…loving Castro. It’s all good:
He was a courtly State Department intelligence analyst from a prominent family who loved to sail and peruse the London Review of Books. Occasionally, he would voice frustration with U.S. policies, but to his liberal neighbors in Northwest D.C. it was nothing out of the ordinary. “We were all appalled by the Bush years,” one said.
So, who could blame him for spying for a communist dictator?
Frank Sietzen has kicked off a discussion over at NASA Watch:
While the present Orion-Ares 1 architecture may well be the “safe, simple, soonest” launch solution promised by ESMD, notice nobody is claiming an Orion-Ares 1 stack will be cheaper than a Shuttle flight. My question to readers: what is the government’s role and responsibility in reducing the cost of access to space? Would you bring back NGLT-or a revamped version of the SLI minus specific vehicle test beds such as the X-33/X-34? How would you revitalize spaceplane research? And would any of you remove funding from existing NASA programs such as exploration to fund research in advanced launch technologies? Or has that ship sailed?
I would certainly remove funding from Ares development for it (because I’d do that on general principles). But NASA wasn’t particularly good at funding launch R&D, as exemplified by the X-33 fiasco. What I would do is get NASA out of the launch development business entirely, and back into the R&T business, and start to view industry as the customer for it, as NACA did. If NASA really wanted to support commercial industry with VSE (as recommended by the Aldridge Commission), it would be doing two fundamental things, neither of which it’s doing much of right now. And no, COTS doesn’t count — it has nothing to do with the VSE.
First, it would be purchasing services, including launch services, from the commercial sector, as it does for unmanned exploration, and stop trying to develop and operate its own dedicated vehicles. Second, it would be canvassing those providers for input as to what high-risk technologies could reduce future costs and increase reliability, and start investing in those. That could include developing X-Vehicles, but they should be true X-Vehicles, each one focused on proving out one or (at most) two key technologies, and not relying on those technologies to be able to fly at all (the grand failing of X-33). They would also be much less risk averse for X programs, and not idiotically shut them down when almost complete out of fear of failure (e.g., X-34). Not to mention demanding that they incorporate some pet NASA project, like a Marshall-developed engine (X-34 again).
There are lots of lessons to be learned from space history, but unfortunately, the space policy establishment seems determined to learn the stupendously wrong ones (e.g., Shuttle proved reusables don’t work, so let’s do Apollo again), and ignore the sensible ones.
From Michael Barone and Frank Tipler.
It makes me all the more curious to see his college transcripts. Did he even take a course in history? And what’s really appalling is that it isn’t just him — there are apparently no fact checkers in the White House itself.
And Victor Davis Hanson says that the president reminds him of himself. A much younger, and more naive himself.
[Update a few minutes later]
Obama’s message of weakness:
The speech…impressed many conservatives, including Rich Lowry, my esteemed editor at National Review, “esteemed editor” being the sort of thing one says before booting the boss in the crotch. Rich thought that the president succeeded in his principal task: “Fundamentally, Obama’s goal was to tell the Muslim world, ‘We respect and value you, your religion and your civilization, and only ask that you don’t hate us and murder us in return.'” But those terms are too narrow. You don’t have to murder a guy if he preemptively surrenders. And you don’t even have to hate him if you’re too busy despising him. The savvier Muslim potentates have no desire to be sitting in a smelly cave in the Hindu Kush, sharing a latrine with a dozen half-witted goatherds while plotting how to blow up the Empire State Building. Nevertheless, they share key goals with the cave dwellers – including the wish to expand the boundaries of “the Muslim world” and (as in the anti-blasphemy push at the U.N.) to place Islam, globally, beyond criticism. The nonterrorist advance of Islam is a significant challenge to Western notions of liberty and pluralism.
Once Obama moved on from the more generalized Islamoschmoozing to the details, the subtext – the absence of American will – became explicit. He used the cover of multilateralism and moral equivalence to communicate, consistently, American weakness: “No single nation should pick and choose which nations hold nuclear weapons.” Perhaps by “no single nation” he means the “global community” should pick and choose, which means the U.N. Security Council, which means the Big Five, which means that Russia and China will pursue their own murky interests and that, in the absence of American leadership, Britain and France will reach their accommodations with a nuclear Iran, a nuclear North Korea and any other psychostate minded to join them.
This reminds me of the old The Simpsons episode about the right way, the wrong way, and the Max Power way. There’s the Reagan way, the Carter way, and the Obama way. The latter is like the Carter way, but way faster. We’re not even half a year into the presidency.
…is on full display over at this “Democratic” Underground discussion of a typical leftist who wants to decide what other people should, and should not hear.
I went in to have some blood drawn on Tuesday, and Fox News was playing in the doctor’s office waiting room. It obviously didn’t bother me, but I can’t imagine being as outraged as some of these people are even if it had been MSNBC with Olbermann.
