Category Archives: Media Criticism

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Media Will Be Quite Disappointed

28 Comments

The Panama city shooter wasn’t exactly a Tea Partier:

Clay Duke, the man who opened fire on a Florida school board Tuesday, posted a “last testament” on Facebook decrying the wealthy and linking to a slew of progressive sites including theprogressivemind.info and MediaMatters.org.

Doesn’t matter, of course — they’ll just lie about it, and call him a “violent right winger.” Because “right wingers” are violent by definition, right? Or perhaps they’ll just pretend he didn’t exist, though if he really were a “right winger,” there would be endless blathering by the lefty punditocracy about how the violent rhetoric of the racist Tea Partiers encouraged him. After all, these are the same hacks who still say that Tim McVeigh was a Christian.

[Update a while later]

Related: Guess which party the media never mentions the Westboro Baptist Church is affiliated with?

Media Criticism, Space, Weird

An Internet First

29 Comments

I rarely link to Mark Whittington’s site, but I think that this is history making. He has finally revealed one of his previously imaginary friends in his “Internet Rocketeer’s Club.” In this case, finally, it’s not imaginary.

I don’t think I really deserve the honor though, unlike Mark, I do know something about rocketry, having actually done it for a living. I also know about launch costs, economics, policy, politics, history, grammar, spelling, HTML, and many other things of which Mark seems innocent. But I hope I’ll get a secret decoder ring soon.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Health Care And Overreach

12 Comments

Twice now, while there were other factors in both cases, the Democrats have been severely punished in elections over their attempt to socialize medicine.

First, in 1994, they lost both houses of Congress because of HillaryCare, which fortunately didn’t pass.

They learned the wrong lesson from 1994, deluding themselves that they lost not because they attempted to take over a sixth of the nation’s economy, and one on which people depend for their very health and lives, but because they had failed to do so. So in 2010, they applied this false lesson to double down, deluding themselves this time that if they passed the latest unconstitutional monstrosity, it would be the key to electoral victory. Even Bill Clinton fantasized (or at least pretended to, perhaps as a way of sabotaging the Obama administration?) that it would magically become more popular once it was passed, and Queen Nancy assured us, holding her giant gavel, that we would find out what was in it then, and like it.

This time, they lost the House even more dramatically, and kept the Senate only because of a combination of safe Dem seats up that year and some flawed Republican candidates. The fact that the law remains on the books, with a president in the White House prepared to veto any repeal of it, his signature “victory” (ignoring the fact that it was rammed through the Congress in a partisan manner via undemocratic procedural gimmicks with very little White House guidance or input), will just make things that much worse in two years in the Senate, with many more vulnerable Democrats up for election, perhaps even providing the Republicans with a filibuster-proof majority.

So what false lesson will they take from this latest setback on their “progressive” road to serfdom? My prediction: the polls are all wrong — the bill was unpopular not because it passed, but because it wasn’t socialistic enough, lacking a “public option” (read “government option” or inevitable slide down the steep greased slope to single-payer). Because in their ideology, the “reality-based community” ise impervious to empirical data, or reason, or reality. It’s the thing that saves us from them, ultimately, in a country where the voice of the people is ultimately heard.

[Update a while later]

And here is Chris Gerrib in comments, right on cue, to validate my prediction.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space, Space History

Time Warp

18 Comments

I just noticed that space historian Roger Launius has a blog, which I’ve added to the roll on the left. And last week, he had a very peculiar post.

It’s actually a generally not-bad history of NASA’s (and the nation’s) continued attempts to replace the Shuttle, but it contains these words:

Without a doubt, moving to a next generation human launcher will cost a significant amount of money. It always has.

…No doubt, building a new human-rated launcher will require a considerable investment. If the United States intends to fly humans into space as the twenty-first century proceeds it must be willing to foot the bill for doing so.

There are two striking omissions in the narrative. First is the complete lack of mention of commercial space or privately developed systems, even failed ones. They don’t exist at all. It might have made sense to write such a piece in the early eighties, maybe even the early nineties, when it was still unimaginable in the conventional wisdom that there would be multiple solutions to the Shuttle replacement problem, let alone private ones.

But this is 2010. And this blog post was written only two days after the successful flight of the Falcon 9 and Dragon. It’s as though it didn’t happen, and remains so unlikely to that it isn’t worthy of mention in the context of the discussion.

