Taser-Cam!

This is either pure genius, or irresponsible madness. I can't quite make out which.

Behold, the Taser Cam!

On the one hand, this sort of thing is the good policeman's best friend: an honest witness. It's just an extension of the squad car video that's been standard equipment for the past few years. If a cop follows policy and does the right thing, the video will show for sure that he did the right thing, and save him lots of trouble afterwards when things go cubist.

It's also the bad cop's worst nightmare: an honest witness. If he's the sort to throw his weight around and harass innocent citizens, the video will tell the tale, and he'll reap his just reward. Cops are real popular in the Stoney Lonesome.

On the other hand ... this sort of thing just begs for abuses, in the wrong hands.

I can see these videos leaking out, and being circulated amongst drunken adolescents. Maybe even some not-so-drunken adolescents. You can be sure they'd make the rounds on the Internet. Some sad bastard is bound to loop one, sooner or later. To borrow Marv Albert's old phrase: "Let's see that again!"

I think I'll pass on that.

But in the end, I think it'll be a good thing, for the first reason stated above. There aren't too terribly many bad cops out there, but what they do makes it all the more necessary for the good cops to have as much information as they can gather, in their own defense. This gives us, the citizens, one more tool to separate the sheep from the goats. And it gives peace officers one more less-than-lethal weapon, so that they have a real choice between doing nothing, and maiming or killing.

In the end, we'll all be better off for that expansion of options.

Potpourri (i.e., a Mess o' Stuff)

I've been unable to string more than one or two coherent thoughts together lately. I blame it entirely on the weather. Fall is a simply glorious season in Texas. Sun, breeze, and temperature in near-perfect measure, excellent conditions for just about anything except swimming. And there are people who like the occasional dip even so.

So, I've been doing things like watching soccer matches and walking the dog instead of doing heavy thinking about the state of the world. Sue me.

But, some fairly important things have been going on. I'd be completely remiss if I didn't make some mention. I'll try to make sense of it, but I probably won't succeed.

Firstly, I've been holding off on commentary regarding the recent Iraqi constitutional referendum. For the first few days, I was waiting to see if it had passed. The results are ... interesting. In more ways than one. Firstly, it's a triumph for the electoral process. Turnout was even higher than in the January elections. There was very little violence on election day. This marks the third straight election that Al Quaeda has failed to deter. As far as their in-country influence goes, they're just about done. Just about the only people who still have a vested interest in seeing the insurgency succeed are the hard-left nut-bars who run the media over here. Which brings us to the next point: didja notice how sparse the coverage of the election was over here? You had to be paying close attention to see it happen at all. Mind you, we've had some hard-hitting, newsworthy disasters on our home court in the last few months. That's a partial excuse. But, I also think that there's an element in the media elite that really, really does not want to report on the fact that the new government is gaining ground over there.

Maybe they think that if they ignore the story, it'll go away.

But here's one they ignored for the first several days, but won't go away: Riots in France.

It would be easy to gloat. I've never had much use for the French government, and this is their own idiocy coming home to roost. No, the unemployed, unassimilated masses lurking in their capital's suburbs would never be a problem. No, they'd never, never rise up and bust the chops of the oh-so-nuanced and solicitous internationalists who staunchly opposed the simplisme, unilateralist Americans. Oh, no, they'd just stay put, hat in hand, and suck up the dole like good little boys and girls.

Hmm ... gloating came easier than I thought. But, after this, can there be any doubt that we're in a real fight? That we're ALL in a real fight? That appeasement won't cut it?

I mean, they found out in 1940 what appeasement gets you. Are their memories really so poor?

Maybe so. They're getting numerous wake-up calls, in the form of Gospodin Molotov's favorite mixed beverage.

The important thing to remember here, folks, is that this demographic time-bomb would have blown up in their faces, invasion of Iraq or no invasion. The poor damn French don't grok immigration. No one in Europe does. It's something they're either gonna have to figure out, or show most of the immigrants the door. It's a problem I don't really envy them.

We have centuries of experience in assimilating immigrant populations. It's who we are. It's what we do. See, there's a key difference between us, and France, and Germany, and the rest of that lot. If I were to move to France or Germany, I could never, ever become French or German. Oh, I could do so in a purely legal sense. But I would never be truly accepted. I'd always be an American ex-pat.

