I missed it because I was too busy traveling and attending and covering the ISDC, but I had a piece at Pajamas Media yesterday on the challenges facing Bolden, if confirmed.
Category Archives: Political Commentary
History Revealed
The “fascist cop” who martyred a left-wing German student in the sixties, and created the German left-wing terrorist movement, including Baader-Meinhoff, and helped turn the German nation to the left, has turned out to be a Stasi agent:
Ohnesorg galvanized a generation of left-wing students and activists who rose up in the iconic year of 1968. What was a fringe soon turned to terrorism.
To them his killer, Karl-Heinz Kurras, was the “fascist cop” at the service of a capitalist, pro-American “latent fascist state.” “The post-fascist system has become a pre-fascist one,” the German Socialist Student Union declared in their indictment hours after the killing. The ensuing movement drew its legitimacy and fervor from the Ohnesorg killing. Further enraging righteous passions, Mr. Kurras was acquitted by a court and returned to the police force.
Now all that’s being turned on its head. Last week, a pair of German historians unearthed the truth about Mr. Kurras. Since 1955, he had worked for the Stasi, East Germany’s dreaded secret police. According to voluminous Stasi archives, his code name was Otto Bohl. The files don’t say whether the Stasi ordered him to do what he did in 1967. But that only fuels speculation about a Stasi hand behind one of postwar Germany’s transformative events.
Mr. Kurras, who is 81 and lives in Berlin, told the Bild am Sonntag newspaper that he belonged to the East German Communist Party. “Should I be ashamed of that or something?” He denied he was paid to spy for the Stasi, but asked, “What if I did work for them? What does it matter? It doesn’t change anything.” Mr. Kurras may be the monster of the leftist imagination — albeit now it turns out he is one of their own.
Hey, fascist, communist, it’s all good
How The “Stimulus” Is Working
It isn’t:
As we know, most of the stimulus spending does not take place until next year and beyond, so the short-run gains are puny. On the other hand, the big increase in the projected deficit creates the expectation of higher interest rates, which raises interest rates now. These higher interest rates serve to weaken the economy.
According to this standard analysis, the stimulus is going to hurt GDP now, when we could use the most help. Much of the spending will kick in a year or more from now, with multiplier effects following afterward, when the economy will need little, if any, stimulus.
This is the flaw with using spending rather than tax cuts as a stimulus. The lags are longer when you use spending.
Of course, if the real goal is to promote government at the expense of civil society and to create a one-party state in which business success is based on political favoritism, then the stimulus is working exactly as intended.
Yup. But it’s a misnomer to call it “stimulus.”
[Update mid afternoon]
The “reality-based community” has a collision with reality:
Cohn reports how former CBO director and current OMB chief Peter Orszag pressured careerists to assume sizable savings due to proposed reforms. The problem is the bean counters did not believe the alleged savings were justified according to the available evidence…it is interesting that the reality-based Obama crowd, which promised to roll back the “Republican War on Science” is now arguing against what Cohn calls “a super-strict reading of the evidence.”
Well, there’s science, and then there’s, you know, “scientific socialism.” Or maybe they’re just waging a war on math.
[Update late afternoon]
Wishful thinking, not a plan:
Congress is working on a health-care bill to expand coverage mainly by subsidizing insurance for tens of millions of households. This new entitlement is likely to cost $150 billion per year initially and grow, on a per capita basis, at a rate that is about 2 percentage points above GDP growth each year going forward. In other words, the cost of this new program will rise just as rapidly as Medicare and Medicaid spending has for decades now.
Orszag and others are saying, don’t worry, health-information technology, comparative-effectiveness research, more attention to prevention and wellness, and some very modest provider payment reforms in Medicare will make all of this governmental spending — on Medicare, Medicaid, and the new subsidy program — grow much more slowly in the future than it has in the past.
But this is an assertion — not a fact. Where’s the evidence to back it up?
“Wishful thinking” is a pretty good summary of Democrat policies in general, both domestic and foreign.
“Liberals,” Then And Now
When did they become Archie Bunker?
Like Sotomayor, Archie is not propounding a theory of racial or ethnic supremacy but describing the world in terms of culturally contingent stereotypes. He is engaging in identity politics.
PodcastJames Taranto on Sotomayor and Archie Bunker.
