NASA stuff

A few articles from NASA:

Scientists Studying Wintry Ice In Summer Clouds

NASA Balloon Makes Record-Breaking Flight

Laser Device Goes Beyond 'CSI'

Good News

This is very good news. I must say that I didn't expect to read an article like this for another year or two.

The sources said London and Washington have approved a plan that would replace military troops with civilian advisers to the Iraqi military, police and security forces. The sources said these advisers would train and mentor Iraqi forces in such operations as counter-insurgency and border security, Middle East Newsline reported.

"The agreement is that the first troops would leave in late 2005," a source said. "The number of troops and withdrawal timetable would depend on operational considerations."

The right thing

Just a few thoughts on the election in Iraq... This was far more than a massive political victory for President Bush--the election in Iraq represents the triumph of democracy and the power of our fundamental belief in liberty. Democracy is on the march in the heart of the Middle East. Proportionally, as many people in Iraq voted today as voted in the US last November. The Iraqi people, after decades of oppression in every respect, rejected the tyranny and idiocy of terror and embraced the promises that democracy holds--freedom, liberty, and the recognition of human rights.

The Iraqis elected today are now to draft a constitution that the people will vote on in October, I believe. And if all goes well (and today is a good sign that it will) a year from now, Iraq will elect its first government under its new Constitution. Ask anyone four years ago if they imagined anything like this could have happened in the Middle East, much less Iraq, and they would have called you crazy.

Fortunately, President Bush had the ability to see the big picture and to look beyond the stupid petty political infighting that consumes nearly all who come to power in Washington. He realized two fundamental things after September, 11. First, Islamic terrorism is real and dangerous threat to our country. If left unchecked, it will only fester and consume more people and more nations in the Muslim world. Secondly, he understands that the only way to solve the problem of terrorism in the long term is to change the very fabric of those societies that spawn terrorists. The key isn't to accomodate ourselves to the enemey. The answer isn't to attempt to appease the Arab world--a world dominated by corruption and abusive tyranny and grounded in the jihadist mandates of a blood-thirsty religion. The real solution is to plant the seeds of freedom and democracy and let them spread. Let freedom take hold in one country at a time. And over time, the pervasive power of democracy will spread, nullifying the pretenses of terror and moderating what is--at least literally taken--an extreme and oppressive religion.

This approach is blasted in the parliments of Europe. It's castigated in most bastions of academia in the States. Its ridiculed and scorned by those of the liberal persuasion. After all, who are we to impose our will? Who are we to say that we're right and they've got it wrong and by golly we gotta show them the light? What arrogance! What imperialism!

But, I wonder, couldn't it be possible that we are right. And they are wrong. Maybe, just maybe, it's not right that most Arab women are oppressed and at the mercies of their husbands--husbands who have been indoctrinated to believe that women are inferior breeds of humanity, a pollution in the eyes of the Koran, and individuals who aren't to be afforded the same rights that men enjoy. Maybe, just maybe, it's not right that millions of Arabs live in poverty under the auspices of oppressive authorative regimes who routinely torture people at their whim. Maybe, just maybe, the demands of thugs who kidnap and behead the innocent shouldn't really be taken as a legitamite political statement.

Maybe we're right. Maybe after the battles we've fought here at home over women's suffrage and civil rights for minorities, we've come to know that there is a better way--a morally superior way to govern a society. And how could we be so shamed into doubting the power and rightness of our own beliefs that we don't feel obligated to spread them in a world in dire need of freedom and hope? Even more than that, doesn't it become a necessity to spread democracy if the absence of our democratic values proves to be a breeding ground for those who seek to destroy us?

There will never be a perfect Iraq--just like there will never be a perfect United States. Man's inherent sinfulness will, until the return of Christ, ensure that we spend most of our energies solving all sorts of awful problems. And while democracy is a horrid choice compared to the rule of Christ that I look forward to, it is from a human perspective, as Churchill once said, the worst form of government--except for all the others.

Our troops under the leadership of our President, aren't just doing a good thing in Iraq. They're doing the right thing.

