You know that Tina Fey has to be hoping for a Republican victory. It’s a guaranteed gig for at least four, and maybe a dozen years.
Category Archives: Political Commentary
How Screwed Up Is Milspace?
This screwed up:
After trying unsuccessfully for years to build its own radar satellite, the Pentagon is now turning to its allies for help and has been presented with a plan that would see it buy a clone of Canada’s highly successful Radarsat-2 spacecraft.
The U.S. Defence Department asked for and received information this week from a number of foreign satellite consortiums on how they could help the Pentagon meet its surveillance needs for the future.
Isn’t there anybody here who knows how to play this game?
Turnabout Is Fair Play
Heh. Instant Godwin:
“Hitler was a community organizer, FDR was a governor.” Makes as much sense as the Jeebus/Pilate meme.
What A Mess
I’m looking at reporting from what looks like the Sheraton in Clear Lake, and there are reports of furniture with NASA logos floating in the bay. Gotta think that some of the JSC facilities were flooded.
If space were important, we wouldn’t have mission control in an area susceptible to floods and hurricanes. The Cape has some geographical reasons for its location, but the only reason that JSC is in Houston is because Johnson wanted it there, and the land was free.
[Update in the afternoon]
Here’s more on NASA’s fragile infrastructure. The agency’s ground facilities are just as non-robust as its space transportation system.
Here is how it seems to work: a hurricane threatens JSC – so NASA shuts off email and other services to a large chunk of the agency. Why? Because NASA deliberately set the system up such that other NASA centers – some of which are thousands of miles away and poised to offer assistance and keep the rest of the agency operating – have their email and other services routed out of JSC – and only JSC (or so it would seem). A few critical users have some service, but everyone else is out of luck for at least 48 hours. Would any self-respecting, profitable, commercial communications company do something as silly as this? No. They’d never stay in business. Only NASA would come up with such a flawed and stupid plan.
That’s too harsh. I can imagine the FAA, or DHS doing exactly the same thing.
It’s just more of that wise, foresightful government thing.
[Update about 1:30 PM EDT]
Jeff Masters says that Galveston lucked out:
Although Ike caused heavy damage by flooding Galveston with a 12-foot storm surge, the city escaped destruction thanks to its 15.6-foot sea wall (the wall was built 17 feet high, but has since subsided about 2 feet). The surge was able to flow into Galveston Bay and flood the city from behind, but the wall prevented a head-on battering by the surge from the ocean side. Galveston was fortunate that Ike hit the city head-on, rather than just to the south. Ike’s highest storm surge occurred about 50 miles to the northeast of Galveston, over a lightly-populated stretch of coast. Galveston was also lucky that Ike did not have another 12-24 hours over water. In the 12 hours prior to landfall, Ike’s central pressure dropped 6 mb, and the storm began to rapidly organize and form a new eyewall. If Ike had had another 12-24 hours to complete this process, it would have been a Category 4 hurricane with 135-145 mph winds that likely would have destroyed Galveston. The GFDL model was consistently advertising this possibility, and it wasn’t far off the mark. It was not clear to me until late last night that Ike would not destroy Galveston and kill thousands of people. Other hurricane scientists I conversed with yesterday were of the same opinion.
And of course, the lesson that the people who stayed behind will take is not that they were lucky and foolhardy, but that the weather forecasters overhyped the storm, and they’ll be even less likely to evacuate the next time. And one of these times their luck will run out, as it did for their ancestors a few generations ago, when thousands were killed by a hurricane in Galveston.
[Update mid afternoon]
Sounds like things could have been a lot worse at NASA, too.
NASA had feared that a storm surge from Galveston Bay would flood some
buildings on the 1,600-acre Space Center. Its southeast boundary is near
Clear Lake, which is connected to Galveston Bay. However, the water did
not rise that high.
Apparently the Guppy hangar at Ellington was destroyed, but it was never much of a hangar–more like a big tent.
Economic Ignorami
George Bush’s announcement this morning that the administration was concerned about “gouging” reminded me of why I wish that we’d had better options in the last two elections (and still do). I expect that kind of nonsense from Democrats, but you’d think that someone who was supposedly a businessman would know better. Or perhaps he does, and is just pandering. I’m not sure which is worse.
