Emily Bazelon isn’t aware of the depth of the irony of her piece at Slate, that describes her apathy to space (which she defines as “astronomy”):
The other night, my boys curled up on the couch with my husband and went to the moon. They were enthralled by a grainy video of Neil Armstrong’s 1969 shaky descent onto the pitted lunar sand. “Mom, the Eagle has landed!” they shouted in unison. “Come watch!” I was in the kitchen, reading Elizabeth Weil’s New York Times Magazine story on the perils of trying to improve a companionate marriage.
She and Liz Weil are soulmates. Liz spent many months hanging around Rotary Rocket in the late 1990s (I had dinner with her once in Tehachapi), doing research for a book
I sat down, put the magazine aside, and tried to care about the moon, the planets, the stars, the galaxy. I concentrated on the astronauts and Sputnik and the race with the Soviet Union from JFK to Nixon. But I was interrupted by a stingy voice in my head: Just think what we could do on this planet with all the time and energy we spend trying to reach other ones. I know, I know: It’s anti-science, anti-American, anti-imagination. But I am incorrigibly, constitutionally earthbound. I have never willingly studied a single page of astronomy. My knowledge of the planets begins and ends with My Very Elderly Mother Just Sat Upon Nine Pillows (except, no more P, as Simon has informed me). I relish stories about NASA boondoggles for confirming my suspicion that the agency is a budget sinkhole.
Well, the agency (at least the human spaceflight part of it) is largely a budget sinkhole. We certainly don’t get value commensurate with the costs. It doesn’t have to be, but because most people are, like Emily, not that interested in space, at least as done by NASA, politicians are free to do whatever they want with its budget, so much of it ends up being simple pork. That’s just Public Choice 101. If Emily and others actually cared, perhaps NASA might have to do more useful things with the money.
But her ignorance extends far beyond simple astronomy. For someone who seems to revel in the fact that NASA wastes its money, like much of the public, she is profoundly unaware of how much (or relatively, little) money it actually is:
Simon has been asking for a periscope. He also says that when he grows up, he’s going to be an astronomer and an astronaut. I mentioned biologist as an alternative a few times. But then I stopped. Now I tell him that I can’t wait for him to teach me all about the solar system. Maybe he’ll be a rebel astronomer, and someday reform NASA, or call for an end to manned space missions so that the money can be used to fix Social Security? A mother can dream.
If she thinks that ending human spaceflight would be more than spitting in a hurricane with regard to the Social Security budget, she is innumerate beyond belief. You could either double, or zero, the NASA budget, and either way it would barely be a rounding error in SS, or the rest of the federal budget in general. I wish that more people thought that space was important, and that it was about more than astronomy. I also wish that people would think and care more about how, not whether NASA was spending the money. But as long as they’re so ignorant as to think that NASA, wasteful or not, has anything to do with the deficit, or the failure to solve intractable social problems (we saw an excellent example of this during the presidential campaign, when candidate Obama’s first space policy was written by an education staffer who thought that we could use the NASA budget for more education funding), we’re unlikely to get better space policy, or policy in general.
What got me is that she doesn’t know that the moon affects tides.
“I mean, who cares about the moon? How does it affect us or any other human beings? It doesn’t.”
Tides that certainly effect man. What a maroon.
“I’m a bit of a wet blanket when it comes to the whole business of space travel.”
“As I get older my unease at the time and the money that has to be spent on projects putting human beings back to the moon, and on to another planet, is so enormous.”
“And it would take up so many resources, which I personally feel should be directed at our own planet.”
“Humankind has just not simply become sufficiently evolved to now leave this planet, take itself out to space and began establishing more of us out there. I would like to see us get this place right first before we have the arrogance to put significantly flawed civilisations out on to other planets – even though they may be utterly uninhabited.”
“or call for an end to manned space missions so that the money can be used to fix Social Security? A mother can dream.”
This mothers dream: her son will grow up to crush others kids dreams.
The inability to grasp the size of budget items like NASA in comparison to social spending is one part innumeracy, three parts willful ignorance.
What struck me about Baelzon’s article is that when she was confronted with her young childrens’ interests that were different than hers, which is completely and entirely natural (and almost guaranteed), she thought of herself first.
She made no mention of encouraging their interest as a mind opening exercise that may lead to the love of learning and other learning discoveries throughout their lives.
The oddest things can catch the attention of young children and a savvy loving parent knows this and employs it for the betterment of the child – setting her own ego aside for a moment. She may have missed a great opportunity here.
