Category Archives: Political Commentary

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Technology and Society

The Perfect Energy Source

May 16, 2009 Rand Simberg 39 Comments

I have commenters who refuse to start their own blogs, so I’ll have to create my own guest-blog posts for them. Here’s Carl Pham:

I wouldn’t say I’m enthusiastic about sequestration, aside from the aesthetic pleasure I get from acres of active sequesterers, particular those in genus Sequoia, but it sure beats the hell out of (1) deindustrialization and refeudalization (I know who wants to be my feudal lord), or (2) flinging irrecoverable resources down the rabbit hole of “alternative energy” sources.

I mean, it amazes me that people think because it’s possible to formulate a sentence like we must search for alternative energy sources that they must exist, whereas a few moments informed thought would tell you this is a sentence like we must search for Atlantis or we must search for a new element with stable isotopes, and coming perilously close to we must search for a perpetual motion machine.

The way I see it, there are four forces. Gravity gives us waterfalls and windpower, tech known since the 8th century, thoroughly exploited. The strong force gives us fission and fusion, also well understood. Fission has been ruled out because we’re stupid. Fusion is tough because of that staggering activation barrier, the size of the match you need to light the fire. The weak force gives us radioactivity, but if you’re going to use that you might as well use fission, so that’s that.

What’s left? The EM force, which gives us solar energy and chemistry. Direct solar power is futile, because the power density at the Earth’s surface is too low, so you’ve got to have some collection and storage system, which inevitably brings us to chemistry, that being the way you store electromagnetic energy (barring the invention of stupendous capacitors).

Problem is, the Earth is a closed system, and it’s had 4 billion years to come to equilibrium. There aren’t many chemical reactions left that (1) have plentiful fuel lying around, but (2) magically enough, have failed to already run sometime over the past million millenia.

Except for one. That would be combustion. And the reason is simple, because we live in a giant photosynthesizing hothouse, a mad biosphere that soaks up gigartons of CO2, reduces it to carbohydrates for storage and transport, and then oxidizes it again for energy and movement. It’s a nice, neat, closed cycle, and has been running stably for millions of years. Humble logic suggests the obvious thing to do is tap into this cycle for our own needs, peel off 0.1% of the carbon for our own purposes.

Which we do — but only on the oxidation side. So logic suggests, once again, that we enlist our chlorophylled neighbors to help us out there by reducing the carbon we so merrily oxidize, balancing the books. And, amazingly enough, just as we’re aware of the problem, we discover the tools necessary: our ability to directly manipulate the genome, so that we can tailor plants and bugs to reduce CO2 just the way we want.

I mean, heck, if only combustion and the carbon cycle had just been discovered, it would be the coolest, most clever, greenest tech, and Obama would be wanting to pour billions into it. But, you know, since the tech is as old as pencils, we sit around thinking No, that can’t make sense. Make marks with a piece of charcoal encased in wood? They did that in the 16th century, back when people were stupid and uneducated. There MUST be a better way.

Humor, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Satire

In Defense of Speaker Pelosi

May 16, 2009 Rand Simberg 3 Comments

It’s all part of a vast, nonpartisan conspiracy:

Poor Nancy Pelosi. For more than two years, our beloved House Speaker has been fighting for the public interest, toiling to restore “integrity and civility” to the Capitol’s lower chamber, and striving to shape the most ethical Congress in world history. And what is her reward for this selfless service? The cruel wrath of a vicious, widespread, nonpartisan conspiracy—designed to convince the American public that she is lying and playing politics with national security. This cabal is especially insidious because it involves so many disparate, and seemingly unrelated, players. Further still, its nefarious and remarkably prescient architects had the foresight to begin crafting the phony case against Pelosi years ago, fabricating evidence and coordinating lies as far back as 2002. These people must be exposed and thwarted to preserve Mme. Pelosi’s honor.