Every time we have a natural disaster like this, this idiotic topic comes up, and we once again have to explain Econ 101 to the products of our public school system, probably in futility. This time, it’s Rich Hailey’s turn.
Here’s what I wrote about it a three years ago, in the wake of Katrina.
[Update late morning]
Jeez, I thought that David Asman was smarter than that. Now he’s telling Fox viewers to take pictures of stations with high gas prices so that they can be reported to authorities. It’s hard for me to believe that Neal Cavuto would do that.
[Another update a minute or so later]
You know, I think that this is an explanation for socialism and collectivism’s continuing grip on the public mind, despite its long history of unending failure. There’s just something in human psychology to which it naturally appeals, and rationality just can’t break through. It just “feels” unfair for prices to go up in an emergency, regardless of the demonstrably bad consequences of attempting to legislate them.
[Late afternoon update]
Shannon Love explains how the gas station business works:
I’ll say it one more time for those who can’t be bothered to actually ask someone who owns a gas station. Gas stations set prices for the gas they sell today based on the wholesale price of the gas they will have to buy to replace it. Get it? The price you pay for a gallon today is the cost of the gallon the station will have buy to replace the one you just bought.
Gas stations sell gas at or near cost, so if they did not use replacement pricing any sudden spike in gas prices would shut them down and you couldn’t get any gas. I simply do not know why our public and private talking heads cannot understand and communicate this simple fact.
Because either they don’t know it, or they think that people don’t want to hear it. They operate on razor-thin margins, and can’t afford to hand out subsidized gas as charity, even if that wouldn’t screw up the market. And note, for those who say it’s “big oil” that is “maximizing profits” in the face of a national emergency, even if that were true (it’s not) “big oil” isn’t threatened with jail for “gouging.” It’s the gas station owner, who has no control over his wholesale gas costs. So people who demand that we crack down on gougers are essentially demanding that the station operators either operate at a loss, or pay fines, or go to jail. I don’t know why anyone would want to be in that business in the face of so much public ignorance about it.
Wile E. Obama
Supergenius?
OK, so you’re running against a guy who for recreation (though not his) used to have his arms tied together at the wrists behind his back, and hang from them for hours, a result of which is that he can no longer raise them above his head. Or other things:
McCain gets emotional at the mention of military families needing food stamps or veterans lacking health care. The outrage comes from inside: McCain’s severe war injuries prevent him from combing his hair, typing on a keyboard, or tying his shoes.
And the Obama campaign is making fun of him for not knowing how to email?
When these guys lose, there will be many reasons why.
[Update late Friday evening]
Glenn has a more. A lot more, with lots of links. This one may have legs.
[Late night update]
One more update from Jonah.
As he says, bogus as it gets.
[Late evening update]
Iowahawk (who else!) picks up on the theme. Hilarity ensues.
[Saturday morning update]
Roger Kimball wonders who is sabotaging the Obama campaign?
Hey, as I say in comments, the guy has problems finding good help. Just who we want for president.
NASA Infighting
An interview with Tom Jones on the subject, over at Popular Mechanics. Note that he doesn’t point out that no one ordered Mike Griffin to develop Ares, which is the biggest reason that Orion is delayed and that NASA doesn’t have enough funding. He also has too much faith in Orion flying before something else (particularly given the Ares problems). I’m sure we could put up a capsule on an Atlas long before 2014, whether Dragon or something else, if we made it a priority.
Accountability
Glenn has some good advice for presidential candidates:
Take your own camera to every interview, and post the raw video online. The news folks won’t like that, but, really, what principled basis is there for objection?
I think that a “principled” basis would be too much to expect from them. It would be amusing to see what their response is.
Staying Together For The Kids
As I’ve noted in the past, we’re going to have to decide how much ISS is worth to us. Chair Force Engineer thinks that we’re going to bite the bullet and buy more Soyuzs from the Russians:
Besides the reliance on Soyuz, there are myriad other ways in which ISS cannot survive unless the US and Russia cooperate. The various modules are too interconnected, and neither country can operate their contributions to the station without the other country playing along. It’s conceivable that Russia could afford to build Soyuz without American money, by selling the American slots to space tourists. But a Russian-led ISS would still require use of American space modules.