It's different here. Anyone can become an American. The main thing that's required, is that you want to. That's about it. If you want to badly enough, and you're willing to make it happen, you can be one of us. You can live in our neighborhoods. Your kids will go to school with ours. We'll cheer from the sidelines of the same soccer games. We'll shop in the same stores, mostly, and go to the same restaurants. We may not attend the same churches, but that's OK. There are lots of different ways of being American.

There aren't a whole hell of a lot of ways to be French.

Which is probably just as well, considering.

From Z To Shining Z

Interesting times, indeed. The main event, of course, is the coming elections on Saturday for the Constitutional referendum. If it passes, and by all indications it ought to, that pounds yet another nail into the coffin of Zarqawi's band of merry murderers.

The insurgency isn't quite dead yet. But Al Qaeda is hurting. Badly.

We've allegedly intercepted a letter from Ayman Al-Zawahiri to Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi. The contents are, to say the least, interesting. There's a bit of analysis from Austin Bay, and the full text is here. (Warning! That last is a link to a PDF.)

First question: as I said in an earlier post about a letter purported to be written to Zarqawi, is this genuine? Same answer as before: probably. False letters are as dangerous as sweaty dynamite. Sure, it'll blow up. Maybe in your truck, or in your hand, and maybe even where and when you wanted it to. But it's more dangerous than it's worth.

Three interesting points to ponder.

One, the tone of the letter isn't the tone of someone who's ahead by thirty points with two minutes to go in the fourth quarter. It's the tone of the coach who's way down with a few minutes left, trying to talk up his quarterback. He knows he probably can't win. What he's really trying to do at this point is limit the spread to single digits.

Sure, he talks about a roadmap for victory. But his roadmap for victory requires our cooperation. For them to win, we have to abandon Iraq. Not just pull out our soldiers. But abandon them, the way we abandoned ARVN in 1975. Herein lies a tale.

Common opinion has it that the insurgents won the war in Vietnam. That's not quite the case. South Vietnam did not fall to a guerrilla army. The Viet Cong were pretty much used up by the end of 1968. Among the other things that the Tet Offensive did, it mauled the VC something fearful. No, South Vietnam fell to mechanized infantry, armor, and artillery. A similar invasion had been repulsed in 1972, when the US committed its air support and logistical help. In 1975, air support was withheld, and ARVN was given twenty rounds and two grenades per man.

The predictable thing happened.

Just about the only way this sad tale can be repeated is if we utterly abandon Iraq. That's such a monumentally stupid thing to do that it amazes me that it's even on the table. We cannot allow that to happen. If we keep our nerve, and keep faith with such friends as we do have, we cannot lose. We may not entirely win, but we won't lose.

The second interesting point is how Zawahiri hits up Zarqawi for cash.

Read Col. Bay's commentary, and read the translated document itself. And think.

If true, this has absolutely tremendous implications.

See, one of the things that's been going on quietly, behind the scenes, is an effort to dry up Al Qaeda's money supply. Starve the beast, and eventually it'll die. Maybe not all the way dead, but still sufficiently weak that they can't do anything of any real worth.

If the Home Office is dunning the branches for donations, what does that say for their reserves? For Osama's legendary deep pockets?

Maybe those deep pockets have a few holes in them, now?

We've hurt them, folks. Hurt them bad, and hurt them where it counts. Money buys weapsons, airline tickets, mobility, access, power. No money buys air sandwiches, and not much else. They're close to running on fumes.

Lastly, Zawahiri hints at some strategic policy blunders that Zarqawi has made. We've all seen how poorly the slaughter campaign has been playing in the Muslim world. It's not making them love us, necessarily, but it's making them hate Al Quaeda, which works just as well. It appears that Zawahiri, at least, has read his Mao. But Zarqawi has not. Instead of being a fish in the sea of people, he's a bull rhino in a stock tank of people. The people hate his kind with increasing passion, and will dime them out in a heartbeat, if given a reasonable opportunity to do so. Zawahiri has noticed this, and is asking Junior Z-Man to rein in a bit on the beheadings. "Not that the infidels don't deserve it, son, but it's annoying the neighbors."

