Category Archives: Media Criticism

Business, Economics, General, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Space

The Heavy-Lift Empire Strikes Back?

46 Comments

Thoughts over at Space Transport news. It was a little dismaying to see Augustine’s comment.

I have no predictions as to the outcome, but I’m not particularly hopeful, given the nature of bureaucracy and entropy. But we are continuing to get useful ideas out there, for the private sector to pick up on even if we continue to waste billions on NASA’s HSF program.

[Update in the evening]

This article would indicate that the panel overall remains stuck in the conventional wisdom that heavy lifters are on the critical path to space exploration. One of the hopes for my piece in The New Atlantis was to break that consensus, but it doesn’t seem to have succeeded, so far.

[Late evening update]

Here’s an interesting chart (that appears to have been captured by a camera at the actual presentation) that summarizes the seven options currently being considered. I assume that “IP” is international participation (aka the Russians). I’m not sure what “SH” means, but perhaps one of my readers will be smarter at deciphering than me. I’m guessing something like “Super Heavy.”

Note that the panel (as a whole — there could be dissent among individuals) assumes that refueling is not an option within the current budget, as the chart is currently configured. Note also that it assumes that Ares V is required. I assume that these two assumptions are not coincidental. Take away the heavy lifter, and there’s abundant budget for depots, and other things.

The real question to me is: what is the driver for the perceived heavy-lift requirement? Is it a credibility factor with the flight rate necessary for smaller vehicles to deliver all the propellant for (say) a Mars mission? Or a “smallest biggest piece” (again for, say, a Mars mission) that begs credibility in terms of ability to assemble it on orbit? Or a “let’s keep the options open for some kind of need that we can’t anticipate”? Or all of the above? I expect that we will know the answers to these questions in a very few weeks. I don’t think that the panel will hide the ball the way that NASA did with ESAS.

But one hint might be in noting that the Mars mission (presumably to the surface) is the biggest driver — it assumes both “many” Ares V launches while also noting that refueling is “enabling” (i.e., cannot be done without it). This is a simple recognition of the reality that at some point, even the heavy-lift fetishists have to recognize that there is a limit to the degree to which they can afford to avoid orbital operations — there are some missions simply a bridge too far to do with a single launch.

Anyway, I’m slightly more encouraged by this chart, if for no other reason that it recognizes refueling as a viable option, and that minds are clearly starting to change. I may have more thoughts anon, though, and it’s a long way to August 31st, I suspect, with a lot of perturbations to come.

[Update a few minutes later]

One other point. The chart isn’t good news for Ares I.

[One more update before crashing to catch with with loss of last night’s sleep]

“Brad” has some more comments on the table:

1) The porklauncher, Ares I, looks dead. Only two of the seven options use Ares I, and one of those two options uses commercial crew services as well.

2) Commercial crew services is going to happen. Five out of the seven options exploit commercial crew services.

3) The Shuttle orbiter looks like it will still retire close to schedule. Only one of the seven options extends orbiter operations through 2015.

4) Ares V may not survive. Even though HLV is endorsed with every option, Ares V is only included in four out of the seven, and those four (IMHO) consist of the less probable choices.

5) Propellant depots are enabling to one option, and mentioned as enhancing three options, so depots are not ignored and have a fair chance for future development. Particularly when you take into account that commercial services are included in every option.

6) The ISS is not going to de-orbit in 2016. Five of the seven options extend ISS operations through 2020. The committee’s hope to expand international cooperation will only emphasize the importance of the ISS. Perhaps this might not be a drain on NASA, if international cooperation offsets the cost of flying ISS beyond 2016.

[Thursday morning update]

Todd Halvorson reports on the subject. Does anyone else see something missing in the reporting? You know, the thing that’s “enabling” for Mars First?

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Obama Joker Poster

29 Comments

Jim Garaghty has a critique, with which I agree:

I actually don’t like the Obama-Joker poster, for several reasons. For starters, this image is too “hot” — i.e., the Joker was a sadist and a psychopath, and Obama is neither. Obama’s the opposite of Heath Ledger’s portrayal; the Joker was a nihilist and Obama is a utopian idealist.

