Governor Gray Davis would like people to think no one should mess with him.

Indeed, serious, Israelis are not to be messed with.

Israelis are not to be messed with.

Looks like NASA will be able to fix the space shuttles within weeks, rather than years.

For your edification, the Declaration of Independence.

Happy 4th of July.

The founding father I should like to celebrate is unknown to history books. Indeed, not much is known about him at all. He moved to South Carolina with his family from Virginia just in time for 1776. His kissed his wife and children goodbye and, taking his rifle down from the mantle, marched forth to join a war which was fought not for land, or booty, or racial or sectarian hatred, but for freedom. He spent the entire war, fighting in South Carolina, then Georgia, then South Carolina again.

The Revolutionary War in the south was a bitter, bloody struggle fought often as not by neighbor and friend against neighbor and friend. Much of the fighting was that of the ambush, the raid, and the massacre in which no quarter was given, nor any recieved. For the man I am writing about, death by shot, shell, or bayonet, suddenly or in screaming, drawn out agony, was the least of his lot. Hunger, cold, weariness must have stalked him for all the years he served.

He fought in some famous battles, of that we are sure, including the Cowpens, when he stood against Tarlington's Legion and helped to break it.

And in the end, with thousands of his bretheran, he won all of our tomorrows of freedom with his sacrifice.

I salute you, Cornelius Whittington, soldier of the revolution, my ancestor.

Stanley R. Fencel liked my LA Times piece:

Saw your article, "Lets aim for the Moon, or Mars in the LA Times today and I heartily concurr. My subject quote is from an article by Space Cycle corp in which the author said the first astronauts steps on Mars would be on their "hands and knees". I have a quote from Daniel Goldin on the terrible health problems in space travel. Your thesis would also alleviate the NIH SYNDROME, (not invented here) which stonewalls Astronaut health and performance solutions on prolonged space missions outside Nasa. I have an extensive background in design of exercise apparatuses, and I am the first and only person to jog underwater, totally submerged, without weights, to simulate mobile Earth activities in a space ship

Here's an appreciation of Children of Apollo by M. Ramon.

Just finished Children of Apollo, and it was great. As someone who was a real space buff, before his interest in politics and history, it was right up my alley. Imagine, Bill Clinton, driven out of politics, a generation early. Bush, the Houston Congressman as VP for the Space Council, A just Korea type solution for Vietnam, and of course an expansion of the Apollo project. Complaints; how you apparently had a joint space race taking the heart of the peace movement; which would logically prevent the Weather terror that inspired the Huston plan and the Plumbers, which triggered WaterGATE, which led almost inexorably to the Arab boycott, and the demolition of our intelligence services. Only a few commentators among them Mr. Riebling have even really examined the connections involved, and he doesn't write fiction

Many thanks for the kind words.

My LA Times commentary is now up. It is, naturally, on the future of space exploration.

Ann Coulter was on Hardball for the second week in a row and this time, I must say, she did a much better job than last. Her answers were erudite and sometimes even amusing. And that's what we like to see.

Peggy Noonan celebrates all that is right about America. She also imagines Sam Adams as a blogger.

Rand Simberg reminds us that there are two signifigent anniversaries coming this month. The other one falls on July 20th.

More on that from your gentle Curmudgeon anon.

The next flight of Shenzhou, the prototype of the Chinese manned spacecraft, may launch this September.

Bill Simon is up nine points over Gray Davis in the race for Governor of California. This must not be, suggest the journalistic establishment of California. Because Simon openly consorts with people who oppose abortion.

Russ Lewis finds the issue ad ban in McCain-Feingold as pernicious as attempts by white segregationists to shut up their critics by suing them for libeling in newspaper ads in the early 60s.

Tom Cruise, an actor and a member of the Scientology cult, has decided to thank all of those Americans who made possible a brillient film career.

President Bush is starting a full throated campaign in support of school vouchers now that the courts have proven them constitutional. A lot of people criticized him for dropping vouchers like a live hand grenade in last year's education bill. Now it seems that Dubya just was using shrewd judgement over when and how to pick fights. Last year, vouchers would certainly have failed no matter what. Now there is momentum.

