The other day, a commenter said that he thought that Constellation was just the rocket and capsule. Many people don’t know what Constellation (and other things) are, and aren’t, which is what feeds part of the ignorant hysteria that we’ve seen in the press and on the Hill since the new budget was bumblingly introduced in February (and unfortunately, the administrator remains poor on his messaging and communications capability, with his talk about “bailouts” for the commercial sector). Anyway, as a probably futile attempt to clear the fog, I have a glossary and explanation up over at PJM today.
Category Archives: Media Criticism
A Waste Of Time And Money
The Orlando Sentinel, like me, is concerned about politics dragging out decisions on the new space policy. A couple points, though. Retiring the Shuttle isn’t “Obama’s plan” — that decision was made over six years ago, by the Bush administration. Similarly, this seems like a strange criticism:
Mr. Obama’s plan also calls for abandoning NASA’s next manned program, Constellation, and its goal of reaching the moon by 2020 for a new program that would aim for farther destinations. But the best the president has promised is that astronauts would be reaching asteroids sometime in the mid-2020s, and flying around Mars sometimes in the 2030s.
Those goals are so distant, they’re almost meaningless. Such a time lag would put at risk America’s legacy of leadership in manned space exploration.
Let’s see… 2020 for the moon minus 2004 when it was announced: sixteen years. 2025 for an asteroid minus 2010 when it was announced: fifteen years. The Obama plan seems to be a slightly less distant goal than the VSE. Did they complain then?
A resolution may not come till the end of the year, when lawmakers give final approval to the 2011 budget.
That’s far too long for space policy to be in limbo. There’s room for a reasonable compromise — perhaps keeping Constellation with a different rocket, or moving up the timeline for a new manned program.
I wouldn’t assume that there will even be one by the end of the year, and there may be a whole new set of lawmakers involved in the final 2011 budget. In fact, we know that Alan Mollohan won’t be committee chair next year.
And what does “keeping Constellation with a different rocket” mean? The Ares was one of the defining features of Constellation. Do they mean restoring the lunar goal? Or what?
[Update a while later]
A commenter asks:
What is there to Constellation but the rocket and the capsule? I didn’t know anything else existed.
A lot of people are in that boat. A lack of understanding of what Constellation is (and isn’t) is one of the sources of the policy confusion. I’ve actually written an article about that, that I hope will be published soon at Pajamas Media. But briefly, Constellation was all of the elements needed to get astronauts back to the lunar surface, but most of them were scheduled to be developed years from now. Only “the rocket and the capsule” are/were under current development.
The Oil Spill
The arguments never change:
Instead of moving the debate on energy policy forward, the spill is being used to grind preexisting policy axes. Unfortunately, those axes were none too sharp to begin with, and the grinding now in play does more to confuse than to enlighten.
Unfortunately, that’s usually the case.
The “John Yoo Trap”
…that might await Elena Kagan.
This is a little off topic, but the author is guilty of one of my pet peeves:
[Ed Note: or will she be called “General Kagan”?]
I sure hope not. Because a solicitor general is not a general. An attorney general is not a general. I cringe whenever I hear a reporter or pundit talking about “General Reno,” or “General Holder” (of all the people to not call a general, Eric Holder should be at the head of the line — he wouldn’t even rate as a PFC).
The “general” part of the title is not a noun. It is an adjective, modifying “solicitor,” or “attorney.”
I understand the urge to come up with a shorter means of address than “Solicitor General Kagan,” but it’s important to remember that she is a solicitor, and not a member of the armed forces.
[Update late morning]
Separated at birth? Now that’s just mean. Funny, but mean.
History
…that is of no interest:
Stroilov claims that his documents “tell a completely new story about the end of the Cold War. The commonly accepted version of history of that period consists of myths almost entirely. These documents are capable of ruining each of those myths.” Is this so? I couldn’t say. I don’t read Russian. Of Stroilov’s documents, I have seen only the few that have been translated into English. Certainly, they shouldn’t be taken at face value; they were, after all, written by Communists. But the possibility that Stroilov is right should surely compel keen curiosity.
For instance, the documents cast Gorbachev in a far darker light than the one in which he is generally regarded. In one document, he laughs with the Politburo about the USSR’s downing of Korean Airlines flight 007 in 1983—a crime that was not only monstrous but brought the world very near to nuclear Armageddon. These minutes from a Politburo meeting on October 4, 1989, are similarly disturbing:
Lukyanov reports that the real number of casualties on Tiananmen Square was 3,000.
Gorbachev: We must be realists. They, like us, have to defend themselves. Three thousands . . . So what?
