THIS WEEK’S HISTORY CARNIVAL is up!

JAMES OBERG WRITES that some people are hyperventilating over space weapons and that they’re not just wrong, but irresponsible:

So scary tales about U.S. “death stars” hovering over target countries promising swift strikes from space rely merely on readers not understanding the basics of orbital motion in space. A satellite circles Earth in an ever-shifting path that passes near any particular target only a few times every 24 hours, not every 10 minutes. It’s quicker and cheaper to strike ground targets with missiles launched from the ground.

Nor is a space rendezvous robot, such as those under development by half a dozen nations and commercial consortia, a “space weapon” — despite media claims that one of them, the Air Force’s XSS-11 satellite, could perform as a weapon. Plenty of productive peaceful rationales for these vehicles exist, from refueling to repair to resupply, and they are going to be deployed in large numbers in coming years.

Raising unjustified fears about them and other so-far-totally-conceptual space vehicles may be politically or ideologically satisfying to some, but in the big picture, feeding foreign prejudices and stoking the insecurities of some naturally paranoid cultures is a dangerous game.

I’ve written about this subject myself, most recently here.

UPDATE: In more space news, here’s an article on commercial space capitalists.

JOHN TIERNEY:

Men in their 70’s raced on bikes for 40 kilometers in this month’s National Senior Games in Pittsburgh. A 68-year-old woman threw the discus 85 feet, and a 69-year-old man hurled the javelin nearly half the length of a football field.

Is it possible that people this age are still physically capable of putting in a full day’s work at the office?

I realize I’m being impolitic. In the Social Security debate, the notion of raising the retirement age is the elephant in the room, as Robin Toner and David Rosenbaum reported in The Times on Sunday. Both liberal and conservative economists favor the change, but politicians are terrified to even mention it to voters.

Americans now feel entitled to spend nearly a third of their adult lives in retirement. Their jobs are less physically demanding than their parents’ were, but they’re retiring younger and typically start collecting Social Security by age 62. Most could keep working – fewer than 10 percent of people 65 to 75 are in poor health – but, like Bartleby the Scrivener, they prefer not to.

As people live longer, this is likely to become a bigger problem:

Today’s notion of “retirement age” is a fairly recent one. Otto von Bismarck is often credited with craftily setting the retirement age at 65 because most people wouldn’t live that long — though in fact, Bismarck set it at 70, and it wasn’t lowered to 65 until later. But the justification for retirement has always been that by retirement age people were nearly used up, and deserved a bit of fun and then a comfortable and dignified decline until death. Get rid of the decline and death, and you’ve given up the justification for living — as Social Security recipients, at least, do — off other people’s efforts on what amounts to a form of welfare . Logically, retirement should be put off until people are medically old, or perhaps just replaced with disability, and those who are able to work should do so, while those desirous of not working should save up as for a long vacation.

The sooner we start moving in this direction, the better for everyone, particularly as the underlying trend will -and should — continue.

REBECCA MACKINNON has thoughts on free speech, blogging and China — er, and Microsoft. “I agree with Scoble: no outsiders, including Microsoft, can force China to change. But nobody’s asking Microsoft to force China to do anything. The issue is whether Microsoft should be collaborating with the Chinese regime as it builds an increasingly sophisticated system of Internet censorship and control.”

I LIKE LILEKS’ SCREEDBLOG. but I wish he’d get permalinks for his entries.

YESTERDAY’S BOOK-MEME POSTING produced requests for more. Maybe there’s something to it after all! Reader Jim Hohnbaum emails:

Glenn, could you please recommend some science fiction authors? I devoured the stuff (Clarke, Asimov, etc.) from the late 50’s through the mid 70’s until marriage, career, children, and so on. When I went back to the bookstore look, it seemed from glancing at the racks that the field had been taken over by fantasy works. Some pointers to authors would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

Well, reader Joshua Kay has emailed to endorse two titles I’ve recommended before:

I just finished Old Man’s War, and have started Weapons of Choice. I enjoyed the first, and very much like the second (about 80 pages into it).

Anyway, thank you, for whatever its worth!

Both of those are quite good. Here’s an earlier post with quite a few book recommendations.

I’m also a big fan of Greg Egan. His Permutation City and Diaspora are among the best hard science fiction I’ve read in recent years, and the opening pages of Permutation City are some of the best writing in science fiction.

DAVE HARDY ON APOLOGIES FOR LYNCHINGS:

Apologies certain are in order, but Congress isn’t the party which needs to make them. It’s the Supreme Court which owes the apology.

Meanwhile West Virginia blogger Don Surber notes that Robert Byrd was uncharacteristically silent on this question: “The protector of the Right to Filibuster was silent when the filibuster’s darkest days were acknowledged.”

HOSSEIN DERAKSHAN IS BLOGGING THE IRANIAN ELECTIONS: From Iran.

WHILE I’M ON VACATION, Ann Althouse is guestblogging at GlennReynolds.com. Here’s her first post.

MICKEY KAUS has an interesting back-and-forth with Walter Dellinger on the problems of third-party candidates.

UNSCAM UPDATE: The New York Times has an interesting memo report:

Kofi Annan has said several times that he did not discuss the contract with his son and was not involved in Cotecna’s selection. A United Nations panel headed by Paul A. Volcker, a former chairman of the Federal Reserve, concluded in March that Mr. Annan had not influenced the awarding of the $10 million dollar-a-year contract to the company.

But the memo appears to raise questions about the secretary general’s role.

I’m not terribly confident that the Volcker Commission will get to the bottom of this, but I hope that someone will.

Ed Morrissey offers perspective:

For months, Kofi Annan has denied any connection between the UN Oil-for-Food contractor and himself through his son Kojo. The Secretary-General has gone so far as to state that he never met with Cotecna on OFF business and only had the most general of information from his son. However, Cotecna has found an e-mail that indicates their executives did indeed meet with Kofi, making his earlier denials look more and more suspicious:

Indeed.

UPDATE: More major developments here.

THIS WEEK’S GRAND ROUNDS IS UP, for all your healthcare-blogging needs.

And there’s also a Carnival of Music!

BEACHBLOGGING: Here’s a picture I snapped off the deck this morning. If you’re wondering why I haven’t been blogging more, well, this is why.

AN INTERVIEW with Federal Election Commissioner Brad Smith over at TechCentralStation. Smith’s not too encouraging regarding the future of free speech under existing election laws.

ARTHUR CHRENKOFF has posted his latest installment of underreported news from Iraq.

ANKLEBITING PUNDITS is warning people off of the latest Clinton allegation. Seems implausible to me.

MERYL YOURISH HAS TAGGED ME WITH THE BOOK MEME. I don’t usually do these kinds of things, but what the hell.

1. Number of books you own: Jeez, I dunno. A couple of thousand? I recently unloaded a lot, but I still have walls of books in several rooms.

2. Last book I bought: I think it was Eric Flint’s Andrew Jackson alternative history (I’m about 2/3 through it now) but it may have been Richard Morgan’s Market Forces.

Last book I read: I think it was Neil Gershenfeld’s Fab. But it might have been Joel Garreau’s Radical Evolution.

Five books that mean a lot to me: The Lord of the Rings, Huckleberry Finn, Charles Black’s The Waking Passenger, Arthur C. Clarke’s Profiles of the Future, and Photography, by Phil Davis.

For me, though, it’s as much about authors as books. I was influenced a lot by Robert Heinlein, Arthur Clarke, and Isaac Asimov, but more by their entire body of works than by any particular book.

THIS WEEK’S CARNIVAL OF THE CAPITALISTS is up!