How to survive it.
What The “Republican Establishment” Really Means
It’s about the spending, stupid:
The current trajectory of American government spending is one in which spending by government in general, and by the federal government in particular, just keeps on growing as a share of the economy, further and further crowding out the space occupied by free private citizens and businesses in the private sector. Worse, much of this happens automatically, without the consent of the governed in any but the most perfunctory way: discretionary spending is designed to grow because budgets are set by using the prior year’s spending as a baseline, and entitlement and public employee benefit spending – which consume a far larger share of spending – grows by itself in the absence of any affirmative legislation to stop it. The federal government has not passed a budget in nearly 1,000 days (President Obama’s State of the Union speech will mark the 1000th), yet spending has continued to grow, and will continue to grow as far as the eye can see – a dramatic change in our country taking place on auto-pilot – unless dramatic action is taken in response to stop it. Jack’s magic beans have nothing on public spending.
And the growth of spending bleeds over into every other issue. Federal spending comes with strings attached, and those strings reduce the independence of the states and burrow the arms of the federal octopus ever further into the area of social policy. Institutions like churches, schools, and hospitals become hooked on federal money, and have to dance the federal tune. Spending gets earmarked and targeted to favored people, businesses and groups, making society less equal and government less ethical. Spending distorts energy markets, housing markets, and markets for higher education, creating bubbles and inefficiency. And that’s before we even get to the metastatic growth of federal regulation. And eventually, runaway domestic spending saps our ability to adequately fund our national defense.
There is general philosophical agreement among both Republicans and conservatives about all of this. Where the fault line lies is in exactly how far we are willing to go to do something about it.
If we don’t do something, America as we knew it is over.
No Manned Flights From Kourou
At least according to this article. I wonder what it would take to modify the Soyuz for a water landing? At least it would be warm water. I think that a trajectory to 52 degrees from there, unlike one from the Cape, would avoid the north Atlantic.
This is also an indicator that it’s not very important to launch crew from there, or they’d take the risk.
NASA Is Still A Go
A Yale senior attempts to educate those who continue to ignorantly think that Obama ended the space program.
Space On Earth
Brian Doherty pays a visit to XCOR.
The Italian Sinking Ship
…was a metaphor for Europe.
[Update mid morning]
Some thoughts on the EU from Theodore Dalrymple:
Belgium’s inability to form a central government would not matter so much if the country did not need to reduce its public spending. Though Belgium is the largest per-capita exporter of goods and services in the world and has healthy private savings, it also has a large and growing public debt—nearly 100 percent of GDP—and an annual budget deficit of more than 5 percent. With growth negligible and government bond yields rising in a currency (the euro) that the Belgians cannot inflate, retrenchment is essential, but the Walloons and the Flemish cannot agree on how to do it. The Walloons want higher taxes to maintain the current arrangements; the Flemish want lower taxes and reduced spending to promote long-term growth. The result is a stalemate. Wallonia and Flanders are like a married couple who no longer can live together but find divorce impossible because of difficulties over the settlement.
It happens that the central offices of the E.U. are located in Brussels. Yet the political difficulties of Belgium do not give the European unionists pause for thought—or, if they do pause, they reach a peculiar conclusion: that what has not worked in two centuries in a small area with only two populations will work in a few years in a much larger area with a multitude of populations. It does not occur to the unionists that different countries really are different: not a little bit, but radically, in culture, language, history, traditions, and economies. The term “European” is not meaningless, but whatever content the term may have, it is not sufficient for the formation of a viable polity.
The debt crisis has revealed differences in national character of precisely the kind that make any closer union both difficult and dangerous. Indeed, the very attempt to force a union is at the root of the crisis, for if Greece and Ireland, to take two countries at the geographical extremes of the continent, had not been able to borrow in euros under the false supposition that eurozone membership effectively guaranteed their sovereign debts, it is unlikely that they would have wound up in their current straits. After all, lenders might have taken more care if their debts were being paid in drachmas or Irish pounds, which the Greeks and Irish could have inflated to their hearts’ content.
…The alternative to sharing the debts seems to be the breakup of the euro. This might turn recession into prolonged slump, with the countries expelled from the eurozone forced into a default catastrophic for the banking system. I get dizzy just thinking about the bank account in which I hold euros: in the event of a breakup, will it be denominated in drachmas or deutschmarks, and who will decide? Like everyone else, I would prefer deutschmarks, a preference that will drive up the price of the currency to the point that German exports, no matter how high their quality, will be too expensive to buy.
No wonder German chancellor Angela Merkel appears indecisive: like every politician, she wants a painless solution to a problem.
Unfortunately for her, there is none.
Some Serious Space Policy Questions For Mitt
I hope that @BretBaier asks something along these lines:
So, Governor, if you want to talk space policy, let’s talk space policy. How about answering some serious questions, instead of pretending that it’s an unserious subject, of no value except to mock your opponent?
In 2008, you said that you supported President Bush’s Vision for Space Exploration, a fundamental part of which was a manned lunar base. Now you criticize Newt Gingrich for the same thing, and imply that it is a frivolity. What happened in the interim to make you change your opinion?
How much do you think that a “lunar colony” would cost? How do you think that Speaker Gingrich would propose to bring one about? Do you think that he would agree with your characterization of his plans? If you don’t know the answers to these questions, on what basis are you criticizing him?
If we are not going to settle the moon and other locations in the solar system, what in your mind is the purpose of having a human spaceflight program? Why are we doing it?
In 2009, when President Obama came out with a new space policy that emphasized competitive commercial services for crew delivery to orbit, and the development of new technologies that would make human spaceflight beyond earth orbit much more affordable, Newt Gingrich was one of the few Republicans to come out in support of it (Bob Walker and Dana Rohrabacher were others). Do you agree with Speaker Gingrich that this is a more promising and cost-effective direction for the program, or do you support the Congress in its demand that NASA spend billions on a giant rocket that won’t fly for many years, and for which no payloads are defined or funded? Or do you have some other proposal?
What would a Romney space policy look like? Given that you’ve elevated the topic in the campaign, I think that those of us to whom space is important deserve to know.
And Bret, if you’re looking for a “gotcha,” probably the second one works best.
Let Freedom Ring
Some thoughts on today’s holiday:
we were still blessed by Providence to have had him, because he was the right man at the right time. It was he who rose to be the leader and articulator and symbol of the civil-rights movement, a “dream deeply rooted in the American dream,” and not the loathsome racist Elijah Mohammed or the criminals of the Black Panther movement or even Malcolm X and his late embrace of mainstream Islam. Would any of these men, or the frauds and swindlers who claim to be “civil rights” spokesmen today, give a speech that ends this way?:
This will be the day when all of God’s children will be able to sing with a new meaning, “My country, ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim’s pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring.”
And if America is to be a great nation this must become true. So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania!
Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado!
Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California!
But not only that; let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia!
Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee!
Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi. From every mountainside, let freedom ring.
And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, “Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”
There is no one like him comparable today. He was a Republican for a reason. His modern heirs are leftists.
More On The Dragon Delay
Over at NASA Space Flight, but still no details on just what the issue is. It’s interesting to note that this announcement comes nine years to the day after the launch of the final flight of Columbia. Probably just coincidence
The EU’s Prisoners’ Dilemma
…is ours, too.