Eric Berger talks about the elephant in the room:
…this battle [over destinations] is a distraction from NASA’s real problem, which neither Democrats nor Republicans are willing to acknowledge. Namely, the space agency is being tasked with building a huge and powerful rocket it will not be able to afford to fly.
It doesn’t matter, as long as the jobs continue.
The media will continue to pretend that there’s nothing there, but it’s going to get harder and harder:
Lew, Carney and Obama himself act like people worried about a threat lying a little farther under investigators’ shovels. And they should be considering the suspicious timeline of Obama-appointed IRS chief counsel William Wilkins visiting the president on April 23 last year; IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman visiting the White House the next day; and Wilkins’ office sending the IRS “guidance” on the Tea Party the day after that.
Just a coinkidinky, I’m sure.
[Noon update]
Did the IRS coordinate with other agencies to target conservative groups?
Sure looks like it. Still waiting for Baghdad Jim’s explanation of why Lerner took the Fifth.
A lesson on the nature of souls.
By breaking the law?
The Obama campaign doesn’t seem to have been deterred by the possibility that it was violating federal law. I can think of at least four reasons why that might be. Three of them are scandals.
Hey, it’s not like President Asterisk (or his sycophants) has ever given a damn about the law.
I don’t know why that’s even a question. Of course he can’t lead. If he could, he would have by now.
…and the much higher cost of carbon denial:
…the relationship between GDP and carbon is not merely linear, but quadratic, with total economic output rising as roughly the square of carbon use. For example, since 1975, carbon use has doubled, causing a quadrupling of global GDP. Furthermore, if we take the ratio of current global GDP ($60 trillion) to carbon use (9 billion tons) and divide it out, we find that, at present, each ton of carbon used produces about $6,700 of global GDP.
So each ton of carbon denied to the world economy destroys about $6,700 worth of wealth. That is the difference between life and death for a Third World family. Seven tons denied corresponds to a loss of $47,000, or a good American job. Since 2007, the combination of high oil prices and a depressed economy has reduced the United States’ use of carbon in the form of oil by about 130 million tons per year. At a rate of $6,700 per ton, this corresponds to a GDP loss of $870 billion, equivalent to losing 8.7 million jobs, at $100,000 per year each. Were we to implement the program of the Kyoto treaty, and constrict global carbon use to 1990 levels, we would cut global GDP by $30 trillion per year, destroying an amount of wealth equal to the livelihood of half of the world’s population.
These people understand neither science, or economics.
…as pointed out by Mickey Kaus:
Does Obama recognize that his initiatives have a weak connection, and even perverse connection, with actually achieving his goal? I hope his biographer, Jonathan Alter, will tell me. But either way, there’s a vacuum between his speechmaking and governing. Is that unusual? After all, Democrats have campaigned for years by arguing that Republican policies benefit the rich–think of all the distributional tables Democrats distributed to fight Reagan’s budgets-without ever saying how much inequality, exactly, they’d be willing to tolerate.
But Obama isn’t vague or incoherent. He’s quite precise about where he wants to go–namely back to something like what we had three decades ago. If his means don’t come close to matching his ends, if they even subvert them, that seems a more troubling, almost pathological mismatch, in which liberalism becomes a sort of cargo cult whose mechanisms have zero hope of achieving the desired results.
Yes, it is a cargo cult, driven by magical thinking.
In which Rachel Maddow calls Barack Obama a liar. And as it continues to “fizzle out,” we learn that the IRS also targeted existing conservative organizations.
Some thoughts. As a commenter points out, many of the men died of many awful things — drowning, dehydration, loss of blood — the sharks were just one way for a relative few of them, but somehow I guess it’s human nature to attach some special horror to being eaten by wild animals. Anyway, as they said, they delivered the bomb, and we should be in awe at the sacrifice that generation made for us. It’s a shame that many today seem to want to squander the freedom that was won then.
Ben Wright McGee has a long essay on old space versus new, which I think misses the point, because he seems to think that space is about exploration, and then gets bogged down in the pointless argument of whether or not suborbital flight constitutes such:
In almost back-to-back recent events, what to me is an example of the true nature of the conflict between the many colliding conceptions of astronauts, space explorers, and space exploration was brought into sharp relief:
On the one hand, a NASA historian who I greatly respect alleged to me that private suborbital spaceflight and even new, commercial orbital space modules and transportation systems (which have recently received NASA funding to enhance the U.S. space infrastructure and give scientists more platforms and opportunities to conduct research), were patently unworthy of NASA dollars.
Existing Russian and U.S. systems should be relied upon, and the already pinched NASA budget, he implied, should be saved and consolidated for the more worthy endeavor of exploring truly uncharted planetary territory.
To me, this is all beside the point. There is an implicit assumption that the purpose of human spaceflight is to explore space, but that has never, ever been the case. In the sixties, its purpose was to beat the Soviets in a peaceful contest in the Cold War, and since then it’s been largely a jobs program — “exploration” was just the excuse, despite the fact that we haven’t left LEO. To me, exploration is a means, not an end. The goal of human spaceflight should be to develop the resources of and settle space, and if we’re not doing that (which we currently are not, at least NASA isn’t), then we should quit wasting money on it. But we remain stuck in this “exploration” mindset because we’ve never had a real national debate on why we’re spending this money, instead talking with hidden assumption that we all assume are shared by others, even though they clearly are not.