Category Archives: Political Commentary

Business, Economics, Political Commentary, Science And Society

The Democrat War On Science

5 Comments

Expect this to be a recurring theme. The latest incident:

Needless to say, there is something ugly and hypocritical about glorifying the absolute authority of scientists and sanctimoniously preening about your bravery in “restoring” that authority — and then ignoring the scientists when politically expedient.

But it is bordering on the grotesque to handpick scientists to give you an opinion and then lie about what they actually said and implement a policy they don’t endorse. (According to the Journal, the Interior Department has apologized to the scientists. But the administration refuses to publicly acknowledge it did anything wrong.)

Of course it does. Not just hypocrites, but incompetent ones, who are compounding the damage to the Gulf economy from the oil leak by wiping out the local oil industry. Oh, and speaking of incompetence, how about this?

Against Governor Jindal’s wishes the federal government blocked oil-sucking barges today because they needed to confirm that there were fire extinguishers and life vests on board and were having trouble contacting the owners.

We don’t have elections often enough.

Humor, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

So Publish The Damn Iowahawk Book Already

1 Comment

Go sign the petition. The background is that Dave was in negotiations with a publisher, but they decided not to go for it, because they didn’t think it would sell ten thousand copies.

[Friday morning update]

If you go to the petition site, DO NOT DONATE any money, at least with the intent of getting it to Burge, because he won’t get a dime. That’s the petition site’s business model.

[Update mid morning]

Iowahawk has shut down the petition, lest anyone else get fooled.

It’s still a good idea, though. Maybe I should set one up here. I’ve been thinking about doing it for a market test of a space policy book.

Political Commentary

Taking America For Granted

46 Comments

Some thoughts from a grateful Tunisian/American cabbie:

The driver was recently back in Tunisia. And a curious incident occurred, in the town. A horse reared up and injured somebody (not badly). The owner subdued the horse as quickly as he could. Later, a mob came and beat the owner up, as punishment. “My sister said, ‘Good, he deserved it.’ And she is a doctor, a psychologist. If she thinks this way — that a mob can just do what it wants — what about common people?”

America, he says, has an independent judiciary, and legislatures, and executive branches. In Tunisia — as in most places — it’s all one. The cab driver thinks that the separation of powers is a miracle. Again, amazing what we take for granted.

And one that we’re in danger of losing, when we have a president who thinks that it’s perfectly fine to extort twenty billion dollars from a private business as a political slush fund.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Representative Joe Barton isn’t impressed with the shakedown, either.

And Iain Murray says that Mordor is looking for more wealth to pay its orc mercenaries.

Business, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space

Telling It Like It Is

10 Comments

Bob Bigelow doesn’t suffer the fools who have been stupidly criticizing commercial space gladly:

We are becoming a member of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation at this time to join with like-minded organizations, who want to see America be able to compete again in the global space launch marketplace, and push back against the pernicious misconceptions that are being perpetuated to harm the Administration’s commercial crew initiative.”

“Specifically, I’m appalled by the condemnation of commercial crew as being somehow less safe than government programs, and the refrain that commercial companies need to prove they can deliver cargo before they deliver crew. In regard to the latter, a leading contender for commercial missions, the Atlas V, has had 21 consecutive successful launches. This rocket is arguably the most reliable domestic launch system in existence today. It strains the bounds of credulity to claim that any new rocket would be able to trump the safety of a system that has an extensive record of flawless operations.”

“Moreover,” Bigelow added, “we’re extremely pleased to be part of the Boeing team constructing the CST-100 capsule under the auspices of NASA’s own Commercial Crew Development program. Boeing’s unparalleled heritage and experience, combined with Bigelow Aerospace’s entrepreneurial spirit and desire to keep costs low, represents the best of both established and new space companies. The product of this relationship, the CST-100 capsule, will represent the safest, most reliable, and most cost-effective spacecraft ever to fly. Again, I don’t understand the critics who say ‘commercial’ entities can’t safely build a capsule. Why is it that Boeing, the company that constructed the ISS itself, can’t safely build a capsule that would go to their own space station? These are the sorts of questions and issues that we will be posing in Washington as a member of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation.”

“Pernicious misconception” is actually kind of a nice phrase for it. I’d like to see more details on the “CST 100” capsule. I wonder what the TLA is? Crewed Space Transportation? And what happened to 1-99? 😉

Political Commentary, Space

How Risky Are The Russians?

17 Comments

Some thoughts from Jim Oberg.

This slow-motion policy train wreck has been going on for years. Decades, in fact. We knew back in 1986 that we needed a more robust transportation architecture, but we trusted NASA to fix it when it just wasn’t up to the job, and never will be. Jobs have always been more important than space, and that will remain the case until space becomes important again, as it was briefly in the early sixties. The only way out is to promote competition and market development in the private sector, which is finally starting to happen with the new policy, if Congress doesn’t screw it up (again). What is so frustrating is that if we’d had sensible plans for the VSE five years ago, and Bush hadn’t allowed Mike Griffin to copulate with the chihuahua for this past half decade, we’d be very close to not having a gap at all.

[Update a while later]

In that two-year-old PJM piece that I linked last night, I just noticed this bit of prescience:

In hindsight, if the goal of Apollo had been to open up the space frontier, rather than a crash program to send half a dozen astronauts to the lunar surface, it would have been better to state as a goal that we would establish an affordable and sustainable transportation infrastructure to and from the moon. As it happens, that was in fact what George W. Bush proposed four and a half years ago in the Vision for Space Exploration, but NASA apparently missed the memo. But that never was the goal of Apollo. The goal of Apollo was to simply prove that a democratic socialist state enterprise was technologically superior to a totalitarian one. Once we had beaten the Soviets to the moon, it was mission accomplished, and no need to go back. The remaining missions after Apollo XI were simply programmatic inertia, using up the hardware after the production was shut down in 1967, when it became clear that we were going to win.

The problem was that, as already noted, Apollo cost a lot of money. So much so that after landing only six crews, we flew the last mission thirty-six years ago, and shelved the technology that enabled us to achieve it, because it wasn’t providing an economic return commensurate with the cost to the taxpayer. In fact, it spurred a new use of the phrase among frustrated space enthusiasts. Since 1972, they’ve been able to ask “If we can send a man to the moon, why can’t we send a man to the moon?” The answer is that we couldn’t afford to continue to do so, at least not the way we’d been doing it (which is a reason why NASA’s plan to redo Apollo, pretty much the same way, will likely not be sustainable, either). To use Apollo as a model for the provision of our most vital commodity — energy — would be economically ruinous.

Emphasis mine. Did I call it, or what?