There’s something particularly wrongheaded about using a character who says his purpose is to “show the schemers how pathetic their attempts to control things really are” to symbolize a politician in love with centralized planning.

As we watch the President’s poll numbers drop, I feel like a lot of damaging memes are starting to stick to Obama — used car salesman, not stupid but doesn’t know issues in depth (tonsil profiteering!), bad first instincts, a wimp on foreign affairs, melting before our eyes without Bush or McCain to run against… The “Joker” image doesn’t fit any of those, and I think is too easily used as fodder for distractions.

I think that the metaphor of Bush as Dark Knight and Islamism as the nihilist joker is interesting, but this poster is probably counterproductive, because while it may make some feel good, it isn’t grounded in a valid analogy. On the other hand:

William Ayers seemed, at one point in his life, intrigued at the thought of “watching the world burn.”

But he was “just a guy in Obama’s neighborhood” (with whom he helped propagandize schoolchildren with the Annenberg funds), so that’s all right.

[Update on Thursday morning]

Frank J. has his own take:

First off, it’s worth looking at whether the poster is racist. Liberals seem pretty certain it is. An LA Weekly blogger commented that “the only thing missing is a noose.” Now, you might be scratching your head and saying that the only people who would call this racist are brain-dead liberals who shriek “racism!” at every criticism about Obama as an alternative to thinking and only cause more problems by confusing the issue of racism and should thus be chased out of society and forced to live in the sewers, only emerging at night to feed on garbage and bugs.

And while that’s quite fair and probably true, we should still give the possibility of racism a fair hearing. Don’t you remember the long, racist history of black people being compared to the Joker? Of course not, because I just made that up — but it could be true in some alternate universe. Also, the image involves white makeup on a black person. White on black — that has to be racist somehow. I’ll bet makeup places won’t even sell white pancake makeup to black people. They’d be like “No! Get out of here, black person! We won’t sell that to you! That’s racist!”

Beyond the racism in the image that’s quite obvious to crazy people, the other question is whether there are any real substantive comparisons between Obama and the Joker. On the surface, they don’t seem at all alike. The Joker is psychotic, and I’ve heard Obama called a lot of things — arrogant, incompetent, deceitful, a Communist — but not psychotic. Obama doesn’t seem like he’s out to kill anyone — not even terrorists — and only leaves the option of killing people on the table to help make ends meet in his health care plan.

Especially terrorists.

Though he doesn’t seem averse to persuading Granny that it’s time to go.

And then there’s comment number two:

The similarities also include the circumstances that brought each to power. As Alfred said “and in their desperation, they turned to a man they fully didn’t understand.”

And the election of Obama is a joke, a bad one on us.

It’s sure not seeming all that funny to me.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space

Sorry, Mark

32 Comments

But no matter how you want to idiotically mischaracterize it, “Flexible Path” is not “Look But Don’t Touch.” It is a plan to allow us to go affordably and sustainably wherever we (and our inheritors) wish in the (or at least the inner) solar system, including planetary surfaces, if we can raise the money and motivation for the additional hardware necessary to do so. And we’ll certainly be able to touch Phobos, Deimos, and near-earth objects, whether to move or mine them.

[Wednesday morning update]

If you follow the above link, you’ll see that Mark continues to fantasize that I have a “chain,” and that I “leap the length” of it. He should really broaden the range of his clichés, not to mention finding some that have some basis in objective reality. It’s of a part with his imaginary friends in the “Internet Rocketeer Club.”

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Sarah Palin

22 Comments

…as James Tiberious Kirk:

For all his talk of being different, representing “hope,” and bringing “change” Obama has turned out to be quite the bore. He is the consummate insider, a recycler of old ideas and failed policies. People wanted to beam up to the starship and explore strange new worlds. We wanted to boldly go where no man (or woman) has gone before. Obama is in the wrong franchise. He and crazy Doc Brown, I mean Joe Biden, gassed up the DeLorean and took us back in time. To 1976.

