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Yes. There are.

Hmmmm... Let me see... There's this...
"the desire to explore and understand is part of our character," President Bush Wednesday unveiled an ambitious plan to return Americans to the moon by 2020 and use the mission as a steppingstone for future manned trips to Mars and beyond.
AND
President Bush's Jan. 14 speech painted broad brushstrokes of his plan to put humans back on the Moon and send them to Mars.

Oh but that was back in 2004, right, trying to get more "techies" to vote for him...

And NOW, as most of us have always know is TRUE color...

Disgruntled members of a congressional oversight committee objected Wednesday to a White House budget plan that threatens to cripple NASA's unmanned space programs and Earth and aeronautics research, President Bush's plan instead emphasizes sending American explorers back to the moon by 2018.

Budget cuts for 2002

Elsewhere there is talk of a 1% increase in NASA's budget for 2k7 but this is NOTHING compared to the slash to the budget that Bush dealt NASA when he first took office because he "needed" that money for the military we would later use to attach the middle east...

Hmmmm... Nice Logic! Instead of looking FORWARD back then... and looking into alternative fuels, the future, and Space ... We (he) was in it for his Oil buddies. Now that he is a LAME DUCK president he can virtually spout off about whatever...

But that's ok, it's obvious at this point that most Americans have a short attention span and don't really delve deeply. At least the "red" ones.

Perfect. We can once again use styrofoam containers for all the cheeseburgers we'll be eating.

These guys are mad with power. About 3 years ago they decided to arrest 278 people with absolutely no cause. Check these articles out. I think every officer involved in the incident should have been fired.

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/special/raid/3 287251.html
http://www.chron.com/content/chronicle/special/02/ raid/index.html

Just imagine what they would pull, if they were given even the tiniest bit more power.

These guys are mad with power. About 3 years ago they decided to arrest 278 people with absolutely no cause. Check these articles out. I think every officer involved in the incident should have been fired.

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/special/raid/3 287251.html
http://www.chron.com/content/chronicle/special/02/ raid/index.html

Just imagine what they would pull, if they were given even the tiniest bit more power.

Right, that's my point, the part about cameras in homes was only mentioned to sensationalize the story. Who gives a rats ass if there are cameras in crime ridden parts of the city and apartment complexes. I see the news every morning and evening and there are murders in apartment complexes almost every day.

If Hurtt or anyone else had mentioned cameras in private homes, the local TV news would have gone nuts. They're so goofy about sensationalizing "The Danger lurking in your home that could KILL YOU at any moment" which is your gas stove if the knob gets turned accidently or something silly like that. This they would have jumped on, there would be no love lost between the cops & news in this town.

Ahh, "chron.com" -- that would be the Houston Chronicle right? Here's the local story for GP poster:
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/3661414. html

Call him a troll if you want, but he's right. See here (never mind, article has apparently been removed. It was from September of last year.)

"Federal auditors said Friday that the Bush administration had violated the law by purchasing favorable news coverage of President Bush's education policies, by making payments to the conservative commentator Armstrong Williams and by hiring a public relations company to analyze media perceptions of the Republican Party."

Last year, a FAKE news report was broadcast that essentially praised Bush's Medicare drug benefit plan. It ended with the "reporter" saying "From Washington, this is Karen Ryan reporting."

Earlier this year a new FAKE report was broadcast, talking about the benefits of the No Child Left Behind plan.

How does it end? "From Washington, this is Karen Ryan reporting."

When the first video came out, The Daily Show had a segment about it in which they exposed the fact that there is no reporter named Karen Ryan working for any media outlet in either Washington, D.C. or the state of Washington. These reports were fabricated and funded by the U.S. government. The first was made by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and the second by

more articles: #1, #2 (which identifies Karen Ryan as a government contractor who produces and narrates the videos), #3 (which has a picture and background on Karen Ryan)

There were also several "town hall meetings" where obvious plants in the audience asked Bush questions. Example: An episode of The Daily Show featured an excerpt from one such meeting. A child no older than eight asked Bush what policies he was putting in place to help fight the war on terror. Children that young do not ask those questions.