What a sad, stupid, navel-gazing closed-minded creature. Ignorant, too, like Weil, who could not be bothered to fact check her snide little book of lies. As in, it’s Highway 58 that runs by Mojave. As in the Catalina aircraft belonged to a private individual and was not a gate guard, which was a F-4. In fact, nothing noble was noted by the disdainful Ms Weil who sneered at everyone on every page. How above the common clay she is! How tragic so few share her lofty, sterile towers! But then, I get the impression that just about everyone in New York would curl up and die of chagrin if they had to live outside of their comfortable so terribly so earnestly self-centered cocoon.
Emily Bazelon’s article is the kind of essay that makes me think women should never have been given the right to vote.
What a sad, stupid, navel-gazing closed-minded creature.
Agreed, at least the kids take after their dad, there is hope for them yet.
Provincial, isn’t she?
Yeah, I was appalled by that too … The Reader’s Digest version of her piece is essentially, “I’m better than they are because I’m ignorant and uninterestd in learning. But since I’m so superior, I’m struggling to understand their point of view, even though it’s wrong … Naaah, not worth it.”
If the development of human civilization had been left to people like Bazelon, we’d still be living in mud huts and dying young of loathsome diseases … but we’d have closets full of fabulous shoes and we’d know all about who’s cheating on whom.
It kind of dovetails with the NY Times story that Ann Althouse is featuring this morning:
…the Democrats were 71 percent more likely to believe that they were in touch with the dead….
Not surprising — they’re one of their biggest voting constituencies, especially in Chicago…
Fortunately, Slate makes up for Bazelon’s piece with their excellent science coverage, especially their detailed and even-handed exposition of the controversy over Climategate.
(Should I have put a <sarcasm> tag in that last comment?)
My frequent reply on other blogs when the “We should be spending that money on X instead.” is;
“Do you have any idea how much money is being spent on X already? It may well be more than you think it is, or than NASA gets. Find out, before raiding someone else’s relatively shallow pockets.”
The new targets seem to be what the ‘rich’ people who have planed, or will plan to fly suborbital with Virgin Galactic ‘should’ do with their $200k*, instead…
* (After tax income, and with no idea of how philanthropic they may already be, as I remind them)
Tides that certainly effect man.
And women even more. One wonders if she has ever given any thought to why “that time of the month” happens on a monthly basis. Or where the word “month” came from?
People like this also fail to realize that the money that gets gutted out of one program doesn’t just instantly appear within some other “noble” causes budget. It just falls back into the federal budget black hole. It will just as likely end up in some other inane program like maybe to study the effects of climate change on diaper adhesive.
Simon has been asking for a periscope. He also says that when he grows up, he’s going to be an astronomer and an astronaut.
Did she mean “telescope?”
The talent opportunity cost of NASA is far greater than the budgetary cost. If all the talent of NASA (without pork) was instead focussed on solving the social security problem, I suspect it would be solved.
It always seemed to me that those schooled in the humanities should be those leading the way in promoting space settlement, because they are the ones who supposedly should have the greatest fundamental understanding of exactly why space settlement is critical to the maturation of humanity.
So why do they not? Is it because these are soft superficial sciences that lack a hard fundamental foundation and just have it wrong? In which case presumably they are also wrong about most everything else and may as well be disbanded, or, do those who come from a hard technical background just not get humanity? And Space settlement is actually a bad idea and those of us who support it should grow up and stop wasting our lives on silliness. There seems to be a contradiction here.
Simon has been asking for a periscope. He also says that when he grows up, he’s going to be an astronomer and an astronaut.
Did she mean “telescope?”
Maybe Simon wants to drive a Soyuz.
Math is so hard.
It does not take a rocket scientist to understand
the case for space exploitation, or the reason the
anti-space propagandists best friends are Useful Idiots
like the woman (person?) no, _woman_ above;
Both genders have their psychological flaws,
women tend to have a short-sighted, family-centered
view which can lead them to sell their children’s future
for (illusory) current security.
Heinlein “The Star Beast” : “Sons are lost from the beginning.”
There are a great many men in the humanities, why are they then not fervent supporters of space settlement?
“Humankind has just not simply become sufficiently evolved to now leave this planet, take itself out to space and began establishing more of us out there. I would like to see us get this place right first before we have the arrogance to put significantly flawed civilisations out on to other planets – even though they may be utterly uninhabited.”
