Category Archives: Political Commentary

Business, Economics, History, Political Commentary, Space, Space History, Technology and Society

A Space Program For The Rest Of Us

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I know, you’ve all given up, and just assumed that the piece in The New Atlantis was just another drug-addled Simberg fantasy of grandeur. That when I kept saying it would be Real Soon Now, that it was just vaporware. Well, Now has finally arrived.

As I wrote in an early draft, if extraterrestrial aliens had contacted the White House after the last lunar landing in 1972, and told the president that humans wouldn’t be allowed to move into space beyond earth orbit, and to pass the message on to his successors, but that the public was not to know this, it’s hard to imagine how policy actions would have been much different. Let’s Hope that this can finally Change with the new administration. That (unlike most of the rest of the agenda) would be Hope and Change that I could believe in.

[Late Friday update]

I want to thank everyone for the kudos, but I can’t accept it (did you know that kudos is not plural?) without acknowledging that this was a collaboration. Adam Keiper, the first and only (to date) editor of The New Atlantis, encouraged me to write this piece and, more importantly, played a key role in making it what it was. While we lost some things in editing (that I’ll rectify in a later Director’s Cut, and perhaps expand into a book), he focused it and almost certainly helped make it more influential in getting more to read it now, when we are at such a critical cusp of policy decisions.

But beyond that, he really helped write it. I was tired when I finished, and had a weak ending. The final paragraph, one of the best in it, if not the best (and it may be), is his.

And I’m grateful for the opportunity that he provided to get this message out, not just with The Path Not Taken five years ago (was it really that long?) but this and other pieces. The links in it are his, which indicates to me that he’s been following this topic closely. The most amazing thing is that this collaboration is a result of a snarky criticism by me of his own space-policy punditry, over half a decade ago. Rather than taking umbrage, he opened his mind to new possibilities, and the result is this (so far at least) collaborative magnum opus.

[Bumped]

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

“I’ve Been Lied To”

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A blue dog is shocked, shocked that his own party leadership is duplicitous:

The seven Blue Dogs on the Energy and Commerce Committee stormed out of a Friday meeting with their committee chairman, Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), saying Waxman had been negotiating in bad faith over a number of provisions Blue Dogs demanded be changed in the stalled healthcare bill.

“I’ve been lied to,” Blue Dog Coalition Co-Chairman Charlie Melancon (D-La.) said on Friday. “We have not had legitimate negotiations.

I’d have some sympathy if I didn’t think that they were so naive as to finally notice this kind of behavior.

Anyway, it’s good news for the rest of us, if the latest radical attack on freedom and the Constitution is stopped in its tracks.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Pegging The Crapometer

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Andrew Klavan applies the probes to the president.

It’s not like it’s anything new. He’s been talking crap ever since he started running for president (if not his entire career). The only difference is that now, when people can compare his promises and rhetoric to his actual actions, they’re starting to really notice:

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Friday shows that 30% of the nation’s voters now Strongly Approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing his role as President. Thirty-eight percent (38%) Strongly Disapprove giving Obama a Presidential Approval Index rating of -8 (see trends).

Just 25% believe that the economic stimulus package has helped the economy.

…Overall, 49% of voters say they at least somewhat approve of the President’s performance. Today marks the first time his overall approval rating has ever fallen below 50% among Likely Voters nationwide. Fifty-one percent (51%) disapprove.

I don’t see anything in sight to arrest the trend. He doesn’t seem to realize that people are starting to see through him. The only thing that has been propping him up (as it did during the campaign) is continued fawning from the media.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary

Why Michigan Is In Such Deep Trouble

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Because it’s run by idiots:

Having required state utilities to generate 20 percent of their electricity from more expensive wind sources (a similar program in Denmark has driven power rates to 30 cents per kWh compared with Michigan’s current 8.5 cents), Democrats now may require the same utilities to cut their bills by 20 percent.

You heard that right: Granholm will require utilities to provide costlier energy — and cap the prices customers pay for it. Does anyone in the Michigan Democratic party know basic economics? They plan to artificially prop up demand at the same time as they artificially restrict supply: the only way to square that circle is to ration the product.

California, here we come! Can you say “rolling blackouts?”

Of course, it will continue until Michigan voters stop reelecting such creatures.

