News and Notes: 9-27-05

It will probably take me awhile to get completely back up to speed with the sites I normally follow, but I've already found a few things worth noting here.

Blog Roundups

Andy Clarkson posted the Reason Roundup at the Charlotte Capitalist.

Martin Lindeskog posted Midweek 38 Sampler at Ego.

Blogroll Changes

The "Resident" Egoist has moved to a new location for the second time in his still-new blogging career! Rumor has it that he may rename himself the "Nomadic Egoist".

Felipe Sedile's good friend Philip B. Pape has started a new blog, Self Uncensored. He looks to be off to a good start.

With the impending removal of the old Anger Management blog from the web, I have removed it from my blogroll. I am also removing TIA Daily, which has started posting new material on its main web site.

I anticipate adding the TIA Daily web site as a News and Opinion permalink at some point in the near future.

Good Hurricane/Tornado Analogy at Objectivism Online

I read through this thread today and liked the following analogy by Scott Kursk.

Hurricanes throw off tornados like a guy throwing hand grenades out of the back of a runaway truck. Sure it stinks to be in the path of the truck but you can usually get out of the way. It's those grenades path that can't be predicted.

I dodged that truck over the weekend, but those grenades went off constantly in Mississippi Sunday.

Private Enterprise and the Space Elevator

Via Instapundit is a good piece on something I noticed awhile back: the space elevator. Specifically, there's a piece about a successful experiment by a private group on a crucial component of said device, the robot climber.

LiftPort Group Inc., of Bremerton, Wash., has successfully tested a robot climber — a novel piece of hardware that reeled itself up and down a lengthy ribbon dangling from a high-altitude balloon.

The test run, conducted earlier this week, is seen as a precursor experiment intended to flight validate equipment and methods to construct a space elevator. This visionary concept would make use of an ultra-strong carbon nanotube composite ribbon stretching up to 62,000 miles (100,000 kilometers) from Earth into space.


The space elevator would be anchored to an offshore sea platform near the equator in the Pacific Ocean. At the other end in space, the ribbon would be attached to a small counterweight. Mechanical "lifters" — robotic elevator cars — would move up and down the ribbon, carrying such items as satellites, solar power systems and eventually people into space.

LiftPort's plan is to take the concept from the research laboratory to commercial development.

Perhaps the commercialization of space is closer than we think!

Anti-War Stagecraft (And PC Alert)

I noted with annoyance (1) all the free press this weekend received by the anti-war left's protest this weekend and (2) the sudden use -- apparently by all media outlets at once -- of the positive term "rally" to describe these anti-American protests. A couple of things should put the former at least into perspective.

First, Christopher Hitchens holds a nice discussion on who, exactly the various anti-war groups are.

To be against war and militarism, in the tradition of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, is one thing. But to have a record of consistent support for war and militarism, from the Red Army in Eastern Europe to the Serbian ethnic cleansers and the Taliban, is quite another. It is really a disgrace that the liberal press refers to such enemies of liberalism as "antiwar" when in reality they are straight-out pro-war, but on the other side. Was there a single placard saying, "No to Jihad"? Of course not. Or a single placard saying, "Yes to Kurdish self-determination" or "We support Afghan women's struggle"? Don't make me laugh. And this in a week when Afghans went back to the polls, and when Iraqis were preparing to do so, under a hail of fire from those who blow up mosques and U.N. buildings, behead aid workers and journalists, proclaim fatwahs against the wrong kind of Muslim, and utter hysterical diatribes against Jews and Hindus.

It's Hitchens. (In other words, read it all!)

Second, here's a post on a phony Republican who has been given huge amounts of coverage in California.

-- CAV