Lileks, one of the biggest Pixar fans around, has a spoiler-free review.
The Ideology That Dare Not Speak Its Name
Who owns socialism?
As Confucius said, “If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success.”
One of the insidious tactics of the left over the decades has been to debase the currency of the language, calling themselves “liberals” and “progressives,” and accusing those who disagree with them as “racists,” and “haters.” I refuse to bow to their politically corrosive sophistry. What we are seeing in Washington today is socialism, and fascism, and the two are not opposites, but are in fact closely related.
[Update a few minutes later]
Jonah Goldberg has similar thoughts today at USA Today:
The whole spectacle was just too funny for liberal observers. Robert Schlesinger, U.S. News & World Report’s opinion editor, was a typical giggler. He chortled, “What’s really both funny and scary about all of this is how seriously the fringe-nuts in the GOP take it.”
Putting aside the funny and scary notion that it’s “funny and scary” for political professionals to take weighty political issues seriously, there are some fundamental problems with all of this disdain. For starters, why do liberals routinely suggest, even hope, that Obama and the Democrats are leading us into an age of socialism, or social democracy or democratic socialism? (One source of confusion is that these terms are routinely used interchangeably.)
For instance, in (another) fawning interview with President Obama, Newsweek editor Jon Meacham mocks Obama’s critics for considering Obama to be a “crypto-socialist.” This, of course, would be the same Jon Meacham who last February co-authored a cover story with Newsweek’s editor at large (and grandson of the six-time presidential candidate for the American Socialist Part) Evan Thomas titled — wait for it — “We Are All Socialists Now,” in which they argued that the growth of government was making us like a “European,” i.e. socialist, country.
Washington Post columnists Jim Hoagland (a centrist), E.J. Dionne (a liberal) and Harold Meyerson (very, very liberal) have all suggested that Obama intentionally or otherwise is putting us on the path to “social democracy.” Left-wing blogger and Democratic activist Matthew Yglesias last fall hoped that the financial crisis offered a “real opportunity” for “massive socialism.” Polling done by Rasmussen — and touted by Meyerson — shows that while Republicans favor “capitalism” over “socialism” by 11 to 1, Democrats favor capitalism by a mere 39% to 30%. So, again: Is it really crazy to think that there is a constituency for some flavor of socialism in the Democratic Party?
No, it’s not crazy talk. Except when “right wingers” talk about it, of course.
But as he notes, “corporatism” (the economic philosophy of fascism) is the best term for it.
Advice To The Tea Partiers
They should ask, “What would Reagan do“?
Conservatives are dismayed and baffled at the sight of Obama’s Latin American-style personality cult and at poll results showing astonishing erosion in public support for free markets and limited government. “This is a center-right nation,” conservatives continue to insist. To be sure, Reagan and the conservative movement stoked the populist flames from the 1970s through the 1990s, with considerable success. But conservatives became too comfortable with the thought that populism would remain a reliable conservative force in American politics, and largely lost or disdained the art of constitutional argument.
Madison and Tocqueville knew better (as Mansfield has warned us repeatedly over the last two decades), and would not have been surprised by the present crisis. The other person who would not have been surprised is Ronald Reagan. This sunny optimist also warned repeatedly that “freedom is a fragile thing and is never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation.” Reagan’s greatest frustration as president was his inability to control spending. In contrast to Pres. George W. Bush, Reagan vetoed several “budget-busting” bills in the course of his presidency, only to see many Republican members of Congress join Democrats in overriding his vetoes. This led Reagan, late in his second term, to recognize the wisdom of Mansfield’s Razor and to embrace a bold constitutional strategy that no one much remembers today.
We need to get people to talk about the Constitution much more.
It’s Official
NASA has announced the Augustine panel, and the Sentinel got it right. Give ’em hell, Jeff.
The Obama Infatuation
Some thoughts from Robert Samuelson. I guess the infatuation is why so much of the coverage had been so…fatuous.
Space Solar Powerballs
Trevor Brown proposes spherical solar power satellites.
