A Mighty Wind Is Blowing

Breaking the Winds of Freedom. Iowahawk has the breaking details:

To be sure, the revival of People Power in the Middle East is not all due to MoveOn. We must give credit where credit is due. The people of the region have also drawn courage from other role models, like visionary filmmaker Michael Moore; respected intellectuals like Noam Chomsky and Ward Churchill; political trailblazer Dr. Howard Dean; and elected leaders like Ted Kennedy and Maurice Hinchey. These are just some of the fearless dreamers and tireless doers who show, by example, how ordinary folks can speak out up to corrupt fundamentalist dictators.

They’re blowing you and blowing me. Heh.

“I Want A Moon Base”

Whatever the merits of the case, Walt would seem to have a novel defense for his tax avoidance:

He was going to use the money to change the world. To fight for arms control and human rights. To promote family planning and space exploration. He was going to give the money away, starting next year…

… Anderson was one of the driving forces behind MirCorp, which sought to privatize Russia’s decrepit Mir space station and arranged for an American financier to take an excursion in space. MirCorp’s ambitions were dashed with the station’s demise.

But Anderson has remained passionate about space. “I want to build my own space station since we lost the Mir,” he said. “I want to have a moon base.”

It also has some interesting quotes from Jeff Manber and Bob Werb.

I believe him. Unfortunately, the government doesn’t view that as a good reason to stash funds overseas.

It would be nice if we could get some philanthropy going in this area from some less flaky sources. One of the reasons that we’ve made so little progress is that the people with the money aren’t interested in space, and the people interested in space haven’t had the money, and when on the rare occasion you get someone with both, there’s some other problem. I hope that the Paul Allens and Jeff Bezos’ of the world will start to change that.

NASA Watch has links to this and related stories.

“I Want A Moon Base”

Whatever the merits of the case, Walt would seem to have a novel defense for his tax avoidance:

He was going to use the money to change the world. To fight for arms control and human rights. To promote family planning and space exploration. He was going to give the money away, starting next year…

… Anderson was one of the driving forces behind MirCorp, which sought to privatize Russia’s decrepit Mir space station and arranged for an American financier to take an excursion in space. MirCorp’s ambitions were dashed with the station’s demise.

But Anderson has remained passionate about space. “I want to build my own space station since we lost the Mir,” he said. “I want to have a moon base.”

It also has some interesting quotes from Jeff Manber and Bob Werb.

I believe him. Unfortunately, the government doesn’t view that as a good reason to stash funds overseas.

It would be nice if we could get some philanthropy going in this area from some less flaky sources. One of the reasons that we’ve made so little progress is that the people with the money aren’t interested in space, and the people interested in space haven’t had the money, and when on the rare occasion you get someone with both, there’s some other problem. I hope that the Paul Allens and Jeff Bezos’ of the world will start to change that.

NASA Watch has links to this and related stories.

“I Want A Moon Base”

Whatever the merits of the case, Walt would seem to have a novel defense for his tax avoidance:

He was going to use the money to change the world. To fight for arms control and human rights. To promote family planning and space exploration. He was going to give the money away, starting next year…

… Anderson was one of the driving forces behind MirCorp, which sought to privatize Russia’s decrepit Mir space station and arranged for an American financier to take an excursion in space. MirCorp’s ambitions were dashed with the station’s demise.

But Anderson has remained passionate about space. “I want to build my own space station since we lost the Mir,” he said. “I want to have a moon base.”

It also has some interesting quotes from Jeff Manber and Bob Werb.

I believe him. Unfortunately, the government doesn’t view that as a good reason to stash funds overseas.

It would be nice if we could get some philanthropy going in this area from some less flaky sources. One of the reasons that we’ve made so little progress is that the people with the money aren’t interested in space, and the people interested in space haven’t had the money, and when on the rare occasion you get someone with both, there’s some other problem. I hope that the Paul Allens and Jeff Bezos’ of the world will start to change that.

NASA Watch has links to this and related stories.

Bloggers Are Good For Journalists

That’s what Ralph Kinney Bennett says. For the good ones, at least:

It’s precisely because good journalism is hard that I love bloggers.

They are always ready to pounce. Whether you’re CBS News or the Daily Bugle, they will not let you get by on the cheap. They teach you by their native wisdom. They teach you by their ignorance.

They can be immensely unfair and incredibly stupid. They open up new vistas for you and force you to consider sometimes cockeyed perspectives that end up giving you more perspective.

They bring the world to a screen right in front of your eyes — in all its uncouth, elegant, raw, funny, revolting, thoughtful, partisan, passionate, tedious, upsetting, amazing, predictable, biased, sordid, elemental, ethereal, exhaustive, cynical, hopeful, delightful, excruciating variety.

And they are providing a venue for some thoughtful, fresh, clever writers who otherwise might have taken a while to find their way into print.

Pompous journalists are disdainful of blogs because they feel threatened by them. They are like members of the Raccoon Lodge and the bloggers just barreled into the ritual room and tore open the curtains and they all look slightly ridiculous in their epaulets and tin pot hats and braided swallowtail coats.

