I’m back from my travels, which were extended due to the untimely death of my father. I won’t go into detail, since that’s not what you read this blog for. Suffice to say he was a fundamentally good man who lived his faith in every word and deed. If there is an afterlife in which our actions in this life count for anything, then there can be no doubt he is well rewarded. If not, at least he lead a life replete with meaning, filled with life, laughter, and love.
This kind of bureaucratic stupidity is the reason that I’m not thrilled with the Bush administration, but there’s no reason to think that a Kerry administration would be any better.
The only way this can be fixed now is with legislation, but that’s unlikely to happen in an election year.
[Thanks to emailer Bruce Brazaitis for the heads up.]
Steven Weinberg has a 5500-word essay in the New York Review of books on the president’s space initiative. It repeats the same tired nonsense and myths, about how space is for science, that there’s no reason for people to go, that it will cost a trillion dollars.
The President gave no cost estimates, but John McCain, chairman of the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, has cited reports that the new initiative would cost between $170 billion and $600 billion. According to NASA briefing documents, the figure of $170 billion is intended to take NASA only up to 2020, and does not include the cost of the Mars mission itself. After the former President Bush announced a similar initiative in 1989, NASA estimated that the cost of sending astronauts to the moon and Mars would be either $471 billion or $541 billion in 1991 dollars, depending on the method of calculation. This is roughly $900 billion in today’s dollars. Whatever cost may be estimated by NASA for the new initiative, we can expect cost overruns like those that have often accompanied big NASA programs. (In 1984 NASA estimated that it would cost $8 billion to put the International Space Station in place, not counting the cost of using it. I have seen figures for its cost so far ranging from $25 billion to $60 billion, and the station is far from finished.) Let’s not haggle over a hundred billion dollars more or less
MATTHIAS: Look. I don’t think it ought to be blasphemy, just saying ‘Jehovah’.
CROWD: Oooh! He said it again! Oooh!…
OFFICIAL: You’re only making it worse for yourself!
MATTHIAS: Making it worse?! How could it be worse?! Jehovah! Jehovah! Jehovah!
Allison Kaplan Sommer says that, after years of intifada, this is the point that the Israeli public has reached, and why there’s little domestic opposition to Sharon’s plan to build the wall and kill the terrorist leadership.
With nothing left to lose, let’s try to do what we can to protect ourselves. That’s the sentiment of the man on the street.
Clearly, the Israeli public seems to have all but given up on figuring out how to make the right moves in order to nudge the Palestinians towards wanting a peaceful two-state solution. They’ve given up. That’s why there’s generally support for Sharon’s unilateral disengagement plan — otherwise known as the “We’re So Disgusted with the Palestinians, We’re Getting the Hell Away From Them and Building a Big Wall” plan. And if they try to wage war from the other side of the wall, they’ll get the same treatment as Yassin.
We’re not running scared. We’re just sick and tired of this.
Stephen den Beste (from whom I got the link to Allison’s post) has further thoughts.