Anger over my fellow Californians’ willingness to enshrine bigotry in the constitution. (However, that is not a done deal, even if Proposition Eight passes.)

And wondering if the Republicans will reform their coalition, shedding the anti-immigrant, evangelical, and Cold War wings.

Most importantly, an emphatic No on 8: it is discriminatory, it hurts my friends and co-workers, and it’s the most mean-spirited thing I’ve seen since, well, the Knight Initiative.

On some of the others:

Prop 1A: I’m torn over this. I want the private sector to build High Speed Rail. I was in Japan last year, and loved how easy it was to get around on the Shinkansen. And like Telstar Logistics, I want that here. Coin Toss, ask your inner libertarian.

Prop 2: Regardless of if you think regulating cage conditions is important, the state is the wrong level of governance to rule on this. This is a NAFTA matter. No.

Prop 4: Another attempt by religious conservatives to control womens’ bodies. Emphatic No.

Prop 7: No.

Prop 8: Let me repeat. Emphatic No.

Prop 10: No.

Prop 11: Bipartisan redistricting is a good start. Yes.

And if you’re in San Francisco, please vote no on ‘R’. It’s an insult to the people who work at the sewage plant.

And, even though the seat is vacant, he’ll face considerable competition from State Senator Jackie Speier, a veteran politician with support from the California Congressional delegation, who started her campaign when Lantos announced he was leaving at the end of his term. The 12th district covers much of San Mateo county and the Southwest corner of San Francisco, which is not the Google heartland.

It’s not my race. I’m in the 14th district. But it’s another round of The Web vs. The Establishment, and will be interesting to watch.

ETA: There’s a discussion of how a Lessig/Speier race could play out, and how Leland Yee could play the spoiler, at Open Left.

ETA: Shelly Powers wrote a thoughtful piece on why Lessig would not be the best candidate for the seat.

ETA: He was considering running, and had not announced. Thanks, Elkit.

ETA: Lessig has decided not to run.

Handing the mall over to SpamCop for munging, I learned two things: the spammer was using my ISP, and they sent the mail using Lyris — who has an anti spam policy.

Yesterday I received an email from a support person at Lyris. The abuse team at he.net forwarded my complaint to Lyris, who had my email address removed from the customer’s list, and they are investigating this list’s activity.

So huzzah for Lyris, who realize spam hurts their reputation.

Update: It launched, but we had unbroken cloud cover to the south, so I only saw it for a couple of seconds through a gap in the clouds.

A commuter down South by La Palma got a shot of it staging. They didn’t know what they were watching.

The launch was visible from as far east as Phoenix, Arizona.

I saw the previous twilight launch from Vandenberg, a Minuteman ICBM carrying a target for an interceptor test, back in 2002.

This time the payload is a military satellite. The launch vehicle is the Minotaur, a decommissioned Minuteman ICBM, with a couple of extra stages from a Pegasus on top that give the extra kick to put the payload in orbit. It burns solid fuel, which produces an easy to see plume.

Spaceflight Now has a status page for the launch, so check it to see if they are still on schedule.

There’s information on watching launches out of Vandenberg at Space Archive.

If you’re taking pictures, share and tag!

I got to ride along in a friend’s RV-7A last Sunday, on an afternoon trip to Placerville.

It may get a little dire before we pull together, but I think when the prosperous nations, and in particular the US, realise they’re wrecking their own kids’ lives, there will be a mass change in value. It will be a difficult century, and ugly, but I don’t think that in the end people are so stupid as to kill themselves off.

The second book in the series, Fifty Degrees Below, arrives in October, 2005.

See Also

• Zone SF interview on The Years of Rice and Salt
• Tim O’Reilly’s appreciation of Kim Stanley Robinson

Through Lenny Bailes, I learn that the PKD android was on the A Scanner Darkly adaptation panel at ComicCon.

Um, woah.

Thanks to an anonymous commentator at Making Light for the title of this entry.

Cynthia alerted me to a song, also on the Eye’s site, inspired by the police log.