Bruce Wilson of the Daily Telegraph obviously never learned the maxim: Better to keep one's mouth shut and have people think you're a fool, rather than open it and remove all doubt.

I just finished a book which should be required reading for everyone who is interested in the politics of space exploration. It's entitled Selling Outerspace: Kennedy, The Media, and Funding for Project Apollo, 1961-63 by James Lee Kauffman. The book descibes the initial political and public relations battles which attended the beginning of Project Apollo, which eventually landed a series of expeditions on the lunar surface.

The book is not without its faults. Kauffman seems to accept at face value the arguements of certain labortory scientists and social liberals that human space flight is unnecessary, too expensive, and achieves goals which could be done just as well with robotic missions. He does not cite too much evidence to support this conclusion, and this is a glaring drawback of the book's examination of the scientific, economic, educational, and even military justifications for human space flight in general and the Apollo program in particular. In fact these arguements were very potent, but like all arguements which appeal to reason and a rational understanding of objective reality, often fell short.

"Selling Outer Space" is best when it examins the emotional, romantic argeument for human space exploration. That arguement was that by sending humans to explore space, the United States was recreating in the heavens the epic, pioneering narrative which was the very birth and growth of the country. Shephard, Glenn, and later Armstrong, Conrad, and Young were later day versions of Columbus, Magellean, Lewis, and Clark. That metaphor had great power in the early 1960s and Kauffman, I think, is quite correct that it "sealed the deal" as it were over whether the United States would embark on missions to the Moon.

The political and public relations struggle which Kauffman describes has some relevence for today's situation. While it is true that there is unlikely to be any more neck or nothing, cost is no object Apollo projects (though there are situations conceivable which might change that situation; say, the detection of a large rock headed on collision course for the Earth), even smaller efforts, using "better, faster, cheaper" management techniques, which support commercial development and are in turn supported by the same, are likely to be mired in the same arguements which rang through the halls of Congress and in the media in the early 1960s.

The question which arises, after citing the scientific, economic, educational, and even military justifications for-just to give an example-a human mission to Mars, will the frontier narrative work as it did in 1961? There is some arguement about that. When Dr. Bob Zubrin, the famous advocate of the settlement of Mars, suggested that such an effort was the "manifest destiny" of the human race, he was viciously attacked by even some fellow Mars advocates who brought up the fate of the American Indians in the settlement of Europeans of the Americas. The fact that there all no native Martians to oppress (except perhaps for bacteria) did not enter into the discussion. The revulsion that the phrase "manifest destiny", with its call to explore, settle, and tame a wilderness had very little to do with objective reality, but rather with a new age, radical left reading of history. The "myth" of the American frontier has been replaced, in the minds of certain people, with the myth of the rape of the American frontier.

So what to do? Do we avoid a fight with the politically correct by trying to find another narrative to use as a metaphor. I had suggested, at one time, the phrase the American Oddysey, seeing as few people accuse Oddyseus of raping the land and oppressing the natives.

However, I think that a call for some renewed space effort, whether back to the Moon, to Earth approaching asteroids, or even Mars, could serve a useful purpose for a parallel effort to try to win back our history from those politically correct scolds who think that the settlement of the Americas and the founding of the United States was just one, long drawn out atrocity inflicted by evil, murderous, greedy white men against peaceful, inoffensive, and indeed passive "Native Americans." After 9/11 there seems to be far less tolerance for the PC way of looking at the world and at history. A debate over the history of pioneering exploration, in which those people are defeated, will serve to facilitate the expansion of the human species to the planets and ultimately to the stars.

Al Gore has decided that it's more becoming to wage class warfare against the rich and powerful from the comfort of a 2.3 million dollar palace located in the toniest neighborhood in Nashville. He's also blasting President Bush's handling the War on Terror, suggesting that he would have done better. Right. That's sort of like Neville Chambelain criticizing Churchill for not being tough enough on Hitler.