TEA Party in Space (TPIS), a non-partisan organization, today publicly released the TEA Party Space Platform. “This is our response to the vacuum of leadership in Washington, D.C., for America’s national space enterprise,” said Andrew Gasser, President of TPIS. “Whether it’s timidity from the White House or Congress’ earmark-laden ‘compromises,’ our space dreams will be stuck on this planet unless someone articulates a vision based on economic and technical reality, so that’s what we’ve done.” Continue reading The Tea Party Platform For Space→
Michael Barone has an interesting article at the Journal today (subscription required, at least for now):
There’s a longing on the left for the golden years of the 1940s, ’50s and early ’60s. Income distribution was significantly more egalitarian than it is today, and Americans had far more confidence in big government, the wisdom of our elected officials, and the ability of Keynesian spending policies to stimulate economic growth.
Hence the search for policies that will somehow get us back to those golden years.
I would note that the current nostalgic longing among some for a big-government space program has its roots in that same “liberal” impulse, though many, perhaps most conservatives don’t understand what an unconservative project Apollo was. NASA was, after all, one of those big-government institutions in which so many had faith in the post-war, early sixties. If you take away the raw rent seeking on the part of those who don’t want to see their home-state pork going away, this nostalgia lies at the heart of much of the outrage over Obama’s sensible new space policy. But unfortunately for NASA, the current justifiable disillusionment with government institutions in general is bleeding over to them as well.
I should have posted this earlier, and it’s hard to believe it’s been that long, but I drove up to Mojave on the twentieth of June, 2004, to see the first flight of SpaceShipOne into space. I put up several blog posts about it, starting with this one. Just consecutively click on the next post (at the top of the page) to see them all, along with links to other posts.
…in the 21st century we need teachers who teach math and science to have expertise in math and science. So there needs to be an upgrade there, and refocus on how much we value those teachers. As you know, in this country, we don’t pay our teachers all that well. We need to rethink that.
The problem isn’t that we don’t pay teachers well, at least on average. The problem is that we don’t pay the valuable ones enough, and we pay the worthless ones far too much, thanks to the unions. We need to be able to adequately compensate the teachers who have actual useful knowledge to impart, and get rid of the ones who don’t. This would all start by eliminating the worthless, or to be more accurate, negative-value, “education” major.