Palin passed the Kobayashi Maru. She is qualified to command the ship. She has all the qualities we want in a captain; valor, principals, vision and most of all, the ability to change the rules.

We’ll see if she’s changed them to her advantage.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space

The Great Moon Debate

4 Comments

It’s started over at The Economist. It seems pretty clear that neither debater had an opportunity to see their protagonist’s input. Gold’s criticism is not of opposition to going to the moon per se, but against NASA’s ability to do it effectively, particularly with its chosen architecture. Gregg’s position (and pretty much standard boilerplate from his old Space Studies Institute days) is that the moon is important as a destination, but he is basically silent on how to get there, or even whether or not NASA should do it, or someone else.

At least for this round, they are basically talking past each other. Tomorrow should be more interesting, since they will both be able to respond to what the other said today. As I predicted previously, I suspect that they will be more in agreement than the people who set up the “debate” expect.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Why Most Journalists Are Democrats

6 Comments

A view from the Soviet socialist trenches.

[Update a few minutes later]

This seems related: Obama’s quest into the magic world of anti-American mythology:

There is a reason why snobby elites on the Upper East Side of Manhattan generously donate to leftist causes and support leftist politicians. Snobs and radicals often act in accord because they are not opposites, as some believe, but rather spiritual cousins — equally despising “the bourgeois,” sharing a low view of humanity as herd animals, and sorting people not on their individual merits but by color, income, occupation, ethnicity, gender, and any other characteristic except the content of their minds. Such beliefs have often served as a veiled excuse for tyranny.

This thinking is the direct opposite of the ideal of individual liberty, on which the United States was founded and which defines this country’s exceptionalism. As such, elitist and leftist beliefs are downright un-American — a term that today has become a fighting word, used broadly by both right and left, sometimes with a completely opposite meaning. Not to be outdone, snobs and radicals have also evolved a natural loathing for American “bourgeois” principles.

But the view of America as the command center of the international capitalist conspiracy is definitely not a product of natural evolution, but rather a foreign implant going back to the days of the Cold War.

…Where’s the “imperialist propaganda” when you need it? The leftist propaganda encountered so little resistance in the land of the alleged “capitalist conspiracy” that an airbrushed version of history has almost universally replaced the truth in the media, education, and entertainment. The intended result is the widespread notion of America’s guilt. One doesn’t even need to be a leftist anymore to believe in this country’s image as a violent empire controlled by greedy capitalist oligarchies that dictate its policies.

Press, academia and the education establishment are mediocre when it comes to imparting reality and promoting critical thinking, but superlative when it comes to collectivist propagandizing.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

A Good Point On Reading The Bill

16 Comments

One of Mark Steyn’s readers points out that:

Congress passed the onerous Sarbanes-Oxley* on the premise there needed to be a new law requiring CEOs to read their financial statements and personally face legal penalties in case there are errors. Maybe Congress would be a bit more cautious if they faced jail time when their 10-year budgets didn’t pan out.

Of course, Congress is notorious for passing bills that hold others to higher standards than themselves, and that don’t apply to themselves (as the “health-care” atrocity surely won’t — they’ll continue to get their own gold-plated plan). In a sane world, SOX would be repealed (that would have a bigger stimulus effect than anything that the people in Washington have done to date), but the larger point is that this practice of holding themselves above the laws that they pass themselves was one of the things that drove the 1994 Republican revolution. In fact, fixing that was one of the ten points of the Contract With America. Time to start drafting up a new one, I think.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Eliminating Private Insurance

13 Comments

Was Barack Obama lying then, or is he lying now? And why isn’t the mainstream press pointing this out?

Oh, right.

[Update a few minutes later]

Thoughts on the unprincipled toads who claim to represent our interests:

In the one exchange I’ve seen, Specter tried to explain how he goes about learning what’s in a 1,000 page piece of legislation. Specter said that, because of time constraints, his practice is to divide responsibility for reading the bill among his staffers. This explanation brought boos from the crowd.

