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Friday, April 23, 2004
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EPA Approved ICBMs. In order to comply with EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) regulations, and at a cost of about $5.2 million per ICBM, the rocket motors on 500 Minuteman III missiles will be replaced with new ones. These rockets will emit less toxic chemicals when used. But the new, environmentally correct rockets will be heavier than the old ones, and will thus have a shorter range than the original motors. The actual range of the Minuteman III has been classified, but is thought to be nearly 10,000 kilometers, based on where the missiles are stationed and where the original Russian targets were. Thus, if the Minuteman III ICBMs have to be used in some future nuclear war, their rocket motors will not pollute the atmosphere. EPA regulations do not apply in foreign countries, so no changes are being made to reduce the harmful environmental effects of the nuclear warheads. [StrategyPage]
Who needs The Onion when the Federal government is around?
10:25:33 PM 
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Dover Hoax. Glenn Reynolds has reported some recent photos purportedly showing flag drapped coffins at Dover Air Force Base are a hoax. According to a NASA headquarters statement, the pictures are actually of the coffins of the Challenger astronauts:
An initial review of the images featured on the Internet site www.thememoryhole.org shows that more than 18 rows of images from Dover Air Force Base in Delaware are actually photographs of honors rendered to Columbia's seven astronauts.
Apparently a number of news outlets fell for it hook, line and sinker. [Samizdata.net]
It's rather amusing to see a bunch of Crusaders make such complete fools of themselves. The photo on the front page of the Los Angeles Times today clearly showed eleven coffins.
9:29:37 PM
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Pain Killer. New at Reason: 25 years in jail for trying to get some pain relief for your multiple sclerosis. Jacob Sullum discusses another drug war outrage. [Hit & Run]
The prosecutors, who finally obtained the draconian sentence that even they concede Paey does not deserve, say it's his fault for insisting on his innocence. "It's unfortunate that anyone has to go to prison, but he's got no one to blame but Richard Paey," Assistant State Attorney Mike Halkitis told the St. Petersburg Times. "All we wanted to do was get him help."
Paey's real crime, it seems, is not drug trafficking but ingratitude. "My husband was so adamant, and so strongly defending this from the very beginning, that it might have annoyed them," says Linda Paey. "They were extremely upset that he would not accept a plea bargain. They felt that anyone who had any common sense would....But he didn't want to say he was guilty of something he didn't do."
The nerve! Imagine, someone refusing to plead guilty of something just because he's innocent. Where does he think he is... America?
2:26:15 PM
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Thumbs Up for firefox. Will Mozilla Fly?: Very positive article on Firefox from a U.K. IT magazine.
It took me a whole five minutes to decide to ditch Internet Explorer and switch to Firefox. Why? The learning curve is about 5 minutes — at most. FireFox is simpler to use. Configuring it is easy and would probably be easy for just about any PC user. You are not faced with the typical Microsoft feature-bloat.
Mozilla Firefox has a better layout and a larger web page area. It loads all your Internet Explorer 'favorites' when you install it on MS Windows and blocks pop-ups completely (there is an option to allow them on specific sites).
I've actually gone back to the full Mozilla suite due to less than perfect IMAP support in Thunderbird. Click here to comment on this entry [Gadgetopia]
I switched to FireFox on my home PC, and it's worked well for me. I don't really see an advantage over the regular Mozilla browser, though.
2:20:50 PM
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FDR's Thought Police: Still Alive, Still Censoring. Print publications are subject to no federal censor, writes Gardner Goldsmith, and the market has managed to sort out tastes and availability based on consumer preference. Some publications are fit for broad viewing and others are not. So too for the web and, for that matter, most of life itself. The job of sorting wheat and chaf, choosing and rejecting, buying and abstaining from buying, is integral to the responsible conduct of life itself. [Ludwig von Mises Institute Articles]
11:59:27 AM
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Bolivian Secession. Some Indian villages are driving out the central government in Bolivia, according to this Los Angeles Times report (as reprinted in the no-reg Florida Sun-Sentinel: The police won't return to this village in the Andes unless the peasants promise not to throw rocks at them.
The peasants rose up and chased the police out months ago, along with the local representative of the provincial government, the judges and even the army. The authorities fled Sept. 20 in the face of a crowd of Aymara Indians armed with little more than sticks and stones and moved by centuries of pent-up frustration.
Since the uprising, this corner of Bolivia, where the dry altiplano, a high plateau, around Lake Titicaca meets lush tropical mountains, has become a kind of an Indian liberated zone.
"Before, they were the bosses. They made us work, they would run everything," said Felix Puna Mamani, a resident of the neighboring village of Viacha, referring to the people of European descent who have dominated Bolivia since the 16th century Spanish conquest. "But people realize what's going on now. It's not like it was before."
As many as 1.5 million people, almost a fifth of the nation's population, live in areas where indigenous authorities have replaced some government functions, said Alvaro Garc’a Linera, a university professor in La Paz who has studied the popular movements of the two main indigenous groups, the Aymara and the Quechua.
"Since 2000, we have seen an enormous, continual uprising of indigenous people, with a strong element of Indian nationalism," Garc’a Linera said. "In many places, the institutions of the Republic of Bolivia have begun to fade away."
[Hit & Run]
Good for them!
10:40:29 AM
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Coffins Exposed, Pentagon Peeved. Russ Kick, a Freedom of Information activist, used FOIA to obtain 361 photographs of American war dead returning to Dover Air Force Base, which he began posting to his currently overloaded website and handing out to other news organizations. The Pentagon is pissed, and has "barred the further release of the photographs to media outlets," according to the AP. [Hit & Run]
I'm not sure which is more disturbing about this story: that the Pentagon thinks it has the power to bar the release of the photos, or that the media outlets aren't disagreeing.
10:07:54 AM
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© Copyright
2006
Ken Hagler.
Last update:
2/15/2006; 2:01:03 PM.
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