Black Hawk Down

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Wow — excellent, powerful, and frightening film. When Black Hawk Down first came out, I avoided seeing it — while I heard from many people that it was good, I was a bit overly cynical as to whether it was getting good reviews because it was actually a good movie, or because the US was in the process of bombing Afghanistan, and a patriotic “rah rah” movie was reaping the rewards of jingoistic fervor.

Let me be the first to say that I sorely underestimated the film, the reasons for its good reviews, and the reviews themselves. Overall, I think a healthy dose of cynicism is a good thing, but this time I seem to have taken it a bit far. Ah, well, everyone makes mistakes occasionally. BHD is actually a gut-wrenching account of a disastrous mission in Somalia that stretched from a planned hour-long insertion and retrieval into around seventeen hours of hell. Not at all pleasant to watch, but excellently done, and very powerful.

There’s what looks to be an excellent newspaper series on the events portrayed in BHD from the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Mark Bowden: Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War.

Can we clone Sen. Byrd?

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Another excellent speech from Sen. Byrd. Can we please get more politicians like this man in office?

The entire thing is so well worth reading, it’s hard to choose any snippet for a decent pull quote, but…

Regarding the situation in Iraq, it appears to this Senator that the American people may have been lured into accepting the unprovoked invasion of a sovereign nation, in violation of long-standing International law, under false premises. There is ample evidence that the horrific events of September 11 have been carefully manipulated to switch public focus from Osama Bin Laden and Al Queda who masterminded the September 11th attacks, to Saddam Hussein who did not. The run up to our invasion of Iraq featured the President and members of his cabinet invoking every frightening image they could conjure, from mushroom clouds, to buried caches of germ warfare, to drones poised to deliver germ laden death in our major cities. We were treated to a heavy dose of overstatement concerning Saddam Hussein’s direct threat to our freedoms. The tactic was guaranteed to provoke a sure reaction from a nation still suffering from a combination of post traumatic stress and justifiable anger after the attacks of 911. It was the exploitation of fear. It was a placebo for the anger.

Since the war’s end, every subsequent revelation which has seemed to refute the previous dire claims of the Bush Administration has been brushed aside. Instead of addressing the contradictory evidence, the White House deftly changes the subject. No weapons of mass destruction have yet turned up, but we are told that they will in time. Perhaps they yet will. But, our costly and destructive bunker busting attack on Iraq seems to have proven, in the main, precisely the opposite of what we were told was the urgent reason to go in. It seems also to have, for the present, verified the assertions of Hans Blix and the inspection team he led, which President Bush and company so derided. As Blix always said, a lot of time will be needed to find such weapons, if they do, indeed, exist. Meanwhile Bin Laden is still on the loose and Saddam Hussein has come up missing.

US takes control of space

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Not satisfied with our current land-based campaigns to keep a grip on the rest of the world (whether they want it or not), it appears the US is looking to lock down space-based tactics also — and other countries don’t get a choice.

The nation’s largest intelligence agency by budget and in control of all U.S. spy satellites, NRO is talking openly with the U.S. Air Force Space Command about actively denying the use of space for intelligence purposes to any other nation at any time — not just adversaries, but even longtime allies, according to NRO director Peter Teets.

At the National Space Symposium in Colorado Springs in early April, Teets proposed that U.S. resources from military, civilian and commercial satellites be combined to provide “persistence in total situational awareness, for the benefit of this nation’s war fighters.” If allies don’t like the new paradigm of space dominance, said Air Force secretary James Roche, they’ll just have to learn to accept it. The allies, he told the symposium, will have “no veto power.”

“Insane,” was my first thought. Here’s an arms race that is bound to get dangerous quickly.

(via Ars Technica)

SARS from space?

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Here’s an interesting theory: could SARS have come to us from outer space?

Chandra Wickramasinghe, a professor at the Cardiff Centre for Astrobiology at Cardiff University in Wales, and his colleagues suggest in a letter to the scientific journal The Lancet that the SARS virus may have arrived with the 2,200 pounds of bacterial material that falls to the planet every day. That’s 20,000 bacteria per square meter of the Earth’s surface.

Some of this material is “highly evolved, with an evolutionary history closely related to life that exists on Earth,” Wickramasinghe wrote in the letter.

This, he wrote, “raises the possibility that pathogenic bacteria and viruses might also be introduced.”

So, here’s a fun little idea my sci-fi fed, conspiracy-theory enjoying little brain cooked up…

There were reports a few years back that cosmonauts aboard the Russian Mir space station had found a “mutant space bug” that was damaging the space station:

Engineers later learned that the fungi also damaged electronic equipment on Mir, including a control block for a communications device used on the outpost from 1997 to 1998 during the 24th main mission to Mir.

The microorganisms crept under the steel cover of the block and sat on electrical contacts and polyurethane pieces. As a result, parts of copper cables located nearby also were oxidized.

Subsistence for the microorganisms was certainly not the metal, glass and plastic of those devices, said Natalia Novikova, a deputy chief of the Department at the Institute of Biomedical Problems (IBMP) in Moscow.

“They consume organic stuff which consists of skin epithelia, lipids and other products of human activity,” Novikova said. “These products get into the station atmosphere from human breath, sweat etc.—and stick to the station?s surfaces.”

“Bacteria and fungi eat this stuff and generate products of metabolism, particularly organic acids which can corrode steel, glass and plastic.”

Not long after those reports came out, Mir came tumbling out of the sky, with over 27 tons of debris falling into the Pacific Ocean.

So…what if this mutant space bug that consumes organic matter was carried along on some of the debris on its way down to earth, was released into the ocean, and between prevailing currents and being ingested by or infecting fish, eventually made its way to China? One of the theories as to the source of the virus is that it came from the civet cat, “a fishing cat eaten by some Chinese people.”

So…

Space virus —> Mir —> ocean —> fish —> civet cat —> people —> SARS

Possible?

Starring Howard Dean

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Kirsten mentioned this a couple days ago, and today Wired posted an article, so I figured I’d head over to check out Howard Dean TV. My first three thoughts were…

“Cool idea!”

“Ick — Windows only (sigh).”

“Oh, wait — Quicktime videos too!”

So it looks like us oddball Mac users won’t be completely left out in the cold. I don’t have time to actually watch the videos right now, but I’ll definitely be checking them out in the future.

With stripes!

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Xander: Hey! Buffy!

Willow: You missed it!

Buffy: Missed what?

Xander: We just saw the zebras mating, thank you, very exciting.

Willow: It was like the Heimlich — with stripes!

— Buffy the Vampire Slayer, ‘The Pack‘

I missed the next few lines of the show after that, I was laughing so hard.

Alaska questions Patriot Act

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This is absolutely wonderful to hear — Alaska has become the second state, after Hawaii, to pass a resolution “expressing concern over the federal USA Patriot Act.”

“When we stand on this floor and we salute that flag, the final words that we use are ‘One nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all,” said Sen. Robin Taylor, R-Wrangell. “I take it deadly serious when we start removing groups of people from ‘justice for all.'”

Many congratulations to Alaska, and to every legislator who sponsored and supported this resolution.

(via Kirsten)

Postscript: Think there’s any significance to the fact that the only two states to take such a step so far are the two that aren’t part of the “Lower 48”, but instead are seperated by many miles of land or sea? Just a thought….