Business, Education, Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary

The American “Elite”

16 Comments

Are they really elite?

No:

Elitism sometimes seems predicated on being branded with the proper degrees. But when universities embrace a therapeutic curriculum and politically correct indoctrination, how can a costly university degree guarantee knowledge or inductive thinking?

Is elitism defined by an array of brilliant and proven theories?

Not really. University-sired identity politics has not led to racial and ethnic harmony.

Is there free speech or diversity of thought on campuses? Did progressive government save the inner cities? Are elites at least better-spoken and more knowledgeable than the rest of us?

Long before Trump’s monotonous repetition of “tremendous” and “great,” Barack Obama thought “corpsmen” was pronounced “corpse-men,” and that Austrians spoke “Austrian” rather than German.

Not long ago, Representative Hank Johnson (D., Ga.) warned that if Guam became too populated it might just tip over and sink.

They’re just credentialed. Elite people are actually educated, knowledgable and competent.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

President Narcissist

11 Comments

Surprisingly, Trump referenced himself much less in his joint-session speech than Obama typically did.

There’s a long piece to be written about all of the media criticism of Trump for things that Obama in fact did much more. But he was the Lightworker, so it was OK.

[Update a few minutes later]

Was last night the night the Democrat Party died?

We are in a new era. I’m 95% excited but 5% blue about what is happening — not because I have even an iota of regret about leaving liberalism, especially now. But because, as Trump himself said the other day, we need a two-party system and I strongly suspect, even with the unlimited pockets of George Soros, the Democratic Party, at least as we know it, is dying. All those crazy protests at town halls and the mass demonstrations of women racing around in vagina hats are the death throes of a movement with nothing to say.

It would be nice, but I doubt it.

[Update a couple minutes later]

The “new” Democrats’ coming-out party bombed last night:

Perhaps they felt the scene was exploitative, as several news personalities pointed out on Twitter, which is fine, but this was the party that rolled out Gold Star family members Khizr Muazzam Khan and Ghazala Khan during the Democrat National Convention and paraded them around cable news for a week in response to Trump’s flippant comments. Maybe, just maybe, both families, Khan and Owens are deserving of ovations. If the reason Democrats can’t rise and applaud the widow of a fallen service member, or victims of violent crime, or American companies based in the heartland of the country is fear of a backlash from their base, maybe the base they are catering to is the problem.

May be.

What a concept.

[Thursday-morning update]

“The compassionate soul of the Democrat Party died at 9:50 PM Tuesday night.”

That would be the “compassionate” Democrat Party that fought to preserve slavery, and Jim Crow, and now fights against quality education for black kids to preserve cushy teachers’ jobs, right?

Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society, War Commentary

Reforming Milspace

9 Comments

Coyote Smith is recently retired from the Air Force, and is apparently free to be much less circumspect about his thoughts on the Air Force:

It is easy to understand why the advancement of American space power has stalled under the Air Force. For very reasonable organizational and bureaucratic reasons, space power simply cannot receive the priority it deserves inside the Air Force.

Everything else will be sacrificed for the air power mission. As a matter of culture, this is the right thing to do. Carl Builder, a RAND analyst working a project for the Air Force Chief of Staff, pointed out in the The Icarus Syndrome that space power is a competing faction that air power advocates must hold at bay. The lesson being, no matter how vital space power becomes to the nation, if it is assigned to the Air Force, or any other service or agency, it will always receive short shrift.

It’s not a new problem. We were talking about it in the eighties. But we may finally be approaching a time in which we can finally fix it. I’ll be on a panel in DC on Monday with Coyote to talk about the U. S. Space Guard.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Sort of related: The coming warbot revolution.

Education, General Science, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Science And Society, Technology and Society

Bill Nye On Tucker Carlson

22 Comments

Bill Nye the Pseudo-Psychology Guy was amazing to behold last night.

Scott Adams has a good take on it:

Tucker then asked Nye a simple question about climate science. He asked how much of the warming is caused by human activity. Nye’s entire ego depended on knowing whether human activity is contributing to climate change in a big way, a medium way, or a small way. Tucker wanted some details. How much difference do humans make? After all, Nye had said this was settled science. Tucker just wanted to know what that settled science said.

Nye didn’t know. And by not knowing that simple answer about the percentage of human contribution to warming – the only issue that really mattered to the topic – he proved in public that his opinions on science are not based on facts or knowledge. Nye tried and tried to dodge the question, but Tucker was relentless. That was the trigger. Nye could plainly see, thanks to Tucker’s simple question, that his belief in science was just a belief, because he didn’t actually know the science. When your self-image and ego get annihilated on live television, you can’t simply admit you have been ridiculous all along. Your brain can’t let you do that to yourself. So instead, it concocts weird hallucinations to force-glue your observations into some sort of semi-coherent movie in which you are not totally and thoroughly wrong. That semi-coherent movie will look like a form of insanity to observers.

