Media Criticism, Political Commentary

I Am So Relieved

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…to hear that the Obama transition team has cleared itself of any impropriety:

Greg Craig, the incoming White House Counsel, conducted his inquiry by taking questions to each transition staff member’s lawyer. The lawyers then went to the staff members and collected the answers. The lawyers then gave the answers to Craig.

In some cases — team Obama won’t say how many — Craig would go back to either the staff member’s attorney or the staff member directly for clarification. But it appears Craig’s direct questioning of staff was very limited.

Additionally, there was no independent effort to verify any of the information provided by the staff member or the staff member’s attorney. If, for example, a staff member’s attorney said there was no e-mail or text messaging with Blagojevich or his staff, Craig took that at face value. No one knows if there was any e-mailing or texting, by the way.

Also, the lawyers’ own words mattered to Craig. He told reporters on Tuesday’s conference call that Valerie Jarrett described Blagojevich’s suggestion he might be appointed secretary of health and human services as “ridiculous” when that subject was broached by the Illinois head of the Service Employees International Union.

How does Craig know Jarrett said the word “ridiculous”? He knows that because that’s what Jarrett’s lawyer told him. Jarrett didn’t say it to Craig. Her attorney did.

This reminds me of when Bill Clinton was fending off Juanita Broaddrick’s accusations of rape. He never denied it, but directed people to his attorney, who claimed that it never happened. Even though he had no first-hand knowledge of it. And of course, the press accepted it as a denial.

Political Commentary, Science And Society, Technology and Society

Smarter Now?

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John Tierney wonders if Dr. Holdren learned anything from his misguided bet with Julian Simon:

Dr. Simon’s victory was not (as some Lab readers suggested) a fluke based on exceptionally lucky timing, as you can see from this Wikipedia graph showing the inflation-adjusted prices for the five metals in the bet from 1950 to 2002. (Since 2002, metal prices rose sharply for several years but have since plummeted back to familiar levels.) Prices do sometimes shoot up for natural resources, but people react by finding new sources and substitutes, and prices come back down. If you look back over the past several centuries, as Dr. Simon demonstrated in his book, “The Ultimate Resource,” you’ll see that the trend was downward long before 1950, too.

What lessons Dr. Holdren learn from that bet? The only one I’m aware of is: Don’t test your theories by betting on them. After Dr. Simon collected his winnings in 1990, he offered to make another bet not just on natural resources but also on any measure of human welfare, like life expectancy or food per capita. Once again, Dr. Simon predicted that humans would adapt to new problems (like global warming) and end up better off in the future — by any measure at any future date that Dr. Holdren or Dr. Ehrlich cared to name. They refused his offer. They did, however, go on making more gloomy predictions and calculations about the problems of sustainability, as in this 1995 essay discussing how to avert future shortages of resources.

I find this particular appointment disquieting. As one of my commenters said earlier, I’d much prefer a “science advisor” who sees technology as a solution, rather than a problem. And, again, I have no idea what the implications of this pick are for space policy.

Political Commentary

A Good Time For A Joint?

23 Comments

Could a President Obama decriminalize Mary Jane? It would be a nice offset to the other damage that he’s going to do (though I wouldn’t use it even if it was legal — I had more than enough in college). And it’s not like he doesn’t (or at least didn’t at one time) have a personal interest in the issue.

But I doubt that he would want to expend the political capital on a fight with Congress over it, so I suspect that this insane war on (some) drugs will continue unabated.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Space

Doing The Right Thing Wrong

21 Comments

Mike Thomas has a misguided rant over at the Orlando Sentinel, bashing NASA and its supposed desire to go to Mars (something that is hard for me to discern, based on what it’s actually doing).

There are, broadly, two classes of NASA critics: those who think that it’s doing the wrong thing, and those who think that it’s doing the thing wrong. I fall into the latter camp, but Mr. Thomas is clearly one of the former. But his position seems to be incoherent. He thinks that NASA is supposed to be doing science (as indicated by his final words), and if so, he’s correct that manned spaceflight, as currently performed, contributes very little to it. But he doesn’t seem to think that it should be engaged in space science. He (like too many) thinks that NASA’s job is to heal the planet. My biggest fear of an Obama administration (at least in terms of space policy) is that they will agree, and divert it from its original role as an agency that looks outward, to one that looks instead inward.

Whether one believes that we should be doing more about climate change or not, Mike Griffin is correct that it is not within NASA’s charter to do the heavy (or even any) lifting in that regard. It was a heartburn that I always had with things like the Ride Report, and “Mission To Planet Earth.” If these are important things to do, then set up an agency to do them, but don’t defocus and distract NASA with them. In fact, it is much more a job for NOAA. The problem is that NOAA has no history of developing satellites, and has traditionally relied on NASA to do it for them. Perhaps that ought to change.

If NASA improperly gets assigned the task of healing the planet, it is inevitable that it will make it even harder for it to properly explore and develop space, which is what it was established to do. Now frankly, given how wrongly NASA has been doing the right thing, I’m not sure that it would be all that much of a tragedy if we were to end its manned spaceflight program. But unlike Mr. Thomas, I’d rather see it starting to do it right.

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