Well, since the United States has dropped the ball on manned spaceflight, it’s nice to see that Japan is planning on picking it back up.

Japan plans to start building a manned base on the moon and a space shuttle within the next 20 years, a newspaper report said Monday.

Japan’s space agency, JAXA, hopes to develop a robot to conduct probes on the moon by 2015, then begin constructing a solar-powered manned research base on the moon and designing a reusable manned space vessel like the U.S. space shuttle by 2025, the Mainichi Shimbun said.

The space agency’s budget could be boosted six-fold to $57 billion to finance those plans, the Mainichi said.

Good for them! I hope they succeed and I wish them all the luck in the world. And who knows, maybe this will spur the U.S. to start taking space seriously again.

Congressman Sam Johnson from Texas has apparently advised the President of the United States to launch a nuclear strike against Syria. Seriously.

Speaking at a veterans’ celebration at Suncreek United Methodist Church in Allen, Texas, on Feb. 19, Johnson told the crowd that he explained his theory to President Bush and Rep. Kay Granger (R-Texas) on the porch of the White House one night.

Johnson said he told the president that night, “Syria is the problem. Syria is where those weapons of mass destruction are, in my view. You know, I can fly an F-15, put two nukes on ‘em and I’ll make one pass. We won’t have to worry about Syria anymore.”

The crowd roared with applause.

The mind boggles, doesn’t it? A member of the United States Congress has seriously advocated a nuclear strike against another nation. And he was cheered for it. CHEERED for it. If we lived in a sane and rational country, Congressman Johnson would have already resigned as a result of public outrage and pressure from the Republican leadership.

So why do I get the feeling that Johnson’s staff isn’t busy polishing their resumes right now?

(link via Matthew Yglesias and Atrios)

You know, there’s always one thing that I think more people should pay attention to with regards to intelligent design as an “alternative” to evolution, and that’s the fact that one of the primary things that attracts people to the argument are the little things in the universe that appear to be conducive to life. One argument commonly mentioned in support of ID is that the position of Earth’s orbit appears to be “fine-tuned” in order to allow for life to emerged. Other arguments invoke things like the gravitational constant, the tilt of the Earth’s axis, etc.

But you’d think one thing that opponents of ID (like myself) should invoke more often are the examples of downright shoddy design put forth by the creator of the universe. The design of the human testicles, for instance. Here we have one of the primary reproductive organs located in a sac outside of the body and very, very vulnerable to damage. Why? Because human sperm can’t be produced at normal human body temperature! That doesn’t seem like intelligent design to me.

Another example of shoddy design is human memory. It has no organization, no reliable system of retrieval, and is prone to both error and degradation. Think about how many catastrophes, both major and minor, have resulted on behalf of shoddy human memory. This was certainly not beyond the means of the creator–after all, we lowly humans can create computers with more reliable memory setups than the brain.

The examples, I think, go on and on (plate tectonics, for example). The fact of the matter is that if the universe were created and designed, you’d think that an omniscient, benevolent creator would have done a better job of things. Like maybe, you know, designed a world where deceit and cruelty are, in fact, bad ways to attain and maintain power. Or a world where vegetables tasted better than candy. Or a world where no child was forced to be born with a horrible birth defect. The list goes on. The fact of the matter is, when you really look at the world around you, it doesn’t really seem all that intelligently designed, does it?

Chalk up one more casualty in the never-ending war against comment spam. I was implementing some new code for the comments to provide more comment spam protection and somehow ended up inadvertantly deleting the comments for the past few days. The problem appears to be fixed now, but for those of you who commented, I apologize. It’s certainly no censorship on my part!

“When we debunk a fanatical faith or prejudice, we do not strike at the root of fanaticism. We merely prevent its leaking out at a certain point, with the likely result that it will leak out at some other point. Thus by denigrating prevailing beliefs and loyalties, the militant man of words unwittingly creates in the disillusioned masses a hunger for faith. For the majority of people cannot endure the barrenness and futility of their lives unless they have some ardent dedication, or some passionate pursuit in which they can lose themselves. Thus, in spite of himself, the scoffing man of words becomes the precursor of a new faith.”
– Eric Hoffer

The Cato Institute posted an interesting article in which Christopher Preble postulates as to why Europeans are so averse to going to war:

While Europeans cannot forget World War II, they are far more likely than Americans to remember World War I. In contrast to the clarity of World War II - a decisive victory for good over evil - World War I teaches that war is always horrible, often inconclusive, and can unleash a host of unintended consequences. A “victory” in war can easily lead to a far more serious conflict later.

It’s an interesting theory, certainly a much better thought-out theory than “They’re cowards.”

Andrew Sullivan does a great job of twisting the knife over the way conservatives largely ignore the big government ways of the Bush Administration.