But it's too late. That boat's already left the harbor. They've seen the pitiful color of Zarqawi's money, and the Iraqi people don't want any of it.

When the end comes, it's liable to come quickly. The whole movement is living off principal, not income, and that's drying up. With the referendum this weekend, another major milestone passes. With it, yet another opportunity to reclaim the initiative slips through their grasp.

Now is not the time to let up. Now is the time to clamp on the pressure for all we're worth. Now is the time for an all-out full-court press. The harder we press, the sooner they exhaust their reserves.

They're not invincible, and time is not on their side.

We can outlast them. Their own message traffic tells us so.

Die, Smurfs! Die! DIE!

Ordinarily, I have no beef with UNICEF. They're fine folks, and their hearts are in the right place. And of course, I'm all for letting kids grow up free from fear.

But, I do have a problem with this new ad campaign, reported here by Varifrank.

You see, I hate those little blue Communist bastards. Always have.

There's a generation of American men of a certain age who are nodding their heads in agreement. We hated, HATED that animated war crime that was lyingly pushed on us as a Saturday morning cartoon. We all wanted with every fiber of our being for Gargamel to catch one, just one, spit him on a stick, and roast him over an open fire. Sadly, it never happened.

Until now.

Is it that wrong to pump your fist and bay at the moon for pure joy at this spectacle of Smurfocide?

Dunno. Maybe. But probably not.

Top Secret Fried Chicken

As a break from the ordinary, I'd like to present a new recipe I've discovered. (Mainly, I wanted to get this down someplace that I wouldn't forget it.)

Fried chicken was my favorite food, growing up. I just loved Mom's fried chicken. It probably wasn't good for me, but it was crispy, salty, and just plain good. I haven't quite re-discovered that recipe, but I'm getting close.

Here's what you need to have on hand to get started:

Chicken: I like the boneless, skinless chicken breasts. For my family, four is a good number. You can also use this recipe for other pieces of chicken. There ends up being enough batter for about eight pieces, I think.

Three eggs.

Two cups of flour.

About two cups of water. (Varies depending on desired consistency.)

Spices. This is a part that you can do a bit of experimenting with. I'll expand on that later.

You'll need a bowl, something like a Presto Fry Daddy, and a baking sheet of some kind or other. I don't know what the technical name for it is, but you'll want something big, flat, metallic, and able to take what your oven dishes out.

Anyway: Break the eggs into the bowl and whip 'em up good, like you were going to make scrambled eggs. Add the flour, and mix well. Now, add the water. I don't know the precise amount. About two cups seems right. You want something more like cake batter than bread dough. Now, add the spices. You can be creative here. I used garlic powder, lemon peel, and black pepper. Next time I try this, I'll probably add some salt, and maybe a dash or two of Tabasco for an extra little kick. You probably have a couple of spices that are near and dear to your own taste buds. But don't add too much. Spices are easy to overdo.

Now, defrost the chicken, if necessary. Coat a piece of chicken in the batter, and drop it in the Fry Daddy for a minute or two. But only a minute or two, dig? You're about to do something very clever with that baking sheet. After a minute or two in the Fry Daddy, put the chicken on the baking sheet. Repeat this until all of your chicken is on the baking sheet.

At this point, your oven needs to have been preheated to 400 degrees. Put the chicken in the oven for 40 minutes at 400 degrees. When it comes out, it'll be nice and crispy on the outside, and tender and juicy on the inside. Yum!

Also, you can fry up the batter by itself. Use a spoon to dribble bits of it into the Fry Daddy, and scoop the fried bits out of the oil after a couple of minutes. Bake it along with the chicken. It's tasty and crunchy. Probably not good for you, but tasty and crunchy nevertheless.

Of course, if you don't even like fried chicken, this recipe is completely useless to you. But if you do, it's probably worth trying. Recommended.

Moonward Ho!

Last week, NASA announced its plan to return to the moon.

The link takes you to NASA's site describing the hardware involved. Some of it ought to look more than a little bit familiar.

On the face of it, taking the Shuttle rocket systems apart and jamming them back together like so many Legos sounds ludicrous. But ... it's not a half-bad idea.

