How much longer can we afford this nonsense?
Category Archives: Political Commentary
A One-Term President
Obama’s poll numbers aren’t looking very good. This was interesting:
Just one group has stuck with Obama through it all. In ’08, he won 58 percent of people with graduate degrees. Now, he’s at 59 percent. It appears that academic types will be with Obama always, but they’re not enough.
They, of course, will claim that this is evidence of how uneducated and stupid the populace is, to no longer recognize the brilliance of The One. I see it as evidence of the worthlessness of most graduate degrees, and much of academia. Let’s pop that bubble, so they can experience the economic disaster that the rest of us have, as a result of their collectivist policies.
It’s Black Friday
At Amazon
Shut Up And Bend Over
So sayeth newspaper editorial boards to America. I particularly like the advice that we should be protesting against the airlines add-on fees.
A Little Thanksgiving Cheer
…from Iowahawk. Though this seems more like a Middle-West negotiating breakthrough than a Middle-East one.
The Pilgrims
…and property rights. How our ancestors became prosperous.
Plus, three centuries of Thansgiving.
And here’s the recipe for my Thanksgiving dressing (probably too late for you to procure ingredients, though, sorry), which I’ll be making today. While watching the Lions embarrass themselves. Again.
[Friday morning update]
The lost lesson of Thanksgiving, from John Stossel.
Time To End The Education Bubble
Should we make college more expensive? I agree with Glenn’s reader. Ending subsidies would actually reduce costs, and focus academics on the people who should really be in college. But it’s going to be very hard to break the back of the politician/media/academia industrial complex. But if any time is one to do it, it’s one of fiscal austerity on the part of the government. If we can defund CPB/NPR, that would be an indication that it’s time to go after this.
I Want To Do Apollo Again
A typical conversation in the space blogosphere.
[Update late evening]
OK, I ended up just redoing it. Try it now.
[Late evening update]
I’ve uploaded a Youtube version.
Did Stalin Commit Genocide?
…and does it matter?
I think the answers are yes, and no. This artificial distinction between “genocide” and the mass murder on a grander scale by Stalin, Mao et al is just a means to distract from the fact that Hitler was not the worst man in history, and that his depredations were actually typical of the left.
Good Policy, Bad President
Two of the most infuriating things I’ve been rhetorically battling ever since the new NASA plan was rolled out at the beginning of the year are the bizarre (to me) argument that I should oppose the plan because it came from the Obama administration and the related complex question “Why do I trust Obama on space?”
It came up again in comments at the previous post.
Back in April, I wrote:
Many don’t trust President Obama to execute this policy along these lines. Neither do I, necessarily. But I’d rather have good policy poorly executed than poor policy well executed. The execution can always be improved later. Do I believe that Obama really cares as much about human spaceflight as he said in his speech at the Cape? No, and I think that’s a good thing. I think he sees NASA as a problem he inherited from George W. Bush, and in that, he is right for once. He assigned to the problem people who do care about getting humans into space and, like Bush, he now wants to move on to other matters. Really, we should fear the day he gets interested in spaceflight; that will be the day that private enterprise is no longer trusted to conduct it. Let’s hope that day never comes. In the meantime, remember that when government does the right thing, it doesn’t matter whether it’s done for the wrong reason. Whatever the motivations behind it, this is a much more visionary space policy than we’ve ever had before.
Did I say I trust Obama? No.
Did I say I think he has good motivations? No.
Yet I am perpetually asked why I place so much trust in Obama and his motivations when it comes to space.
Back in 2004, many science bloggers said something to the effect that the Vision for Space Exploration would be a good policy. If only it hadn’t come from that anti-science idiot, George Bush. It was just a reelection ploy (you know, because a new big expensive human spaceflight project is always so politically popular). There just had to be something evil about it.
Well, this doesn’t make any more sense with Barack Obama than it does with George Bush. Policy and president are really completely orthogonal issues. And this is true even if Barack Obama is the anti-Christ.
Let me put it simply.
We have four theoretical options in a two-by-two matrix: good policy, good president; good policy, bad president; bad policy, good president; bad policy, bad president. Realistically, absent the simultaneous removal from office of both Barack Obama and Joe Biden, sometime after next January, when John Boehner is Speaker, we don’t have the option of having a good president until January, 2013. And from the standpoint of space, it’s not clear that John Boehner would be very good. So our only options until then are good policy, bad president, and bad policy, bad president. I prefer the former. I don’t understand why people think I should prefer the latter.