America and Russia are left in a situation where it’s unlikely that either will abandon the ISS, even though both nations are mired in growing mistrust. If I had to make a bet, I would say that the US and Russia will learn to grin and bear it, operating ISS jointly until 2017. When Congress looks rationally at its options, it will realize that it will have to begrudgingly buy more Soyuz if it still wants to participate in ISS.
Sometimes, I think that expecting Congress to “look rationally at its options” is asking too much. Particularly when it’s robbing money from the NASA budget to provide foreign aid to Ethiopia. Sure, why not? It’s not like NASA’s spending the money very usefully, anyway. It just proves my oft-made point that space isn’t politically important.
Anyway, as I said in my Pajamas piece, this is a policy disaster long in the making, and the chickens are finally coming home to roost. It was naive in the extreme at the end of the Cold War to assume that we and Russia would be BFFs and enter into such an inextricable long-term relationship. Now it’s like a very dysfunctional marriage that is being held together only out of concern for the children. Without ISS, the divorce would be swift, I suspect.
[Update a while later]
Speaking of apt metaphors, Clark Lindsey has one for the Ares program:
Yellow and red grades notwithstanding, it has always seemed extremely unlikely to me that Ares I would fail to fly when NASA has so many billions of dollars available to spend on it. However, since I believe the whole Ares I/V program to be a stupendous waste, if technical problems did arise that led to its cancellation, I’d consider it a boon for US space development. If the brakes fail and a huge truck starts to careen down a hill, it’s a blessing if the thing blows a tire instead and flops over into a ditch with relatively little damage to people and property. Unfortunately, it appears that Ares will keep rolling no matter what.
Actually, I wouldn’t necessarily bet on that. There may be “change” coming to NASA next year, regardless of who wins the election.
The Media Meltdown
Mark Steyn comments:
Howie [Kurtz] feels the press is being “manipulated” by the McCain campaign.
Maybe it is. A conventional launch strategy for a little-known vice-presidential nominee might have involved “manipulating” the media into running umpteen front-pagers on Sarah Palin’s amazing primary challenge of a sitting governor and getting the sob-sisters to slough off a ton of heartwarming stories about her son shipping out to Iraq.
But, if you were really savvy, you’d “manipulate” the media into a stampede of lurid drivel deriding her as a Stepford wife and a dominatrix, comparing her to Islamic fundamentalists, Pontius Pilate and porn stars, and dismissing her as a dysfunctional brood mare who can’t possibly be the biological mother of the kid she was too dumb to abort. Who knows? It’s a long shot, but if you could pull it off, a really cunning media manipulator might succeed in manipulating Howie’s buddies into spending the month after Labor Day outbidding each other in some insane Who Wants To Be An Effete Condescending Media Snob? death-match. You’d not only make the press look like bozos, but that in turn might tarnish just a little the fellow these geniuses have chosen to anoint.
I suspect that it’s just going to get worse for them, particularly when they see the generic poll for Congress.
[Update a few minutes later]
John Hinderaker has more on Howie’s anger:
I’m not sure what Obama had in mind, but I find it odd that in pages of outrage devoted to the supposed excesses of the McCain campaign, Kurtz finds no room to mention the fact that prominent Democrats (not anonymous emailers, who are much worse) have said that Governor Palin is Pontius Pilate and that her primary qualification seems to be that she hasn’t had an abortion.
The truth is that Sarah Palin has been the object of the most vicious and concerted smear campaign in modern American history. But that fact doesn’t cause the media (or Howard Kurtz) to get mad.
It’s not too hard to diagnose why, as Kurtz correctly says, “the media are getting mad.” They’re getting mad because their candidate is losing. They’ve spent years building him up and covering for his mistakes and shortcomings, and he is such a stiff that he can’t coast across the finish line. I’d be mad too, I guess, but I think I’d have the decency not to take it out on Sarah Palin.
Not just the decency. Also the intelligence, given how badly it continues to backfire on them.