According to the BBC we have a second space shuttle crash

Nasa loses contact with shuttle
The US space agency Nasa loses contact with the space shuttle Columbia, minutes before it is due to land in Florida.
...

Apparently it was seen breaking up over Dallas...

Compared to Iraq or N Korea its nothing, but somehow it seems worse. The dream of leaving this planet becomes a nightmare (again).

I'm sure we will learn more over the coming days, but I just wonder if this isn't caused by the same institutional ignorance of statistics and probability that caused the Challenger disaster all those years ago...

My thoughts and condolences are with the families of the astronauts

DD

Good Cop / Bad Cop

From Reuters/Yahoo

Blair confident of new U.N. Iraq motion

By Andrew Cawthorne

LONDON (Reuters) - Prime Minister Tony Blair is back home from his "war council" with U.S. President George W. Bush expressing confidence the United Nations will pass a second resolution potentially authorising war on Iraq.

"I believe that there will be a second resolution," Blair told reporters on the plane back to London after Friday's pivotal meeting with Bush at the White House.

Blair used his visit to the United States to insist on sticking with the U.N. route over Iraq. But Bush appeared less enthusiastic over a second motion at their joint news conference, saying it should not be used as a delaying tactic.

The PM, who has been Washington's closest ally since September 11 and was effusively hailed by Bush as "a friend of mine", said it was "nonsense" to suggest a diplomatic chink over Iraq had opened between London and Washington.
...

It seems to me that the Bush / Blair combo is doing an excellent bad cop/good cop double act as seen in endless police TV shows. And, as in the TV shows, the act really gets results; in this case doing an exellent job in smoking out weaselly politicos and their intellectually bankrupt academic supporters.

I don't know if this is intentional or if it was planned from the beginning, but it could well be that this results in a moment of truth for the UN and the other great powers. Essentially what I think we will see is that the Iraq war is placed (correctly IMO) into context in terms of its complete and utter flouting of UN resolutions and treaty conditions. Then we have a moment of truth - how should the UNSC react to such flagrant abuse? At this point all those countries (mainly beginning with F and G) that have claimed the UN as the ultimate fount of authority and justice will be forced to either say "yeah well actually we don't have either testicles or vertebrae" or do some serious backpeddling with, in the case of G at least, some possibly fatal results in national politics.

The end result however is likely to be that the UNSC either becomes publically discredidited as a toothless paper tiger - in which case the case for an alternative Pax Americana becomes strong - or we see the UN becoming more like it was originally proposed to be in the 1940s. I truly hope that we get to the second option because I believe that the US acting in the role of self appointed gloabl policeman will eventually cause a lot of grief.

If looked at in this context the whole Iraq disarmament debate becomes more of a sideshow as the world finally gets to grip with the New World Order we hoped for in 1991. It is quite possible that the Bush and Blair administrations have gone this route deliberately as they feel that the laternative drift scenario leads to more Sept 11th style unrest but I doubt we will know this until 30 or more years from now when the various governments release the relevant papers.

DD

I've posted some pictures I took with my digital camera recently on my photo web-site. This site is under serious construcion at present so there isn't much point in looking around at other parts of it.

DD

I've been playing around with the stylesheets again. I hope its better. It won't work properly with idiots who use IE6, but does look OK in IE5.x and looks perfect in Mozilla, Netscape 6/7 and probably Opera. It should also look good for MAC IE users.

DD

My name is Francis Turner. I usually go by the nickname of [Dirty]
Dingus, which is the name wished on me by a bunch of Samurai hashers.

I live on the Riviera, but for the last year have actually been
working in Wiesbaden most weeks. This is good for air miles but has no
other advantages I can think of. Despite the ocasional little issuettes,
such as a need to completely rewire the place, I love our house in France,
which is 'un vrai mas provencal' - see my web page for some pictures
of our olive trees - and the quality of life in France, so I'm not moving to
Germany full time.

I'm originally English but have not lived in England since I graduated
from university. Since then I spent 9 months in Finland, 2+ years in
Japan, nearly 7 in California and now 3 here. As one of my colleagues
put it I am "try-lingual" in that I try to speak many languages. I've
travelled a lot (40+ countries so far and about 2/3rds of the US
states). My wife is Japanese, an excellent cook, artist and budding
photographer. She'll be exhibiting in Kobe next June so feel free to
come see :)

A large part of my social life has been defined by the Hash House
Harriers - a group defined as a "Drinking Club with a Running
Problem". The hash has resulted in many friendships, many hangovers,
being run over by a mercedes, my nickname and my marriage. It also
keeps me fit and lets me see the parts of places normal tourists often avoid.

I work with computers. I started off as a programmer, discovered I was
good at troubleshooting and so became a bugfixer ratehr than creative
programmer. Then I became a network designer/troubleshooter. Now I'm
CIO of a small biochemical company which means I do everything for
them including writing programs in Perl.

DD