Category Archives: Political Commentary

Business, Political Commentary, Space

Ray LaHood?

8 Comments

That’s the latest rumor for SecDOT. I’m looking at his committee assignments from when he was in Congress, and see nothing to indicate any expertise or knowledge of transportation issues. The only relevance that the NYT points out is that he’s overseen pork transportation projects on the Appropriations Committee (my characterization, not theirs). And he’s a Republican. But he’s from Illinois. And he’s of Arabic (Christian) descent.

Is this just a token to show bipartisanship by the incoming administration? I have no idea what this implies (if anything) for space transportation regulation. I’d be willing to be that he’s never given it a moment’s thought, which can be both good and bad. It’s good in the sense that he won’t come in with any agenda, but he’ll have to be educated. I’d like to know if he has any natural tendencies when it comes to regulation in general.

[Thursday morning update]

Here’s more on LaHood. Apparently he does have some history in dealing with aviation/airport issues, but nothing about space or spaceports.

Education, Political Commentary

Is Our Secretaries Learning?

12 Comments

I guess it’s too much these days to expect a Secretary of Education to know basic English grammar:

I want to thank our mutual friend John Rogers, who’s been a mentor and friend to me since I was 10-years-old. He gave my sister and I the opportunity to start a great school in the Southside of Chicago, and that has become a model for success in urban education.

I know it’s a nit, but after all the Bush bashing for the past eight years, I can’t resist.

Political Commentary

Could The Blogo Scandal Ensnare Team Obama?

4 Comments

Yup.

We don’t know the extent of the investigation into Blagojevich’s allegedly corrupt dealings. Have witnesses been brought before a grand jury? We don’t know. If so, who are they? We don’t know. What witnesses have been interviewed by FBI agents working for Fitzgerald? We don’t know. Do Fitzgerald and his investigators have any doubts about the truthfulness of those who have talked? We don’t know.

But we do know that something big is going on. “There is a lot of investigation that still needs to be done,” Rob Grant, who is the special agent in charge of the FBI office in Chicago, told reporters at the news conference announcing the Blagojevich charges last week. “There are critical interviews that we have to do and cooperation we need to get from different people.” At the same press conference, Fitzgerald himself added, “We have a tremendous amount of information gained from the wiretap and bugs that occurred over the last month and a half or so….One of the things we want to do with this investigation is to track out the different schemes and conspiracies to find out which ones were carried out or not and who might be involved in that or not. And that’s something we haven’t done yet. Now that we’ve gone overt, we’ll be interviewing people and figuring that out.”

One of the things Fitzgerald and his fellow prosecutors and FBI agents will be doing is trying to determine who is telling the whole truth and who is not. “There’s always a danger that people will make a mistake, get it wrong. There’s human frailty. They may also lie,” says Joseph diGenova, a former U.S. attorney who was a vocal critic of Fitzgerald’s handling of the Plame affair. “Fitzgerald will try to do perjury traps, because that is what he does.”

As he notes, just remember the Plame case (also by Fitzgerald), where there was a conviction for perjury, with no underlying crime.

Political Commentary, Space

The Wrong Lessons From Apollo

92 Comments

It’s not news to anyone who has been reading him (and me, among others) for years, but Henry Spencer explains once again why NASA’s architecture choice is the wrong one (and no, I’m not talking about Ares):

There is also a longer-term advantage: if you decide to launch everything on one big rocket, what happens when you outgrow that rocket? Even if your early expeditions stay within the rocket’s capacity, presumably you’ll want to do bigger and more complex ones later. What then? Develop a still-larger rocket?

Even people who don’t want to depend on orbital assembly for the first expeditions to the Moon (or Mars, or wherever) often will concede that it will be necessary eventually. But then, where’s the gain in delaying it?

If you’re going to want to do orbital assembly anyway, you’re better off starting it right away, so even early expeditions can benefit from it. The only reason to delay it is if you think there won’t be any later expeditions – if you’re planning a dead-end programme.

I’ve never seen anyone even attempt to refute this logic.

[Update on Tuesday afternoon]

Well, here’s an attempt, but it uses ludicrous analogies:

One can only imagine someone talking to Prince Henry the Navigator circi 1410 and trying to convince him that adapting steam power (then known since Heron of Alexandria) to ships would be desirable to why not start now and stop messing with those quaint, wind powered caravels. Or someone else trying to sell jet engines to Lindbergh before crossing the Atlantic. Forever delaying doing things until the technology is “just right” doesn’t work very well.

No one is proposing the equivalent of steam power in the fifteenth century or jets in the nineteen twenties (though in the latter case, they weren’t far off). That would be akin to demanding a space elevator, or anti-matter rockets.

Nor is anyone, including me or Henry, proposing “forever delaying doing things until the technology is ‘just right.'” The technology for propellant depots could have been well in hand years ago had NASA stayed in the technology business, instead of cutting off all funding to it to redo what was done forty years ago. An assembly-based architecture could still easily be in place just as fast as NASA’s Constellation plans, and much cheaper, particularly given appropriate incentives to private industry. We are proposing that NASA plan for the future, with an affordable and sustainable plan, instead of looking to the past.

