Category Archives: Media Criticism

Media Criticism, Space

Bad PR, In My Opinion

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Scaled has issued a press release in response to Rob Coppinger’s speculations about Monday’s rudder-dragging incident that raises new questions. What do they mean when they say:

…you should question the motivations of a publication that reports design or flight test information that is based only on speculation.

Why should we question them? What will it gain us to do so? What “motives” are they implying here?

Also, my understanding is that Rob posted this at his blog, which presumably has less rigorous standards than a Flight Global article, and is exactly the place to do the same kind of speculating that we all were (though I didn’t blog about it).

This seems like an unjustified slam at Rob, with no basis, other than that they’re upset about his speculations. I doubt if it will change his reporting or attitude toward Scaled in the future, but this doesn’t seem like very good press relations to me, and I just don’t understand their purpose in doing this. As Clark says, it would have been a lot better had they left off that last sentence. Also, as Jeff says, that’s why they call them “test flights.”

Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Space, Technology and Society

Solar System Day

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Regular readers know that I hate the earth and the environment.

Well, not really, but I’d imagine that some of the more deluded among them believe that. And I am opposed to many so-called environmentalists. But it’s not an anti-environment position so much as an anti-anti-humanity and anti-anti-free market position.

So I do have trouble getting into Earth Day. I find the notion far too blinkered and unimaginative.

Yes, earth is special and, as we learned over forty years ago (shortly before the first Earth Day), looks like a very precious and fragile jewel against the black background of an unimaginably vast, sterile and hostile universe.

But it’s just one planet of uncountably many, and we don’t just live on a planet, we live in a solar system, a galaxy, a universe. In fact, while there’s an implicit recognition of this in the worship of the sun by the renewable energy types, they’re insufficiently open minded about the use of the rest of the system as a source of resources whose harvesting would be much gentler on the planet than mining them here, if it could be done cost effectively.

I’d like to see Earth Day used as a platform to focus a lot more attention on the environmental benefits that space technology has brought us over the past half century, from data gathering on deforestation and pollution, communications that allow less business travel and more telecommuting, to space-based navigation that saves fuel and lives. I’d also like to see consideration of the even greater future potential for saving the planet via space.

I actually do share the goal of the anti-humans of wanting to reduce the environmental burden of humanity on the planet, and I don’t even necessarily object to the goal of reducing the terrestrial population, as long as we can dramatically increase the extraterrestrial human population, because I’m one of those people who think that human minds are the ultimate resource, and that you can’t have too many of them. But the way to achieve that goal is to open up space, not to simply reduce the human population on earth, by whatever means necessary (and many of these folks think that end will justify any means).

Back in the seventies, many of the L-5ers were hippies who recognized the peaceful potential of space colonization to gently depopulate the earth and make it into a giant natural park, with the vast bulk of humanity living and producing off planet the wealth, via industrial-intensive processes, that would make such a thing affordable. I wasn’t a hippy, but I thought then, and still think, that a wonderful ultimate goal.

But the means to achieve it are not more constraints and taxes on current energy use, or population. It is to deploy technologies that can actually achieve the goal — nuclear, molecular manufacturing, fusion (if we can do it), and low-cost space access, which might eventually make space solar power and extraction of other extraterrestrial resources for use on earth economically feasible.

Golda Meir once said that there would be peace in the Middle East when the Arabs started to love their children more than they hated the Jews. Similarly, the planet will be saved when many of the watermelons who claim to care for it start to love it more than they hate humans, freedom, individualism and technology.

[Thursday morning update]

Save the humans:

Last week the Environmental Protection Agency did bravely move forward by finding that things like smokestacks and breathing — or anything related to greenhouse gases — endanger the public health and welfare. And since the EPA can now regulate CO2, it can have a say in nearly everything we do with little regard for silly distractions like economic tradeoffs…

…What’s worse than the EPA grabbing power over CO2? Well, leading Luddite and Congressman Henry Waxman is worse. His proposal sets carbon reduction goals of 20 percent by 2020, 42 percent by 2030 and 83 percent by 2050, and, with cap-and-trade, effectively nationalizes energy production.

This incremental destruction of prosperity is probably going to have to be modified as soon as citizens get a taste of reality. But how could any reasonable or responsible legislator suggest an 83 percent cut in emissions without any practical or wide-scale alternative to replace it, or any plan to pay for it all?

Well, that assumes that Henry Waxman is reasonable or responsible, when the available evidence indicates otherwise.

[Bumped]

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Confidence Building

17 Comments

Appropriately frightened CEOs are hampering the recovery:

The yield curve predicts growth. Check. Consumer sentiment is ticking up. Check. But CEO confidence is lousy, and CEOs are (not) spending accordingly. Whoops. This begs the question: Why are CEOs in such a low mood?

