I Refuse to Believe We’re Stuck Here.
In relation to my previous post about getting off this planet, I’d like to show you this:
It’s the Milky Way as seen from Death Valley.
We can’t be stuck here. We can’t.
Category: Uncategorized
A Comment on Podcasts.
Glenn Reynolds links to an interview of Iraq the Model‘s author Omar by Belmont Club‘s author Richard Fernandez. Sounds interesting, so I click on over.
It’s a podcast.
This is the blogosphere. It’s not talk radio. It’s not that I mind that it’s audio, but I want to READ the interview. There might be something in it I’d like to excerpt for a post, or save in my ever-growing “Quotes” file. While I’m at work, I like to listen to talk radio. It’s often just background noise, but sometimes something truly interesting is said. One of the things I most appreciate is Duane Patterson’s Radio Blogger site. Duane is the Senior Producer for Hugh Hewitt’s afternoon radio show, and he posts transcripts of most of Hugh’s interviews. Hugh has his own blog, but Duane does the transcripts. He often also posts audio links to the interviews as well, which I think is an excellent idea, but the written word is the media of the blogosphere, in my opinion. You want to podcast? Fine. I’m quite taken with Michelle Malkin’s Hot Air site myself, but I WANT TRANSCRIPTS.
And We Thought the Kelo Decision Was Bad!.
Homes of the dead to be seized
Bereaved families could have the homes of dead relatives seized under new laws that allow the state to commandeer empty properties.
Local councils will be able to take control of inherited homes if they are left vacant for more than six months.
After that time the beneficiaries of a will risk seeing the house that has been left to them taken over and rented out as social housing.
The new rules, which could affect 250,000 homes in England, will come into force next month, according to details slipped out by Communities Secretary Ruth Kelly.
They state that those who leave a house or flat empty for six months risk losing control of it to the local council, which will have power to break in, alter or refurbish it, and let it out to tenants of the authority’s choice. The greatest impact is likely to fall on bereaved families.
Although actual ownership will remain with the family, the new law means that the home of a relative who has died may be taken over by the council just six months after the will has been put into effect.
Many families are likely to be debating how to deal with or share out the value of the home of a loved one for several months after a death. The risk of losing family property comes on top of the growing burden of inheritance tax and the highly controversial ‘means test’ system for long-term care of the elderly.
Tory housing spokesman Michael Gove said yesterday: “Seizing homes of the recently deceased is particularly disturbing. I doubt that state officials will always recognise the delays that can result from complex wills or appreciate the traumatic ordeal that families face with the task of clearing a home of personal possessions.” He added: “I fear this is a stealthy new form of inheritance tax.”
Housing experts called the confiscation of property ‘outrageous’. Robert Whelan of the Civitas think-tank said: “This runs right against the ancient common law principle of private property, which is as fundamental as habeas corpus.
“The right to private property is the Englishman’s right to his castle. This looks to me like the point where Labour has overstepped the mark into behaving more like a dictatorship than a democratic government.”
Mr Whelan added: “I think anybody whose property is seized under this law should go straight to court to see if a judge thinks it should stand.”
Henry Stuart, head of property at the City law firm Withers, said: “Many families decide to sell inherited property – but they often wait for the right time. For example, you do not sell a country cottage in November, you wait until the spring. But by then the local council could have put a tenant in.”
The right for councils to impose ‘Empty Dwelling Management Orders’ was included in a 2004 Housing Act pushed through by Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott.
Miss Kelly, his successor in charge of housing policy, published guidance on how the orders will work last Friday afternoon, without informing MPs or the media.
When the law was pushed through Parliament, it was said that target homes would be in crime-affected streets in inner cities. However, the details now made public show that the orders will apply to any home. The guidance on the new powers said: “The property does not have to be run down or uninhabitable. The fact it has not been lived in for more than six months may be enough to allow an EDMO to be made.”
Exceptions cover second and holiday homes and homes of those working ‘temporarily’ away. In the case of inherited property, exemption applies for six months after grant of probate. An EDMO can last for seven years, but owners can apply to get their house back earlier. No home can be seized if its owner can show it is ‘genuinely’ on the market.
