Transterrestrial Musings

Externships

Jon Goff has some thoughts about outsourcing NASA employees to private industry.

It's an interesting concept, and not to discourage him from out-of-the-box thinking, but it has several flaws, more than one of which is almost certainly fatal.

Where would they work? Senator Shelby is not going to countenance a program that ships a Huntsville employee off to Mojave (and there are a lot of NASA employees who don't want to move to Mojave). It's not just the jobs that are important, but where they are. So it may necessitate moving the company to places like Huntsville to take advantage of it, even though it may be a terrible location from most other standpoints (e.g., flight test). In addition, a lot of the jobs that Congress wants to save aren't just NASA civil servants--more, probably many more of them are contractors. How does that work? Does Boeing send you an extern and get reimbursed by NASA? How do you work out proprietary issues (among others)? How do you ensure that they send you the best employees, and not the ones they were going to lay off?

Also, there will be a huge discontinuity with skill matches. The current Shuttle work force, for the most part, knows very little about vehicle development, and what they know about vehicle operations, from the standpoint of a low-cost launch provider, is mostly wrong. Also, while a lot of people work for NASA because they're excited about space, many there do so because they like the civil service protections and pensions. They don't necessarily want to work the long hours often demanded of a startup, and they come from an employment culture that may be quite incompatible with the fixed-price private sector. I won't say any more than that, but this is one of the reasons that the Aldridge Commission's recommendation to convert the NASA centers to FFRDCs went over like a lead blimp.

And how would one qualify to get these "government resources" and how many would you get? As many as you ask for? After all, if the product is free (and contra the paragraph above, desirable) surely demand will exceed supply. How will you allocate the supply. It won't happen on price, obviously, so some other solution will have to be developed. Would a company "bid" for an extern (and would they be able to bid on a specific person, or would they have to take pot luck?) by putting some kind of proposal to demonstrate how worthy their cause and their use of her will be? Who will be the equivalent of a source selection board for such a process? Can the current acquisition regulations even accommodate something like this? I know that this currently occurs for a few individuals, where it is mutually agreed, but I'm not sure that it would work for an entire work force.

Just a few thoughts, off the top of my head.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:13 PM

John Adams Must Be Smiling

This post, linked by Glenn from the ISDC, reminds me of this post I wrote when this blog was only four months old. It's not that long, so I'll repeat. It was titled (as shown over in the left sidebar) "Why This Blog Bores People With Space Stuff":

As a follow up to today's rant over our "allies" in Europe, over at USS Clueless, Steven den Beste has an excellent disquisition on the fundamental differences between Europe and the U.S. They don't, and cannot, understand that the U.S. exists and thrives because it is the UnEurope, that it was built by people who left Europe (and other places) because they wanted freedom.

I say this not to offer simply a pale imitation of Steven's disquisition (which is the best I could do, at least tonight), but to explain why I spend so much time talking about space policy here. It's not (just) because I'm a space nut, or because I used to do it for a living, and so have some knowledge to disseminate. It's because it's important to me, and it should be important to everyone who is concerned about dynamism and liberty.

And the reason that it's important is because there may be a time in the future, perhaps not even the distant future, when the U.S. will no longer be a haven for those who seek sanctuary from oppressive government. The trends over the past several decades are not always encouraging, and as at least a social insurance policy, we may need a new frontier into which freedom can expand.

Half a millenium ago, Europe discovered a New World. Unfortunately for its inhabitants (who had discovered it previously), the Europeans had superior technology and social structures that allowed them to conquer it.

Now, in the last couple hundred years, we have discovered how vast our universe is, and in the last couple decades, we have discovered how rich in resources it is, given will and technology. As did the eastern seaboard of the present U.S. in the late eighteenth century, it offers mankind a fertile petri dish for new societal arrangements and experiments, and ultimately, an isolated frontier from which we will be able to escape from possible future terrestrial disasters, whether of natural or human origin.

If, as many unfortunately in this country seem to wish, freedom is constricted in the U.S., the last earthly abode of true libertarian principles, it may offer an ultimate safety valve for those of us who wish to continue the dream of the founders of this nation, sans slavery or native Americans--we can found it without the flawed circumstances of 1787.

That is why space, and particularly free-enterprise space, is important.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:22 AM

May 30, 2008
Way To Go

Thanks for discouraging live blogging of space (and other) conferences (not to mention anything else), Keith.

[Saturday morning update]

The lesson here is that you have to be careful to delineate your editorial comments from the reportage (I usually do this with parenths, I think, though I'd have to go back and look at some from the past to be sure--I might use square brackets) when transcribing, because it is easily confused otherwise. But as I said, we shouldn't let things like this discourage us from doing it. This is the first conference like this that I've missed in a while, and I really appreciate what Clark and others are doing. I've always wondered if what I was doing was worthwhile when I live blogged other conferences, and now I know that it definitely is. Well, at least when others do it...

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:57 PM

China In Space

Glenn Reynolds has filed his first report from the ISDC, on the status of the Chinese space program. Or to be more accurate, the status of our knowledge of the Chinese space program.

I'm long on record as being concerned about the Chinese in space, when it comes to the military, and sanguine when it comes to them going to the moon. I remain that way. As Glenn notes, when it comes to manned space, they're simply recapitulating what we did in the sixties, except much more slowly.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:50 PM

The Candidates And Space

This sounds like an interesting session. I hope that Glenn is taking good notes. I'd expect Jeff Foust to post something on Space Politics as well (in addition to an article in The Space Review on Monday).

It may be the first time that representatives from all three campaigns have been on a single dais for this subject. We'll see it they can pin the Obama guy down on how expects to fund education with the space program without throwing a wrench in the works with a delay (and how he addresses the dreaded "Gap"). And why he wants to wait until after the election to have a national dialogue on space.

I know Lori, but I've never heard of the other two.

[Update on Saturday at noon]

Here is Jeff Foust's report, with more to come on Monday. As I would have guessed, the only people up on the issues were the moderator and Lori. I think that it says something about Obama and his campaign that he doesn't have an adviser for this subject (or perhaps science and technology at all).

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:51 PM

Words Of Wisdom

On entrepreneurial space, from Jeff Greason and Burton Lee.

And Clark has another news item, which is one of those have-to-laugh-so-you-don't-cry things:

After $10B+ in development costs, the Orion crews will land on the ground only by accident: NASA develops airbags for emergency on-shore CEV landings.

Sigh.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:47 PM

ISDC Eye Candy

Well, for guys, anyway.

OK, I recognize Michelle Murray (of FAA-AST) on the left, but who are the other two? Name tags are hidden. As Glenn notes, there are a lot more women (and attractive ones) at space conferences these days (compared to, say, the eighties). I think that has something to do with the excitement of the privatization activities, though the increase in the number of women engineers since then is probably a contributor as well. Not that there aren't roles for other professions in opening up the frontier.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:22 PM

Maybe They Could Use Crayons

There's been quite a bit of commentary about the technological backwardness of the enemy. That is certainly a key distinction between this war and World War II and the Cold war, in which we were at war with technologically advanced industrial states (Germany, Japan, the Soviet Union), whereas the hirabis have virtually no industrial or weapons-making capability, short of nail bombs. I think that it was Rich Lowry who compared the two cultures by writing something like "...we build skyscrapers and jet airliners--that's our idea. They hijack our airliners and fly them into the skyscrapers--that's their idea."

Anyway, there was some buzz recently that they had developed a computer graphic of a nuked Washington DC for one of their propaganda videos.

Nope. They had to lift it from a western video game. They're not only incapable of carrying out our destruction, they're not even capable of simulating it. But it does speak strongly to their intent if they ever get their hands on advanced weaponry, something that, with advancing technology, will become more and more of a problem in the future.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:45 AM

Constellation Panel

Clark Lindsey doesn't usually editorialize, but he does in this report:

Cooke:
- Powerpoint graphics showing Ares I/V, Orion, Altair

- Factors in selecting architecture include performance end-to-end, risk, development cost, life-cycle cost, schedule, lunar surface systems architecture.

- Implementation according to NASA institutional health and transition from Shuttle, competition in contracts, civil service contractor rules.

- Discusses the studies that justify the Constellation architecture that Griffin had decided on long before he came to NASA as director and long before the studies were done.

- Will get problems like thrust oscillation solved.

- NASA proposes to stay on course through a change in administrations. Surprise, surprise...

Emphasis mine. Are they actually openly admitting that Mike ignored all of the CE&R studies, and just did what he planned to do before he was administrator?

This was amusing:

The Coalition for Space Exploration shows a brand new NASA space exploration promotion video. Gawd. After the last panel I felt like killing myself. No problem. I can watch this video again and die of boredom...

He has some other pretty tart comments as well.

[Early afternoon update]

As Clark notes in comments, that reference to Griffin's plans were his words, not Steve Cooke's.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:19 AM

Standing Up For Free Speech

The Canadian Association of Journalists is finally waking up, and coming to Mark Steyn's (and others') defense against the Orwellian "Human Rights" Commission.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:57 AM

Not Familiar With The Concept

Here's one for the stupid criminal files. We've all heard of putting nylons over your head to conceal your face, but here are a couple mental defectives who robbed a gas station wearing thongs on their heads.

[Via Jonah's Odd Link Gal, who should just get her own blog]

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:27 AM

Carnival Of Phoenix

Well, it's actually the latest Carnival of Space, over at the Lifeboat Foundation, but it's pretty Phoenix-centric.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:13 AM

Problems I Will Never Have

Eight annoying types of people you'll run into at Starbucks.

I don't frequent Starbucks, because, not being a coffee drinker, or consumer of high-glycemic carbs, they have absolutely no items that appeal to me. But those who do may find this amusing. I particularly liked the Starbucks hater. I might be him if, you know, I ever went to Starbucks. But unlike him, I practice what I preach.

[Via Geek Press]

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:55 AM

One Final Word

Well, that was certainly interesting, if not very enlightening or uplifting, when it comes to on-line discussion.

I see that some blogs are continuing to mischaracterize my post as saying that Buchenwald was "not as bad" as Auschwitz. First, I didn't say that. My point was never about whether one camp was "better" or "worse" than another. They obviously were all horrific, in different ways, and there's no sensible or universal way to make such an assessment. As some commenters have pointed out, it's perhaps better to be gassed immediately than worked to death (on the other hand, in Buchenwald, you had a much better chance of survival).

My point was, and remains, despite all the idiotic straw men (like the above) and insults, that Auschwitz was more notorious, to the point that it almost came to be an icon of the Holocaust. While Buchenwald was certainly one of the more well-known camps, I'd be willing to bet that many more people know the word Auschwitz and what it represents than they do Buchenwald. And among those people is, apparently, Barack Obama. Auschwitz is like Holocaust 101, which it would appear to be as far as Senator Obama ever got in his education on the subject.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:42 AM

Personal Space Travel In Europe

Unfortunately, the ISDC in Washington this week coincides with the space tourism conference in Arcachon, France, and space bloggers like Clark Lindsey and Jeff Foust (who both live in the DC area) can't cover both. But Rob Coppinger has a lot of posts from Arcachon, with some interesting concepts from European aerospace companies (though it's unclear what the funding prospects are for them). Just keep scrolling.

[Update an hour or so later]

Clark Lindsey has some of the permalinks.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:26 AM

Virgin Tales

Jeff Foust has some reporting on Will Whitehorn's talk at ISDC yesterday. In this post, he notes that White Knight 2 will roll out on July 28th, presumably in Mojave, and discusses other potential applications than just a first stage for SpaceShipTwo, including a satellite launcher. The lack of comment other than "we've learned some lessons" on the SS2 propulsion is interesting to me. It sounds like they're still not sure what they're going to do, which continues to put SS2 schedule (whatever it is) in jeopardy. I suspect that Sir Richard's hype remains ahead of the actual program.

In this post Whitehorn mildly disses the Lynx:

XCOR is a company I respect, but with respect to them, they're not building a spaceship. They're building basically a high-altitude MiG equivalent. They're building something that you can strap in and go up to 37 miles. You won't get your astronaut wings but you will see the curvature of the earth. That will be an exciting project, but the problem is that it's not a space project, and I think it's been a little bit wrong to call it that.

While technically that's true, it is a project that can easily evolve into a "space project," which is what the program intent is. I don't see this as a problem. In fact, I see it as a solution, because Virgin may have bitten off more than it could chew with SS2. In hindsight (and foresight for some of us) it might have been useful to develop more operational experience with a lower-performance vehicle before moving to a bigger one.

Really, the only thing lacking from the XCOR product is a lack of astronaut wings--it will certainly be a space experience, and a more personal one with a better view, sitting in the left seat. I think that the market for it will be bigger than Whitehorn claims to think.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:02 AM

May 29, 2008
Space Media Panel

Clark is blogging a panel on how the media cover space, to which it looks like Instapundit was a last-minute addition (he's not listed in the program).

[Evening update]

Clark has a new post up on the spaceport panel.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:22 PM

What Doesn't?

Apparently, the phrase "War on Terror" offends Muslims. Words fail.

Well, OK, not completely. Somehow, this reminds me of the (feigned?) outrage that the Democrats exhibited when President Bush talked about appeasers in his speech to the Knesset, but didn't name names. You know what? If the shoe doesn't fit, don't wear it. It doesn't really serve your cause when, in response to criticism of someone unnamed, you jump up and shout, "Hey, he's talkin' 'bout me!"

