Category Archives: Political Commentary

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, War Commentary

Guantanamo

4 Comments

…as a state-sponsored madrasah:

if we think it probable or possible that a man would only mutate into such a monster after undergoing the Guantanamo experience, then I can suggest one reason why that might be. Nothing prepared me for the way in which the authorities at the camp have allowed the most extreme religious cultists among the inmates to be the organizers of the prisoners’ daily routine. Suppose that you were a secular or unfanatical person caught in the net by mistake; you would still find yourself being compelled to pray five times a day (the guards are not permitted to interrupt), to have a Quran in your cell, and to eat food prepared to halal (or Sharia) standards. I suppose you could ask to abstain, but, in such a case, I wouldn’t much fancy your chances. The officers in charge were so pleased by this ability to show off their extreme broad-mindedness in respect of Islam that they looked almost hurt when I asked how they justified the use of taxpayers’ money to create an institution dedicated to the fervent practice of the most extreme version of just one religion. To the huge list of reasons to close down Guantanamo, add this: It’s a state-sponsored madrasah.

Of course, I don’t think that’s an excuse to shut down Gitmo, but it is an excuse to rethink our “tolerance” of the totalitarian ideology with which we’re at war, but won’t admit it. I can only shake my head at the insanity of those who thought that the Bush administration was too hard on radical Islam. Would we handing out copies of Mein Kampf to German POWs during the war (ignoring the fact, of course, that these are not POWs but illegal combatants)?

And more on the president’s naivety and historical ignorance:

The same near-masochistic insistence on taking the extreme as the norm was also present in Obama’s smoothly delivered speech in the Egyptian capital. Some of what he said was well-intentioned if ill-informed. The United States should not have overthrown the elected government of Iran in 1953, but when it did so, it used bribed mullahs and ayatollahs to whip up anti-Communist sentiment against a secular regime. The John Adams administration in the 1796 Treaty of Tripoli did indeed proclaim that the United States had no quarrel with Islam as such (and, even more important, that the United States itself was in no sense a Christian nation), but the treaty failed to stop the Barbary states from invoking the Quran as permission to kidnap and enslave travelers on the high seas, and thus Thomas Jefferson was later compelled to send a fleet and the Marines to put down the trade. One hopes that Obama does not prefer Adams to Jefferson in this regard.

Any person with the smallest pretense to cultural literacy knows that there is no such place or thing as “the Muslim world,” or, rather, that it consists of many places and many things. (It is precisely the aim of the jihadists to bring it all under one rulership preparatory to making Islam the world’s only religion.) But Obama said nothing about the schism between Sunni and Shiites, or about the argument over Sufism, or about Ahmadi and Ismaili forms of worship and practice. All this was conceded to the umma: the highly ideological notion that a person is first and foremost defined by their adherence to a religion and that all concepts of citizenship and rights take second place to this theocratic diktat. Nothing could be more reactionary.

That would be too politically inconvenient to mention.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

“Saved Or Created”

Fictional job numbers from the administration? I’m shocked. Of course, if we had a press corps that was a watchdog, instead of a lapdog, they wouldn’t continue to get away with this sophistry.

[Update a few minutes later]

“Drop dead, American business:”

So the question is, why does Obama advocate a policy that so flies in the face of everything that economists have learned? How could Obama possibly say, as he did last month, that he wants “to see our companies remain the most competitive in the world. But the way to make sure that happens is not to reward our companies for moving jobs off our shores or transferring profits to overseas tax havens?” Further, how could Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner call a practice that top scholarship has shown increases wages and employment in the U.S. “indefensible?”

I have to admit I am at a loss. Maybe it is good politics to bash American corporations, and Obama isn’t really serious about making this change happen. But if the change is enacted, and domestic corporate taxes aren’t reduced to offset the big tax hike, the result will be a flight from the U.S. that rivals in scale the greatest avian arctic migrations.

As I said yesterday, it’s Munchausen By Proxy. By keeping the economy permanently sick, they hope to entrench their power, as FDR did.

