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Jim's Journal
Here's a transcript of Condaleeza Rice's comments before the 9/11 Commission today.
Every time I see Dr. Rice speak in public, I have to stop and watch. She's incredibly intelligent, engaging as a speaker, and has an uncommon ability to explain complicated matters in a way that a layman like me can easily understand. And she's really quotable, too. Here's an example from today.
"After the September 11th attacks, our Nation faced hard choices. We could fight a narrow war against al-Qaida and the Taliban or we could fight a broad war against a global menace. We could seek a narrow victory or we could work for a lasting peace and a better world. President Bush chose the bolder course."
Bam - concise and sharply to the point.
You may not like her politics but you can't deny that she's damned sharp and more than qualified to do what she's doing.
Now, I'm going to pick a couple nits here where she's concerned. First, the woman holds a Doctorate and she's the National Security Advisor. She's earned much better than to be called "Condi" by the media talking heads. They've not earned that level of familiarity with her in any way. Her position and sheer manners demands that they either call her "Dr. Rice" or "Condoleeza" until she grants them permission to be more familiar. And if that happened, they certainly shouldn't refer to her by a diminuitive nickname in a news broadcast. Using a nickname like that diminishes her. It makes her smaller and less important than she is and it's disrespectful. I don't see them doing this with any other female officials in this administration (or any other, for that matter).
Second, I have a huge problem with the raking over the coals she's been getting. If you read the newscasts, you see all sorts of phrases attributed to her that I know full well wouldn't be used if another woman were in her position. I have even more respect for her because she's not cut loose and flown off the handle. She could very easily make the point that the coverage of her has been sexist and perhaps even racist, but she hasn't. it's one hell of a credit to her that she's stayed focused on the issue at hand instead of defending her own personal honor.
Normally, I'm a John Ashcroft fan. This time, though, he seems to have gone way, way off the reservation to me.
The Justice Department is spending millions of dollars to start prosecuting Federal porn cases again - something that hadn't been done for about ten years.
On one hand, I can see some of the merits of what they're doing. Porn has, in some cases, gotten out of hand. It's shoved into your e-mail box (and the e-mails of children) without your consent and often against your express desire otherwise. There's no telling what pop-up ad will have something pornographic in it, even on the most innocent of web sites. It crops up in places that no parent might suspect (hence, the furors over the Super Bowl halftime show). It routinely employs underage women (Tracy Lords thankfully credits an FBI raid with ending her porn career at the age of 18). It's exploded to the point where it's nearly inescapable.
On the other hand, the scope of the investigation here seems far too broad to me. The article says that the FBI will even be looking at "soft-core cable programs such as HBO's long-running Real Sex or the adult movies widely offered in guestrooms of major hotel chains". That seems to be to be a huge overreach and I'm not sure why it's necessary to do so. Generally, porn is an adult activity for adults to choose if that's what they want. If porn industry people are using kids, then bust them hard. If they're shoving porn into our boxes without our consent, well, that's not illegal, but it certainly could be if we wanted the legislation drawn to narrowly cover that.
The problem is that we of course have a First Amendment problem here. The bulk of court rulings on porn is that the First Amendment covers it and that it's just fine. The real relevant case was decided in 1973 - Miller v. California - and it held that something could be considered "obscene" only if an average person applying contemporary community standards would find it patently offensive. Sounds good, right? There are some problems with it, though.
It's nearly impossible to get a conviction under those guidelines because there's so much play in words like "patently" and "contemporary community standards". There's just no way to tell what a jury will find.
For my money, if we really wanted to get to the heart of porn, we'd look at it as a commercial activity. There are all sorts of things that might be perfectly constitutional but that are regulated or even prohibited commercially. That porn is sold makes it a matter of commerce and that's something that certainly could be regulated, even on the Federal level. I'm not suggesting that it ought to happen, but that it's possible.
Either way, I really think that the Justice Department has other things to worry about instead of making this a priority. Last I heard, there are still folks creeping into the country who want to kill lots and lots of us.
I read this morning about a rather neat experiment that's going into orbit very soon.
Gravity Probe B is scheduled for launch from Vandenberg AFB on April 19. The satellite will be carrying four very precise gyroscopes - perhaps the most precise and frictionless gyroscopes ever made. The purpose of GPB is to verify part of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity.
Okay, so let's see if I can explain why this is cool. It's going to be kind of quick and dirty, so I'll leave some of the really detailed things out. And I'm not a physics major either (my physics major friend isn't available to proof this either) so you'll have to settle for the explanation of an amateur science-geek.
The General Theory of Relativity is one of the really big theories we have out there. it explains exactly how and why things in the universe act they way they act. The GTR is all mathematical formulas, though, and at the time much of it wasn't scientifically verifiable because we just didn't have the technology to do so. The math was sound, though, and what experiments could be run bore it out every time. Scientists can't really rest, though, until they can verify all of a Theory with direct experiments, though, and that's what the GPB is intended to do.
The GTR deals with large objects - really large objects. For "normal" objects like falling apples, buildings, and airplanes we use the old Newtonian Physics that the GTR supplanted because for the most part, Newtonian Physics works. When you get out into space and start dealing with things the size of planets and moons, though, Newtonian Physics just doesn't work. There are all sorts of imprecisions and conflicts and things that it just can't handle. So we have to use the GTR.
The biggest thing the GTR did was to say that there was no such thing as separate notions of time and space, but one thing called "spacetime". Spacetime is flexible. It bends and warps substantially when something large gets involved. How this happens is a really neat trick. Before Einstein, folks believed that gravity was a force that something gave off. Einstein showed that it didn't quite work that way.
Let's do a little visualization. Imagine that space is a nice, flat piece of rubber. Now roll a ping pong ball along the rubber sheet in a straight line. No problem. Now let's put a bowling ball in the middle of the sheet. It's going to make a dent in the sheet that, when we roll the ping pong ball again, is going to cause the ball to move toward the bowling ball if it gets close. That's the analogy Einstein used for how spacetime works. Before that, there were no "dents. Planets and starts just exerted a force called gravity that reached out and grabbed something. Einstein said that there was no reaching and grabbing, but that spacetime was warped by the gravity of a massive thing. It was a change in thinking that proved to be huge, to say the least.
But what about this time thing? How does that figure into it? Well, here's where the "relativity" part of the GTR fits in. Let's say you're on a spaceship with a perfectly tuned watch orbiting the Earth. I have the partner to your watch on my wrist standing on the surface of the planet. You orbit for an hour or so then come back and we compare watches. You'll find that our watches are now out of sync and that yours will be slightly faster than mine. You can even do that experiment by having one person to to the bottom of Death Valley and one staying at the top. The difference will be very slight, but it will be there. That's because Einstein found that time was a relative notion. You get even more extreme effect as gravity itself becomes stronger and stronger or as an object's speed gets closer to the speed of light.
These two discoveries (and an awful lot of math and experimentation that followed) put space and time together in one single unit. Convenient, huh? Except that proving it to a very precise degree is difficult. You have to be able to get experiments out into space and free of as many other influences (like flaws in the material, friction, etc) as possible before you can have any confidence in them.
What scientists believe will happen is that the gyroscopes in the GPB will be influenced by the curvature of spacetime around the earth in a very precise and predictable direction. The phenomenon they're looking at is called "frame dragging" and the satellite should be accurate to within 0.01 percent which is the most precise experiment ever done.
Very cool indeed.