Potpourri LXXIX

Cirque du Soleil's founder is looking forward to his trip to the International Space Station. It would be interesting to see if, after returning from his trip, he decides to create a space-themed show.

From Lin:

• The pernicious effects of "instant wealth" through history.
• Farmers in India are reviving an old fertility custom to increase the chances for rain.
• A new word, which I love: "presstitutes," i.e. members of the media willing to sell themselves in support of the Obama Administration.
• Additional links regarding healthcare:
  http://www.foxnews.com/video2/video08.html?maven_referralObject=7164033&maven_referralPlaylistId=&sRevUrl=http://www.foxnews.com/huckabee/index.html
  http://liveshots.blogs.foxnews.com/2009/07/24/uninsured-a-look-at-the-fifty-million/
  http://www.foxnews.com/video2/video08.html?maven_referralObject=7164074&maven_referralPlaylistId=&sRevUrl=http://www.foxnews.com/huckabee/index.html
  http://www.weeklystandard.com/Utilities/printer_preview.asp?idArticle=16755&R=162641932E
• Also, an editorial on progressive taxation. This offers food for thought: it might make sense in the short term to "tax the heck out of the rich" to pay for government programs now, but what if you tax these folks so much that they no longer ARE rich? Where do you get the money then? There's a certain magical thinking involved with progressive taxation, and it amounts to the belief that the rich will always be there to soak and that they'll always continue to do the things that make them rich. However, if you keep taxing them, they won't be as rich, or they might leave the country, or they might cease to work as hard because the effort isn't worth the payoff anymore. Food for thought as we continue to mortgage our future. I highly recommend Thomas Sowell's Basic Economics, which I'm a little bit more than halfway through--it teaches the reader a lot about the repercussions of using political "solutions" to fix economic problems.
• Michio Kaku talked on FoxNews about Mars missions.

From Cliff, a music video on Glenn Beck's show featuring some clips of political figures.

From the Down Under Defense Expert (DUDE):

• Government and climate change.
• White Knight Two to fly at the Oshkosh Air Venture.

From my NASA PAO feed, a story about an Earth science program being run out of Edwards AFB.

Buzz Aldrin stated that there's a monolith on Phobos. Saaaaayyyyy what?

Keith Cowing is playing nice with the new NASA Administrator...so far. All it will take is for Gen. Bolden to make one decision Keith doesn't like, and the seal clubbing will begin.

New from Hu: Fans of Starship Troopers will appreciate this. Special Forces troops are getting "Land Warrior" high-tech battle gear.

This editorial irritated me because the writer presumes to take the voice of reason on the space program, but she gets several things wrongs and mischaracterizes other aspects of space. Frustrating.

From Rich: a great speech about asking the right questions, about religion and its role in democracy and capitalism, and about scouting. Yes, all of these things are related.

And lastly, from Dan the PAO Man, some thoughts by T. S. Eliot...written before the Internet:

Opening Stanza from Choruses from "The Rock"

The Eagle soars in the summit of Heaven,
The Hunter with his dogs pursues his circuit.

O perpetual revolution of configured stars,

O perpetual recurrence of determined seasons,

O world of spring and autumn, birth and dying

The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,
All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to GOD.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Bring us farther from GOD and nearer to the Dust.

Rereading the Constitution

I'm really not interested in recounting the sins of the previous administration. I can watch CNN or MSNBC for that. The Bush Administration was neither completely wise nor brilliant in its handling of the War on Terror. Fine. Moving on. Obama is President now. What he's doing matters, both in the present and for the future of this nation's efforts to prosecute the GWOT (oh, sorry, the Overseas Contingency Operation) abroad and ensure politcal comity and stability here at home. President Obama needs to reread the Constitution, which is somewhat surprising, since he reputedly taught constitutional law at Harvard Law School.

Let's start with Article I, which states:

No bill of attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed.

A bill of attainder, according to TechLawJournal.com, is:

A legislative act that singles out an individual or group for punishment without a trial.

An ex post facto law is a law that subjects individuals to criminal penalties for actions that were legal at the time they were committed.

