After all these years, Adolf Hitler’s greatest crime against humanity has finally been revealed. He was a tax dodger.
A Significant Administrator
Mark Whittington has a pretty good summary of Sean O’Keefe’s tenure as head of the national civil space agency.
[Update at 1:30 PM EST]
He says he has no regrets, and wouldn’t change any of his decisions.
Well, perhaps the incoming administrator can fix his dumb Hubble one.
Good Riddance
The Kyoto Treaty is effectively dead.
The conventional wisdom that it’s the United States against the rest of the world in climate change diplomacy has been turned on its head. Instead it turns out that it is the Europeans who are isolated. China, India, and most of the rest of the developing countries have joined forces with the United States to completely reject the idea of future binding GHG emission limits. At the conference here in Buenos Aires, Italy shocked its fellow European Union members when it called for an end to the Kyoto Protocol in 2012. These countries recognize that stringent emission limits would be huge barriers to their economic growth and future development.
Another myth about “enlightened and progressive Europe, leading the world” falls.
Read this, too:
…climate scepticism is gaining ground in Western Europe. It is even becoming respectable. Many organisations, often cum websites, provide ample information about the views of the climate sceptics, thus breaking the de facto information monopoly of the pro-Kyoto scientists belonging to the ‘established climate science community’.
Good. Now maybe we can have a rational discussion about politically and economically realistic solutions.
Failure Has To Be An Option
Keith Cowing disagrees with (retiring) John Young’s comments (valid, in my opinion) that it’s time to accept the risk of the Shuttle and start flying again:
…to just throw up your hands, as Young has done, and say nothing has changed – and that its not worth the effort to try and get better – is defeatism of the first order. It is curious that he feels this way when you recall that a contemporary of his, Gene Kranz, coined the phrase “failure is not an option”.
It’s not defeatism–it’s realism. Shuttle’s safety flaws are intrinsic, and really unfixable for the most part, without spending much more money on it than a new, much better launch system would cost. I’ve always believed that the CAIB recommendations about what was needed to return to flight were unrealistic, and at some point NASA (and the administration) will have to admit to that as well, or stop flying. We know we’re going to retire it (so we don’t have to husband the resource of orbiters as hard as we have in the past), and we’ve got plenty of astronauts willing to fly it, so we should either start flying it again and getting some use out of it, or shut the whole thing down and apply the savings toward something with a future. As it is now, we’ve the worst of both worlds–spending billions on it every year, with no activity at all other than trying to put lipstick on a pig.
As for the quote about failure not being an option, it all sounds very inspiring, but like the Kennedy quote of “because it’s hard,” it doesn’t really make much sense when one actually parses it. As someone once said, when failure isn’t an option, success gets pretty damned expensive. If we can’t take risks, there’s no point in even attempting to venture into the cosmos.
Giggle Factor Gone
The Economist has a serious article about the state of the space tourism industry at the end of 2004, with new details on both Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin. I was confused by this bit, though:
In September, news emerged that Robert Bigelow, who runs Bigelow Aerospace, a firm based in Los Angeles, was going to back a $50m prize modelled on the $10m Ansari X prize that led to the creation of SpaceShipOne.
As far as I know, Bigelow Aerospace is now, and always has been, based in Las Vegas.
Physics Reminder
Alan Boyle has a little piece today about the elevators in the tallest building in the world. But this bit is misleading:
Imagine riding in a car going almost 40 mph (60.6 kilometers per hour). Not that impressive, right? But now imagine going that same 40 mph … straight up.
That gives you some idea how elevator riders must feel in the world’s tallest building, Taipei 101.
Actually, you can’t feel speed at all. There is no difference in sensation between a twenty mph elevator and a forty mph elevator, other than perhaps vibrations transmitted through the cables and contact with the shaft. Acceleration is what you feel, so the difference is how long it takes you to get up to speed (and back down from it), not what the top speed is.
Similarly, he writes:
The cars go faster on the way up than on the way down
War Unwinnable In Face Of Renewed German Offensive
December 17th, 1944
PARIS (Routers) Long-time critics of the Roosevelt administration declared themselves vindicated today, as the Germans began a renewed offensive yesterday in the Ardennes Forest in Belgium, opening a huge hole in the “Allied” lines and throwing back troops for miles, with previously unimaginable US casualties.
Early yesterday morning, eight German armored divisions and thirteen German infantry divisions launched an all-out attack on five divisions of the United States 1st Army. Hundreds of heavy guns, howitzers and multiple-rocket launchers were fired on American positions.
