Category Archives: Political Commentary

History, Humor, Political Commentary, Satire

State Department Issues New Language Guidelines

2 Comments

December 15th, 1941

WASHINGTON (Routers) In an effort to drive a wedge between moderate Germans and those more extreme, the State Department issued new rules today, stipulating that the word “Nazi” was not to be used by department employees to describe the enemy. Germany recently declared war on our country, as part of its alliance with Imperial Japan, which itself attacked us at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii a little over a week ago, and with which we are now at war.

“Nazism has a great many admirable features,” said a department spokesman at Foggy Bottom, “and we want to make clear that despite the fact that the Nazi Party rules Germany, we have no quarrel with the vast majority of Nazis with peaceful intent.”

She went on to describe the National Socialist universal health care plan, its youth programs that inculcate loyalty to the government, its strict and necessary control over unbridled private industry, its wage and price controls, its strict separation of church and state, its progressive views on food purity and safety, and other beneficial features of the fascist system.

“Many of the Nazi programs have their counterparts here in President Roosevelt’s own New Deal, such as the NRA, the CCC, our price monitoring boards, and so on. In fact, many of the ideas of National Socialism were first developed in our own progressive country, and we in turn might want to consider examining their policies for more ways to improve our own.”

She went on, “…if we call Hitler and his staff, who lack moral legitimacy, ‘Nazis,’ we may unintentionally legitimize their rule, and end up offending many of the peaceful National Socialist Germans with whom we can develop a productive relationship after the defeat of the extremist Hitler regime. We don’t want to tar all Nazis with the racism and war mongering of the more fanatical members of the party.”

“We are concerned that use of the term “Nazi” to refer to the murderous extremists may glamorize their racism, give them undeserved moral authority with the German people, and undermine our ultimate war strategy of winning their hearts and minds. We want them to understand that we recognize Nazism as an ideology of peace, and welfare for the common good and betterment of all Germans. Not to mention their understandable desire for lebensraum.”

When asked what term employees were to use to refer to the enemy, she replied, “We haven’t quite worked that out yet. We’re considering ‘the Hitler gang’ for now.”

Economics, Political Commentary, Space

Time For Space Solar Power?

36 Comments

There’s certainly no reason to think that much has changed based on this latest call for it:

PV technology has improved considerably since this idea was developed adding to the argument that this source of energy should be revisited. In addition, the economics of the cost of energy have changed. According to Dr. Neville Marzwell and his colleagues at the Jet Propulsion Lab, an SSP system could generate energy at a cost including cost of construction of 60 to 80 cents per kilowatt-hour at the outset. He believes that “in 15 to 25 years we can lower that cost to 7 to 10 cents per kWh.” The average cost of residential electricity was 9.86 cents per kWh in the U.S. in 2006.

The problem (as always) is that this doesn’t account for the costs of competing energy sources dropping even more. And of course, the notion of building SPS with the existing space transportation infrastructure remains ludicrous. Get the costs of access down (a good idea for a lot of other reasons), and then see if it makes sense. Unfortunately, current space policy (or at least the vast amount of expenditures on space transportation) seems aimed at increasing the cost of access to space.

[Via Ken Silber]

[Early evening update]

Mark Whittington:

Rand’s approach is just clearly wrong. There are no market incentives to decrease the cost of space travel, outside the COTS competition.

Nope, none at all. How will we ever do it without the government?

Oh, wait! How about the millions of people who want to take a trip, and can afford to do so if the price comes down? Mark ignores that one, though, because it doesn’t require NASA getting billions of dollars, or giving them out for a few flights via COTS, that will do very little to significantly reduce the cost of access.

Political Commentary, Science And Society

Doomsday Has Been Postponed

8 Comments

Apparently, global warming is being delayed:

Commenting on the new study, Richard Wood of the Hadley Centre said the model suggested the weakening of the MOC would have a cooling effect around the North Atlantic.

“Such a cooling could temporarily offset the longer-term warming trend from increasing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

“That emphasises once again the need to consider climate variability and climate change together when making predictions over timescales of decades.”

Gee, what a concept.

Economics, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Social Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

Green Fascism

13 Comments

There’s an interesting post over at New Scientist on the new eugenicists. What’s even more interesting, though, are the numerous comments, which repeat many of the myths about population growth and control, and feasibility of mitigating it through space technology, including space (to use the politically incorrect word) colonization.