That’s just the beginning.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Satire

The First Hundred Days

May 16, 2009 Rand Simberg 1 Comment

…of President Palin.

Political Commentary, Popular Culture

The Needs Of The Many

May 16, 2009 Rand Simberg 3 Comments

…outweigh the needs of the Pelosians:

We have long been on record in our belief that much of the current crisis can be traced back to the baleful influence of rampant Picardism in the diplomatic corps. Ambassador Picard’s conviction that the “European Hegemony” was a lasting model for intergalactic peace has led us into one calamity after another (for this analysis always leaves out of the equation the Pax Americana which made the European Hegemony possible). Picard’s disagreements with the late Governor Worf stretch back to their service on the Enterprise-D and while the younger Worf was often too much of a hawk (or bird of prey, one might say) there can be no doubt that he had the better of the arguments when it came to the Romulans. No doubt he had learned important lessons from his father’s slaughter at the Katyn forest of the 23rd century, Khitomer. Picard, meanwhile, after a distinguished — but by no means perfect — military career became entranced with the 20th-century writings of Warren Christopher. Prior to Picard’s popularization, few remembered who Christopher was. Indeed, it’s been said that people forgot who Christopher was while they were still having conversations with him. A diplomat of no significant achievement in his own time, Christopher’s writings in a fusty privately published tome — Diplomacy: The Forgotten Imperative — nonetheless ensorcelled the former starship captain. Picard’s proposal, directly inspired by Christopher’s writings, to mandate that all phasers be limited to “light stun” deprived federation security officers from using deadly force and as a result untold millions died and billions more were sentenced to permanent slavery to the Borg collective. But all this, too, goes down the memory wormhole, only to pop-up at some later time and place when such memories provide no practical guidance to current affairs, serving instead for conversational fodder at academic junkets to Risa.

Now the Picardians and Pelosians have become natural allies and would-be quislings in the burgeoning showdown with the Romulans. The old adage that the “Prime Directive is not a suicide pact,” means nothing to them. Would that the spirit of James Kirk (contributing editor from 2261 to 2271, we’re proud to say) could be conjured at this moment. Who among us can forget those immortal words, “Praetor Pardek tear down this neutral zone!” What would Kirk think as he watched the Federation appease the Romulans, feeding the targ one limb at a time, as the Klingons say?

Roddenberry’s collectivist future was actually kind of a bleak one.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

You’re Irrational

May 16, 2009 Rand Simberg 9 Comments

…if you don’t want to ban private gun sales. So sayeth several lying, idiotic Senators:

“There is no rational reason to oppose closing the loophole. The reason it’s still not closed is simple: the continuing power of the special interest gun lobby in Washington” Sen. Lautenberg said ignoring the Constitution.

There is no “loophole.” As is noted at the link, what they’re trying to do is to ban private gun sales. And the reason people are fighting this unconstitutional power grab is that they believe that they have a right to buy and sell guns, like any other commodity. I hope they won’t be able to find sixty votes for it. I suspect they won’t. There are too many western Democrats who would have to answer to their constituents if they allow this atrocity to occur.

Economics, History, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Why Did The Tea Partiers Complain About Obama’s Debt?

May 15, 2009 Rand Simberg 10 Comments

…but not Bush’s? Well, actually, they complained about both. But here’s a nice description of why it reached a tipping point:

[Update late afternoon]

Again, it illustrates the point that I’ve made in the past on this subject, that quantity has a quality all its own.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary

“Revenue Neutral”

May 15, 2009 Rand Simberg 20 Comments

Sorry, there’s no such thing as a “revenue neutral carbon tax.” Or if there is, you’d stumble on it by pure luck:

The most important point is that revenue neutrality is most likely a mirage. We would have to maintain the carbon tax for decades in order to generate the consumption reductions that advocates argue will occur, but FICA rates aren’t static over decades. In 1950 the FICA rate was 1.5%; by 1970 it was 4.8%; by 1990 it had risen to its current rate of 7.65%. It has been stable for about two decades, but meanwhile the programs that it (in theory) funds are in crisis.

