History

Are You Better Off?

Year US Life Expectancy at Birth
1905 47.8
1975 72.5
2005 77.9

Five and a half years extra life expectancy after 30 years. Not bad. An extra 30 after 100 years. Nice. I guess the combination of stress, pollution, moral decrepitude, corroded job protections, declining medical care and all the other crises of the day are actually coincident with increased lifespan. Don’t be optimistic about it; it’s not fashionable.

Space

The Empire Strikes Back

Are we nearing the end of COTS? Happy New Year.

It’s probably not too late to do anything about it:

If you’re even half as angry about this as I am, then it’s time to let Congress know that you’re mad as hell and not going to take it any longer. Even if it doesn’t do any good, won’t it just feel grand to let your Representative and Senator know how you feel!? And while you’re at it, write a letter to your local newspaper editor.

If you want to communicate with the Member of Congress who is sponsoring this destructive anti-COTS language, I recommend calling or writing to Senator Barbara Mikulski, who can be reached at:

Senator Barbara Mikulski
Hart Senate Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20510
PHONE: (202) 224-4654

Here’s the Space News story from Brian Berger.

I guess I’d be more disappointed if I had had higher hopes for the program. But it was conceptually flawed to begin with, in many ways, and while the people executing it are good people, they had to battle a bureaucracy whose primary focus was on maintaining jobs and Constellation, many of whose cohorts (along with the porkmeisters on the Hill, such Senator Mikulski) no doubt viewed it as both a threat and a distraction.

I don’t know whether or not this effort will save the program or not, but I’m not sure that it really matters. SpaceX always had a plan that didn’t involve COTS, and will continue to move forward without it. Bigelow is continuing to offer his market incentives. The suborbital business will go on in the absence of COTS. As for how ISS is supported, that will continue to be a slow-motion train wreck into the next decade. I think that in the end, it will go off the tracks, as more and more people realize in Washington that the federal human space program is FUBAR, and likely to be replaced by a private one.

Political Commentary

Run, Ron, Run

On the Constitution Party ticket?

The story isn’t well sourced, but it certainly wouldn’t shock me if true. Despite the fervent hopes of his followers, his chances of getting the Republican nomination are nil, and I can easily imagine them continuing to support him as an independent or another party.

The conventional wisdom would be that this would be bad news for Republicans, but I disagree. When you look at where most of his support is coming from (mostly anti-war), and the fact that none of the Democrat candidates will surrender as fast as the anti-war left wants them to (plus all his support from Soros & Co.) I think that he’d pull more from the Democrats than from the Republicans.

But that depends a lot on who the Republican nominee is. In the unlikely event that it were Huckabee, I can actually imagine a four-way race with another independent run by someone, so that there would be at least one candidate for those who want to actually win the war. And I think that it would fracture both major parties along libertarian/collectivist lines (something that is long overdue).

War Commentary

It Was Only A Matter Of Time

This isn’t good news. Benazir Bhutto has been assassinated by a suicide bomber. I’m a little surprised that Musharraf himself has lasted this long, but I imagine he’s pretty fanatical about security. I also hope that he has the bombs under control.

Pakistan is probably the most intractable problem we have right now, and in many ways is at the heart of the war. And the notion that “non-interventionalism” will make it go away is hopeless naive.

[Update a few minutes later]

Some thoughts from Michael Ledeen:

The freedom of women in the world

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!