Disinformation Or Cold Calculation?

The Times of London of all places has an article claiming that sources close to Hillary Clinton are whispering that she might opt out of a run for the White House and become the leader of the Democrats in the Senate. There have been rumors and stories to that effect for several weeks, of course.

FRIENDS of Hillary Clinton have been whispering the unthinkable. Despite her status as the runaway frontrunner for the 2008 Democratic nomination for president, some of her closest advisers say she might opt out of the White House race and seek to lead her party in the Senate.

The former first lady longs to return to the White House with husband Bill as consort. Only last week she told television viewers America would be led by a woman one day. “Stay tuned,” she said.

First, however, she has to win the election. Some Democratic party elders — the American equivalent of the Tories’ “men in grey suits” — say Clinton may back out of the race of her own volition.

“I would not be surprised if she were to decide that the best contribution she can make to her country is to forget about being president and become a consensus-maker in the Senate,” said a leading Democratic party insider. “She believes there is no trust between the two political sides and that we can’t function as a democracy without it.”

As senator for New York, Clinton has forged alliances across party lines with leading Republicans such as Senator John McCain and Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House of Representatives. In the eyes of the electorate, however, she is a potentially divisive figure.

A recent poll for Time magazine showed that 53% of the electorate said they had a favourable impression of Clinton and only 44% viewed her negatively, figures that President George W Bush can only dream of at the moment. Even so, 53% of independent voters said they would not vote for her.

“The prospect of a Hillary for President campaign has put much of the Democratic establishment in a bind,” Time concluded. “The early line is that Hillary would be unstoppable in a Democratic primary but unelectable in a general election.”

The solution, insiders say, is for Clinton to take over as Senate minority leader in 2009 from the lacklustre Harry Reid, senator for Nevada. One well-respected blog, The Washington Note, recently claimed that Reid privately told Clinton the job was hers if she gave up her presidential ambitions.

Reid’s office denied it, but the claim made its way into the Los Angeles Times where it was suggested she would make a “superlative Senate leader” while keeping her options open for the 2012 presidential race.

If I were as calculating as the Clintons have proven themselves to be over the years, I'd be keeping an option like this on the table for one very good reason. If the party veers hard to the left as the netroots want it to, Hillary would be in a tough, bruising fight for the nomination and would have a massively uphill (and ultimately unwinnable) battle in a general election. I suspect that is why the more moderate Democrats are thinking along these lines. It is also possible that this is simply misinformation being spread around to keep attention on her without having to actually take any positions.

Trying To Get Facts Out About 9/11

The US government is trying to get facts out to rebut some of the conspiracy theories that swirl around 9/11. Of course, the conspiracy theorists simply won't listen to it. But maybe some hard facts will keep the more rational folks from going off the deep end.

According to a Scripps Howard/Ohio University poll carried out in July, more than one-third of Americans suspect U.S. officials helped in the September 11 attacks or took no action to stop them so the United States could later go to war.

The State Department responded this week with a rebuttal of World Trade Center demolition theories and doubts about other events of the day that abound on the Internet.

It listed some of the most prevalent September 11 myths, led by claims the twin towers were destroyed by secretly planted explosives, not burning passenger jets.

"This is how the collapses may have appeared to non-experts, but demolition experts point out many differences," said a department "special feature" available at http://usinfo.state.gov/media/misinformation.html.

Demolition professionals always blow the bottom floors of a structure first, while the collapses began at upper levels — where the hijacked Boeing 767s hit, it said.

Nearly 3,000 people were killed on September 11. The Bush administration responded by leading an invasion of Afghanistan and, in 2003, of Iraq.

'CORRECTIVE' EFFORT

The State Department was providing "corrective information" in response to misinformation in the media and on the Internet, said Joanne Moore, a department spokeswoman.

The information in the rebuttal was not new, she added, but drawn from public sources.

In a similar vein, the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology posted a "fact sheet" on its Web site on Wednesday in question-and-answer format responding to alternative theories about the fire and the collapse.

NIST, which carried out a three-year investigation, concluded the towers collapsed after being hit by separate, fuel-laden aircraft flown by hijackers.

The resulting fire, which reached temperatures as high as 1,000 degrees C (1,800 degrees F), led to an inward bowing of perimeter columns and subsequent collapses, NIST found in 43 volumes that comprise a final report issued last October.