Also, this:

The unmasking of “the li’l Injun that could” set me to thinking. Can you imagine what a job freewheeling bloggers would have done on Adolf Hitler as he was on his “way up?”

Or (not that I’m making any comparisons here) Bill Clinton?

A Flawed Decision

Robert Zimmerman has a disturbing (though not surprising, at least to me) piece at Space Daily, which reports that NASA did no analysis in support of its original decision to cancel the planned Shuttle flight to repair Hubble, and ignored more viable options in favor of its misguided robotic gambit:

NASA historian Steven Dick gave a presentation at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in Washington, in which he described the process by which that decision was made and revealed that, in fact, no formal risk analysis had been completed.

Dick had interviewed all of the NASA officials who had been involved in the decision to cancel the shuttle mission to the Hubble, a discussion that came to a head in December 2003 when those officials had been working on NASA’s fiscal year 2005 budget.

According to Dick’s interviews, risk was the major factor in the discussion, but the officials decided a formal risk analysis was unnecessary. Instead, Dick noted, “The decision was made (by O’Keefe) based on what he perceived was the risk.”

In other words, O’Keefe canceled the Hubble mission solely on his gut feeling of the situation. So, the only way NASA can provide the House Science Committee’s requested copy of that risk analysis from December 2003 is to recreate it after the fact.

I had always suspected this. I think that Sean O’Keefe was good for the agency, in terms of starting to get the books straightened out (a task that’s by no means complete), and starting to restructure it for the end of the Cold War, but I also think that he lost his nerve after having to stand on the tarmac and tell those families that their loved ones weren’t coming home two years ago. He simply didn’t want to have to risk doing that again. And that’s fine, but if so, he was no longer the man for the job, and perhaps didn’t step down soon enough, because it clearly adversely influenced the decision he made a year later. Spaceflight is inherently risky, and if we can’t accept that, as either a NASA administrator or a nation, then we have no business doing it.

And as Zimmerman concludes, that’s really what’s so disturbing about that decision, in terms of its potential implications for the future:

For NASA and the American space program, this increasingly untenable position is beginning to have a serious political cost. By refusing to reconsider their decision and reinstate the shuttle servicing mission to Hubble, NASA is undercutting its ability to persuade Congress to give it money to build spacecraft to fly humans back to the moon.

As Rep. Mark Udall, D-Colo., noted during those same science committee hearings, “If we’re unwilling to take the risks to go to Hubble, then what does that say about (our willingness to mount) a moon and eventual Mars mission?”

Or as Boehlert remarked, “In a budget as excruciatingly tight as this one, NASA probably should not get as much as the president has proposed.”

Unless President George W. Bush appoints a new NASA administrator with the courage to reverse the Hubble decision, he is going to find it increasingly difficult to persuade Congress – or anyone else, for that matter – that NASA has the wherewithal to handle his ambitious space initiative.

But it goes beyond the risk aversion. If the story is true, the changing stories and lack of data after the fact bring back memories of the Goldin years, in which some said that NASA stood for “Never A Straight Answer.” That was something that O’Keefe was supposed to fix, not contribute to, and it may take a further investigation with some mea culpas and credible recommendations for avoiding this sort of thing in the future, in order for NASA to gain the confidence needed, from both Congress and the public that still wonders why it’s about to lose one of the few NASA programs with genuine widespread support.

Looks Like He’s Going To Make It

Fossett is apparently over Kansas, and close enough to be able to glide in, even if he runs out of fuel, now.

[Update about 2:36 PM EST]

He’s almost made it–just a few miles out. Another record, for him, and another feather in Burt’s cap.

[Update at 2:48 PM EST]

He’s on the ground. I’ll bet he’ll be happy to find some indoor plumbing. And a bed.

No Free Speech For Reporters

Hiawatha Bray has gotten into trouble with his bosses at the Boston Globe for expressing his political opinions on line:

…Bray posted an item under his own name on a blog hosted by the San Jose Mercury News dismissing Kerry’s strategy of promoting his Vietnam service record as “moronic.”

Bray promoted many of the Swift Boat attacks on Kerry – some of which were proven false. He questioned his own paper’s work, dismissing probes of Bush’s National Guard service as “innuendo.”

And in another Web forum after the election, Bray identified himself as a “Bush supporter” and said he’s “feeling pretty good now.”

Emphasis mine. I’m not aware of any that were “proven false.” That’s the same kind of sophistry–well, lie, actually–that the same folks use when they say that the Independent Council report “proved the Clintons innocent” of everything in Whitewater. As far as I’m aware, the worst that can be said about any of the charges is that they remain in dispute. Few of them can be resolved absent Kerry’s service records, which he continues to refuse to release, despite his statement that he would do so to Tim Russert a few weeks ago.

Anyway, that’s a side issue. According to the article, Bray “had been told in November his postings were ‘inappropriate and in violation of our standards.”’

One can’t help but wonder if they would have been more”appropriate” and in keeping with their “standards” if the criticism had instead been directed at George Bush, rather than the hometown boy.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!