Of course, one basic difference between Iraq and Libya is that the Bush administration had a plan for what would happen after Saddam was gone, and they executed it, with mixed results. The almost incredible fact is that the Obama administration–most notably, Hillary Clinton–had no meaningful plan for what would follow Qaddafi. The result was, almost immediately, a disaster. This is the fact that should be pounded home whenever Hillary’s tenure as Secretary of State is under discussion.
Just to recap. She didn’t turn over the Sid’s emails to Congress, despite their clearly being related to Libya and Benghazi. This is called “obstruction of justice.” It runs in the family, I hear.
As for my basing a large part of my career on attacking Mann, I do sometimes marvel at the way people who profess to be saving the planet can be so fantastically parochial. In 2001, I wrote about the then-newish hockey stick in Britain’s Sunday Telegraph and Canada’s National Post, and some five years later in The Australian. But, as far as I recall, until November 2009 I had never ever mentioned Michael E Mann’s name in print. That was the month Climategate broke, of course, and I alluded to him a handful of times in the ensuing weeks. (Mann knows all this because I responded to his discovery requests almost a year-and-a-half ago, since when he’s refused to respond to mine.) And after that handful of times, I never mentioned him again until a 2012 blog post for which he’s suing me.
So now I mention him somewhat more often.
The same is true of me, in fact. If this does go to trial, Professor Mann is going to be very disappointed to discover how little attention I paid him up until I wrote that blog post.
The FISO presentation from May has been released. I’ll definitely use this in the project, to show how it could be improved by dumping SLS/Orion.
[Update a while later]
OK, I’ve glanced through it. There isn’t much in the way of numbers (Isp, mass, etc.) to make it easy to come up with alternatives. I will note that they are looking at 17 or eighteen SLS flights over a two-decade period, or about once a year. That probably implies a couple billion per flight, ignoring all the money we’re currently wasting on development.
Well, then I guess they do have a point that encryption wouldn’t have been very useful
Seriously, I think it’s time to completely overhaul the civil service system. We just had a cyber Pearl Harbor. Will anyone be punished? We know the answer to that one.
[Thursday-morning update]
The military-clearance OPM breach is an absolute calamity. And Obama can’t even bring himself to admit that the federal government screwed up.
In which he is an idiot (sorry, behind a paywall):
The head of the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) on Tuesday downplayed the potential national security significance of NASA
continuing payments to Russia to get astronauts to and from the International Space Station (ISS).
“I have a much bigger problem with the Russian rocket engine,” Chairman John McCain (R-Ariz.) told reporters at the Capitol. “I don’t see what the impact is, financially, of the Russian riding as compared with $300 million worth of rocket engines. There’s no comparison.”
But this is what I found interesting:
McCain’s counterpart in the House, Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Texas), told reporters Tuesday that U.S. dependence on Russia for space-related items is a national security issue. But Thornberry also said the challenge with paying for Russian rides to ISS is much like the RD-180 scenario: one faced with limited options.
“It ought to be a lesson for all of us about letting key capability atrophy and becoming dependent upon somebody else whose reliability can be called into question,” Thornberry said. “That doesn’t mean you snap your fingers and solve it any more than you snap your fingers and solve the Russian engine issue.”
Actually, we could. All we have to do is be more accepting of astronaut risk.
I’ve already started to work on the project (even though I don’t get the money for a couple weeks). Re-reading the depressing NRC report from last summer. It will be my point of departure for the remix.