I find it telling that the president thinks that she’s “one of the best governors in the country.” Because he’s an economic ignoramus as well.

History, Humor, Political Commentary

Apollo Memories, And A Modest Proposal

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…from Iowahawk:

Today, America still has a space effort, but sadly it just doesn’t inspire like it once did in the heady days of Apollo and Gemini. Unmanned probes and orbiting space labs are fine, I guess, but where is the glamor? Where are the crewcut astronaut he-men with names like ‘Deke’ and ‘Buzz’ and ‘Gus,’ driving around Houston in matching big block Corvettes and Ray-Bans? Nowhere, that’s where. They’ve all been outsourced by space computers and floaty-haired National Junior High Science Teacher of the Year nerds. You tell me — do we really want dorks like these as Earth’s first line of defense against invading intergalactic aliens? No wonder my brother and I have to be half-blotto before we play pretend astronauts anymore.

If America wants to get back on the right track, scientific space mission-wise, we need to once again pick an inspiring, audacious goal, and man it with the kind of inspirational crew to make it happen. At long last, let us realize mankind’s most cherished dream — sending the entire United States Congress to the Moon by 2010.

When I mention this proposal to my space engineering friends at Meier’s Tap, they are often skeptical. They’ll argue it’s impossible, that even NASA’s most powerful booster rockets never anticipated a payload of 535 people including Charlie Rangel and Jerrold Nadler. Look man, I’m just the idea guy, and I’m sure those details can be worked out. When John F. Kennedy first proposed going to the Moon in 1961, did you people expect him to already have a formula for Tang? The beauty of my proposal is that our Astro-Congress is already on payroll — and chock full of crisis tested problem-solving engineers. If they can take over the entire US auto industry and re-engineer the American heath care system in two weeks, surviving a Moon mission will be a snap!

If only he’d been elected president last year. I’d be space czar now.

Philosophy, Political Commentary, Technology and Society

When Do We Die?

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While I was waiting for my mythical piece in The New Atlantis to come on line (Real Soon Now) I was looking over the spring issue, and found this piece on the legal definition of death. His purpose is to define when it’s morally acceptable to harvest organs, but I don’t think that it will work as well for cryonicists (a subject I discussed several years ago). The problem with the legal definitions is the word “irreversible.” It’s not really possible to know prospectively whether or not a given biological state is irreversible, because this is an ever-moving target and a function of available technology, whether in your geographical or temporal location. As I noted in my cryonics piece, many conditions that would have been considered “irreversible” in the past (e.g., cessation of respiration after drowning) can now be routinely reversed, without even special tools–just knowledge of CPR.

The only truly definitive definition of death is the concept of information death, in which the ashes of the brain are scattered to the winds. And the fact remains that death is a process, not a discrete event, and as technology continues to advance it will be possible to reverse it as we go deeper and deeper into the process.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary

Because Unemployment Isn’t High Enough, Yet

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Michigan Democrats want to raise the state minimum wage to ten bucks an hour. This is economically criminal behavior. It will further devastate black youth in Detroit, Flint and Saginaw. Flint’s official employment rate is almost thirty percent.

And meanwhile, the red fox has returned to Detroit. Moose won’t be far behind, if they want to walk across the Mackinac Bridge.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

The More Things Change

4 Comments

The more they remain the same:

…the masses are morons who respond only to simple messages repeated thousands of times (a perspective I discuss at length in my book).

Seventy-some years later, this belief is as popular with the powers that be as it was in 1933.

You know, like Hope! And Change! And we can spend our way out of bankruptcy. And that you’ll get to keep your private insurance.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Some Madoff Thoughts

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With this more generally applicable opening:

A rule we can rely on to be unfailingly applied is this: No matter how much the government controls the economic system, any problem will be blamed on whatever small zone of freedom that remains. This of course is evidence of a rigged game. The government can’t possibly monitor and regulate absolutely every transaction that takes place in a country. Stalin and Hitler couldn’t do it by a long shot. So anything that displeases the ruling regime can easily be laid at the doorstep of freedom and be used as an excuse for stamping out whatever traces of liberty still exist.

The other part of the rigged game is to have so many laws that it is almost impossible to get through a day without violating one or another, making every citizen a subject of the state, vulnerable at all times to prosecution on unrelated issues if she doesn’t toe the state line.