Archive for February, 2004
Paige Sorry, Meant to Call NEA ‘Extortionist Cabal’
Scrappleface has more on the “terrorist organization” claim mentioned earlier.
Ash Wednesday
This is sort of a weird thing to mark on the calendar. Am I missing something?
UPDATE: I meant no blasphemy by this. What I did mean to do was to contrast the significance of today’s holy Day of Ashes with the Ian Holm character Ash from the film Alien.
Why an ash cross on the forehead on the real Ash Wednesday?
Because in the Bible a mark on the forehead is a symbol of a person’s ownership. By having their foreheads marked with the sign of a cross, this symbolizes that the person belongs to Jesus Christ, who died on a Cross.
This is in imitation of the spiritual mark or seal that is put on a Christian in baptism, when he is delivered from slavery to sin and the devil and made a slave of righteousness and Christ (Rom. 6:3-18).
The android Ash, the faceless Company that implanted him into the crew of the Nostromo, and the Alien creature that implants a killing, remorseless beast into a living host are all more or less equivalent. You do not to be some terrifying Star Beast to be a monster. We have enough monsters down here already, thank-you very much.
Everything that Ash admires about the Alien, and everything that he and his Company stand for, represent the worst in life. And the Company, the pure logic android, and the single-minded Alien all exist today. Here. Someone needs to blow them out the airlock. Surely, you don’t need to be a Believer to see that.
Paige tells governors National Education Association is “terrorist organization”
A reader gave me the heads up on this story. Secretary of Education Rod Paige called the NEA, the nation’s largest teacher’s union, a “terrorist organization” in a meeting with state governors at the White House on Monday.
Now, before you start e-mailing me or leaving comments agreeing with Paige’s assesment, shut up for a minute.
The NEA is not a terrorist organization. No matter what your beliefs or political stand on education is, and regardless of your opinion of unions in general, calling them a “terrorist organization” isn’t constructive in any way.
This reminds me of when Nancy Pelosi told Mexican officials that the October arrest of illegal workers at Wal-Mart was “terrorizing”.
Those aren’t the only times this is happening, either. Right now, people are referring to their opponents as terrorists. Before that, it was Commies, or Nazis. I’m all for calling a spade a spade, and I don’t think that we need to be friendly for the sake of being friendly. But this type of rhetoric makes the speaker look dumb (especially if he’s the Education Secretary) and doesn’t help anyone.
Neither the Education Department nor NEA had an immediate comment on Paige’s comments. Both indicated that statements were forthcoming.
If the NEA’s statement claims responsibility for a suicide bombing, they’re a terrorist organization. Otherwise don’t say such stupid things.
Buckethead (who is a regular commenter here on MO – thanks!) notes my earlier post about the theory that they Space Shuttle might be done for as of now. Like me, he’s more than a little skeptical, but probably wouldn’t shed any tears if it turned out to be the case.
It’s a sad fact that China and Russia – using forty year old technology – have a more robust and capable manned space flight capability than we do with our thirty year old technology. There have been no significant advances in space transportation since the shuttle flew back in ’81, and that wasn’t much of an advance, as Murdoc has pointed out. There are three things we need for a decent space transportation infrastructure, and we have only one of them.We have disposable launchers that can reliably put satellites and other moderate sized, unmanned payloads into orbit, for a fairly reasonable price. The other two things are a safe and reasonably priced manned vehicle, and a heavy lift vehicle. We have known almost from the beginning of the shuttle era that despite the smoke NASA’s been blowing, the shuttle is none of these things.
He also observes, that with all the abandoned projects in the files and all the advances in computer design and materials manufacturing, we really should be able to whip out a new manned spacecraft design pretty quickly. (He says they could do it in a weekend, but I’ll give them until the end of the year.)
I mentioned in a comment in the earlier post
NASA killed a project that, while expensive, had returned far more in science and experience when it canceled the Apollo-based programs in favor of an untested, fragile, far more expensive Shuttle program. Huge budget cuts (neither of the Bushes were in the White House in 1970 when NASA’s budget started getting sliced and diced) canceled three moon missions and a lot of other manned and unmanned projects. So what does NASA do? Discard an Apollo system that was running like clockwork for a questionable, experimental program that cost way, way, way more (canceling many projects to do so) and then putting all the eggs into that one basket. And make no mistake, the Space Shuttle IS experimental.