The Senate fancies itself “the world’s greatest deliberative body.” But it’s becoming increasingly clear that the Senate is not a deliberative body at all — not when Senators concede that they would vote on legislation to overhaul one-sixth of our economy, and arguably the most important sixth, without having read the legislation. Specter’s defense that there’s not enough time for him to read it all himself simply raises the problem in a more acute from: why would the world’s greatest deliberative body consider legislation on a timetable that leaves Senators with insufficient to see for themselves exactly what’s in the bill?

Americans inevitably will disagree over how our health care system should operate. But nearly every American would agree that Senators should know what’s in major health care legislation before they vote on it, and that such legislation should not be enacted in a rush.

No, there are Americans like commenter “Jim” who thinks this setup is just dandy, as long as it gives him the socialist system that he wishes to impose by stealth on the rest of us.

[Early afternoon update]

Thoughts from Kevin Hassett:

Here’s how it works. Democrats propose something radical and unpopular, like President Barack Obama’s health-care plan. Then the Blue Dog Democrats traipse onto the public stage claiming to carry the banner of fiscal responsibility and moderation.

The show is covered the same way by the media every time. The virtuous, “centrist” Blue Dogs share the concerns of the American people, the story goes, and have enough votes to stop Nancy Pelosi and the fringe from radicalizing American policy. After “tough” negotiating sessions, the Democrats cave in to Blue Dog demands, producing a bill that is moderate and reasonable.

Except that it’s all just nonsense, meant to create the illusion that Pelosi isn’t dictating the details of Democratic bills in the House. In fact, she is.

Take the health bill. For any moderate and sensible individual, the key problem with Obama’s approach is that it calls for a public insurance plan, run by the government, that will compete with private plans.

…Make no mistake. If a public plan is enacted, it will move us swiftly toward socialized medicine with a single government payer, an objective Obama has endorsed in the past.

I agree that the Blue Dogs are not the friends of either the Republicans or the American people, but I also agree with Ramesh that there are other reasons to oppose this bill.

And as an aside, I hate the phrase “make no mistake.” It’s usually a bit of political rhetoric (like Obama’s verbal fetishes of “…as I’ve said before,” and “Let me be clear”) and throat clearing to indicate a massive whopper to come. I don’t think that Hassett is wrong, but I wish that he’d avoid that cliche.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The God Who Bleeds

10 Comments

Jonah Goldberg says that the public is starting to see the man behind the curtain of the great Ozbama:

Obama undoubtedly has major accomplishments ahead of him, but in a real way the Obama presidency is over. His messianic hopey-changiness has been exposed for what it was, and what it could only be: a rich cocktail of pie-eyed idealism, campaign sloganeering, and profound arrogance.

As president, he’s tried to apply the post-partisan gloss of his campaign rhetoric to the hyper-partisan dross of his agenda. And he’s fooling fewer people every day.

Indeed, the one unifying theme of his presidency so far has been Obama’s relentless campaigning for a job he already has. That makes sense, because that’s really all Obama knows how to do. He’s had no significant experience crafting major legislation. He has next to no experience governing at all.

But he’s great at giving speeches, holding town halls, and chitchatting with reporters. So that’s largely what he does as president. The problem is that campaigning is different from governing. The former requires convincing promises about what you will do; the latter requires convincing arguments for what you are doing. He’s good at the former, not so good at the latter. Or as columnist Michael Barone puts it, he’s good at aura, bad at argument.

It’s revealing that liberals suddenly want Obama to spare the god and use the rod. Specifically, as Dick Polman notes in the Philadelphia Inquirer, they want Obama to channel Lyndon Johnson (whom no one confused for a quantum leap in our consciousness). Liberal historian Doris Kearns Goodwin says she wants BHO to go LBJ: “to take charge, to draw lines, to pressure, to threaten, to cajole.” Liberal activist Dean Baker says Obama should “get the list of every hardball nasty political ploy” that Johnson ever deployed.

As Polman rightly notes, this is crazy talk for the simple reason that Obama has nothing like LBJ’s experience, skill set, or treasure trove of chits and political IOUs. Obama can no more decide to become LBJ than Carrot Top can decide to become Laurence Olivier.

I guess that some people continue to avoid looking behind the curtain.