Despite warnings, or BECAUSE of them? The Houston Chronicle thinks the latter, and I'm inclined to agree.

Well, it's not like Exxon Mobile had it's most profitable quarter ever while Americans were paying through the nose for gasoline.

Oh, wait.

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/business/energ y/3622022.html

Or look at Clinton. Or FDR. Or Reagan. It doesn't matter which president you pick, they've all stretched the law.

If the courts find Bush violated the law, then yep, he should be punished. But until the courts so find, some folks seem to have forgotten you have to presume he's innoncent.

ID isn't science. Personally, I have no problem with it being taught in a philosophy class, though apparently others do when it's a philosophy class in a government-funded high school.

> Multiple coal plants could be built in the time it takes to PERMIT a nuclear
> plant. I doubt the time to permit would be less than 10 years for a nuclear
> plant in the US. Time is money. Not to mention the cost overruns common in the
> nuclear energy field (in the US).

I'll ignore the sarcasm for now. Of course there's a political issue here. But even that is changing - Westinghouse got its third gen AP1000 reactor approved for construction in the US, and the new energy bill allows for the same 1.8 cent credit to nuclear power as it does wind power. Considering that you can run an nuclear plant at 1.5 cents/kWh, its basically letting operators get 1/3 cent for each kwH they produce.

As for cost overruns, well, the AP1000 (and other third gen plants) are modular, can be factory constructed and have the parts shipped to construction sites. So there isn't the "we're doing one-offs all over the place" debacle that caused the major cost overruns of the 60s-70s. It also simplifies the legal process and permitting process that you seem so fond of EMPHASIZING.

As a result, utilities are responding. In the southwest alone, there are 10 such plants being planned, and that's just starters there. Reference here.

In addition, we are very close to a carbon tax - the last vote being 55/45 in the senate, so this gives utilities a lot of pause before investing in coal. As a result, lots of the planned coal fired plants are being rethunk.

  And since wind isn't a real competitor of natural gas/nuclear/coal - being about 3-12 times as expensive as coal or nuclear even before costs of backup facilities are included - that leaves nuclear.

Anyways, what's your point? The only *positive* point I think you could be making is that we need more lobbying for the sake of nuclear power. Think of nuclear power as a large train; once you get it truly going and some positive feedback loops in place, it will pretty much run over everything in its path. That's what happened in france, and that was with 30 year old technology.

Ed

spreading "Joe Smith is gay" is wrong; spreading "Joe Smith is a convicted child molestor" (assuming it's true) is alright...

Really? I don't agree. Having sat on a jury where the charge was aggravated sexual assault of a child, I can tell you that people get convicted of being child molestors for things that don't pass the smell test. Here's an example (just to grab a random example out of today's newspaper) of someone arrested where the actual language of the indictment includes "...She could tell by the way (the accused) was hugging her, he was feeling her breasts with his chest,..." Excuse me?

It takes only a few minutes googling to find kids under 18 convicted of producing child pornography because they taped themselves masturbating or having a bit of sport with a girl/boyfriend. In the state where I live, there's an active lobbying group trying to get the sex offender registry records expunged in cases where the perp and his victim were, respectively, some high school senior (18 years old) and his prom date (17 or less) who just happened to get caught. They've had some success and prosecutors can, in those cases, now choose to refrain from putting convicted people on the list but that sort of common sense is not yet mandatory.

So if it's wrong to say someone's gay when that is intended to inflame the listener and cause them to feel ill will toward the person being discussed, why is the "convicted child molestor" tag worse? Depending on the circumstances, both can be totally innocuous observations that, frankly, are better left unsaid because they don't communicate any information of real value.

This really isn't complex.

