I don’t think that the redheaded Russian spy is all that hot. I wouldn’t throw her out of bed, but I think that people are making too big a deal of her.
Category Archives: Media Criticism
Et Tu, Cal?
The latest foolishness about the new space policy from an ostensible conservative comes from Cal Thomas. The nonsense begins with almost the opening sentence:
Silly me. I thought America’s unparalleled space program (before the present administration began dismantling it) was a triumph of American ingenuity, technology, vision and boldness.
If you thought that, you weren’t paying attention. There was nothing “ingenious,” “visionary” or “bold” about Constellation and Apollo on Steroids. It was warmed-over technology from decades in the past, and it was obscenely expensive. If it were the only way to do the job, it might have been worth the money, but I don’t think so, even then. The new policy is much more innovative and visionary, and yes, bold, than the old one, regardless of one’s opinion of the president.
More On The Muslim Outreach Kerfuffle
Keith Cowing points out that this isn’t really new, but I think he’s missing the point. Yes, this isn’t the first time that NASA has said it is going to do an outreach. What has people upset is that Bolden said it’s one of the agency’s top priorities.
[Update a while later]
Thoughts on the business of government:
The true business of government involves converting limited authority, granted through reason, into a limitless moral imperative. The Founders were very logical men. Both the Constitution and Bill of Rights are tightly reasoned documents. So were the original charters of government agencies which have since swollen to grotesque size. A calm, logical application of Constitutional principle would have prevented this… but when government transforms itself into a moral enterprise, people become willing to let it bypass its restrictions. Thus, NASA began with a clear mission whose success was easily measured – is space travel advancing or not? It ends in a great, gelatinous mass of international outreach and Muslim self-esteem, open-ended projects that will never require less funding in any future year.
Success is punished, failure is rewarded.
[Update a few minutes later]
Thoughts on why the New York Times and others refuse to cover this:
The reason the MSM has the lid on NASA’s new “mission” to snuggle up to Islam (in between decapitations and floggings) is that it would be devastating to Obama if it became known. On the surface, the new NASA “mission” seems merely screwball, and thus a small story. But I think it’s a good deal more than that. It shows that Obama’s thinking is unrecognizable to the average person. It also shows that he’s unserious — frivolous, really — about something that made a generation of Baby Boomers take pride in their country. How many millions of people sat in their junior high auditoriums and watched the Alan Shepherd and John Glenn launches? How many millions more were up at midnight on July 20, 1969 to watch the first human being, an American, put his foot on the moon?
When the domestic roots of skepticism about America (and sometimes flat-out anti-Americanism) were being laid — in the 60’s assassinations, the Vietnam War, and the exposure of the country’s treatment of blacks — the one thing in which we all took pride was the space program. So for Obama, it’s now one thing that needs to be perverted. Making it a dumbed-down PR front for Islam is, in its way, a genius move for this purpose. But as the MSM recognizes by its silence, it’s a bridge too far.
This makes me crazy, though:
Under Obama, NASA has ended plans to go back to the moon, or go to Mars (something also underreported). Budgets are tight, you know. Time to hunker down and lower our sights. But we can do Muslim outreach.
There were never any serious plans to go back to the moon to end, let alone Mars. The only plan was to keep Marshall and Kennedy busy building big, unnecessary rockets. Work on the (unneeded) heavy lifter wasn’t going to start for years, and work on the necessary earth departure stage and lander wasn’t going to start for year after that. Constellation wasn’t going to get us back to the moon — it was going to collapse of its own fiscal weight at some point. It was better that it happen now than before we sunk too much more money down that rat hole. We have much better prospects for a lunar return now than we did with Constellation, and not just for a few NASA civil servants, but for private adventurers and wealth seekers, even if there isn’t a Glorious Fifteen-Year Plan to do it. Apollo is, finally, over.
Setting The Record Straight
Elon Musk (reluctantly) discusses his divorce and finances. His finances are fair game, but it’s a shame that he has to respond to tabloid gossip about his divorce.
Layers Of Fact Checkers And Editors
There’s kind of a weird editorial by Joshua Green over at the Boston Globe today. I don’t understand the title (Takeoff?), and he doesn’t seem to know the name of either the senior senator from Florida or the NASA administrator. And this kind of statement is always sort of annoying:
The real shock came in January, when President Obama killed its successor, Project Constellation, which aimed to return Americans to the moon by 2020.
What does it mean, to call Constellation the Shuttle’s “successor”? I guess it is, in the sense that it was the next human spaceflight program that would absorb all of the NASA personnel that were working Shuttle, but it’s not like it actually replaces the Shuttle in any functional sense, other than the ability to get crew to and from LEO. And then we have the usual dumb comments from people like Tom Delay:
Critics reply that killing Constellation and reorienting NASA is foolish and costly. “The innovations that have come out of the space program are phenomenal,’’ DeLay said. “With our failing manufacturing base, it is extremely important for our economy to maintain them.’’ Private space flight has shown promise, but it will be years before a commercial company can safely launch astronauts into space. Lacking the capacity to send US astronauts to the International Space Station, we’ll soon pay Russia to ferry them there, which won’t be cheap.