I don’t really have time to critique in any detail, other than to note that anyone who makes feasibility arguments on the latter subject by referring to Shuttle costs is completely clueless. Sadly though, years ago, Carl Sagan did exactly that.

Political Commentary

Superfluous

2 Comments

These people seem to think (nuttily enough) that there’s some kind of anti-government bias in the media, and thus a need for their web site. It’s basically your one-stop fascism shop.

[Via you know who]

Hmmmm…

Well governmentisbad.com is already taken, though it doesn’t seem to be a counterpart.

[Afternoon update]

“Government is good,” eh? Yeah, government is great:

The problems first emerged in May 2007, when 1,400 handhelds were deployed for a “dress rehearsal.” In the field, they proved to be slow and unreliable. The Bush Administration’s official explanation is that the Census Bureau didn’t get its requirements straight with the contractor, Florida-based Harris Corp. No doubt that’s true – the Government Accountability Office warned all the way back in 2005 that Census did not have a good grasp of its technology needs or effective procurement. Even so, we doubt that “slow and unreliable” were part of the original specs in March 2006.

The Census Bureau decided as long ago as 2000 that handheld computers were the future, and spent four years trying to develop one in-house, with little to show for it. That earlier failure led to the contract with Harris in 2006. As usual in government, no one in particular seems to be taking responsibility for the serial failures – which of course is part of the problem. There is little incentive for getting it right, because no one below the level of a political appointee ever loses a job for getting it wrong. You can even lose your job for getting it right if it means more efficiency.

In the case of the botched handhelds, the result is that the Census will now have to deploy some 600,000 temporary workers to go door to door and get the forms filled out by hand. The handhelds will still be used for “address canvassing,” although even at that they can’t handle more than 700 addresses at a time. For this great leap backward, taxpayers will pay $3 billion more for the census than originally estimated.

This must be one of those awful articles “biased” against the government.

General Science, Political Commentary, Science And Society

Et Tu, Alan?

6 Comments

Alan Boyle has a long review of the movie Expelled. While I largely agree with it (and it has reduced my estimation of Ben Stein, who seems to have gone completely off the deep end, tremendously), it is marred, severely in my opinion, by the use of the politically loaded word, “swiftboating,” not just in the text, but in the title itself.

He seems, from context, to be using the word in its popular, but grossly mistaken and (Democrat) partisan sense, as in “spreading malicious lies about something or someone.” But for those of us actually paying attention at the time, and using more enlightened sources than Lawrence O’Donnell screaming “Liar! Liar! Liar!” at John O’Neill, the word means “revealing inconvenient truths about a political candidate who is a Democrat.” Most of the charges of the Swift Boaters were in fact validated–on the subject of Christmas in Cambodia, despite it being “seared, seared into his memory,” John Kerry was either lying or fantasizing, and his campaign essentially was forced to admit that. And the video of his Senate testimony in which he slandered his fellow sailors, airmen, marines and soldiers, calling them war criminals, was indisputable.

So it would be far better to simply avoid the word, given the fact that it has almost exactly the opposite meaning to two different sets of readerships, and is bound to raise hackles, regardless of the context. I expect it from political polemicists, but I expect (and almost always get) much better from Alan.

I’ll have more thoughts on the movie itself (which I haven’t seen, and have no plans to), but will save them for another post.

[Thursday morning update]

Alan responds, but seems to miss the point that I was making. Apparently, to him, the term “swiftboat” as a verb simply means “negative campaigning,” something that he doesn’t like. But I don’t think that’s what it means to most people, on either side of the partisan divide. As I describe above, Democrat partisans have come to use it to mean not just negative campaigning, but lying about their candidate, whereas those of us who were opposed to John Kerry (for reasons that the Swift Boat Vets stated, and many others) view it as telling inconvenient truths that didn’t reflect well on him. Both of those fall under the rubric of “negative campaigning,” if by that one means saying things about a candidate (or a concept) with the intent of making people think less of them.

Now, in light of what I think is my understanding of Alan’s point, I disagree. I actually have no problem at all with negative campaigning per se, if the campaign is truthful. I think that in order to make a judgment about a candidate or an issue, the more information the better, both pro and con. If a candidate happens to be an ax murderer, would there be something reprehensible about pointing this out? I think that it would be information that the voting public would have a right to know, despite the fact that it’s (sigh) “negative.”

