The Economist has an article on Bigelow’s legal victory against one of the more idiotic interpretations of ITAR, and its implications for the industry and future ITAR reform.
Command And Control Of The Economy
…by stealth:
The editorial hints that these sorts of provisions have been inserted because the bill’s authors are counting on fellow members of Congress not to read what they’re voting on. They undoubtedly remember how easy it was to get Congress to ban incandescent light bulbs by sneaking a provision into the Bush-era energy bill.
Tar. Feathers.
On Pseudonymity
There’s been a little kerfuffle in the “left-right” blogosphere this weekend over the “outing” of a pseudonymous blogger.
While I sympathize (or is the right word these days “empathize“?) with Ed Whelan’s frustration at being publicly attacked by someone who wants to lead a dual on-line/off-line life (and ignoring the incivil nature of many of the comments over at Obsidian Wings), I think that (former pseudonymous) blogger Jonathan Adler has the better part of the argument.
I would also say that I agree that there is an important distinction between pseudonymous and anonymous blogging. The former establishes an identity and a reputation that must be both established, and upheld. After a while, people will respect, or not, posts or comments from such a person, regardless of whether or not they know the real name/profession/location, etc. An anonymous commenter/blogger, on the other hand, has the potential to be a drive-by arsonist, and many are. In the space Internet world, Tommy Lee Elifritz is perhaps the best example of this, who changes his nom de plume more often than he probably changes his underwear, at places like Space Politics, NASA Watch and Rockets’n’Such. Of course, in his case, the vile style is quite distinctive.
Anyway, from a personal perspective, I’ve always blogged under my real name, for better or worse. In some cases, it’s been for the worse. I won’t name names, but I know for a fact that I have lost consulting work and been blackballed by parts of the industry because of my writing on the net under my own name (the proximate cause was the LA Times debate that I had with Homer Hickam), prominently noted to industry insiders, who might otherwise not have noticed it, by NASA Watch. Thanks, Keith…
Note that this wasn’t over my “right wing” (a phrase that never fails to amuse) politics, but specifically about my space policy blogging. This undoubtedly cost me many thousands of dollars in income since then, and ultimately resulted in a blogging plea for work last summer (one that ultimately resulted in consulting employment that undid at least some of the personal economic damage, so blogging has some value). This isn’t a complaint, but simply a statement of how the world works.
Perhaps, had I been blogging pseudonymously, this wouldn’t have happened. But as others in the most recent discussion have pointed out, one can only maintain pseudonymity for so long, until one is “outed,” because the more one reveals on the blog (and if one is a serious blogger, much is eventually revealed), diligent people can figure it out, and if they think it in their interest, reveal it to others. And of course, had I been a pseudonymous blogger, I wouldn’t have gotten the LA Times gig to begin with. Who wants to read Homer Hickam debating someone who won’t use their own name?
Anyway, when I started this endeavor, my motto was “to thine own self be true.” I’ve always tried to do that on this blog, consequences (apparently) be damned, and I’d like to assure what few readers I have that I’ll continue to do so.
[Monday morning update]
Heh. “I’ve looked at a bunch of the sites that have posted on the Blevins affair, and their anonymous commenters are running heavily against Ed for some reason.”
Hating Bush
…loving Castro. It’s all good:
He was a courtly State Department intelligence analyst from a prominent family who loved to sail and peruse the London Review of Books. Occasionally, he would voice frustration with U.S. policies, but to his liberal neighbors in Northwest D.C. it was nothing out of the ordinary. “We were all appalled by the Bush years,” one said.
So, who could blame him for spying for a communist dictator?
Should NASA Get Back Into The Launch R&D Business?
Frank Sietzen has kicked off a discussion over at NASA Watch:
While the present Orion-Ares 1 architecture may well be the “safe, simple, soonest” launch solution promised by ESMD, notice nobody is claiming an Orion-Ares 1 stack will be cheaper than a Shuttle flight. My question to readers: what is the government’s role and responsibility in reducing the cost of access to space? Would you bring back NGLT-or a revamped version of the SLI minus specific vehicle test beds such as the X-33/X-34? How would you revitalize spaceplane research? And would any of you remove funding from existing NASA programs such as exploration to fund research in advanced launch technologies? Or has that ship sailed?
I would certainly remove funding from Ares development for it (because I’d do that on general principles). But NASA wasn’t particularly good at funding launch R&D, as exemplified by the X-33 fiasco. What I would do is get NASA out of the launch development business entirely, and back into the R&T business, and start to view industry as the customer for it, as NACA did. If NASA really wanted to support commercial industry with VSE (as recommended by the Aldridge Commission), it would be doing two fundamental things, neither of which it’s doing much of right now. And no, COTS doesn’t count — it has nothing to do with the VSE.
First, it would be purchasing services, including launch services, from the commercial sector, as it does for unmanned exploration, and stop trying to develop and operate its own dedicated vehicles. Second, it would be canvassing those providers for input as to what high-risk technologies could reduce future costs and increase reliability, and start investing in those. That could include developing X-Vehicles, but they should be true X-Vehicles, each one focused on proving out one or (at most) two key technologies, and not relying on those technologies to be able to fly at all (the grand failing of X-33). They would also be much less risk averse for X programs, and not idiotically shut them down when almost complete out of fear of failure (e.g., X-34). Not to mention demanding that they incorporate some pet NASA project, like a Marshall-developed engine (X-34 again).
There are lots of lessons to be learned from space history, but unfortunately, the space policy establishment seems determined to learn the stupendously wrong ones (e.g., Shuttle proved reusables don’t work, so let’s do Apollo again), and ignore the sensible ones.
More History Lessons For The President
From Michael Barone and Frank Tipler.