Call me nostalgic, but isn’t the Apollo program what we need right now? You want a space station? We had one, but it fell down and went boom because of Shuttle delays. You want a heavy lift booster? We had the biggest and baddest heavy lift booster of them all, but we canceled it. You want to go to the moon? To Mars? Beyond? Apollo had, or was capable of, all of that and more.
Am I suggesting that we really go back to 1975 and pick up right where we left off?
Well, now that you mention it, I think that I am.
And go read Buckethead’s whole post on The Ministry of Minor Perfidy.
Today’s Twisted History notes
1945: The famous photo of the three G.I.’s raising U.S. flag on Iwo Jima is taken.
UPDATE: For more on the raising, and info on the “three” GIs who raised the flag, check this out. That site also has a lot of other pics, including the first Iwo Jima flag raising and other “behind the scenes” moments. Good stuff.
Oscar Jr. points out that 934 people in Israel have been killed by Palestinian violence since September 2000. Also noted is the fact that, if that rate were applied to the United States, we would have suffered more than 44,300 dead in the same time period.
We aren’t the only ones fighting the War on Terror. Its a war with many fronts, with many battles, and, like most wars, it’s a war with many civilian casualties.
If we fight, we must fight to win. I believe that we are fighting that way. We must also continue to fight honorably. I believe that we are doing so.
Many (including me) don’t think that Israel always fights so honorably. I’m certainly not excusing their actions, but if the United States had suffered over 40,000 dead over the past three years, I suspect that we wouldn’t be fighting so cleanly, either.
Jennifer Granholm, the governor of my home state of Michigan, said this morning on FoxNews Sunday that manufacturer Electrolux moving 2,700 jobs to Mexico is “like a nuclear bomb going off.”
This morning’s Grand Rapids Press showed a woman who is going to be laid off getting financial information and advice. She looked unhappy, and her husband looked downright upset. I’m sure that they don’t have any idea what they’re going to do. Their life is going to change forever because workers in Mexico will work for less than $2.00 per hour. I believe that something needs to be done to address this type of situation.
However, if you compare that picture to pictures of people in Hiroshima after a nuclear bomb went off, I think you’ll see significant differences.
UPDATE: Jack Welch later compared the anti-globalization talk of the Left to the closed economies of Cuba and Soviet Russia. MO readers know that I’m fond of Cold War metaphors, but give me a break. There’s a lot of middle ground between NAFTA and Cuba.
He did, however, point out that today’s 5.6% unemployment rate is better than the unemployment rate for the decade of the 1990s. He wasn’t trying to minimize the effect of lost jobs, but wanted to get a little perspective on the situation.
UPDATE 2: Cached transcript.
Is The Shuttle Grounded Forever?
Jeffery F. Bell thinks maybe it is. He argues that post-CAIB shuttle flights might not be any safer, overall, than before. He throws out a 40% chance of another dead crew and destroyed shuttle before the end of the ISS flights in 2010. He thinks maybe the plan all along has been to ground the shuttle forever.
Is this the real Bush Space Plan? Was this intended right from the start?In this model, the current Plan Bush is just a politically sellable intermediate plan to get the contractors and politicians all mentally accustomed to a Shuttle-free environment a few years down the road. Thus the shock of Shuttle termination will be lessened, when it is finally announced sometime after the November elections. Lockheed and Boeing will get big contracts for CEV and Super-EELV, about the same size as their current Shuttle and Station contracts. No NASA centers need close. Everybody is happy.
Could this particular “conspiracy” theory actually be true?
I don’t know if I’m buying it, but I’m not so sure I would oppose the shuttle program’s immediate demise. Think of the budget money freed up to reinvent the Apollo program, which is more or less what we need to do at this point.
And I wouldn’t, even for one moment, believe that the Bush people are above sneaking their plan in.
And as for the Bush Administration, this is exactly the kind of indirect approach they have adopted for most of their major initiatives. They are very clever at taking advantage of the blind Bushophobia of the Administration’s opponents. They always start out by doing something very different from (sometimes exactly the opposite of) what they really want to do. Then when the first plan is denounced by the news media and the Democrats, they reverse course and do what should have been done in the first place.Then the President’s opponents congratulate themselves on having “forced” Bush to abandon another misguided plan. This ploy works best if the original plan is really stupid and obviously failing (e.g. letting looters run wild in Baghdad), but this isn’t really necessary anymore, since Bush-bashing has become so reflexive that any program he suggests is automatically attacked.