Apple to the top

Apple, taking over Google's top spot from last year, has been voted the globe's most influential brand. This is obviously due in large part to the iPod--which is indeed a wonderful little machine. Interestingly enough, Coke did not make even the top five, but Al Jeezera did.

73%

The DM ran a front page story above the fold entitled "Law students receive affirmative action benefit." The article reports that every minority in the law school receives in automatic scholarship 73% of their tuition. For the record, I receive because I'm white 0% of my tuition in scholarship. But because the black students are black, they receive 73% of their tuition. There are no academic considerations at play here. Only racial. This is pure racism and in my estimation a blatant violation of the Equal Protection Clause given that Ole Miss Law School is state sponsored.

The policy behind this is two-fold I think. In the first place, the school is desperate to increase the number of minorities enrolled. Secondly, there's a belief that the past wrongs society has inflicted on minorities justifies the present benefits to assure that everyone has a fair fighing chance in life. But fighting racism with racism is morally repugnant and logically absurd. It only breeds resentment on one side and complacency and dependency on the other.

Hubble no more.

This is sad.

Food for thought

The question of how things came into being—the origin of the universe and life—will always be an extremely controversial subject. It seems to me that irrespective of what one thinks of the tenets of evolution vs. the Biblical account of creation one would have to adopt one of two approaches as to the origin of all things: it had to occur either naturally or supernaturally.

Intelligent design proponents have recently made inroads in secular society where strict creationist have not by making a concerted effort to avoid specific Biblical or theological references in setting forth an alternative to naturalistic evolution. The core tenet of intelligent design is that some things in creation/nature (whatever you call it) are so far beyond any scientific explanation or are irreducibly complex so that they couldn’t exist but for the prior existence of some intelligent designer. This belief is deduced not on the basis of a pre-existing religious conviction but rather on what has been discerned from science itself. The more life is probed, the more complex it becomes, then logically the less likely that it happened on its own or naturally. All this in turn suggests the existence of some designer.

Many people, however, especially in academia are appalled at the notion of this proposition being offered to students alongside the classic evolutionary model. They say that the theory of intelligent design is different from the theory of evolution in that intelligent design isn’t really a scientific theory at all. It should be relegated to the philosophy or religion class.

What I find amazing, though, is the presupposition that evolution is based on science and that it has a monopoly on science in the context of origins. At the heart of intelligent design is the thought that somewhere in the equation of how things came into being is a supernatural event and/or being. Naturalism, or evolution as its taught in schools today, rests on the conviction that nothing—especially the origin of the universe and life—happened supernaturally.

The problem, though, is that this presupposition is a statement of faith no different in essence than that proffered by intelligent design theorists. Can the committed naturalists prove scientifically that there wasn’t a supernatural element to the origins of life? In fact, neither side can test or verify their respective theories through any scientific process. Because both sides begin from an unverifiable premise and use the same data to draw their conclusions, doesn’t it stand to reason that both positions should be presented in a class that is tackling the issue of biological origins? It seems blatantly unscientific to me to intentionally exclude an idea from a curriculum—to deny students information to use in drawing a conclusion—simply because it presupposes the supernatural rather than the natural.

Ultimately, the issue of origins is the one issue of science that in the end can’t help but delve into the theological, philosophical, or metaphysical. Even the strict naturalist who swears by atheism has to grapple with the initial origin of matter. Can something come from nothing? In trying to answer these questions, one quickly leaves the realm of science and at the least enters a metaphysical nightmare that requires some basic presuppositions that will ultimately fail to find any adequate scientific scrutiny.

All this to say that the subject of origins can’t be fairly dealt with in the final analysis if the supernatural is not at least considered along side the natural.

Costumegate?

Mark Steyn is brilliant and witty in his column on the uproar over Prince Harry's choice of costume. Steyn observes:

But a good indication of societal decadence is when it prefers to obsess over fictional offences rather than real ones.

