Category Archives: Political Commentary

Humor, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Satire

Just Arrived In Big Hollywood

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Iowahawk:

Cold Humpcrack Creekwater: Two retarded gay cowgirl sisters (Rene Zellweger, Traci Lords) defy a fundamentalist sherriff (Chris Cooper) and discover love in this 1930’s period piece set in the Appalachian outback of Nebraskansaw.

Angel Soft This: In a shocking and sometimes humorous indictment of the toilet paper industry, filmmaker Morgan Spurlock documents the ravages he suffers after 30 straight days of non-stop butt-wiping.

Snow Fuji Mountain: Mothra (Toby Damon) and Gamera (Orlando Law) discover forbidden love while destroying Tokyo in this story of nuclear-triggered sexual awakening.

I would actually pay to see some of these.

Economics, Philosophy, Political Commentary, Science And Society

The Economy Is Not A Machine

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I don’t understand why people don’t understand this. An ecosystem is a much more accurate (and more useful) analogy. And I’ve always found this amusing/frustrating:

Keynesians on the left are eager to dismiss Intelligent Design (ID) as the creationist afterthought to evolution, but just as eager to embrace its analog in economics. Disciples of Adam Smith know better. Darwin, after all, read Smith. As the late naturalist Stephen Jay Gould wrote, “the theory of natural selection is a creative transfer to biology of Adam Smith’s basic argument for a rational economy: the balance and order of nature does not arise from a higher, external (divine) control, or from the existence of laws operating directly upon the whole, but from struggle among individuals for their own benefits.”

It’s particularly ironic (and there must have been some cognitive dissonance) that Gould wrote this, because my understanding was that he was a life-long Marxist. And of course, the opposite applies as well — many free marketeers refuse to believe in biological evolution. They understand that there is a natural emergent order in the marketplace, but can’t believe that life could evolve unguided from above.

I’m one of those weirdos who believes in both free markets, and free nature.

[Update late morning]

Arnold Kling has some thoughts on the myth of the “economic multiplier”:

It is amazing what happens when you assume that you live in a linear world. You say that the multiplier for government spending is 1.57.

Really? Over what range? Think of it this way: at which level of additional government spending would the path of U.S. real GDP be the highest?

(a) $100 billion in spending above the baseline
(b) $1 trillion in spending above the baseline
(c) $100 trillion in spending above the baseline

If you use a constant multiplier of 1.57, the right answer is (c). Yet we know that this is not the right answer. At $100 trillion in additional government spending, the United States would be operating like Zimbabwe, with similar results.

This is similar to the (dumb) argument often made by space advocates that space spending has a high (or higher) “multiplier” effect than other kinds of spending (the study most cited on this is the one done by Chase Econometrics back in the 70s).

Yes, obviously, if you pay engineers to do things, they’ll go out and spend the money on goods and services, and create more jobs for other people. And yes, if you develop technology, some of it is bound to have an economic benefit and improve productivity, or create new products, and grow the economy.

But when one makes these kinds of arguments, it’s all too easy to ignore what you’re spending the primary money on. It really does matter what product the engineers are building with government money. When it comes to space, does anyone think that it makes no difference whether we had continued to employ people building and flying Saturns, or had developed the Shuttle? Or that if we’d developed a better version of the Shuttle (perhaps by starting with smaller prototypes, and continually improving the concept over the past thirty-five years) that it would have made no difference in our prospects for being spacefaring? That it makes no difference whether we spend thirty-billion dollars developing Ares, or instead something that actually reduces the cost of access to space?

To listen to the “multiplier” argument, it doesn’t matter at all. Having the engineers design a machine to bore a hole to the earth’s center has the same economic value as to build a space elevator.

When we are talking about government spending, it isn’t sufficient to talk about how much we’re spending, and whether or not it will “stimulate the economy.” We have to talk about what we’re spending it on, and unfortunately, much of what the Democrats want to spend it on will (relative to letting people decide what to do with their own money) not create wealth, or grow the economy, but rather destroy it. It’s what governments do.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, War Commentary

Why We Should Support Israel

4 Comments

Armed Liberal explains:

As I never tire of reminding people, the disparity in power between Israel and the Palestinian proto-states (and the entire Arab world) is immense, driven in large part by the cultural gap between the westernized Israelis and the balance of the Middle East.

I’m no expert, but I have to believe that the day Israel gets tired of this stalemate and simply starts playing by Hama rules, it will be a matter of days before there simply are no more Palestinian people.

