It’s the overhead, stupid.
The Politics Of Amnesia
Maybe, for instance, the speaker doesn’t remember that in September 2002, as ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, she was one of four members of Congress who were briefed by the CIA about the interrogation methods the agency was using on leading detainees. “For more than an hour,” the Washington Post reported in 2007, “the bipartisan group . . . was given a virtual tour of the CIA’s overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk.
“Among the techniques described,” the story continued, “was waterboarding, a practice that years later would be condemned as torture by Democrats and some Republicans on Capitol Hill. But on that day, no objections were raised. Instead, at least two lawmakers in the room asked the CIA to push harder.”
Or maybe the speaker never heard what some of her Democratic colleagues were saying about legal niceties getting in the way of an effective counterterrorism strategy.
“Unfortunately, we are not living in times in which lawyers can say no to an operation just to play it safe,” said Democrat Bob Graham, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence during the 2002 confirmation hearing of Scott Muller to be the CIA’s general counsel. “We need excellent, aggressive lawyers who give sound, accurate legal advice, not lawyers who say no to an otherwise legal opinion just because it is easier to put on the brakes.”
Also, Scooter Pelosi. The thought of this incompetent hack and liar being third in line for the presidency would be more frightening if the imbecilic Joe Biden weren’t number two. How did we end up with such a government?
[Update late morning]
The country’s in the very best of hands.
Busted
The country’s in the very best of hands:
The cavalier use of brute government force has become routine, but the emerging story of how Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke forced CEO Ken Lewis to blow up Bank of America is still shocking. It’s a case study in the ways that panicky regulators have so often botched the bailout and made the financial crisis worse.
In the name of containing “systemic risk,” our regulators spread it. In order to keep Mr. Lewis quiet, they all but ordered him to deceive his own shareholders. And in the name of restoring financial confidence, they have so mistreated Bank of America that bank executives everywhere have concluded that neither Treasury nor the Federal Reserve can be trusted.
Boy, that’s not a very flattering picture of Hank Paulson. Looks like Darth Vader without the mask.
How Is This Not Nationalizing GM?
There used to be a quaint concept called “bankruptcy court” for things like this. I guess not, in the age of Obama. Like other recent events, there’s a word for things like this. It starts with an “f.” For the slow among you, it’s not that “f-word.” Its the one that ends with “ism.”
So It’s Not Just Me
Andrea Harris hates reggae:
I don’t hate Marley as a person — for one thing, he’s dead, so it would be pointless. But I hate the people who keep flogging him as some sort of Jesus of music. That song, “No Woman No Cry”? Hey, how about not getting stoned on weed and sitting around like a stinky lump. Also she’s tired of you stealing her brassieres, Mr. Pot-Made-My-Moobs-Grow.
The reason so many white people like reggae is because most white people live well above the Tropic of Cancer and thus think of reggae and other genres of “island” music as “exotic” and a promise of an escape from driving down icy streets every day to a nine-to-five job or shoveling snow. I sympathize, but since I actually grew up in the tropics I also know that living year-round with humidity in the 90s coupled with temperatures in same, every insect on earth, and a yearly threat of hurricanes isn’t exactly a vacation, and the prevalence of music where every single song has the same drunken-donkey-walk rhythm and must always be sung in high, whining tones doesn’t help. It’s almost as bad as salsa.
Yes, living in Puerto Rico, and the Caribbean in general, was hell for me, musically.
Not to mention, almost everyone who loves reggae seems to think that you also have to have dirty hair full of mud (I don’t care if the mud came out of a forty-dollar jar you bought at your stylist’s — your dreadlocks look like you went outside after a good rain, scooped up a wad of dirt from the back yard, and rubbed it into your hair) and smoke pot. Marijuana smells worse than the stinkiest cigarettes, and I’m pretty sure all the second-hand pot smoke I inhaled at too many concerts contributed to the destruction of my sinuses.
You may or may not be surprised to learn that she doesn’t like ska, either.
[Update a few minutes later]
I should add that technically, Miami (which I think is where she grew up) is not the tropics, but it’s miserable enough to seem like it.
There’s Something Missing
So the president made (or is making) a speech before the NAS today in which he proposes to increase spending for “science,” and R&D (I wonder if he understands that these are different things?).
Well, no surprise there. Increasing spending is his first resort to every conceivable problem (except when it comes to defending the nation). But do you not see what I don’t see?
Obama said he plans to double the budget of key science agencies over a decade, including the National Science Foundation, Department of Energy Office of Science and the National Institutes of Standards and Technology.
He also announced the launch of the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy. It is a new Department of Energy organization modeled after the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, that led in development of the Internet, stealth aircraft and other technological breakthroughs.
Look, Ma, no space agency! No mention of NASA at all. This, combined with the continuing absence of an administrator or White House direction, makes me wonder just where space falls in the priorities of this administration.