[Bumped]

[Mid-afternoon update]

It strikes me that this paragraph from my extended version of The Path Not Taken is relevant:

While the report of the Aldridge Commission on the new vision, released in June, had some good recommendations in it, it also had a few potentially disastrous ones. Perhaps the most damaging statement in it was to declare heavy-lift launch systems to be an “enabling technology” for carrying out the vision. This is a phrase of art in the engineering world meaning that, absent such a technology, the goal is unachievable. The commission is claiming that we cannot send humans beyond low earth orbit without a much larger launch vehicle than anything existing. If they had used the phrase “enhancing technology,” meaning that it’s not an absolute necessity, but that it makes things easier to do, I’d have less complaint, but as they’ve stated it, it commits us to an expensive development of a new launch system, that shows no promise of actually reducing costs. Moreover, it commits us to an approach to exploration that, like Apollo, is not affordable or sustainable.

I hope that this is a recommendation that can be revisited.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

It’s The Productivity, Stupid

3 Comments

I have some thoughts today on the real problem with the UAW, over at PJM.

[Update a few minutes later]

More thoughts from Mickey Kaus — from Taylorism To Wagnerism.

[Update a little after 9 Eastern]

Here’s an excellent piece on the same subject by Michael Barone.

[Afternoon update]

Jim Manzi has more thoughts on Wagnerism versus Taylorism:

…there appears to be a cyclical nature to these things. More-or-less the same, basically sensible, method for business operational improvement — carefully observe current work practices, think of them holistically and in light of the goals of the business, and then redesign work practices — keeps getting reinvented. Taylorism, “Goals and Methods”, factory statistical process control (SPC), Total Quality Management (TQM), reengineering, and so on are all just manifestations of this approach. Each is typically pioneered by innovators who have a fairly supple understanding of the often unarticulated complexity of the task. It drives clear profit gains, and many other people want to apply it. A group of experts are trained by the pioneers, who are also quite effective. There is an inevitable desire to scale up the activity and apply it as widely as possible. It becomes codified into some kind of a cookbook process that can be replicated. This process becomes a caricature of the original work, and the method is discredited by failure and ridicule. (Seeing this phase of reengineering at several companies in the 1990s, a close friend of mine once described it as “like the Planet of the Apes, but the monkeys have taken over from the humans”.) Within a few years, some new pioneers develop some new manifestation of the approach, and the cycle begins again.

Just before I left Rockwell in the early nineties, they had caught on to the latest TQM management fad. We all went to courses on it, as well as taking classes based on the management philosophy of Stephen Covey.

Much of it was absurd. There is no sensible way to apply statistical management process control to research and development, but they attempted to do so, having us set out the processes by which we did trade studies, etc. This senseless training was, of course, charged to overhead (i.e., it was included as part of the burden on our Air Force and NASA cost-plus contracts). Just in case you were looking for more reasons that space stuff costs so much.

Humor, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Satire

Epic Fail

That’s what Iowahawk says that his five-year plan was:

I started this blog with a simple goal in mind: to attract gullible millions into a worldwide online cult and then bilk them of their life savings. Five years, 450-odd posts and almost that many pageviews later, my actual market appeal has proven somewhat more selective. Extremely more selective. Still, it’s much more than I deserve, and I’d like offer my very sincere thanks for your patronage. I sure hope you had 1% of the fun reading the junk I post here as had typing it, even if (especially if?) you don’t see eye-to-eye with me politically. If any of it annoyed you I hope that deep down, were also a tiny bit amused.

I (and I suspect many others) disagree (and I say this as someone who was beating on him to get a blog via email for many months prior to its inception). His top-twenty-five hits are spectacular, and somehow, I had missed the liberal elevator pitches, which are hilarious (as are some of the reader contributions in comments).

Here’s to at least another five years of the unexcellable Hawk.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

What They Need

3 Comments

…but won’t get. Iain Murray describes what will be necessary for a successful auto industry:

…the best way to save the auto industry remains a deregulatory bailout, reducing government-imposed burdens on the industry, and in particular Congress backing off on its destructive CAFE requirements.

One of those government-imposed burdens is the Wagner Act and the NLRB that enables the UAW to maintain a stranglehold on the industry. Unfortunately, all of the above, while the most needed, are also the most unlikely things to be had from the new regime. If anything, as I’ll note in a Pajamas column tomorrow, they’re only going to make things worse.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

From “Dictator” To “Czar”

4 Comments

Jonah Goldberg with some brief thoughts on the unconscious fascism of the denizens of the Beltway.

[Update in the afternoon]

Mickey has a good point:

We need a Czar Czar, to crack the whip on all the czars. … P.S.: Also a federal czar policy. Right now, czar decisions are made on an ad hoc, case-by-case basis, with no attempt at czar harmonization.

It seems like a logical next step.