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.
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.
Bill Whittle has a couple new Afterburners up, one two–parter filmed out at XCOR, and the other an interview with the world’s best-known space law professor. Also, thoughts on revising the Outer Space Treaty.
The states hit hardest by the recession are getting the least amount of “stimulus.” Well, what else would you expect from Barack Hoover Obama?
[Mid-morning update]
Or is he Jimmy Carter? At this point, that’s a best-case scenario, I think.
…and the difference between dead-tree and electronic books. This has been a black eye for Amazon.
He sux.
Who knew we were electing a national mother-in-law? And get a chance to endure increased taxes for the privilege. Obama’s supposed to be rallying support from voters, not castigating them. Outside the S& M parlor, most people do not enjoy paying to be disciplined.
What’s amusing is that his acolytes (including some in this very blog’s comments) are just as bad, because they use the same dumb arguments.
No surprise. The only thing he’s ever really been able to sell is himself. He may be the most spectacular example of the Peter Principle in world history.
[Update a few minutes later]
When we first saw the paragraph Tuesday, just after the 1,018-page document was released, we thought we surely must be misreading it. So we sought help from the House Ways and Means Committee.
It turns out we were right: The provision would indeed outlaw individual private coverage. Under the Orwellian header of “Protecting The Choice To Keep Current Coverage,” the “Limitation On New Enrollment” section of the bill clearly states:
“Except as provided in this paragraph, the individual health insurance issuer offering such coverage does not enroll any individual in such coverage if the first effective date of coverage is on or after the first day” of the year the legislation becomes law.
So we can all keep our coverage, just as promised — with, of course, exceptions: Those who currently have private individual coverage won’t be able to change it. Nor will those who leave a company to work for themselves be free to buy individual plans from private carriers…
…It took just 16 pages of reading to find this naked attempt by the political powers to increase their reach. It’s scary to think how many more breaches of liberty we’ll come across in the final 1,002.
You can see why these fascists object to the notion of reading bills.
[Update late morning]
The civil war among the Democrats:
Blue Dogs had aired their complaints last week in a letter to Pelosi that caused her to delay the rollout of the bill until Tuesday. But when the bill was introduced, they felt Pelosi and the committee chairmen who wrote the legislation hadn’t taken their concerns into account.
That led to a tense session between Pelosi and Blue Dogs at the group’s regular Tuesday meeting hours after the rollout.
“The meeting did not go well. She just kept saying it was a good bill,” said one Blue Dog.
“There is a growing perception among many of us that our leadership meets with us but doesn’t listen to us,” said another Blue Dog.
What do you expect? She’s a moron. And I hope that she’ll continue to lead them…to a massive defeat next year.
[Noon update]
I propose that the government impose a single-payer system on the legal profession. Instead of charging private fees, all attorneys would have to send their bills to LegalCare, a new agency in the federal government. Because the government can bargain collectively, they can impose rational fees for legal services instead of the exorbitant billing fees attorneys now charge. Three hundred dollars an hour? Thing of the past. Everyone knows that the government can control costs through price-setting; now we can see this process applied to the legal system, where the government has a large interest in seeing cost savings.
How will we pay for LegalCare? I take a page from the House surtax method here, which will disproportionately hit doctors in a wide variety of disciplines. In this case, I propose a 5.4% surtax on lawyers, judges, lobbyists, and political officeholders at the state and federal level. They’re the ones who have enriched themselves through this inequity in the legal system. After all, why should we all have to pay for the single-payer legal system when we can penalize lawyers instead?
I think we need a big-bang solution that can integrate a solution to the health-care and legal-care crises.
[Update after 3 PM]
The public-option scam:
Some statements are inherently unbelievable. Such as: “I am an official of the government of Nigeria, and I would like to deposit $60 million in your bank account.” Or: “I’m Barry Bonds, and I thought it was flaxseed oil.” And this new one: “I’m Barack Obama, and I favor more competition in health insurance.”
They must think we’re stupid. And unfortunately, judging by the election results last fall, it might not be a bad bet.
[Update a few minutes later]
A shocking development — honesty from someone in Washington, from the CBO, of all places.
I wish more people would do things like this to these racialist morons. Click on the link to see Senator Boxer eviscerated by an uppity black man who won’t stay on her plantation.
It seems to me that the Democrats ignore polls like this at their political peril:
“Sixty-seven percent (67%) of Mainstream Americans say they are not willing to pay higher taxes and utility costs to generate cleaner energy and fight global warming, compared to only 17% of the Political Class,” reported Rasmussen Reports.