The arrogance to put “flawed civilizations” on other planets? How about the arrogance to tell everyone else they’re doing it wrong, and therefore are not allowed to leave the Earth where, of course, busybodies like the author are there to provide proper oversight.
Notice the inherent assumption that we need everyone here to “get things right” – of course you do, if you’re a marxist fool who thinks the solution to the worlds problems is just a matter of hooking up enough people to enough hamster wheels. God forbid you let any of them escape to go create something nice somewhere else; the current 5 year plan on drab little cars and 10″ color TV’s is behind schedule, and we need more widget stampers. No, we can’t have them taking their labor elsewhere.
Telescope. Telescopes are for looking at far away stuff. Periscopes are for looking at stuff from underwater. Do you see the difference, you dimwit?
It gets worse… the NYT on marriage she was reading approvingly was earlier linked by Instapundit.
In it, the female author nearly strangles her marriage by her urge t control everything and ‘improve’ her marriage by micromanaging it (and her husband). In the end the fool treats the realization that maybe she can’t quite script everything (after all a marriage is two individuals compromising, often messily) like its some great (though unsatisfactory to her) revelation.
Idiots.
Maybe she meant ‘microsocope’?
If she thinks a basic periscope (two flat mirrors) is complicated she is an idiot.
What Pete said above reminds me of another saying I read in SF (not sure if it was Heinlein though):
Romantic eras need practical men to survive them.
Practical eras need romantic men to survive them.
Whats the name for the sinking sensation you get when you realize its not Parody?
Emily: “Maybe he’ll… call for an end to manned space missions so that the money can be used to fix Social Security? A mother can dream.”
If only Emily had studied history. Or at least honored Columbus Day.
Lady Emily Bazelon: “Crazy man wants to sail away from the known world. Her Majesty will fund it. If only Isabella would use that gold to fight poverty.”
Insty is wrong about saying to cut her some slack, just like he’s wrong for pimping Megan McArdle so much. I guess it gives him a chance to burnish his ‘independent’ credentials. McArdle is presumably libertarian leaning, but more and more in trying to establish herself as a ‘reasonable’ moderate she just looks like she’s getting seduced by the Wa-NYC establishment.
At the height of the Apollo program the old Department of Health Education and Welfare (HEW) lost or otherwise could not account for twice what NASA spent. I’m sure the situation has only gotten worse. Government entitlement programs could slurp up NASA’s budget and not even burp.
“The talent opportunity cost of NASA is far greater than the budgetary cost.”
Somewhat off the point, but I could not agree more (though maybe not about solving social security; you can’t “solve” a Ponzi scheme without having lots of babies). It pains me that NASA is not only a jobs program, but a jobs program that a) dominates its industry’s employment rolls either directly or through oversight of cost-plus programs, and b) does so in a way that is so utterly opposite the way that entrepreneurs and engineers would do it. I shudder when I consider the millions of career-years that have been poured down the NASA black hole for… virtually nothing. Those same engineers, managers, and scientists could have done truly remarkable things in the last 40+ years, not only in space but in aviation, energy, electronics, computing… a whole host of industries.
Pete @ December 13th, 2009 at 12:56 pm
“The talent opportunity cost of NASA is far greater than the budgetary cost. If all the talent of NASA (without pork) was instead focussed on solving the social security problem, I suspect it would be solved.”
Well, at least you recognize the proper tradeoff, that money itself is merely a representation of the allocation of resources. But, the problems with SS don’t require rocket scientists to figure out. You can’t, with increasing generosity, support an overwhelming leisure class on the backs of a small and shrinking number of workers without those workers suffering a decline in their relative standard of living. So, stop trying to do it. Problem solved. Now, can I go back to designing rockets?
This woman has never gazed up at the heavens from someplace devoid of man-made light, such as the deck of a ship in the mid-Atlantic or a high desert plateau in New Mexico, and been struck by the vastness of the visible universe laid out before her eyes. If she had, she would not – could not – have said, “I am incorrigibly, constitutionally earthbound.” Like the ocean, it is impossible to look at the stars and be satisfied with only knowing only one side.
There are sights provided to us by God – which are there for the taking – that reveal the smallness of both ourselves and our problems in the grand scheme of things.
How sad it is for Ms. Bazelon that she has yet to experienced the wonderfulness of being insignificant.
Of course, that was tongue in cheek. If you want to be able to provide more lavish benefits to people in their autumn years, while maintaining living standards of the producing class, you have to increase productivity dramatically. Which means that about the worst thing you could do would be to devote your pool of engineering and scientific talent to mundane study of logical impossibilities.