The seizure of homes must also be approved by a Residential Property Tribunal. These are the panels that have until now been confined to settling disputes between private landlords and tenants.
Those who are the first to lose control of property to a council may also challenge the new law in the courts through the process of judicial review.
A spokesman for Miss Kelly’s department said: “The owner retains ownership rights and can dispose of their dwelling at any time or seek revocation of an order to enable sale or to otherwise secure occupation.”
Yes, England slides further towards bondage.
And the populace increasingly avoids involving itself in fighting crime, since the State has made it plain that they’re not qualified and will be punished for doing the State’s job:
Pensioner brutally attacked at seafront – yet no one came to his aid
When pensioner Derek Gull was targeted by two vicious muggers he was not walking through a tough housing estate or along some dark alley.
The 76-year-old was sitting on a bench in broad daylight on a busy sea front.
But as the thugs smashed a brick into his face and broke both his wrists as they tried to wrench his watch off his arm, not a single person stepped in to help.
The grandfather told yesterday how more than a dozen people carried on walking as he struggled against his attackers with blood streaming down his face.
He fought bravely to stop them taking the watch – which was a present from his wife on their golden wedding anniversary – and they eventually fled after pushing him down an 8ft embankment.
And as he staggered through the town covered in blood, still no-one stopped to help.
“I couldn’t see properly because my eyes were watering,” Mr Gull said yesterday as he recovered from his injuries at home.
“I was covered with blood from my nose. At least a dozen people walked past and did not bother to do anything, they just ignored me.
“It’s disgusting, my whole family is upset about it. I suppose people just don’t want to get involved any more, they don’t seem to care.
“But if I saw someone like that I would see if I could help, I wouldn’t just walk past and ignore it.”
Mr Gull’s ordeal earlier this month came just days after motorists ignored a girl of eight as she dragged herself to the pavement with a broken leg after being mowed down by a hit and run driver.
Cait Atkins was walking near her home in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, when she was run over. Up to 12 motorists drove past her without stopping to help.
Mr Gull, a retired electrician from Rainham, Essex, had been visiting Clacton-on-Sea on a day trip with his local working men’s club.
During the day, he separated from the others to visit a friend at the town’s bowling club.
As he walked back to meet the rest of the group in a restaurant he decided to sit on a bench for a while and watch some youngsters playing football on the beach.
“Suddenly I felt an arm come round from behind and grab me and a voice demanded that I hand over my watch,” the father of three said.
‘He would have had to kill me for the watch’
“It was a golden wedding anniversary present from my wife so he would have had to kill me to get it.
“Another arm came round and started tugging at the watch and trying to get it off. I clenched my fist so he couldn’t get it off me.
“Then he pulled my arm through the slats and twisted it until it broke.
“I heard him say to someone else “hit him” and the next thing I knew half a brick hit me in the face breaking my nose.
“There was blood everywhere and my eyes were watering, I couldn’t see a thing.”
Mr Gull, who is registered disabled as he suffers from curvature of the spine, managed to struggle to his feet and his attackers – aged in their late teens – pushed him down an 8ft bank onto a concrete path before fleeing.
“I got my faculties together and tried to make my way back to the restaurant but I was covered in blood and it was pouring out of my nose.
“I couldn’t see a thing because my eyes were watering so much.
“I must have passed about half a dozen people but no one asked me what had happened or offered to help me.
“At the time I was so upset that people just ignored me but looking back I suppose they just didn’t want to get involved or maybe they thought I was a drunk.
“If it was me though, I would have gone out of my way to help someone in that situation.”
Eventually Mr Gull met some members of his group who guided him back to the restaurant where he was cleaned up and the police were called.
After showing them where the incident took place he insisted on taking the hour and a half long journey back to Rainham with the working men’s club on the coach.
It was only when he got home that he agreed to go to hospital where he collapsed in casualty.
Doctors were so concerned about the amount of blood he had swallowed that they gave him a lung scan and he was kept in hospital for more than a week before being allowed back home on Wednesday. He is unable to drive his car or play his regular game of bowls.
Mr Gull, who served in the Army for two and a half years after joining in 1947, suggested bringing back national service to deal with antisocial youths.
