I have to confess a little skepticism, though — there are no interstates above the Grand Canyon. The closest one, I-40, is sixty miles south of the rim.
Also, Apple’s new customer service.
Category Archives: Political Commentary
Which Senator?
…will save the space program from a Shuttle-derived parasite eating up all the technology funding?
This bill, however, will probably not get very far. Note Jim Muncy’s comment to the NASA Watch item:
Fortunately, most authorization bills can’t proceed in the Senate without unanimous consent. Which means one Senator can stop this monstrosity.
We continually hear about how “The” Congress is opposed to the Administration’s plan for NASA. However, most all of the vocal opposition to the plan has come from a limited number of Congresspersons protecting Constellation related projects in their states and districts. They deliberately biased the hearing witness panels to eliminate voices of independent support for the administration’s plan.
I’m thinking maybe Sam Brownback.
As a commenter somewhere (maybe over at Space Politics?) said, the key to settling space isn’t going farther now — it’s reducing the cost of access and making it routine. Commercial crew will do that for LEO, and the new technology development programs will do it for beyond. And heavy lift, particularly a Shuttle-derived version, will just continue to delay the day that we become spacefaring, as the falsely perceived need for it has done for forty years.
[Update a few minutes later]
A draft of the bill, obtained by the Orlando Sentinel, was presented to NASA last week by the committee, chaired by Florida Democratic U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson. So far the White House has not commented on the bill, but several Florida Space Coast leaders have expressed concern about its impact here.
Of particular concern is the fact that Nelson — Florida’s main space supporter — would take away billions of dollars from commercial rocket and technology development that over the next decade would have diversified the aerospace industry in Florida and provided KSC with new jobs and prestige.
…Frank DiBello, the president of Space Florida, the state’s aerospace development body, is not pleased. “We don’t want to sacrifice Florida seed corn for an increased R&D role to be politically expedient and save jobs for Utah and other states,” DiBello told a Brevard County jobs-development meeting Saturday.
“The Senate bill kills outright the promise of a real R&D opportunity for KSC. It’s not good for Florida. I don’t know who Bill Nelson is listening to, but it’s not his constituents,” DiBello said.
Of course, the question itself is generous in its assumption that there is any cognition at all going on here. Bill Nelson has never struck me as the sharpest tack in a drawer of pretty dull ones, and this is just more evidence of it.
Just The Facts
The debate over the new space policy has been taking place in pretty much a logic-free and fact-free environment, at least on the part of those who oppose it. The Commercial Spaceflight Federation has released a fact sheet to dispel all of the Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD), much of it nonsensical, that opponents have been tossing up for months. Clark Lindsey has an HTML version.
I found it a little amusing that they counted Jake Garn as an “astronaut.” I doubt if many of the astronauts consider him (or Bill Nelson) one.
A Letter
…from Harper Lee.
What Were They Thinking?
So, I’m watching This Week this morning, and thinking that Jake Tapper is the best host they’ve had since Brinkley left, and of course, the thought is spoiled by an ad of Christiane Amanpour coming on and telling us that she’s taking over next month. At which point, of course, the show becomes unwatchable.
Why in the world did the ABC suits decide that Americans want to get their Sunday morning political news from an Iranian, British-raised anti-American “journalist”? I’ll be watching the ratings, but I won’t be watching the show. Especially if George Will is gone.
[Update a few minutes later]
Speaking of Jake Tapper, this is one of the things that he elicited from the always smarmy David Axelrod:
This morning on ABC News’ “This Week,” Senior White House Advisor David Axelrod insisted that President Obama’s recess appointment of Dr. Donald Berwick to be the administrator of The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services was simply “too important” to wait for a Congressional hearing.
Yes, when it comes to our nation’s health care, we can’t let that pesky “advise and consent” thing and the US Constitution get in the way. It’s for the children.
The Hidden Costs
…of the Jew-baiting in England.