Yes, it is complex. It is really, really complex. I don't think MS did the right thing. Far from it. But I do say that we need to be slow and deliberative, we need to think pretty damn hard, before we say "this is right and that is wrong." I was reared in a religious tradition that taught only God can know what is in someone's heart. I think that's true. I think when we judge the actions of others, we take serious risks. The questions are usually more complex than we can ever know.

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/world/35418 44.html

Houston Chronical computer reviewer comments on our article.

When I review a PC, as part of the process I disable as many background programs as I can, to get a feel for the capabilities of the "pure" system. Maybe I shouldn't do that anymore . . .

I should probably be taking to task in my column manufacturers that overloard new systems with junkware.

Ah, my first resolution for the new year!

Just make sure to kill off a few innocents while you're at it, if you're really going to do it the Texas way.

Mods: Do what you will, but please don't mod this (my) post as funny. Ironic, yes, but this is not funny.

Actually, the article says that the cruise ship and the pirates were 100 miles off the coast of Somalia. It doesn't say how far away the pirates were from the cruise ship.

whining about global warming again

Global warming is a fact. The cause is yet to be determined.

And evidence suggests that the cause may be external to the earth, as it seems that Mars is getting warmer. How many SUV's have you seen on Mars lately?

I prefer NASA's terminology: Payload Specialist.

Here's an article from the Houston Chronicle which details the event. For the record, I screwed up. It wasn't the 82nd but the 101st Airborne. Please note at the end where Geraldo goes after his former employer trying to claim that they are behind getting him ejected (as I had mentioned previously).

For a secondary article see CNNs take on what was going to happen and again, Geraldos comments that what was being said was lies.

Needless to say Fox says he 'volunteered' to leave Iraq but the military wanted him out regarless of how he left was called.

First:
I find it amusing that the Right Wingers out there have latched on to this mantra of "Democrats believe the Bush caused Katrina, what idiots".. I couldn't figure it out at first and then I realized that this was an unclever ploy to make Liberals look stupid somehow.. except that I couldn't find any Liberals actually ever even IMPLYING Bush was responsible for "causing" Katrina..

What Liberals were saying (right or wrong) is that it wasn't handled appropriately and Bush even agreed and took responsibility for this.

So please do yourself a favor and stop regurgitating whatever Fox News feeds you. (the origins that Democrats were even suggesting that came from Ben Stein http://www.snopes.com/katrina/soapbox/benstein.asp )

Let's see you like to talk a lot of officially approved Right Wing propaganda, but who had the highest death toll from Katrina? .. Which State? I'll help you out.. Starts with an L and ends with an A.
Here's a little link for your narrow mind.. Please click on it, it will help to educate you:
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/nation/33 87284

Let's see Louisiana had 1003 dead, Missisippi which you claim was hit the hardest only had 221 people dead.. Let's see I guess math escapes you, that's almost 5 times as many dead in Lousiana.

Maybe you should get your facts straight and do a little bit of research from alternative news sources before you go off spouting the misinformed Fox News spinning of the facts.

catch the same child molester in the act again, and you send him home, having brought an end to the incident. The following day, you catch the same child molester in the act again... You are convinced that left to his own devices, this child molester will continue to have his way with the children in your neighborhood. Assume that "the state" will not intervene. You choose to kill him, rather than let him continue to terrorize the children in your neighborhood.

That is an awful lot of assumptions you are making - the perpetrator is remorseless and psychopatic, "the state" will not intervene, there are no other options.

In reality there are many other possibilites. I could inform "the state" (police and/or social authorities), who would investigate without a doubt. I could try to reason with this child molester, or threaten to tell everyone else if he did it again. I could inform the neighbours that they should keep their children again. You are doing the same thing as in the book, you are making up a very black and white situation, where you are pure and the opponent is purely and unrepentatly evil. That is a dangerous way of thinking.

How about a more timely and realistic example: You're stranded in the New Orleans Superdome in the aftermath of a Hurricane, and a group of men has dragged a screaming woman into the flithy public restroom to gang-rape her.

Is it realistic?