Over the next few decades, we should expect to be in bitter political fights over changing retirement ages, benefit levels, access to publicly-funded medical care, tax rates, and other measures designed to make these programs financially stable. The FICA rate will not be insulated from this process. Who could possibly say that when it has increased in irregular and unpredictable steps to, say, 15.3 percent between now and 2028 in response to various political crises, that, but for the carbon tax, it would otherwise have been 16.5 percent?

I’ve previously discussed this conceit of politicians that they can predict the economic effects of their nostrums:

When a politician says that he’s going to either cut or increase your taxes, he is engaging, wittingly or not, in a conceit and a deceit. He says it as though he has the power to do any such thing, when in fact he does not. He has no power except to reduce or increase the rate at which you pay taxes, whether on property, income, or whatever.

Think of it as the difference between a joystick and a mouse. With a computer mouse, you can point directly to the place that you want to be on a screen. With a joystick, you can only control the rate at which you move toward it, and in so doing, the target may move, and it may move faster or in a different direction than you can keep up with using your rate control. Politicians talk about tax cuts as though they have a computer mouse that allows them to pass a law and a specified amount of revenue will roll in, but the reality is that they have a slow joystick, with a nebulous relationship to the eventual goal.

As Manzi says, TANSTAAFL. I think that dropping both sides of the payroll tax until the economy recovered would have been a hell of an instant stimulus, but eventually, that money’s got to be put back into the system.

Political Commentary, Space

Has The Wall Finally Come Down Completely?

May 15, 2009 Rand Simberg 1 Comment

Back in the 1990s, the Clinton administration made the disastrous policy decision to eliminate intra-government competition in launch systems, and assigned expendables to the military and reusables to NASA. As a result, fifteen years later, we had the X-33 fiasco, and since then, have no significant government activities in the latter area.

But the Air Force has put out a Request for Information (RFI) for data on reusable first stages (and interestingly, it includes suborbital as a mission category, in which case it could be a single-stage reusable). There’s no serious money flowing yet, or requests for actual proposals, but I hope that this means that the DoD will finally pick up the ball that NASA dropped, and get on with the business of supporting the vital development of space transports.

[Via Doug Messier]

Political Commentary, Space

Then And Now

May 15, 2009 Rand Simberg 17 Comments

Paul Spudis has some guidance for the Augustine Commission to update the 1990 report to the 2009 report, based on what we know about the moon now that we didn’t then:

what do these discoveries mean for lunar return? We now know that sustained human presence on the Moon is possible, largely because we’ve found a source of near-constant power (permanent sunlight) and a source of sustenance and rocket propellant (volatiles, including water). The robotic Clementine and Lunar Prospector missions showed us that the poles, almost completely unknown in 1990, are inviting oases on the lunar desert. There, we can extract hydrogen and oxygen to make air and water for life support and propellant to fuel rockets. The sunlit areas can generate near continuous electrical power, with regenerative fuel cells providing power for the short duration eclipse periods. Locally obtained power and consumables means that continuous human presence is possible, without the enormous expense or unproven technology of large nuclear reactors and the delivery of massive quantities of material from Earth.

The new Augustine committee should be made cognizant of these facts. The more we learn about the true nature of the Moon, the more the goal of learning to live there on a quasi-self sufficient basis appears feasible. This opens up wholly new areas of operations and commerce in space, undreamed of as little as twenty years ago. It has the potential to change the entire paradigm of spaceflight, from a narrow, government-run, science-oriented program, completely dependent upon the caprice Congressional largess to a self-sustaining, free-market program, in which NASA develops and demonstrates new technologies that open up spacefaring by many different passengers and payloads for a wide variety of purposes.

Wouldn’t that be a breath of fresh space policy air?

Transterrestrial Musings