Similarly, how can Muslims be offended by a "war on terror"? Do they think that terror and Islam are inevitably and appropriately identified with each other, and inseparable? Well, if so, stupidity like this just fuels that perception.

[Update in the evening]

Robert Spencer has further thoughts on fantasy-based policy making.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:41 PM

More ISDC Blogging

Clark Lindsey blogs a panel on interactions between private space and the government, that sounds interesting. Unfortunately, because there are so many parallel tracks at an ISDC, it's not possible for one person to cover everything, but he does his best with a report on the space-based solar power session and lunar regolith processing.

And Glenn Reynolds is there now, due to speak shortly, topic TBD. Wish I could have made it this year. I managed to have dinner and drinks with him last year in Dallas (first time I'd seen him in years).

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:33 PM

Which Three Body Parts?

...would you rejuvenate? Randall's choices would make a lot of sense for me, too. Though I'm not sure how useful this is as a thought experiment. How likely is it that we'll actually be presented with such menu?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:53 AM

A Prediction From Ramesh Ponnuru

...with which I agree:

The Democrats are almost certain to treat any campaign that threatens to deprive Obama of the presidency as negative and nasty.

Yes. Obama has already helpfully told us all of the topics that are off limits.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:59 AM

ISDC Blogging

Clark Lindsey is live blogging Will Whitehorn's and Elon Musk's presentations.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:53 AM

A Brave, And Almost Lone Voice

A Pakistani bishop defends a shrinking Christianity in the UK. What I found ironic was this:

His outspokenness has put him in the vanguard of opposition to hardline Islamism and made him one of the highest-placed enemies of the gay rights movement.

And what loathsome thing has he done to become an enemy of the gay rights movement?

He has criticised civil partnerships and opposed the extension of IVF treatment to single women and lesbians.

I don't know the nature of the criticism, but is it really outrageous to think that the state should not be assisting women in the deliberate (and expensive) creation of fatherless children? I guess to the gay rights movement it is. But if I were gay, I'd be a lot more concerned about the continuing growth of a religion that would stone me for being gay, than about a bishop who criticizes my lifestyle and objects to a state subsidization of it.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:06 AM

May 28, 2008
First He's The Messiah

...and now apparently Obama is Iron Man.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:46 PM

The Uncle Seems Real

OK, Occam's Razor would indicate that Barack Obama has a maternal great uncle (i.e., his mother's mother's brother), named Charles Payne (middle initial unclear) who served with the 355th Infantry that liberated one of the camps in the Buchenwald complex, despite previous concerns on that score.

It seems very unlikely that he would have a great uncle by that name, and that someone by that name would have had that service record, who also was an Obama political supporter, and he would put forth such a story, and that they are not the same person, despite the confusion about the middle initial. So, if we ignore the "Auschwitz" reference, and the fact that he calls his great uncle his uncle (understandable, given that he had no actual uncles, at least on his mother's side), the story is accurate.

But it's not that easy to ignore Auschwitz.

That's because "Auschwitz" has become one of the most emotionally charged words in the English (well, OK, it's not English--it's German) language. It's one of the most emotionally charged words in any language, for anyone who is aware of what happened there, and few educated people aren't, regardless of their native language.

The word is significant in the context of the Obama campaign for two reasons.

First, because it has such emotional connotations, particularly for Jews, with whom Obama has had trouble closing the deal, it looks like he's pandering to them. I'm not saying that he is, but it has that appearance.

Auschwitz was the site of the deliberate extermination of many of them (as well as Catholics, Gypsies, homosexuals, and others deemed "unworthy of life" by the National Socialists aka Nazis) and one might cynically think that an attempt to say that one of his family members was responsible for the liberation of the camp would give that constituency a warmer feeling for him, despite his many foreign policy advisors who clearly are not fans of the state of Israel (e.g., Zbig).

Buchenwald, on the other hand, while atrocious beyond normal human understanding, was merely a slave labor camp, and not historically abnormal in a time of war. The people who died there did so under the stress of work and disease, rather than as a deliberate attempt to wipe them off the planet. Which, of course, says much more about human nature and history than it does about the Nazis.

But beyond that, it is of concern because it reveals a profound ignorance of history and/or geography.

Anyone familiar with the history of World War II knows that Auschwitz (despite its Germanic name, which like Dansk to Danzig after the conquest in 1939, was a rename--the Polish name is Oswiecim), was in the occupied country of Poland, which before the war had hundreds of thousands of Jews, and after the war had...virtually none.

Furthermore, anyone familiar with that history knows that American troops never advanced past the River Elbe, in Germany, and that the Soviet forces advanced all the way across Poland and into eastern Germany, raping and pillaging as they went. Which is why there was an East Germany. Has Barack never heard of that "country," which was a colony of the Soviet Union, of which his mother was not obviously unfond (to understate the issue)?

No one, in other words, familiar with that history, would imagine that an American soldier, under Patton, had contributed to the "liberation" (scare quotes because the Soviets never liberated anyone--they only enslaved them) of Auschwitz.

Obama didn't know this. Nor, apparently, did anyone on his staff, since he had been spouting the same fable since 2002 and no one had bothered to correct him. Or if they had, they were ignored. I'm not sure which is worse.

Given his unfamiliarity with Jack Kennedy's less-than-successful negotiations with Khrushchev, it makes one wonder what else he doesn't know.

[Late evening update]

Some have taken issue of my characterization of Buchenwald as "merely a slave labor camp."

This has to be taken in context. I'm not sure what part of "atrocious beyond human understanding" with regard to that camp the commenters don't understand.

I wasn't excusing it in any way. I was simply pointing out that in the historical context of war, in which civilians were generally enslaved or killed, and disposed of when they could no longer work, it was hardly abnormal. Auschwitz (and Treblinka, and Sobibor, and Chelmo, and Betzec, and Majdenek) were in a separate class, previously unknown, which gave rise to the term "genocide," in which the intent was to wipe out an entire people. I'm sorry that some don't get the point.

[Thursday morning update]

Well, I certainly seem to have stirred up a hornet's nest among some. Let me pick up the remains of the straw men that were strewn around and kicked apart here overnight.

For the record, I did not say, or imply, that Buchenwald was a summer camp. I did not say, or imply, that the leftist Hitler's crimes were a "drop in the bucket" compared to the leftist Stalin's. I did not say, or imply, that working people to death is not murdering them. I did not say, or imply, that anyone's death (including Anne Frank's) was less tragic because it occurred at Bergen-Belsen than at Auschitz. I did not say, or imply, that I would "smile with satisfaction" if I were at Buchenwald instead of Auschwitz.

I'm not sure how to have a rational discussion with anyone nutty enough to have managed to infer any of the above from what I actually wrote.

Also, for the record, I am not now, and have never been a Republican, or (AFAIK) a "right winger," unless by that phrase one means a classical liberal. As for "sitting down with my Jewish friends and discussing this," I not only have Jewish friends, but Jewish relatives by blood, or perhaps I should say had, because they include many who doubtless died in both types of camps.

[Update a few minutes later]

One other straw man. I did not say, or imply, that because of this single incident Barack Obama was unfit to be president of the United States. But it is part, albeit a small one, of a much larger tapestry.

[One more update]

To the people in comments asking me what I meant by this, or why I wrote it, I don't know how to better explain my points than I already have. If after having actually read it carefully, for comprehension, you still don't get it, or willfully choose to misinterpret it, I can't help you.

[Update again]

OK, I'll make one attempt, for those who think that I am somehow "minimizing" what happened at Buchenwald. Perhaps they don't understand the true meaning of the word "atrocious," as in the phrase I used, "atrocious beyond human understanding."

I wasn't using it in perhaps a more popular (and trivial) sense as "that movie or meal was atrocious." I was using it in its most literal sense, as in a place where actual atrocities occurred. The two words are related, you know?

[Update about 9:30]

If I change the phrase "merely a slave labor camp," which is what seems to be generating such irrational fury and umbrage, to "not a site for the extermination of a people on an industrial scale," will that mollify people? Probably not, but I'll do it anyway.

[Afternoon update]

I'm wondering how much of the rampant insanity, straw mannery and outrage in comments would have been avoided had I merely omitted the word "merely".

[Friday morning update]

I have one final (I hope) follow up post on this subject.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:52 PM

Maybe He Sailed Up The Rhine

OK, when we last left our hero, his ~~uncle~~great-uncle had liberated ~~Auschwitz~~Buchenwald while in the army. Or did he?

His only Great Uncle is Charles W. Payne. It at least appears that no one by that name from Kansas served in the Army during WWII.

Charles W. Payne of Kansas, with a similar birth era, served in the Navy during WWII.

What Obama's campaign released via first link above states he served in the Infantry. I assume it's possible the records are wrong, or he changed branches. But I'm unaware of that as a standard practice. Perhaps it happened during WWII for manpower reasons? Otherwise, Obama's Great Uncle would seem to have done most of his marching and liberating while at sea.

Hey, maybe the story is fake, but accurate.

You know, if I were an Obama staffer, I'd start fact checking everything he says, to try to stay ahead of the blogosphere. If this turns out to be true, that press release that the campaign put out yesterday is going to be pretty embarrassing.

[Update a few minutes later]

There's no "Charles W. Payne" listed as having served in the 89th Infantry Division. The closest it comes is a Pfc "C. T. Payne," which even if it's a Charles, has the wrong middle initial.

I think that yesterday's press release has to be considered non-operative at this point.

[Update a few minutes later]

More at The Virginian, which notes that Buchenwald was a slave labor camp, not a Jewish extermination site, so it's less convenient than Auschwitz for political purposes:

what we appear to have is something that's commonly known as "resume inflation." And that's what you get when you have a man who has no real experience. When what you have is an empty suit who is trying to pretend that there is substance there.

But what was the point of the fable? The point was really to try to connect with the American people by telling them how callous the government is about the emotional problems of its soldiers. The "uncle" is supposed to have spent six months in the attic, having experienced the sights he encountered in the liberation of Ohrdruf, an experience that may have lasted less than three hours.

The punch line is that Obama will make sure that America's fighting men and will get all the mental care they deserve.

That's it. That's the punch line. That's the reason for the fable. That's what American fighting men are good for: a story line for a health care pitch. And the combat vet is cast in the eternal role that the Liberals have created for him: the crazy uncle in the attic. Just wait until Barack discovers another uncle whose wartime experiences drove him to drink and living in the street when he isn't shooting up a beer hall on Saturday nights.

Yes, that's what bothers me about this story, even if it's true. As is usually the case with Democrats, they seem unable to talk about the military without slandering them or making them out to be victims.

[Early afternoon update]

It's possible that the genealogy site linked by Dan Riehl has the middle initial wrong. If you assume that the middle initial wasn't "W," there actually were five Charles Paynes in the army from Kansas: a Charles A, a Charles E, a Charles J, and two Charles Ls (the second one is a Charlie rather than Charles). So it's possible that it's one of them. The problem remains, though, that we don't have any record of a Charles Payne in the 89th, and the only potential candidate (C. T. Payne) doesn't have any of those middle initials.

[Update a few minutes later]

Heh. Here is a map that might explain it.

[Mid-afternoon update]

OK, the issue seems to be resolved, assuming we can take the word of the proprietors at the 89th Division web site:

Concerning the service of Mr. Charles Payne: C.T. Payne was a soldier in the 89th Infantry Division. He served in the 355th Infantry Regiment, Company K. The 355th Infantry Regiment was the unit to liberate Ohrdruf. Mr. Payne was there.

But we still don't know why his middle name is "T" there, and "W" at the genealogy site. Not that it matters.

[Update a few minutes later]

The statement is a little Clintonesque. It says that Charles Payne was there, but it doesn't say that it's the Charles Payne who is Obama's great uncle. The only reason that I'm suspicious is because of this. They seem to be Bush deranged.

[Late evening update]

I think that it's clear that Obama's great-uncle did have a role in liberating Buchenwald. I have a follow-up post here.

Obama doesn't get off clean.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:53 AM

Space Investment Summit

Clark Lindsey is live blogging, here and here.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:34 AM

May 27, 2008
It's Nothing New

Thanks to a link from one of my Obama-admiring commenters (thank you, Robert), we learn that Obama's tales of Americans liberating Auschwitz didn't start this weekend. He was telling similar stories about his grandfather back in 2002, in his now-famous Iraq speech, which I'd never previously read:

My grandfather signed up for a war the day after Pearl Harbor was bombed, fought in Patton's army. He saw the dead and dying across the fields of Europe; he heard the stories of fellow troops who first entered Auschwitz and Treblinka.

The first troops to enter those two camps (in Poland) were Soviet troops, so unless Patton was leading them, this can't be true.

As I noted in comments, you'd think that if he's going to be telling these kinds of stories, he'd at least attempt to make them plausible (e.g., Dachau and Buchenwald). My guess is that he's unfamiliar with the actual history of the war, and just invoked two of the most notorious camp names to make his point. Whether his grandfather (or "uncle") actually told him tales of concentration camps will probably never be known.

It's interesting that no one has ever noticed this historical discrepancy before, considering how such a big deal has been made of that speech. This should also knock the legs out from under arguments from the Obama camp that he didn't really say "Auschwitz," and that it was CBS and other news sources putting the word in his mouth.