But all right, all right, I'll answer your underlying question: Is violence ever acceptible? Yes. I am not a complete pacifist. I just think you (and especially OSC) are creating virtual worlds where everything is set up so that taking the violent path is obviously justified and moral. People in the real world are always justifying their violent acts to themselves, right? They themselves are always the misunderstood good guys in a bad world. So for me the important question to always ask yourself is why you think your own reasoning is any more valid than theirs? Do you really have all the facts, do you really know all about the situation and the motives of the people involved?

FYI, Renee and I finally got to Palestine, TX at about 5:45 AM -- 30 hours after leaving our house in Clear Lake. The Prius still has about 1/4 tank of gas...

last i heard, the deaths caused by Rita weren't even in the 10s:
this article only mentions 4 so far: http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/metropoli tan/3371006

alternatively, there are 600,000 obesity related deaths: http://msnbc.msn.com/id/9480347/

Abortion Protesters are not allowed within x feet of a clinic. Using the same logic could political protestors be kept a specific distance from a convention of political office holder?

Ah, and here's the difference. If an abortion protestor is not allowed within x feet of a clinic, they're free to locate a convenient place that obeys the law. There is no such ability with a "free speech zone". You may or may not agree that requiring people to meet at a certain location takes away their freedom to peacably assemble, to which I'd respond that in 2008, both of the major party's national convention free speech zones will be conveniently located on the south pole of Mars.

You may trust your government to behave, but for all I know, I'll show up at the "free speech zone" and be arrested the instant I break out the signs, because 30 minutes prior the police chief posted a notice in their basement saying that the free speech zone has moved across town.

It's good to see that we're taking the initiative at ticking other spacefaring nations off right before we're about to suffer another financial blow

Actually, it isn't. Bad example. It was known for years that the levees would break given an adequately severe storm. The Feds just didn't give a shit.

What? "Didn't give a shit?" I suppose if they "did give a shit" they would have turned off "the hurricane machine" or something? The levee system was not designed to take a hurricane of this magnitude. The best thing to do would have been to evacuate New Orleans.

Ok, I'm going to rant. Not at you in particular, so please don't take this as a personal attack.

The primary responsibility for evacuating New Orleans was *THE MAYOR*, as witnessed by his recent statement, "There is only one Mayor of New Orleans". He had a 300+ page written document for evacuation. It was not followed.

As I said this is a rant. I am sick and tired of hearing people whine about "The Feds" not being able to handle problems that were clearly created by an incompetent Mayor's reaction to a bad situation.

Screen cap.

Definitely one of the funniest things I've seen in a while. At least Bill seems to have a sense of humor.

This is a bug on behalf of the Tivo software...

See

http://blogs.chron.com/techblog/archives/2005/09/c opy_protection.html


Okay, so it's a bug. This does not mean that it is acceptible for TIVO to release software to its users, especially software which is forcibly updated which would cause this sort of bug. If TIVO cannot be reasonably sure that it's system will not misintepret noise as a broadcast flag, then it should not release the software

This is a bug on behalf of the Tivo software...

See

http://blogs.chron.com/techblog/archives/2005/09/c opy_protection.html


Update: Jim Denney, director of product marketing for TiVo, said the instances of standard TV shows being affected by new copy protection restrictions likely are "false positives."

Denney said the copy protection is trigged by a flag in the video signal. The reports appearing on the Web appear to be cases where TiVo misinterprets noise in the signal as a copy protection flag, and imposes the restrictions.

"During the test process, we came across people who had false positives because of noisy analog signals," he said. "We actually delayed development (of the new TiVo software) to address those false positives."


Apparently they still didnt fix the issues.

Fine, let's say the first 72 hours of response should be up to the city and state... hell, let's say they should be responsible for the first WEEK of response time. It doesn't change the fact that it took 8 days for some people to be rescued. That's inexcusable across ALL levels.

In the end, it will be a great big blame game with everyone pointing fingers at everyone else, well choreographed to make sure that the viewing public gets their tax dollar's worth while keeping them in the dark about the fact that all of them are equally at fault.