I suppose it's possible that, should fate bring Harry to the throne, he'd turn into a Victor Emmanuel or King Carol of Romania and lend a constitutional figleaf to some Fascist regime. But worrying about a minor Royal schoolboy's alleged Nazi bent seems something of an indulgence at a time when the neo-Nazis get as many votes in Saxony's elections as Gerhard Schroeder's Social Democratic Party; when from Marseilles to Paris, Jews are being attacked and their homes, schools, kosher butchers, synagogues and cemeteries burnt and desecrated in a low-level intifada that's been going on so long the political establishment now accepts it as a normal feature of French life; and when the Berlin police advise Jews not to go out in public wearing any identifying marks of their faith. It's not just Nazi insignia you don't see in Germany these days; Nazi wise, the uniforms are the least of it.

Prince Harry acted like an idiot to be sure. But what he did is by no means appalling compared to the increasing level of anti-semitism that plagues Europe--an anti-semitism that will only grow in strength as Europe's Muslim population increases and European society becomes increasingly indifferent or willfully ignorant of Islam's fascist-extremist leanings.

Year in preview

Here's a brief list of why 2005 promises to be an exciting year in space exploration.

Double Decker

Looks like Airbus is about to unveil its much hpyed A380--the worlds largest passenger airplane.

Orange New World

I know that this picture is all over the internet, but how can one resist posting it on your own blog? The only bad thing about the Huygens probe is that once you get a small taste of a new world, you want to explore the whole thing. But for now, the data coming back from Titan is still an amazing treat.

The Apple Store

Today I found myself in the Apple store in Memphis. As much as I enjoy Apple products, the store frustrates me. In keeping with the astronomical theme of this blog, the people working in that store are less than stellar. There’s a night and day difference between the service in the Memphis store and the service in the only other Apple store I’ve been in—the one in Minneapolis. There, several employees offered their help. And they all seemed like MIT grads talking to me about the products and answering all my technical questions. In Memphis, help isn’t as forthcoming, and the employees seem like they came from a coffeehouse in Seattle—spacey and presenting themselves like they are the offspring of a hippie and a grunge punk.

I’ve had other unpleasant experiences in Memphis. Today’s wasn’t unique. Typically, once I leave the sanctuary that is trying out an iPod or playing with a G5, my love for Apple is diminished when I see the spiked hair girl behind the checkout counter babbling endlessly with her co-worker.

The marketers at Apple know that they don’t just sell products. They sell a lifestyle. Apple products—perhaps more than any other company’s—are connected with the owner far beyond his raw computing needs. They are to many owners a symbol of well-informed style and sophistication. Not the pretentious kind of sophistication but the kind that results in this geeky zeal to change the minds of all the blind followers of PC-dom.

My point is that Apple, a company whose market share and future success depends in large part on preserving its unique appeal, should pay more heed to the faces that are professionally associated with selling itself to the general public. In other words, Apple better not become so wrapped up in its marketing machine and current success that it looses sight of one of the basics of any solid business: sound customer service. It’s rather funny…in the Apple store, the person who handles the repairs that customers bring in is called the “genius”—as if everyone else working there is far below the bar in comparison. I know this is reading between the lines a bit sarcastically, but the grain of truth behind it is running rampant in Memphis. Apple should take better care of its faithful customers by taking care to hire people who aren’t professionally dysfunctional.

Titan at last

NASA has posted one of the first pictures from Titan, courtesy of the Huygens probe. It's the picture on top. A few minutes later, the ESA posted what it claims is the first picture from Titan (see directly above). All indications are that this probe is going to be a remarkable success. It looks like the picture posted by NASA on top is of Titan as the probe was descending, whereas the second picture is clearly a surface shot. This stuff is absolutely amazing.

More to come...

CBS

Ann Coulter on CBS. What can I say?

And Hugh Hewitt at the Weekly Standard weighs in as well.

Cosby speaks

Bill Cosby has an interesting solution to the educational and social problems in the black community: parents. Not a new federal program or study, but the simple and persistent involvement of parents in the life of black youths.

Presidential iPod

Yet one more reason why I voted for the right guy in 04...