My guess? He's just making this stuff up. Because it sounds good to the ignorant rubes, and he's a good speechifier. It's all part of that "new politics" we've heard so much about.

[Update a couple minutes later]

I'm hearing a report on Fox News, where they have video of his uncle story. Yes, he really said that he liberated Auschwitz, and then hid in the attic for six months.

[Another update]

OK, in Obama days, "the next day" means over half a year later in June of 1942. Just another "mistake," I'm sure.

[Update on Wednesday morning]

I have a follow-up post. It turns out that he may not even have been in the army at all.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:23 PM

I Hate When That Happens

It's a pretty common occurrence for a little kid to be disappointed when he loses his grip on his balloon, but this is in a different class entirely:

The former paratrooper had hoped his "Big Jump" -- starting 40 kilometers (25 miles) above the Earth's surface -- would set new records for the highest jump, fastest and longest free fall and the highest altitude reached by a man in a balloon.

But those hopes drifted away over the plains of Saskatchewan in Canada when the balloon escaped.

I think he should give up on the balloon thing, and just wait for a rocket ride.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:46 AM

So What's With Rocketplane?

Is it dead? Or alive?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:49 AM

In The (Red) Army Now?

It wouldn't shock me if Obama's uncle was in the Red Army, given his mother's apparent political beliefs, but I suspect that he's either repeating a family myth, or gaffeing again. I don't think that this is his Tuzla, though. If he claimed to have liberated Auschwitz himself it might be Hillary-class, but not this.

[Update a while later]

Does Obama even have an uncle who could have served in the US Army?

It's one thing to get your concentration camps confused, but conjuring up family members puts this in a different class of fabulism. Does he really think that no one will call him on this? Well, considering the way the media has been swooning for him, maybe he does.

[Update a few minutes later]

Heh. From comments, I agree. Maybe he was thinking about his Uncle Joe...

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:43 AM

Black Shirts

I'm listening to the young (or maybe not so young) fascists disrupting McCain's speech in Denver on nuclear proliferation, with chants of "Endless War! Endless War!" They are being drowned out by the Senator's supporters chanting "John McCain, John McCain."

OK, whether or not they're fascists is just a guess, but I think it's a pretty safe one. Though it's probably unfair to characterize them as Black Shirts--they were mostly ex-military.

[Update in the later afternoon]

Jim Geraghty agrees with me:

At this point, noisy protesters disrupting a McCain speech are basically advertising, "I am incapable of letting those I disagree with express their views in public; I am uncomfortable with free expression and at heart a fascist, as I do not believe opposing viewpoints should be heard."

He thinks that they were chanting "Stop this war," not "Endless War." That could be.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:14 AM

Alan Alda For President

Well, not really, but he did show how to beat an Obama. Unfortunately, McCain isn't the man to propound those views.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:40 AM

So, What's Wrong With Capsules?

Frequent commenter "Habitat Hermit," commenting on my Space Show appearance on Sunday, wrote:

There's still plenty of room for disagreements --I have some myself (perhaps even a big one when it comes to capsules although it depends on the details, I think they've still got lots of more or less unexplored potential...

I agree that there are lots of interesting concepts for capsules and their recovery modes. But that's beside the point. The reason that I don't like capsules, of any form, is quite simple. They imply that the only part of the vehicle (at least the upper stage of it) that returns is the capsule. Hence they imply at least a partially, if not fully expendable launch system. I don't believe that we are going to seriously open up space by continuing to throw hardware away.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:11 AM

What A Maroon

I think that if you look in the dictionary under "sanctimonious twit," you'll see a picture of this guy. I found the link in comments at this post which describes the sad state to which the Harvard Law Review has fallen (at least, I'm assuming that it was once much better).

Boy, as a commenter said, I'm sure glad that people associated with it don't go into politics...

[Update a few minutes later]

Geez. He's continuing to defend the stupid essay on a blog dedicated to the subject.

As someone else at Volokh's place said, why does he have both kidneys? He's guilty of murder because he hasn't donated one.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:21 AM

Phoenix Descending

I have some thoughts on this weekend's successful arean invasion, over at PJ Media.

[Update at 7:40 AM EDT]

Some less lofty thoughts over at Althouse's place, particularly in comments.

[Mid-morning update]

Jeff Foust writes about a second chance for an underdog, over at The Space Review.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:16 AM

May 26, 2008
Revenge Of The Jedi

The browser wars return.

This particularly caught my eye:

Firefox 3.0, for example, runs more than twice as fast as the previous version while using less memory, Mozilla says.

The browser is also smarter and maintains three months of a user's browsing history to try to predict what site he or she may want to visit. Typing the word "football" into the browser, for example, quickly generates a list of all the sites visited with "football" in the name or description.

Firefox has named this new tool the "awesome bar" and says it could replace the need for people to maintain long and messy lists of bookmarks. It will also personalize the browser for an individual user.

"Sitting at somebody else's computer and using their browser is going to become a very awkward experience," said Mitchell Baker, chairwoman of the Mozilla Foundation.

Sounds like a market opportunity to me. I have a few ideas about how to solve it.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:08 PM

Memorial Day

I've been busy working on an article, and finishing the gutters (all done now except strapping the downspouts, because the straps I got are too short), so no posting today. But I did want to note the history of the holiday, for those unaware. Unlike Veteran's Day, it's not a day just for remembering war dead, but dead loved ones in general. I remember as a child that my grandmother would always go up to her home town of Beaverton, Michigan (sometimes stopping by on the way home from our cottage by Houghton Lake) to put flowers on her husband's (my grandfather, who died when I was six) grave.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:11 PM

May 25, 2008
I'd Buy One

I think that a bumper sticker that said "I'D RATHER HAVE BUSH'S THIRD TERM THAN JIMMY CARTER'S SECOND" would be a hot seller, assuming that Obama is the nominee. Note, contrary to convention wisdom, I still don't assume that. There's this little thing called a "convention" coming up that will determine that.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:49 PM

"The Sun Sets"

...finally, on the British Empire.

Strange to witness one of the oldest and most successful of nations commit suicide without even being aware of what it's doing.

Strange indeed. And very sad.

[Update, a few minutes later]

You know, if the Saudis wanted to spend their money building Muslim hospitals in the UK (just as the Catholics have their own hospitals in the US), complete with restrictions as to how much hygiene is required on the part of the nursing staff, per sharia law, who could object to them orienting the beds in whatever direction they wished? The only people who would suffer would be the Muslims stupid enough to use their services.

But instead, because Britain, with its NHS (and other programs) has become a welfare state, it's a lot cheaper for them to spend the money bribing MPs to institute such nonsense in the public hospitals, so they can save their money for funding madrassas that encourage people to bomb the Tube.

This would seem to have parallels to the public school system, and the battles over what kind of "science" to teach in science classes. It is an intrinsic pitfall of state-supplied health and education. Not to mention other vital needs.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:18 PM

A Convention Battle

We haven't seen one of these with the major parties in decades, though I think it's a good bet for Denver this year with the Dems.

But if you're interested in how floor fights actually work, here's some live blogging from Dave Weigel on the Libertarian convention (also in Denver). If this happens with the donkeys in August, there will be a lot of blood shed (literally, in the streets, I suspect).

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:59 PM

The Cosmic Ghoul Missed One

Congrats to JPL on the successful (so far) landing of the Phoenix. Interestingly (though almost certainly coincidentally), it happens on the forty-seventh anniversary of Kennedy's speech announcing the plan to land a man on the moon by the end of the decade.

And (for what it's worth--not much, to me, and even more certainly coincidentally) it's the thirty-first anniversary of the initial release of Star Wars in theaters. I didn't see it that day, but I did see it within a couple weeks. I remember being unimpressed ("the Kessel run in twelve parsecs"...please), though the effects were pretty good. But then, I was a fan of actual science fiction.

[Update late evening]

It's worth noting that (I think) this was the first soft landing on Mars in over twenty years, since Viking. Surely someone will correct me (or nitpick me) if I'm wrong.

[Monday morning update]

OK, not exactly wrong (it has been over twenty years), but it's thirty years. I'm pretty good at math. Arithmetic, not so much.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:43 PM

Space Show

I had a post about this last week, but I forgot to remind people today, that I was on The Space Show this afternoon (I took a break from yardwork, where we're tearing out old hedges, and still finishing up guttering--on the radio, no one can hear you sweating). Here's a place to comment for anyone who happened to listen in.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:55 PM

One Of The Last Of The Paperclips

Dennis Wingo remembers Ernst Stuhlinger.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:43 PM

Thoughts On Global Warming

From Freeman Dyson. It's a long read but worthwhile (as always).

[Update late evening]

Dayo Olopade has an uncomplimentary review of Dyson's review.

FWIW, I don't think that GW skepticism is equivalent to Pascal's wager. But I don't have time right now to say why.

Hope I live to tell the tale.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:43 AM

May 24, 2008
More Relationship Advice

It's round two of Ask Barry!, over at Iowahawk's place.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:48 AM

Saganites?

I find it amusing that these folks were clueless as to the purpose of the Google Lunar Prize when they signed up:

In my first blog, I wrote why Harold Rosen formed the Southern California Selene Group. In short, he and I registered our team to compete for the Google Lunar X PRIZE to demonstrate that a low-cost space mission to the moon could be accomplished and could lead to lowering the cost of some future robotic missions to planetary moons. Plus, we intended to have fun! Harold and I both are strong supporters of space science and robotic space exploration. (For one, I'm an astronomy and cosmology enthusiast.) We love the kind of work that JPL is doing, for example. But we most definitely are not in favor of human space missions. That is not our goal, nor do we support such a goal.

The Team Summit turned out to be a real wakeup call. In the Guidelines workshop that I attended just last Tuesday, the cumulative effect of hearing all day from Peter Diamandis, Bob Weiss and Gregg Maryniak that the "real purpose" of the Google Lunar X PRIZE was to promote the so-called commercialization of space (which I took to mean highly impractical stuff like mining the moon and beaming power to the earth, as shown in one of GLXP kickoff videos), humanity's future in space, etc. etc., took its toll. I couldn't help but think "what am I doing here?" When I spoke to Harold about it on the phone later, he agreed - no way did he want to be involved in promoting a goal he does not believe in.

So, what does this mean? It sounds to me like it's not just a goal they "don't believe in" (which is fine--they could not believe in it and still want to win the prize for their own purposes), but rather, a goal to which they are actively opposed, and don't think that anyone should be pursuing. I'm very curious to hear them elaborate their views, but it sounds like they're extreme Saganites. For those unfamiliar with the schools of thought, you have the von Braun model, in which vast government resources are expended to send a few government employees into space (this is Mike Griffin's approach), the Sagan model ("such a beautiful universe...don't touch it!), and the O'Neillian vision of humanity filling up the cosmos.

So when they say they don't support such a goal, does that mean they oppose it, and would take action to prevent it from happening if they could? Sure sounds like it. And they take it as a given that lunar mining is "impractical," but is that their only reason for opposing it, or do they think that it somehow violates the sanctity of the place, and disturbs what should be accessible only for pure and noble science? I'll bet that they'd prefer a lot fewer humans on earth, too.

[Via Clark Lindsey]

[Update late morning]

Commenter "Robert" says that I'm being unfair to Carl Sagan. Perhaps he's right--I was just using the formulation originally (I think) developed by Rick Tumlinson, though Sagan was definitely much more into the science and wonder of space than were von Braun or O'Neill... If anyone has a suggestion for a better representative of the "how pretty, don't touch" attitude, I'm open to suggestions.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:27 AM

Self Assembly Progress

This seems like a big deal:

The CHN (Center for High-rate Nanomanufacturing at Northeastern University) has been able to develop a novel way to assemble nanoelements (nanotubes, nanoparticles, etc.) into nanostructures and devices that enable the mass production of atomic-scale structures and will lead to the production of devices such as biosensors, batteries, memory devices and flexible electronics very quickly and efficiently and with minimal errors.

Bring it on.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:24 AM

May 23, 2008
Like Mother

Not like daughter. Alice Walker's daughter rejects gender feminism.

Sounds like she should be grateful she wasn't born a boy. Who knows how badly she'd have been treated?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:33 PM

527 Fodder

I've got to believe that this is going to be the stuff of ads this fall. Do we really want people in this party to control both the Congress and the White House?

Unfortunately, "profit" is a dirty word to John McCain as well. Let's hope some of his advisors can keep him under control.

[Update later afternoon]

Heh. Will Obama make Maxine Waters his Secretary of Energy?

[Update a few minutes later]

Geez. Maybe she'll be energy secretary no matter who wins. John McCain:

Um, I don't like obscene profits being made anywhere-and I'd be glad to look not just at the windfall profits tax-that's not what bothers me-but we should look at any incentives that we are giving to people, that or industries or corporations that are distorting the market.

And this guy calls himself a "Reagan conservative"?

I think that Mickey has it right. Republicans are suckers.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:26 AM

"Highly Educated Voters"

Some thoughts about the supposed "highly educated voters" who the media told us voted for John Kerry, and are voting (and will vote for) Barack Obama:

I invited the applicants for interviews. These PMI wannabes came off as slick and somewhat rude. I noted something among my subjects, a sense of entitlement, they all, to varying degrees, emitted a message along the lines of "Why are you bothering me with this silly interview? I am obviously brilliant. I have a degree from Columbia. I am not going to spend my whole life as you have in this stupid bureaucracy. I just need this to add to my resume. I am in a hurry."