The 5th and 6th Panzer armies, consisting of some eleven divisions, broke through the Loshein Gap against the American divisions protecting the region. The 6th Panzer Army then headed north while the Fifth Panzer Army went south. The latter army attacked the U. S. VIII Corps some 100 miles to the south, which was quickly surrounded, resulting in mass surrenders of unprepared American soldiers. By any reasonable and objective standard, it was an utter military disaster for the “Allied” forces.
It all came as a complete shock to the Roosevelt administration who, rumor has it, had been informed by the head of OSS that the imminent collapse of the German army was a “lead-pipe cinch.” This only confirmed reasonable pre-election suspicions that the administration and General Eisenhower were operating on flawed intelligence, and led the nation into an invasion of Europe on clearly false pretenses.
This new setback came amidst continuing problems with the new government in France, installed by the “Allies.” Many consider it a puppet, lacking legitimacy, and it has proven itself inept. The situation is chaotic, and “President” De Gaulle has shown himself to be unable to control food riots, or prevent the commission of massacres of former regime loyalists and the German troops who had supported the overthrown legitimate Vichy government. Though elections are promised sometime in the future, there is widespread doubt, given the infighting between FRLs, communists, and Gaullists, that peaceful and orderly elections can be held any time soon or that civil war can be prevented.
Many have pointed out that the troop strength on the continent has been inadequate since the invasion at Normandy last June, and that this only confirmed that. In addition, they say, it didn’t help that, due to incompetence at the highest levels, up to the newly installed Secretary of War Hull, many troops died as a result of our own bombs.
“They ignored our warnings about getting embroiled in a quagmire here, and this campaign has been a disaster, from the hundreds killed in training, to the thousands who died on the beaches in France,” said an anonymous State Department source. He continued, “We’ve also shamed ourselves before the world with our reckless policies and atrocities.” In the wake of all this, some, off the record, are suggesting that it’s time to consider impeachment of the recently reelected president.
Back in Washington, despite lofty rhetoric from the White House about the “liberation” of Europe, many had always been skeptical about the prospects for defeating Germany. As they correctly point out, the Germans are after all defending their homeland, and no matter how bad the alleged depravations of the Nazi regime, all familiar with the German character know that they can be depended on to fight to the death against any foreign invader, no matter how well intentioned. Many of the German dead or captured for the past few weeks have been adolescents, some only fourteen or fifteen years old, with dead, untrained yet willing hands clinging to their rifles. Seeing such images of dedication to the cause, it’s difficult for many to believe that victory is possible.
As a result, the new setback has renewed rumbling among some that the time has come to seek an accord with the Nazi regime that could allow a withdrawal from Europe with honor, and not lose any more American troops in a hopeless cause, let alone bog them down for an unforeseeable period of time. “It was Japan that attacked us, not Germany,” pointed out a Senate staffer. “We need to focus our resources on the true enemy in the Pacific.”
Some staffers on Capitol Hill implied that the timing itself of the offensive was suspicious. “Hitler wanted Roosevelt to be reelected, so that he could continue to fight a war against a sick, senile incompetent. Had he started this offensive before the election back on November 7th, everyone would have seen what a disaster this president has been on foreign policy, and Hitler would have had to confront a young, vibrant Tom Dewey.”
Others, representing moderate Democrats, seemed resigned. “We’re stuck with a stubborn megalomaniac who’s eventually going to have us at war with the rest of the world. How long will our Russian allies put up with this kind of behavior? How can we found or host a ‘United Nations’ when we ourselves are the author of so much aggression?”
(Copyright 2004, by Rand Simberg)
When Good Governments Go Bad
Andrew Napolitano has an article at Cato about how the US government is exempt from its own laws (it’s a PDF). He includes a story about Janet Reno of which few are aware (though anyone could have known about it at the time, had they wanted to do the research).
Last Ditch
Sixty years ago today began what came to be called the Battle of the Bulge. It was Hitler’s last, desperate attempt to throw the invaders back across the Channel, or to get them to sue for peace, or at the least, to buy time until he could reconstitute his forces. Initially successful, the battle lasted six weeks, through Christmas and most of January, 1945. When it ended, the Allies had broken the back of the German western front, and all but Hitler himself knew that the war had been lost, though it took another three months to finally occupy Germany.
No More Good Money After Bad
Here’s some evidence that NASA is starting to take the policy to retire the Shuttle seriously.