But try this counter-factual: If Al Gore, say, had, turned a surplus into years of mounting debt, if he’d added a huge new federal entitlement to Medicare, if he’d over-ridden the rights of states to set their own laws with regard, say, to education, if he’d put tariffs on steel, if he’d increased government spending faster than anyone since LBJ, if he’d said that government’s job was to heal hurt wherever it exists, if he’d ramped up agricultural subsidies, poured money into the Labour and Education Departments, thrown public dollars at corporate America, spent gobs of money on helping individuals in bad marriages, used the Constitution as an instrument of social policy, given government the right to detain people without trial and subject them to torture, and on and on, I don’t think National Review would have been content merely to nitpick. Do you? I think they would have mounted a ferocious attempt to remove the guy from office. The duplicitous, budget-busting Medicare entitlement alone should have caused an insurrection. It didn’t. I think that tells you a lot about where some conservative thinkers are really coming from.

He’s quite right, I have to say. Matthew Yglesias opines that this is because what he terms the two “major brands of conservatism” have pretty much split from each other for the time being.

The point, at any rate, is that some folks on the right are motivated primarily by a distrust of the state while others are motivated more by a distrust of leftwingers. For a long, long, long time between the 1930s and the end of the 1970s these two brands of distrust were almost perfectly aligned. Liberals gave birth to the vast majority of the federal apparatus, and the government was usually controlled by — and always populated by — leftwingers. If you were concerned about the state, you had to be concerned about the left, because the state was full of leftwingers. If you were concerned about the left, you had to be concerned about the state, because the state was the most important institution the left controlled.

Over the 80s and 90s the balance-of-power in Washington and the state capitals started to shift, and now by the 2000s the state is mostly under the control of rightwingers. This has started to pull anti-state rightwingery and anti-left rightwingery apart.

This isn’t a bad paradigm, but I think that Matt overstates the popularity of the anti-left rightwingers. The one thing that has kept support for Bush going isn’t that Republicans now control the federal government. What’s kept him going is the war on terror and the perception that Democrats are weak in that department. The fact of the matter is, there are a lot of libertarian-leaning Bush supporters who support him pretty much wholly on the grounds of the war on terror. If you were to go back in time and prevent the 9/11 attacks from happening, I think that one probable result of that would be Bush getting the boot in 2004. Granted, it’s hard to know that for sure, but given his lack of the popular vote in 2000, his narrow victory in 2004, and the fact that he just didn’t seem to be doing much before 9/11 all point to, I think, a probably Bush loss. And perhaps even the Democrats taking back at least one of the houses of Congress.

The problem for Democrats is that for all of Bush’s shortcomings in foreign policy (and they are legion), the Democrats never established any credibility on national security. If they had, I think that you’d be seeing a different tune from the libertarian-leaning, war on terror supporting right. I didn’t support or vote for Bush, but I couldn’t support Kerry, either, because he didn’t seem to put forth the message that national security in a time of terror groups and nuclear proliferation is something that needs to be taken seriously.

On the other hand, given the weak criticism of Bush’s domestic policy by the right, apparently small government isn’t something they take seriously, either.

“Never insult anyone by accident.”
– Robert A. Heinlein

The GAO recently conducted a study that showed that gay soldiers discharged from the military disproportionately were the personnel the military is now desparately trying to recruit.

Of those [9,488 individuals] who left, 757 held critical jobs for which the Pentagon offers re-enlistment bonuses because of their specialized nature, such as data processing technicians and translators.

Many who were discharged had intelligence-related jobs. Also, 322 spoke foreign languages, including Arabic, Farsi, Korean, and Mandarin, which the Pentagon has called critical skills amid threats from terrorists.

Nice to know that our Defense Department has its priorities straight. I mean, after all, isn’t getting all the sodomites out of our armed forces so much more important than being able to understand the people who are attacking us? It’s not like a gay man ever turned the tide of a war or anything…

Unless you’re living under a particularly heavy rock, you know that in May of 2004, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts allowed the first legally sanctioned same-sex marriages to be performed in the United State. What some of you may not know is that our governor invoked a law passed in 1913 preventing non-Massachusetts residents from obtaining Massachusetts marriage licenses if the marriage would be null and void in their home state. Now, the Supreme Judicial Court has agreed to hear a challenge to this law.

State officials, however, used the 1913 law to stop nonresident couples from coming the state to get married.

The eight out-of-state gay couples sued, and a Superior Court judge ruled last August the law was not discriminatory. Clerks in several communities also sued, saying they were being forced to apply a discriminatory law.

To me, this case seemed like a no-brainer: “Legislative Intent” people (who irritate me to no end, as I’m a textualist.) can’t get around the fact that this law was enacted to prevent Massachusetts from becoming the Las Vegas of interracial marriages. The intent was discriminatory, so the law would be struck down. People who are more textual should realize that this law denies people a right protected by the MA constitution while they’re in the state simply because another state doesn’t recognize it. It’s discriminatory per se against out-of-staters, and should be struck down thusly.
But then again, the anti-same-sex-marriage crowd is going to throw everything they have at this to “contain the damage”. So it’ll be interesting to see if they bow to political pressure on this case or not.