Across the way at Ninth and H
The sidewalk’s clogged
With a clump of dreads and nugs
Sift through slang and patches
And cart away the thugs

Update

Well, BBum says that Cory and, by simple algebra, myself have foot-in-mouth, and we should realize that the court had no choice to rule the way it did. And that it creates the necessary legal tension to have the Knight Amendment overturned. Fine, point well taken.

So let me refine my reaction:

1. I am angry that the Christian Right in California had constructed a situation, by promoting Proposition 22, that made Mayor Newsome take unilateral, unconstitutional action.
2. I am angry that in response to the “February Revolution”, the Christian Right and the President of the United States reacted as if we, in the Bay Area, were Enemies of the State.
3. I’m angry that a supposedly advanced, open society is having this argument.

So Bill, I get the damn realpolitik, but I don’t have to like it.

Patrick feels the same way. Discuss it there.

She sent this from the floor:

Today was the first official day of the convention and I’ve only been on the floor for about an hour. Imagine a huge arena with vast numbers of people moving all the time. There is a din from hundreds of people talking while the speaker gives the ‘official’ speech. Right now the speaker is the Mayor of Boston, Thomas Menino. As the night goes on the speakers will get more famous.

This afternoon I went to a luncheon in honor of our Senator, Diane Feinstein, hosted by Disney. The speakers included Vice President Mondale, Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, Congresswoman Jane Harman, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, and, of course Senator Feinstein. The attendees read like a who’s who of California Politics from San Jose Mayor Ron Gonzales to CA Assemblywoman Rebecca Cohen and Congresswomen Ellen Taucher.

After the political speeches were done the actors from Lion King (the play) sang four songs. That’s just an appetite whetter. We’ll see the play on Wednesday. The DNCC treats us well.

While being a Delegate is fun, it’s entirely non-stop. I’ve been going since 7 AM and there will be no rest until late tonight. There are endless events going on at the same time. If only I had a cloning device and a transporter. The later would be particularly important because the events are all over Boston.

Alyson posted delegate experience to her Live Journal.

Correction: DU columnist The Plaid Adder is not at the DNC.

I grew up watching the Apollo flights to the Moon, but when I was able to read and haunt the school library, I learned about the X-15, the rocket-powered space plane NASA flew out of Edwards Air Force Base during the 1960′s.

The X-15 came straight out of science fiction (remember, the Shuttle didn’t fly until I started high school) a sleek black plane with a rocket motor that flew to the edge of space and glided back to earth instead of a scorched capsule splashing into the ocean with half a naval task force chasing it.

Flying to the Moon was a hell of a feat, and it’s no surprise NASA chose Neil Armstrong for the first landing, he’d already distinguished himself as a pilot flying the X-15 and Gemini. But to me, even if landing on the Moon was amazing, flying a space plane was cool.

The X-15 still holds the unofficial altitude record for aircraft: 108 kilometers. SpaceShipOne barely broached 100 kilometers when it flew Monday morning.

The black dart remains part of California culture and politics. Before the late state senator Pete Knight campaigned to write discrimination into the California Constitution, he became the fastest pilot on Earth, flying an X-15 to Mach 6.7.

In 1961 Richard Donner made a movie about the X-15 with Charles Bronson as the perfect pilot, Mary Tyler Moore as the perfect pilot’s wife, and Jimmy Stewart as the narrator (in USAF uniform.)

The Right Stuff, from 1983, remains the better movie about test pilots and astronauts, even it doesn’t have X-15′s.

Eleven years later, Shôji Kawamori, and Shinichirô Watanabe revisited the test pilot mythology in Macross Plus where the colony world of New Eden looked like California from the giant hangers at the “New Dryden Flight Test Center”, the ranks of wind turbines in the mountains, to a barely disguised Fisherman’s Wharf ‘ship’s wheel’ sign. They mixed the test pilot story with Top Gun. Two pilots compete over a military contract for a next generation mecha, and for the affections of their high school sweetheart.

And seeing that we’re back to thinking about our old crushes, I’ll finish.

Update: here’s a batch of photos from the trip.

Chad Orzel has some good comments on the snark coming from the Libertarians in the wake of the flight, which was not without gliches (though from the ground, it looked great) so political sneering by the Randoids shouldn’t reflect badly on the feat itself. More Libertarian deflation over on Live Journal.