Look: the primary lesson we can take away from our experience with the Shuttle is that parallel staging is nothing but trouble. Both times we lost an orbiter, it was because of the hazards inherent in parallel staging. An O-ring burn-through is what killed Challenger, and insulation shedding is what did Columbia in. If the Orbiter had been designed such that it rode atop the External Tank, the Columbia accident could never have happened the way it did.

Now, take another look at the CEV stack. (It's on the right.) SRB on bottom, cryogenic stage in the middle, and the "Son Of CSM" CEV manned module on top. If something goes cubist with one of the lower two stages, the astronauts can jet away with an escape tower. That's proven tech, folks. We never had to use one with Apollo, but the Russians have had to make use of escape rockets, and they really do work.

Looking at the proposed heavy-lift model (it's on the left), we see that the SRBs and External Tank are side-by-side, just like we do it now. But, we've pretty much fixed the O-ring burn-through problem. They'll have to find a brand new way to screw that one up. And the cargo rides up on top. The foam can shed 'till the cows come home, and never hit anything important.

There's evidence of a lesson learned, here. Because we did something quite foolish at the end of the Apollo program in the early 1970s.

We threw all of that old, proven hardware away.

By electing to start from a completely clean sheet of paper, we thought we'd be able to realize some measure of economy by developing completely new technology. But, at the same time, we lost the opportunity to leverage from what we'd learned from building and flying the Apollo/Saturn hardware. We threw away a booster with an absolutely spotless flight record! Every time the Saturn V flew, it put its payload in orbit. A perfect record. You don't see that very often.

What they're doing right here, in my opinion, is leveraging what the American taxpayer has already bought and paid for. We don't need to blow R&D money on a new heavy-lift booster. We've already got one, for the most part, we just need to reconfigure it a bit. We don't need a completely new manned booster. We just need to use what we've already built a little more creatively.

Some might deride this approach as low-tech. Me, I see it as being good stewards of the public's money, using what we've already got to get where we want to go. Using known, proven technology to get the job done. No vaporware. No unobtainium. No dumping massive amounts of cash down a money pit for five or ten years, only to discover that you just can't get there from here.

Well, we can get there from here. What man has done, man can aspire to.

When I was a boy, I saw men walking on the Moon, live on TV. Not many can say that they chose their college major at five years of age, but I did. I always wanted the chance to do that, myself. I probably won't get it -- I'll be 51 in 2018, after all -- but it does warm the heart to know that the Stars and Stripes will once again be planted on extraterrestrial soil.

It is good to see us dare great things, again.

UPDATE: Holy Pimp-Slap, Batman! Now, it's important not to read more into what Dr. Griffin said than he actually meant. He's not saying anything that many of us in the aerospace community haven't already been saying for years: the Shuttle is a seriously compromised design, and always has been. But there's also a side point that ought to be stressed. With the imminent phase-out of the Shuttle, NASA gets a lot of budgetary breathing room. That's where the funds for this new initiative will come from. So, the answer to the inevitable question, "Where's the money come from?" is "Same place it always has." There's no new funding here, just a re-allocation of what NASA already gets.

Back to the Final Frontier (revisited)

I don't often plug products or services. In fact, I don't think I have ever done so. But in this case, I'll make an exception.

The product I'm talking about is Orbiter, a bit of software from Dr. Martin Schweiger of London, England.

For one, it's free. For another, the system requirements for the bare-bones version are quite modest. And finally, I can think of no better way to play armchair astronaut.

It's quite realistic. It's a faithful reproduction of what it's like to fly into, in, and back from space. The learning curve is fairly steep, even for those of us who know our orbital mechanics fairly well. But there are a lot of tools included to help you out. If you're reasonably bright, and you persevere, you'll figure it out.

If you're a flight sim aficionado, it's a must-have. Recommended.

Can do!

We see today from CNN that the Corps of Engineers has patched the broken levees.

This isn't surprising. There are government agencies that can't seem to find their butts with both hands and a map (coughcoughFEMAcough), but when the Corps of Engineers gets marching orders to make something happen, it happens. Mind you, the hard part of that job has just barely begun. Now they have to pump out all the water that came through. But they'll get that done, too. It'll take them a bit of time and a lot of work, but they'll get it done, and quite probably sooner than you might expect.

