…have to start carrying guns.
Being unarmed didn’t work out well for them the last time.
Category Archives: Media Criticism
The Faux Issue About Ted Cruz And NASA
A good analysis from Hank Campbell, with a little history for those ignorant in the space-science community.
I love cute robots on Mars and pretty pictures from Hubble but keep in mind that politicians and their staffers see beyond that. They know we could have cute robots and pretty pictures while spending a whole lot less money – and we wouldn’t lose a single NASA employee. Though advocates claim we will “lose leadership” in some area or another if we don’t spend more money than some other country, that argument does not work with politicians, who see how badly money can be misused – when it is the pet projects of their political opponents, anyway.
I don’t care what Ted Cruz thinks about global warming, pollution is bad whether he thinks so or not, and Senator and now President Obama said he thought vaccines might be causing autism, but did anyone in science not vote for him in 2008 because of that? If you about care climate science, don’t worry about NASA, worry about the new chair of the environment committee, Senator Jim Inhofe, who denies climate science outright.
If you do care about space science, Cruz is a good choice. Just like Cruz’s opinion on climate change, that science media happens not to like Republicans is irrelevant to how well someone will do at NASA. He’s likely to be better for space science than the people we have had under Democrats, including the space advocate (and space-farer) Senator Bill Nelson of Florida, who insisted that extending the life of the glorified space-going UPS trucks known as the Shuttle Program was somehow necessary for science – a porkbarrel agenda that would have starved out actual space science programs – and did nothing at all about President Obama canceling Constellation in his home state. Nelson has to be careful criticizing the President ‘or the Republicans win’ but Cruz is not handcuffed by common party registration. If he has presidential ambitions, helping NASA will help him in Florida and some common sense about funding will be welcome to the public and a lot of NASA employees and scientists who can’t criticize the President. As I have discussed about the James Webb Space Telescope and its eternal cost overruns, every time a high-profile NASA project hemorrhages money, it’s the less-publicized but more scientifically valuable projects that bleed.
NASA needs someone who is not going to sign off on projects hoping they will become too big to fail. It’s better for the public and it’s better for science, because all those experiments that only need a few million dollars can then get it, rather than being told to wait for next year because an old program no one is excited about is delayed and over budget once again.
Unfortunately, he’s bought (or at least seems to have bought) into the SLS BS. But he’s a smart guy, so he may be educable.
Martin Rees
…has some thoughts on risk, and who will be exploring Mars:
…space travel will be done by adventurers, doing it for the sake of it, and they will thus become more like today’s mountaineers, who are actually doing things which others have already done, but making life harder for themselves – for example by climbing without ropes.
“I hope that some people now living will walk on Mars, but they will go in my view not in the spirit of Nasa astronauts – who are exposed to fairly low risks – but as part of a cut-price venture accepting great danger and perhaps even a one way ticket. If the Chinese wanted to have a prestige programme, as the Americans did with Apollo, they could get there in 20 years. But unless they do so, the first people to land on Mars will be mad, brave adventurers, and we will cheer them on.
Yup.
Fifty-Dollar Oil
Is it a floor, or a ceiling?
Competitive market conditions would therefore dictate that Saudi Arabia and other low-cost producers always operate at full capacity, while US frackers would experience the boom-bust cycles typical of commodity markets, shutting down when global demand is weak or new low-cost supplies come onstream from Iraq, Libya, Iran, or Russia, and ramping up production only during global booms when oil demand is at a peak.
Under this competitive logic, the marginal cost of US shale oil would become a ceiling for global oil prices, whereas the costs of relatively remote and marginal conventional oilfields in OPEC and Russia would set a floor. As it happens, estimates of shale-oil production costs are mostly around $50, while marginal conventional oilfields generally break even at around $20. Thus, the trading range in the brave new world of competitive oil should be roughly $20 to $50.
Makes sense to me.
[Update a few minutes later]
I’ve long said that oil over a (inflation adjusted) hundred dollars a barrel was unsustainable. This would seem to validate that.
High-Fat Rodent Diets
Why they are not to be trusted:
So are the results telling us that the increasingly popular low carb high fat approach is wrong? That after all there’s no need for official bodies to perform a major U-turn? Not as far as I can tell. In fact it seems the rodent work is highly misleading. Not only are the so called ‘high fat diets’ they are fed nothing like the low carbohydrate diets any informed human would follow, but the animals have been selectively bred to ensure they become fat and diabetic on a high fat diet. This is not research, it is a rigged game.
I’m sure you’re as shocked as I am.
The White House
…is it a sleeper cell?
Just yesterday I theorized the real reason Obama didn’t go is he just couldn’t put the words “Islamic” and “terrorism” together in one sentence even if, forgive the tired image, it hit him in the face. (The exception of course being when insisting that something is NOT Islam.) He just can’t handle it after nearly fifty years of virtually non-stop anti-imperialist programming. His mind would fly apart if he had to utter the words “radical Islamic terrorism,” which French PM Valls, and any honest person, was quite willing to do.
Now I admit that was just a supposition. Just because I’ve never heard him link Islam and terror doesn’t mean in his heart of hearts he doesn’t. Though not a genius, he does have an IQ in triple digits and sees what’s right in front of his nose, I assume. He just interprets it differently. But why?
Is someone whispering in his ear?
My money would be on (born in Iran) Valerie Jarrett.
High-Speed Rail
It’s not news that Kevin Drum opposes it, but it’s still nice to see attacks on it from the left. Yes, it is a waste of time and money.
Charlie Hebdo
How do we stop another one? Thoughts from Richard Epstein on religious tolerance:
The hard question then is what should be done with those who refuse to accept the universal truce not to use violence against those who dare to utter statements that they regard as blasphemous.
Here again the libertarian theory offers the first step towards a response. By their refusal, they become outlaws. Those who are prepared to use force should be subject to the full range of criminal and civil sanctions. Individuals and the state may use force to resist force, they may work hard to ferret out threats of the use of force before they materialize, and they may root out conspiracies of individuals for particular acts of violence. Similar hostility is the order of the day against the nations and groups that practice the use of unlawful force or harbor those that do. Once again, it is critical to note that the libertarian vision seeks to preserve a large domain for protest and dispute, but it is relentless against those do not play the game in accordance with those rules. Its basic principle is: you disarm, we disarm, but if you fight, we fight harder.
At this point, the practical program should be clear. It is no longer defensible to try to soft-pedal the enormity of the difficulty by announcing some supposed parity between murderers and the people they murder. Supposed social grievances against those who ridicule and deal in satire must fall on deaf ears. Moral equivocation worsens our ability to maintain an ordered liberty. Force must be met with force. France, the United States, and other nations must conduct massive manhunts against those who commit terrorist actions, properly labeled as such. They must go further and deprive these individuals of the sanctuaries from which these attacks can be brought, which means troops on the ground, as well as planes in the air.
No one has a right to not be offended. And yet, with perfect timing, the largest Islamic organization in the world calls for more anti-speech laws.
[Update a few minutes later]
Popehat has some questions for the New York Times regarding its policy on depicting Mohammed.
Whole Grains
No, the fact that they’re not as bad for you as refined grains doesn’t mean they’re good for you. This is a great example of nutrition junk science.
Fight For Space
The documentary project has a trailer out, and a new Kickstarter to complete and release it. It seems to have evolved considerably (and usefully) from the original project.