Likewise, I have no problem with movies that oppose evolution, per se, as long as they’re honest, and I would not characterize such movies as “Swift Boating” (particularly since I think that the Swift Boat Vets, in pointing out facts about John Kerry of which the voting public was largely unaware, performed a public service). From what I’ve heard about Expelled, however, it’s scurrilous, and to associate the tactics used there with John O’Neill and his cohorts is slanderous, if not libelous, to them. There’s been a lot of discussion about the movie in the last couple days, and the war on science in general (a war that, by the way, contra Chris Mooney’s flawed, or at least limited, thesis, is thoroughly bi-partisan). I hope to provide a link roundup and some thoughts of my own shortly, if I can find the time.

In any event, I continue to find Alan’s usage of the new (and ambiguous) verb “swiftboating” problematic, for reasons stated above. As I already noted, I expect to hear that word from “political consultants” on partisan talkfests on the cable news channels, but not in a reasoned discussion about science and society.

Political Commentary

“Nonsense And Betrayal”

Something tells me that we haven’t seen or heard the last of Reverend Wright:

“After 20 years of loving Barack like he was a member of his own family, for Jeremiah to see Barack saying over and over that he didn’t know about Jeremiah’s views during those years, that he wasn’t familiar with what Jeremiah had said, that he may have missed church on this day or that and didn’t hear what Jeremiah said, this is seen by Jeremiah as nonsense and betrayal,” said the source, who has deep roots in Wright’s Chicago community and is familiar with his thinking on the matter.

Up until now, the defense has been that these remarks of Wrights were atypical and taken out of context, and sufficiently rare that Obama never happened to have heard them, despite having been a church member for two decades and sitting regularly in the pews. Not that I’ve ever bought it, but that was the story.

Now Wright himself is saying (and made pretty clear on Monday) that these are not just sporadic and infrequent flights of fancy, but things that he fervently believes and is happy to tell anyone on any occasion, including Sunday sermons. And furthermore, he knows that his protege was well aware of his views (and may even have thought that he agreed with them, though that’s less clear).

I have a pretty low opinion of the pastor, for a lot of reasons, but I haven’t yet seen any evidence that he’s a liar. But either he is prevaricating, or Obama is. I know where I’d put my money at this point. This will be a ticking time bomb going into the fall. I hope that the Democrats continue to let it tick.

[Update at 2:45 PM EDT]

Ramesh Ponnuru defends Wright (err…sort of):

One theme I’ve seen in the commentary about Wright, especially the liberal commentary, is how terrible it is, how selfish, for Wright to get in the way of Obama’s presidential campaign. There are a lot of grounds for criticizing Wright–that he is an anti-American and racist buffoon, example–but I don’t see why he should keep quiet just to keep from inconveniencing a political candidate. He takes these. . . ideas of his very seriously, and he has the opportunity of a lifetime to disseminate them. Why wouldn’t he take it?

Beyond that, there seems to be this implicit assumption among the liberal media and Obama supporters (but I repeat myself) that Wright does (and should) want to see his congregant become president. Hence the anguished cries of “betrayal!, and “selfishness!”

But if Obama is elected president, doesn’t that knock the legs out from under his race- and class-war theories? Doesn’t it show that perhaps AmeKKKa isn’t the racist monster of his sermons?

On the other hand, if Obama loses, doesn’t it validate his (and Michelle’s) hatred of this racist country, as bad as (or worse than!) Al Qaeda? And then doesn’t he get to continue hawking his paranoia and lunacy to the chumps, and continue to get their adulation? And moolah from the DVD sales? Gotta keep up the payments on the mansion, you know.

Political Commentary

“Nonsense And Betrayal”

Something tells me that we haven’t seen or heard the last of Reverend Wright:

“After 20 years of loving Barack like he was a member of his own family, for Jeremiah to see Barack saying over and over that he didn’t know about Jeremiah’s views during those years, that he wasn’t familiar with what Jeremiah had said, that he may have missed church on this day or that and didn’t hear what Jeremiah said, this is seen by Jeremiah as nonsense and betrayal,” said the source, who has deep roots in Wright’s Chicago community and is familiar with his thinking on the matter.

Up until now, the defense has been that these remarks of Wrights were atypical and taken out of context, and sufficiently rare that Obama never happened to have heard them, despite having been a church member for two decades and sitting regularly in the pews. Not that I’ve ever bought it, but that was the story.