Virginia Postrel says do Medicare first:
Think about this for a moment. Medicare is a huge, single-payer, government-run program. It ought to provide the perfect environment for experimentation. If more-efficient government management can slash health-care costs by addressing all these problems, why not start with Medicare? Let’s see what “better management” looks like applied to Medicare before we roll it out to the rest of the country.
This is not a completely cynical suggestion. Medicare is, for instance, a logical place to start to design better electronic records systems and the incentives to use them. But you do have to wonder why a report that claims that Medicare is wasting 30 percent of its spending thinks it’s making a case for making the rest of the health care system more like Medicare.
Because they think we’re rubes. And judging by the voting results last fall, many of us are.
This reminds me of the old Soviet joke (that I’m sure I’ve related at this blog, perhaps more than once, but it remains appropriate). A teacher is lecturing schoolchildren on the brilliance of Karl Marx. A kid raises his hand, and says, “Teacher, was Marx truly a great scientist?” She beams and nods, and declares him the greatest scientist in the history of mankind. “Well,” he went on, “then why didn’t he try this crap on rats first?”
[Saturday afternoon update]
Peter Orszag has responded to Virginia’s question. Hail the blogosphere.
I find this quite telling:
Medicare First–changing Medicare and waiting to see how it works before messing around with the rest of the health care system–won’t work politically.
You don’t say…
Some people might think that cause to rethink. But not these people.
[Bumped]
Jon Goff has an instructive post on NASA’s supposed risk aversion, and points out that had they taken the same attitude half a century ago, Apollo would likely have failed (as Constellation seems likely to fail today, ironically, because it’s too much like Apollo, but without either the requirements or the management talent of that project).
But this opens up a much broader discussion of risk. There are multiple kinds of risk for a space project (and technology projects in general). There is technical risk — the risk that what you are trying to do may not be achievable within the schedule or budget because the technologies haven’t been sufficiently demonstrated and there are too many unknowns (both “known” and “unknown”). There is program risk — the risk that you may not manage the various aspects (including risk) of the project adequately, also resulting in cost increases and/or schedule slips (it is clear that this has happened to Constellation, as many have been pointing out for years). There is market risk — the risk that the thing that you’re building won’t actually satisfy the need. And for government programs, there is political risk — the risk that your project will lose political support prior to completion (actually sort of the government version of market risk, except that you’ll often find out that the market has disappeared prior to project completion, which is, I suppose, a feature rather than a bug).
A key element of being a successful project manager is managing and mitigating these risks. A lot of it happens at the very beginning of the project, when it’s a lot cheaper to do risk mitigation, and decisions taken have long-term consequences.
In that context. Mike Griffin failed the day that he selected the current architecture, because it had so much risk (of all varieties described above) cooked in right from the get go.
Not having access to the probabilistic risk analysis (PRA) that is a standard management tool for such decisions (I’m being generous in the assumption that one was actually performed, and the decision based on it) it appears to an outsider that no risk was considered other than purely technical. NASA (in defiance of one of the roles stated in its charter) chose the path that was deemed to have the best chance of success because it broke no new technological soil. In its own parlance, it chose to develop launch systems built from components of high TRLs (Technology Readiness Level). That is, they had been demonstrated operationally in the operational environment, in previous programs. Of course, because they didn’t really understand the operational environments (it’s a lot more than just flying through the atmosphere and going into space), it bit them on the ass, and took out a lot of meat (almost doubling the initial estimates of development cost, and slipping the schedule one year per year since it started). “Demonstrated in the environment” includes the environment of an integrated launch system. For instance, the fact that the SRBs only killed one Shuttle crew didn’t make them safe or, in isolation, “human rated.” And the fact that the vibration environment when they were structurally buffered from the crew system by a tank full of a million and a half pounds of propellant was minimally acceptable didn’t mean that it was a good idea to put a much smaller stage directly on top of them.
They probably considered program risk, but assumed that it was non-existent, because they were running the program, and who was better at managing programs than them? They apparently completely ignored political risk, or misassessed it. They seemed to think that the way to maintain program support was to completely ignore the recommendations of the Aldridge Commission — to make it affordable, sustainable, support commercial activities and national security — and instead to cater to the parochial demands of a few Senators on the Hill, particularly Senator Shelby. That one hasn’t bitten them on the ass yet, but it probably will when the Augustine recommendations come out in the fall, removing whatever glutiginous meat remained.
The tragic thing, as Jon points out, is that in avoiding the narrow technical risk of delivering, storing, manipulating propellants on orbit, something that is absolutely essential for future space exploration and space development (because they’ll never be able to come up with a launch system that can do a Mars mission in a single launch), and focusing all their efforts on a perceived “low-risk” but unnecessary new launch system, and in ignoring the systems necessary to get beyond LEO (as opposed to simply getting to orbit, which the private sector has had down for years) they have wiped out more billions in taxpayer dollars, and allowed the day that we would once again go beyond earth orbit, to recede far into the future.
At least, that is, if the lunar-bound vehicle has the word “NASA” on its side.