“That would sort out all the young thugs of today. Like the old saying goes, you go in as a boy and come out as a man.”
Mr Gull’s 75-year-old wife, Violet, said she was pleased that her husband clung on the the gold Ellesse watch she had bought him.
She added: “He was very brave, but it’s disgusting that no-one helped him.
“I don’t know what the world is coming to.”
Essex Police are appealing for witnesses.
What’s the world coming to? Well, apparently it’s coming to shit.
Damn, it pains me to see what the Mother Country has become.
OK, but Why?.
Titled “4 (Million) Eyes”:
This is a publicity shot for Micreon GmbH of Hannover, Germany. It took a pulsed titanium-sapphire laser to cut the eyeglass frames from an itty-bitty, thin sheet of tungsten, and then a pair of tweezers, a microscope, and two weeks of labor to get them on the (very dead) fly.
It’s supposed to “demonstrate the precision possible with femtosecond lasers.”
Ooookay.
Hey! You Kids! Get Off the Planet!
(Blogging from work again. Left last night at 7:00PM, back again at 6:15AM.)
Physicist Stephen Hawking recently declared that humans must go into space if we want to survive as a species. I’m pretty much with him on that one. I’d hoped (since I grew up on Florida’s Space Coast during the race to the moon) that we’d already have colonies on the moon and a significant presence in space.
Two guys floating around Earth in a Greyhound Bus is not a “significant presence” in my book.
There are two hurdles that have to be overcome for this to happen, though. One: we have to have the will to do it. Two: we have to have the money. To some extent will equals money, but even if the ready cash was on hand, if you’re not willing to spend it on getting out of here, then it might as well not exist. Leaving the planet is expensive – or at least it will be until we develop technologies that reduce the cost.
Right now it costs (officially) about $5-10k to put one pound into low Earth orbit. The real cost, when you add in the expense of the support infrastructure behind a launch and ground support during a mission, is probably more on the order of $40-50k. Assuming your average buck-naked human being weighs 150Lb (obviously we’re not talking about your average American here) and you’re looking at between $1.5 and $75 million dollars just to put someone into a not-too-stable orbit around the Big Blue Marble. Getting to escape velocity costs a lot more. (The $1.5M price tag obviously ignores things like life-support.)
There are other ways to get into space. Glenn Reynolds thinks that a Space Elevator is a good idea, and the idea of a gigantic magnetic-induction catapult has been floating around for decades, but both are multi-billion dollar investments with engineering, safety, environmental, and materials problems of their own.
I’m not sure the United States has the political will to do the job. At this point, I’m not sure we have the political will to defeat the forces of Islamism. I’ve written before that it’s possible that China may be the country that first succeeds in colonizing off-planet. Dictatorships don’t have as much of a problem with “political will” as democratic forms do, and they can wring the money out of the rest of the world, so long as we keep buying from what are largely State-owned industries.
In the same speech, Hawking said,
We are getting closer to answering the age-old questions: Why are we here? Where did we come from?
That’s great, but I’m more interested in “Where are we going, and how will we get there?”
OK, THIS is FUNNY!.
From AR15.com, I bring you Weekend at Zarqawi’s:
And it goes very well with Iowahawks’ last missive from the Zarqman, Paradise is Overrated, which is worthy of a spew warning: Drink no beverages while reading.
And yes, I’m taking pleasure in the ridicule of the death of a (notional) human being.
Scraping Off the Rust
I was listening to talk radio the other day. I can’t even remember which show it was, but something was said that caught my attention. The speaker said that, while the Right has got talk radio and (to some extent) Fox News and the Right side of the blogosphere, this is a long-haul thing. This is something I’ve alluded to here, when speaking about the cockroach resilience of the Left – they that scatter, mumbling about “repression” and “free speech” when hit with the light of truth and fact, but who come back out once the light has passed, and continue on unscathed and unrepentant.
