while true

FOXNews.com - SpaceShipOne Reaches Space Again, Lands:: This is a great story. Private enterprise racing past beached whales at NASA, new markets & frontiers, and so much good technology democratized for the general, paying public.

Look for Virgin space tourism, but also for Virgin satellite launch services

I guess I should plan now if I want to buy a house or go to space for 5 minutes in 2007. Hopefully by 2017 the trip length and quality can be extended by a few years. By 2027, we should be able to reach Mars and build significant energy generation capabilities on orbit. By 2037, we’ll be able to mine asteroids and live permanently on multiple extra-solar bodies.

I might be getting into the heat of the moment.

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100M investment. Crazy? Or just so sane that it blows your mind. I can't wait. Anything below $200K would be a great deal.
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TCS: Tech Central Station - Arnold Kling describes how things are getting better, faster all the time.

Anytime you hear about the "middle class squeeze", you should remember that statistics show that, if anything, the middle class is being squeezed upward into the upper class. He responds to a story about the disappearing middle class:

The proportion of families earning $35,000 to $50,000 has fallen from 22.3 percent to 15.0 percent, which is consistent with the tone of the story. However, the proportion of families earning less than that has fallen, also. The most dramatic development is the increase in households earning more than $75,000, which went from 8.2 percent of households in 1967 to 26.1 percent of households in 2003. A large portion of the population has been "squeezed up" into the highest income category.

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"Allawi Effectiveness Hinges on Credibility":: Kerry's staff has made completely inappropriate comments about Interim Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi. Terrorists are inspired by talk of oppressive occupation and emboldened when a Democratic candidate co-opts their position that being allied with America costs foreign nations’ civilian lives.

This is ridiculous.

"While Kerry was relatively restrained in disputing Allawi's upbeat portrayal, some of his aides suggested that the Iraqi leader was simply doing the bidding of the Bush administration, which helped arrange his appointment in June.

'The last thing you want to be seen as is a puppet of the United States, and you can almost see the hand underneath the shirt today moving the lips,' said Joe Lockhart, a senior Kerry adviser."

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IEM 2004 US Presidential Election Winner Takes All Market Price Graph:: quite a bump for Bush. 68-32. Remarkable.
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Cato's Alan Reynolds, a senior fellow, surprisingly argues that budget deficits do not cause interest rate increases.

Either way, the most powerful attack on Bush is his lack of fiscal restraint. it will be trumped by terrorism as a voting issue, but I would like to see something done about it.

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I,K-bot Check out my new blog. I focused so much on politics here, that I think a dedicated blog on robotics is in order.

For those here for the first time, and easily offended or wrongly opinionated, I would check out the non-partisan I,K-bot.

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American RealPolitik: Report From Iraq:: Read it all.
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The New York Times > Washington > Weapons Inspectors: Iraq Study Finds Desire for Arms, but Not Capacity

A new report on Iraq's illicit weapons program is expected to conclude that Saddam Hussein's government had a clear intent to produce nuclear, chemical and biological weapons if United Nations sanctions were lifted, government officials said Thursday. But, like earlier reports, it finds no evidence that Iraq had begun any large-scale program for weapons production by the time of the American invasion last year, the officials said.

This is exactly what I've been trying to explain to people. First, we didn't know they didn't have weapons for sure until the invasion. Second, leaving Saddam in power after inspections finished and sanctions were lifted would embolden and empower him to produce those weapons.

Add humanitarian motives, and a chance to change the ideological map of the Middle East, and you get a fine justification for invasion.
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The New York Times > Reuters > International > South Korea Admits Enriching Uranium to Near Bomb Grade:: This is news. The Cato Institute believes that the solution for N.Korean nukes is to have America tell China, "China, if you can't control N. Korean nukes, we can't stop S.Korea and Japan from getting nukes".

I'm not sure what the solution is. We probably should have acted earlier, before it was so certain that they had nukes. I'm currently reading a National Geographic article on the DMZ, and the situation is intollerable.
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