Look for Nye to go totally mental in the last minute of the clip, changing the topic to political leaks for no apparent reason. That’s your tell. His brain just sort of broke right in front of you.

If I’d been debating him, when he started ranting about being able to grow grapes in England, I’d have asked, “Bill, have you ever heard of Hadrian’s wall? Because the Romans were growing grapes that far north 2000 years ago. Do you know why Greenland was called that, and why North America was called “Vinland” by the Vikings? Are you blaming their SUVs?”

[Wednesday-afternoon update]

Nine reasons you shouldn’t listen to Bill Nye about science. Or anything else. And only nine?

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space, Space Science, Technology and Society

Back To The Moon

32 Comments

An Apolloistic interview with Bill Posey. I really hate this sort of thing:

Going to the Moon again would be exciting, but NASA’s already-minuscule budget (a mere $18.5 billion in 2016, compared to $585 billion for the Department of Defense) means that the agency can probably only afford one big dream at a time. Do we go back to the Moon or do we press ahead on visiting Mars? Right now, Mars is winning by a landslide. For the last few years NASA has been focused on its Journey to Mars, with no plans to send people back to the Moon.

“This bill proposes not just a visit to the Moon but a presence on the lunar surface,” Casey Dreier, space policy expert at the Planetary Society, told Motherboard. “This isn’t wrong by any means, but it’s one of those things that if you do this, you just won’t go to Mars for a long time.”

In fact, if we changed course from the Journey to Mars to Journey Back to the Moon, we might not see footprints on Mars in our lifetime. “It would put us back at least a generation,” Dreier said.

a) There is, and should be, no relationship between the NASA budget and the Pentagon (or any other agency’s) budget. Each agency’s budget request has to stand on its own. And b) as usual, note the assumption that we have to choose between one destination or the other. Some people, including the so-called experts, cannot conceive of the possibility of doing both.

Also note the implicit assumption of the next question:

Motherboard: Given NASA’s already underfunded budget, do you think it would be worth abandoning a mission to Mars to go back to the Moon? [Emphasis added]

It’s a matter of prioritization, and we’ve asked NASA to prepare a roadmap of what steps they’re going to take in a timeline given current funding, for increased funding or decreased funding. What steps are you going to take to get to the Moon? They have discovered there are resources on the Moon that they can make fuel out of, you know launching from the Moon, you can see many, many reasons why it’s good to have a Moon base. And that’s part of the process of getting to Mars. It’s been awhile since we’ve been on the Moon and we’ve had some technology to catch up on and practice so those are all important.

And note the omission in the next response:

I’m excited about any private industry that plans on doing any space exploration. One time NASA came up with a series of different ideas, they would touch an asteroid, land on an asteroid, then it changed to a bigger mission and then smaller mission but there was no tie-in to a Mars mission. A lot of the private sector are ready, willing and able to explore and mine asteroids so that we don’t need to do it. Anything that you can find in the phonebook that the private sector is doing, the government doesn’t really need to be doing. Exploring an asteroid is one of those things.

Hey, Bill, did you know that the private sector is interested in mining the moon, too?

And here comes the Apolloism:

Motherboard: Do you have a special memory from working on Apollo 11 that you’d like for the next generation to experience?

What inspired me so much was President Kennedy’s speech from Rice University, that was so inspiring to me when he said we’re going to put a rocket on the Moon. I wanted to go to work on that rocket and have my fingerprints on that rocket that takes men to the Moon. So that was a big inspiration for me and I think returning to the Moon will also re-engage the public’s interest in the space program and inspire a new generation of American students to study engineering and mathematics where we currently lag behind other students in competing nations.

Motherboard: How do you see NASA handling itself as we move forward between finally choosing between going back to the Moon or going straight to Mars?

We’ve spent somewhere between $20-24 billion on what we call “missions to nowhere” and we can’t do that again. The NASA budget is now about one half of one percent [of the GDP]. During the Apollo era it was 4 percent of the GDP, I would love to see it at 1 percent. Neil deGrasse Tyson explained very well one time, space is the only thing that Congress spends money on truly to benefit the next generation, and I think that’s a true statement. I’d like to see congress spend 1 percent, I’d even like to see a constitutional amendment requiring that 1 percent be spent on human space exploration each year so that we will have the survival of our species.

With all respect to Neil Tyson (OK, I don’t have that much) it’s mindless to have an arbitrary percentage of the federal budget for anything, let alone NASA. The only way to determine how much budget NASA should get is to decide what it’s going to do, come up with a set of plans to do that, and estimate the costs. Right now, I’d say that NASA has plenty of money, or would if people like Bill Posey didn’t force it to waste money on a giant rocket and capsule that it doesn’t need, in order for him to revisit his lost youth. The three billion a year that he’s forcing the agency to spend on SLS/Orion would go a long way, perhaps all the way, both a lunar return and a Mars mission in the next decade (with public/private parterships using Commercial Cargo and Crew as a model) if NASA was allowed to spend it instead on things it actually needs to do both those things

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!