It looks like (contrary to the idiotic claims that there was “widespread opposition” in Congress to the new direction for human spaceflight) Bart Gordon is having trouble selling his porkfest to “aggrieved” representatives outside the committee:
In a July 21 letter to Gordon, 13 California Democrats urged the committee to restore funding for commercial crew and cargo initiatives and exploration technology programs requested in Obama’s 2011 spending plan.
“These reductions will have a serious effect on California’s workforce and economy, and that of many states,” states the letter, which was spearheaded by Rep. Anna Eshoo, a Silicon Valley Democrat who has worked closely with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on energy and technology policy initiatives in Congress. “These are areas that should be the cornerstone of NASA’s new direction because they will drive innovation and job creation across the nation.”
It’s nice to see the California delegation finally acting like they give a damn about space, after all of the jobs they allowed NASA to move to Florida, Alabama and Texas in the nineties. I assume that some of this is a result of successful lobbying by SpaceX.
He doesn’t look a day over thirty. His youthful vitality is particularly amazing, considering that he’s a veteran of the Pacific War. I’m tempted to say we should send him to Afghanistan, but he’s probably too politically incorrect for today’s army.
When the attorney general of Virginia sued to force Michael Mann of “hockey stick” fame to provide the raw data he used, and the complete computer program used to analyze the data, so that “you” could decide, the Faculty Senate of the University of Virginia (where Mann was a professor at the time he defended the hockey stick) declared this request — Feynman’s request — to be an outrage. You peons, the Faculty Senate decreed, must simply accept the conclusions of any “scientific endeavor that has satisfied peer review standards.” Feynman’s — and the attorney general’s and my own and other scientists’ — request for the raw data, so we can “judge whether a sensible conclusion has been arrived at,” would, according to the Faculty Senate, “send a chilling message to scientists … and indeed scholars in any discipline.”
According the Faculty Senate of the University of Virginia, “science,” and indeed “scholarship” in general, is no longer an attempt to establish truth by replicable experiment, or by looking at evidence that can be checked by anyone. “Truth” is now to be established by the decree of powerful authority, by “peer review.” Wasn’t the whole point of the Enlightenment to avoid exactly this?
That old “Enlightenment” thing is for fogies. We’re all postmodernists now.