I have two bachelors degrees and a masters. Am I highly educated? Well, I'm sufficiently educated not to let Obama pull the wool over my eyes.

Come to think of it, Obama seems to be in a hurry as well.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:46 AM

For A Friday Morning

Fifty stunning photos.

[Via Geek Press]

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:37 AM

Space Tourism Heating Up In Europe

Apparently, things are starting to get more serious over there, though the EADS/Astrium concept remains a bad joke. Rob Coppinger has a roundup from across the pond.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:24 AM

May 22, 2008
The Dem's Dilemma

A concise description of it, over at Ann Althouse' site (see second comment):

Obama would not be getting the super delegates at this stage if he were not african american.

Hillary has the popular vote. Moreover, if primaries were held again today, Hillary would greatly expand her lead. She would beat Obama by 3/4 of a million votes in Florida and she would crush him in Michigan. In addition, Obama's big lead from Illinois would shrink.

Today compared to January, what we know about Hillary has not changed. This is not true for Obama. Everything we have learned about Obama in March-May has been negative. The truth is that Obama was unknown on Super Tuesday and people voted for him because they thought he was something other than what he is. Today Obama is more known and the trend of support for him in the battleground states is downward. The super delegates were put in place to pick up on these trends. Unfortuantely, the race issue has tied their hands.

Oh, well. Sux to be them.

It's a bed they made, though. Sleep tight.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:37 PM

That Trick Never Works

But maybe this time. Peter Thiel has provided seed funding for a libertarian ocean colony.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:42 AM

Bizarro World

The comments (125 and counting) in this post over at Space Politics a few days ago have gotten progressively weirder and weirder.

Did you know that New Space is a baby boomer thing? And that it's a failed paradigm, while the standard procedures of NASA giving out cost-plus government contracts has been a total success, and will get us to the stars any year now?

Me, neither. What is "Someone" smoking? No surprise that he or she posts anonymously.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:54 AM

May 21, 2008
Lebanon Has Been Lost

Why is there no news about this? Sorry, but I think that it's more important than both the primaries and Ted Kennedy's brain tumor. I really don't understand it, particularly since it seems like a great opportunity to blame George Bush, and actually (much more rarely) be right.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:03 AM

Soylent Something

Here's an article about the current status of the lab-grown meat industry (such as it is):

...don't hold your breath while waiting for your first lab-grown roast. Despite considerable hubbub over the technology in recent months, we're still years--or, more likely, decades--away from affordable lab-grown meat. The current experiments are taking place in bioreactors that measure only a few hundred milliliters in volume, and the longest complete muscle tissues are just 2 centimeters long. Researchers are nowhere close to scaling up their production to market-ready levels, to say nothing of market-ready prices. A Dutch team's lab-grown pork, for example, would cost around $45,000 per pound--assuming they could make an entire pound of the stuff. Bioreactors may be energy-efficient when compared with cattle, but they're also expensive to design, build, and maintain. They also require highly skilled personnel to manage, in order to preserve aseptic conditions.
Furthermore, manufactured meat promises to replicate only the taste and texture of processed meat; as far as we are from enjoying lab-grown hamburger, we're even further from perfecting man-made rib-eyes. So even if meat labs did become viable commercial enterprises, the naturally raised meat industry would hardly vanish.

I think that this is a little too pessimistic. Considering where we've gone with realistic computer graphics based on fractals, I wouldn't count out the possibility of a nicely marbled filet being produced in the lab. But this is what I found interesting, in a linked article at the New York Times, bewailing how much meat we eat:

Americans are downing close to 200 pounds of meat, poultry and fish per capita per year (dairy and eggs are separate, and hardly insignificant), an increase of 50 pounds per person from 50 years ago. We each consume something like 110 grams of protein a day, about twice the federal government's recommended allowance; of that, about 75 grams come from animal protein. (The recommended level is itself considered by many dietary experts to be higher than it needs to be.) It's likely that most of us would do just fine on around 30 grams of protein a day, virtually all of it from plant sources.

What's the point of the first sentence? Were the 1950s the epitome of American health? Yes, people were eating less meat, and a lot more processed high-glycemic carbs (noodle casseroles, mashed potatoes, lots of sugary dishes--Lileks can tell you all about it). It's my parents diet (and it was mine as a child). They were both overweight, and both died of heart attacks fairly young (my father was eight years younger than me when he had his first, and if I live two more years I'll outlive him). I'm in relatively good coronary health, with no known problems. It's the diet of our grandparents that we should be emulating, not our parents (speaking to the boomers here).

And since when did the federal government become a nutrition expert? They food pyramid is a bad joke, in terms of health, with far too little protein, and too many carbs. The author of the article blithely states protein requirements as though they are established, objective fact.

It could be that some people are eating too much meat, but I'll bet that a lot more are eating too much sugar, white rice and refined flour. The interesting thing is that it's not meat and fat per se that seems to increase cholesterol levels (assuming that high cholesterol is really a problem, and not just a symptom), but the combination of it with an overabundance of carbs. That's what Atkins is all about (though I think he took it too far).

Anyway, I find it annoying to see this stuff promulgated as though it's indisputable, when in fact it is in constant dispute, and I think that those disputing it have the better of the argument. But if we do need more meat, I hope that we can in fact get the factories going, for both cost and ethical reasons.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:23 AM

May 20, 2008
Practice What You Preach

I'm sorry to hear about Senator Kennedy's bad news, and wish him and his family the best, but I and Dr. Hsieh have a question for him:

I wonder which country with morally superior "universal health care" he'll go to for his treatment? Will it be Canada, the UK, or Cuba?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:38 PM

Soyuz Question

Anyone out there know what they're using for comm these days? Do they have a TDRSS system as part of the ISS operations agreement? Or something else? Or both?

[Update about 1 PM EDT]

Via an email from Jim Oberg:

Mir used to have a TDRSS-like system called 'Luch', and a dish antenna capable of communicating with the GEO relay satellite is installed on the Service Module now linked to ISS.

But it's never worked. The old system broke down and wasn't replaced in the 1990's. There are one or two payloads already built, at the Reshetnev plant in Krasnoyarsk, but they won't deliver them until the Russian Space Agency pays cash -- and by now, their components have probably exceed their warranties anyway.

The Russians have a voice relay capability through the NASA TDRSS, but can't relay TV or telemetry, so they conduct how-criticality operations such as dockings or spacewalks only when passing over Russian ground sites. They don't even have ocean-going tracking ships any more -- all sold for scrap [one is in drydock as a museum].

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:18 AM

Lunar Property Rights

The current state of play, according to Glenn Reynolds. There was a piece on the subject in Sunday's Boston Globe as well. I wish that Congress would do something about this. It would have a lot bigger effect in the long run than deciding how much to underfund a failed Constellation concept.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:54 AM

The Zero-Sum Candidate

Both Barack and Michelle Obama have a collectivist mentality:

Jeff Dobbs, a little while back, saw Michelle Obama's statement that "The truth is, in order to get things like universal health care and a revamped education system, then someone is going to have to give up a piece of their pie so that someone else can have more."

...Barack Obama today: "We can't drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times ... and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK," Obama said.

Would an Obama Administration really mean an end to "eating as much as we want?"

There is an implicit assumption here that, in order for one person (or country) to have more, another must thereby have less. This is the view of a person who views wealth not as something that is created, but something that simply exists, and the only important issue is how to divvy it up. But no one in Zimbabwe is starving because I took food away from them and ate it myself. They are starving in former Rhodesia, and in North Korea, and other places, because the governments there, in thrall to greed and the poisonous ideology of collectivism, have destroyed the agricultural sector.

What are the Obamas going to take away from us to give to someone else? And how will they decide from whom to take it, and to whom to give it? And what means will they choose to do so?

And which countries' approval are we seeking? Egypt, to whom we give billions a year in aid? France? Germany? The Europeans seemed to be well fed, last time I checked.

My mother, who used to tell me to clean my plate in the sixties because there were children starving in China, had her mother tell her to clean her plate during the depression because there were children starving in Europe. Who is it that Obama is asking (telling?) us to clean our plates (or better yet, put less on them) for? Will he set up rationing? Will Michelle be in charge of the rationing board and pie distribution?

Hungry stomachs want to know, before November.

The sad thing, of course, is that our agricultural policies, which actually increase the cost of our food (though we're wealthy enough to afford it, at least until the Obamas take over), are also complicit in destroying the agricultural sector of many third-world countries, by providing foreign aid in the form of subsidized grain and depressing the price of food there, making farming a non-viable economic activity. What will Barack do about that?

[Update a few minutes later]

This doesn't speak so much to their collectivism, but Charlotte Hays asks:

I loved Obama telling us how how "unacceptable" and "low class" it would be for us to to mention his wife's anti-American remarks. How's he gonna stop us? (I certainly hope he will have a tougher approach when negotiating with dictators!) And, come to think of it, this isn't the first time Obama has said that anti-American "snippets" by a close associate were taken out of context. We get to decide if we think this is relevant, not the candidate.

Do we really want to be bossed around by these arrogant people and their double standards for four years?

[Update in the afternoon]

Rachel Lucas and her commenters aren't very impressed by Obama's Calvin-ball campaign rules.

So I just want to know what happens if Republican's aren't "careful." Is he gonna give them karate? Write a strongly worded letter of disapproval?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:46 AM

Crossing Their Fingers

It looks like NASA's not going to abandon the ISS. That seems sensible to me.

I'd like to know where they get the 1/124 number for probability of having to evacuate. But it makes sense, given that they're already down at least one (and actually, more like two or three) level in the fault tree, that you can accept a lower reliability for the lifeboat. Lifeboats, after all, have traditionally been pretty iffy propositions. It's not reasonable to demand high reliability of them. That was one of the complaints that I used to have when working on CERV--that the requirements were overspecified for something that was only for use in an emergency.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:39 AM

Irony At Epcot

A travelogue by Lileks:

The plot was hugely ironical: Timon and Roomba or whatever the warthog is named were building a resort in the jungle, and damning a stream to create a water feature. Simba showed up to demonstrate the error of their ways. The hilarity of any manifestation of the Disneyverse criticizing an artificial lake to build a resort goes without saying. And it did go without saying, of course. Simba said that Timon and Roomba or whatever were acting like another creature that did not behave in tune with nature, and that creature was . . . man.

BOO HISS, I guess. Jaysus, I tire of this. Big evil stupid man had done many stupid evil bad things, like pile abandoned cars in the river, dump chemicals into blue streams, and build factories that vomited great dark clouds into the sky. Like the People's State Lead Paint and Licensed Mickey Merchandise Factory in Shanghai Province, perhaps? Simba gave us a lecture about materialism and how it hurt the earth - cue the shot of trees actually being chopped down, and I'm surprised the sap didn't spurt like blood in a Peckinpah movie - and other horrors, like forests on fire because . . . well, because it was National Toss Glowing Coals Out the Car Window Month, I guess. I swear the footage all came from the mid-70s; it was grainy and cracked and the cars were all late-60s models. Because I'm pretty sure we're not dumping cars into the rivers as a matter of course any more. You're welcome to try to leave your car on the riverbank and see how that turns out for you.

At the end Timon and Phoomba decided to open a green resort, and everything's hakuna Montana.

Follow the link for the rest of the story.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:13 AM

May 19, 2008
One Of The (Many) Reasons

...that Obama is unlikely to win. Michael Weiss writes extensively about his Iraq minefield:

...there is every expectation that Obama will have his bluff called sooner or later. Adolph Reed, a prominent black leftist intellectual who teaches political science at the University of Pennsylvania, published a fascinating and undervalued essay in current issue of The Progressive magazine. It is titled "Obama No." Professor Reed has followed the resistible rise of this young Chicago politico for quite some time, and he never liked what he saw:

Obama's style of being all things to all people threatens to melt under the inescapable spotlight of a national campaign against a Republican. It's like what brings on the downfall of really successful con artists: They get themselves onto a stage that's so big that they can't hide their contradictions anymore, and everyone finds out about the different stories they've told different people.
Again, for various reasons, this is not the kind of thing that Hillary! was able to use against Obama, but it will be devastating to him in the fall.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:46 PM

Sweet Deal

If I were George Bush, and Congress overrode my veto of the criminally outrageous agriculture bill, I'd take Tim Carney's suggestion, and have the Justice Department start investigating all those who vote to override for bribery. Republicans and Democrats alike.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:39 AM

Math Is Hard

...as Barbie used to say. Well, actually, it's not that it's hard, but that women just aren't as into it as men are.

The tone of the article is amusing, because the author clearly knows that she is reporting politically incorrect (though obvious to most thinking, observant people) results, and seems uncomfortable with it. So kudos to her for doing it anyway. And of course the feminist establishment is extremely threatened by the notion that there is any cause of disparity between men and women that cannot be attributed to evil patriarchal social conditioning and rampant sexist discrimination. To the point at which they of course have to completely misstate the argument in order to knock down the illogical straw man:

Rosalind Chait Barnett, at the Women's Studies Research Center at Brandeis, says that boys and girls are not, at root, different enough for such clear sorting to be seen as a matter of "choice."