Western anti-Zionists shy away from the dangerous and painful but legitimate and necessary criticism of Muslim radicals. They prefer the easy, cost-free baiting of any Jew proud enough to feel that his or her own people deserve a state. Instead of turning to the Muslims and saying “why can’t you express a fraction of the self-criticism of the Zionists?” they prefer to repeat the most toxic accusations against the Jews and claim: “I’m not saying anything that Jews haven’t said.”
They are the true Islamophobes — afraid to criticize Islam, eager to join in its chorus of hatred.
And in this act of demission before the Islamist challenge, British opinion makers and shapers also submit to their own bullies, their own zealots who push the Jew-baiting beyond the weekend sport of the salons, into the professional arena of anti-Zionist activism. When the founders of Hamas in 1988 penned their genocidal charter that explicitly targeted all infidels, little did they suspect that within twenty years, those infidels would chant “We are Hamas!” in the streets of London. Who could hope for a more useful infidel than that?
In the European past, Jew-baiting may have seemed relatively cost-free. After all, humiliate a Jew and the worst he’ll do is hector you. Sure, sometimes the sport got out of hand, and killing Jews en masse, or forcing them to convert, or kicking them out may have deeply damaged the economy and empowered repressive forces, like the Inquisition, to go after other religious dissidents. But who really noticed?
Today, however, the situation has changed dramatically because Europe doesn’t just run the risk of internal failure, but getting vanquished by an implacable and merciless foe. By failing to denounce toxic Muslim communitarianism and instead adopting its shrill discourse of demonization about Jews, Brits feed the monster that devours them. If it continues apace, if the British do not make Muslim civility towards Jews the shibboleth of assimilation to a free and democratic culture, they risk losing that civil polity entirely. As always with real anti-Semites, the Jews are only their first target.
As Churchill said, they feed the crocodile in the hope it will eat them last.
You Don’t Have To Be A Psychopath
…to be a politician. But it helps:
Psychopathy is a personality disorder manifested in people who use a mixture of charm, manipulation, intimidation, and occasionally violence to control others, in order to satisfy their own selfish needs. Although the concept of psychopathy has been known for centuries, the FBI leads the world in the research effort to develop a series of assessment tools, to evaluate the personality traits and behaviors attributable to psychopaths.
Interpersonal traits include glibness, superficial charm, a grandiose sense of self-worth, pathological lying, and the manipulation of others. The affective traits include a lack of remorse and/or guilt, shallow affect, a lack of empathy, and failure to accept responsibility. The lifestyle behaviors include stimulation-seeking behavior, impulsivity, irresponsibility, parasitic orientation, and a lack of realistic life goals.
Research has demonstrated that in those criminals who are psychopathic, scores vary, ranging from a high degree of psychopathy to some measure of psychopathy. However, not all violent offenders are psychopaths and not all psychopaths are violent offenders. If violent offenders are psychopathic, they are able to assault, rape, and murder without concern for legal, moral, or social consequences. This allows them to do what they want, whenever they want. Ironically, these same traits exist in men and women who are drawn to high-profile and powerful positions in society including political officeholders.
Words to remember every voting day.
Comment Du Jour
From John Kavanaugh:
“…capable of lifting at least 75 metric tons — should be largely derived from shuttle systems and likely would use solid rocket boosters…”
Space launch design by committee.
I can’t imagine the Pentagon’s reaction if the Senate Armed Services Committee specified that the Joint Strike Fighter must be derived from F-16 heritage hardware, must use a low bypass turbofan that requires JP-6 jet fuel and must have a minimum pounds-specific weapons capacity – and don’t even think about dividing that minimum amount of armaments across more than one aircraft!
Just another example that NASA’s enablers in Congress could care less about results-driven spaceflight. This is just a jobs program.
The committee should stop pretending that we’re all fools and just legislate honestly: NASA funding must deliver a minimum jobs quota in Texas, Alabama and Florida – or else.