A sound mind in Britain

I had never heard of Melanie Phillips until I came across this speech, in which she brilliantly sets forth and attempts to explain the British media's irrational perversion of its coverage of the war in Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian quagmire. This is absolutely one of the best pieces I've read on Israel or the war in Iraq. Although her commentary on the media is aimed at the British press (she is after all British) her words ring just as true for the left-leaning media in the States. The link provided above leads you to a page that contains a link at the bottom to the entire 17 page pdf file. Every word of this speech should be read. But if time constrains you, here are some of the highlights:

How has Middle Britain come to applaud the view — hitherto confined to the most extreme left-wing circles — that the President of the United States is more of a danger than an unbalanced dictator with a terrorist history? How have such solid citizens come to view a democracy — Israel — that has been under attack since its foundation as the greatest threat to world peace? And how has the ancient libel of sinister global Jewish power been allowed to rear its head so openly once again?

Britain is gripped by an unprecedented degree of irrationality, prejudice and hysteria over the issues of Iraq, the terrorist jihad and Israel. All three are intimately linked; all three, however, are thought by public opinion to be linked in precisely the wrong way. This is because all three have been systematically misreported, distorted and misrepresented through a lethal combination of profound ignorance, political malice and ancient prejudices.

This systematic abuse by the media is having a devastating impact in weakening the ability of the west to defend itself against the unprecedented mortal threat that it faces from the Islamic jihad. People cannot and will not fight if they don’t understand the nature or gravity of the threat that they face, so much so that they vilify their own leaders while sanitising those who would harm them...

The public has been grossly misled by the British media, and falsehoods have become accepted as fact, so much so that any statement of actual facts which undermine this mindset are excised from the debate altogether...

Every single development in the Iraq saga has been reported through a prism of prejudice. The whole debate has been characterised by distortion, omission and misrepresentation. The intended outcome is not just to discredit Tony Blair but to induce such cynicism and fury about the Iraq war that Britain withdraws its troops, peels off from the US and undermines the defence of the west...

On Blair's Israeli policy:

A crucial part of this frenzy has been the firm belief that Iraq was the wrong target. And that’s because the media knew what the real target should be. The real cause of terror, goes the prevailing wisdom, is Israel’s perceived refusal to grant a state to the Palestinians — a misapprehension unfortunately given weight by pronouncements by Tony Blair himself, who has said that solving the Israel/Palestinian impasse would make the greatest contribution to the war against terror. He has it precisely the wrong way round: only by ridding the world of the sources of terror will the Israel/Palestinian conflict be solved. His inability to give the British public a correct perspective on the relationship between Israel and terror has undoubtedly been a major factor behind both Britain’s extreme animosity towards Israel and, ironically, its hostility to Blair’s policy on Iraq...

As to why terrorists do what they do:

Unaware of this, people ask themselves what can possibly cause human beings to behave in such a barbaric way. And in their media-induced ignorance, they conclude the only reason must be despair and dispossession. And so they fix on Israel as the cause, because through the relentless TV pictures of Palestinians weeping in the rubble of houses demolished by the Israeli army, with a running commentary which predicates the myth of Israeli tanks against Palestinian stones, they are provided with a neat cause of righteous armchair indignation. The obscenity of using even children as human bombs focuses British ire not at the Palestinians for doing so but at Israel, their target. The actual causes of the slaughter — the indoctrination from the cradle in gross Jew hatred, paranoid delusions about the west and a cult of death sanctified and even mandated by religious edict — are studiously ignored by the media which presents it instead as a dispute over
land...

Concerning Israel:

Moreover, Israel itself is shamefully misrepresented by the British media. As in other parts of Europe, Israel is now demonised in a way that goes way beyond legitimate criticism. The one democracy in the Middle East is being delegitimised as a pariah state, while the media is silent on the despotisms that try to destroy it. Of course, it sometimes behaves badly and should be criticised. But it is held to impossibly high standards of behaviour which are expected of no other country. Its every action is reported malevolently, ascribing to it the worst possible motives and denying its own victimisation. Instead of the truth, which is that every military action is taken solely to protect itself from attack, it is portrayed falsely as instigating the violent oppression of Palestinians.