Answer: If you are a CEO in financial services, manufacturing, energy production and health care, you are going to be more regulated. Period, end of story. Your response to forthcoming regulation of yet-to-be-determined complexity will be to hunker down. Keep your name out of the news, improve the balance sheet and hold tight.

This is why the U.S. economy, which wants to turn the corner, is still stuck in the intersection as it decides which way to go.

In her book The Forgotten Man, Amity Shlaes (now a Forbes columnist) wrote that the 1937-38 “depression within a depression” occurred when “capital went on strike.” President Roosevelt’s willingness to “try anything”–including retroactive taxation, laws against discount pricing and an attempted Supreme Court packing–had businesses and their backers so confused about Roosevelt’s rules that they simply withdrew.

This is the risk of Obama’s willingness to “do what it takes.” The words sound positive and action-oriented. But in practice, “do what it takes” really means “anything can happen.” Tearing up of legal contracts … that can happen. Limits to salary and travel … that can happen. Bullying by the Environmental Protection Agency … that can happen. Nationalization of General Motors and Citigroup … that can happen. Nobody knows for sure. Government is sorting it out, day by day.

I’d be happy to triple Congressional salaries, if they wouldn’t come in to “work.”

Media Criticism, Space

Confusing

4 Comments

Andy Pasztor has an article at the Journal today about NASA’s budget problems that is very misleading in its use of the word “Constellation.” For instance:

By casting doubt on Constellation’s progress, the report may provide ammunition for lawmakers and others hoping to extend the life of the shuttle past its current retirement date of 2010. Extending the life of the shuttle could reduce the gap between the last shuttle flight and the initial operation of Constellation. Lockheed Martin Corp. is the prime contractor for the project.

No, Lockheed Martin is not the prime contractor for Constellation, which consists of a number of system elements, starting with the Ares 1 launcher and Orion capsule. LM is only prime for the Orion. ATK is the lead for the Ares 1.

And then he writes:

Accelerating Constellation to 2013, as some inside NASA have advocated, would require significantly larger budget hikes, according to the report. NASA officials project the total cost for Constellation at around $30 billion

It’s not “accelerating Constellation,” which won’t be complete for many years, as it includes things like the Ares V heavy lifter, earth departure stages, the Altair lunar lander, etc., development of which haven’t even begun. It’s only accelerating Ares/Orion, which is what is required to close the dreaded “gap” (assuming that they don’t instead just do COTS D and hope that SpaceX comes through with Falcon 9 and Dragon).

And there’s no way that the total cost for “Constellation” will be only thirty billion. The GAO recently estimated that Ares 1 alone is going to cost at least seventeen billion, and Orion was going to cost at least twenty, with top estimates of twenty and twenty-nine respectively, which would mean close to fifty billion for Ares/Orion alone (and that’s just development costs — it excludes operations).

With all the numbers floating around out there, it’s easy to get things confused, but the words do mean things. Ares/Orion are not Constellation — they are a subset of it and only the first planned elements.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Lies, Damned Lies…

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…and Mexican gun violence:

Obama is right that the U.S. is largely responsible for the carnage in Mexico, which claimed more than 6,000 lives last year. But the problem is neither the drugs Americans buy nor the guns they sell; it’s the war on drugs our government insists the rest of the world help it fight. Instead of acknowledging the failure of drug control, the Obama administration is using it as an excuse for an equally vain attempt at gun control.

And the administration continues to lie about the percentage of Mexican guns that come from the US, and much of the media ignorantly (or otherwise) repeat it.

Business, Economics, Education, Media Criticism, Philosophy, Political Commentary

Making Ayn Rand Look Good

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Tyler Cowen has a brutal review of what looks to be an idiotic ant-capitalist documentary:

A few months ago I went back and tried to read some Ayn Rand. As Adam Wolfson has suggested recently in these pages, it wasn’t easy.1 I was put off by her lack of intellectual generosity. I read her claim that “collectivist savages” are too “concrete-bound” to realize that wealth must be produced. I read her polemic against the fools who focus on redistributing wealth rather than creating it. I read the claim that Western intellectuals are betraying the very heritage of their tradition because they refuse to think and to use their minds. I read that the very foundations of civilization are under threat. That’s pretty bracing stuff.

I can only report that The End of Poverty, narrated throughout by Martin Sheen, puts Ayn Rand back on the map as an accurate and indeed insightful cultural commentator. If you were to take the most overdone and most caricatured cocktail-party scenes from Atlas Shrugged, if you were to put the content of Rand’s “whiners” on the screen, mixed in with at least halfway competent production values, you would get something resembling The End of Poverty. If you ever thought that Rand’s nemeses were pure caricature, this film will show you that they are not (if the stalking presence of Naomi Klein has not already done so). If you are looking to benchmark this judgment, consider this: I would not say anything similar even about the movies of Michael Moore.