No shit! Scary thing is that this all went down before the National Guard and FEMA even got to NO.

That's pretty funny, but I think it's true that lawsuits (or the fear of them) played a role in this disaster too.

The city of New Orleans had 400 municipal buses and 2500 school buses, enough to take 100,000 people to Baton Rouge in a day and a half. The only one that was used was commandeered by a 20-year-old civilian, Jabbar Gibson (bless his soul), and driven to Houston with 70 strangers aboard. The rest were not only unused, but now lie destroyed by the flood waters. Why?

The answer could be simple ignorance and incompetence on the part of local Democrat politicians (at the risk of being redundant). However, the buses were part of the official State of Louisiana Emergency Operations Plan: see page 13, paragraph 5:

'The primary means of hurricane evacuation will be personal vehicles. School and municipal buses, government-owned vehicles and vehicles provided by volunteer agencies may be used to provide transportation for individuals who lack transportation and require assistance in evacuating'...

I have a more likely theory to explain this appalling failure on the part of the local pols: I bet the Mayor and Governor were afraid there would be a traffic boo-boo, and everyone aboard would sue the city for millions.

(Especially if the evacuation turned out to be a false alarm. Which is why the incompetent Democrat schoolmarm of a Governor went out of her way at the Aug. 28 press conference to state that she and the Mayor were only evacuating the city at the express urging of none other than President George W. Bush.)

If you are a lawyer, you had better think long and hard about the damage your profession is doing to the American way of life.

-ccm

Wind River Systems built the POSIX compliant based OS into the Odyssey, Stardust and Rovers, so it's possible the MGS has a similar OS to those.

The OS is VxWorks and it's been used in Sattelites, Robots and for some reason Movie editing (probably a file management system)

http://www.windriver.com/products/device_technolog ies/os/vxworks6/

http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/special/0 3/mars/jump/2404308

Halliburton hired for storm cleanup

The Navy has hired Houston-based Halliburton Co. to restore electric power, repair roofs and remove debris at three naval facilities in Mississippi damaged by Hurricane Katrina.

Halliburton subsidiary KBR will also perform damage assessments at other naval installations in New Orleans as soon as it is safe to do so.
KBR was assigned the work under a "construction capabilities" contract awarded in 2004 after a competitive bidding process. The company is not involved in the Army Corps of Engineers' effort to repair New Orleans' levees.

Read this.

Actually, Halliburton doesn't need to demand anything -- their friends in the administration take care of that for them. They've already been given a contract for the reconstruction of some Navy facilities, as reported in the Houston Chronicle :

The Navy has hired Houston-based Halliburton Co. to restore electric power, repair roofs and remove debris at three naval facilities in Mississippi damaged by Hurricane Katrina.

Jobless rate hits 4-year low

Report says employers added 169,000 positions

By JAMES P. MILLER

Chicago Tribune

In a bit of good economic news that drew only limited attention, the Labor Department said Friday that U.S. employers added a net 169,000 jobs in August, and the nation's unemployment rate declined to a four-year low of 4.9 percent.

but

Although the magnitude of Katrina's blow to the nation's economy -- and labor force -- has yet to come into focus, experts figure it is a near certainty that the U.S. unemployment rate has already climbed back above 4.9 percent. In fact, the likelihood of a recession has doubled in the aftermath of Katrina, credit rating agency Standard & Poor's said Friday. The likelihood of a recession has increased from less than 12 percent to 25 percent following Katrina, the agency said.

Actually New Orleans was not directly hit, and the storm was a Category 3 at the time of landfall thanks to a last minute puff of air. http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/nation/33 31922/

No, what we have here is a bunch of companies that could have helped but chose to sit on their asses. Two choice quotes from comments at http://blogs.chron.com/sciguy/archives/2005/08/kat rina_a_terri.html:

Amtrak crapped out on us - closing up shop and shooing all their paying passengers out of the building - telling all passengers who were/are in New Orleans to transfer to other trains that we have to fend for ourselves. No emergency assistance - no emergency transportation to catch other trains or (at least) get us out of town - no emergency assistance to get us a place to stay.