Now Wright himself is saying (and made pretty clear on Monday) that these are not just sporadic and infrequent flights of fancy, but things that he fervently believes and is happy to tell anyone on any occasion, including Sunday sermons. And furthermore, he knows that his protege was well aware of his views (and may even have thought that he agreed with them, though that’s less clear).

I have a pretty low opinion of the pastor, for a lot of reasons, but I haven’t yet seen any evidence that he’s a liar. But either he is prevaricating, or Obama is. I know where I’d put my money at this point. This will be a ticking time bomb going into the fall. I hope that the Democrats continue to let it tick.

[Update at 2:45 PM EDT]

Ramesh Ponnuru defends Wright (err…sort of):

One theme I’ve seen in the commentary about Wright, especially the liberal commentary, is how terrible it is, how selfish, for Wright to get in the way of Obama’s presidential campaign. There are a lot of grounds for criticizing Wright–that he is an anti-American and racist buffoon, example–but I don’t see why he should keep quiet just to keep from inconveniencing a political candidate. He takes these. . . ideas of his very seriously, and he has the opportunity of a lifetime to disseminate them. Why wouldn’t he take it?

Beyond that, there seems to be this implicit assumption among the liberal media and Obama supporters (but I repeat myself) that Wright does (and should) want to see his congregant become president. Hence the anguished cries of “betrayal!, and “selfishness!”

But if Obama is elected president, doesn’t that knock the legs out from under his race- and class-war theories? Doesn’t it show that perhaps AmeKKKa isn’t the racist monster of his sermons?

On the other hand, if Obama loses, doesn’t it validate his (and Michelle’s) hatred of this racist country, as bad as (or worse than!) Al Qaeda? And then doesn’t he get to continue hawking his paranoia and lunacy to the chumps, and continue to get their adulation? And moolah from the DVD sales? Gotta keep up the payments on the mansion, you know.

Political Commentary

“Nonsense And Betrayal”

6 Comments

Something tells me that we haven’t seen or heard the last of Reverend Wright:

“After 20 years of loving Barack like he was a member of his own family, for Jeremiah to see Barack saying over and over that he didn’t know about Jeremiah’s views during those years, that he wasn’t familiar with what Jeremiah had said, that he may have missed church on this day or that and didn’t hear what Jeremiah said, this is seen by Jeremiah as nonsense and betrayal,” said the source, who has deep roots in Wright’s Chicago community and is familiar with his thinking on the matter.

Up until now, the defense has been that these remarks of Wrights were atypical and taken out of context, and sufficiently rare that Obama never happened to have heard them, despite having been a church member for two decades and sitting regularly in the pews. Not that I’ve ever bought it, but that was the story.

Now Wright himself is saying (and made pretty clear on Monday) that these are not just sporadic and infrequent flights of fancy, but things that he fervently believes and is happy to tell anyone on any occasion, including Sunday sermons. And furthermore, he knows that his protege was well aware of his views (and may even have thought that he agreed with them, though that’s less clear).

I have a pretty low opinion of the pastor, for a lot of reasons, but I haven’t yet seen any evidence that he’s a liar. But either he is prevaricating, or Obama is. I know where I’d put my money at this point. This will be a ticking time bomb going into the fall. I hope that the Democrats continue to let it tick.

[Update at 2:45 PM EDT]

Ramesh Ponnuru defends Wright (err…sort of):

One theme I’ve seen in the commentary about Wright, especially the liberal commentary, is how terrible it is, how selfish, for Wright to get in the way of Obama’s presidential campaign. There are a lot of grounds for criticizing Wright–that he is an anti-American and racist buffoon, example–but I don’t see why he should keep quiet just to keep from inconveniencing a political candidate. He takes these. . . ideas of his very seriously, and he has the opportunity of a lifetime to disseminate them. Why wouldn’t he take it?

Beyond that, there seems to be this implicit assumption among the liberal media and Obama supporters (but I repeat myself) that Wright does (and should) want to see his congregant become president. Hence the anguished cries of “betrayal!, and “selfishness!”

But if Obama is elected president, doesn’t that knock the legs out from under his race- and class-war theories? Doesn’t it show that perhaps AmeKKKa isn’t the racist monster of his sermons?

On the other hand, if Obama loses, doesn’t it validate his (and Michelle’s) hatred of this racist country, as bad as (or worse than!) Al Qaeda? And then doesn’t he get to continue hawking his paranoia and lunacy to the chumps, and continue to get their adulation? And moolah from the DVD sales? Gotta keep up the payments on the mansion, you know.

