Got up a bit earlier than usual this morning with hopes of dragging out my telescope and seeing the LCROSS lunar impact first-hand. I was encouraged because when I went to bed last night, the sky had mostly cleared after raining and then snowing all day (final accumulation about 1/2″ of snow on the ground). Alas, ’twas not to be — there’s fog outside, a relatively rare phenomenon here. I can see the moon glowing through the fog, almost directly overhead. So I turned NASA TV on instead and built up the fire in the wood-burning stove; two of the dogs are out here with me. Now to see what happens . . .

[UPDATED 0548 MDT]

Well, that was…underwhelming. As far as I can tell, the flash of the first impact overwhelmed the video signal from the trailing L-CROSS craft. I keep waiting for NASA TV to bring up some telescope views of the impact, but we’re treated instead to very low-key talking heads. Many, many years ago, Jerry Pournelle described someone’s lame marketing effort as if KFC were trying to market “hot, dead chicken”. That’s pretty much my impression every time I turn on NASA TV. I mean, I’m grateful they’re not doing the UFO/Bigfoot stuff that seems to have invaded the History Channel, the Discovery Channel, etc., but man, they’re telecasting is dull.

In other news, Pres. Obama has won the Nobel Peace Prize. Seriously. I mean, shouldn’t they have waited until he actually accomplished something? Or was in office for more than 9 months? The Nobel Peace Prize committee has just wiped out whatever lingering value or meaning the prize may have had.  ..bruce w..

Somewhere before dawn this morning, I started a long, low-key dream in which I was composing a blog post about one of my favorite books: The CRC Handbook of Astronautics. The book was about the same size as the old classic CRC math tables handbooks (as opposed to one of the massive CRC chemistry & physics volumes), but contained a mixture of history, little-known facts, and mathematical details and calculations about the start of manned (and womanned) space flight.

In my dream, I was actually thumbing through the book itself, rediscovering historical items about the early space race between the US and the USSR (including the Russians sneaking onto a US aircraft carrier and recovering a long-stolen historical artifact). I remember hitting the 10-page discussion of calculus around page 162 — a digression to better explain orbital mechanics — and mentally composing a passage about how I almost wept the first time I saw that out of admiration for the authors’ and editors’ willingness to tackle the hard stuff required to understand astronautics rather than dumb the book down. As I went on through the book, I kept expecting it to end post-Apollo, pre-Shuttle, but found that the book kept going on. When it started discussing the US space program under Pres. Clinton, I became puzzled — surely the book was older than that. I checked the copyright date up at the front of the book and saw it was 2006. I thought, “That can’t be right; I’ve had this book for decades.”

At which point I woke up and thought, “Wait — I don’t own the CRC handbook of astronautics; in fact, I’m not ever sure such a book exists.”

As it turns out, it appears there was a CRC Handbook of Space Technology (1985), though I’m sure I never owned a copy. But the Astronautics volume I dreamed about had some great stories, and I wish I could remember them better.   ..bruce w..

A very interesting change has taken place on the Sun. As readers of this blog know, I have been watching the Sun for some time, especially with regards to the deep solar minimum we currently have between sunspot cycle 23 and cycle 24.

If you look at the image above, you might not see any sunspot activity. It looks like the rest of the visuals we have had from the Sun for the past couple of years, devoid of activity. This is caused by changes deep within the Sun that are part of the normal cycle, albeit one that we have probably not witnessed since we began observing the sun with such precision.

On closer inspection, there are some tiny discoloration just to the left of the center of the image. In fact the agencies that monitor the sun assigned this cluster of solar “plaque” a sunspot number and began to track it. While some scientists may moan that we are now counting any smudge on the sun as a spot, there are some important things happening here.

If we take that section of the image, and enlarge it, we can see it more clearly:

To my eye it seems that the “freckles” are really bordering a circular region of magnetic flux, just as if that circular region were a sunspot. The reason that sunspots look dark is that the are colder than the surrounding surface of the sun. So when we look at them using the filters needed to prevent going blind, they seem as dark areas on the surface of the bright sun.

In some ground breaking work, Drs. Livingston & Penn have been observing that over the decade, the contrast of the spots has been decreasing. That is to say that the temperature of the spots themselves are going up.

What exactly does this mean to any of us? No one knows for sure, but it’s a chance to better understand the physics behind the largest source of energy for our planet,

We're coming for you.

MORNING LINKS

ITEM: Speaking of swine flu hysteria, this may be a good time to invest in pork belly futures – there may be a shortage soon.

ITEM: Yet another way in which Western Europeans are looking for the US to help them financially.

ITEM: Here’s a slideshow of items from the Michael Jackson Neverland Ranch auction. Some interesting, some amusing, some downright creepy. Hat tip to the Drunk Report.

OVERNIGHT LINKS

ITEM: With rising panic over the swine flu, here’s a statistic to keep in mind: about 36,000 people already die each year from flu right here in the US.  It will be interesting to see how many actual swine flu deaths we have here in the US. Bet it won’t be 36,000.