So what does he think is a “significant amount of money”? Or a “considerable investment”? Because any rational analysis, based on SpaceX’s costs to date, would indicate that they are less than a billion dollars away from having a “new human-rated launcher” (ignoring the archaic and useless notion of “human rating” a twenty-first-century launcher designed to the current state-of-the-art in reliability). But no, because “it always has,” it always will.

It’s amazing how myopic the conventionally wise can be.

[Update a while later]

Speaking of myopic space historians (or policy analysts or both, depending on what you think he is), I hadn’t previously seen this quote from John Logsdon cited by Jeff Foust at today’s issue of The Space Review:

Others question just how “commercial” such systems could really be. “I think one of the worst things that happened in managing this revolutionary proposal with respect to human spaceflight is to call the transportation service ‘commercial,’” John Logsdon, the former director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, said in a space policy forum earlier this month hosted by the Marshall Institute. “There is no obvious market” right now for crewed flights beyond NASA’s needs, he claimed, and allowing that question to dominate the policy debate “is one of the policy failures of the last year.”

Well, let’s see. Space Adventures has had several customers for the Soyuz flights, and has more who would like to fly, but the supply seems to be the choke point. Bob Bigelow has MOUs with several nations who would like to lease his facilities who clearly can afford it, but in order to use them, their “astronauts” (or whatever they want to call them) will need rides to and from. In addition, Bob has offered hundreds of millions of dollars of his own (existing) money for the capability to offer such rides. Maybe John doesn’t want to call that a market, “obvious” or otherwise, “beyond NASA’s needs,” but it sure looks like one to me.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

If The Republicans Supposedly Filibuster So Much…

2 Comments

…there’s a reason:

the GOP’s historic number of filibusters is the only viable response to Sen. Harry Reid’s unprecedentedly authoritarian rule of the Senate. Senator Reid has blocked the minority from amending bills more than any Senate majority leader in history — and more times than the last four Senate majority leaders combined.

How does Senator Reid do this? He uses his right to be recognized first by the chair to offer just enough amendments to bills to block any further amendments. These amendments are usually meaningless, like changing a word or a date, but they effectively block the minority’s opportunity. This is a clear abuse of the spirit, if not the letter, of the Senate’s rules, and that is one reason why we have witnessed Republicans’ frequent use of the filibuster.

Well, we’ll have an opportunity to fix that in a couple years. And even if Reid had lost, I wouldn’t lay long odds that Schumer wouldn’t have behaved the same way.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space

In Which The Truth Is Revealed

22 Comments

There are a lot of comments over this post at Space Politics (over a quarter of a kilocomment, at last count) from last week. As is often the case, they are rife with reading miscomprehension and straw men — I guess people only read, or hear, what they want to read or hear. Hint: just for the record, I don’t think that anything NASA does to go back to the moon is intrinsically Apollo redux. I think that Apollo redux is Apollo redux.

But what’s fascinating is, finally, an implicit admission by some of the most vociferous opponents of the new policy that they had no concept of what it actually was, and that their opposition to it was based entirely on the (politically stupid) decision by the White House to make a big effing deal out of the fact that we aren’t going back to the moon as the first destination (allowing people not paying attention to nuttily spin this into the notion that we weren’t going back at all or were ending the American human spaceflight program). (I should note, though, that there are also some people like the troll “amightybreakingwind” who seem to sincerely believe that Constellation was the greatest concept ever conceived by the human mind, and continue to hold out hope for its resurrection).

But Ferris Valyn managed to finally elicit the truth after posing the question: if the policy had been rolled out simply as a faster-cheaper-better way to get back to the moon (and yes, despite the false lessons of the nineties, there really are faster, cheaper, better ways to do space than NASA has been doing them), would you have supported it? And the answer, in more than one case, was essentially “yes.” Which is interesting, of course, because that’s exactly what it is.

But as I noted over there, it remains frustrating that so many people are basing their opinions about the new direction totally on emotion, determined to remain ignorant of what it actually is, and primarily based on the speech of a president whose every statement comes with an expiration date, and who is likely a one-termer, so it doesn’t matter where he says we’re going to go first or ever in space. It is a tragedy, from a policy standpoint, that it was this politically incompetent White House that came up with the smartest space policy in the history of the program, in terms of finally opening up space (not that that’s a high bar), because it poisoned the well in selling it, particularly with the incoming Congress.

It’s going to take a lot of work to undo the policy damage, but I’m hoping that I’ll be properly funded soon to start to try.