The Founders had several reasons for including bills of attainder and ex post facto laws in the Constitution. They had read history. They knew that Rome began to shift from a Republic to an Empire with a winner-take-all political system when winners of elections would attempt to prosecute their predecessors after the fact for just such things. It became increasingly important to hold onto power because if you ever lost it or retired, you'd soon find yourself executed under some new law. That is where we're heading now with allowing CIA agents to be prosecuted--here or overseas--for interrogations performed in pursuit of terrorists.

The military and CIA interrogators had strict guidelines on what they were and were not allowed to do during their interrogations of people like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and they got actionable intelligence that saved lives. If we subject them to ex post facto laws, we're violating our own Constitution. And we're also putting past, present, and future CIA employees and other Americans at risk from international prosecution. The war is still going on, after all, and Obama is showing signs of continuing the Bush policies in Iraq and Afghanistan. He certainly hasn't withdrawn our forces. In any case, once the Obama administration comes to an end, as all regimes do eventually, the President is leaving his own people vulnerable to the very thing he's threatening to do to President Bush's people now. This is why we have ex post facto laws and also why the President is empowered to pardon people--to prevent junk like this from happening.

Let me guess: the next thing I'm going to hear is, "Torture is a violation of our Constitution, too." Awhile back I was scolded by a liberal friend for accepting or being indifferent to the use of waterboarding or other non-lethal, non-flesh-damaging, non-bone-breaking, non-permanently-harming interrogation techniques on terrorists caught on the battlefield. I believe the exact phrasing was, "Come on, Bart. You wouldn't accept your mother or sister being subjected to that." To which I'd respond, then as now, "No, I wouldn't. But then my mother or sister wouldn't have been caught on the battlefield in Afghanistan, shooting at our troops and hanging out with people planning to kill Americans."

So, seriously, I have another question for my liberal readers: how do you get information about imminent terrorist activities from very bad people who have no interest in helping you and every reason in the world (to them) to harm you? Let's say, for argument's sake, that I'm wrong, that torture is in fact unreliable as a means of obtaining informaiton. Then what? Rather than take the "you wouldn't let your sister be waterboarded" angle, I would ask the reverse: your sister is being held captive by people known for beheading their prisoners and posting the videos on Al Jazeera. You've captured a guy that you know is high up in a terrorist organization. You know his group plans to strike again, soon, and possibly behead your sister. Now: would you forbid waterboarding if you had the lead bad guy sitting captured before you? Repeat playings of Barry Manilow records? Jimmy Carter "national malaise" speeches? How do you get the information? I don't know, either.

However, Americans who have been in the very rough and serious business of fighting this nation's enemies deserve at least the benefit of the doubt. More than that, they deserve the protections of the Constitution they've been fighting to preserve.

The Current Financial Mess, Again Reconsidered

Dr. Pournelle's turn:

http://www.jerrypournelle.com/view/2008/Q3/view537.html#Tuesday

Pournelle's take on this is interesting because he blends in a theme he's been discussing quite often of late: the criminalizing of political actions, which he states was one of the causes of the fall of the Roman Republic. If this sounds bizarre (criminializing politics), I direct your attention to the candidate for Vermont attorney general who promises to prosecute George W. Bush for actions he performed legally as President. Or consider the attempted prosecution of Bill Clinton, or the outrage that Democrats felt about Gerald Ford pardoning Richard Nixon before he could be prosecuted. Pournelle examines this phenomenon in his usual logical detail.

I speculated on LinkedIn.com recently that it might be cheaper to let some of these large mortgage firms to fail and to pay out unemployment insurance to their workers than to let a trillion-dollar bailout go forward. However, a full-scale panic is on in Washington, as there's an election soon, and incumbents need to be seen DOING SOMETHING, even if that SOMETHING is very, very bad. Can we, as taxpayers, stop this madness? I don't really care for all the finger pointing ("It was Reagan's fault for deregulating the banking industry!" "No, it was Carter's and Clinton's fault for forcing banks to give loans to high-risk borrowers!"). However, it might be better for the country if the congress continues to argue from now until election day instead of passing this very, very bad and expensive idea.

Again: where will the money come from? Us. How will that come about? By printing more money and raising taxes. The illness (financial instability) is bad; the proposed cure (government takeover of the mortgage industry) is potentially much, much worse and will last much longer.