And here’s the problem – the same problem I’ve worried about since 2001. How do we prevent this from seeming like a good idea?

Well, the strongest way is for Israel to know that it’s not alone.

And we’re doing a worse and worse job of that.

I also think that Joe Katzman’s comment about the Juan Coles of the world is spot on:

You assume that the hatred of people like Juan Cole is rational.

If Israel falls, and million of Jews are murdered, Cole and his ilk will just smirk and enjoy the victory their Islamist friends have won.

If Israel wipes out the Palestinians, it serves as full justification to them for all the loony things they blieve about Western Civilization (and the Jews), and in their minds they were the “heroes” who tired to stop it. On some level, I suspect they may desire this; it fits their ideological fantasies too well. The fact that [they] would have done a fair [b]it to cause the situation will not, of course, be allowed to enter their minds.

So, their position is one in which nothing of theirs is held at risk, and either way they “win.”

Logic is not relevant to any of this. Only the hate that animates them.

And there are far too many of them, particularly in Europe.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space

Enough With The “Military Rockets” Already

19 Comments

Andy Pasztor makes the same mistake as Bloomberg and many others have in this WSJ piece about the potential new administrator:

One of the first big questions confronting NASA is whether the new team will embrace the Bush administration’s concept of building a new fleet of space shuttle-derived rockets to reach the orbiting International Space Station and return to the moon. In the past few weeks, there have been increasing calls by outsiders to scrap some of those plans in favor of using existing military rockets.

The Atlas and Delta are not “military rockets.”

They are commercial launch vehicles, developed partly with a subsidy from the Air Force. Anyone can fly on them who has the money, and they are built and operated by commercial contractors. They fly out of a military range, but almost all commercial vehicles do. There is nothing “military” about them. Why can’t people get this straight?

History, Political Commentary, Space, Space History

A Nice Space History Find

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After I mentioned the story about Bob Frosch wanting to run NOAA instead of NASA (something that I’d heard at the time, but had never really verified, even after meeting and spending quite a bit of time with Frosch in the early nineties), I decided to dig into it to see if it was true or apocryphal. Which resulted in finding this transcript of a very long but interesting interview with him, that contains a lot of interesting Carter-era NASA history.

It confirms that NOAA was his first pick, and he expected to get it, but was edged out by someone more politically connected (I didn’t bother to find out who it was — the NOAA history site didn’t make it very easy to figure it out). The first question on the table for the incoming Carter administration was whether or not to cancel Shuttle, which they didn’t seem to understand, and Frosch’s first task was to figure it out, because they were looking for places to cut for the president’s own programs. In the end (obviously) it wasn’t cancelled, but the planned fleet was cut from seven to five (and really four, because Enterprise never flew). Had they built the full seven, it would have cost a couple billion more at the time, and we’d have five (or possibly four, because we might not have replaced Challenger) now instead of three, and eking another few years out of it might look a lot more attractive.

But this part struck me as kind of funny, given the rumors that have been flying about Obama’s plans:

Frosch:…there was another question that came, not so much from the President, but began to come from OMB and Frank Press, which is important to reorganization. It is: why does NASA have so many centers? Why don’t you close a few centers? You know, it’s a perpetual question. It tended always to focus on Huntsville, largely because they were the engine place, and the mentality of a lot of OMB and political types is a very short-term mentality; and so, they were saying, “Gee, we’re almost through with the development of the Shuttle engines. Obviously, you don’t need Huntsville. After you finish the engines, you dispose of Huntsville.” You can decrease the number of people. And remember, the President came in saying there were too many bureaucrats; you’ve got to decrease the number of bureaucrats. There was a lot of pressure — “What are you going to close?” In fact, there was a rumor around NASA that the reason I had been selected was because, as I told you, in the Navy job I actually closed something. Okay, so that was mixed up in this whole organizational guestion.
DeVorkin:
That rumor wasn’t well founded, was it?
Frosch:
No, no: as far as I know, it had nothing to do with it. Nobody was thinking about that at all. Oh, there were funny rumors, that since Lovelace and Frosch had both had experience in the Pentagon, the whole place was going to be swallowed up by the Pentagon. In fact, there were people running around at one stage, saying we were brought in to militarize NASA. It was very peculiar, but the only thing you do about these things is you ignore them (laughs), very straightforward. So, we launched, among other things, into “what are we going to do about reorganization?”

The more things change…