"The data is quite clear," she says. "On anything you point to, there is so much variation within each gender that you have to get rid of this idea that 'men are like this, women are like that.' "

Well, the data may be clear, but the logic is severely flawed (I'll refrain from noting that it may be because it's coming from a woman...).

Even if there is tremendous variation among individuals within genders (which there clearly is) it doesn't follow that there won't be average differences in traits between genders. For instance, when it comes to math, what Larry Summers noted (and lost his job over after some of the mature, rational, scientific women present got the vapors and had to hie to their fainting couches) was that in fact men have a much greater standard deviation than women. They have both more geniuses, and more morons, when it comes to higher mathematics, whereas women have more of a tendency to stay near the mean. And there are brilliant (individual) woman mathematicians and hard scientists. But that doesn't mean that we can therefore conclude that there are no statistical differences in these traits between men and women. And the fact that there are allows us to draw no conclusions about any particular man or woman (if I call Ms. Barnett illogical, it is because she conveys illogic, and has nothing to do with her genital configuration.) It remains perfectly reasonable, on a statistical basis, to make some broad statements about the genders ("men are like this and women are like that") without having to infer that every man is like this and every woman is like that.

This is the general problem with discussions of gender and race differences, and why books like The Bell Curve are such anathema, and draw down such fury from the left. If one views people as individuals, then it doesn't really matter whether or not blacks, on average, have a lower (or for that matter, higher) IQ than whites do. You still have to test each individual's IQ and treat them as an individual.

But leftists, hating individualism, and being addicted to group and collective rights, can't conceive that such research wouldn't or shouldn't be translated into some attempt at social policy making. Similarly, if women's choices in career really are choices, and not a result of false consciousness, then they won't be able to get as much support for implementing their social engineering nostrums.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:18 AM

Hypocrite

One of the reasons that Obama has done so well is that Hillary has never really brought out the big guns against him, something that the McCain campaigns and the 527s will have no compunction about doing in the fall. His campaign (at least up to the point of the Reverend Wright controversy) was a hothouse plant, and it's likely to wilt when put out in the wild after the convention.

And why didn't Hillary hit him where it really hurts (as opposed to idiotic things like kindergarten essays)? Because those big guns are likely to backfire on her. Here's an example:

In her campaign for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination, Clinton has said little about her experiences in the tumultuous late 1960s and early 1970s, including her involvement with student protests and her brief internship at the law firm, Treuhaft, Walker and Burnstein. She has said she worked on a child custody case, although former partners recall her likely involvement in conscientious objector cases and a legal challenge to a university loyalty oath.

But her decision to target Obama's radical connections has spurred criticism from some former protest movement leaders who say she has opened her own associations to scrutiny.

"The very things she's accusing Barack of could be said of her with much greater evidence," said Tom Hayden, a leading anti-Vietnam War activist, author and self-described friend of the Clintons.

Next thing you know, she'll be accusing him of shady real-estate deals.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:04 AM

On The Radio

I'll be on The Space Show on Sunday afternoon at noon to 1:30 PM PDT, talking about space and politics, and whatever.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:46 AM

Doomsday Has Been Postponed, Part Whatever

More thoughts on "peak oil," and what I'll call the "peak oil constant," which seems to be twenty or thirty years (i.e., it's always predicted to be that far in the future).

[Update mid afternoon]

Manzi has a follow up, in response to a Georgetown professor. Bottom line:

What if we had reacted to the predictions throughout the 1970s and 80s that we would reach peak oil in about 2000? Do you think that some of these proposed changes would have slowed economic growth and prevented the world from being in the current position of paying an ever-dwindling share of total output for oil? What other difficult-to-anticipate changes might some these interventions have had? Could the idea of purposely restructuring the transportation, housing, and agricultural sectors of the U.S. economy based on a prediction for an event that we have proven to be very bad at predicting - and for which the world's leading experts refuse to provide anything other than very broad guidance - induce a sense of humility? It does in me.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:34 AM

Free-Market Health Insurance

An FAQ. All of the campaigns should read it, though I suspect the very concept is anathema to both Senators Clinton and Obama.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:29 AM

Lack Of Confidence

Wow.

NASA is actually considering abandoning ISS until they can resolve the safety issues surrounding the Soyuz currently docked there (and in general).

This whole fiasco reveals a fundamental design (in fact conceptual) flaw of the station from the beginning (one that was shared by the Shuttle)--a lack of redundancy and resiliency. NASA had the hubris to think that they could design and build a single vehicle type that could not only have the flexibility to satisfy all of the nation's (and much of the world's) needs for transport to and from space, but do so with confidence that it would never have cause to shut down (and remove our ability to access LEO). They learned the foolishness of this notion in 1986, with the Challenger loss.

Similarly, they decided to build a manned space station, that would be all things to all people--microgravity researchers, earth observations, transportation node, hotel--because they didn't think that they could afford more than one, and so they have no resiliency in their orbital facilities, either. If something goes wrong with the station, everyone has to abandon it, with nowhere to go except back to earth.

Having multiple stations co-orbiting, with an in-space crew transport vehicle (which could serve as a true lifeboat) was never considered, though the cost wouldn't necessarily have been that much higher had it been planned that way from the beginning (there would have been economies of scale by building multiple facilities from a single basic design). That would have been true orbital infrastructure.

Instead, we have a single fragile (and ridiculously expensive) space station supported by a single fragile (and ridiculously expensive) launch system, with only the Russian Soyuz as a backup. And because there is no place nearby to go, if there's a problem on the station, everyone has to come home, and the crew size is thus limited by the size of the "lifeboat," (which is a "lifeboat" only in the sense that it is relied on for life--in actuality, it's much more than that. It's as if the "lifeboats" of the Titanic had to be capable of delivering their passengers all the way to New York or Southampton).

And now we can't trust the backup, and we have no lifeboat at all.

Now that the ISS is almost complete, it is capable of supporting the Shuttle orbiter on orbit for much longer periods of time by providing power, so its orbital lifetime is no longer constrained by fuel cell capacity. But it's still not practical to leave an orbiter there full time, because a) with only three left, we don't have a big enough fleet to do so without impacting turnaround time for the others and b) we're not sure how long it's capable of staying safely without (say) freezing tires or causing other problems, because the vehicle wasn't designed for indefinite duration in space.

So as a result of flawed decisions made decades ago, NASA is in a real quandary. They can leave the crew up there, and cross their fingers that a) nothing goes wrong that requires an emergency return and b) that if the return is required, the Soyuz will work properly. Or they can abandon the station until they resolve the Soyuz issues (something over which they have absolutely no control, and will have to trust the Russians).

Sucks to be them.

[Update a few minutes later]

Not that it solves this immediate problem, but Flight Global has a conceptual rendering of a European crew transportation system (presumably based on the ATV) that could (in theory) be available within a decade.

[Another update]

Here's more on ATV evolution, over at today's issue of The Space Review.

[One more thought, at 11 AM EDT]

NASA doesn't seem to have learned the lesson of Shuttle and ISS, because Constellation has exactly the same problem--a single vehicle type for each phase of the mission. If Altair is grounded, we can't land on the moon. If the EDS has problems, we can't get into a trans-lunar orbit. If something goes wrong with Orion, or Ares, the program is grounded. Why aren't there Congressional hearings, or language in an authorization bill, about that?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:53 AM

May 18, 2008
Busy Weekend

Slow posting because I'm finishing up painting and starting a new project--reguttering the front where we removed the gutters over the garage, and putting them in on the rest of the front of the house where there was never any, but now we have new landscaping to protect from the rainy season which starts in a couple weeks.

The challenge is that it turns out that the roof fascia board slopes in the direction opposite the one that I want it to in order to put one of the down spouts at the end of the house. In fact, the whole house seems tilted slightly toward the east three inches or so end to end (probably settling toward the intracoastal, since it was built on fill). So it works fine for the east spout, but not so much for the west one. Which means an ugly angle on the westward side to force the water to run uphill, so to speak. Still not sure what to do about that one, but now I know why the old gutter never worked very well...

The other joyous part of the adventure is that the fascia isn't vertical, as the hangars expect--it's seventeen degrees off with a slight overhang. So I get to cut a bunch of wedges from two-by-four to make up the difference. Which is where our new Craftsman double-bevel mitre saw, that we got for crown and base molding installation (which I haven't started yet) will come in handy.

I'll also add that laser levelers are well worth having. It would have been a real PITA to figure this out with a standard bubble and tacked string.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:02 PM

Better Than The Book?

Frederica Mathewes-Green thinks that Prince Caspian is a much better film than a book. There is also a list of other films for which many think this the case.

But doesn't it matter (and quite a lot) whether one reads the book, or sees the movie first? If you like either a book or a movie when you first experience it, it seems more likely to me that you'll be disappointed when you do the other, because it may not meet your expectations, or have the features that you liked.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:31 AM

May 17, 2008
"Growing" In Office

Iowahawk has a trip through time for one Republican Congressman. Too bad it isn't only one.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:18 PM

Authorizing NASA

There's a lot of good discussion (and some not-so-good discussion) of the NASA Authorization bill over at Space Politics, here, here and here. I haven't read the whole thing, and frankly, it's hard for me to get motivated to invest much time or thought in it, because it's just an authorization bill. Most of the time, they never even get passed, and even when they do, they're pretty meaningless, because the only one that really counts is the appropriations bill, where the money gets handed out. Authorization, when it exists at all, simply serves as a sense of the Congress (and more generally, just as a sense of the relevant Congressional committee). But to that degree, it does provide a useful insight into where appropriations might lead, and potential future policy, particularly in the next administration.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:53 PM

May 16, 2008
Are Anti-Jaywalking Laws Fascist?

Let me start by saying I don't know the answer to the question in the post title, but it is one of the hallmarks of a nanny state. Interestingly, though, while it's an east-coast, west-coast thing, it's the reverse of the usual stereotype, in which the westerners are anarchist cowboys, and the easterners civilized obeyers of the rules. Let me explain.

Growing up in southeast Michigan, I remember understanding the term "jaywalking," but only because someone explained it to me after I heard the term, not because I personally had any experience with it. Or rather, not because I had any personal experience with it in terms of it being illegal, and the law being enforced. I walked across a street when it seemed safe to do so, regardless of distance from lights, or their chromatic condition. And no one ever said boo about it, let alone the law enforcement authorities. I always considered the "Walk" and "Don't Walk" signs advisories, rather than commands (and I should add that I like the new ones that have a countdown clock telling you how many seconds until it's going to change, so you can judge whether you have time to start across). This was true in both Flint, the city in which I was raised, and Ann Arbor, where I spent three and a half years at school.

Being brought up in such an environment, I was surprised when I moved to southern California, and was informed by the locals that the gendarmes took illegal pedestrian street crossing seriously (i.e., they actually gave out tickets for it if, for instance, you crossed the street within some specified distance of a traffic signal, but didn't use the crosswalk). I heard many tales from the locals of such ticketry, and accordingly, I restrained my chicken-like urges to cross the road where and when I pleased (traffic permitting, of course). But like red arrows for left turns, when there was no oncoming traffic, I bridled at it, thinking it idiotic, and being treated like a child.

It got to the point that one of the reasons that I looked forward to business trips back east (generally, in my case, DC) was that I would have the freedom to cross the street if it was safe, anywhere and anywhen I wanted, without first having to check for the gestapo.

Anyway, Tigerhawk had a (to him) disturbing visit to the left coast (Seattle) and was shocked at the level of conformity and groupthink in this supposedly hip and counter-cultural town:

I walked down the hill and up again all before about 7 am. The streets were essentially empty of cars, so being an Easterner I skipped merrily along with little regard for the status of the pedestrian Walk/Don't Walk signs.

Then I noticed that the few other peds were just standing there waiting for the "Walk" signal to come on even when there was not a car in sight. Not surprisingly, they all looked at me like I was a middle-aged feminist at an Obama rally, so I also stopped violating the crosswalk lights.

When I landed I reported all of this to a friend of mine who claims to hate Seattle -- how can anybody actually hate Seattle? -- and she said "Of course, Seattle is basically just a suburb of Canada."

Like that explained it. Although it sort of does.

Anyway, other than in Washington, DC -- which back in the day raised money by assigning cops in unmarked clothes to write jay-walking tickets -- I've always thought of crosswalk signals as purely advisory. Not the command "Don't Walk," but more like "probably not a good idea to walk, because the cars have a green light." That is certainly the rule in any city in which I have lived or worked, including both New York and Chicago. In Seattle, though, pedestrians comply with crosswalk signals almost to the extent that motorists obey traffic lights. You know, they wait for the light to change even when there is neither a car nor a cop in sight. It is bizarre, and really quite un-American.

Well, the "suburb-of-Canada" thing doesn't explain the attitude in southern California. But it is un-American. A good friend of mine (who has been in LA for the past thirty years or so) lived in Germany for quite a few years back in the seventies, and acquired a wife and step-daughter there. He described the Germans (including his wife and step-daughter) as being hyperobediant to the law, including jaywalking laws, and they would never think of going without permission from the traffic signal, or outside of a cross-walk. At the time I attributed it to being German, but one of Tigerhawk's commenters notes that the Swiss are similar (though he didn't say whether it was the French, Italian or German Swiss).