Political Commentary, Space

Naked Emperor?

12 Comments

An interesting comment from someone who claims to work on the program, over at Space Politics (it’s the sixteenth one), in response to the usual idiocy that everything is fine with ESAS, and that we all have to get behind it, and there are no other choices:

Your interpretation of published Ares I status is overly optimistic to an extreme. For instance, the J-2X ignition tests to which you refer has been done at the igniter level, a far cry from an actual engine test. The J-2X exists only on paper, and still very much at the powerpoint level.

The Ares I-X is also merely a stunt and represents no true progress to an actual flight configuration. It’s what we in the business refer to as an “Admiral’s Test,” looks impressive to the uninformed, but adds no value to the final product.

You’ll find that many of us Ares I naysayers actually work on or have involvement with the project. Ask the troops at MSFC and you’ll get a completely different story than what you’re getting through the NASA propaganda machine.

A lot of us are concerned with what kind of reputation we’ll be left with when Griffin leaves and this whole Ares I/ESAS debacle is exposed.

That certainly rings true to me, based on other emails I get from program insiders.

Meanwhile, over at NASA Space Flight, there’s a description of proposed solutions to the Ares vibration issue. The first one is the most interesting kludgesolution:

The anti-Thrust Oscillation RCS would be a totally new system, located on the aft skirt of the Ares I booster. Known as Active Pulse Thrusters (APT), documentation shows this system to hold the potential of reducing Thrust Oscillation by around 10 times that which is currently expected.

‘Active Pulse Thrusters (RCS TO Damper): First Stage carries most of the design changes (Orion Service Module tanks change required),’ noted associated documentation on this concept. ‘Could provide 10X reduction in TO. Relatively mature thruster design. Self contained. Relatively mature control system.’

However, it would – as with most of the mitigation options – hold a mass impact on the vehicle, something Ares I has been struggling with since its early design cycles.

‘Performance and aft skirt design challenge: (around) 500 lbm (pounds mass) payload impact. Trade required for separation and booster deceleration. Add failure modes. Must survive aft skirt environments.’

The system consists of four pods, located around the aft skirt on the Ares I First Stage. Early graphics of a system – that are bound to mature if accepted as the way forward – show each pod will have a fuel tank, an oxidizer tank, a pressurant tank, and seven thrusters.

The downside of this concept – which is a completely separate system than the roll control system on the interstage – is the addition of failure modes, which would hit Ares I’s LOC/M (Loss of Crew/Mission) numbers.

Also on the downside, the concept is a retro thrusting system (negative thrusting) – which would impact on Ares I’s performance figures.

OK, if I understand this correctly, this is what I would call the “Bose headphone” approach. Apparently, the plan is to actually fire thrusters in a direction opposite to the main thrust, at a frequency and phase to actually cancel out the vibration of the SRM. The description of the downside of this solution is a little dry, to me. They are introducing a new, complicated, expensive-to-develop-and-test system into the vehicle, which will add weight and (probably weird) potential failure modes, and reduce the net thrust of the vehicle, thus reducing its payload performance, which already has essentially no margin.

Great.

Next? Isolation mounts:

‘May reduce payload by 1000 lbm. Reduces lateral stiffness unless mitigated in the design. Adds failure modes. Changes system modes for loads and control.’

“…unless mitigated in the design.” There is an implicit assumption in that statement that such a mitigation is possible, but it may not be. I suspect that it doesn’t just reduce lateral stiffness, but may also reduce stiffness in bending, which means more potential problems as the upper stage wiggles back and forth on top of the SRB, adding to the joy of the ride for the crew, and further complicating the control system’s job, in all three axes.

They’re right–this one is unlikely to survive the trade study.

Even the third, favored option is a kludge, which “consists of rails and springs under the top plate of the parachute platform on the First Stage. The active system would require a control system and associated battery power supply – all located under the aeroshell that houses the drogue parachute.”

“The passive system has a rail attachment on the forward skirt extension of the First Stage providing lateral support. Damping would be provided by springs attached through the ancillary ring.”

Rube Goldberg, call your office.

I’ve probably used this Einstein quote already recently, but it continues to apply: a clever man solves a problem–a wise man avoids it. This is all the result of the strange decision to use a Shuttle SRB as a first stage. That was not a necessary choice, and a good trade study (as opposed to the sixty-day exercise) would have identified these problems up front, and considered them in the trade. Anyone want to bet that it did?