It makes me all the more curious to see his college transcripts. Did he even take a course in history? And what’s really appalling is that it isn’t just him — there are apparently no fact checkers in the White House itself.
And Victor Davis Hanson says that the president reminds him of himself. A much younger, and more naive himself.
[Update a few minutes later]
Obama’s message of weakness:
The speech…impressed many conservatives, including Rich Lowry, my esteemed editor at National Review, “esteemed editor” being the sort of thing one says before booting the boss in the crotch. Rich thought that the president succeeded in his principal task: “Fundamentally, Obama’s goal was to tell the Muslim world, ‘We respect and value you, your religion and your civilization, and only ask that you don’t hate us and murder us in return.'” But those terms are too narrow. You don’t have to murder a guy if he preemptively surrenders. And you don’t even have to hate him if you’re too busy despising him. The savvier Muslim potentates have no desire to be sitting in a smelly cave in the Hindu Kush, sharing a latrine with a dozen half-witted goatherds while plotting how to blow up the Empire State Building. Nevertheless, they share key goals with the cave dwellers – including the wish to expand the boundaries of “the Muslim world” and (as in the anti-blasphemy push at the U.N.) to place Islam, globally, beyond criticism. The nonterrorist advance of Islam is a significant challenge to Western notions of liberty and pluralism.
Once Obama moved on from the more generalized Islamoschmoozing to the details, the subtext – the absence of American will – became explicit. He used the cover of multilateralism and moral equivalence to communicate, consistently, American weakness: “No single nation should pick and choose which nations hold nuclear weapons.” Perhaps by “no single nation” he means the “global community” should pick and choose, which means the U.N. Security Council, which means the Big Five, which means that Russia and China will pursue their own murky interests and that, in the absence of American leadership, Britain and France will reach their accommodations with a nuclear Iran, a nuclear North Korea and any other psychostate minded to join them.
This reminds me of the old The Simpsons episode about the right way, the wrong way, and the Max Power way. There’s the Reagan way, the Carter way, and the Obama way. The latter is like the Carter way, but way faster. We’re not even half a year into the presidency.
Fox Derangement Syndrome
…is on full display over at this “Democratic” Underground discussion of a typical leftist who wants to decide what other people should, and should not hear.
I went in to have some blood drawn on Tuesday, and Fox News was playing in the doctor’s office waiting room. It obviously didn’t bother me, but I can’t imagine being as outraged as some of these people are even if it had been MSNBC with Olbermann.
Show Us How It Works
Virginia Postrel says do Medicare first:
Think about this for a moment. Medicare is a huge, single-payer, government-run program. It ought to provide the perfect environment for experimentation. If more-efficient government management can slash health-care costs by addressing all these problems, why not start with Medicare? Let’s see what “better management” looks like applied to Medicare before we roll it out to the rest of the country.
This is not a completely cynical suggestion. Medicare is, for instance, a logical place to start to design better electronic records systems and the incentives to use them. But you do have to wonder why a report that claims that Medicare is wasting 30 percent of its spending thinks it’s making a case for making the rest of the health care system more like Medicare.
Because they think we’re rubes. And judging by the voting results last fall, many of us are.
This reminds me of the old Soviet joke (that I’m sure I’ve related at this blog, perhaps more than once, but it remains appropriate). A teacher is lecturing schoolchildren on the brilliance of Karl Marx. A kid raises his hand, and says, “Teacher, was Marx truly a great scientist?” She beams and nods, and declares him the greatest scientist in the history of mankind. “Well,” he went on, “then why didn’t he try this crap on rats first?”
[Saturday afternoon update]
Peter Orszag has responded to Virginia’s question. Hail the blogosphere.
I find this quite telling:
Medicare First–changing Medicare and waiting to see how it works before messing around with the rest of the health care system–won’t work politically.
You don’t say…
Some people might think that cause to rethink. But not these people.
[Bumped]
Sixty-Five Years
Next year, it will be roughly two-thirds of a century since the Normandy landing. The ceremonies on the beach had been held every ten years up until 2004. I remember the 1974 anniversary, and my mother, who had been a WAC in Egypt, commenting that she couldn’t believe that it had been thirty years. It’s sobering to realize now, as my age is close to hers then, that the landing was as close to her in time as the Iranian revolution and the worst of the Carter era is to me now.
Anyway, today’s ceremony has been only five years since the last one, because it won’t be long before there are no survivors left. The youngest of the men who stormed Juno, Gold, Sword, Omaha are eighty-three years old, and many of them are older, and they are dying by the hundreds each year as their ages advance. There will be many fewer on the seventieth anniversary, and just a handful, if any on the eightieth.
When they’re all gone, will European and North American leaders still gather on the once blood-soaked sand to commemorate their sacrifice and bravery? If so, for how many more years, before it becomes an event in long-forgotten history, irrelevant to those generations? We no longer have such ceremonies at Gettysburg, a similar watermark in political and military history, because no one alive remembers it first hand. Has any president given a speech there on the anniversary (the nation’s birthday)? Has any made a speech there on any day since Lincoln made his famous address only a few months after the event? I suspect that as time goes on, no one will show up at Normandy on June 6 except history buffs. The “greatest generation” is passing, and with them, an era.
[Update in the afternoon]
It occurs to me that this is probably the first such event at which none of the leaders speaking at it were alive when the landing occurred. G. W. Bush was born just after the war, but in 2004, Chirac gave a speech, and he was twelve years old when France was liberated. I’m pretty sure that Sarkozy, Harper, Brown and Obama are all baby boomers.
[Update a while later]
Lots of D-Day posts and links over at Aaarrrggghhh (not a permalink, just scroll).
Response To LLC X-Prize Concerns
Will Pomerantz responds to concerns about the rules for the Lunar Landing Challenge.