I'd like to dream my troubles all away, on a bed of California stars

As I've mentioned before, I'm not a huge fan of many aspects of NASA's manned spaceflight program, especially the part about going to the moon and then to Mars. More than anything else, it's a matter of wasting limited resources on a program that returns only minor scientific gains, but today's news reminded me of a few more reasons to have doubts. First, to quote Harlan Ellison Philip K. Dick [ed. note: oops, my bad, thx madpoet for the correction], androids may indeed Dream of Electric Sheep (it's a book; the movie was called Blade Runner), but they don't sleep with other robots and then try to off their lovers. The same can no longer be said of astronauts, according to the NY Times:

The police in Orlando, Fla., filed attempted murder charges today against Capt. Lisa Marie Nowak, a NASA astronaut who the authorities say attacked a rival for another astronaut’s affection at Orlando International Airport on Monday after driving more than 900 miles from Houston to meet her flight.

Captain Nowak, a Navy captain who flew on a shuttle mission last summer, was originally arrested on attempted kidnapping and other charges, and a judge initially set a $15,500 bond at a court session this morning.

But this afternoon, the police filed the new charges against her, saying they had evidence that Captain Nowak intended ”to do serious bodily injury or death” to Colleen Shipman, a captain in the Air Force, because she considered Captain Shipman to be a rival in her romance with a fellow NASA astronaut, Cmdr. Bill Oefelein.

When the police arrested Captain Nowak, they found in her possession a steel mallet, a buck knife with a four-inch blade, a BB gun and a map to Captain Shipman’s house, they said.

My immediate response: these people have to be pretty damn bright to become astronauts and get through training, so how exactly does she plan to get away with any scheme that involves a mallet (?), knife, BB gun (?!?) and some form of kidnapping? If it's too implausible for CSI or Law and Order, it just won't work in real life. You could strongly suggest she doesn't have....the Right Stuff (oh-oh oh-oh-oh, oh-oh oh-oh).

More seriously for all space travel/satellites, but particularly those with live people on board, is the sheer amount of crap flying around out in space. Most of it is small, but it pack quite a wallop when it hits you at 21,000 miles per hour. Thanks to the Chinese shooting down a satellite to test out their abilities, there are now 1 thousand new piece of large debris to go along with the 7,000 old ones (<- cool NYTimes interactive graphic!). According to a colloquium I heard last year, there is virtually nothing that can be done to get rid of them, and thanks to all the new debris, we're going to eventually get to a point where we get a chain reaction as pieces of debris hit other pieces, creating even more debris. Beyond all the problems with keeping people alive in space in a sustainable way, we simply have no way to deal with simple tasks like taking out the trash. It's a serious problem, and it's getting worse. Perhaps we should spend a bit less time trying to get to Mars, and a bit more making our current home planet a bit more livable, by making sure it doesn't get so warm that we flood all our coastal cities and kill off a big chunk of the biosphere. Just saying.

You're bound to lose, you fascists, you're bound to lose

Having devoted yesterday's post to possibly the greatest American of the 20th century (and make sure to check out dkon's post immediately beneath this one for more on why he was a great liberal), we'll now turn our attention to some of the world's worst, people for whom Godwin's Law does not even apply (it states that an argument is over when you compare your opponent to Hitler or the Nazis). Our inspiration, such as it is, comes from a truly disagreeable quote from Martin Peretz, the looney-tune sewing-machine-heir-marrying owner of the New Republic. He writes, in smearing an interesting editorial by James Carroll about Martin Luther King, Jr. (if you really want to see the Peretz post, then google it; I wouldn't link to him if you paid me):

And on another clumsily related point by Carroll: "Expect the mantra of 'Socialism!' chanted last week in Venezuela to grow louder... Socialism, compared with possible anarchy, is benign." This was the identical apology to the one made for Stalin and Mao, Pol Pot and Castro. And what about Hugo Chavez's friends, Ahmadinejad and Kim Jong Il? Are their regimes better than anarchy?

