Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture

Pete Seeger

12 Comments

I love this line in this NPR puff piece:

Seeger actually was a member of the Communist Party in those early days, though he later said he quit after coming to understand the evils of Josef Stalin.

Yeah. You know when he came to “understand the evils of Josef Stalin”? Not until the nineties. He was in his seventies before he figured out what I knew as a kid in the sixties.

[Update a while later]

Glossing over the dark side:

As an apology Seeger’s words are underwhelming. While “cruel misleader” is by no means a term of endearment, in light of Stalin’s monstrous record, it vastly understates the depth of his depravity and the true horror of Stalinism. There are many more apt nouns and adjectives in the English language to describe the man who gave us the purges of the Great Terror, the Gulag, and the Ukrainian Terror Famine. Lost in the obfuscations of Seeger’s moral equivalencies is the fact that contemporary Christians, White people, and Mongolians are not responsible for the acts, however heinous, of Christians, white people, or Mongolians of the past, because they had nothing to do with them. Whereas Seeger is all too culpable for the crimes of Stalin because he was an open apologist for “old cruel Joe” and other communist thugs at the very time they were slaughtering millions.

Yes.

[Late-morning update]

If only Leni Riefenstahl was a communist like Pete Seeger.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, Space, Space History

Another Book Review

4 Comments

Mark Lardas had a review a couple weeks ago in the Galveston Daily News, but it was behind a paywall. But I just learned that he reposted it at Ricochet. It’s an appropriate time to note it, given that today is the 47th anniversary of the Apollo 1 fire, and tomorrow is the 28th anniversary of the Challenger disaster.

[Update late afternoon]

Here’s another brief (partial) review, in comments at the same web site. It’s the first one to discuss the quality, as opposed to the content of the book.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

Does Virgin Galactic Have A License Problem?

14 Comments

It would be nice if they did. That would be a lot easier to deal with than their real problem, which is propulsion.

As Jeff explains, there’s a lot of misunderstanding about the nature of spaceflight regulation in the US, both here and across the pond. As I noted on Twitter:

This, from Jeff’s article, is a good summation of the license situation, despite the recent misleading stories about it:

The emphasis on a lack of a commercial launch license, then, is something of a red herring. Virgin doesn’t need a launch license now to continue its testing regime, isn’t late now in receiving one, and given current law, there’s no reason to believe the Virgin won’t receive one before it plans to begin commercial flights, so long as as it can demonstrate the vehicle’s safety to the uninvolved public.

Yes.

[Afternoon update]

Jeff Foust also has a summary of the London Times article that’s behind their paywall, with some corrections.

[Update a couple minutes later]

If the reporting is true, and they really are finally running away from the hybrid, and particularly the rubber hybrid, as fast as possible, I wonder what the implications of this are for Sierra Nevada? Will they continue to promote hybrids, and will they still use one in Dream Chaser assuming it flies in three years? I’d bail on it myself and just buy something from XCOR, but they have a lot of PR invested in the technology, thanks to Jim Benson.

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