in China, with Yao Ming's coming to the Houston Rockets. I can report that normal day-to-day conversation among Chinese men is as likely to be centered on the minutiae of NBA statistics as any similar setting in America.

An argument can be made that Yao Ming is one of the most important people in the world as a result. He has done more than anyone else to open life in America up to average people in China, and to create a sentiment of a shared global culture with the US among millions and millions of China.

posted by Greg 6:22 AM

CHINA PICS 1

I'm slowly getting my computers back to life in the Batcave and, so far, have uploaded the pics I took with my Blackberry Pearl. Here's the first one, taken along one of the main avenues in the Olympics area. On the left is the main athlete housing.

The air quality, famously in the news more and more these days, is quite evident. The day before this, the sky was as clear and blue as I've ever seen it in Beijing, including during my time there 30 years ago. One thing that newcomers to Beijing don't know is that much of the grit in Beijing's air isn't man-made. When the wind blows from the west, sand from the Gobi desert has always blown into Beijing's skies.

posted by Greg 6:15 AM

Tuesday, March 11, 2008

BACK

I'm back in the USA ... still a little lagged. Being a Houstonian, I'm naturally attracted into Continental airlines' system. This last trip to China was made on Continental's new non-stop service from Newark to Beijing, which is great, but the leg between Continental's two main hubs, Houston and Newark SUCKS. Especially on the return flight, it was grueling, with passing through immigration in Newark and the packed flight Sunday night being a true example of travel hell. As a result, I didn't get to sleep Sunday night until very late and, with the switch to Daylight Savings Time coming the same day, I'm still running two hours or