Holy category mixing, Batman! This list includes four deeply evil men (Ra-di-cal-ly E-e-e-vil, for those who know Leon Botstein and his cadences), one minor league dictator, one wannabe badass with a bark much worse than his bite, and one deeply troubling but morally ambiguous leader. Let's consider them in turn.

1. Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot, and Kim Jong Il: Mao killed tens of millions, through violence, repression, and forced famine. Stalin claims a comparable total, by many of the same methods. Pol Pot only rings up 1.5 million deaths or so, but not for lack of effort; Cambodia only had roughly ten million people to kill. Finally, Kim Jong Il has overseen the forced starvation of a couple million people, and takes his rightful spot among the infamous.

2. Castro is a guy that some people on the right think all liberals like. Here's an example from National Review:

But...you know what? Fidel Castro is going to die sooner rather than later. And when that happens, you're going to hear crickets chirping in certain quarters of the left before you hear similar denunciations of Castro, who remains more of a tyrant than Pinochet was. And, you can be sure, conservatives will suddenly sound universal and idealistic in their condemnations of human rights abuses under Fidel.

Umm, no. Castro is in many ways a very bad man. Cuba imprisons dissidents, bans free speech, and represses gays and lesbians. There are numerous reports of mistreatment and beatings/torture in Cuban jails, although it can now be easily argued, thanks to our wonderful administracion and Presidente, that the most infamous prison on Cuban soil is the one at Guantanamo Bay. Pinochet, on the other hand, had a thing for attaching electrodes to people's testicles, and then dumping their bodies out of helicopters into the sea after they were dead, or in some cases, before they were dead. I could give a shit about what you or he thought about the free market; he was a deeply evil man and it's a good thing that he's dead. I don't know what you have to be smoking to defend Pinochet, or Castro for that matter, but if there are levels in Hell, look for Pinochet to be a couple of extra floors down from his Cuban fellow traveler.

3. Ahmadinejad is an anti-Semite and a holocaust denier, even if he claims he is not. He is famous for saying that Israel should be wiped off the map, though some have questioned the translation. In any case, if he had one tenth the power that people attribute to him, he might actually be dangerous. Thankfully, this is not the case. Foreign policy in Iran, including the nuclear program, is controlled by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who is the true Iranian figure about whom you should worry. Ahmadinejad talks a big game, but he's something of a figurehead, without the power to do a goddamn thing to Israel other than to make ridiculously offensive speeches. He's also largely a problem that we had a hand in creating. His predecessor, Mohammed Khatami, was a true reformer and moderate. Just today Khatami has a measured, thoughtful piece in the Washington Post about the Iraq war, criticizing the "great nation of America" (yes, he says that and it's not sarcasm) but calling for increased dialogue and a drive for peace. Washington treated Iran with nothing but hostility once Bush came into office, dooming Khatami's government and giving rise to the movement that brought Ahmadinejad to power. The "Axis of Evil" speech has seen our problems with all three nations get worse, in at least two cases due in no small part to our own actions (the North Koreans are crazy, who knows what they want).

4. Chavez isn't even demonstrably evil. He's undemocratic, and again not a big fan of free speech, but that doesn't boost you into the ranks of "evil". What's more, our government has taken to referring to him as a huge threat, by which they mean that he has oil and we want it but don't like him. I have never seen any evidence that he regards the US as an inevitable enemy; rather, it seems as if he and the Bush administration have mutually decide to be antagonistic, benefiting his status personally but very few people else in either country. Lost on our neocon brethren is the distinction between "people who control oil and don't have right wing views" and "evil men". Chavez, until he does something significantly worse, is in the former category. I'll happily admit that I think his repressive tendencies cannot be morally justified by his actions on behalf of the poor, but the latter do serve as a moral counterweight of sorts, and we shouldn't forget it. Ideally, if we elect some grown-ups, we could actually try talking to him and, gasp!, to some of our antagonists in the Middle East, and see if we actually have some common interests, rather than rattling sabres at them constantly. Until 2009, I'm not holding my breath.