Satire

Local Democrats Stunned By Buchanan Upset

Since I’m down here in Pompano Beach, and Glenn says we should do some local reporting, I thought I’d pass on the following.

March 10, 2004

BOCA RATON, FL (APUPI) Democrat officials in south Florida are still trying to understand the unexpected defeat of Democrat front-runner John Kerry by the former Republican and Reform Party candidate Patrick J. Buchanan in yesterday’s Florida primary. Validating what some had seen as an early trend in the 2000 presidential election, Mr. Buchanan came in first in Palm Beach, Broward and Dade counties.

One Palm Beach County party official’s perplexity was typical.

“At least the last time, the voters had the excuse that Pat was on that confusing butterfly ballot. But we got rid of that ballot design for this election, and he wasn’t even on it for the primary. He’s been a presidential candidate of lots of political parties, but I don’t think he’s ever been a Democrat. We’re really scratching our heads till they’re bloody and infected here.”

Some, however, point out that, while the dislike of local Democrats for the president (the governor’s brother) is even more visceral than in the rest of the country due to the controversy of the 2000 election, there is no fervor among Florida Democrats for John Kerry. “Anyone who looked more attractive than Kerry, but could still beat Bush had a good shot, even as a write-in,” explained one analyst. “It doesn’t surprise me at all.”

“In fact,” he continued, “if Buchanan can’t beat Kerry, I think we ought to run a dead guy, like we did in Missouri for Senator. He’d be more exciting than Kerry, and his positions would be more consistent. Dead people of all parties have been voting Democrat for years–I say that it’s about time that we made one president.”

A more typical voter who apparently prefers his candidates above room temperature, Herb Flannery of Deerfield Beach enthused, “Buchanan was opposed to globalization before it was cool, he opposed the war in Iraq, he’s always criticizing Bush. He stands up for the little guy, he’s got charisma, and you know where he stands. He gives great speeches, too.”

“He’s kind of like Jesse Jackson, except not as black. Or as corrupt.”

“Let’s face it, once people start to really get to know John Effing Kerry, he’s really charred toast. But Pat Buchanan is a dream nominee for Democrats this year.”

According to Ellen Schmuel Levi at the B’Nai B’rith in Boynton Beach, there had been many support rallies outside synagogues up and down the coast. Many of the local residents had reportedly decided to show their support for “Pitchfork Pat” by driving their Cadillacs and Towncars up and down the A1A highway very slowly, with a single turn signal perpetually on, all through election day. It wasn’t clear how effective the demonstration had been, however, because long-time residents were hard pressed to distinguish it from normal traffic.

The support from the local Jewish community seemed at first particularly shocking to many, given Buchanan’s history of veiled anti-semitic comments, but the enthusiasm seemed just as high at Nate’s, a busy deli in Lauderdale By The Sea.

“Israel, schmizrael,” one patron exclaimed. “So he doesn’t support Israel. Our party hasn’t supported Israel in years–we’re used to it. The important thing is, we’re Democrats.”

Questioned about Mr. Buchanan’s hints about the Jewish cabal that secretly pulls the strings in the government, Hollywood and the media, local beach metal-detector prospector Saul Weinstein was nonchalant, between sips of his egg cream.

“At least he gives us our due. And since when has being anti-semitic been a problem for Democrats? I should laugh till I pee my pants.”

“Remember Jesse ‘Hymietown’ Jackson? And how about that guy that Hillary screamed at and called ‘a schtupping Jew bastard.’ Well, she didn’t say ‘schtupping.’ She used a shiksa word for it.”

“Anyway, who’s perfect? You want I should vote on such narrow issues when we have Hitler in the White House? Hey, pro-semitic, anti-semitic, it’s all good.”

In an interview by telephone, Mr. Buchanan was pleasantly surprised to hear the unexpected news.

“I am always prepared to serve when my nation calls,” he said. “If we can sustain the excitement I sense in ‘hanging chad country,’ we can carry this insurgent campaign on to Texas and other states, and try to catch up with Mr. Kerry before it’s too late.”

“I have experience in being the nominee of a troubled, fractious and confused political party. Sadly, that party is no more, so I welcome the opportunity to do so again, in hopes of better results.”

“I call on my newfound fellow Democrats to take up the pitchforks and torches, and lock and load for America.”

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My African American Co-Blogger

I see that Andrew has introduced himself. I have to relate that when he told me that he was going to Botswana for a family emergency, I told him that it seemed funny (not the family emergency–the fact that he had a family in Botswana, and not in the squirting-flower-trick sense) because, being a Person of Pallor, he didn’t look Botswanan.

He replied that that was because he was actually Zambian.

[rimshot]

Well, I thought it was funny.

He also said that he’s been tempted to check the “african american” box on various forms, but couldn’t quite work up the moxie, to which I replied that it seems to work for Theresa Heinz.

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Double Standards

Mark Whittington has a cogent point about the congressional handwringing over the potential and uncertain costs of a mulit-decade space program.

I suspect that had Medicare been subjected to these kind of requirements back in the mid 1960s, it would never have passed.

Not to mention the president’s recent prescription drug program.