This isn’t a new idea. I wrote a paper on it back in the early nineties for an SPS conference, and I think that Geoff Landis has done some work on it as well (for instance, here’s a report of a talk that he gave on it at the 1996 ISDC, which was the last one that I attended prior to by going to Dallas two years ago — ctrl-F for “spherical”). It does vastly simplify the design issues, because it is no longer necessary to point the panels at the sun. One of the comments there needs some elaboration:
While the surface area of the sphere facing the Sun matches your calculations, the whole side would not be available for power generation. The so-called Beta angle, or the Sun angle, affects the total amount of power converted. Also, while a sphere would not need rigid station-keeping and attitude control to collect solar energy, the transmitter back to Earth certainly will. Also, a large spherical structure would be more taxing on a station-keeping/attitude control system than a more planar design. These caveats in mind, this is a creative alternative.
With regard to the needed area, the beta-angle effect means that at any orientation, you’re only getting the effective solar panel area of the cross-section of the sphere. That is, while the hemisphere has twice the area of the circular cross section, the non-zero beta angle of all points except that at the center of the illuminated area means that you need twice the solar panel that would be necessary if it were a flat circle. Add to this the fact that you have just as much area on the side in shadow, and it means that you need four times the total solar panel area to get the equivalent collection capacity of a pointed flat plate. So you have to postulate very cheap panels for this to make economic sense. But if you can get them, the simplification of the design is worth a lot.
As for pointing the transmitter, that’s actually not so tough a job. You hang it down below the sphere, and it will remain vertical, due to gravity gradient restoring torques. You could point it with control cables all around its circumference, attached to the sphere. In addition to inflating it, I also considered putting a charge on its surface to keep it spherical, but it would take a lot of ions, particularly for a big one, and inflating is probably a better solution, though subject to leaks, and the need for gas resupply.
One other point. I actually considered a fleet of them in MEO, continuously switching from one rectenna to the next as they orbit, to reduce the size of the transmitter antenna, which gets kind of humungous out at GEO.
An Interesting Quote
On the economics of fascism, from self-declared fascist Lawrence Dennis:
Thus we shall see what fascism has to do to make a system of private ownership and management workable, so far as arrangements involving capital income or reward are concerned. The ruling principle must be that capital and management reward must be kept in continuous and flexible adjustment with economic possibilities, and that legal and institutional arrangements—like loan contracts, bonds, legal concepts of just compensation, due process of law, and confiscation—must not obstruct executive action of government to maintain this adjustment otherwise than by the present devices of bankruptcy, foreclosures, reorganization, and cycles of booms and depressions. [Lawrence Dennis, The Coming American Fascism (New York: Harper & Bros., 1936 ), Ch. V. “Can We Reorganize the Present System?”]
Emphasis mine. As Jonah notes, it seems very familiar, somehow.
More On Kurras
Michael Moynihan points out that West German “fascism” was manufactured in East Germany.
DIRECT Rebuttal Thoughts
I had missed this when they were posted, but the Chair Force Engineer had some thoughts on DIRECT a couple weeks ago, here and here.
“Wow.” Are we to believe that ESAS was designed with little or no consideration of what the supporting infrastructure would cost? It would certainly explain why we’re stuck with the unaffordable Ares I and Ares V.
I’d like to say that I’m surprised, but sadly, I’m not.
Further NASA statements such as “Ares I + Ares V uses 15 SRB segments, while two Jupiter 232’s use 16 segments” also reveal an incredibly simplistic approach to cost estimation. Such simple methods might be appropriate for pre-algebra students. Professional cost estimators ought to know better. That’s why cost estimation is so difficult; there may literally be thousands of dependent and independent variables that make up the true cost of the system over its lifetime. Saving a few million in rocket hardware may have bigger reprocussions with development dollars, standing army costs, and infrastructure costs. It’s best summed up on Slide 26, where Jupiter’s higher launch costs (measured in tens of millions per launch) are offset by the savings of billions in development costs.
We’d have to see a full life-cycle cost accounting with assumptions to know whether or not it’s a good saving to cut development cost at the price of higher ops costs. It depends on how much you’re going to fly. But I suspect that it probably is, because the up-front costs are in expensive near-term dollars whereas the flight costs are down stream and discounted, and the flight rate will probably never get big enough to justify spending more on development to reduce marginal cost per flight. That’s always the problem with expendables.
I really need to write up my talk on marginal costs from Space Access.
Danger: Sand
Some thoughts on the uselessness of MSDSs.
Of course, it’s not as hazardous as this toxic substance.