Category Archives: Political Commentary

Humor, Political Commentary, Technology and Society

A CCW Joke

21 Comments

From an email list:

A guy cruises through a stop sign and gets pulled over by a local policeman.

He hands the cop his driver’s license, insurance verification, plus his concealed carry permit.

“Okay, Mr. Smith,” the cop says, “I see your CHL permit. Are you carrying today?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Well then, better tell me what you got.”

Smith says, “Well, I got a .357 revolver in my inside coat pocket. There’s a 9mm semi-auto in the glove box.

And, I’ve got a .22 magnum derringer in my right boot.

“Okay,” the cop says. “Anything else?”

“Yeah, back in the trunk, there’s an AR15 and a shotgun.

That’s about it.”

“Mr. Smith, are you on your way to or from a gun range…?”

“Nope.”

“Well then, what are you afraid of…?”

“Not a damn thing…”

Political Commentary

Notes On “Plymouth Rock”

14 Comments

Jon Goff attended an interesting meeting at SwRI last week.

While a dual-Orion mission may be doable for a two-person crew, I still think that it’s more of a stunt than a serious mission, and I actually question the value of sending people to a NEO early, other than to demonstrate and practice deep-space capability. I’d also send an “armada” of two. I’m not sure you get sufficient redundancy from a single dual-Orion mission, due to potential common cause for the two docked vehicles. With two separate “ships” flying in a loose formation, you’d have a lot more depth in safety.

Of course, Orions won’t be cheap. Maybe Dragons instead. Then you’d get the bonus of having an asteroid map with the words, “Here be Dragons…” 🙂

But as Bigelow said, what you really want is an expandable habitat, and just take the capsule along for the entry, as (I suggested to Keith Reiley at Boeing yesterday on the phone) a motor home drags a car along for short excursions. Also, I can’t speak to what Boeing plans, but if I were them, I’d be scarring CST for deep space.

[Update a while later]

Now that I think about it, if you really want to eliminate common cause (other than a major solar flare), your armada would consist of a CST-based craft, an Orion-based craft (if you could afford it) and a Dragon-based craft.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary, Space

The Race Heats Up

28 Comments

…and Sir Richard moves on:

Dulles, Va.-based Orbital is teaming with Virgin Galactic of New Mexico on the Commercial Crew Development 2 (CCDev 2) project. Virgin Galactic will market commercial rides on the spacecraft, conduct drop tests of the orbital space vehicle using its WhiteKnightTwo aircraft and offer transport services for the space vehicle, industry sources said. Although Orbital expects to launch and land the spacecraft at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla., in the event of an abort, WhiteKnightTwo would be used to ferry the spaceship between its landing location and the Cape.

Virgin is also expected to announce this week a separate CCDev 2 bid led by Sierra Nevada Corp., the big winner in NASA’s first round of Commercial Crew Development awards earlier this year. The Sparks, Nev.-based firm garnered $20 million in CCDev 1 funds to mature its Dream Chaser orbital spacecraft, a six-passenger lifting-body vehicle based on NASA’s HL-20 concept from the early 1990s that the company has been working on for several years.

I can’t reveal the source, but I am reliably informed that at Burt Rutan’s retirement dinner last week, Sir Richard phoned it in from Necker Island, with a video lamenting Burt’s abandoning the field (though Burt had always been on record as not knowing how to do orbit — at heart he was always an airplane guy, and one of the best ever). With the hybrid engine problems, I take this as a sign that, while he still hopes to make his mark in the suborbital world, his focus has shifted to a higher velocity game. It can’t be a result of SpaceX’s success last week, because both deals have to have been in work for months, but I suspect that the week of the Dragon had some influence as to when to make announcements.

The Congress will do what it does when it reassembles in January, but with Bigelow’s habitats beckoning, I doubt that anything they do will have much influence over our future in space, at this point. At worst, they will only be able to continue to waste the taxpayers’ money.

Political Commentary

ObamaCare Is On The Ropes

66 Comments

Richard Epstein explains:

The government finds itself here in a real pickle. Virginia has drawn a clear line that accounts for all the existing cases, so that no precedent has to be overruled to strike down this legislation. On the other hand, to uphold it invites the government to force me to buy everything from exercise machines to bicycles, because there is always some good that the coercive use of state authority can advance. The ironic point is that this is not a commerce-clause argument as such, for in my view any state statute would be subject to the same objection even though the state has plenary police powers.

Read the whole thing.

I think that this also demonstrates the constitutional ignorance of the Democratic leadership and its counsel, and legal incompetence of the Holder Justice Department (not that it was really a winnable case).

I would also add that, as he points out, that this is a demonstration of why state requirements for the purchase of auto insurance don’t lie with the fact that the are states, but with the fact that driving on public highways is a privilege, not a right, and that auto insurance mandates are to protect others from the externalities of your driving, not to protect you from yourself (as health insurance is).

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Health Care And Overreach

12 Comments

Twice now, while there were other factors in both cases, the Democrats have been severely punished in elections over their attempt to socialize medicine.

First, in 1994, they lost both houses of Congress because of HillaryCare, which fortunately didn’t pass.

They learned the wrong lesson from 1994, deluding themselves that they lost not because they attempted to take over a sixth of the nation’s economy, and one on which people depend for their very health and lives, but because they had failed to do so. So in 2010, they applied this false lesson to double down, deluding themselves this time that if they passed the latest unconstitutional monstrosity, it would be the key to electoral victory. Even Bill Clinton fantasized (or at least pretended to, perhaps as a way of sabotaging the Obama administration?) that it would magically become more popular once it was passed, and Queen Nancy assured us, holding her giant gavel, that we would find out what was in it then, and like it.

