Category Archives: Political Commentary

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Jim Moron

61 Comments

The Virginia Congressman, just having beamed in from some other planet, says “the economy has recovered“:

In fact, in the last six months more jobs were created than Bush was able to generate in eight years, Chris. People don’t understand that, the economy has recovered.

Guess he picked a bad week to keep huffing glue.

Meanwhile, back on Planet Earth, Rick Santelli goes off on another righteous rant, and says to “stop spending.”

Here’s to that. Hope it stirs the folks up again, though he should have waited until closer to November. Of course, I suspect there’s plenty more where that came from.

Political Commentary, War Commentary

A Grim Milestone

6 Comments

The UN “Human Rights” Council has now condemned Israel more than all other countries on the planet combined.

Well, of course. It is the worst country in the history of the universe.

And who would expect otherwise, with such saints and luminaries as this running the UNHCR?

Really, I think that it’s time to move the whole shebang from Turtle Bay to Brussells, the true “capital of the free world.” After all, the anti-dumbass says so.

Political Commentary, Space

Good News, Bad News

28 Comments

The new national space policy is out. Jeff Foust has some related links and initial thoughts.

First, the good news (and this is assuming that the people I’m linking are correct — I haven’t had time to read through it myself). As Clark points out, the policy to support NASA’s chartered requirement to encourage maximize the use of commercial activity now has a lot more detail. As Gary Hudson notes in comments, any sane reading of it kills the Orion lifeboat, at least as a sole-source Lockmart cost-plust ($4.5B?!) program.

The bad news, as related in this discussion kicked off by Neil Halelamien at NASA Spaceflight, is that the overall human spaceflight goals have been weakened considerably (per the comment from Bill White). I didn’t expect (and don’t care all that much) that the moon is no longer a goal (as I said, we’ll probably have a new policy in a less than three years anyway, and the old one wasn’t getting us to the moon). But it looks to me like the main thrust of the VSE has been lost, if true. The 2006 policy (which was based in part on the 2004 VSE), said that the goal was to “implement and sustain an innovative human and robotic exploration program with the objective of extending human presence across the solar system.”

The new policy deletes this and apparently replaces it with: “Pursue human and robotic initiatives to develop innovative technologies, foster new industries, strengthen international partnerships, inspire our Nation and the world, increase humanity’s understanding of the Earth, enhance scientific discovery, and explore our solar system and the universe beyond.”

From the standpoint of extending humans into space beyond earth, this is pretty weak tea in comparison. It in fact doesn’t require it. “Human and robotic initiatives” could mean having people in the space station monitoring robots exploring Mars. It doesn’t require humans on Mars, or anywhere beyond LEO (and perhaps even that). It could even just mean that humans at JPL will mind the robots. It all comes back to the outdated and useless notion that NASA is only about “science” and exploration. The old policy contained the word “explore,” but it was clearly much more than that, in its extending human presence language. The new policy has reverted to the exploration goal as an end in itself, rather than a means, and is a huge step backwards.

I don’t know whether this was deliberate or not (but given Holdren’s ideology, I’m assuming the worst), but clearly the goal of extending humanity into the solar system, which to me was the key element in the VSE missing for, well, forever in previous space policy has been abandoned. I am open to hearing an explanation from an administration official (most likely in the White House) as to why this language was changed, but for now, I consider it a betrayal of what much of the space community has been fighting for for decades, and thought we had won six and a half years ago.

Since the beginning of this administration, despite my strong disagreement with it on almost every other policy, I have been giving it the benefit of the doubt, defending it against many with whom I agree on other issues. I will continue to fight for the technologies needed to expand humans beyond the earth, and the needed commercialization of earth-to-orbit transportation for both crew and cargo, and I remain glad that we’ve killed off the parasitic monstrosity of Constellation, but I cannot, and will not defend this new policy document, at least in regard to that goal statement.

[Update a while later]

Well, that will teach me to post without Reading The Whole Thing. “Major Tom” says it contains these words:

The Administrator of NASA shall:

– Set far-reaching exploration milestones. By 2025, begin crewed missions beyond the moon, including sending humans to an asteroid. By the mid-2030s, send humans to orbit Mars and return them safely to Earth;

So that’s pretty clear. I’d still like to know when the wording changed, though. “Extending human presence across the solar system” wasn’t an explicit advocacy of space settlements, but it clearly implied more than mere exploration, at least to me. The solar system is sufficiently large that it implies people living in space, far beyond LEO and even Greater Metropolitan Earth.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary

No Sex Please

7 Comments

We’re middle class. Thoughts from la Camille. I thought this relevant to the new movie production venture:

The elemental power of sexuality has also waned in American popular culture. Under the much-maligned studio production code, Hollywood made movies sizzling with flirtation and romance. But from the early ’70s on, nudity was in, and steamy build-up was out. A generation of filmmakers lost the skill of sophisticated innuendo. The situation worsened in the ’90s, when Hollywood pirated video games to turn women into cartoonishly pneumatic superheroines and sci-fi androids, fantasy figures without psychological complexity or the erotic needs of real women.

