…of Tom Friedman. Friedman gets entirely too much respect for his intelligence.
Comeback Kid
Is Curiosity a sign of a new NASA?
I’ll believe there’s a new NASA when Webb and SLS are finally put out of their misery. But the problem isn’t just NASA — it’s Congress.
The Hippy MIT Geek
…who saved Apollow 13?
Geoff Landis is skeptical. So am I. It’s hard to believe that this wouldn’t have been the first thought to almost everyone in Mission Control.
[Via Geek Press]
Barack’s Daddy Issues
I always thought that the notion that George W. Bush went into Iraq to please his father was an idiotic theory, but Moe Lane has a much more plausible one with regard to the current president. He did, after all, have a whole book ghost written for him on the subject.
I also think that Romney will take advantage of the president’s visceral dislike for him repeatedly in the next three months, by getting under his skin and goading him into some very ugly stuff that will finally dispose of his supposed “likability.”
Loot
I find it interesting that many of the spam emails I get offering me quick loans (usually on the order of a thousand or fifteen hundred or so) use the word “loot” in the subject line to describe the funds (e.g., “We’ve got the loot the get back in your bankroll!”). I wonder if this is a deliberate connotation of theft, or just a poor understanding of the historical meaning of the word on the part of the spammer?
The False Dichotomy
Lileks, with some thoughts on evangelistic atheism:
Religion seeks the metaphysical truth to existence, and science explains the physical truth. The former is predicated on accepting the unprovable, and hence science is not its opposite. That’s the part I don’t get: the need to set up science as a contrapositive model. It’s like saying you shouldn’t want to see the Batman movie because the jetstream is dipping south and dragging cold moist Canadian air over the planes. Huh? I want to see Batman. But rain will be falling over most of the Dakotas. Why does that matter? It’s the Batman movie. The rain will be too late for the small grains, but may prepare the soil for next year. I think we’re talking about two different things.
I’ve never understood it, either. Of course, these are the same people who idiotically assume that because I’m skeptical about Warmageddon, that I must be a Christian creationist.
I See Clueless People
Remember, the “progressives” should be allowed to run our lives, because they’re so much smarter than the rest of us.
New Solyndra Revelations
I wish that it were true that this would doom Chicago Jesus’s reelection.
Unfortunately, the media is so deep in the tank for him that they’d get the bends if they came up before November.
Civil Society
…and Barack Obama’s war on it.
The End Of The Frontier?
Roger Launius has an essay on the decline of significance of the metaphor with regard to space:
The image of the frontier, however, has been a less and less acceptable and effective metaphor as the twentieth century became the twenty-first century. Progressives have come to view the space program from a quite different perspective. To the extent that space represents a new frontier, it conjures up images of commercial exploitation and the subjugation of oppressed peoples. Implemented through a large aerospace industry, in their view, it appears to create the sort of governmental-corporate complexes of which liberals are increasingly wary.
Despite the promise that the Space Shuttle, like jet aircraft, would make space flight accessible to the “common man,” space travel remains the province of a favored few, perpetuating inequalities rather than leveling differences. They also assert that space exploration has also remained largely a male frontier, with room for few minorities.
In the eyes of progressives, space perpetuates the inequities that they have increasingly sought to abolish on Earth. As a consequence, it is not viewed favorably by those caught up in what political scientist Aaron Wildavsky has characterized as “the rise of radical egalitarianism.” The advent of this liberal philosophy coincides with the shift in ideological positions on the U.S. space program in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Frankly, I don’t give a damn what regressives think about space any more than I do about their thoughts on any other subject. Dr. Launius does attempt to defend the metaphor, though, at the end:
I would like to suggest that the frontier myth is an incomplete but uniquely understandable way of looking at the space program. From the beginning of the space age the U.S. effort has been motivated by essentially three priorities. The first was Cold War rivalries with the Soviet Union and the desire to demonstrate the technological superiority of a democratic state over a communist dictatorship. The second was the lure of discovery of the unknown. The third was adventure. The first priority, oriented toward national security, has ceased to be important in this post-Cold War era. But the second and third priorities lie at the heart of the frontier myth and are still just as attractive as they were more than 40 years ago at the creation of NASA.
He misses a key priority, though, that is quintessentially American: liberty.