Fortunately, some of us, more attuned to the real risks, have other ideas.
A warning to modern “progressives” to be careful what they wish for:
I’m thinking of an American president who demonized ethnic groups as enemies of the state, censored the press, imprisoned dissidents, bullied political opponents, spewed propaganda, often expressed contempt for the Constitution, approved warrantless searches and eavesdropping, and pursued his policies with a blind, religious certainty.
Oh, and I’m not thinking of George W. Bush, but another “W” – actually “WW”: Woodrow Wilson, the Democrat who served from 1913 to 1921.
President Wilson is mostly remembered today as the first modern liberal president, the first (and only) POTUS with a PhD, and the only political scientist to occupy the Oval Office. He was the champion of “self determination” and the author of the idealistic but doomed “Fourteen Points” – his vision of peace for Europe and his hope for a League of Nations. But the nature of his presidency has largely been forgotten.
That’s a shame, because Wilson’s two terms in office provide the clearest historical window into the soul of progressivism. Wilson’s racism, his ideological rigidity, and his antipathy toward the Constitution were all products of the progressive worldview. And since “progressivism” is suddenly in vogue – today’s leading Democrats proudly wear the label – it’s worth actually reviewing what progressivism was and what actually happened under the last full-throated progressive president.
The record should give sober pause to anyone who’s mesmerized by the progressive promise.
But they don’t even understand their own intellectual history.
Half full, or half empty?
I was surprised that no administration officials were on the business news channels this morning. That is highly unusual for Jobs Day. Maybe they are afraid of the following sequence of questions:
1. Is the economy recovering? (They would like to answer this one, “Tentatively yes. We’re seeing positive signs, but there’s a long way to go.”)
2. If so, is the economy recovering because of the stimulus? How can you claim that it is if only $40-ish billion has gone out the door so far?
3. Or are the green shoots growing just because it’s springtime? Is the less worse economic news primarily a result of financial institutions raising capital and the passage of time?In addition to being inefficient and wasteful, the stimulus was poorly timed. By deferring to congressional desires to shovel taxpayer funds to slow-spending infrastructure projects, the administration got a stimulus law that isn’t helping GDP growth now, and won’t have a quantitatively significant effect until 2010. The administration is in a tough spot — if the economy is not healing, then at some point the president will take the blame. If instead the economy is healing before the stimulus takes effect, then maybe the stimulus was unnecessary or even counterproductive.
Gee, it’s not like nobody predicted this months ago when the fool bill was passed without anyone having a chance to read it.
Michael Ledeen points out more alternate history from the president’s speech:
On the other hand, there were so many errors of history that I was left wondering if there is anyone in the White House that checks facts. “Islam has a proud tradition of tolerance. We see it in the history of Andalusia and Cordoba during the Inquisition.” But the Muslims had been driven out of Spain by the time of the Inquisition. The Inquisition was Catholic, after all. What was he thinking? And even if he was thinking about an earlier epoch, the so-called Golden Age, “tolerance” is hardly the right word. Yes, non-Muslims were permitted to live, provided that they submitted to Muslim rule and paid their rulers. Yes, Jews were better off in Muslim lands than in Christian areas during the Middle Ages. But “toleration” it wasn’t. One of my best professors used to argue that the word, in its contemporary sense, only began to make sense in the seventeenth century.
He credited Muslims for inventions of others, from the magnetic compass to algebra to pens, arches, and even to printing. It’s as if there were no ancient Chinese inventions, and the Romans had to await the Prophet before they could build the Pantheon. And someone really should tell him that printing came from the Orient, was rejected in Muslim domains, and then developed in Europe. It was introduced into the Middle East in the 15th century by Jews, who were not permitted to publish in Arabic. So the first printing press in the region was brought by Jews who then published in Hebrew.
The absolute worst part of the speech was the mush about Iran. He could have talked about the great Persian contributions to Western culture, or credited Cyrus the Great for issuing the first known document dealing with human rights. He didn’t do that (Cyrus wasn’t a Muslim, after all). Instead, he regretted American meddling in Iran in 1953, and then moved on to assure the mullahs that they were fully entitled to have a (peaceful) nuclear program. As if nobody knew (Bushitlercheney had made the same point, let us not forget). Not a word about Iranian killers around the world. Not a word about the dreadful repression of the Iranian people. Not a word about any possible consequences if, as everyone expects, Iran builds atomic bombs.
That’s because he expects there to be none. I suspect that the Israelis have a different idea.
Over, and over and over again. As Ann Althouse notes, you’d think that a wise woman would know better than to continue to repeat such a “poor choice of words” (as the White House put it). Unless, you know, she actually thought it was a good choice of words, at least until some non-racialist actually liberal stick-in-the-muds started criticizing it, and she was up for a SCOTUS nomination.
Why, it’s almost enough to make one question her wisdom. Not to mention her probity.
[Update in the afternoon]
Explaining what a “liberal” is to Judge Sotomayor, who claims not to know what it is, even though she also claims she is one.