Maybe it’s not too late to change that.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, War Commentary

Our War Crimes

35 Comments

Some thoughts:

I relate a story told by Judge Mukasey, George W. Bush’s last attorney general. He was down at Guantanamo in February 2008. He looked at “high-value” detainees — the worst of the worst — on video monitors. He did not see Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, however. (Remember that “KSM” is the guy who “masterminded” the 9/11 attacks, which killed 3,000 people. He’s also the beauty who beheaded the Jewish journalist Daniel Pearl. Etc.) KSM was not in his cell; he was off having his Red Cross visit.

Mukasey did see the exercise room adjacent to KSM’s cell, however. And he remarked something: KSM had the same elliptical machine that he, the attorney general, did, back in Washington — at his apartment building, the Lansburgh. Only there was this difference: Mukasey had to share that elliptical machine with the other residents of the building; there was a scramble in the morning to get to it. KSM had an elliptical machine all to himself.

As I say in my column, how much more tenderly do America’s critics expect us to treat these people? Are we to administer abdominal massages, the kind that recently made ex-vice-presidential news? (Wouldn’t the “world community” call that “torture”?)

Of course not. It’s Obama now, not Bush.

Political Commentary, Space

Flawed Logic

6 Comments

I often see this “argument,” and it doesn’t become any more logical from repetition (it is repeated ad infinitum by “Gary Church” over at Space Politics). This one is from “orionContractor” over at NASA Watch:

This continual argument over the huge waste of government spending that NASA does confuses me, only someone with NO understanding of how our government works and the enormous sums of money which are blown daily on worthless projects that add no value to anything other than pet spending plans could make that statement with a straight face.

There is no relationship between government waste in other programs, even if it’s much greater, and government waste at NASA. Even if the Pentagon really does waste hundreds of billions of dollars (and note that in this context, the accuser generally simply means “spending money on defense items that I don’t personally think we need”), that doesn’t make it all right for NASA to waste tens of billions on Ares.

Political Commentary

A Victory For Liberty

7 Comments

People have a right to bear arms in Chicago, too.

The Second Amendment: it’s not just for “wingnuts” any more. It even applies to Richard Daley.

Though I have to say that I am disappointed that we have a court with four justices who oppose this.

[Update a couple minutes later]

A nice excerpts of Alito’s smackdown of the clueless minority in this comment:

First, we have never held that a provision of the Bill of Rights applies to the States only if there is a “popular consensus” that the right is fundamental, and we see no basis for such a rule. But in this case, as it turns out, there is evidence of such a consensus. An amicus brief submitted by 58 Members of the Senate and 251 Members of the House of Representatives urges us to hold that the right to keep and bear arms is fundamental.

Third, JUSTICE BREYER is correct that incorporation of the Second Amendment right will to some extent limit the legislative freedom of the States, but this is always true when a Bill of Rights provision is incorporated. Incorporation always restricts experimentation and local variations, but that has not stopped the Court from incorporating virtually every other provision of the Bill of Rights.

Somehow, this piece by Michael Barone seems relevant:

…we still live in an America like the America of the Founders, and unlike the America of the Progressives and the New Dealers, in which a majority of citizens are or have every prospect of becoming property owners.

And a desire for the right to defend that property, and their lives.

Since she’s unlikely to have to rule on it now, I wonder if someone will ask Kagan her opinion on the ruling this morning, and if she’ll answer. And if so, if she’ll do so honestly?

[Update a while later]

More thoughts from (law professor) Instapundit:

…it really is interesting how much emphasis the majority, and Justice Thomas’s concurrence, put on the racist roots of gun control. See this article and this one by Bob Cottrol and Ray Diamond for more background. And isn’t it interesting that this is happening on the same day the Senate’s last Klansman went to his reward?

I can’t imagine it hasn’t been done, but if not, someone should put together an essay on the racist roots of most of the “progressive” project (recall that Woodrow Wilson was one of the most racist presidents in history, at least in the twentieth century), from gun control, to minimum wage, to Davis-Bacon and birth control and legalized abortion, and “affirmative action.” I’ve seen essays on each one of them, but no comprehensive one.