Michael Hiteshew

According to David Hencke, writing for the Guardian:

MPs are planning to impeach Tony Blair for “high crimes and misdemeanours” in taking Britain to war against Iraq, reviving an ancient practice last used against Lord Palmerston more than 150 years ago.

Eleven MPs led by Adam Price, Plaid Cymru MP for Carmarthen East and Dinefwr, are to table a motion when parliament returns that will force the prime minister to appear before the Commons to defend his record in the run-up to the war.

Nine of the MPs are Welsh and Scottish Nationalists, including the party leaders, Elfyn Llwyd, and Alex Salmond, and two are Conservative frontbenchers, Boris Johnson, MP for Henley and editor of the Spectator, and Nigel Evans, MP for Ribble Valley.

A number of Labour backbenchers are considering whether to back the motion, though it could mean expulsion from the party.

The MPs’ decision follows the commissioning of a 100-page report which lays out the case for impeaching Mr Blair and the precedents for action, including arguments laid down in Erskine May, the parliamentary bible, on impeachments dating back to medieval times.

The authors are Glen Rangwala, a lecturer in politics at Newnham College, Cambridge, and Dan Plesch, honorary fellow of Birkbeck College, London.

Under the ancient right, which has never been repealed, it takes only one MP to move a motion and the Speaker has to grant a debate on the impeachment. This means, at the least, Mr Blair will have to face a fresh debate on his personal handling of the war and there will have to be a vote in parliament on whether to institute impeachment proceedings.

If that weren’t bad enough, Cherie Booth’s legal firm, Matrix, has been selected to draw up the impeachment document. Cherie Booth is the Prime Minister’s wife.

Maybe she thinks he’s spending too much time at the office.

However, according to the BBC News, this procedure probably won’t make it to a vote:

Labour MP and former minister Keith Vaz told Newsnight: “This is a silly story for the end of the silly season.”

Mr Vaz said the evidence in the academics report was thin and questions over the Iraq war had been raised numerous times in Parliament, as well as in a string of inquiries.

“This matter has been put before the nation day after day over the last few years,” said Mr Vaz. “All these reports have exonerated the government and it’s time to move on.”

Donald Anderson, chairman of the Commons foreign affairs committee, called the impeachment call a “political stunt” and a “no-hoper in legal terms”.

I can’t believe it was coincidental that Matrix was chosen to draw up the impeachment. I suspect they were picked to maximize political embarrassment, maximize publicity and possibly to create dissension between the PM and his wife. Had they refused, no doubt there would have been accusations of political interference. The impeachment papers are proceeding.

Reed College hosts a website dedicated to the spectacular architecture of the Getty Center. The architectural design firm, Richard Meier & Partners, is also responsible for another stunning and widely praised structure, the Jubilee Church in Rome.

One thing that immediately jumped out at me is the use of shape. Curves contrasting orthogonal elements and angular elements, often nesting one inside the other, or integrally constructed together and opposed to each other, or even echoing each other.

The second thing was texture. Notice how the texture of the stone contrasts the smoothness of the tile, and how it has the effect of accenting each?

Finally, we have contrast of color. Greens against tans against against blue. It creates some remarkable effects. Astonishingly good work. Of course, when you’ve got a billion dollars to play with it’s amazing what you can create. I wonder what, for instance, the Palace at Versailles cost in year 2000 dollars?

More: || Gallery1 || Gallery2 || Full site map ||

Pete Peterson, Secretary of Commerce for Nixon, chairman of The Blackstone Group, chairman of the Institute for International Economics and chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations (How’s that for a CV?) has written an article in Foreign Affairs entitled Riding For A Fall, which is adapted from his book Running On Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It.

It’s a pretty damning article. First he lays out all the nasty facts:

* In short, the stunning effectiveness of the U.S. armed forces has come with an equally stunning price tag. For most of U.S. history, going to war was like organizing a large federal jobs program, with most of the work done by inexpensive, quickly trained recruits. Today, it is more like a NASA moon launch, entailing a massive logistical tail supporting a professionally managed and swiftly depreciating body of high-tech physical capital.

