Category Archives: Political Commentary

Political Commentary, Space

Have We Seen The Last Shuttle Launch Already?

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Maybe. I’d like to call in on the phone bridge to today’s press conference with Gerstenmaier and Shannon, but I don’t have a center press credential. I’m hoping that someone, perhaps Oberg, will ask what should be the obvious question today — what are the program consequences of shutting the system down now? It seems to me that the only reason that they wanted three more flights is to preserve the jobs as long as possible, and the only real lost capability will be AMS, which they could perhaps put up on something else (e.g., Falcon 9, if a Dragon were in place to tug it to ISS). Of course, as I noted over at Space Politics, Nelson et al don’t really care whether the Shuttle actually flies or not, as long as they keep spending the money. But it’s gong to look like a ripe place to cut.

Philosophy, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Social Commentary

Deinstitutionalization

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I wrote yesterday that there are no acceptable changes to current law that would have prevented Saturday’s horrific events, but Clayton Cramer says that perhaps there is one:

In 1950, a person who was behaving oddly stood a good chance of being hospitalized. It might be for observation for a few days or a few weeks. If the doctors decided that this person was mentally ill, they would be committed, perhaps for a few months, perhaps longer. Hospital space was always at a premium, so generally, if someone was kept, there was a reason for it. The notion that large numbers of sane people were kept for no reason just has not survived my research efforts.

I will not claim that the public mental hospitals back then were wonderful places. They were chronically underfunded from the 1930s through the 1950s, and even into the 1960s, conditions in some were the shame of civilized people everywhere. (Ken Kesey wrote the novel One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest after taking LSD and going to work at a mental hospital, and the film by that name is not a documentary.) But it did mean that many people who were mentally ill were either locked up (where they did not have access to guns, knives, or gasoline) or at least not sleeping on a park bench, catching pneumonia.

A large fraction of the “homeless” population are people who in earlier times would have had “homes,” though little or no freedom. But it’s not clear the degree to which people who are slaves to the roiling and chaotic chemical impulses of their brains can be said to be free, either, and some percentage of them endanger the rest of us, as we saw. But speaking as someone with a history of this in his family, it’s a very tough problem.

[Tuesday morning update]

“Politically incorrect” thoughts from Dr. Helen.

[Bumped]