I think there’s a lot of good that could come from an early end to the Shuttle/ISS debacle. A lot of loss, too, of course, but in the long run we might be better off.
And NASA should put the Hubble Space Telescope on eBay right now. Someone could buy it, science organizations and universities could rent time on it, and interested parties could try to fund a Soyuz-based servicing mission or two. Unloading the Hubble operations would save NASA another ton of dough, and they could get back to the cutting-edge stuff that no one else can manage.
XM-25 Tested With Smarter Shells (Feb 20, 2004 entry)
Strategy Page has a must-read post on the development of the M25 grenade launcher. This isn’t your daddy’s M203.
Regular MO readers will know that the XM29 OICW was scrapped and the two elements of that weapon, a 5.56mm assault rifle and a 20mm grenade launcher, went on to be developed as separate weapons. The XM8 assault rifle is in the advanced stages of testing as we speak. The XM25 smart grenade launcher is lagging, but should be ready for initial testing late this year or early next year.
The 20mm shell of the OICW has been replaced by a 25mm shell. The 20mm was originally adopted because the weapon and the ammo would be lighter, and the weapon was too heavy as it was. The XM29′s weight was a major factor in its cancellation. Splitting the grenade launcher off into its own weapon allowed the step up to the 25mm shell, which increases performance by about 50%.
The 25mm shell in the XM-25 provided some more options, and, it is hoped, more lethality. The US has fired over 30 million 25mm shells from the cannon on its M-2 Bradley armored vehicles and was satisfied with the lethality of that shell against infantry. One of the new options with a larger shell is a fuel-air explosive (or “thermobaric”) shell for the XM-25. Such a shell would cause greater blast effect in an enclosed space, and actually suck most of the oxygen out of a cave or closed room long enough to make surviving troops at least a bit groggy. In combat, every bit helps.
The 20mm and 25mm “smart shells” use a computer controlled fuze in each shell. The M-25 or M-307 operator can select four different firing modes via a selector switch on the weapon. The four modes include “Bursting” (airburst). For this to work, the soldier first finds the target via the weapons sighting system. This includes a laser range finder and the ability to select and adjust the range shown in the sight picture. For an air burst the soldier aims at an enemy position and fires a round. The shell is optimized to spray incapacitating (wounding or killing) fragments in a roughly six meter radius from the exploding round. Thus if enemy troops are seen moving near trees or buildings at a long distance (over 500 meters), the weapon has a good chance of getting them with one shot. M-16s are not very accurate at that range, and the enemy troops will dive for cover as soon as M-16 bullets hit around them. With smart shells, you get one (or a few) accurate shots and the element of surprise.
The other modes are “PD” (point detonation, where the round explodes on contact), PDD (point detonation delay, where the round detonates immediately after it has gone through a door, window or thin wall) and “Window”, which is used for firing at enemy troops in a trench, behind a stone wall or inside a room. The round detonates just beyond the aiming point. For buildings, this would be a window or door frame, cave entrance or the corner of a building (to get enemy troops thought to be around the corner.)
While the XM8 is basically nothing more than an incremental improvement to existing assault rifle technology, the XM25 is a great leap forward for individual fire support.
The 25mm shell for the XM25 was originally developed for the XM307 grenade launcher, which is to replace the current 40mm M19 grenade launcher found on many vehicles, especially Humvees and Strykers. The XM307 has a much longer range than the M19, and it’s more accurate and lethal. Good stuff.
UPDATE: Strategy Page made a seperate page for its XM-25 post here. I quoted part of it in my post, but if you want to know about the weapon you really need to go check out the SP article. (I wish that SP would have permalinks to each post all the time. They put such consistently good stuff every day.) They also have the same pic I used, which I found on some Japanese-language site. There don’t seem to be many XM25 images out there yet.
Truck’s armor proves it can take a punch
Go check out Michael Gilbert’s latest that recounts the four RPG attacks against Strykers so far.
It seems that Army officials have come to the conclusion that the first RPG hit, which was initially thought to have missed the slat armor, in fact glanced off the cage before striking the hull.
Another RPG hit left a fist-sized dent in a FUEL TANK. It was apparently a dud.