Difficult jobs, they do immediately. For the impossible, they'd prefer a week's notice.

Let's all raise a glass and toast the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. They've made invaluable contributions to the nation's health and welfare, both in war and in peace. We're lucky that our nation's founders had the foresight to establish such a group, and that our leaders since have continued to keep them on the payroll.

Back From the Final Frontier

Some long-delayed thoughts on the recent Space Shuttle mission:

On the one hand, I am a bit disappointed that they were so ready to call off all future missions.

On the other hand, it's somewhat refreshing to see that they're actually paying attention to their flight safety rules.

But on the gripping hand, isn't it way past time to put that sucker up on blocks and build something new? Preferably before it manages to smoke another crew.

Expanding one at a time:

One of my gripes about modern America is how we've become almost obsessively risk-averse. We won't dare anything, if there's a chance of something bad happening. We insist on perfect safety. We insist on absolute reliability. When I look back on who we were forty and fifty years ago, it makes me want to cry, sometimes. Once, we were a people who were prepared to pay any price, bear any burden, dare any deed. Say what you want about John Kennedy's policies, he was a man who called his nation to dream big and dare great things. If we would fail, at least we would fail grandly. If we were to miss, it wouldn't be because we didn't aim high enough. Now, far too often, it seems as though we set low goals, and fail to achieve them.

On the other hand ...

NASA's problems also stem from an eagerness to rush ahead when they've got good reason to suspect that not everything is quite as it should be. Such as, for instance, launching a mission when icicles were hanging off the Orbiter the day before launch. Prudence, in the form of properly-written and observed mission rules, might dictate that you hold on a bit. "Go-fever" always says, go ahead! That's what lost us Challenger. Remember my diatribe about Blaine Hammond a few posts back? How the position of Safety Officer seemed like a dumping-ground for unwanted talent? Maybe, just maybe, that's changed. If that's the case, this may actually turn out to be an encouraging development. A sign that the powers that be really got it this time.

But on the gripping hand ...

Isn't this latest grounding of the Shuttle simply an acknowledgement that it's time to let this old dog go to sleep? When the design was frozen, gas was cheap, no one had ever even heard of disco, and I still thought girls had cooties. That was over thirty years ago, people! It's getting harder and harder to find spare parts for the bloody thing! Ever try to find a water pump for a '73 Buick? Yeah, good luck with that.

Look, it was a marvelous vehicle in its day. It was a bold experiment. We thought that one multi-faceted vehicle would be able to cover all of America's space launch needs. As it's turned out, that isn't true. It couldn't. And now, in its old age, we're finding that it can't even put people into space reliably.

What we need is a vehicle designed according to a whole new concept. A design that's operations-driven, not performance-driven.

Consider a Maserati: a performance-driven design if ever there was one. When it's running right, there's nothing that moves quite like it. But it takes an awful lot of TLC from a highly-skilled mechanic to make it run right.

But on the other hand, consider a Honda: not precisely built for speed. It moves, but that's about all you can say for it. But, it won't darken a mechanic's door for the first two or three years that you own it. THAT'S operations-driven design.

NASA doesn't seem to get it, yet. But that's OK. There are several who do. Rutan does. Elon Musk of SpaceX does. So do a few others. There are enough of them, and their backers have sufficiently deep pockets, that in ten years the center of gravity of the American space effort will be in private industry, not in government laboratories. And where they lead, NASA will be compelled to follow.

A bit of healthy competition never hurt anyone. Maybe that's what's been missing, all along.

Baked Apple, anyone?

I'm not an exceptionally prolific poster to begin with, but I didn't intend to skip the entire month of August. My house was hit by lightning on August 5, knocking out my phone line, and frying my old reliable iMac DV SE, that I've had since '00 or thereabouts. It's taken this long to get back online.

Not that I'm complaining. After seeing what the lightning did, I'm darn lucky the house didn't burn down.

So... I'm back up and running, this time with a cheapo Dell. Which is working out surprisingly well, actually. I've had it about a week now, and I'm quite happy with how it's working so far.

In any case, the rants will resume shortly.