Political Commentary, Science And Society, Space

More Etzioni Idiocy

11 Comments

Fresh from his brutal but well deserved fisking by Lileks, old Amitai is at it again. This time, he wants NASA to forget about this space stuff and explore the oceans.

Leaving aside his historical ignorance (it was Copernicus, not Kepler who posited that the earth went around the sun), really, what part of National Aeronautics and Space Administration do these morons who want to repurpose the agency not understand?

We have an agency that studies the oceans — it’s called the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. We also have an agency that deals with energy issues. It’s called the Department of Energy. Can you say “Department of Energy,” boys and girls?

If we don’t want to have a federal space program, then disband the agency, and shift its funds to the things we do want to do. If there are NASA employees who know how to and want to study the ocean and energy, they can transfer to the places where those things are done. But enough with these stupid attempts to make NASA something that it is not.

Space

More On Scaled/VG

8 Comments

Clark Lindsey has an extensive discussion going in comments. One point that came up is something I’ve been wondering about. Virgin has been talking about passengers in the White Knight 2, doing parabolas or other experiences. As Paul Breed points out, they won’t be able to do this unless they certify it as a commercial aircraft (I would assume under Part 127). I wonder if they’ve budgeted in time and funds for that certification, which could increase the cost of the program an order of magnitude or more.

Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

A Space Libertarian Follow Up

7 Comments

I just ran across this (five-year-old) post of mine that seems relevant to the recent discussion (which has a fascinating discussion by Carl Pham in comments on the nature of law, dictatorships and the state):

As a comment outside the context of the debate, Dr. Kurtz’ position is one shared by many, but the point is not that space is by its nature a libertarian utopia, any more than (and yes, I know he dislikes the analogy, but that doesn’t make it invalid) were the Americas two and a half centuries ago. Yet somehow we created a form of government here previously unseen in the history of the world, that was quite libertarian in philosophy (certainly much more so than either major party today).

From the standpoint of forming new societies, the point of settling space is that it’s a tabula rasa, and that many different groups and ideologies will find room there to do social experimentation. This is a factor that is independent of technology. Yes, cooperation will be required, and perhaps even laws, but there’s nothing intrinsically unlibertarian about that. Ignoring teleological arguments about our duty to be the vessels that bring consciousness to the universe, this is to me the greatest value of space–an ongoing large petri dish in which groups of like-minded people can continue to seek improvements on society, unconstrained by existing governmental strictures that are now dominant on this planet.

There’s some good discussion in comments there as well.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

From Christianism To Europeanism

2 Comments

Some thoughts:

Liberals are determined to mock and ridicule the notion that Obama’s moving America in a European direction. But of course he is. Liberals have been — unapologetically — pushing America in that direction for generations.

Anyway, what I didn’t get into in the column is how this contrasts with the theocracy-panic of five minutes ago. Back then, the liberal consensus was that we need to be very, very, very scared that the bible thumpers were going to take over everything and turn us into a Handmaid’s Tale (itself a classic example of paranoid fiction). But back then, if I had suggested that America’s rich history of religious tolerance and pluralism could stand up to the Orwellian onslaught of Bush’s Office of Faith Based Initiatives, I would have been laughed off as ludicrously naive.

But when Obama is literally spending trillions of dollars to move us in a European direction, conservatives like Mark Steyn, Charles Murray, and others are supposedly daft for thinking this is anything worth worrying about.

It’s just the substitution of one religion for another — worship of the state.

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