Such an approach is rooted in the media’s astonishing ignorance of history and wilful distortions. The Middle East tragedy is patently not about a Palestinian state, which could have been established any time between 1947 and 1967, and which was actually offered both in 1947 and in 2000, when the only response was an unprecedented campaign of mass murder. Journalists talk about the ‘occupied territories’ without ever saying this is not an aggressive occupation - as is, for example, the Syrian occupation of Lebanon, which is simply ignored - but in Israel’s case it is perfectly legal to hold land where the belligerent entity that has attacked it in the first place still regards itself as in a state of war against it.

The media constantly present Israel’s behaviour as brutal and disproportionate. And yes, sometimes it is - and it should be condemned when this is so. Yet there is no acknowledgement of the substantial attrition rate suffered by its forces by choosing to conduct house to house searches in order to minimise innocent casualties rather than bomb from the air, as the Americans would undoubtedly do to minimise their own casualty rate. Indeed, in the battle of Jenin in 2002 when Israel went in to root out terrorists, the media described it as a massacre with hugely inflated figures of hundreds of dead Palestinians. The massacre story ran for days, even in newspapers whose editorial line is sympathetic to Israel. Yet the facts were that only 52 Palestinians died, of whom the
vast majority were armed men, and no fewer than 23 Israeli soldiers — an extraordinarily high attrition rate. But the false impression created by the media libel remains to this day...

The following is true for many media outlets in the US:

But probably the greatest single reason for the obsessive and unbalanced focus on Israel,along with the irrationality over Iraq, is the hostility and prejudice of the BBC’s reporting. Unlike newspapers, the BBC is trusted as a paradigm of fairness and objectivity. In fact, it views the world from a political position which is similar to that of the Guardian or Independent. In other words, its default position is the left. And since it regards this as the political centre of gravity, it cannot acknowledge its own bias. The BBC is thus a perfectly closed thought system...

The conclusion of Phillips's argument:

So why has all this happened? Why has the media succumbed to this epidemic of bigotry, blindness and bias?

One obvious reason is simple fear. In Ramallah, when Arafat was alive, reporters who assembled for a press conference happened to witness a man being frog-marched outside and shot. They were threatened with death if they reported it. In tyrannies or police states where information is hard to get, journalists report what they are told and have neither the language skills nor the freedom to inquire whether it is actually true. At home, journalists are terrified of being tarred and feathered as an Islamophobe or right-wing or worst of all, a Sharon-lover. There is no equivalent fear, it seems, of being thought a Jewhater, which is merely laughed off as another example of Jewish paranoia and Holocaust hysteria.

The second reason is the cult of postmodernism to which the media, like the rest of the intellectual world, has fallen victim. Some time ago, journalism decided that objectivity was bunk and truth was relative. Facts stopped being sacred and news reporting became an expression of opinion. And because truth itself was merely a subjective view, the way was open for propaganda based on lies to be promoted as the truth as long as it fitted the prevailing prejudice.

That prejudice is overwhelmingly the mindset of the left. Since the left demonises America and western capitalism, and lionises the third world and all liberation movements, America or Israel can never be victims, only aggressors, while the Muslim and Arab third world can only be victims because they are the powerless pawns of western imperialism. This has propelled the left into an unholy alliance with the Arab and Muslim world. As a result, both western leftists and eastern zealots share the perception of America and Israel as the Great and Little Satan, and march shoulder to shoulder behind placards saying ‘No Blood for Oil’ and ‘Death to the Jews’...

The appalling result of all this is that, if a terrorist outrage in London were to claim the lives of hundreds or thousands of people, the reaction of many Britons might not be a revival of the spirit of the Blitz and an iron determination to defeat fascism and tyranny. It might be instead to turn on Tony Blair and blame him directly for bringing about the slaughter. And that, of course, is precisely what makes such a terrible outcome more likely. There can be little doubt that al Qaeda, such a shrewd judge of western decadence and the differences in moral fibre between the countries of the west, will have noted the fact that in Britain, the worse the terrorist outrage that is committed, the more the public will turn on Tony Blair. Every single defeatist, distorted or dishonest article about Iraq, Israel and the war on terror makes another barbaric atrocity more likely.

It is this weakness and moral confusion that comprise the great goal of terrorist strategy; it is this that has characterised the west’s response to Islamic terror for many decades; it is this that has brought us to where we are today. In the war that has been declared upon the free world, the western media’s abuse of power is perhaps the most lethal weapon of all.