[Update early afternoon]

Cue the laughter. It’s pretty sad when Chinese students are a lot more business savvy, and understand basic economics better than our own home-grown press. Or the US Secretary of the Treasury…

Political Commentary, Space

Constellation Problems, Continued

10 Comments

“Rocketman” has thoughts related to yesterday’s post, here, and more details on last week’s Ames meeting:

First up for review was the preferred solution of a single plane attenuation system. It was believed to be the lightest weight band-aid available for the already overweight and underperforming stick. Architectural changes made to the segmented spaghetti-like stack have made it stiffer. That had the unfortunate side-effect of sending increased loads up to the crew compartment. Those loads are even higher than the seat-of-the-pants requirements loosened by fiat (and loosey-goosey analysis) from the accepted Gemini era 0.25 g peak to almost three times that value (0.7 g).

Scratch the goateed one’s favorite solution.

I know it’s popular and easy for some who don’t understand physics and engineering to say, “well we had problems on program X, and we managed to solve them,” without understanding that there are some technical problems that simply have no solution, regardless of how much time and money is put into them. Sometimes, all the potential solutions simply introduce new problems, or make the old ones worse, and you end up chasing your tail and failing to get the design to close. I don’t know if the Ares thrust-oscillation problem falls in that category, but the possibility cannot be excluded, and so far, it’s looking that way. And when that happens, the only solution is to go back to the drawing board, and start with a different concept.

A good engineer will recognize such problems early, and not waste too much time and money trying to solve them. As Einstein once said, a clever man will solve a problem — a wise man will avoid it. We had, and still have, at least for now, people running NASA’s human spaceflight development program who (as the Brits would say) are too clever by half.

Rocketman also thinks that the writing is on the wall:

All hailed and praised the rocket scientist with more degrees than fingers on our right hands. As the Kool-Aid flowed, we reveled in the plans to renew the minions’ skills for building cathedrals to the sky. We marveled at the safety numbers that flew out of the supercomputers. And we ignored the mounting number of little things that were “normal for a development program.” The steroids flowed, the oscillations increased, and the dollars disappeared.

Fast forward five years with nothing to show for the investments made so far. “Wait a little longer,” they say. “We’re getting our arms around this.” And the congressfolk from Florida push for more money to shower over the falls. And the Senator from Alabama holds up any investments in commercial opportunities so that his precious voters will hold on to their jobs.

But it is already too late. Indeed, the seal on the codex has been broken. All the President’s men do not carry rose colored glasses around with them. They see the forest for the trees.

Clark Lindsey has a summary of a Space News editorial by Bob Bigelow, that would appear to be explaining what should have been obvious to the Senator from Huntsville (who is also the Senator from Decatur, so I continue to be baffled why he doesn’t want to ramp up EELV production).

/– Talks about the overruns in Constellation
/– “Constellation appears to be yet another ill-conceived NASA boondoggle suffering from all too familiar runaway costs.”
/– Talks about the serious technical problems with Ares/Orion
/– Criticizes the reduction of Orion from 6 to 4 passengers.
/– Gives a vigorous defense of the accomplishments of SpaceX and its potential to provide low cost launch access.
/– Says Shelby made an error in ignoring the commercial access capabilities of the Atlas V, which is produced in Alabama.
/– “Bigelow Aerospace has studied human-rating of the Atlas 5 and found the concept to be both viable and economically attractive.”
/– The high reliability of the Atlas V undercuts Shelby’s comments about commercial launchers.
/– “Commercial crew transport, as demonstrated by SpaceX’s dramatic progress and the existing Atlas 5 launcher, represents a viable, affordable, and robust path forward.”
/– Talks about the many launch vehicle project failures at NASA.
/– “Moreover, to hear a Republican senator espouse the virtues of a bloated, costly government program over innovative commercial concepts is so paradoxical that it requires no further comment from me.”

Hey, since when did Republicans care about business, or markets? Not when it doesn’t suit their parochial political interests, for sure.

Norm Augustine and his panel have quite the challenge ahead of them.