That’s what this Congressional rocket design is all about anyway.
That’s the way it will be as long as it’s a government-funded program in a democracy.
I should add that while this congressional “compromise” is going to waste a good bit of money, it’s not “restoring the Program of Record.” All that remains of Constellation is Orion, and that existed before Constellation, except it was called the Crew Exploration Vehicle.
More On Mecca In Space
From Charles Lane:
Last time I checked, the Constitution expressly forbid the establishment of religion. How can it be consistent with that mandate and the deeply held political and cultural values that it expresses for the U.S. government to “reach out” to another government because the people it rules are mostly of a particular faith?
To be sure, the U.S. government has an interest in good relations with all the people of the world, regardless of their religion. We have, perhaps, a particular interest in combating hostility toward our country and its people among the Muslim faithful, because much terrorism is rooted in extreme Islamist ideology.
But does it follow that the U.S. government should seek cooperation on space projects with the government of a particular country explicitly because its people are mostly Muslim?
Doesn’t this put us in the position of categorizing nations by religion as opposed to other characteristics, such as whether they are democratic? We did not pursue space partnerships with Europe because it was “Christian” or Israel because it was Jewish, did we?There are two risks here. The first is to encourage Islamic identity politics in states that already consider themselves Islamic — Pakistan comes to mind. The second is to discourage those prospective space partners that do not accept the label of “Muslim” or “Muslim-majority” that the administration seems so eager to pin on them.
And Charles Krauthammer:
Obama is not the first president with a large streak of narcissism. But the others had equally expansive feelings about their country. Obama’s modesty about America would be more understandable if he treated himself with the same reserve. What is odd is to have a president so convinced of his own magnificence — yet not of his own country’s.
This was such a stupid completely unforced error, driven by moronic political correctness in the White House. They can’t utter the word “Muslim” when one shoots up an Army base while calling himself a soldier of Allah, but they can pervert NASA in its name. It’s a tragedy that one of the smartest space policies we’ve ever had has come from one of the most idiotic and incompetent administrations, poisoning the well for it. Lori Garver, Bobby Braun and others have to be pulling their hair in frustration.
The Catastrophic Response
The nation is being run by looters and vandals:
As more and more startling facts emerge we are finding almost criminal ineptness by Washington compounded by BP’s almost criminal negligence. As with many crises, Washington’s reactions cause greater damage than the event itself. Yet lurking in the mess are the extreme environmentalists staffing the Obama Administration with their declared agenda of shutting down all offshore oil drilling. The Sierra Club has bragged about how it helped shut down all new coal generating electricity plants. Other environmentalists are still happy that the Three Mile Island crisis succeeded in ending all new nuclear-generating power plants. Preventing new offshore oil drilling in Alaska is another of their primary objectives.
Now CNN reports that almost all new drilling activity has been suspended for over two months. This includes shallow wells in less than 500 feet of water—despite Obama’s statement that such wells would not be affected by his orders to cease all deep-water (over 1,000 feet) drilling. After thousands of deep-water wells have been drilled successfully without spills, the Interior Department, under Secretary Ken Salazar, has so delayed permitting and continuing operations as to possibly bring financial ruin to countless smaller companies. It would be similar to shutting down all airlines after a single crash. It may be that Salazar and his gang are just so ignorant of business that they think the government can simply shut down the super-sophisticated flow of supplies and men and then later restart it like flipping an electric light switch. It’s already estimated that it will take two years or longer to get Gulf production back to its pre-suspension levels. Meanwhile, deep-water drilling rigs—which cost over half a million dollars per day to operate—are being sent away from the Gulf to work in Africa and Asia where they are wanted. It will take months, if not years, to bring them back. Some 100,000 high-paying jobs are now at risk. Already the number of deep-water rigs has dropped from 42 to 19.
But they’ll blame “deregulation.” And George Bush.