But actually, what I find much more disturbing is this:
“I believe it is not in our character, American character, to follow — but to lead. And it is time for us to lead once again. I am here today to set this goal: we will devote more than 3 percent of our gross domestic product to research and development,” Obama said in a speech at the annual meeting of the National Academy of Sciences.
Let’s leave aside the arbitrariness of setting a percentage goal at all (why 3%? Why not 2.5% or 5%?). Let us also ignore the fact that at the rate things are going, there’s not going to be much of a GDP to have a percentage of, and that the $420B number makes some optimistic estimates.
Why set the goal as a percentage of GDP? Why not as a percentage of the federal budget, something over which a president and a government has at least theoretical control? The implication is that he doesn’t just preside over the government and its spending priorities, but that he commands the entire national economy, and can, should and does dictate how others are to spend their own money, which apparently is no longer their own money. It implies a conceit of omniscience on the part of him and his advisors about how much we should be spending on R&D as a function of domestic product, and how we should be spending it, when he has no useful control over what non-governmental entities are spending.
Or does he? Just what does he have in mind?
Oh, and note the latest gratuitous slap at the previous administration, without which, apparently, no Obama speech is complete:
In recent years, he said, “scientific integrity has been undermined and scientific research politicized in an effort to advance predetermined ideological agendas.”
He then drew chuckles, commenting: “I want to be sure that facts are driving scientific decisions, not the other way around,” Obama said.
Yes, there will be no predetermined ideological agendas in an Obama administration.
Right.
Oh, one other thing. I don’t have the time to run the numbers right now, and it obviously depends on how you categorize things, but I’d wouldn’t be surprised if we don’t already spend more than 3% of the GDP on R&D. It’s just not being spent the way The One wants it to be spent.
[Update a few minutes later]
This brings to mind some thoughts that I had last summer on the ability to command and control R&D, with bad Apollo analogies.
[Late afternoon update]
One of Clark Lindsey’s readers makes a good point about the non-mention of NASA:
Perhaps, as the reader suggests, if NASA had not dropped most of its R&D in favor of funding a handful of giant development projects like Ares I, it would get more backing for such activity.
Of course, Ares 1 is R&D, technically speaking. But almost all other, more diverse and certainly more useful R&D has been sacrificed to fund it. But somehow, I actually doubt that this is the reason for the apparent oversight. It think it’s just an oversight.
[Update a few minutes later]
OK, NASA didn’t go entirely unmentioned. He did repeat the flawed Apollo analogy again (it’s one of his favorites), and then said this:
My budget includes $150 billion over ten years to invest in sources of renewable energy as well as energy efficiency; it supports efforts at NASA, recommended as a priority by the National Research Council, to develop new space-based capabilities to help us better understand our changing climate.
That little whirring windy sound you hear is my upright forefinger twirling around and around.
Whoopee.
A Che Teeshirt
…that I would love to wear, say, in Ann Arbor. I wonder if they sell it at Che Mart?
Heh.
“A Terrible Energy Plan”
From Sarah Palin. Which just shows that Republicans can be as economically clueless as Democrats. If she runs for national office again, I hope that she gets better economics advisors.
A Back Door To The Moon Treaty?
Taylor Dinerman warns about a UN (and France) bearing space gifts.
Not Guilty?
There is evidence that the asteroid that created the Chicxulub crater didn’t wipe out the dinosaurs:
New clues at other sites in Mexico showed that the extinction must have occurred 300,000 years after the Chicxulub impact and that even larger asteroids may not be the purveyors of doom they’re thought to be, according to a paper published in the Journal of the Geological Society by researchers from Princeton, New Jersey, and Lausanne, Switzerland.
“We found that not a single species went extinct as a result of the Chicxulub impact,” said Gerta Keller, a professor of geosciences at Princeton University, in a release distributed by the Geological Society of London. “These are astonishing results.”
Maybe. But even if true, it’s not an excuse to ignore the problem. Being hit by one of these things will mean a bad day, and maybe a bad decade, depending on its size and strike location. Tonguska was only a hundred years ago, and if it were to hit a populated area (e.g., the eastern Seaboard) today, it would be more devastating than a nuclear blast (minus the radiation), potentially killing hundreds of thousands of people. Even if it didn’t wipe out species, you can bet that anything that can create a crater over a hundred miles across wiped out a lot of life. We should still be investing a lot more than we are to become spacefaring, and prevent a repeat.
And what’s frustrating is that we wouldn’t even necessarily have to spend more money. We’d just have to spend NASA’s budget smarter. But that wouldn’t keep the jobs in the right districts.
[Update a few minutes later]
I wonder if this topic will come up at the Planetary Defense Conference. Looks interesting — wish I could attend. A. C. Charania is blogging it.
[Update a few minutes later]
Or maybe we shouldn’t waste all this money on planetary defense, and just get the president to apologize and make peace with the solar system.