Forgive the length of this post; it's worth the bandwidth and time.

Uh oh

I suppose this was inevitable...

Thank you, Trent

Mississippians will play a large role in the events surrounding the inauguration of Bush this month. Among the slated performers is Guy Hovis. I've heard him perform many many times, most recently at an Ole Miss football game this past year where he sang the National Anthem. The Alcorn State University Choir will also perform.

Observing log

The moonless sky is crisp and clear--a perfect night for tracking down Comet Machholz. Around 1:30 this morning, I pointed my little ETX 90 with a 26mm eyepiece (48x) towards Taurus in the west and quickly found the comet. It's a beautiful sight, brilliant yet diffuse. It was very hard to distinguish any kind of a tail in my light polluted skies; rather, surrounding the bright nucleus was a pale blue haze. The comet's coma consumed roughly the size of a full moon in my field of view. Machholz was also prominent in a pair of cheap, low-power binoculars. After adjusting my eyes to the darkness (and knowing where to look) I was also easily able to spot the comet with my naked eye, where it appears as an obvious blur in the sky compared to the neighboring stars. This was perhaps the most enjoyable aspect--being able to look up in the sky without peering through a lense and seeing a blazing ball of ice and rock racing through the heavens at thousands of miles per hour.

This doesn't compare to the memorable Hale-Bopp. But if you fail to take a moment one night over the next week to glimpse little Machholz, you're still missing out on a beautiful sight.

War Eagle

13-0 should speak for itself. The Auburn Tigers defeated Virginia Tech last night in the Sugar Bowl to end the season with a perfect 13-0 record. You would think an undefeated SEC team after beating three top ten tens, winning the SEC and beating the winner of the ACC would qualify for the national championship. But it's just not so. Auburn is the best football team in the country. Period. The only reason they aren't playing for the national title, despite having the best defense in the country in terms of points allowed per game, is because they weren't favored as high in the pre-season polls. Something must change in the BCS. Regardless of the outcome of tonight's Orange Bowl, Auburn deserves a trophy.

You can read more here.
Or here.

Arafat's Legacy

Mahmoud Abbas, the clear frontrunner to lead the Palestinians, is demonstrating once again why the Palestinians can't be trusted as potential partners in peace, calling Israel the 'Zionist enemy.' Their barbaric and savage approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has long since convinced me that its foolish for anyone to hope for a peaceful outcome to this quagmire so long as the Palestinians--the leaders and the masses--have such a penchant for genocide and make no efforts to exercise diplomacy in their language. Why the world continues time after time to blast Israel while giving the Palestinians the benefit of the doubt is beyond me. The Palestinians have made it clear that the only solution on their part to the conflict is the destruction of the Israeli state and the annihilation of Jews as a people. Their insistence on the right of return (which is their reason for collapsing the 2000 Camp David meetings) is grounded not so much in historical grievances as it is in the Palestinian desire to demographically overwhelm the land of Israel so that eventually the Jewish state can no longer exist as a sovereign entitity capable of protecting its Jewish population.

I hardly ever find myself agreeing with Alan Dershowitz. But in his book The Case for Israel, he is right on the mark. He provides the reader with non-emotional and factually persuasive arguments for Israel on nearly every imaginable issue stemming out of this conflict. This book should be required reading for anyone who has an interest in fully understanding the most volitile and intractable problem in the world.

Up in the sky

Comet Machholz is shining in the night sky around magnitude 3.5, making it a fairly easy naked eye object over the next few moonless nights. I haven't yet tracked this thing down in my telescope, but it's on my to do list tonight or tomorrow. I don't recall observing a comet with my telescope (or my unaided eye) since Hale-Bopp so I'm excited the heavens are putting on a little show (although Machholz is nowhere near as bright as Hale-Bopp). MSNBC has a decent article with a star chart for locating the comet here.

I just realized that the picture above isn't actually a picture of Comet Machholz (I think it's Hale-Bopp instead). But because it's such a lovely picture, I don't want to replace it with an actual picture of the current comet. So below is Machholz in all its glory.

Still, a pretty picture in its own right.