Political Commentary, Space

More Constellation Problems

27 Comments

No one who has been following the program will be shocked to learn that the major, fundamental design issues continue, and that they aren’t just “teething pains” of a new program. Despite a lot of happy talk from Griffin and Cook and Hanley over the past few months, thrust oscillation remains a serious problem for the Ares I first stage:

According to a NASA blog, the engineers are still looking at putting a series of passive dampers at the bottom of the rocket and a series of spring-like brackets in the middle to soak up the vibrations like shock absorbers.

Originally the brackets, called a dual plane C-spring isolator system, were too heavy to incorporate into the overall design. An updated version uses titanium, which is as strong as steel but lighter.

However, the fixes are not easy and engineers have yet to settle on a solution. According to NASA officials who attended the meeting, the shaking problem is more difficult to combat than originally thought as each solid rocket burns slightly differently.

You don’t say. That means that a passive solution won’t work, unless they can predict prior to flight exactly what the characteristics will be for each SRB (a longer way of saying…it won’t work). They’ll have to have an active approach that can actually measure the vibrations in real time and try to compensate for them. My solution? Bag the solid first stage. Here’s one that will save even more money. Bag Ares I.

And all is not well at the pointy end of the rocket, either:

An Air Force memo obtained by Todd Halvorson of Florida Today indicates that military safety officials are worried that NASA’s Orion capsule and its crew might not survive an emergency escape off an exploding Ares I rocket.

As I understand it, the concern is that the launch abort system is sized to accelerate away from an exploding upper stage, and to outrun an out-of-control first stage, but not from the flack created by the massive explosion of an SRB. Parenthetically (without the parentheses) it should be noted that one of the ways that NASA put its thumb on the scales when it compared Ares to EELV was to assume that the same LAS would be used in both cases, but the latter has a much more benign failure environment, and could get by with a much lighter LAS, so dinging the EELV for lacking the performance to lift an unnecessary weight was stacking the deck against it.

Anyway, how likely is it that the first stage will explode? Well, I find this sadly amusing:

…the article also has Hanley pooh-poohing the Air Force’s concerns, saying that “supercomputer analyses” will prove that the Ares I rocket is a fine vehicle and Orion’s launch abort system will be able to save the crew in the event disaster strikes.

They have top men looking at it. Who?

Top. Men.

Here’s my question. If they know the results of the “supercomputer analyses” before they have performed them, why are they bothering to perform them? Couldn’t they save some money and just skip them?

Florida Today quotes Hanley saying that the statistical probability of an Ares I first-stage failure is remote. He pinpointed it at 1 in 3,000 to 1 in 3,500.

Gotta love that verb, “pinpointed.”

You know, those were the kinds of numbers that they were claiming for Shuttle, right up until around January 27th, 1986. They got some new data the next day, though, that significantly altered the estimates going forward…

So, once again, show us the numbers, Jeff. Show us your work.

It’s hard to know from this brief news story, so I don’t even know what he means by “failure.” Does he mean spontaneously explode without warning? Well, it’s not unheard of for solid rocket motors to do just that, though it has never occurred in the Shuttle program. But I suspect that what the Air Force is concerned about is a different kind of failure — a guidance failure that requires the Range Safety Officer to destroy the vehicle so that it doesn’t hit any uninvolved areas (e.g., Daytona). And considering that an SRB has never had to do guidance without help from a partner on the other side of the tanks and the SSME gimbals, that’s a non-trivial concern. And when the stage is destroyed (by setting off a linear charge along its length) it could create explosive debris that the LAS may not outrun. I assume that’s the Air Force’s (probably supported by an analysis from Aerospace) concern.

Of course, this all raises the question of whether or not we should even have a launch abort system, as I’ve discussed previously, with further thoughts here. Of course, the whole problem goes back to NASA’s “cargo-cult” engineering approach to Constellation, in which they think that if they just go back and do things the way the Apollo gods did, except “on steroids,” they’ll once again have a successful program.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Race Obsession

63 Comments

…of Judge Sotomayor:

A disinterested observer would conclude that Justice Sotomayor is race-obsessed. In her now much quoted 2001 UC Berkeley speech she invoked “Latina/Latino” no less than 38 times, in addition to a variety of other racial-identifying synonyms. When one reads the speech over, the obsession with race become almost overwhelming, and I think the public has legitimate worries (more than the Obama threshold of 5% of cases) over whether a judge so cognizant of race could be race-blind in her decision making.