ITEM: Or should I say “H1N1 flu deaths“? Just trips off the tongue, doesn’t it? Kind of like “man-caused disasters”. Hmm…maybe “porcine-induced disaster“? (For SK fans out there: yes, ‘trips’ was deliberate.)

ITEM: What is most telling about Arlen Specter’s party switch is not the move itself; it’s his blatant hypocrisy after denying such a switch just five weeks ago and proposing changes to Senate rules back in 2001 after Jeffords’ defection. But here’s the real kicker: Joe Biden talked him into the switch. It’s one thing to be persuaded by the charisma and rhetoric (if a teleprompter is handy) of Obama — but Joe Biden?  It doesn’t say much for Specter. Of course, neither does this.

ITEM: The economic collapse has made wildcatters of us all:

In 1993, Chevron Corp. gave up the ghost and turned the field over to the city. “We go for big oil fields,” a Chevron spokesman says, and Whittier just “wasn’t economical.” Whittier, for its part, saw its legacy in President Richard M. Nixon — who attended college here when he couldn’t afford Harvard — and the city was glad to be rid of the pumps.

But then last year, as tax revenues plunged and oil crept up toward $150 a barrel, Bob Henderson, the town’s mayor, had a revelation.

“I was sitting at home, just idly thinking about this possibility of oil drilling and suddenly thought: ‘Oh, my God, when I purchased the old Chevron property, we demanded they give us the oil rights.’ ”

The demand was made so Whittier could convert the area into a wilderness preserve. Says Mr. Henderson: “It’s home to an awful lot of animals — bobcats, coyotes, hundreds of birds.”

Goodbye Bambi, hello oil rigs. Cha-ching!

ITEM: And pirate attacks have made heroes of us all:

Tayler and the others rushed to the railing and also saw what he described as five or six men sitting in a roofless pirate boat. One started climbing a rope to the deck beneath them. “He was already halfway up,” says Tayler. One passenger screamed: “Pirates!”

Without hesitation, passengers began to grab whatever they could find around them. “We immediately began throwing tables and deck chairs at the rope,” said Tayler. One hit a pirate scaling it. He fell off and the boat turned around, Tayler recalls.

The skirmish between the passengers and the pirates lasted for several minutes, he says. Suddenly, the pirates opened fire — Tayler says he counted three salvos of 25 to 30 rounds each.

Again and again, the pirate boat would approach the ship and disappear under the stern, only to reemerge. Tayler and his fellow passengers continued to throw chairs despite the gunfire. One passenger was shot in the leg and one bullet grazed the head of a crew member. The armed security staff finally turned up six to eight minutes into the skirmish, passengers claim.

Good for them.

ITEM: And the continuing market in credit default swaps (CDSs) may yet again make paupers of us all:

Wall Street looks to be quietly making gains in its attempt to keep regulatory interference to a minimum in a $30 trillion derivatives market at the heart of the financial crisis.

The fact that I haven’t even mentioned the name of the market yet speaks to one of the main reasons Wall Street is winning: it is benefitting from the fact that Main Streeters and their representatives in Congress are too bored by the topic to do anything about it.

Credit default swaps, or CDS — there, I said it — are a really geeky business. They are essentially promises by one party to pay another, if some third party should fail to pay its debts.

ITEM: Quick, which car manufacturer do you think will be #1 in global new car sales ten years from now? I’ll bet you weren’t thinking of this one.

ITEM: Speaking of manufacturing, here’s one of my all-time favorite SNL commercials. The best part is watching Sam Waterston struggle to keep a straight face.

ITEM: And finally, this is just too cool for words:

One man, living his dream.

Thanks for stopping by!  ..bruce w..

We're from the Government, and we're here to help!

[Here are Wednesday's links as well]

MORNING LINKS

ITEM: USA Today has an outstanding article debunking the various myths about the Columbine shooters who killed just over a dozen of their fellow students 10 years ago:

They weren’t goths or loners.

The two teenagers who killed 13 people and themselves at suburban Denver’s Columbine High School 10 years ago next week weren’t in the “Trenchcoat Mafia,” disaffected videogamers who wore cowboy dusters. The killings ignited a national debate over bullying, but the record now shows Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold hadn’t been bullied — in fact, they had bragged in diaries about picking on freshmen and “fags.” . . .

“These are not ordinary kids who were bullied into retaliation,” psychologist Peter Langman writes in his new book, Why Kids Kill: Inside the Minds of School Shooters. “These are not ordinary kids who played too many video games. These are not ordinary kids who just wanted to be famous. These are simply not ordinary kids. These are kids with serious psychological problems.”

How many TV shows and movies in the last decade have reinforced the stereotype of the “goth/loser/excluded” student shooter? Read the whole thing.

ITEM: Oopsie! You know those evil Wall Street executives who took “shameful” bonuses while receiving federal bailout money? Well, one of them is working in the Obama Administration — as a Deputy Secretary of State, no less.