The Congressional Budget Office recently recalculated the administration’s projections…The results are eye-opening: total defense outlays over the next decade may cost 18 percent more than the administration’s official projection. Including interest costs, this excess amounts to $1.1 trillion in new spending…Even this number does not reflect the cost of any new military operations abroad, which three of every four Americans believe are “very likely” in “the next few years,”…

* He then goes on list all the unfunded homeland security issues that almost certainly need to be addressed, including: properly equipping first responders, costs to improve health-care capabilities over the next five years for radiation or biowarfare attacks (about $36 billion), reducing the threat posed by cargo containers ($20 billion upfront, plus recurring costs), improving our ability to deal with immigrants of both the legal and illegal variety and safeguarding critical infrastructure.

He concludes that section by saying, “For the first time in the post-World War II era, the United States faces a future in which every major category of federal spending is projected to grow at least as fast as, or faster than, the economy for many years to come.”

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Ever been hurricaned? It’s interesting. Last week I had to travel to Florida. I barely pay attention to weather forecasts here in Maryland, so I was totally unaware of the hurricane brewing in the Gulf of Mexico. Duh. I got my first hint that trouble lay ahead on Friday morning, eating breakfast in a hotel in South Carolina. As I ate a big toasted bagel with cream cheese, CNN was reporting live from Tampa on the coming storm. Hmmm. Not good.

Since I was driving down I-95, I figured I’d be fine. I’d be along the Atlantic coast and the storm was coming ashore from the Gulf. How intense could it be, I reasoned, after passing all the way across Florida? Hurricanes lose power rapidly once they make landfall, don’t they?

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Speaking of jets, DARPA, the famous Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, has been funding a new technology demonstration which, if successful, could revolutionize air travel. At the heart of the technology is the abilty to mathematically model, and so predict and control, the shape and intensity of shock waves as they propogate away from the leading and trailing edges of supersonically flying aircraft and expand into the atmosphere and across the ground below them. These shock (pressure) waves are translated inside our ears into sound and are what are commonly know as sonic booms. According to Aviation Week:

Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin have concluded that it may be possible to meet DARPA’s target for the sonic boom by changing the shape of the aircraft, and without using exotic technologies such as plasmas. The idea is not to eliminate the pressure wave (‘Ye canna change the laws of physics, Jim’) but to change the normal ‘N-wave’ profile of the boom to a smooth hump, removing the rapid pressure rises at the nose and tail of the aircraft.

Working from pure acoustic theory in the late 1960’s, Cornell University’s Dr. Albert George and his colleague, Dr. Richard Seebass, found a way to reshape the sonic boom into a soft, harmless pressure wave. The result became the Seebass-George theory and was published in 1971.

The problem was that, until this DARPA program, no-one had ever actually tested the theory. It’s extremely expensive to build planes, set up instruments for monitoring performance, analyse the results, change the aircraft, make more tests, then deal with a whole new set of test results. It’s only recently that low cost, high speed computers and the advent of advanced computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software have combined to allow engineers to model various aircraft configurations and test them against Seebass-George theory.

In order to verify its accuracy, DARPA provided funding to modify a supersonic, 1960’s era F-5 with a different nose configuration. Sonic boom pressure measurements were taken with an unmodified F-5 and compared to the modified F-5. In each test, the modified pressure waves matched the Seebass-George theory predictions both in their intensity and shape. Quite an accomplishment. This is exactly the kind of thing takes aerospace design and ‘kicks it up a notch’.

There’s still one major hurdle left though, basic engine noise and long term performance. General Electric, Rolls-Royce and Pratt & Whitney are studying the problem. Civil engines have to be quiet on takeoff and landing but supersonic military engines don’t. Also, supersonic engines run at full blast all the time, making it hard to run several thousand hours between overhauls. Pratt & Whitney is said to looking at a version of their new F-119 Supercruise engine developed for the F-22. It’s powerful, with 35,000 lbs of thrust, and fuel efficient since it does not require fuel guzzling afterburners to run supersonic.

DARPA envisions a plane with a 6,000 nautical mile unrefueled range while running at mach 2 to 2.4. The plane would weigh in at approximately 100,000 lbs, compared to the Concorde’s 400,000 lbs, and with a payload to weight ratio of around 20% (20,000 lbs of payload), compared to the Concorde’s 7% (28,000 lbs of payload).

So what does this mean for us? In the next 10-15 years we could begin to see supersonic overland travel becoming available. Imagine taking off from Boston at 8:00 AM and landing in San Diego at 11:00 AM. Now imagine taking off from New York at 8:00 AM and landing in Honolulu at 2:00 PM, nonstop. What do you think that will do tourism worldwide?

More:
Bill Sweetman’s Popular Science Article
Affordable Supersonic Flight (NASA)
Darpa News Release (2002)