Category Archives: Media Criticism

Business, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space

It’s Not The End Of American Leadership In Space

9 Comments

So sayeth Dana Rohrabacher.

[Update mid afternoon]

Jay Barbree has finally noticed that there’s more to the commercial space industry than SpaceX, but he’s still drinking the ATK koolaid:

he key here would be the launch vehicle for Boeing’s CST 100.

Standing by is arguably the world’s most reliable rocket: a U.S.-European vehicle which is an upgraded version of the space shuttle’s solid booster rocket that has flown perfectly 216 times, and France’s Ariane-5 rocket as a second stage that has flown 41 times successfully.

The rocket, called Liberty, is being offered by ATK Space Launch Systems. It’s capable of carrying all crew vehicles in development today.

“Both stages of Liberty were designed for human rating from the beginning,” said ATK Vice President Charlie Precourt, a veteran astronaut and former director of NASA’s flight crew operations. The other rockets haven’t yet gone through the time-consuming process to be certified as safe for flying humans.

Without getting too deep into the details of this nonsense (any discussion containing the phrase “human rating” are almost predestined to be nonsense), he writes this as though Liberty exists in any form other than marketing viewgraphs. Here’s a question I have. Can an Ariane-V even handle the vibration environment on the top of an SRB without major beefing up of the structure?

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space

Six False Lessons

31 Comments

…of the Shuttle program. With Atlantis in orbit for the last time, I have some cautionary words over at Popular Mechanics.

[Update a few minutes later]

I also have a piece up over at National Review Online — is the era of big-government space programs over?

[Update at 12:45 PM PDT]

I’m on hold right now with Bill Carroll on KFI-AM in LA, who’s been bewailing the end of the space program. Don’t know if I’ll get on or not.

[Update a while later]

The segment ended before he got me on, but I’ve been in an email discussion with his producer, so maybe next week.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

The Problem With Big Cities

14 Comments

It isn’t about race:

Think of the path to successful middle class living as a ladder; the lower rungs on that ladder are not nice places to be, but if those rungs don’t exist, nobody can climb. When politicians talk about creating jobs, they always talk about creating “good” jobs. That is all very well, but unless there are bad jobs and lots of them, people in the inner cities will have a hard time getting on the ladder at all, much less climbing into the middle class.

Many sensitive and idealistic people in our society work very hard to keep from connecting these dots and admitting to themselves that bad jobs are something we need. Quacks abound promising us alternatives (“green jobs” is the latest fashionable delusion), but ugly problems rarely have pretty solutions. We need entry level jobs that will get people into the workforce, and we need ways that they can learn useful skills at affordable prices that will help them climb the ladder and move on.

To get these jobs, we have to change the way our cities work. Essentially, we have created urban environments in which the kind of enterprises that often hire the poor — low margin, poorly capitalized, noisy, smelly, dirty, informally managed without a long paper trail — can’t exist. The kind of metal bashing repair shops that fill the cities of the developing world are almost impossible to operate here. Plumbers, carpenters, electricians, pushcart vendors and day care operators need licenses; construction work has to comply with elaborate guidelines and city bureaucracies disgorge the required permits slowly and reluctantly.

The minimum wage is part and parcel of this problem.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The War On Industry

9 Comments

Make that industries:

So starting as a presidential candidate, Obama has:

Called for bankrupting the coal industry.
Raised gas prices by forcing domestic production to a crawl.
Demonized bankers and automatic teller machines.
Went to war against Fox News, talk radio, and Twitter user Kevin Eder.
Alienated Wall Street, which backed him in 2008 — and will probably do so again.
Nationalized the car industry.
Forced Chrysler to terminate 25 percent of its auto dealers.
Demonized Las Vegas.
Alinskyized the Chamber of Commerce.
Blocked Boeing from expanding into a Right to Work State.
Is busy transforming the insurance industry into the equivalent of quasi-government utilities.
Created an uncertain (to say the least) regulatory environment, making new hiring a challenging proposition.
And is now Alisnkyizing private planes, despite having temporary custody of the greatest “private” plane of all.

As Doug Ross wrote last fall, “Unlike Tricky Dick Nixon, Obama Wears His Enemies List On His Sleeve.”

And yet, when only 18000 jobs were created last month, and unemployment is at 9.2%, it’s “unexpectedly.”

[Update a couple minutes later]

See?

U.S. employers added 18,000 workers in June, the fewest in nine months, and the unemployment rate unexpectedly climbed, indicating a struggling labor market.

Emphasis mine.

[Update a few minutes later]

Economic calamity:

…Keynesian economics is a total fail. Fred Barnes quoted FDR Treasury Secretary this morning in the WSJ:

“In FDR’s time, a surge in spending by Washington was a cornerstone of New Deal efforts to lift the country out of the Depression. But unemployment never dropped below 14% in the 1930s and rose to 19% by the end of the decade. “Now, gentlemen, we have tried spending,” Henry Morgenthau, FDR’s Treasury secretary, confessed to House leaders in 1939. “We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work.”

Combine that with James Pethokoukis column yesterday that lays out exactly how dire the future budgeting and debt of the US is and you have an actual, not manufactured, crisis that needs to get resolved today.

This isn’t rocket science. But it does require the progressive wing to give up their reliance on economic theory that only works in a textbook. Economics is a social science and a study of human behavior. Keynes postulated a theory and we have numerous empirical examples of that theory failing miserably. How long will it take?

Einstein said the theory of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting different results. There, my friends, is the core principle of Democratic policy. Insanity.

Frighteningly, almost half the electorate shares their affliction.

Business, Economics, Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Cargo Cult

12 Comments

…of credentials.

[Update a few minutes later]

More thoughts from (uncredentialed) Mark Steyn:

The justification for this absurd prolongation of adolescence is that it opens up opportunities for the disadvantaged. But credential-fetishization has the opposite effect. Remember Ronald Reagan, alumnus of Eureka College, Illinois? Since then, for the first time in its history, America has lived under continuous rule by Ivy League – Yale (Bush I), Yale Law (Clinton), Harvard Business (Bush II), Harvard Law (Obama). In 2009, over a quarter of Obama’s political appointees had ties to Harvard; over 90 per cent had “advanced degrees”. How’s that working out for you? In my soon to be imminently forthcomingly imminent book, I point out that once upon a time America was the land where guys without degrees (Truman) or only 18 months of formal education (Lincoln) or no schooling at all (Zachary Taylor) could become president. Credentialization is shrinking what was America’s advantage – a far greater social mobility than Europe. We’re decaying into a society where 40 per cent of the population do minimal-skill service jobs and the rest run up a trillion dollars of debt in order to avoid that fate, and ne’er the twain shall meet, except for perfunctory social pleasantries in the drive-thru lane.

We’re looking at education upside down: We should be telescoping it, not extending it.

But think of all the academic bureaucrats! Won’t someone think of the academic bureaucrats?