OVERNIGHT LINKS

ITEM: The grandstanding out of Congress and the Obama Administration continues to have consequences:

Businesses, already struggling to survive the perils of an economic downturn, are starting to push back against a growing public perception that business travel is wasteful and unethical.

Government efforts to curtail corporate travel by companies that receive federal bailout funds have demonized the meeting business and harmed the nation’s hotel and travel trade, industry leaders say.

As with the brain drain on Wall Street, it is unclear whether these consequences are desired or unintended. The classic dictum, of course, is “Never ascribe to malice what can be explained by stupidity.” The problem is that with Congress, it’s really hard to separate the two.

ITEM: Creeping socialism/fascism alert: Faced with piracy, an unstable and dangerous border with Mexico, and a direct threat of a White House attack by the Taliban, the Department of Homeland Security has zeroed in on — “rightwing extremist activity” within the United States:

The Department of Homeland Security is warning law enforcement officials about a rise in “rightwing extremist activity,” saying the economic recession, the election of America’s first black president and the return of a few disgruntled war veterans could swell the ranks of white-power militias.

A footnote attached to the report by the Homeland Security Office of Intelligence and Analysis defines “rightwing extremism in the United States” as including not just racist or hate groups, but also groups that reject federal authority in favor of state or local authority.

And just in time for the Tea Parties on Wednesday, too. I will cheerfully bet $1000 that during the Obama Administration, we will never see a report out of the DHS that uses the adjective “leftwing”, much less “leftwing extremist.” Any takers?

ITEM: From the New York Times, more details on the Navy’s rescue of Captain Phillips. Initial reports indicated that Phillips had jumped from the lifeboat just before the SEALs fired, but that was not the case; he was “tightly bound” and in the lifeboat at the time.

ITEM: Meanwhile, the “Barry and the Pirates” meme continues to spread, while others speculate that the Somali pirates will become the Left’s newest useful idiots. However, people elsewhere in the world are taking note — in some cases, favorably — that the US did what no one else has to date: intervened with force rather than succumb to ransom.

ITEM: And while Obama keeps talking about the “inherited Bush deficits” (which aren’t Bush’s at all — they are from the Democratic Congress that’s controlled spending for the last two years), he hasn’t said anything about the inherited Bush military, other than he plans to change it.

ITEM: Obama is losing “the legal Left“:

A growing chorus on the legal left is cooling toward President Barack Obama as a result of recent actions by the Justice Department vigorously defending the Bush administration in what it termed the war on terror.

“Obama Position on Illegal Spying: Worse Than Bush,” a large graphic declared over the weekend on the home page of a respected group advocating freedom on the Internet, Electronic Frontier Foundation.

ITEM:  Obama is also losing India, mostly for claiming the existence of something called “the moderate Taliban”. Yeah, where are those folks? Meanwhile, losing India is not a good thing at all.

ITEM: Obama continues to lose the American public, with his Rasmussen Presidential Approval index down to just +2 (after being as high as +8 just last week). I wonder if the approach of Tax Day has anything to do with that?

ITEM: Meanwhile, the global warming menace continues and will only get worse.

ITEM: This New York Times article, “Last Voyage for the Keeper of the Hubble“, reads like something out of a Heinlein short story.  It’s a great article and a great story; go read it.

ITEM: Yep, that stern letter from the UN Security Council to North Korea about its failed missile launch had a real impact, all right. Peace and security are just around the corner!

ITEM: Asinine opening paragraphs of the week:

Drivers have long wondered how size affects safety in car crashes. Many small cars perform well in safety tests but appear, intuitively at least, to be at a disadvantage in collision with larger vehicles.

Now a series of crash tests indicate the disadvantage is substantial, even when small cars collide with vehicles that don’t seem that much larger.

The only drivers who have ever “wondered how size affects safety in car crashes” are the stupid ones. One does not even need high school physics to know that a larger car is safer than a smaller car, especially if the two collide. Commentators have been noting for decades that the push for greater fuel efficiency through smaller, lighter car designs comes with an increased risk of injury and death. This “new study” is a bit like confirming that snow is cold or rain is wet, or that the sun comes up in the morning.

ITEM: Expect to see a lot more of these — “Oregon Sues [Oppenheimer Funds Inc.] Over Risks Taken In Its ‘529′ Fund“.  Key grafs:

Oregon charges that Oppenheimer Core Bond fund, which was in the state’s 529-plan options billed as “conservative,” became significantly more risky starting in late 2007 or early 2008. The fund lost 36% of its value in 2008, but its benchmark index, the Barclays Capital Aggregate Bond Index, rose 5.2%.

“The Core Bond Fund was no longer a plain bond fund,” the complaint says. “It had become a hedge-fund like investment fund that took extreme risks.”

The complaint says the fund veered into credit-default swaps and other derivatives, which the state called “high-risk bets that were plainly inappropriate for those saving for college.”

ITEM: Headline redundancy award: “Distracted Congress Loses Focus on Credit Freeze“. Collectively, Congress has about a 5-day attention span.

