Alan K. Henderson's Weblog

We now know that the shuttle was a mistake. It has not lowered the cost of access to space; it has not made access to space more routine; it has not proven safe. The shuttle had to meet too many requirements—it had to be everything for everyone, but on an insufficient budget to do all that was required. Because it had to carry a certain class of classified military payloads, it was very big. Because it originally had no space station to go to, it had to serve as a sort of mini-station itself with a multi-day orbital capability. Early plans to launch the shuttle with booster rockets that could fly back and land on a runway were scrapped in favor of solid rocket boosters that parachuted into the ocean; these had a much higher recurring cost, and one of them destroyed Challenger in 1986. Because of the payload requirement and the lack of funding, the shuttle uses an external fuel tank (the tall, rust-colored part of the shuttle) that is just discarded after each launch; this wastefulness dramatically increased costs, and the tank’s foam insulation was responsible for the loss of Columbia in 2003.

Imagine if in 1948 some Japanese investors planned to build a Japanese cultural center two blocks from Hickam Field. They give lip service to building bridges without giving any specifics, but the public has no record of the project leader’s views on Japanese-American relations, and doesn’t even know who’s investing in the project. That the investment group is named the Manchukuo Initiative leads many to believe that the leader is quite nostalgic for Japanese imperialism, as Manchuckuo was the name Imperial Japan have to occupied Manchuria. The leader is either a dishonest swine*, or a supremely incompetent diplomat.

(* Allusion to Islamic dietary laws purely accidental.)

Construction of the Manchukuo Center can’t be stopped legally, but after such a faux pas there’s no way it could ever serve as a cultural bridge builder.

Segue to 2010. A mysterious entity plans to build a mosque blocks from Ground Zero. We don’t know anything about this outfit’s philosophy or its source of funding. Imam Rauf plans on calling it the Cordoba Center. According to the New York Times, this name invokes “the city in Spain where Muslims, Jews, and Christians lived together centuries ago in the midst of religious foment.” Rauf is either a snake-oil salesman or an utter fool; Westerners (aside from the lefty anti-Western-Civ crowd) feel the opposite of nostalgia for a city where Jews and Christians lived under the Islamic thumb.

There appears to be a legal means of stopping the mosque’s construction: Imam Rauf is a donor to the Free Gaza movement. Citizens may protest in foreign countries [without violating American laws, I should have added], but they’re not allowed to pay people to directly obstruct foreign nations’ law enforcement. That sort of thing is (rightly) what one government does to another. There’s a case to be made that Rauf illegally engaged in conducting foreign policy. I would think that municipalities are authorized to hold up construction permits for persons under felony investigation.

A group of high school students attending a conservative leadership conference in Washington, D.C. said they were ordered by a security guard to stop singing the national anthem during a June 25 visit to the Lincoln Memorial.

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U.S. Park Police confirmed that the students were in violation of federal law and their impromptu performance constituted a demonstration in an area that must remain “completely content neutral.”

You’re free to open whatever you like. If you won’t consider the sensibilities of Muslims, you’re not going to build dialog

The Cordoba House was supposed to be a monument to religious tolerance, an homage to the city in Spain where Muslims, Jews, and Christians lived together centuries ago in the midst of religious foment.

The US Code does not change existing concepts. It contains a dictionary of terms; many of these the government uses in the same context as the general population does, some are coined to define specific concepts. “Discovery” in the legal sense is in no way confused with any other concepts we call by that name.