Completely out of touch.
Let the jobless recovery begin.
There are some interesting comments over at this NASA Watch thread about the impending death of Ares 1. This one was particularly sad, but jibes with my experience over the years, and talking to others who have worked for and with Marshall:
I left MSFC last year after dedicating many years of my life to our nations space program (9 years contractor and 9 years civil servant). I consider that time completely squandered. I would never recommend an aerospace career to any bright young person.
The general mood at MSFC is pure apathy tempered only by greed. Keep in mind a GS-13 civil servant (anyone with 10 yrs experience) is knocking down $90K plus per year, 3-4 weeks vacation per year, great benefits, and near total job security. Needless to say – not very many of them are going to rock the boat. In this kind of environment, managers pretty much do what they want since few of the working troops will challenge them and hold them accountable. The primary promotion criterea at the center is how well you “obey” (ie kiss butt). The resulting incompetence at all levels of management is beyond belief.
Ares I is a perfect example of what this environment produces. Remember what ESAS said was “off-the-shelf” 4 segment SRBs and J-2. How that vehicle could ever meet requirements when the upgraded 5 segment SRB and new turbopump J-2 equipped vehicle barely meets requirements is a question some investigation board should ask. But I can already tell you why that vehicle was recommended. Because the top dog said so. And when the top dog says do it then pesky little things like physics or economics matter not to MSFC/NASA management.
I’ve told family for years “If the American people knew how bad things were at NASA – they would shut it down”. There is no solution for NASA. You can’t salvage it. You can’t fix it. It’s over. The cancer that is politics has ravaged our once great space agency enough. Be humane and put it out of its misery.
That’s unlikely to happen, of course, for political reasons, but the Aldridge recommendation to convert the centers to FFRDCs was an attempt to fix some of those problems.
On another topic, a frequent commenter who calls himself “Ben the Space Brit” has some mistaken thoughts on propellant depots:
Propellent depot-based architecture requires a huge commitment to a sustained LEO infrastructure. To the uninitiated, that means building, maintaining and continually refilling specially-designed satellites that act as ‘gas stations in the sky’.
Right now, there is no reason to do this except to have an EELV-based lunar archetecture and to express commitment to a hazy concept of commercial HSF. Simply put, no politician would right now be willing to commit money to such an open-ended venture. The advantage of a HLLV is that it is something that you spend a big amount on once and then operate at a reduced cost. Depots are something that you have to spend on and then keep spending to keep them operational.
Now, it is true that, in the long run, a depot-based architecture will be key to keeping an early-stage lunar outpost operational. However, just as money for commercial Earth-to-LEO developments only became seriously available when there was a destination (ISS), I do not consider it likely that money for depots and other LEO infrastructure of its type will become available until after the outpost is operational, thus creating a clear target for the investment.
IMHO, depots will never be politically acceptable as a precursor to a lunar mission, only as an investment to bring down maintenance and logistics costs for it once in place. You will still need an HLLV to put the outpost in place and also act as the LV for the precursor survey missions.
This makes no sense whatsoever to me. Where is the evidence that an HLLV will “operate at a reduced cost”? The only example we have is Saturn. It did not have low operational costs. There is no reason to believe that an Ares V, or any other wet dream of the heavy lifter fetishists will do so, either. Why does he think that heavy lifters aren’t “something that you have to spend on and then keep spending to keep them operational”? That is an excellent description of a heavy lifter, and the heavier the lifter, the lower the flight rate, which means that you never get your average costs down to anything reasonable.
Depots, on the other hand, shouldn’t require much in the way of ongoing costs, once in place, except perhaps replacing them every few years. Their cost of use should be quite low, and they allow the cost of propellants (the vast bulk of mass that has to be delivered for missions beyond LEO) to drop by encouraging competition among providers. And such an architecture is much more robust, particularly with multiple redundant depots. If a depot fails, you switch over to another one. If a launch system fails, you switch over to another one. But if you only have a single heavy lifter (and does anyone imagine that we’re going to develop two?) and it has a stand down (and don’t say that it won’t), you’re out of business until you get it running again.
There may be good arguments against a depot-based architecture, but I haven’t heard any yet. They always seem to be rationalizations to defend an irrational devotion to big rockets.
[Update a few minutes later]
One of the subtitles (or themes) of my piece at The New Atlantis (which will be on line Real Soon Now) could be “BFRs? We don’t need no stinkin’ BFRs.”
[Another update a few minutes later]
There’s an interesting discussion in comments over at Selenian Boondocks about the politics of selling propellant depots.