ITEM: Howard Jacobson talks about the rise of public anti-Semitism in Britain. I fear that may be a precursor to a similar rise here in the United States, especially given the Left’s constant ranting about “neocons” and “the Israeli lobby”.

ITEM: In local news, the Colorado Legislature is draining $500 million from the state’s workers comp insurance fund — paid by state businesses over the years — so they won’t have to cut the budget elsewhere. That, of course, leaves the question of just how Colorado is going to pay workers compensation claims. Expect to see more acts like this around the country.

That’s it for today; in the meantime, here are Monday’s links.

P.S. For those of you who moused over the poster image above, here’s what “the Spanish Prisoner” refers to.

Remember -- the future depends upon you.

MORNING LINKS

BREAKING NEWS: The American crew on that ship hijacked by Somali pirates has retaken control of the ship. A reminder to the world: don’t screw with Americans.

ITEM: Two books you really, really should read are Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan, both by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. These are outstanding works that deal with the real-world implications — such as the massive financial meltdown that we’re in — of human ignorance or misunderstanding of probability. Both books were written before the meltdown; Taleb now talks about how to avoid a repeat performance. Example:

6. Do not give children sticks of dynamite, even if they come with a warning. Complex derivatives need to be banned because nobody understands them and few are rational enough to know it. Citizens must be protected from themselves, from bankers selling them “hedging” products, and from gullible regulators who listen to economic theorists.

ITEM: You should also read (and it will only take a few minutes) Joshua Stanton’s piece over at the New Ledger on “The Myth of Soft Power: Ten Effective, Non-Military Options Obama Won’t Use Against North Korea“. Example:

7. Expand U.N. sanctions to ban the sale of North Korean gold — some of it likely mined in concentration camps — on the international markets. Even if China blocks U.N. sanctions on North Korean gold sales, most of this gold is sold in the capitals of U.S. allies Thailand and the United Kingdom. Thus, bilateral diplomacy would be an effective alternative to the U.N.

ITEM: Great news! The ceiling credit card interest rate has been lowered to 12.5%! Oh, wait — that’s over in Taiwan. Here in the States, Congress is atttempting to raise payday loan interest rates to 391%.

ITEM: Obama is losing, or at least annoying, John Dickerson over at Slate. The reason: Obama’s propensity to use exaggeration and overstatement (and, let’s face it, though Dickerson is too polite to put it in these terms, outright lies)  in characterizing his critics and watchdogs (emphasis mine):

He’s also a nuance-free exaggerator. In Turkey, he told students, “Some of my reporter friends from the States were asking, ‘How come you didn’t solve everything on this trip?’ ”

A politician is always on safe ground charging that the press has gone overboard. But no one was asking that question.

Nor was anyone saying what Obama said some people were saying in his press conference last month: “We did a video, sending a message to the Iranian people and the leadership of the Islamic Republic of Iran. And some people said, ‘Well, they did not immediately say that we’re eliminating nuclear weapons and stop funding terrorism.’ ” No one said that. But it helped Obama make his pitch for patience.

For me, that’s a sign of intellectual dishonesty (or, at least, laziness) and indicates that Obama may think that his arguments and actions can’t stand on their own merits. Note that other people were pointing out this same tendency in Obama’s comments well before the election last fall.

ITEM: Like it or not (and a lot of people don’t), your Social Security number has become, in effect, your universal identifier. But for most of us, our SS card is a flimsy, plain piece of paper buried in a file or drawer somewhere. So the design firm Frog has proposed a 21st century Social Security card that incorporates photographic, anti-forgery and biometric features. But they seriously need to work on their marketing; their name for this proposal is the “Troika” card, a word that has strong (and negative) Cold War-era connotations.

ITEM: How bad is the mortgage fraud crisis here in America? So bad that the Feds just indicted a group of 24 people down in San Diego led by a street gang member for at least $9 million in mortgage fraud in the 2005-2008 period. Like Willie Sutton said, it’s where the money is (or was).

ITEM: Speaking of fraud, here’s a bit of news to reassure a public wondering where all this stimulus money is going (emphasis mine):

The federal government will soon send more than $300 million in stimulus funds to 61 housing agencies that have been repeatedly faulted by auditors for mishandling government aid, a USA TODAY review has found.

Yeah, that’s going to work out well, don’t you think? And Treasury’s creation of the P-PIP Fund may open the door to lots more financial shenanigans.

ITEM: Speaking of piracy, it appears even the Somali pirates want to test President Obama. This is the first ship with an all-American crew that the Somali pirates have seized. Coincidence or opportunity? You decide. Of course, this comes just as Joe Conason tries to argue (with a straight face) that Obama represents an extremists’s nightmare.

ITEM: Creeping socialism/fascism alert: I somehow missed this little gem from Treasury Sec’y Tim Geithner:

“Accordingly, we recommend that all advisers to hedge funds (and other private pools of capital, including private equity funds and venture capital funds) with assets under management over a certain threshold be required to register with the SEC. All such funds advised by an SEC-registered investment adviser should be subject to investor and counterparty disclosure requirements and regulatory reporting requirements. The regulatory reporting requirements for such funds should require reporting, on a confidential basis, information necessary to assess whether the fund or fund family is so large or highly leveraged that it poses a threat to financial stability.”