What’s fascinating about this is that the Meathead (played by Rob Reiner) is a peer of La Jueza Empática: She was born in 1954; Reiner, in 1947. But the liberalism of “All in the Family” is not the liberalism of the baby boomers. It is that of an earlier generation–Archie Bunker’s generation. Series creator Norman Lear and Carroll O’Connor, who played Archie, were born in 1922 and 1924, respectively.
Today, you can easily imagine a conservative uttering the Meathead’s earnest query: “Why do you always have to label people by nationality?” But somewhere along the line, liberalism lost its ideals and adopted Archie Bunker’s theory of representative government.
Actually, I think they’ve just reverted to type from the early twentieth century, when “progressives” were all in favor of eugenics. In both cases, Lear and a “conservative” would be acting as the true liberals. The classical ones, before the word was hijacked by the left.
[Update in the early afternoon]
If I were a Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, I’d have the All In The Family clip played in lieu of some of my time. It’s a lot more effective than most of Senatorial bloviating.
[Update a while later]
Would Sotomayor qualify as a juror?
But Other Than That, It’s Great
Some criticism (to put it mildly) of Constellation over at SpaceVidCast, in comments.
I agree with the commenter over at Clark’s place, though, that the purpose of the program should not be to create jobs, and layoffs at NASA centers are a feature, rather than a bug, if we want to get more for the taxpayers’ money. Of course, if NASA could come up with something useful for those people to do in advancing the goal of becoming a spacefaring nation, and keep them on, that would be even better.
Fusion News
There’s an interesting question at the end of the post about the progress of ITER versus polywell:
Why hasn’t Polywell Fusion been fully funded by the Obama administration?
I suspect it’s not “green” enough. And by that, I don’t mean that it has too high a carbon footprint — it obviously has none. No, the problem is that it doesn’t force us to tighten up the hair shirts, and force us to live the politically correct lifestyles that our betters demand of us.
The Greason Pick
…assuming that he really will be on the commission, of course.
Jeff Foust has a report on an aspect of Jeff’s talk yesterday that I missed because I was late to the session. It provides an interesting context for his commission duty, if it occurs.
A Thought From Lileks
“Once again I say: any planet whose ecosystem can be wrecked by burping sheep deserves it. Darwin on a galactic scale. Man up, Mother Earth.”
[Late afternoon update]
Here’s the correct link, for those who were scratching their heads.
NASA Plenary
Here are my notes from this morning’s session on NASA and Constellation. There’s a little bit of transterrestrial commentary in parentheses, but it’s mostly just trying to capture what was said. Continue reading NASA Plenary
The Augustine Commission
It’s not official, but the Orlando Sentinel has some names, including one surprising one:
Christopher Chyba – Professor of Astrophysical Sciences and International Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University. He once held the Carl Sagan Chair for the Study of Life in the Universe at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif.
Sally Ride – Physicist and a former NASA astronaut who, in 1983, became the first American woman and youngest American (at the time) to enter space.
Lester Lyles – Retired Air Force General and NASA administrator candidate. He is an expert in military space issues and is a member of the NASA Advisory Committee.
Edward Crawley – Ford Professor of Engineering at MIT, and a Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics and of Engineering Systems. He is engaged with NASA on the design of its lunar and earth observing systems, and with BP on oil exploration system designs.
Bohdan “Bo” Bejmuk – Respected engineer and executive at Boeing Co. and one-time executive at Sea Launch, where he helped put together and run the company’s unique offshore rocket launch system. He also assembled and led an elite Boeing engineering team to assist leading the integration of Russian elements into the Station. He was also involved in the space shuttle program from its earliest days.
Jeff Greason – President, CEO and founder of XCOR Aerospace and the Personal Spaceflight Federation. He was the team leader for engine development at the now-defunct Rotary Rocket, and previously worked at the computer chip manufacturer Intel. He has been active in lobbying to encourage support for private spaceflight activities.
Wanda Austin — President and CEO of The Aerospace Corp., an independent non-profit dedicated to assisting the nation’s space program. NASA recently commissioned her company to study whether military rockets could lift people and cargo to the international space station and the moon, and the study concluded they could, contrary to NASA’s previous assertions.
Emphasis mine. As confirmation (sort of), Jeff mentioned to me yesterday that he was going to be doing some consulting this summer, which was going to be keeping him very busy. I didn’t ask him what it was at the time, but I think I can guess now.
I think that this is great news (I know Bo Bejmuk, too, from Rockwell days). Jeff will definitely have an oar in the water to steer in a useful direction.
I’m not looking a gift horse in the mouth, but I’d love to know how he was picked, and who suggested him.