I would not wish to be a member of what she termed in the speech the “old-boy network” in a case in her chambers pitted against a self-identified “Latina.” Indeed, if one were to substitute the word “white” for “Latina” in the speech, it would be rightly derided as a classical display of racialist chauvinism.

One of the many and enduring lies of the Obama campaign was that it was going to usher in a post-racial America.

[Update a few minutes later]

A relevant passage from the book about this kind of stuff:

You might say it’s outrageous to compare the current liberal program to help minorities with the poisonous ideology of fascism and Nazism. And I would agree if we were talking about things like the Holocaust or even Kristallnacht. But at the philosophical level, we are talking about categorical ways of thinking. To forgive something by saying “it’s a black thing” is philosophically no different from saying “it’s an Aryan thing.” The moral context matters a great deal. But the excuse is identical. Similarly, rejecting the Enlightenment for “good” reasons is still a rejection of the Enlightenment. And any instrumental or pragmatic gains you get from rejecting the Enlightenment still amount to taking a sledgehammer to the soapbox you’re standing on. Without the standards of the Enlightenment, we are in a Nietzschean world where power decides important questions rather than reason. This is exactly how the left appears to want it. One last point about diversity. Because liberals have what Thomas Sowell calls an “unconstrained vision,” they assume everyone sees things through the same categorical prism. So once again, as with the left’s invention of social Darwinism, liberals assume their ideological opposites take the “bad” view to their good. If liberals assume blacks—or women, or gays—are inherently good, conservatives must think these same groups are inherently bad.

This is not to say that there are no racist conservatives. But at the philosophical level, liberalism is battling a straw man. This is why liberals must constantly assert that conservatives use code words— because there’s nothing obviously racist about conservatism per se. Indeed, the constant manipulation of the language to keep conservatives—and other non-liberals—on the defensive is a necessary tactic for liberal politics. The Washington, D.C., bureaucrat who was fired for using the word “niggardly” correctly in a sentence is a case in point. The ground must be constantly shifted to maintain a climate of grievance. Fascists famously ruled by terror. Political correctness isn’t literally terroristic, but it does govern through fear. No serious person can deny that the grievance politics of the American left keeps decent people in a constant state of fright—they are afraid to say the wrong word, utter the wrong thought, offend the wrong constituency. If we maintain our understanding of political conservatism as the heir of classical liberal individualism, it is almost impossible for a fair-minded person to call it racist. And yet, according to liberals, race neutrality is itself racist. It harkens back to the “social Darwinism” of the past, we are told, because it relegates minorities to a savage struggle for the survival of the fittest.

The notion that it is “racist” to oppose quotas is a perfect example of this kind of doublethink.

[Tuesday morning update]

She’s not a racist, she’s a racialist. I agree that she shouldn’t be “borked,” but she has to be soberly questioned on this sort of thing. Republicans probably can’t stop the appointment, but they can make it very unpopular, and something that people will remember in the voting booth a year and a half from now.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

So How’s That “Stimulus” Working Out?

17 Comments

Like this:

…thanks to Barack Obama and democrats, the US Unemployment rate is worse today than if they never would have passed their stimulus package. The Obama Administration predicted the unemployment rate with and without President Obama’s stimulus package, the one that is supposed to “create or save” 3 million jobs.

Unfortunately, the red line shows the actual trend since the Stimulus was passed.

It wasn’t stimulus, it was scamulus. And it’s scandalous. Or it would be if we had a press that was a watchdog, rather than a lapdog, when Democrats are in power.