What “innovations” were going to come out of Constellation? The whole point of the project was to avoid innovation, with its associated technical risk. And I suppose that it’s technically true that it will be “years” before a commercial company can safely launch astronauts into space. But it won’t be as many “years” as it would have been with Ares/Orion. There’s no reason that the number of years need be more than two or three, except for resistance from Congress to fund it for dumb reasons like this:
…the loudest complaint regards “American greatness’’ — the idea that the willing forfeiture of our leadership in space amounts to a kind of moral trespass that will cede to nations like China and India the next great strides in science and technology.
This is mindless. We aren’t “forfeiting our leadership in space” by sensibly having private companies perform the mundane task of getting astronauts to and from there, half a century after the dawn of the manned space age. And China and India are both a long way from doing anything that will vault them ahead of us (and even longer, if we follow the new course instead of the moribund Constellation).
Where his critics have a point is in arguing that NASA lacks a clear mission. Without a directive and funding, talk of visiting Mars or an asteroid is grandiose but empty.
While the funding is lacking, due to squabbling on the Hill, there is a directive — to develop the technologies needed to make going beyond earth orbit affordable. But for people who look at the world through Apollo-colored glasses, unless it has a destination and date and unaffordably huge rocket (i.e., a five-year plan for the celestial crops), it’s not a real space program.
Now I’ll Have To Rethink My Position
Are the elite starting to turn against Obama?
“If you’re asking if the United States is about to become a socialist state, I’d say it’s actually about to become a European state, with the expansiveness of the welfare system and the progressive tax system like what we’ve already experienced in Western Europe,” Harvard business and history professor Niall Ferguson declared during Monday’s kickoff session, offering a withering critique of Obama’s economic policies, which he claimed were encouraging laziness.
“The curse of longterm unemployment is that if you pay people to do nothing, they’ll find themselves doing nothing for very long periods of time,” Ferguson said. “Long-term unemployment is at an all-time high in the United States, and it is a direct consequence of a misconceived public policy.”
But…but…Nancy said that paying people unemployment was the fastest and best way to create jobs!
Ferguson was joined in his harsh attack by billionaire real estate mogul and New York Daily News owner Mort Zuckerman. Both lambasted Obama’s trillion-dollar deficit spending program—in the name of economic stimulus to cushion the impact of the 2008 financial meltdown—as fiscally ruinous, potentially turning America into a second-rate power.
“We are, without question, in a period of decline, particularly in the business world,” Zuckerman said. “The real problem we have…are some of the worst economic policies in place today that, in my judgment, go directly against the long-term interests of this country.”
Gee, Mort, I could have told you that two frickin’ years ago. Why did it take you so long to catch on that you were one of the rubes?
And I loved this:
Ferguson warned: “Do you want to be a kind of implicit part of the European Union? I’d advise you against it.”
This was greeted by hearty applause from a crowd that included Barbra Streisand and her husband James Brolin. “Depressing, but fantastic,” Streisand told me afterward, rendering her verdict on the session. “So exciting. Wonderful!”
Brolin’s assessment: “Mind-blowing.”
To be fair, though, I suspect that you could blow Brolin’s mind with a butterfly wing.
This can’t be good for his renomination prospects. The long knives will be out on November 3rd, I suspect.
Don’t Know Much About Thermodynamics
I’m not trading in my anything for this “wind-powered” car.
Buyers’ Remorse
..from the Chicago Sun-Times, over Blogo. I wonder if that’s just the indictment talking, or if they’ll come around on the other empty suit that they sent to the White House?
The Long View
If we can turn the cultural and political momentum around on gun grabbing, can we do it on big government, too?
We’ll find out. I think that Pelosi, Reid and Obama have awakened a sleeping giant. The “Silent Majority” is finally speaking up.
[Update a couple minutes later]
From a surprising source — liberals should defend the Second Amendment:
while liberals certainly do not argue for lawlessness, and will acknowledge the necessity of certain restrictions, it is generally understood that liberals fight to broadly interpret and expand our rights and to question the necessity and wisdom of any restrictions of them.
Liberals can quote legal precedent, news reports, and exhaustive studies. They can talk about the intentions of the Founders. They can argue at length against the tyranny of the government. And they will, almost without exception, conclude the necessity of respecting, and not restricting, civil liberties.
Except for one: the right to keep and bear arms.
When it comes to discussing the Second Amendment, liberals check rational thought at the door. They dismiss approximately 40% of American households that own one or more guns, and those who fight to protect the Second Amendment, as “gun nuts.” They argue for greater restrictions. And they pursue these policies at the risk of alienating voters who might otherwise vote for Democrats.
And they do so in a way that is wholly inconsistent with their approach to all of our other civil liberties.
Of course, true liberals (as opposed to “progressives”) have always supported the Second Amendment. But I can understand why those who want government to rule the people wouldn’t like it.
[Update a few minutes later]
There are over 1400 comments, most of them the usual (“but what about nukes and cannons?” dorm-room stuff), but I was amused to see a little side thread among some of the leftists about the relative virtues of .357 versus .44 Magnum, and carryability. Diversity!
Happy Independence Day
Sadly, I think that too many take our freedom for granted, and are too willing to trade it for government cheese. But I think that the past couple years have seen a reawakening of the principles on which the country was founded, as a backlash against the current political class, which to the degree that it isn’t entirely ignorant of them, seems to hold them in contempt.
Part of that backlash is two promising web sites, debuting today, Declaration Entertainment, and Big Peace, another Breitbart production. I wish them luck in their efforts to help restore the Republic.