Category Archives: Political Commentary

General Science, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Space, Space Science, Technology and Society

I Wish Congress Wouldn’t Make NASA Waste So Much Money

11 Comments

So they could afford to do things more like this.

It’s always a little unnerving to me to see them fly through the ring plane. It makes you realize that as striking they are in appearance, the mass density is very slight, and there’s plenty of open space in there. Not that they couldn’t have had a collision, but they haven’t.

OK, I know, even if they weren’t being forced to waste money, they’d still have trouble getting more funding for more planetary missions.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Nope, No “Liberal” Bias Here

5 Comments

Allahpundit, on the president’s brackets:

This is a rare case where I think (hope?) that even our resident liberal trolls will admit that a Republican president in the same situation would be utterly destroyed by the media for wasting time on something so inane as NCAA brackets at a moment of global high anxiety. Libyan rebels holed up in Benghazi are preparing to make their last stand, with all that entails; cable news is wall-to-wall with updates on how much worse than Three Mile Island the situation in Japan is and whether Californians should be stockpiling iodide. And meanwhile, this guy’s talking about Pitt’s perimeter game. If you want to equivocate on world events that have captured the public’s imagination, okay (well, not okay), but can we at least deep-six the lighthearted photo ops until we know for sure that a cesium cloud isn’t headed for Tokyo? Says John Podhoretz, “We’re going on four weeks now, or more, that Barack Obama has been reading My Pet Goat.” Except he’s not just reading it. He’s doing ESPN segments about it.

But as I wrote earlier, given his general competence level, I’d prefer he stick to that sort of thing myself. He’s not good at it, either, but at least it won’t do much harm.