Is such strict cultural regimentation in itself fascist? No. In fact, I think that in general, respect for the law is obviously a good thing. But sometimes, as Dickens put into the mouth of his character, "the law is a ass." Like the rules of bureaucracy, the laws are meant to protect people with poor judgment (and others who might be affected by dumb decisions) by constraining their behavior. Some foolish people might misjudge traffic, and unthinkingly cross the street against the light, or in the absence of a light, and get hit? Make it illegal. Problem solved. No judgment required. Just follow the rules.

In fact, in LA, I suspect that it has the unintended consequence of actually causing more accidents, exactly because it removes pressure for people to think before acting. Children are taught in school to always use a crosswalk, because in a crosswalk, you see, the pedestrian has the right of way, and cars aren't allowed to enter it while they're in it. And in fact, when you step into an unsignaled crosswalk in LA County, traffic will generally (note the word) stop for you. It's the law, and the culture.

Which can breed a dangerous complacency. That the crosswalk doesn't contain a force shield to actually prevent cars from crossing it while a pedestrian is in it, and that the law doesn't involve suspension of the very real physical law of momentum or decrease the stopping distance of trucks, isn't taught, apparently. I haven't seen the statistics, but I'll bet that a lot more people (particularly California natives) are injured and killed in crosswalks, where they have a false sense of safety, than in the "unsafe" areas where they actually have to look both ways and think before crossing the highway. Particularly because they not only have to look out for traffic, but police with nothing better to do than hand out jaywalking tickets.

Too much unthinking respect for the law isn't fascistic per se, but it provides a fertile breeding ground for someone with charisma who comes along with grand ideas for new laws which, of course, because they are laws, must be obeyed. Thus when it became the law for Germans to turn in the Jews, what choice did they have? It wasn't after all, their decision. It was the law.

But of course, while LA and Seattle are the west (about as far as you can go west in the lower forty eight and remain above water), they're not the wild west. They're in fact (with San Francisco) the bluest of the blue states, chock full of so-called "progressives." So it's not surprising at all, per Jonah's thesis, that they are much more culturally attuned to obeying laws, even senseless ones, and all in favor of more. For the children.

OK, now for the challenging part. How to fit the traffic anarchists of New York City (cue Dustin Hoffman, "I'm walking here!") into the thesis?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:44 PM

"The Real Iraq"

Michael Totten reviews Michael Yon's book:

Iraq is a tragic, unhappy, and often disturbing place, but it's less sinister and frightening up close than it is from a distance. That's because it's a country striving for normality, whose normal aspects rarely make their way into media reports that highlight violence, mayhem, and failure. On TV, Iraq looks like a nation of masked, gun-toting fanatics, but in person, one finds friendliness, solidarity, and reasonableness amid the chaos. "Just because Iraqis have 'Allahu Akbar' on their flag," Yon writes, "doesn't mean they're going to blow up the World Trade Center any more than 'In God We Trust' means we're going to attack Communist China." "Iraq does not hate America," he insists. "If they hated us, I'd be urging an immediate troop withdrawal, because there would be no hope of winning this war. If the Iraqis hated us, we would be fighting the Iraqi Police and the Iraqi Army. Instead, we're fighting alongside them."

Yon convincingly argues that the U.S. is winning in Iraq, at least for the moment. "The enemy learned that our people and the Iraqi forces would close in and kill them if they dared stand their ground. This is important: an enemy forced to choose between dying or hiding inevitably loses legitimacy. Legitimacy is essential. Men who must always either run or die are no longer an army and are not going to found a caliphate." The outcome, though, is still in doubt. If Petraeus's surge strategy fails or is prematurely short-circuited by Congress, the American and Iraqi forces will almost certainly lose. "Maybe creating a powerful democracy in the Middle East was a foolish reason to go to war," Yon concludes. "Maybe it was never the reason we went to war. But it is within our grasp now and nearly all the hardest work has been done." Which makes the present moment the moment of truth in Iraq.

Barack Obama might productively read it.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:11 PM

And In Plenty Of Time For Christmas

Hey, Father's Day is coming up, too. This isn't new, but it's the first time I'd come across it. Behold, the complete ACME catalog. Considering the election coming up, I could use the anti-nightmare machine. And the atom re-arranger sounds like a proto-form of nanotech and molecular assemblers.

I wonder if they have a gift registry?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:13 PM

Science News You Can Use

The neurology of org@sms. Mostly safe for work.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:59 AM

Crossing The Rubicon

Thomas James writes that NASA is (with little fanfare) disposing of the tooling to build Shuttle Orbiters.

This doesn't make it impossible to build new ones--the blueprints probably remain available, and new tooling could be built in theory, but it dramatically raises the (already ridiculously high) costs of building any replacement vehicles. Even if we were to continue to fly the Shuttle, we will do so with a three-vehicle fleet, so we would never get a flight rate higher than the current one (which is the highest it's been this year since we lost Columbia). Until we lost another one, anyway.

This really is a point of no return.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:42 AM

May 15, 2008
Something That Gene Kranz Got Right

"We became our own customers."

I don't understand why he doesn't see that that's exactly the problem with ESAS.

[Update in the afternoon--sorry, I've been housepainting again, in a race against the approaching summer, when it will be too blasted hot in southern Florida for such things]

I recall that Max Hunter said something very similar, I would guess about twenty years ago at a small workshop on launch vehicle design issues that I attended. He said that the big difference between NACA and NASA was that the former saw industry as its customer, whereas NASA saw it as (at best) a supplier. This was a consequence of going from a pure R&D agency to one with an operational mission (put a man on the moon). It has never recovered.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:38 AM

Why Blacks Should Be Skeptical

...of Obama. Cinque Henderson makes the case:

It's worth remembering that the majority of blacks still think O.J. Simpson is innocent. And, in times like these, when a black man is out front in the public eye, black people feel both proud and vulnerable and, as a result, scour the earth for evidence of racists plotting to bring him down, like an advance team ready to sound an alarm. Barack needed only a gesture, a quick sneer or nod in the direction of the Clintons' hidden racism to avail himself of the twisted love that rescued O.J. and others like him and to smooth his path to victory, and, therefore, to salvage his candidacy. After Donna Brazile and James Clyburn started to cry racism, Barack was repeatedly asked his thoughts. He declined to answer, allowing the charge to grow for days (in sharp contrast to how he leapt to Joe Biden's defense a month earlier). But, while he remained silent about the allegations of racism, he gave speeches across South Carolina that warned against being "hoodwinked" and "bamboozled" by the Clintons. His use of the phrase is resonant. It comes from a scene in Malcolm X, where Denzel Washington warns black people about the hidden evils of "the White Man" masquerading as a smiling politician: "Every election year, these politicians are sent up here to pacify us," he says. "You've been hoodwinked. Bamboozled."

By uttering this famous phrase, Obama told his black audience everything it needed to know. He was helping to convince blacks that the first two-term Democratic president in 50 years, a man referred to as the first black president, is in fact a secret racist. As soon as I heard that Obama had quoted from Malcolm X like this, I knew that Obama would win South Carolina by a massive margin.

Read all.

[Update a few minutes later]

Ruben Navarette, Jr. helpfully explains to us white folks that if we don't vote for the Messiah, it can only be because we are racist:

Some want to know why it isn't racist when 70 percent of African-Americans vote for Obama but it is when 70 percent of whites vote against him.

The answer has to do with history. Over the decades, black Americans have had plenty of opportunities to vote for white people for president. And they have done so. But this is the first time that white Americans have a chance to vote for an African-American with a shot at the presidency. And what are they doing?

Many are responding quite well. Obama won the votes of many, to borrow a phrase, "hardworking white Americans," in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska and Wyoming. But, elsewhere, as Obama said in a recent interview, people may need to get their head around the concept of an African-American even seeking the presidency, let alone winning it.

I guess some of us just aren't responding as "well." But we can't have legitimate reasons to not vote for him, because obviously, there are none. We just can't stand the thought of a darkie in the White House.

Despite the fact that many who won't vote for Obama would have no problem doing so for Colin Powell, or Condi Rice, or Michael Steele, or J. C. Watts. But then, maybe they're not authentic black folk.

This reminds me of the nineties, when I was told by the left that I didn't like Hillary because she was a "strong woman," and I was threatened by that. By a "strong woman," did they mean like Maggie Thatcher? Or Jeanne Kirkpatrick? Or any other number of women who I'd have been happy to vote for, because they weren't power-hungry harridans who wanted to run my life for me? No, it could only be sexism.

As I've said in the past, when John McCain wins the election, it will be because the nation is either racist, or sexist, or (if by some miracle they're both on the ticket), both.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:37 AM

May 14, 2008
Don't Know Much About Space Policy

Gregg Easterbrook thinks that NASA should be saving the planet from errant asteroids, instead of building a moon base. He can't avoid the usual straw man, of course, which makes much of the rest of his whining about moon bases suspect:

As anyone with an aerospace engineering background well knows, stopping at the moon, as Bush was suggesting, actually would be an impediment to Mars travel, because huge amounts of fuel would be wasted landing on the moon and then blasting off again.

Bush only "suggested" that to people who miss the point of the program. No one is proposing that every, or even any, mission to Mars touch base on the moon before going on to the Red Planet. The point was that the moon might be a useful resource for making Mars missions more cost effective, particularly if we can find water there, and deliver it as propellant to some staging point, such as L-1, which isn't particularly out of the way en route to Mars. In addition, learning how to build a base on the moon, only three days away, is valuable experience to wring the bugs out of a Martian base, which is months away, despite the different environments.

But ignoring that, the real problem is that he doesn't seem to understand NASA's role:

After the presentation, NASA's administrator, Michael Griffin, came into the room. I asked him why there had been no discussion of space rocks. He said, "We don't make up our goals. Congress has not instructed us to provide Earth defense. I administer the policy set by Congress and the White House, and that policy calls for a focus on return to the moon. Congress and the White House do not ask me what I think." I asked what NASA's priorities would be if he did set the goals. "The same. Our priorities are correct now," he answered. "We are on the right path. We need to go back to the moon. We don't need a near-Earth-objects program." In a public address about a month later, Griffin said that the moon-base plan was "the finest policy framework for United States civil space activities that I have seen in 40 years."

Actually, Congress has asked NASA to pay more attention to space rocks. In 2005, Congress instructed the agency to mount a sophisticated search of the proximate heavens for asteroids and comets, specifically requesting that NASA locate all near-Earth objects 140 meters or larger that are less than 1.3 astronomical units from the sun--roughly out to the orbit of Mars. Last year, NASA gave Congress its reply: an advanced search of the sort Congress was requesting would cost about $1 billion, and the agency had no intention of diverting funds from existing projects, especially the moon-base initiative.

Now, I disagree with Mike that we don't need an NEO program--I think we do. But unlike Gregg, I wouldn't put NASA in charge of it. And if Congress wants to fund NASA to look for space rocks, it's going to have to tell NASA not to do the other things that it wants to do, or fund it. Also, this was a little verbal gymnastics on Gregg's part. Mike said that Congress had not instructed NASA to defend the earth, which is true, and the fact that they asked NASA to look for hazardous objects doesn't change that fact in any way, despite his sleight-of-hand at the keyboard. Looking for objects is one thing--actually physically manipulating them is a different thing entirely. It's like the difference between the CIA and the military. The former provides intelligence, the latter acts on it.

The Space Act (almost fifty years old now) does not grant NASA the responsibility to protect the planet, even with subsequent amendments. It is simply not its job. Moreover, no federal agency has that job, and as Gregg points out, if the US military were to take it on, there would be widespread suspicion on the part of the rest of the planet, and it would open us up to tremendous liability if something went wrong (not that there would necessarily be any lawyers around to care).

And is it really the job of the military? Again, as Gregg points out, this is a natural problem, not an enemy. If ET, or Marvin the Martian presented a threat, it would make sense to get the Air Force (or if we had one, Space Force) involved, because that is a willful enemy to be engaged, which is what we have a military for.

But as I've written before (six years ago--geez, where does the time go?), the only historical analogue (at least in the US) we have for planetary defense is the management of flooding by the Army Corps of Engineers. This is a predictable (though not as predictable as an asteroid or comet strike) natural disaster, at least statistically, and one that can be managed by building dams, which is largely what they do.

Now, I'm not proposing that the ACE be put in charge of defending the planet, but that thought isn't much more frightening than putting NASA in charge of it. Yes, Gregg, we could lobby to get Congress to amend the Space Act to put it in the agency's portfolio, but do you really think that would be a good idea? NASA is fifty years old this year, and bureaucratically, it acts much older than that. You don't want to take an existing agency, with too much on its plate, and too little resources with which to do it (and yes, much of what it's doing it shouldn't be doing, but that's a different discussion) and give it such an important, even existential task. It worked fine in the sixties, because it was a young, new agency with a focus on a single goal (though it managed to accomplish a lot of other things along the way in terms of planetary exploration--Tom Paine once told me that there was so much going on during Apollo that NASA did a lot of great things that it didn't even know it was doing).

No.

I've often said that if the president really thought that the VSE was important, he would have taken a policy lead from the Strategic Missile Defense program in the eighties, in which an entirely new entity was established to carry it out (SDIO, now BMDO), because it would otherwise get bogged down in blue-suit politics in the Air Force.

