Category Archives: Media Criticism

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Technology and Society

Weinergate

27 Comments

…and the Twitter numbers. It’s OK, though — he’s a “liberal” Democrat.

[Update Monday morning]

“I demand an official investigation of the hacker who broke into Congressman Weiner’s Twitter account.” Me too. It’s an outrage.

[Update a couple hours later]

Mickey Kaus agrees with Jim Treacher and me:

So a liberal Congressman basically stands accused of sending a highly inappropiate tweet, while a right-wing blogger basically stands accused of setting him up. They could both be innocent, of course. Or not. But this isn’t a case of he said/he said. There are electronic records of all these actions. If both of the accused open up their computers to a neutral, third party tech nerd–-who doesn’t have to be in law enforcement–-it should be possible to find out fairly quickly if either/both/none of them is culpable, no? The truth is in there!

I wonder if the congressman can handle the truth?

[Tuesday evening update]

The Democrats are circling the wagons, as they always do.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Weird

Yeah, That Must Be It

36 Comments

The president stammers because he thinks too fast.

I don’t recall Buckley as a stammerer, just a deliberate speaker. It’s been a long time since I heard him, though. And I do find Obama’s long “aaaaaannnddds” annoying. Of course, I think that Sarah Palin needs a speech coach, too, not to get rid of her accent, but to lower the register of her voice a little and not sound quite so screechy.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

What Have They Been Hiding?

15 Comments

We may be about to finally find out, though I expect them to continue to stonewall: a judge has ordered the University of Virginia to release the climate research materials And Michael Mann is his usual smarmy, ad-hominem self:

“I think its very unfortunate that fossil fuel industry-funded climate change deniers … continue to harass U.Va., NASA, and other leading academic and scientific institutions with these frivolous attacks,” he said.

Hey, if I’m funded by the fossil-fuel industry, where the hell is my check?

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space, Space History

Yet More Anniversary Thoughts

8 Comments

Robert Zimmerman has a post, with which I mostly agree. But since I seem to be unable to comment there, I would add a couple corrections.

Gagarin’s launch vehicle had reached escape velocity and orbited the earth.

No, it reached orbital velocity. If it had reached escape velocity, it would never have come back. Escape velocity is about 1.4 (root of two, to be exact) times local circular velocity.

Another point (besides the fact that the two Bushes aren’t Junior and Senior).

In all these declarations, it was assumed that the space vehicles and rockets to get into space would be designed and operated by the federal government.

That actually was not the case for the Vision for Space Exploration. If you go back and read the Aldridge report, it recommends commercial (and international) participation, and doesn’t require or expect NASA to develop any launch systems. It only directs it to build a “Crew Exploration Vehicle” (what eventually became Orion). All of the contractors for the Concept Exploration & Refinement trade studies considered existing commercial launchers, or larger versions of them, for the lunar architecture. No one considered anything resembling what became Ares, because it was universally recognized that a Shuttle-derived system would be unaffordable (not to mention that it was always a nutty idea). It was only when Mike Griffin replaced Sean O’Keefe and fired Craig Steidle that a Marshall-developed rocket became the baseline. In fact, other than eliminating the goal of moon first, the new NASA plans (or, at least, the 2011 budget submission) resemble the original VSE much more than Mike Griffin’s Constellation did.