In this movie, the causes of poverty are oppression and oppression alone. There is no recognition that poverty is the natural or default state of mankind and that a special set of conditions must come together for wealth to be produced. There is no discussion of what this formula for wealth might be. There is no recognition that the wealth of the West lies upon any foundations other than those of theft, exploitation and the oppression of literal or virtual colonies.

“Narrated by Martin Sheen” would be the first clue.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Coming Fourth American Republic

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Here’s a long, but interesting essay on American history, and what perhaps lies ahead.

His formulation of multiple republics since 1787 makes a lot of sense to me, particularly since, though we haven’t written a new constitution, we have amended and misinterpreted it far beyond anything that the Founders envisioned for the nation. It’s pretty clear that both the War Between the States and the New Deal were major demarcation points from one governmental era to the next (Wilson was the first fascist American president, but even his era, even with the introduction of the federal income tax, didn’t end the post-war limits on government). And sadly, Reagan only temporarily slowed down the growth of the state, but didn’t end the era of what Delong calls the “Special Interest State.” Obama and the current Democrats may finally do so, however, in their overreaching. I certainly hope so.

Delong is optimistic that we may return to a true republic again in the next phase. I hope he’s right. But even if so, I fear a very ugly transition.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Winning Hearts And Minds

22 Comments

A Democrat official in New Hampshire says that the Tea Partiers are out of their minds. Well, the feeling is mutual, I’m sure. I don’t have an idea why this guy, and Pelosi, and the other Democrats trying to denigrate these people think that this is going to tamp down the anger at them. And according to Rasmussen, if they’re crazy, there are an awful lot of crazy folks out there, including a lot of Democrats. And note the huge opinion gap between political elites and the rest of us. All this is going to do is get people to sharpen up their pitchforks even more.

[Update a few minutes later]

Michael Barone says that the public isn’t as stupid as the political elites would like to believe:

Many of the sneering comments about the participants in last week’s hundreds of tea parties across the nation were premised on the idea that these people didn’t know much about public policy. The hostile CNN reporter (Rush Limbaugh might call her an infobabe) who told tea party attendants that they were going to get tax rebates was an example of that. It was also an example of the condescension of so many in the media: ordinary people should be satisfied with getting a few extra bucks now and shouldn’t worry about the long-term effects of huge increases in government spending and government debt. As I wrote last, the idolators who attended Obama events last year seemed entranced by the candidate’s persona, while the tea party participants seemed preoccupied with serious issues of long-term public policy. Which side was more intellectually serious?

We’ll see how long he can continue to skate on charisma alone. Because that’s about all he has.

[Update late morning]

More Tea Party thoughts:

What we found most striking about the tea party we attended, and those that we observed taking place elsewhere, is how it departed from the normal partisan atmosphere one comes to expect at political rallies. Those in attendance were for the most part not political activists, and most did not come to support one party or oppose another, though certainly there was an emphasis on limited government that once was, and must become again, the rallying cry of the Republican Party.

We say once because during the presidency of George W. Bush, Republicans in Washington abandoned their economic principles. Spending rose and the earmark culture flourished. As has often been said, Republicans went to Washington to drain the swamp, but instead joined the alligators.

Thus, the furious reaction by many on the left to the tea parties. They hoped, they believed that fiscal conservatism was a spent force, that conservatives had lost the credibility and even the will to be fiscally responsible. After bringing America dramatically closer to the European economic model of state control in three short months, with only fawning approval from the mainstream media, suddenly from out of nowhere came demonstrations of mass opposition to the Obama program. Left wing activists, flush with triumph, could only ask with great annoyance: How could the “failed” policies of the past eight years suddenly have such popular support?

They fail to recognize that the tea parties are not Republican forums for Bush nostalgia. They are expressions of frustration with the government’s failure to live within its means, as the rest of us must. Hundreds of billions of dollars in Bush administration debt are being chased by trillions of dollars of Obama administration debt. The pundits care only about political scorekeeping, so they simply are not equipped to understand the honest-to-goodness, enough-is-enough exasperation of the tea parties.

The fact that the tea parties represent a grassroots movement only perplexes the cynics further, because Obama’s election to the presidency has been marketed as the apotheosis of grassroots populism. It is as if the true believers of ever-expanding government have actually convinced themselves that only hedge fund managers on Wall Street could possibly oppose the government takeover of the private sector. Of course, they’ve also convinced themselves that a federal government unable to balance its budget — or even to finish its budget on time — year after year is somehow going to introduce sound accounting to the private sector.