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Someone Killed The Crickets

Well, ask, and ye shall receive.

I don’t have a lot of time to post, but I want to welcome Jim McDade. He brings a different (should I say more traditional?) space policy viewpoint to Transterrestrial, and I suspect that some intrablog sparring will liven up the discussion here. While I agree with him that a Kerry presidency shows no signs of boding well for our future in space, there are a number of other things with which I would take issue, particularly in his follow-up comments (particularly his trotting out of the old “broken window” fallacy). Unfortunately, I don’t have time to do so right now, because, as I said, I’m busy househunting in Florida, so I’ll let others discuss it for now.

I also hope that Jim (and Andrew) will put up a brief description of who they are, for the edification of the readership.

[Update around noon eastern time]

Jim responds in comments on breaking windows. My response:

With respect to boosting economies post hurricanes, no one disputes that it benefits the local economies of the people whose communities get rebuilt. The problem is that they’re not the ones who pay the opportunity costs–the taxpayers are. It’s easy to make things boom locally by taxing others globally (just as it’s easy to decrease entropy locally, at a greater cost in the rest of the universe). It’s also easy to boost a bank robber’s income by letting him rob banks. That doesn’t mean that turning everyone into bank robbers will increase the national wealth.

The point is not that we shouldn’t help people out after hurricanes and that it’s a benefit to them when we do so, but rather that we shouldn’t fool ourselves that this is in any way a good thing for the national economy, and that we should therefore wish for hurricanes.

Space programs have to be justified by their benefits to society as a whole, not by how much they benefit communities with NASA centers, at the expense of the taxpayers. If we make bad and easily refuted arguments in support of space expansion, it can be worse than making no arguments at all.

Space

Boost Phase Intercept Talk

There was a talk at the University of Maryland today by Daniel Kleppner, one of the co-chairs of the American Physical Society’s Boost Phase Missile Defence Study Group. The report is summarized here, and the whole thing is available here.

Anyway, the talk was very well presented, and it’s clear that if you accept the initial assumptions the conclusions follow logically. It’s the input assumptions that are somewhat problematic. I’ve seen people complain that the choice of initial assumptions is due to liberal bias, but Kleppner defended them quite well on the basis of the National Intelligence Estimate and the systems actually under consideration. Some of the parameters considered, such as the burn time, were skewed in favor of the defender, and they considered zero decision time cases, which also favor the defender. The minimum kill vehicle mass considered (90 lbs, including sensors, thrusters and fuel) seemed to me a little large, but I don’t have a basis to dispute it. This is a critically important parameter, since it scales all the other masses in the system.

Continue reading Boost Phase Intercept Talk →

Space & Campaign 2004

Kerry: NASA Friend or Enemy

An examination of John Kerry’s official campaign documents reveals some clues as to his general attitude towards the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the US space exploration agenda. Kerry categorically places NASA under his, “AGENDA FOR URBAN AMERICA” on the official Kerry campaign web site. That particular categorization might be a clue that points to the candidate’s view of the role of NASA in his presidential plans. NASA is bunched there in the same “urban” priority category as the National Science Foundation (NSF). NSF is primarily in the lucrative and politically interesting business of handing out money to university based researchers. In other words, Kerry may view NASA primarily as a distributor of monetary grants for university based lab research. That is a politically sensible approach in view of the fact that academia is a an important and influential part of the Democrat party base in Kerry’s home region, the Atlantic Seaboard.

Most people have never worked in a major university research environment and may not understand the underlying significance of the interplay between the federal government’s rich and powerful grant giving machinery and the university recipients. It is politically convenient to label liberal college deans and professors as “elitist phonies” The actual relationship between universities and the Democrat party is a far more practical arrangement than the perceived “elitist” conspiracy that heartland Republicans routinely rally against. The people working in academia realize that probably the quickest way to become ostracized by your colleagues is to shift over to the right of the political spectrum and start questioning the status quo of the government-university cash cow. Grants pay for campus buildings, labs, and facilities. Most significantly, research grants pay the salaries of faculty and staff. A good grant writer is a cherished university employee.

Federal research grants are essentially the academic equivalent of “pork-barrel” spending. President John F. Kennedy used the “grant carrot” to win over the support of university president’s when the late-President proposed the Apollo program. The traditional grant recipients— such as those people who count how many worms of some obscure subspecies still exist in some muddy creek in lower Kentucky– made loud noises in university president’s offices when they feared that Apollo spending would mean the end of their grant funds as Apollo ramped up and gobbled up federal grant dollars. JFK locked up the support of university leaders by promising millions of dollars to build new engineering schools, labs, and even enough funding to justify the creation of entire new universities, e.g. the University of Alabama at Huntsville.

The NSF, NASA, as well as the National Institutes for Health fit well into the urban agenda of a politician who seeks support from academics, university presidents and city politicians from those major urban areas where the bulk of research dollars wind up. Kerry states that NASA’s “technological advances (are) transferable to people with disabilities, and could enhance their capacity to work.” That position is admirable and those transfers should and must be made, but where is Kerry’s vision for NASA beyond converting existing space technology for practical use?

