Category Archives: Political Commentary

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space

More Denigration Of American Entrepreneurs And Industry

26 Comments

…by so-called conservatives:

Let’s look at what the Obama budget proposes. It ends our manned moon and space exploration, but it proposes a total NASA spending increase by $1 billion. So NASA won’t be totally out of business. His FY2011 budget proposed $19 billion, with emphasis on science, not on manned space flight. He wants to end NASA’s manned space flight program and rent space on Russian spacecraft. He wants to turn space transportation over to private, commercial companies, such as Space X, United Launch Alliance, Boeing, Sierra Nevada, Bigelow Aerospace and others. There is only one problem with privatization with space flight – it does not work. Space X is where NASA was in 1960 with Project Mercury. The ability to put humans into orbit exists only on paper.

Really? The Falcon 9, which has had two successful flights with no failures, and the Dragon capsule, which flew into orbit and returned safely last year, “exists only on paper”? And a capsule that can carry seven crew is “where NASA was in 1960 with Project Mercury,” which could only carry a single person? Really?

Whence comes this compulsion from many supposed anti-government and free-market types to deliberately slander private industry? Do they really hate Barack Obama that much?

Political Commentary, Space

The Post-Shuttle Era

7 Comments

There’s a pretty good article on the history and the future over at Wired. This isn’t right, though:

It took the crash of Challenger in 1986, after which all surviving space shuttles were grounded for three years, to convince the military that it could not rely on the huge, complex craft for all its orbital missions. That was the beginning of the end of the Pentagon’s love affair with the shuttle, and in its autumn years, it did very little military work that we know of.

The Pentagon never had a love affair with the Shuttle to end — it always felt like it had been forced to use it, and (fortunately) fought to keep Titan, Delta and Atlas alive, despite the national policy that all was going to be launched on the Shuttle. This paid off after Challenger (though the other vehicles had failures as well — 1986 was probably the worst year for the space program since the early days).

Business, Economics, Political Commentary

The Administration’s War On Business

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The head of Home Depot calls them out on it:

IBD: If you could sit down with Obama and talk to him about job creation, what would you say?

Marcus: I’m not sure Obama would understand anything that I’d say, because he’s never really worked a day outside the political or legal area. He doesn’t know how to make a payroll, he doesn’t understand the problems businesses face. I would try to explain that the plight of the businessman is very reactive to Washington. As Washington piles on regulations and mandates, the impact is tremendous. I don’t think he’s a bad guy. I just think he has no knowledge of this.

He’s being too generous. There’s little evidence that he’s a good guy.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Homers In The Media

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Mark Tapscott:

…why is it a foregone conclusion that CCB can’t pass the Senate? By uncritically reporting that claim, journalists are in effect giving senators a pass on the balanced budget issue specifically and more generally of whether their previous declarations are worth anything at all.

And is it too much to ask our esteemed lions of the Fourth Estate toiling in the White House Press Corps to at least ask the president why he opposes a constitutional amendment requiring a balanced budget and a supermajority in both chambers of Congress to raise taxes?

No doubt he has a logical case to support vetoing such a measure, but why not just ask him to state it for the record? Don’t our readers deserve to know at least that much?

This is an illustration of why so many journalists covering the White House, Congress and national politics so frequently end up functioning like “Homers.” No, I’m not referring to the ancient author, but rather the derisive term for sports reporters who never write anything critical of the home professional teams.

Whether they intend to or not, too many journalists are little more than Homers for the Big Government team. And then they wonder why their credibility is in tatters.

They may also be Homers as in “Simpson.” D’oh!

Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary, Space

The Shuttle’s Ignominious Conclusion

11 Comments

Thoughts from Ed Driscoll, over at PJM. As he notes, Lileks has some reflections as well:

NASA is keen to tell you there’s a still a future for sending Americans into space, but there’s a general cultural anomie that seems content to watch movies about people in space, but indifferent to any plans to put them there. This makes me grind my teeth down to the roots, but I suppose that’s a standard reaction when the rest of your fellow citizenry doesn’t share the precise and exact parameters of your interests and concerns. That’s the problem when you grow up with magazines telling you where we’re going after the moon, with grade-school notebooks that had pictures of the space stations to come, when the push to Mars was regarded as an inevitable next step.

Just got hung up on the “why?” part, it seems. Also the “how” and the “how much” and other details. I can see the reason for taking our time – develop new engines, perfect technology, gather the money and the will. It’s not like anything’s going anywhere. But it’s not like we’re going anywhere if we’re not going anywhere, either – when nations, cultures stop exploring, it’s a bad sign. You’re ceding the future. If you have a long view that regards nation-states as quaint relics of a time in human history when maps had lines – really, you can’t see them from space! We’re all one, you know – then it doesn’t matter whether China or the US puts a flag on Mars. It’s possible a Chinese Mars expedition would commemorate the first boot on red soil with a statement that spoke for everyone on the planet, not a particular culture or nation. It’s possible. But history would remember that they chose to go, and we chose not to.

No signs that anyone is serious about choosing to go to Mars, other than Elon Musk. For the record, I think that it’s important that we carry Anglospheric and western values into the cosmos, and I’m pretty confident we will. I am equally confident that we won’t do it if we persist in thinking (like the Chinese) that it will be done with a Twenty-Year Plan.

I’m wondering what the thirty-somethings are thinking today. They don’t really remember a time when there wasn’t a Space Shuttle, either under development, or flying. And for most of them, Apollo is just a history that their parents lived through and told them about (as the Depression and WW II are for me). But I suspect that they, and the generation behind, will get pretty used to the idea of a real American space industry taking people into orbit, sans a government mission-control room with lots of desks. I hope that, for them, space will finally become a place instead of a program.

[Update later morning]

More lunacy and inability to read for comprehension or discern human emotions, from Mark Whittington, who fantasizes that I am “dancing on the Shuttle’s grave.”