Of course, because it is coming from the government, the zealots dismiss it out of hand (along with the laws of physics, of course). But the folks at Reuters provide a bit too much credibility to the critics, too:

"NIST is a group of government scientists whose leaders are Bush appointees, and therefore their report is not likely to veer from the political story," said Kevin Ryan, an editor of the online Journal of 9/11 studies.

Ryan says he was a former site manager of a division of Underwriters Laboratories, an independent, not-for-profit product-safety testing and certification organization.

Sounds impressive, no? "Former site manager of a division of" UL. People reading this would get an inflated sense of Mr. Ryan's credentials. He was actually former Site Manager for Environmental Health Laboratories in South Bend, Indiana according to Wikipedia. Not exactly a credible voice on things to do with structural engineering.

As I have mentioned before, I know of exactly one engineer and one professor of physics who are part of the group. All the rest are either "soft" science types or have no engineering background whatsoever. I have also mentioned the NIST report before and noted that steel loses 80% of its yield strength at 600° C. There is nothing on this earth that could have prevented the towers from collapsing when two fuel laden aircraft were intentionally flown into them. By al Qaeda terrorists. Who take full credit for the attack.

UPDATE: The New York Times also has an article. They also have one detail I was not aware of, but that completely demolishes the 9/11 nut's arguments.

The report brought to light one little-known detail about the morning: a private demolition monitoring firm, Protec Documentation Services, had seismographs at several construction sites in Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn.

Those machines documented the tremors of the falling towers, but captured no ground vibrations before the collapses from demolition charges or bombs, according to a separate report by Brent Blanchard, the director of field operations for Protec. It is available online at www.implosionworld.com.

Asked for comment, Mr. Ryan said that his online 9/11 journal would soon publish an article on those seismic recordings. He also maintained that the Protec paper did not adequately address why puffs of smoke were seen being expelled from some of the floors. However, the federal investigators said that about 70 percent of a building’s volume consists of air, and what looked like puffs of smoke were jets of air — and dust — that were pushed ahead of the collapse.

That and the impossible logistics of the planting of explosives pretty much wipe the theories out. But never fear, now they are developing a theory of "super-thermite". They won't give up this lunacy.

UPDATE: Or is it REALLY Super-thermite they are looking for? Hmmmmm?

UPDATE: Klein Verzet has it all in easy to understand cartoon form.

Europeans Crash Ship Into Moon

They did so intentionally, of course, but it sounds funny, doesn't it? Telescopes on earth were able to capture the image of the craft hitting the intended target zone in the Lake of excellence.

The SMART-1 spacecraft slammed into volcanic plain called the Lake of Excellence at 1 1/4 miles per second right on time. The impact was captured by observers on Earth, and scientists hoped the resulting cloud of dust and debris would provide clues to the geologic composition of the site.

"That's it — we are in the Lake of Excellence," said spacecraft operations chief Octavio Camino as applause broke out in the European Space Agency's mission control center in Darmstadt, Germany. "We have landed."

Minutes later, a video screen on the control room wall showed an image of the bright flash from the impact. The infrared image was captured by the Canada France Hawaii Telescope on Mount Kea, in Hawaii.

"It was a great mission and a great success and now it's over," said mission manager Gerhard Schwehm.

During its months in orbit around the moon, the spacecraft scanned the lunar surface from orbit and took high-resolution pictures. But its primary mission was testing a new, efficient, ion propulsion system that officials hope to use on future interplanetary missions, including the BepiColombo mission to Mercury slated for 2013.

SMART-1 was launched into Earth's orbit by an Ariane-5 booster rocket from Kourou, French Guiana, in September 2003. It used its ion engine to slowly raise its orbit over 14 months until the moon's gravity grabbed it.

The engine, which uses electricity from the craft's solar panels to produce a stream of charged particles called ions, generates only small amounts of thrust but only needed 176 pounds of xenon fuel.

Ground controllers learned to adjust to the slow but continuous acceleration from the ion engine, requiring them to check the craft's course more often in contrast to the one-time push from a rocket. U.S. astronauts on Apollo missions flew to the moon in just three days, launched by giant Saturn-V rockets.

Interesting demonstration of the technology, of course, but it is not exactly the express route. The craft was launched in September, 2003. I don't think the ion engine is going to be real practical for manned missions just yet.

SMART-1, a cube measuring roughly a yard on each side, took the long way to the moon — more than 62 million miles instead of the direct route of 217,000 to 250,000 miles. But ESA did it for a relatively cheap $140 million.

Here's the ESA website where they have some neat animations and photos. It does not have the impact pictures up yet, but there is on with the AP story linked above.