I agree that we should be doing much more about this threat than we are, but just because NASA is ostensibly a space agency doesn't mean that they should be in charge of it. I would establish a planetary defense agency, which had that as its sole charter. It might ask for (and occasionally get) cooperation from NASA, but it would do the same with the Air Force, and it would put out contracts to the private sector, and it would coordinate with COPUOS and encourage other nations to establish such entities to enter into cooperative agreements. If you ask NASA to do it, it will just become one more boondoggle, or it will get buried in the agency's other priorities. Either way, if it's important, you don't want a sclerotic agency, long past its sell-by date, to be in charge.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:17 PM

"Don't Freak Out"

Some advice for John McCain, from Bjorn Lomborg.

I expect the ad hominem attacks on Mr. Lomborg to commence shortly.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:11 PM

Time To Give It Up

So sayeth Hillary:

Frankly, there's just no way around the stark mathematics of the situation: Inconvenience(Me) = 1.0 * Accident(You). It is an inescapable statistical fact, as proven over and over again by my loyal team of Karma accountants -- including Sid Blumenthal, Howard Wolfson, and Harold Ickes. Contrary to what some people say, my boys did not learn untraceable poisoning techniques from the Russians. In fact, it was the other way around. And let's face it: even if Senator Obama receives prompt medical attention for his eventual post-nomination accident, voters in the general election will be repulsed by his grotesque and permanent Dioxin scarring. Once again, Hillary Time.

So today Senator Obama faces a clear choice: (a) stay in the campaign through the convention, wasting millions of dollars on primary advertising and expensive food tasters, or (b) withdraw immediately and graciously transfer his war chest to the only remaining Democratic candidate capable of appealing to hard-working white voters, such as Hillary Rodham Clinton. Same outcome either way, with the possible exception of body count.

I don't know how Burge finds these scoops.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:49 AM

D'oh!

Does Obama think that Afghans are Arabs? Or that they speak Arabic?

Was he speaking off the cuff, or was this a prepared speech that others reviewed? If the latter, it makes one wonder about the quality of his foreign policy advisors.

I guess you just can't get good help these days.

Ed Morrisey points out another problem:

The Afghans need to establish the proper infrastructure first before massively committing to acceptable crops, and they need to start with reliable roads. However, they cannot even do that until the security situation improves, as the constant attacks by the Taliban and al-Qaeda make it impossible to build the necessary roads, electrical distribution, and refrigeration systems the Afghans require. What would agricultural experts do in Afghanistan while those issues remain unresolved?

Obama's rhetoric calls into question whether he has any real knowledge of the issues in either Iraq or Afghanistan in any depth beyond that of the latest MoveOn talking points.

Not much question in my mind.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:59 AM

Etymology Question

When did "kick-up" become an adjective?

I ask because I get a lot of porn spam using it that way in the subject line (e.g., "kick-up video of Mariah Carey").

Do people who are into this stuff commonly use that phrase? I've never heard of it in any other context. The only Google hit for "kick-up" that seems pertinent is this column by Mark Morford, which is basically a spam dump of his inbox. And it's not even in the top ten hits. The vast majority of them are a verb (as I would expect). I would have thought there'd be something in the Urban Dictionary, but no.

So is it some new usage that some spammer made up, and it's supposed to be obvious what it means? Anyone more hip than me (i.e., almost everyone) have any idea where this comes from?

[Update in the afternoon]

Heh. Google works fast. This post is now number seven in a search for "'kick-up' adjective."

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:47 AM

Feel The Love

For Hillary Clinton: Go away you horrible human being!

I actually liked Hillary up until a few months ago. Other bloggers used to tell me that Joe and I were too nice to Hillary. People just assumed that we were endorsing her. Now I actually loathe her. She makes me yell at the TV like she's George Bush, and no one other than George Bush makes me yell at the TV - until now. I actually can't stand her or her husband any more. I defended her. I defended her husband. And now I'm actually wondering if the Republicans weren't right about them. That's how bad she has damaged her reputation. People who actually liked you, who actually helped you, who actually defended you, LOATHE you now. Call me a Clinton-hater all you like, but people like me were the ones who had your back. And we never will again.

Emphasis mine (and Jim Geraghty's).

Yes, the scales continue to fall from their eyes, and they're finally seeing the Clintons that some of us, more objective, have seen all along.

Hear that sound? It's a nanoviolin, scraping out a plaintive dirge.

I'm overcome with emotion. I think that it's called schadenfreude.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:36 AM

The New Politics?

Now he he wears a flag pin? As Byron York asks, what has changed?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:17 AM

The Month Of The Natural Disaster

May '08 has been a pretty rough month for the planet and its inhabitants, what with the volcanoes and tornadoes and cyclones and earthquakes, <VOICE="Professor Frink>and the drowning and the crushing and the evacuating and the staaaaarving, glavin</VOICE>.

Jeff Masters has a roundup and some history, and some inside info on why the death toll in the country formerly known as Burma was so high.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:01 AM

Too Much Time On Their Hands

A blog devoted to things younger than John McCain.

[Via Geek Press]

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:34 AM

Frustration

Phil Plait has a little rant about our (lack of) progress in human spaceflight. The usual pointless man-versus-robot debate ensues in comments. (I think that the post title should be "whither," though, not "whence"--whence, which is often misused with the redundant "from whence," means "from where," while "whither" means "to where".)

[Via Tom Hill]

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:22 AM

Happy Blogiversary

Congratulations to Alan Boyle for six years of Cosmic Log.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:02 AM

May 13, 2008
News You Can't Use

You know, if you really need these job interview tips, they probably won't do you much good, because even if you follow them, you're likely to do something equally or more stupid.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:51 PM

Some Graduation Advice

From P. J. O'Rourke:

Don't moan. I'm not going to "pass the wisdom of one generation down to the next." I'm a member of the 1960s generation. We didn't have any wisdom.

We were the moron generation. We were the generation that believed we could stop the Vietnam War by growing our hair long and dressing like circus clowns. We believed drugs would change everything -- which they did, for John Belushi. We believed in free love. Yes, the love was free, but we paid a high price for the sex.

My generation spoiled everything for you. It has always been the special prerogative of young people to look and act weird and shock grown-ups. But my generation exhausted the Earth's resources of the weird. Weird clothes -- we wore them. Weird beards -- we grew them. Weird words and phrases -- we said them. So, when it came your turn to be original and look and act weird, all you had left was to tattoo your faces and pierce your tongues. Ouch. That must have hurt. I apologize.

So now, it's my job to give you advice. But I'm thinking: You're finishing 16 years of education, and you've heard all the conventional good advice you can stand. So, let me offer some relief.

Read on. Some of it actually is good advice.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:24 AM

May 12, 2008
Some Questions For John McCain

From George Will:

You say that even if global warming turns out to be no crisis (the World Meteorological Organization says global temperatures have not risen in a decade), even unnecessary measures taken to combat it will be beneficial because "then all we've done is give our kids a cleaner world." But what of the trillions of dollars those measures will cost in direct expenditures and diminished economic growth--hence diminished medical research, cultural investment, etc.? Given that Earth is always warming or cooling, what is its proper temperature, and how do you know?

You propose a "cap and trade" system to limit the carbon dioxide that many companies can emit. Is not your idea an energy- rationing proposal akin to Bill Clinton's BTU tax?

He has more, not related to climate change.

Also, a long paper on the futility of trading hot air.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:41 PM

Not Again

Quite a bit of jousting in comments (including some by yours truly) about Expelled, science, epistemology, etc., over at WOC.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:49 PM

The Difference Between Harvard And A Hedge Fund

Not much, apparently.

It really does make it hard to justify their tuition. They should be giving out, and paying for a lot more scholarships.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:37 PM

The Buck Stops...

...somewhere else.

I guess you just can't get good help these days.

It's a little frightening to think what his cabinet would look like.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:30 PM

Cocooned

Boy, if I held the cartoon views of conservatives and libertarians held by some of the folks commenting at this post, I'd be unable to call myself a libertarian, and I would look with new eyes at my (apparently) evil conservative friends whose first thought in getting out of bed in the morning (if not upon awakening) is "how do I screw the poor today?"

But fortunately, I get out occasionally.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:06 PM

On The Verge?

Jeff Foust has a report on the propellant depot panel at Space Access a few weeks ago, in which he asks whether their time has almost come. I hope so, because they are critical infrastructure for opening up space, in a way that HLVs are not.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:53 AM

A New Campaign Slogan

"Obama: Not As Elitist As John Kerry"

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:20 AM

They Should

The last two Soyuz flights (or to be more precise, landings) are worrying NASA.

Via email from Jim Oberg, who notes a quote of his that the reporter didn't use: "NASA would have a hard time developing any other human space transport system in the next 4-5 years as reliable as the soyuz. We now realize that the Soyuz backup systems were effective in insuring a reliable - if very rough - landing in these previous cases."

What a policy mess.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:05 AM

What Could (And Should?) Have Been

Rob Coppinger has some thoughts on SpaceShipOnePointFive.

I suspect that Alex, and perhaps Sir Richard, are now regretting their decision to not take advantage of the bird in the hand, holding out for the flock in the bush. They probably (in fact, almost certainly) didn't anticipate the development problems they'd have with the propulsion system, though they were warned. I suspect that they (like Burt) drank too much of the hybrid koolaid, and were lulled into complacency by the success and (apparent, though this was an illusion) safety of the SpaceShipOne engine.

As for the comment that a passenger wouldn't have paid the costs of the flights, I don't buy it. They could have charged much more than a couple hundred thousand for the first several, perhaps even few dozen, flights. But we'll never know.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:52 AM

No Revolution This Year

Glenn Reynolds has a review of Ron Paul's book. I haven't read the book, but I agree with the points made in the review about Paul's views, and the difference between Rothbardians and Heinleinians.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:41 AM

May 11, 2008
A Good Old-Fashioned NASA Bash

While this Orlando Sentinel columnist makes some valid points in his criticism of the space agency, he also takes some cheap, and unfair shots.

You know we are headed for a boondoggle when the agency's marketing division starts up a Web page called, "Why the Moon?"

And the first sentence is, "If you asked 100 people why we should return to the moon, you'd probably get 100 answers -- or more!"

Translation: We can't come up with one good one.

I'd call that a mistranslation. It's like saying that we shouldn't have removed Saddam because we didn't find WMD. It really is possible for there to be more than one reason to do something (and in fact, most decisions are made on that basis--any one reason might not, per se, be sufficient, but a combination of them often are).

It may in fact be true that none of the reasons listed are good (I haven't bothered to check out the site to see), but one certainly can't logically infer that from the fact that there are more than one, or even a hundred. But this part is actually a misrepresentation of history:

NASA once took on the mission of providing cheap, routine access to space with the shuttle. Then it took on the mission of building and servicing a space station.
Then came two shuttle disasters. And before the station was even half-built, agency officials began complaining they had no mission and needed to fly off into the solar system.

We still don't have safe and routine access to space. And now, we won't have our grandiose research platform up there either.

Which "agency officials" were making such complaints? Can he name names? In reality, much of NASA would have been content to continue to fly the Shuttle, complete the station, and finally hope to get some value out of it, even after Columbia. There are no doubt "agency officials" who, if asked over a beer, would say that would be the best course even now, given the problems with Ares 1 and Orion, and the fact that we have been getting a lot better at launching Shuttles. That was certainly the prevailing agency attitude in 1989, when President Bush's father announced the Space Exploration Initiative, and NASA sabotaged it both indirectly, by coming up with a ridiculously overpriced program, and directly by actively lobbying against it on the Hill (one of the reasons that Dick Truly was fired).

In general, it's unfair to blame NASA for what is really a failure of the entire federal space policy establishment. NASA doesn't establish goals, or make policy (though it will often play bureaucratic games to attempt to influence it).

The space station was the "next logical step" in proposed plans for space, going all the way back to the fifties, based on von Braun's vision. The problem was that the "logical step" before it was to establish affordable and routine access to orbit. The Shuttle was an attempt to do, but a failed one. Unfortunately, the policy establishment failed to realize this until long after space station plans had jelled into one dependent on the Shuttle (and later, the Russians, which is why it is at such a high inclination, increasing the cost of access).

Yes, NASA "took on the mission," but it failed at it. And with subsequent failures, such as X-34 and X-33, the nation has learned the wrong lesson--that if NASA can't reduce cost to orbit, it can't be done, and we should simply give up on the project, and go back to the way we did it in the sixties. But the failure wasn't due to the fact that it can't be done, but rather than it can't be done the way NASA does things: developing and operating its own systems, for its own uses. Government agencies, by their nature, are not well suited to either developing or running cost-effective transportation systems.

It is understandable and natural to want to maximize the value of something in which we have invested many tens of billions of dollars over the years, and it does seem like a waste to abandon the ISS just a few years after its completion, which took decades to accomplish. But there's a concept called "throwing good money after bad" in which too many people engage. The fact that we spent a hundred billion dollars on ISS doesn't make it worth a hundred billion dollars. It may, in fact have negative value, like the proverbial white elephant that costs too much to feed and care for.

The mistake of the Vision for Space Exploration was not in establishing a national goal of moving the nation (and humanity) beyond earth orbit. Such a bold and broad policy statement of our ultimate goals in space was in fact long overdue.

