I’m quite sure that Doug Stanley is on record as not being on board with the moon as a goal for VSE, and wanted to use the opportunity to build a (heavy-lift) infrastructure for Mars. But can anyone point me to a citable source for this?
Yes, I am working on a major piece for a serious publication…
I have a recollection that at some time within the past few years, Burt Rutan made a statement to the effect that if we weren’t killing a few people to open up space we weren’t pushing hard enough. But a diligent search of the Intertubes doesn’t turn up anything like that. Does anyone else recall this, and if so can they provide a citation? Or was I just imagining it?
Some questions:
Now that the president has decided it’s okay to meddle in Honduras (where they are fighting to keep preserve their democracy against the Chávez-style thug who Obama wants to re-install) but not Iran (where thousands of Iranians who seek democracy are being killed, maimed and jailed by a regime which has been at war with the United States for 30 years), the president’s tack is to say that Honduras’s action in removing Zelaya is “not legal.”
What on earth makes Obama think he knows better about what is legal under the law of Honduras than the Supreme Court of Honduras and the law-writing legislature of Honduras? The Honduran military acted after Zelaya defied an order by that nation’s highest court which pronounced his coup attempt illegal; he has been replaced under a Honduran legal process by that nation’s Congress, which essentially impeached him and democratically voted in a successor. That sounds pretty legal to me. I am the first to admit I am not an expert in Honduran law, but I’d bet the Honduran Supreme Court has a better grasp on it than President Obama. On the issue of what is legal in Honduras, as between Hugo Chávez and the Honduran Supreme Court, our president has decided to go with Chávez.
Secondly, as IBD notes, the Obama administration is now “threatening to halt its $200 million in U.S. aid, immigration accords and a free-trade treaty if it doesn’t put the criminal Zelaya back into office.” Can someone explain to me how it is that Obama is willingly giving $900M to Hamastan (i.e., the jihadist-controlled Gaza strip) but would pull back a comparative pittance of aid in order to penalize a poor country in our own hemisphere for trying to preserve its democracy against a would-be left-wing dictator?
Also, as Charles Krauthammer said last night on Special Report:
…our decision ought to be: Yes, a coup isn’t a nice thing, but it’s preferable to having Zelaya dismantle the democracy. And we should insist on the elections of a president as scheduled in November, so it is a temporary situation.
Look, a rule of thumb here is whenever you find yourself on the side of Hugo Chavez, Daniel Ortega, and the Castro twins, you ought to reexamine your assumptions.
Hey, left-wing dictators have to stick together.
[Update early evening]
Zelaya’s operatives did their dirt all the way through. First they got signatures to launch the “citizen’s power” survey through threats — warning those who didn’t sign that they’d be denied medical care and worse. Zelaya then had the ballots flown to Tegucigalpa on Venezuelan planes. After his move was declared illegal by the Supreme Court, he tried to do it anyway.
As a result of his brazen disregard for the law, Zelaya found himself escorted from office by the military Sunday morning, and into exile. Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Cuba’s Fidel Castro rushed to blame the U.S., calling it a “yanqui coup.”
President Obama on Monday called the action “not legal,” and claimed that Zelaya is still the legitimate president.
There was a coup all right, but it wasn’t committed by the U.S. or the Honduran court. It was committed by Zelaya himself. He brazenly defied the law, and Hondurans overwhelmingly supported his removal (a pro-Zelaya rally Monday drew a mere 200 acolytes).
Yet the U.S. administration stood with Chavez and Castro, calling Zelaya’s lawful removal “a coup.” Obama called the action a “terrible precedent,” and said Zelaya remains president.
In doing this, the U.S. condemned democrats who stood up to save their democracy, a move that should have been hailed as a historic turning of the tide against the false democracies of the region.
They only like democracy when it gives them the right (in this case “left”) result.
…is not a one-sided threat. For those people who don’t understand discount rates, a graphical presentation.
This is a problem that just begs to have a regret analysis performed on it. Of course, we have a media that can’t even do simple division, so why would we expect them to understand net present value?
[Update on Tuesday morning]
It’s the economic growth, stupid:
Here are some other metrics. The percentage of the world’s population that is at risk for coastal flooding is well under 1% in the baseline, and is not projected to rise close to 1% in any scenario within the 95-year forecast. Malaria deaths have historically been in effect eliminated by societies that achieve several thousand dollars per year of per capita income — the key risk here is once again slower economic growth that keeps parts of the developing world poorer longer.