This time, they lost the House even more dramatically, and kept the Senate only because of a combination of safe Dem seats up that year and some flawed Republican candidates. The fact that the law remains on the books, with a president in the White House prepared to veto any repeal of it, his signature “victory” (ignoring the fact that it was rammed through the Congress in a partisan manner via undemocratic procedural gimmicks with very little White House guidance or input), will just make things that much worse in two years in the Senate, with many more vulnerable Democrats up for election, perhaps even providing the Republicans with a filibuster-proof majority.

So what false lesson will they take from this latest setback on their “progressive” road to serfdom? My prediction: the polls are all wrong — the bill was unpopular not because it passed, but because it wasn’t socialistic enough, lacking a “public option” (read “government option” or inevitable slide down the steep greased slope to single-payer). Because in their ideology, the “reality-based community” ise impervious to empirical data, or reason, or reality. It’s the thing that saves us from them, ultimately, in a country where the voice of the people is ultimately heard.

[Update a while later]

And here is Chris Gerrib in comments, right on cue, to validate my prediction.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary

A Blow To Lawlessness And Socialism

26 Comments

…and a victory for the Constitution:

A federal judge declared the Obama administration’s health care law unconstitutional Monday, siding with Virginia’s attorney general in a dispute that both sides agree will ultimately be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.

I would have been surprised (and dismayed) had it gone any other way. Let’s get it to appellate and the Supreme Court quickly, before Obama is able to stack it with more Elena Kagens who, as Jeff Sessions demonstrated, don’t seem to think that there are any limits whatsoever to the federal government’s reach into individuals’ personal decisions.

[Update a few minutes later]

Great minds…apparently Cuccinelli has requested a direct appeal to SCOTUS. This is unusual, but it may happen, given the magnitude of the decision and its impact.

[Update a couple minutes later]

More from Bryan Preston. I love this display of idiocy by Josh Marshall:

Josh Marshall, in a state of shock, says that “no one” took the constitutional argument against ObamaCare seriously. Obviously a majority of the voters did, a couple dozen state attorneys general did, and a federal judge has as well.

It’s one thing to argue that it’s constitutional. It’s another to be so willfully blind as to imagine that “no one” thought it wasn’t. This kind of delusion is one of the reasons they got “shellacked” last month.

[Update a few minutes later]

A link roundup at How Appealing.

[Update a while later]

It’s unconstitutional and unpopular. What’s not to like?

But of course, as Nancy said, we had to pass the bill to find out what’s in it. That’s the way it is with bills of thousands of pages that no one reads.

[Update a few minutes later]

Memo to Bob Gibbs, who has now gone all Orwellian on us, rebranding the “individual mandate” “individual responsibility.” Even granting for the sake of argument only that I have such a responsibility, the Constitution still doesn’t allow the federal government to compel me at gunpoint to be “responsible.” Sorry, no sale.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space, Space History

Time Warp

18 Comments

I just noticed that space historian Roger Launius has a blog, which I’ve added to the roll on the left. And last week, he had a very peculiar post.

It’s actually a generally not-bad history of NASA’s (and the nation’s) continued attempts to replace the Shuttle, but it contains these words:

Without a doubt, moving to a next generation human launcher will cost a significant amount of money. It always has.

…No doubt, building a new human-rated launcher will require a considerable investment. If the United States intends to fly humans into space as the twenty-first century proceeds it must be willing to foot the bill for doing so.

There are two striking omissions in the narrative. First is the complete lack of mention of commercial space or privately developed systems, even failed ones. They don’t exist at all. It might have made sense to write such a piece in the early eighties, maybe even the early nineties, when it was still unimaginable in the conventional wisdom that there would be multiple solutions to the Shuttle replacement problem, let alone private ones.

But this is 2010. And this blog post was written only two days after the successful flight of the Falcon 9 and Dragon. It’s as though it didn’t happen, and remains so unlikely to that it isn’t worthy of mention in the context of the discussion.

So what does he think is a “significant amount of money”? Or a “considerable investment”? Because any rational analysis, based on SpaceX’s costs to date, would indicate that they are less than a billion dollars away from having a “new human-rated launcher” (ignoring the archaic and useless notion of “human rating” a twenty-first-century launcher designed to the current state-of-the-art in reliability). But no, because “it always has,” it always will.

It’s amazing how myopic the conventionally wise can be.

[Update a while later]

Speaking of myopic space historians (or policy analysts or both, depending on what you think he is), I hadn’t previously seen this quote from John Logsdon cited by Jeff Foust at today’s issue of The Space Review:

Others question just how “commercial” such systems could really be. “I think one of the worst things that happened in managing this revolutionary proposal with respect to human spaceflight is to call the transportation service ‘commercial,’” John Logsdon, the former director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, said in a space policy forum earlier this month hosted by the Marshall Institute. “There is no obvious market” right now for crewed flights beyond NASA’s needs, he claimed, and allowing that question to dominate the policy debate “is one of the policy failures of the last year.”

Well, let’s see. Space Adventures has had several customers for the Soyuz flights, and has more who would like to fly, but the supply seems to be the choke point. Bob Bigelow has MOUs with several nations who would like to lease his facilities who clearly can afford it, but in order to use them, their “astronauts” (or whatever they want to call them) will need rides to and from. In addition, Bob has offered hundreds of millions of dollars of his own (existing) money for the capability to offer such rides. Maybe John doesn’t want to call that a market, “obvious” or otherwise, “beyond NASA’s needs,” but it sure looks like one to me.