Yeah, regulating venture capital funds is going to help stimulate the economy. Talk about a flight from investment, and right when we need it the most.

ITEM: Creeping socialism/fascism alert (part 2): Steve Malanga has a well-written piece on the “reawakening of corporatism” thanks to the Obama Administration:

But a version of corporatism also emerged in the 1920s in Fascist Italy, where Mussolini conceived of syndicates in numerous industries composed of labor leaders and businessmen helping direct the Italian economy in the service of Fascism. Hitler’s solution was more thorough, to eliminate those organizations and associations within Germany that opposed him and to smother individualism by instituting a corporatist regime of forcible coordination among trade unions and business groups.

As chilling as these authoritarian versions of corporatism sound today, in the 1930s they found admirers in the U.S., where the ravages of the Great Depression provoked public longing for a safer, more thoroughly planned economy without as much resistance and debate from recalcitrant business leaders or opposition party members who opposed the New Deal. Even today one occasionally hears a longing for a benign version of this elaborately planned economic world in phrases like “getting the trains running on time,” or in a recent column in the New York Times which suggested that Hitler’s wartime buildup amounted to a successful government stimulus in Depression-era Germany.

Oh, and if you haven’t read Liberal Fascism and The Forgotten Man, you should.

OVERNIGHT LINKS

ITEM: Tired of all the bad news? Wish that things could be like this instead? (A distinct leftish bias, but I’m willing to take the bitter with the sweet. Hat tip to Metafilter.)

ITEM: Speaking of humorous fantasies — with Bush out of office, the market for Bush-bashing jokes, web sites and paraphernalia has plummeted. Of course, they could always start to make fun of Obama . . . naaah.

ITEM: And if you’re in the mood for some bad news — that is, besides all the items below — here’s a little something to worry about. However, the Bad Astronomer weighed in on it about a year ago, and we’re all still here.

ITEM: And yet more bad news — or, better said, sad advice to the successful. (Hat tip to Rand Simberg.)

ITEM: Well, the Obama Administration is now saying that “the government has spent, lent or set aside more than $4 trillion through the Troubled Asset Relief Program, the Federal Reserve and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.” The mind boggles, and the unborn children weep.

ITEM: Keith Hennessy, who raised concerns about the lack of “free market” references in the G-20 summit statement, gives Obama credit for directly addressing the need for free trade while speaking in France, no less.

ITEM: VP Joe Biden says that former VP Dick Cheney is “dead wrong” on the safety of the United States. If I had to pick one or the other to protect the US — or, frankly, to carry out any task requiring executive competence — I’d pick Cheney, and not Biden. ‘Nuff said.

ITEM: Not everyone is buying the attempted rehabilitation of Eliot Spitzer. And why is it that only Democrats get this kind of pass? I’m surprised Obama hasn’t nominated Sandy Berger for some key position.

ITEM: Glad to see that someone continues to raise questions about Larry Summers and his income from Wall Street. And it’s the Washington Post doing it. I’m telling you — the WaPo is making the New York Times look like the Obama lapdog that it is. On the other hand, Woman On Fire Megan McArdle puts together a reasonable defense of Summers, though that may just be to tweak Glenn Greenwald (who had two New York Times Bestseller books!*).

*OK, in all fairness to Glenn, if any of my books had made the NYT Bestseller lists, you can be sure it would be mentioned prominently on this blog.

ITEM: Proof by assertion is no proof at all. Stephen Morris assures us up front that

Despite blunders in the appointments process, Obama has shown a wisdom, intellectual clarity and moral humility that Jimmy Carter lacked, and that augurs well for dealing with the tremendous threats to US and Western security.

But he fails to provide any convincing evidence to that end, beyond his own admiration for Obama and his own wishful thinking. Stephen Morris is an Australian who, as far as I can tell, didn’t actually live here in the US during the Carter Administration. I’m an American who did (and was in the workforce with a wife and children to support). Beyond that, I have yet to see “wisdom, intellectual clarity, and moral humility” on the part of President Obama since his inauguration; quite the opposite, I’d say.

ITEM: Just a “helpful reminder” that the United States income tax code is already one of the most progressive taxes in the world. But Congress and Obama don’t think it’s progressive enough, apparently.

ITEM: Best headline of the overnight links: A Nuclear Hedge Against Aliens.

ITEM: Camille Paglia keeps making excuses for Obama himself, though she excoriates his staff. I sense, however, that she will not always remain so forgiving of the One. And, God bless her, she remains intellectually honest:

Yes, something very ugly has surfaced in contemporary American liberalism, as evidenced by the irrational and sometimes infantile abuse directed toward anyone who strays from a strict party line. Liberalism, like second-wave feminism, seems to have become a new religion for those who profess contempt for religion. It has been reduced to an elitist set of rhetorical formulas, which posit the working class as passive, mindless victims in desperate need of salvation by the state. Individual rights and free expression, which used to be liberal values, are being gradually subsumed to worship of government power.