...but the thing that really ticks me off is that amtrak closed up shop and activated a law loophole that would prevent the louisiana [sic] goverment from useing [sic] there trains to evacuate innocent people from louisiana [sic] especially new orleans [sic]. and just when you thought amtrak [sic] couldn't sink any lower.

You're right on that in general... our tort system is all stick and no carrot, and a whipped dog will simply work harder to hide from its master.

However, Merck's Vioxx case isn't the one to tout as an example. The $229 million punitive damages award in the Texas case was specifically awarded (even though it's in execess of the legal maximum and will be reduced) because a Merck memo showed that someone estimated that delaying four months before updating the package material to warn users of the heart attack risk would allow them to earn $229 million more dollars.

This article is pretty interesting. It puts forth the idea that tort is "privatized justice". When the government failed to punish Merck, lawyers took up the slack. The author paints a concept where someone will be around to punish evildoers, and if the government doesn't want lawyers to step up to the plate, then they need to work harder to do the jobs themselves.

We have troops around Mecca,

No, we do not.

You should keep up with the two year old news.

And they weren't near Mecca, even before that.

The Shuttle has exactly the same level of reliability and safety as the Russian system

The Russians have lost two crews. One cosmonaut, Vladimir Komarov, died when Soyuz 1 re-entered Earth's atmosphere out of control and crashed just three months after the Apollo 1 launch pad fire. Then, in June 1971, three cosmonauts died when the Soyuz 11 capsule decompressed during descent.

From TFA:
The location to produce the fleet of rocket planes is very likely to be Mojave, California. ?That?s where we expect to be in production,? Whitehorn said, although the takeoff site of Virgin Galactic?s public space trips is a different matter. ... ?We are already in discussion with a number of states in the United States,? Whitehorn said

When they say "a number of states", I think the number is close to 1. Texas has laws on the books establishing "Spaceport Development Corporations" with the authority to levy taxes, and the three locations that have established these SDCs all have big advantages over anyplace else in the US:

* One is in the middle of nowhere, for early testing (which might include Things Blowing Up).

* One is an hour away from Houston, for when suborbital and orbital commercial flights become routine.

* One is not-too-far away and offers launching above water, for flights after "experimental" but before "routine".

For further reference, this Houston Chronicle article name-drops about everyone remotely involved in a private space project, from Amazon's Jeff Bezos to Carmack to Armadillo/Id Guy John Carmack.

As long as we're talking about the shuttle, here, it's interesting to remember that it was the Nixon administration that essentially cooked the numbers to make the shuttle program seem cost-effective, and that got the thing through congress. Meanwhile the Dems, Walter Mondale prominent among them, regarded the shuttle program as wasteful high-tech socialism. (Can you say "enormous federal boondoggle"?

With respect to the particular program, Mondale's argument had a big measure of truth. The "productive" space program in terms of science is pretty clearly the low(er)-cost uncrewed probes now, isn't it? On the other hand the engineering involved in crewed exploration has a different set of challenges, and the ISS and the shuttle are more about those.

Maybe we think the shuttle's an example of the sort of corrupt, pork-laden process you're talking about. "Military industrial complex" and all that. (Please, where is Mr. Eisenhower when we need him?) But the lines involved aren't nearly as clean as our more doctrinaire partisans would think. The Republicans were all for the enormous spending program, and the Democrats were extremely skeptical about whether it was cost-effective.

Very simply under Clinton the EPA refused to let NASA use Freon to apply the foam to the H2 tank.