And a transcript of Gorbachev’s conversation with Hans-Jochen Vogel, the leader of West Germany’s Social Democratic Party, shows Gorbachev defending Soviet troops’ April 9, 1989, massacre of peaceful protesters in Tbilisi.
Stroilov’s documents also contain transcripts of Gorbachev’s discussions with many Middle Eastern leaders. These suggest interesting connections between Soviet policy and contemporary trends in Russian foreign policy. Here is a fragment from a conversation reported to have taken place with Syrian president Hafez al-Assad on April 28, 1990:
H. ASSAD. To put pressure on Israel, Baghdad would need to get closer to Damascus, because Iraq has no common borders with Israel. . . .
M. S. GORBACHEV. I think so, too. . . .
H. ASSAD. Israel’s approach is different, because the Judaic religion itself states: the land of Israel spreads from Nile to Euphrates and its return is a divine predestination.
M. S. GORBACHEV. But this is racism, combined with Messianism!
H. ASSAD. This is the most dangerous form of racism.
One doesn’t need to be a fantasist to wonder whether these discussions might be relevant to our understanding of contemporary Russian policy in a region of some enduring strategic significance.
As she points out, there should be at least as much opprobrium for defending, or being associated with communists as there is with Nazis. They did, after all, murder many more people. Instead, their fellow travelers continue to travel freely in academia, and pollute the minds of our youth. And as the documents show, they continue to run Europe as well.
[Update a few minutes later]
I hadn’t read the whole thing when I first posted this. Here is another gem:
And what of Zagladin’s description of his dealings with our own current vice president in 1979?
Unofficially, [Senator Joseph] Biden and [Senator Richard] Lugar said that, in the end of the day, they were not so much concerned with having a problem of this or that citizen solved as with showing to the American public that they do care for “human rights.” . . . In other words, the collocutors directly admitted that what is happening is a kind of a show, that they absolutely do not care for the fate of most so-called dissidents.
Remarkably, the world has shown little interest in the unread Soviet archives. That paragraph about Biden is a good example. Stroilov and Bukovsky coauthored a piece about it for the online magazine FrontPage on October 10, 2008; it passed without remark. Americans considered the episode so uninteresting that even Biden’s political opponents didn’t try to turn it into political capital. Imagine, if you can, what it must feel like to have spent the prime of your life in a Soviet psychiatric hospital, to know that Joe Biden is now vice president of the United States, and to know that no one gives a damn.
You should really read the whole thing.
The Oil Spill
…doesn’t make the case for Big Government:
…the idea that because a person or thing can do some things brilliantly doesn’t mean they do everything well. Some writers can’t count past 10 without taking their shoes off; some artists are tone-deaf; some math whizzes cannot learn languages.
Franklin Roosevelt and Albert Einstein were exceptional talents, but asking them to trade occupations would not have been clever. Like Einstein and Roosevelt, markets and government do different things well.
Government is a big and blunt instrument, while markets are smaller and flexible tools. Government acts for the whole, and gives things one direction; markets react to and serve individuals, respond to a great many small discrete interests, and facilitate the pursuit of happiness by creating demands for a great many diverse and various skills.
The frustrating thing is that doing all sorts of things in which it has no business, and isn’t very good at, it’s neglecting the things that it’s supposed to be doing, and being even more incompetent at them in general.
It’s Shakespeare
…with lotion. Greg Gutfeld’s take on Media Matters and its Fox News obsession.
It kind of reminds me of some of the commenters over at Space Politics. Particularly Oler.
That’s No Lady
…it’s my Supreme Court nominee. Of all the things for the left to get its panties in a new wad about.
Though this does remind me of a pet peeve of my own, and a much more egregious one (I just heard it again yesterday morning on the local news). The female anchor (not to pick on her, men do it, too) was describing some sort of brutal crime, after which she said that the police were still looking for the “gentleman” who perpetrated it.
Apparently, many people are no longer familiar with the meaning of the words “lady” and “gentleman” (it just occurs to me that people in show business compliment their audiences by addressing them as “ladies and gentlemen” — do they say that at WWE events? Wishing to see such an exhibition doesn’t seem very ladylike…). They are not synonyms for (respectively) “woman” and “man.” They are describing a particular sort of woman or man. As far as I know, and from all I’ve heard about her public conduct (and ignoring rumors about her private life, about which I’m indifferent), Elena Kagan is a lady. And the guy the news reporter was describing was no gentleman.
“Financial Reform Is Hard”
An interview between Rick Santelli and Regulation Barbie.
Red State Update
Laughing, so they don’t cry about Nashville. Note the guy on the right’s garb, though, and how he’s disrespecting Mexicans.