Media Criticism, Political Commentary

“Transforming Democracy”

9 Comments

John Cox, on the salivating glee with which people like Todd Gitlin and E. J. Dionne look forward to the fascist tactics that will be enabled by President Obama’s identity cult:

Gitlin becomes almost giddy with the prospects of how a cult of personality, fluent in Web dynamics, can exploit “his more than 3 million names – disproportionately young and energetic.” They “remain a political force as long as he satisfies them that, once in office, he can deliver.”

But Obama doesn’t have to “deliver” in conventional political terms in order to “satisfy” his netroots. In a “political landscape where passions outweigh ideological clarity,” as Gitlin himself puts it, Obama’s self-centered movement need only satisfy those passions. And Gitlin makes it clear that the Web technologies are ideally suited to do just that.

Obama can “deploy his supporters to muscle reforms through.” One gets the distinct impression that for Gitlin it’s the muscling even more than the reform that’s so satisfying. As president, Obama can get them to “bombard Congress with phone calls to break filibusters and [my favorite catch-all] otherwise stir them to action….”

As he asks at the end, into what are they are so eager to see democracy “transform”?

Business, Economics, Political Commentary

Missing The Real Point

12 Comments

I think that this is a misdiagnosis:

How come nobody connects the following dots:

1. Massive bank problems precipitate a $700 billion federal bailout.
2. Meanwhile, private companies (including automakers) find it difficult to get banks to loan them money.
3. So those private companies go to the feds for bailouts of their own.
4. Nobody says: “The federal government won’t bail out companies that can’t get private loans. That’s why we gave the money to the banks, so the banks could make private loans. Loan money is what banks do. If you need money, go see a banker. We gave them lots of money they can loan out. Maybe they’ll loan some to you.”

Am I missing something?

An excellent point. So I put it to some auto supplier and finance sources, and this is what they say we’re missing: The federal credit bailout ain’t working.

Credit is still frozen. No banks are willing to lend. And the auto companies are still in free fall.

I don’t think that’s the problem at all. I don’t know whether credit is still “frozen” or not (there seem to be a lot of mortgage loans happening), but even if it were melted and boiling, I don’t think you’d find a sane banker who would lend these companies money, even at junk-bond rates, given the nature of their business plans and prospects. That’s why they have to go to Congress…

Political Commentary, Space, Space and Campaign 2008

It’s A Start

4 Comments

We’re finally starting to take the asteroid threat seriously enough to start dedicating new telescopes to looking for them. A hundred million dollars seems like a pretty cheap insurance policy against another Tunguska or worse, in a populated area.

Unfortunately, we’re not developing the kind of spacefaring capability we need to do something about it if we see one coming. This is one kind of change that I’d be happy to see with the incoming administration. But it remains to be seen what space policy will come out of the process.

Political Commentary, Space

Good News, If True

I had suggested this to some people on the transition team, but I’m sure I wasn’t the only one. It looks like the Ares V RFP (and perhaps others) that was going to ruin (as is often the case) the contractors’ holidays with the need to work a proposal, is being postponed (and perhaps going away altogether — we can only hope). It’s a waste of money and contractor resources to force them to bid on a Phase I of a program that’s under review as to whether it should exist at all. Clearly, as noted over at R’n’S, Mike was trying to rush these things to entrench them and make them more of a fait accompli before he leaves, and fortunately, the incoming administration is having none of it.

I’m not sure how that worked, exactly, since they don’t actually have any authority until January, but (just as a guess) if I had been them, I would have told the contractors that I had no intention of funding the program without (at a minimum) a requirements review, which would imply (at a minimum) a rebid, and hope that they would in turn tell NASA that no one would bother to bid now.

Technology and Society

Making Our Own Leaves

10 Comments

Here’s an interesting piece on breakthroughs in artificial photosynthesis. My biggest problem with it is that it talks about hydrogen as being “easy to store,” but it doesn’t describe in any way how this is done. Clearly, if you don’t have to carry it in a vehicle (as would be required for transport fuel) the job is a lot easier, but it’s still non trivial. If it’s simply for load leveling, you have a lot more options, but they still come down to three: hydrides, high-pressure gas, or liquid. The latter uses a lot of energy to chill it, and loses it in rewarming.

There is a picture of a notional system in a garage, but it shows a water tank, hydrogen tank, and oxygen tank, and the separated gases (or liquids?). The water tank looks like about half the volume of the separated elements. How realistic is this? What is going on? I’d expect more from an article in Technology Review.

General, Science And Society

News I Can Use

12 Comments

Sort of.

I had my eyes checked last week (for the first time in three or four years) and discovered that I’m color blind. Sort of. It’s minor enough that it’s never been an issue from a functional standpoint, apparently, and this is the first time that I’ve ever had this problem diagnosed. I went on line to check out some of the tests to confirm it, and I do show up as red-green color blind, but only mildly. That is, I can sometimes make out the things that normal sighted are supposed to see, but some of them just barely very dim, and I can see some (but not all) of the numbers that true red-green color blind people aren’t supposed to at all. On the ones that have one number for normal, and a different one for color-blind, I see the color-blind one more clearly, but I can actually see both. And I’ve never had any trouble distinguishing red from green traffic lights (which would be the biggest problem, I would think, though fully color-blind people know from position). When I look at the pictures that show what the world looks like to normal and deficient eyes, I can very clearly see the vivid red dress as red, whereas it should be more of a greenish color if I were fully color blind. I wonder what this page looks like to someone with no red receptors? Are both pictures the same? And it makes me wonder what the red dress would look like to someone with normal vision (something I’ve never wondered before, because I’ve always thought I had normal vision).

So, the question is, have I always had this borderline condition, and it’s only become apparent now, or was I much better in my youth (I never failed a test as a kid) and have deteriorated a lot with mileage? I’m guessing that maybe I was always borderline, but far enough over the border toward normal earlier that I always passed the test, not realizing that I could have been seeing the numbers more clearly had my color sight been better, and perhaps with age, I’ve drifted into a region where I don’t fully pass any more, but am still a long way from being unable to distinguish red from green.

Anyway, the opthalmologist recommended a follow-up visit to a neuro-opthalmologist, just to make sure that there wasn’t something else going on (just as a precaution, because it’s unlikely that it’s caused by anything serious).

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!