ITEM: Mark Liberman over at Language Log takes David Brooks to task over his misreading of alleged scientific findings. Or, better put, Liberman finds a third-party cartoon that does the deed.

ITEM: Gerard Vanderleun nails the main advantage (obvious in retrospect) of newspapers over new media:

Meanwhile, Jeff Javits over at BuzzMachine posts the keynote talk that he thinks the “angry, old, white men” at the Newpaper Assocation of America meeting should get (but won’t):

You blew it.

You’ve had 20 years since the start of the web, 15 years since the creation of the commercial browser and craigslist, a decade since the birth of blogs and Google to understand the changes in the media economy and the new behaviors of the next generation of – as you call them, Mr. Murdoch – net natives. You’ve had all that time to reinvent your products, services, and organizations for this new world, to take advantage of new opportunities and efficiencies, to retrain not only your staff but your readers and advertisers, to use the power of your megaphones while you still had it to build what would come next. But you didn’t.

You blew it.

That’s just the warm-up. Definitely worth reading.

And remember — vote for prawns!  ..bruce w..

Today the Drudge Report had a rather alarming red faced link, describing that China now had a special “Kill Weapon” that was a threat to US aircraft carriers.

The article cited was produced by the US Naval Institute, and outlines this weapon:

After years of conjecture, details have begun to emerge of a “kill weapon” developed by the Chinese to target and destroy U.S. aircraft carriers.

First posted on a Chinese blog viewed as credible by military analysts and then translated by the naval affairs blog Information Dissemination, a recent report provides a description of an anti-ship ballistic missile (ASBM) that can strike carriers and other U.S. vessels at a range of 2000km.

The range of the modified Dong Feng 21 missile is significant in that it covers the areas that are likely hot zones for future confrontations between U.S. and Chinese surface forces.

If operational as is believed, the system marks the first time a ballistic missile has been successfully developed to attack vessels at sea. Ships currently have no defense against a ballistic missile attack.

Along with the Chinese naval build-up, U.S. Navy officials appear to view the development of the anti-ship ballistic missile as a tangible threat.

The Dongfeng (East Wind) 21 is a land based medium range ballistic missile. It is a two stage, solid fuel rocket. By using solid fuel, it is easier to set up and launch as it does not require cryogenic cooling or propellents. China likes to deploy these on mobile launchers that they can easily move around to hide them from anyone who might want to make sure they never launch them.

What the US Naval Institute is implying, without spelling it out, is that China has claimed that they have developed a very accurate warhead that can be targeted against ships at sea, a land-based anti-ship ballistic missile based on the DF-21. This warhead would be nuclear, and with a big enough yield, the Chinese could “Kill” a US carrier. While it is true that if you can toss a live nuke close enough to a carrier, you can sink it, the premise of the entire write up is so far from credible as to be a joke.

One has to wonder how and why this article surfaced. Is the Navy or it’s supporters attempting to stoke support for development money for the Aegis systems? There was at one time a proposal to enhance Aegis to attempt terminal intercept capability. Or is it just time to once again realize that China is steadily moving to expand its sphere of influence in Asia?

Make no mistake, the events that would lead to a DF-21 fired at a carrier battle group would be well down the road of a full fledged and escalating war with China, and would signal the beginning of a nuclear exchange that would see hundreds of millions die, mostly in China. While it is not public knowledge, China knows that the location of their missiles, command and control and launch authorities have been infiltrated, measured to within the inch, and can be targeted within seconds should anyone ever be so stupid as to use a DF-21 against US assets. The chances of this ever happening are so close to zero as to not even merit consideration, let alone the level of concern Raymond Pritchett has raised.

Might as well start getting used to it.

OVERNIGHT LINKS

ITEM: Hey! Al Gore and I both celebrated Earth Hour with our lights on! We’re buds now! As for Kentucky, heck, they celebrated a whole Earth Week not long ago!

ITEM: Creeping socialism/fascism alert: Obama tells GM CEO to hit the road. For firms and organizations still considering taking government money, there’s a story about a camel sticking its nose into a tent during a sandstorm that’s worth remembering. Ford, at least, appears to have remembered that story. And Darleen Click has some other cautionary observations.

ITEM: Courtesy of Lucianne.com:

ITEM: Say Anything pretty much sums it up: “In 45 Days Obama Administration Has Authorized More Debt Than Reagan Did In 8 Years“.

ITEM: Obama is taking an entourage of 500 people for his trip to Europe. I wonder if the media will give that figure coverage equal to that given to Bush a few years back? Particularly the part about local law enforcement? And note that Obama is going to London, not a near-active war zone.