[Afternoon update]

Andy McCarthy noted Austan Goolsby’s dancing around this issue this morning, with two left feet:

I caught a panel on which Obama economic advisor Austin Goolsbee conceded that the administration had previously predicted unemployment would top out at around 8%, that it was now up to 9.4%, and that double-digit unemployment was a distinct possibility in the near future. Goolsbee didn’t resort to the administrations’s blather about “saving or creating jobs,” but he did repeat its fustian about how last month’s loss of 345,000 jobs (resulting in a half percentage point jump in the jobless rate) is somehow good news because it beat predictions (I don’t recall him saying whose) of even more dire loss numbers. It made me wonder why, if those predictions either existed or were serious, the Obama administration would have previously predicted that unemployment would top out at 8%?

Because they’re economically clueless, and willing to drive the economy deeply into a ditch if it will expand and entrench their political power?

[Monday morning update]

More thoughts from Stephen Green:

Let’s pretend for a moment that, god forbid, you break your arm. And somehow you end up with a team of doctors all trained at Obama University. As you lie there on the table in the ER, one doctor treats your arm by banging on the unbroken one with a ball-peen hammer. The second doctor takes the unusual course of setting your hair on fire. And the third one uses leaches.

Undeterred by your arm’s stubborn refusal to set, soon the doctors start blaming one another. And even though all of them are doing nothing but compounding your injury, none will take any blame. In fact, the louder you scream, the harder they go to work on you.

That, apparently, is what’s going on in the West Wing these days. Our economy is being managed by Dr. Howard, Dr. Fine, and Dr. Howard.

It’s Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy.

[Bumped]

General, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space

On Pseudonymity

21 Comments

There’s been a little kerfuffle in the “left-right” blogosphere this weekend over the “outing” of a pseudonymous blogger.

While I sympathize (or is the right word these days “empathize“?) with Ed Whelan’s frustration at being publicly attacked by someone who wants to lead a dual on-line/off-line life (and ignoring the incivil nature of many of the comments over at Obsidian Wings), I think that (former pseudonymous) blogger Jonathan Adler has the better part of the argument.

I would also say that I agree that there is an important distinction between pseudonymous and anonymous blogging. The former establishes an identity and a reputation that must be both established, and upheld. After a while, people will respect, or not, posts or comments from such a person, regardless of whether or not they know the real name/profession/location, etc. An anonymous commenter/blogger, on the other hand, has the potential to be a drive-by arsonist, and many are. In the space Internet world, Tommy Lee Elifritz is perhaps the best example of this, who changes his nom de plume more often than he probably changes his underwear, at places like Space Politics, NASA Watch and Rockets’n’Such. Of course, in his case, the vile style is quite distinctive.

Anyway, from a personal perspective, I’ve always blogged under my real name, for better or worse. In some cases, it’s been for the worse. I won’t name names, but I know for a fact that I have lost consulting work and been blackballed by parts of the industry because of my writing on the net under my own name (the proximate cause was the LA Times debate that I had with Homer Hickam), prominently noted to industry insiders, who might otherwise not have noticed it, by NASA Watch. Thanks, Keith…

Note that this wasn’t over my “right wing” (a phrase that never fails to amuse) politics, but specifically about my space policy blogging. This undoubtedly cost me many thousands of dollars in income since then, and ultimately resulted in a blogging plea for work last summer (one that ultimately resulted in consulting employment that undid at least some of the personal economic damage, so blogging has some value). This isn’t a complaint, but simply a statement of how the world works.

Perhaps, had I been blogging pseudonymously, this wouldn’t have happened. But as others in the most recent discussion have pointed out, one can only maintain pseudonymity for so long, until one is “outed,” because the more one reveals on the blog (and if one is a serious blogger, much is eventually revealed), diligent people can figure it out, and if they think it in their interest, reveal it to others. And of course, had I been a pseudonymous blogger, I wouldn’t have gotten the LA Times gig to begin with. Who wants to read Homer Hickam debating someone who won’t use their own name?

Anyway, when I started this endeavor, my motto was “to thine own self be true.” I’ve always tried to do that on this blog, consequences (apparently) be damned, and I’d like to assure what few readers I have that I’ll continue to do so.

[Monday morning update]

Heh. “I’ve looked at a bunch of the sites that have posted on the Blevins affair, and their anonymous commenters are running heavily against Ed for some reason.”