“Now, can I go back to designing rockets?”
Not until you not only convince humanity to let you – in an effective manner, but also find the resources to do so (without NASAfication).
“Whats the name for the sinking sensation you get when you realize its not Parody”?
I propose the new word “Bazelonic”
““Humankind has just not simply become sufficiently evolved to now leave this planet, take itself out to space and began establishing more of us out there. I would like to see us get this place right first before we have the arrogance to put significantly flawed civilisations out on to other planets – even though they may be utterly uninhabited.””
Well, they can let us practice our ballistic ambitions by leaving peacably or some other way they might (briefly) find more…..well……..Darwinian.
Telescope. Telescopes are for looking at far away stuff.
that was at her right ortho, not at me.
Solving social security is not that hard, if you approach it from a evolutionary biology perspective, there are many possible solutions. For example, eliminate unwanted pregnancies (for both partners), by say making sterility the default position, and I suspect the problem would largely fix itself.
Social security is not a problem that can be simply fixed by throwing money at it – I doubt many would disagree with this (hence the requirement for intellectual capital). Space settlement (or any new settlement/emigration), on the other hand, will require resources.
“As I get older my unease at the time and the money that has to be spent on projects putting human beings back to the moon, and on to another planet, is so enormous.”
I’m supposing that this self-centered nit-wit assumes that IF the federally funded space program shut down tomorrow, all the people currently interested in space, would join Green Peace and PETA and such enterprises? This looks to me to be, from other conversations I’ve had with liberals, their typical attitude.
And I thought about her “steering” her child away from his interests, towards hers. Mother of the Year, she ain’t!!
Suppose her mother had pushed her toward a more “normal” female roll for women in the 50’s and 60’s when her mother was coming along. Given her love of children and their interests, she’d have made a good prison matron, IMHO.
I would like to see us get this place right first before we have the arrogance to put significantly flawed civilisations out on to other planets – even though they may be utterly uninhabited.”
This from a descendant of European Jews. She ought to be pretty goddamned glad that some of us arrogant people put our “significantly flawed civilization” in North America.
Yes, Em dear, just tell the little dreamers to relax, Daddy will find them a nice easy spot to spend their lives, just as yours did for you.
Damn, I’m glad to be 55.
Yes, the blog pimp does so enjoy his women, no? Especially at sites ( PJM, ATL, Slate ) where some sort of trolling registration is required to comment.
I don’t know much, but I know enough not to comment on topics I don’t understand. Their kind should stick to the Arts.
Emily is the sort that would shred up the last copy of Shakespeare to line her nest.
Pete @ December 13th, 2009 at 2:30 pm
“Solving social security is not that hard… eliminate unwanted pregnancies (for both partners), by say making sterility the default position, and I suspect the problem would largely fix itself.”
Pray tell, how is that going to fix the problem, which is already due to a dearth of younger producers to carry the aged on their backs?
Maybe the child said proctoscope, and she mis-understood. He could get lots of practice without leaving the house.
Bart, I think he means that you simply have to extend the procedure to its logical conclusion.
Oh, he’s just kidding then. Got me! Man, do I feel foolish.
He is kidding, right?
She was going to get her kids a periscope. I guess if the astronaut thing does not work out, the kid could get a posting on a submarine.
I really find this woman annoying. Yes, let’s not explore space, let us instead sit around and talk about relationships!
Ghad I bet her poor husband and kids get tired of her.
Emily should not be allowed to watch television (transmitted by satellites) or read weather reports (info gathered by satellites) or use computers (the microminiaturization for computers is a development both of the space race and of ballistic missile technology) or use any other space-derived technology without paying an extra tax for her idiocy.
Emily is the sort that would shred up the last copy of Shakespeare to line her nest.
Hmm. I don’t think that’s a good metaphor. Bazelon wouldn’t shred Shakespeare’s works, in spite of the fact that he’s a DWM, because his verses are words. She likes words, because using words is the only thing she can do.
A better metaphor would be that she’s the sort of person who would buy herself a copy of Shakespeare with her last $20 rather than buy her kid the chemistry set that he wanted for Christmas.
wtfo wrote,
The commenter “Jean-Luc Picard” was quoting the actor Patrick Stewart. He ain’t no marxist (as far as I know), but being an actor, he’s probably just as foolish.
Rand Simberg Says:
LOL! (I live in Chicago.)