ITEM: A week or two before Glenn Reyonds (Instapundit) first started quoting the Li’l Abner song title, “The Country’s in the Very Best of Hands”, I posted the entire lyrics here at ASIP, thanks to a showing of the movie on TCM, and noted its remarkable timeliness. But Glenn has now gone one better and posted a link to the actual movie clip.

ITEM: Remember my earlier discussion about how “the Greater Fool theory” drives the stock market? Well, investors may be starting to wonder if there are some greater fools running around out there.

ITEM: Caught between Scylla and Charybdis: are we going to end up with inflation or deflation? And if you think deflation sounds good, Woman on Fire Megan McArdle ’splains it all to you.

ITEM: NY Times article headline states, “Anglo-American Capitalism on Trial.“ To paraphrase Chesterton, it’s not that capitalism has been tried and found wanting; it has been found risky and inequitable, and thus is being abandoned. But however bad capitalism is, to paraphrase Churchill, all the other economic systems are so much worse.

RELATED ITEM: I strongly recommend reading my all-time favorite economic treatise, Eat the Rich by P. J. O’Rourke. Unlike most economists, op-ed columnists, and politicians, O’Rourke actually visited all the countries in question (US, Albania, Sweden, Cuba, Russia, Tanzania, Hong Kong, Singapore), talked to relevant parties, and wrote up his observations. His first chapter is on Wall Street (“Good Capitalism”), but his closing paragraphs for that chapter — written over a decade ago during the dot.com bubble — are remarkably prescient on several levels:

Wall Street’s free-market capitalism is doubtless a wonderful thing and a boon to humanity, but it scared me. The free market scared me even when I watched it function under the rule of law. Capitalism scared me despite the fact that I was seeing it operate within a well-defined set of rules understood by all the players. And I liked the players. Capitalists are at least as honest and nice as the people I know who don’t have capital. But I was still scared.

Free-market capitalism was terrifying under the best circumstances. What it was like under the worse circumstances, I couldn’t imagine. And becaue I couldn’t imagine it, I needed to go someplace that had no rules and was full of crooks. I considered Washington D.C., but Albania looked like more fun.

ITEM: More on the time-bomb ticking to the south of us (emphasis mine):

The presence of the informers, some of them former soldiers, highlights a central paradox in Mexico’s ambitious and bloody assault on the drug cartels that have ravaged the country. The nation has launched a war, but it cannot fully rely on the very institutions — the police, customs, the courts, the prisons, even the relatively clean army — most needed to carry it out.

The cartels bring in billions of dollars more than the Mexican government spends to defeat them, and they spend their wealth to bolster their ranks with an untold number of politicians, judges, prison guards and police officers — so many police officers, in fact, that entire forces in cities across Mexico have been disbanded and rebuilt from scratch.

ITEM: David Rothkopf wonders in a WaPo op-ed, “Where are the leaders?”, but places blame everywhere but on Obama. Key quote: “But to paraphrase Roosevelt, Obama can only be as great a president as the people let him be.” Oh, please.

ITEM: Since we’re giving a billion dollars to the terrorists running Gaza, wouldn’t it make sense to give some money to the actual democracy in the region?

ITEM: What a surprise! Sen. Chris Dodd (D-self) pressed AIG for campaign donations even as he gained power in the Senate Banking Committee. And yet the Left and the media are still fixated on Jack Abramoff.

ITEM: We almost lost a third Space Shuttle some 21 years ago during a top-secret satellite mission. Key indicator of government idiocy:

“Their conclusion, which they did not pass back to us, was ‘oh, you know what? That’s not tile damage, those are just lights and shadows we’re seeing in this video.’ So in other words, the resolution on the encrypted video was that bad that they based a conclusion on it that was in gross error. … If I had said hey, I think this is important enough for us to break the encryption and send you guys clear video, oh, it would have been pandemonium down there at DOD. But in hindsight, oh man, that’s what we should have done. Because they were drawing an incorrect conclusion from it and they were not telling us what their conclusion was.”

Translation: the US government would only let the NASA engineers look at low-quality encrypted video to inspect tiles. It turns out that the shuttle was badly damaged and almost had a Columbia-type burn-through.  Read the whole story; hat tip to Ace of Spaces.

Possibly more links later. ..bruce w..

The road ahead

OVERNIGHT LINKS (and don’t go waiting for any updates, either)

ITEM: Headline of the week: “Spacetime May Have Fractal Properties on a Quantum Scale.”

ITEM: Economic common sense from … Germany?

ITEM: There is some justice in the world, after all:  “Vindictive people make less money.”

ITEM: On the other hand, this explains a lot: “Expert financial advice cuts brain activity.”

ITEM: Just in case you were wondering, here’s how to become a ‘blimp’ pilot.

ITEM: Another idiot school, though this one was over in Britain: School sends parents letter complaining about poor class attendance of dead daughter.

The sun is blank. No sunspots.

ITEM: I happen to have the SciFi Saturday nigh movie, “Polar Storm”, on the TV. I think it’s setting a new record for scientific/technological errors per minute. UPDATE: Oh, it’s even more horrible than I could have imagined. I mean, the production, effects, and even acting are up to the usual SciFi Saturday standards. But I have never seen such an unremitting series of scientific and technological idiocies. On the other hand, I’ve never watched An Inconvenient Truth….