The 'new' foam is only used on acreage foam. The hand sprayed/sculpted foam (which killed Columbia and produced the big scary chunk after SRB sep on the current flight) is still the old freon blown foam. This is very plainly spelled out in the CAIB report and recent NASA press releases.

http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2005/7/28/93055 .shtml

A few days after the slashdot story I read about Barton and the $11,600,000,000 subsidy to his sugar-daddy thanks partly to the work of Mckintyre and McKitrick. How could this happen, is there anyone in US politcs who is not feathering thier nest with lobby money. Kick the lot of them out of power and replace them with some thinkers or artists or even the village idiot .... oh, umm, forget that bit.

A few days after the slashdot story I read about Barton and the $11,600,000,000 subsidy to his sugar-daddy thanks partly to the work of Mckintyre and McKitrick. How could this happen, is there anyone in US politcs who is not feathering thier nest with lobby money. Kick the lot of them out of power and replace them with some thinkers or artists or even the village idiot .... oh, umm, forget that bit.

Bakri said he would like Britain to become an Islamic state but feared he would be deported before his dream was realized. "I would like to see the Islamic flag fly, not only over number 10 Downing Street, but over the whole world," he said.

Looks like they're friendly and reasonable after all! I apologize.

Are you even following the war? It was the initial attack that destroyed the infrastructure of Iraq, NOT insurgents.

I've been following it, but not on Al Jazeera. It's a rather "duhhh" kind of point that US military "blew stuff up." They blew up areas of Iraq's already-awesome infrastructure (neglected for decades, according to Iraqis) to weaken Iraq's military. That's war. Unlike with the "insurgents," the point was not to do harm to the people, but to do harm to their government so that they could be more quickly and easily beaten, thus inflicting fewer war-related casualties, so that Iraqis could resume life with a democratic government. Immediately after the war, the US government began _rebuilding_ the infrastructure, repairing not only war-damaged areas, but also old stuff that just wasn't working well three decades on. The inhumanity of it all!

Meanwhile, my sources seem to think the "insurgents" (otherwise known as "terrorists," speaking of labels) ARE destroying infrastructure. *Specifically* to damage reconstruction efforts and harm the everyday Iraqis in the process. (There would be plenty more of these attacks if it weren't for Iraqi police and coalition soldiers preventing them.) But where, oh where, are THEIR reconstructive efforts?? If you can use moral relativism to equate these two kinds of damage, you've got severe issues well beyond your lack of logical prowess. (This is not to mention the fact that the terrorists don't need to rely on infrastructure attacks to harm Iraqis, when they can carbomb neighborhood children, gas stations, police stations, and stores, which they do quite frequently. You're right -- these "insurgents" are the ones to get behind!)

Let's recap: "NOT insurgents." Now, I wonder: what does a person like you do when faced with a multitude of facts, by a variety of more knowledgeable people than yourself, that contradict the very wrong (and very odd) claims that you've made?

BECAUSE THEY AREN'T ONES GOING ROUND CLAIMING TO BE MORALLY RIGHT!!

Yet again: do you actually believe these statements, or do you just hope that no one will argue against you? You DO realize that these people shout "Allah akbar" as the planes slam into the buildings, right? And the same when they behead people? And claim

"The cloud requirements (of which there are quite a number) aren't about rain; they're mainly about lightning,"

From the Houston Chronicle

"The tiles can shatter under finger pressure. In fact, the shuttle cannot be launched in a rainstorm because water droplets smacking into the ship as it hurtles toward orbit can damage the tiles."

Its somewhat beyond "rainstorm" since the rain doesn't have to hit the ground. I'm pretty sure NASA or Air Force planes fly in to any clouds near the launch trajectory and if there are water drops of any size in clouds that will be in the launch trajectory it will delay or scrub the launch until they clear.

When the shuttle first started flying I'm pretty sure water drops did damage tiles, and NASA ran a test program with a research aircraft with tiles strapped to that flew through clouds to establish how vulnerable they were to various droplet sizes at various speeds. Even if the droplets don't break the tiles they can damage them enough that they have to be replaced before the next launch.

There is a wind shear restriction as well which comes hand in hand with thunderstorms

There are so many Shuttle launch restrictions now its understandable that you can't keep track of them all.