Not for most people, but for James Lileks:
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Sadly, this is the future for many papers, many of them much better than that one…
[Via Instapundit]
I should have written this.
It is time — indeed, past time — for us to ask: why do the geese hate us?
Here are some good ones. I suspect that the socialists will have a response to this one, though:
President-elect Obama claims that spending approximately $800 billion will create 3.675 million new jobs. That comes to $217,000 per job. This doesn’t sound like a very good value, especially with the national average salary around $40,000. Wouldn’t it be cheaper to just mail each of these workers a $40,000 check?
The response will be that the jobs will last more than a year. But of course, they’d have to last at least five years to be equivalent.
It’s been a year now since Jesse Londin’s most recent post at Space Law Probe. Anyone know what happened?
Jim Pinkerton thinks that space development should be at the center of Obama’s stimulus plan.
The problem is that, as “anonymous.space” points out, it isn’t particularly stimulating in the short run:
Unfortunately, departments and agencies with large portions of their budgets dedicated to multi-year development projects — like NASA and DoD — are extremely poor prospects for near-term economic stimulus funding. Congress appropriates the vast majority of NASA’s $17 billion budget as two-year funding, meaning that NASA has two years to get the funding on contract or otherwise awarded. NASA has an even longer period of time to spend the funding — i.e., obtain a receipt from the contractor and pay them. If the White House and Congress want to see federal funding pumped into the economy in early to mid-2009, NASA would be a very poor choice of vehicle for that funding (as much as I wish it were otherwise). Funding appropriated for NASA in 2009 would not really be flowing until 2010-12.
Space projects are about the farthest thing from shovel ready. And there’s a lot of up-front effort that has to go in to how to properly spend the money.
I met Pinkerton at a free-market space symposium sponsored by Cato about a decade ago. He was (and remains) very enthusiastic about space, but very skeptical about private space.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Over in the same comment thread as the one from “anonymous.space,” Charles in Houston has a great stimulus idea:
OK, I can’t help myself!!! I have to at least fire off a controversial and pointlessly realistic posting on the NASA As Stimulus idea!!!
Why not create a few more NASA centers? We have created lots of jobs by opening the Shared Services Center and the Independent Verification center and some other center that I forgot about and maintaining a whole host of overlapping Centers for years. Why not open a few more in Detroit and hire a bunch of auto workers to do something or the other?? You would build parking lots and visitor’s centers and attract tourists – all NASA facilities attract tourists like picnics attract ants.
He might be able to get John Conyers’ support for that one.
[Update a few minutes later]
Here’s the original version of the Pinkerton piece at Fox News, which is much easier on the eyes to read. The Lifeboat Foundation really needs a site redesign.
Armed Liberal explains:
As I never tire of reminding people, the disparity in power between Israel and the Palestinian proto-states (and the entire Arab world) is immense, driven in large part by the cultural gap between the westernized Israelis and the balance of the Middle East.
I’m no expert, but I have to believe that the day Israel gets tired of this stalemate and simply starts playing by Hama rules, it will be a matter of days before there simply are no more Palestinian people.
And here’s the problem – the same problem I’ve worried about since 2001. How do we prevent this from seeming like a good idea?
Well, the strongest way is for Israel to know that it’s not alone.
And we’re doing a worse and worse job of that.
I also think that Joe Katzman’s comment about the Juan Coles of the world is spot on:
You assume that the hatred of people like Juan Cole is rational.
If Israel falls, and million of Jews are murdered, Cole and his ilk will just smirk and enjoy the victory their Islamist friends have won.
If Israel wipes out the Palestinians, it serves as full justification to them for all the loony things they blieve about Western Civilization (and the Jews), and in their minds they were the “heroes” who tired to stop it. On some level, I suspect they may desire this; it fits their ideological fantasies too well. The fact that [they] would have done a fair [b]it to cause the situation will not, of course, be allowed to enter their minds.
So, their position is one in which nothing of theirs is held at risk, and either way they “win.”
Logic is not relevant to any of this. Only the hate that animates them.
And there are far too many of them, particularly in Europe.
Andy Pasztor makes the same mistake as Bloomberg and many others have in this WSJ piece about the potential new administrator:
One of the first big questions confronting NASA is whether the new team will embrace the Bush administration’s concept of building a new fleet of space shuttle-derived rockets to reach the orbiting International Space Station and return to the moon. In the past few weeks, there have been increasing calls by outsiders to scrap some of those plans in favor of using existing military rockets.
The Atlas and Delta are not “military rockets.”
They are commercial launch vehicles, developed partly with a subsidy from the Air Force. Anyone can fly on them who has the money, and they are built and operated by commercial contractors. They fly out of a military range, but almost all commercial vehicles do. There is nothing “military” about them. Why can’t people get this straight?
…in which Keith Cowing accuses me of being “snarky” (in comments). Guess his irony meter is on the fritz. Oh, well, can’t complain. I’ve been getting steady hittage off it for the last hour or so.
Anyway, with regard to the pick for White House liaison to NASA, I’d just like to see something more to his qualifications than that he raised money for Obama (and of course, his sexual orientation is entirely irrelevant, at least to me).
Some thoughts on a lapdog press corps.
It’s not like we haven’t seen this before. Like the last time a Democrat was in the White House.
The voting for best Middle-East/Africa blog is pretty much down to Juan Cole and Michael Totten. Please don’t sully the award by allowing Cole to win.
Something I just noticed, which is typical of leftists — false advertising. From the Bolsheviks (no, they weren’t really the majority), to “progressives” and “liberals” and support of “appropriate technology,” they have to steal a base with their misleading (to be polite) names. Not to mention, of course, Democratic. “Informed Comment” is just the latest (and even more presumptuous than usual) in the sham names.