WEIRD ITEM: Obama preparing for UFO arrival.

ITEM: Remember all those cool time-lapse videos you’ve seen of plants growing and blossoming. Well, now you can make your own with this little gizmo. Ain’t technology wonderful?

ITEM: On the other hand, here’s a reminder on the unexpected gotchas of technology: serial killer “suspect” turns out to be woman who accidentally contaminated DNA swabs.

ITEM: Why we should think long and hard before attempting “bioengineering” or “terraforming” to solve “global warming”:

While some scientists and environmental groups object to their plan fearing harmful changes to the ecosystem, Planktos went ahead and dumped a hundred tons of iron dust mixed with seawater into international waters off the coast of the Argentina.

Expecting a plankton bloom and carbon credit riches to follow, their plans were literally eaten alive by a swarm of algae-loving shrimp. They did get their bloom, but it was not large, carbon dioxide capturing algae. Instead they promoted the large-scale bloom of haptophytes, a tiny algae common in the open ocean and extremely abundant in the fossil record. They are also the fellows responsible for the white foam you sometimes see on the edge of beaches.

That’s it! See you on Monday.  ..bruce w..

Under our law, we can intercept any object if it is falling towards Japan, including any attacks on Japan, for our security

As discussed on this weblog before, we have always considered the possibility of Japan “taking the shot” should the North fire one of their somewhat ridiculous rockets down range towards Japan.

Possible shooters in a Japanese intercept of North Korean rocket

Anatomy of a Japanese Intercept

In the graphic above, I have attempted to diagram the likely participants in any intercept of the Taepodong-2 launch, focusing on a Japanese Self Defense Forces lead role. The blue dots represent assets capable of taking the shot, with rings showing the nominal engagement range of the weapons. The red dot represents the North Korean launch site, with the wide red lines representing the announced flight path and the prior flight path of the Taepodong-2.

JSD Kongo underway

Foremost in this line up is one or several of Japan’s Aegis destroyers, lead by the JDS Kongo. Kongo is credible threat for a North Korean intercept. In December 2007, during a joint US-Japanese exercise, the Kongo successfully tracked, engaged and destroyed a theater ballistic missile fired from the U.S. Navy’s Pacific Missile Range Facility on Kauai, Hawaii using a Raytheon Standard-3 Aegis missile. In other words, it’s already done this on the practice field, and scored a kill. Kongo is currently sailing with the fleet forces of the ongoing exercise Foal Eagle being conducted in the sea of Japan. The likely scenario should Japan decide to intercept would use a SM-3 missile during the Taepodong-2’s initial ascent phase, when it is moving at its slowest, and will fall over water rather than Japan.

Also of note are the Patriot-3 batteries employed by the Japanese forces. These are the same intercept missiles that were so famous during the first gulf war for being able to knock Iraqi SCUDs out of the sky. the Patriot-3 is a greatly enhanced system capable of engaging faster moving and higher altitude targets. The first battery is located in the north of Japan at Misawa Air Base. The announced flight path falls within the engagement range of the Patriot-3, though at this point the missile will be moving very fast and (as long as the rocket is working) at high altitude.

Should the launch follow the same path as the prior Taepodong-2 launch, the second battery at Camp Narashino outside of Tokyo will also have the opportunity to take a shot, should Japan decide to try an intercept.

US Role in a Japanese Intercept

Though the current meme is that this would be a Japanese operation, there would be a significant role played by US forces in any intercept. This would include detection of the launch by US satellites from the DSP series satellite, a geosynchronous reconnaissance bird built to detect missile launches from Russia, China or even North Korea. DSP satellites were in part responsible for cueing the Patriot batteries during the first gulf war, and played a large role in their success.

Further support will include integrated command and control from a variety of coalition systems including NORAD, and likely support in fixing and tracking the North Korean launch from assets based in South Korean (Osan AFB) and overhead such as the RC-135 Cobra Ball

Geo-Political Impact of a Japanese Intercept

The geo-political ramifications of a Japanese intercept would be enormous. Japan right now amounts to a sleeping giant of the east. For more than 60 years Japan has worked hard to embrace a pacifist culture. This was to the benefit of the entire world, as Japan has historically been very successful at repeatedly conquering any nation or kingdom it felt like in the region. Japan’s focus on non-military achievements has been a driving force in the recent era of prosperity and technological advancement the world has enjoyed.

As is frequently the case in world history, it only takes one jerk to ruin a good thing. In the case a resurgent China and an increasingly belligerent North Korea has forced Japan to face the fact that no one is ever going to defend them as well as they will defend themselves. Because China has failed to contain the NORKs, Japan could be firmly placed on the path towards a re-awakinging of their Bushido tradition. The global winds of protectionism and nationalism could blow fiercely in Japan, resulting in an effort to stimulate their economy through expanded military spending and enlistment.