This person, either an interview subject or a caller, I can’t remember, likened the job to that of keeping the rust on a ship at bay. It’s a job that requires constant labor; sanding, scraping, painting, in order to maintain the ship. If we stop, the rust eventually wins. Well, I’ve been taking a break, at least from the blogosphere end of it. Since I started blogging three years ago, many others have joined their voices, added their scrapers, sanding blocks and paintbrushes to the job. But the force of corrosion haven’t slacked off any, nor do I expect them to. We’ve discussed before the “true believer,” and the opposition is, if nothing else, true believers.
Anyway, I just wanted to post this note to let you know that, even though I’m not posting much, I’m not quitting either. I’ve been spending my downtime (what there is of it) reading and thinking. I’ve been spending quite a bit of time reading up on the philosophers Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. I’m trying to finish David Hackett Fischer’s Albion’s Seed, and I have two more books lined up after it, Victor Davis Hanson’s Ripples of Battle: How Wars of the past Still Determine how We Fight, how We Live, and how We Think, and Gordon S. Wood’s Revolutionary Characters: What Made The Founders Different. I’m going to have to order a copy of James Bowman’s Honor: A History because my local Barnes & Noble doesn’t carry it. Before too much longer, I’ll start writing again. For those of you hanging in there, checking in periodically: Thanks. I appreciate it.
I’ll be back.
But, But, It’s Not a Religious War…
So, we whacked Al-Zarqawi. Good for us. Really. There’s not too many people out there who need to be dead more than he. But the opposition’s response?
The death of our leaders is life for us. It will only increase our persistence in continuing holy war so that the word of God will be supreme. – Abu Abdel- Rahman al-Iraqi deputy “emir” of al- Qaida in Iraq
Nope. If we just leave them alone, they’ll leave us alone, right? They only hate us because of our political interference in the Middle East!
I don’t think so. And I have yet to figure out why the Left refuses (not fails – refuses) to recognize this.
I Hope He was Playing “Amazing Grace”.
A lone bagpiper plays a lament overlooking
Juno Beach in Courseulles-sur-Mer (AP Photo)
I Am Not a Great Fan of Nuclear Power.
Someone once said, “Using nuclear fission to boil water is like cutting butter with a chainsaw.” In large part, I’m in agreement with that assessment.
If you’re going to use radioactive materials to produce power, however, it seems to me that it would be logical to standardize on a design. The French have done that, and produce 62,466 MW – about 78% of their total production – using 59 identical reactors. The U.S. generates 96,245 MW with 103 reactors – no more than three of which, to my knowledge, are identical to any other. The latest to be commissioned, Watts Bar Unit 1 in Tennessee, was licensed for construction in 1973, and finally came on line in 1996 – 23 years later at a cost of $6.8 billion. It has a maximum output 1,167MW of power. Its operating license expires in 2035. Construction on Unit 2 was stopped by the utility – no word on how much money that ate. The price of power varies with demand, but $60/MW-H is a reasonable working figure.
You calculate the payback.
But nuclear power appears to be, in all honesty, our only option for increasing demands for power generation. Even Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace, has not only written a strong defense of nuclear power plants, he has become co-chair of a new industry-funded initiative, the Clean and Safe Energy Coalition, to support increased the use of nuclear energy.
It says something when even a staunch tree-hugger embraces the atom.
The only really bad accident the nuclear power industry has suffered is Chernobyl, twenty years ago last April. Three Mile Island was bad, but the containment structure did its job. Chernobyl, however, was a disaster of a plant in the first place – an inherently dangerous design, everyone agrees. However, I’ve seen lately some pieces saying that perhaps the Chernobyl disaster wasn’t all that bad. For example, the Kid of Speed site where a young woman from Kiev motorcycles through the area, and this BBC piece on the hardiness of the local fauna.
Pardon me if I’m a little bit more humanocentric, though. Before we enthusiastically embrace the atom ourselves again, I’d like it if members of Congress, the Executive branch, and the nuclear power industry would sit down for a few minutes and watch this slide show by photographer Paul Fusco concerning the human cost of a serious accident.
I believe nuclear power is necessary. We’ve got to get the cost and time required to build such plants down closer to the range of normal coal or gas plants. But they’ve got to be safe.
I can’t imagine anything better at emphasising that fact than Paul Fusco’s photographs.
Warning: Some of those photographs are disturbing. And they should be.