Kerry does not even mention human spaceflight or any program of space “exploration” to occur outside of the 1G environments of university labs. He apparently views NASA as a useful grant-generating machine. PhD researchers, school deans, school presidents, and a few thousand-lab technicians will be the primary direct beneficiaries of this aspect of NASA funding. The big losers will be the NASA centers that focus on sending “researchers” into microgravity (KSC, MSFC, and JSC) if Kerry’s space vision is limited to restoring “the government’s commitment to scientific achievement through increases in research funding for the Department of Energy, NASA, and the National Science Foundation”, through his stated urban strategy.

Kerry lists 28 priority issues on his web site. Space exploration is not in that list., Kerry claims that, “More than 425,000 technology jobs have been lost on President Bush

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On The Road Again

I’m going back down to Fort Lauderdale tomorrow to do some house hunting. I’ll check in intermittently, but I won’t have constant broadband, and I don’t know how good the dial-up will be. I’m sure that my other mysterious co-bloggers here will pick up the slack any minute, though.

Right?

[crickets chirping]

Any minute.

Sure is quiet in here…

[High lonesome howl of a coyote in the distance]

Anyway, I’ll be back next Tuesday, and by then, I hope that things will be in full swing.

Space

The Fall Of NASA?

Jeff Foust has a review of Greg Klerkx’ new book, Lost In Space (the title of this post is a subtitle of the book). I read it right after it came out a few weeks ago, and have been meaning to review it myself, but Jeff has mostly done it for me. He’s right in that there are some errors in the book that detract somewhat from its credibility. Here was a list that I made as I went through it.

He says that “…at their most basic, tethers are analogous to the wire that runs from a wall socket to a lamp.”

Errr, no. At their most basic, space tethers are a line that connects one object to another in orbit. He’s talking about a special category of space tethers–electrodynamic tethers, and an uninformed reader might believe that these are the only kinds of tethers that exist, and that their only use is for converting orbital energy to electrical energy and vice versa, when in fact that’s only one application.

He repeats the myth that “Even the paper plans for building the Saturns were gathered up and destroyed.” Not true. Well, perhaps it may be literally true–the plans exist on microfiche, but the implication is that they are beyond our reach. What really no longer exists is the tooling (at least not all of it), which was expensive to preserve and warehouse for a program that was considered part of the past. Should we choose, we could resurrect the Saturn program. It wouldn’t be wise, four decades on, but we have the plans, and there was no conspiracy to burn the bridge over the Rubicon to Shuttle, once across.

He says that “…two congressmen have flown, with little rationale other than their political status…” on the Shuttle. It’s wrong no matter how you define “congressman.” Two Senators (Garn and Glenn) have flown, and one congressman (now senator)–Bill Nelson. This is a particular perplexing error, because it should have been caught by an editor–later in the book, in discussing Senator Glenn’s flight, he writes, “To [Alan] Ladwig, this was Garn and Nelson all over again.”

In describing the Kistler K-1 vehicle (a project that recently got a new lease on life with a couple hundred million NASA contract to purchase flight data), he writes that it “would be a lot cheaper to use than the shuttle…because it will not be piloted and therefore will not have need of the extensive ‘human rating’ requirements that NASA employs for the shuttle.”

Here, he’s bought into (or at least is implictly endorsing) two myths of spacecraft design.

The first is that pilots add cost to vehicles (including space vehicles). There’s actually no evidence for this, at least in any vehicle other than space vehicles. There’s actually good reason to believe that piloted vehicles, properly designed, could be cheaper than unpiloted ones–a proposition that the X-Prize and commercial suborbital developers will test in the coming months and years.

The second is that the shuttle is human rated. In fact, it is not, and never has been, by the standards that NASA has established as human rated. For instance, it doesn’t have “zero-zero” abort capability (that is, the ability to abort from the pad all the way to orbit, the zeros corresponding to the velocity and altitude of the starting condition). I’ve discussed both of these aspects extensively in the past.

He states that Columbia wasn’t able to reach the ISS orbit. In fact, it was–but its payload would have been much less than that of the other orbiters, so it was designated mostly for non-ISS missions. It was in fact scheduled to go to the ISS had it not been destroyed a year ago.

On page 224, he expresses concern about sending nuclear waste into space that indicates a lack of understanding of the issues–he’s a little too prone to buy the scare mongering of some people about this. I do think that it might be financially feasible, and safe, to store nuclear waste in space, but this won’t happen until we develop much more reliable vehicles than are available at present. I discussed this a couple years ago in an early Fox News column.

Greg also has a higher opinion of Bob Park’s opinions than I do.

Overall, I agree with Jeff’s assessment of the book. It’s an interesting read, and will provide a lot of background in terms of NASA versus the private sector, but as Jeff says, it’s a little schizophrenic, in that he can’t quite decide whether the agency is an evil monolith, or a bunch of warring fiefdoms. Ultimately, while descriptive, it’s not very prescriptive, or well organized. It’s more a compendium of interesting stories than a coherent narrative, and it seems to peter out at the end, with no clear conclusion.

The world still awaits the book that lays out clearly the problems with our space policy, and viable recommendations to address them. This isn’t that book. Perhaps mine, if I ever get around to finishing it, will be.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!