Again and again, we see the same pattern: At least for the next century, changes in human welfare, even on metrics that are not purely economic, are fundamentally driven by changes in economic development, not AGW damages. This is why it makes sense to be focused acutely on risks to economic growth when considering the overall effects of any emissions-mitigation program.
Most people who advocate nonsense like cap and trade are ignorant of the science, but even more are ignorant of economics, including the “scientists.”
..it would probably just chase women:
The person in the wheelchair wears a cap that can read brain signals, which are relayed to a brain scan electroencephalograph, or EEG, on the electrically powered wheelchair, and then analyzed in a computer program.
Research into mobility is part of Toyota’s larger strategy to go beyond automobiles in helping people get around in new ways.
The new system allows the person on the wheelchair to turn left or right and go forward, almost instantly, according to researchers.
Seriously, this will be a huge boon for the disabled. Faster please.
Unlike a lot of watermelon environmentalists, they’re honest about it. They want to adopt a highway, but the state won’t let them:
Representatives of the National Socialist movement in Missouri did not immediately return calls seeking comment about the legislation Sunday. But a statement on the movement’s Web site calls the renaming “a lame attempt to insult National Socialist pro-environment/green policies.”
Birds of a feather…
Wes Huntress has some. I agree with a lot of what he says, but not all:
The directive to land on the Moon by 2020 is not achievable given the agency’s current limited out-year budget, costs for Constellation development, and the looming requirement to support the International Space Station beyond 2015. The best approach to lower cost and sustained development is to leverage existing space transportation infrastructure to the maximum.
I absolutely agree with the second sentence, but not the first. It is possible to get to the moon by 2020, within the available funding. But in order to do so, NASA has to focus its resources on getting to the moon, in an affordable and sustainable manner, using that existing infrastructure. As long, though, as they focus on developing their own launch systems, it will never happen. And not just because they’re not very good at developing launch systems.
I wouldn’t emphasize the international part, either. I don’t mind doing partnerships, if they make sense, but we shouldn’t do things internationally for its own sake. I wouldn’t abandon the moon–I think that NASA should be developing a lander, but that’s really the only major hardware element (at least in terms of transportation) that’s lunar specific. We need to develop a general deep-space transportation infrastructure, and it NASA had focused on that instead of Ares/Orion, they’d be a good way down that road now.
A thirteen-year-old boy goes retro:
My friends couldn’t imagine their parents using this monstrous box, but there was interest in what the thing was and how it worked.
In some classes in school they let me listen to music and one teacher recognised it and got nostalgic.
It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape. That was not the only naive mistake that I made; I mistook the metal/normal switch on the Walkman for a genre-specific equaliser, but later I discovered that it was in fact used to switch between two different types of cassette.
Another notable feature that the iPod has and the Walkman doesn’t is “shuffle”, where the player selects random tracks to play. Its a function that, on the face of it, the Walkman lacks. But I managed to create an impromptu shuffle feature simply by holding down “rewind” and releasing it randomly – effective, if a little laboured.
I told my dad about my clever idea. His words of warning brought home the difference between the portable music players of today, which don’t have moving parts, and the mechanical playback of old. In his words, “Walkmans eat tapes”. So my clumsy clicking could have ended up ruining my favourite tape, leaving me music-less for the rest of the day.
How did we survive?
SCOTUS says that Sotomayor screwed up, and screwed the firefighters. Kind of frightening that it’s only 5-4.
[Noon update]
“…not a single justice thought that Judge Sotomayor acted correctly in granting summary judgment for the City of New Haven.”
But let’s put her on the highest bench in the land.
[Update a few minutes later]
She essentially committed judicial malpractice.
That even Justice Ginsberg and the dissenters would have remanded — undoing what Judge Sotomayor did — confirms that Sotomayor is a far-left liberal judicial activist who ignores the law and rules on her own personal agenda, even beyond the current liberals on the Court.
There is nothing moderate, mainstream, or nonideological about that. This demonstrates that the White House spin on this nominee is a pure fabrication.
Usually, poor performance in any profession is not rewarded with the highest job offer in the entire profession.
What Judge Sotomayor did in Ricci was the equivalent of a pilot error resulting in a bad plane crash. And now the pilot is being offered to fly Air Force One.
I hope that this is a major issue at confirmation hearings.
[Update about 5 EDT]
More thoughts from Richard Epstein.
Kennedy asked the question forty-eight years ago. Dennis Wingo, Paul Spudis and Gordon Woodcock answer it.