The mistake was in specifying in too much detail the means and schedule to do so, and in the failure to recognize that we never completed the job that was supposed to be performed by the Shuttle--developing affordable access to space. This is a capability without which attempts to open up the frontier will remain as unsustainable as they were during Apollo, and to repeat Apollo (albeit in slow motion), which is essentially NASA's current plan, is to repeat that mistake.

Yes, the Shuttle was a mistake, as was a space station based on the assumption that it had met its goals, but that doesn't make the goal of the Shuttle a mistake. Achieving that goal remains key to supremacy in space, for both civil and military purposes, and it has to be done before we can seriously contemplate human exploration and development of the solar system. But to blame NASA for these mistakes is wrong, not just because there's plenty of blame to go around, but because if we believe that NASA is the problem, we won't address the other very real sources of the problem, and we'll continue to make such policy mistakes.

[Monday morning update]

More commentary over at Clark's place.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:29 AM

May 10, 2008
Hezbollah's Apologists

It's been a rough week (and year) for them. I expect Obama to want no-conditions negotiations with them any minute.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:06 PM

Don't Know Much About History (Part Two)

Jack Kelly has more thoughts on Obama's frightening ignorance of American history (hey, it would be nice if he could just figure out how many states there are):

Sen. Obama is on both sounder and softer ground with regard to John F. Kennedy. The new president held a summit meeting with Soviet leader Nikita Khruschev in Vienna in June, 1961.

Elie Abel, who wrote a history of the Cuban missile crisis (The Missiles of October), said the crisis had its genesis in that summit.

"There is reason to believe that Khrushchev took Kennedy's measure in June 1961 and decided this was a young man who would shrink from hard decisions," Mr. Abel wrote. "There is no evidence to support the belief that Khrushchev ever questioned America's power. He questioned only the president's readiness to use it. As he once told Robert Frost, he came to believe that Americans are 'too liberal to fight.'"

...It's worth noting that Kennedy then was vastly more experienced than Sen. Obama is now. A combat veteran of World War II, Jack Kennedy served 14 years in Congress before becoming president. Sen. Obama has no military and little work experience, and has been in Congress for less than four years.

If we elect someone as callow as Obama, maybe Khrushchev will be proven right.

[Update a little later]

Heh. Suitably Flip has a new lapel pin for Barack:

[Late afternoon update]

Now he can't even make up his mind. I guess he was for the unconditional meeting before he was against it.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:08 AM

May 09, 2008
New Space Blog

I see that the Orlando Sentinel has a space blog now, headed up by Robert Block, their space editor, though there are other bloggers there as well.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:08 PM

Solar Singularity

Is it approaching? A nickel a kW-hr would be pretty hard to beat.

Like Phil Bowermaster, this kind of thing is why I don't lose much sleep over peak oil.

[Update a few minutes later]

A lot of comments on the subject over at Randall Parker's place.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:05 AM

Making The Sahara Green

Through global warming. See, climate change ain't all bad.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:06 AM

Expelled Exposed

SciAm has an article on the six things that Ben Stein doesn't want you to know about the movie. Just the first one is sufficient to me to think the whole thing a contemptible fraud.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:49 AM

May 08, 2008
The Logic Of Superstition

For what it's worth, I set my watch to the destination time zone when they close the plane doors.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:06 AM

Summits With Dictators

Tom Maguire says that Obama and his supporters don't know much about history:

Obama's supporters are too young to know any of this, but Roosevelt led the United States in the war against Hitler; the Allied policy was unconditional surrender, so there was very little for Roosevelt and Hitler to discuss, and in fact, the two did not meet at all (but they did exchange correspondence before the war).

So my guess is that Obama is thinking of the Yalta Conference with Churchill and Stalin as talking to "our enemies", although of course we were still allied with the Soviet Union against Germany and Japan at that point. Beyond that, is the Yalta Conference something Obama and his advisers view as a success worthy of emulation? Puzzling.

Actually, one leader did have a talk with Hitler. His name was Neville Chamberlain. And we know how that worked out.

Or at least some of us do. But perhaps Obama and his supporters are unaware of that as well. Jim Geraghty has further thoughts.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:39 AM

Encouraging Words

In his Senate testimony, Frederick Tarantino, head of USRA, made the following interesting recommendation:

I also want to bring to the subcommittee's attention an exciting new way in which university-led experiments with hands-on training could be boosted by NASA involvement. Within the next few years, suborbital commercial vehicles being developed by such companies as Virgin Galactic, XCOR Aerospace, Armadillo Aerospace, and Blue Origin, will provide a unique way to engage scientists and researchers. NASA has already taken the first step by issuing a request for information to help in the formulation of a Suborbital Scientist Participant Pilot Program.

By providing the opportunity for researchers and even undergraduate students to fly into space along with their experiments, not only can new experiments be conducted, but the opportunity can inspire students to engage in the math, science, and engineering. The participatory approach of the personal spaceflight industry means each suborbital launch can be experienced by thousands of people, with young people able to tune in and watch live video from space as their professors and fellow students conduct experiments in real time and experience weightlessness and the life-changing view of the earth from space. The hands-on experience will create a new generation of Principal Investigators who will be prepared to lead the flagship science and human exploration missions, later in their careers.

These new vehicles will provide low-cost access to the space environment for scientific experiments and research. The market rate for these services has already been set by the space tourist market at $100,000-$200,000 per seat, a much lower cost than existing sounding rockets.

We believe the commercial potential here could be energized by the participation of our space agency. USRA requests the subcommittee authorize NASA to follow through on the request for information by establishing the Suborbital Scientist Participant Pilot Program and issuing a NASA Research Announcement soliciting investigations. This will create a university research payloads market for these emerging commercial operations, provide a new way for university researchers to conduct experiments with student involvement and hands-on-training, and bring the involvement of NASA, and its imprimatur, to an exciting new U.S. industry.

Let's hope that the staffers were paying attention.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:54 AM

Dhimmification

Sam Harris has a long piece at (of all places) the Huffington Post on the unwillingness of western civilization to stand up for its own values against radical Islam. And as others have noted (and he notes himself), this is particularly ironic:

In a thrillingly ironic turn of events, a shorter version of the very essay you are now reading was originally commissioned by the opinion page of Washington Post and then rejected because it was deemed too critical of Islam. Please note, this essay was destined for the opinion page of the paper, which had solicited my response to the controversy over Wilders' film. The irony of its rejection seemed entirely lost on the Post, which responded to my subsequent expression of amazement by offering to pay me a "kill fee." I declined.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:34 AM

A Depressing Thought

If I thought that Gene Kranz knew what he was talking about, I'd be pretty dismayed about this comment:

"This is the best game plan that I have seen since the days of President Kennedy," Kranz said of ESAS, comparing it to the DC-3 and the B-52. "The system that Griffin's team is putting into place will be delivering for America 50 years later...

What an insane comparison. The DC-3 and B-52 have been operating for decades because they were mission effective and affordable (the latter because they were extensively reused, and not thrown away after, or during each flight).

If a century after the founding of NASA we are still sending people into space in little capsules on large expendable rockets, that will be a testimony to a tremendous failure of national will, and of private enterprise. If that's the best that we can do, I predict that we'll just give up on human spaceflight, and we should. So either way, this prediction is very unlikely.

Fortunately, he's just suffering from sixties nostalgia, and there's little basis for his belief.

[Update a few minutes later]

Apparently that was from his oral testimony, or an answer to a question. Here's the written testimony as submitted, which doesn't make the DC-3 comparison, or talk about fifty years in the future.

NASA Watch has the other witnesses' testimony as well.

[Update about 11 AM EDT]

One other point about the Kranz testimony from the Space Politics link:

Kranz stepped in and described the cost in money and schedule he experienced man-rating the Atlas and Titan for the Mercury and Gemini programs.

Comparing human rating an Atlas V to the original Atlas and Titan isn't a useful comparison. The latter were converted ballistic missiles, whereas Atlas V was designed from scratch to be a reliable launch system. All that's really required to human rate it is to add Failure On-Set Detection (FOSD), and ensure that its trajectory doesn't create any blackout zones for aborts (which it has plenty of power and performance to do).

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:10 AM

May 07, 2008
A Robust Design?

Jim Oberg has the most extensive public report yet on last months Soyuz mishap, over at IEEE Spectrum.

It's a fascinating read, but it has to give us pause in relying on Soyuz when the Shuttle is retired.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:47 PM

Still Singing To The Horse

Hillary is going to stay in all the way to the convention--why should she quit? That horse might still learn to sing, or there could be more bad news for Obama. And here's one of the more unsavory reasons that she stays in:

"I can't stand him," the man said. "He's a Muslim. He's not even pro-American as far as I'm concerned."

Such feelings leave Clinton and the Democratic Party in a tough spot. With the largest number of remaining delegates nowbeing party insiders, they have to decide if Obama can overcome enough of that antipathy - essentially deciding if enough working-class whites will back away from the black candidate, whether because of the false Muslim rumors, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright flap or old-fashioned racism.

I think, though, that this is delusional:

A top Democratic source with insight into Bill's and Hillary's states of mind says the Clintons are convinced that a Democratic presidency is all but certain no matter how messy the fight for the nomination.

In that scenario - which the Obama side and some Democratic elders worry is wishful thinking at best, delusional at worst - there's no downside for Hillary doing whatever it takes for as long as it takes.

How does anyone know what "the Clintons are convinced" of? On what basis? Because they say so? I'd say that if you want to know what the Clintons are really thinking, the least reliable method is to take them at their word. This "top Democratic source" makes the mistake of thinking that the Clintons care about the fate of the Democrat Party, despite their devastation of it in the nineties. He (or she) is the one who is being delusional, but about the Clintons, not the Clintons about the party's chances in November.

In fact, as I've said before, I assume that if she doesn't get the nomination, she'll do what she has to in order to ensure Obama's defeat. She doesn't want to have to run against a Democrat incumbent in 2012. So they're right that there's no down side for her to stay in. They're just confused about the reason.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:31 AM

Broken Logic

There's an interesting discussion in comments over at Selenian Boondocks on the value of microgravity processing (that veers into other subjects, such as utility and value of propellant depots). I think that Jon gets the better part of the argument, and that "Googaw" is overreacting to overhype. Not to mention ignorant of orbital mechanics. As Jon says, I don't think that he's thought through the concept of a propellant depot in GTO.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:01 AM

May 06, 2008
Plan B From Outer Space

...or rather, for outer space. Dennis Wingo presents a backup plan for when ESAS collapses. It's much better than Plan 9. And it's even better than ESAS*.

I was a big Shuttle-C fan twenty years ago. Or rather, I was a Shuttle-derived fan. Shuttle-C has the problem that Dennis admits--a lack of payload volume and (more importantly, from the standpoint of building really nice space stations) a lack of payload diameter, since it's constrained by current pad infrastructure, including the RSS (Rotating Service Structure), to fifteen feet. I preferred in-line concepts (such as Shuttle-Z) that put payload on top of the ET, which would allow twenty-two-foot-diameter, or larger, with a hammerhead configuration. Ah, good times, good times. At least in our dreams.

I've long thought that the time was past for such things. It doesn't address the fundamental problem, which is the high cost of launch, and corresponding low levels of activity, something that neither ESAS, Direct, or Plan 9B address. But if we insist on such a trivial goal of sending a few astronauts to the moon a couple times a year a decade or more from now, then this plan makes more sense than what NASA's doing. We'd probably only waste half as much money.

I'm not sure why we even need Orion, though, in this scenario. If it's a LEO-only vehicle, why waste money to build something that competes with the private sector? I thought that the idea was to get NASA out of LEO, and force them to focus on the "beyond."

* Admittedly, a low bar in both cases--it remains uncertain whether
or not ESAS is better than Plan 9. Actually, now that I think about it, there are similarities. ESAS is, after all, an attempt to conquer space by resurrecting Apollo from the dead.

[Update in the afternoon]

I "snear"? I didn't know I knew how to do that...whatever it is. In fact, I'd never even heard of the word before today. Who knew that Mark was so hip (even if he doesn't know how to read my posts)?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:08 AM

Criminals

You know, if there were some planetary version of Child Protective Services (not that I'm proposing such a thing--I'm sure that its primary focus would be Katrina "victims"), the Burmese people would be taken away from their rulers:

...with the clock ticking four days after the storm hit, Myanmar's reclusive military rulers insisted foreign aid experts would still have to negotiate with the government to be allowed into the isolated nation.

Also, the army, which had plenty of manpower to come in and beat protesting Buddhist monks a few months ago, is nowhere to be found.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:07 AM

Getting Ready For An EVA?

Rob Coppinger has dug up an interesting Chinese video. As he points out, we didn't do training in a water tank in the sixties, but the Chinese are standing on the shoulders of giants. But their program will continue to move at a snail's pace, and never be a serious threat, as long as they continue to emulate NASA and Russia.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:29 AM

Movie Review Time

Over at Lileks' place:

Their logo looks like a deformed octopus. We get the picture, though. It's the Klan. This was still a touchy thing in '36; this must have irritated the people who thought the film ignored all the good things the Klan did, like community outreach and neighborhood suppers and the occasional potluck where a fella could get together with like-minded Americans and talk freely about the Catholics.

Gee, to what or whom could he possibly be referring?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:03 AM

May 05, 2008
Two For One?

Christopher Hitchens is willing to ask the question that so many others are not, and the one to which the answer seems pretty obvious, at least to me:

What can it be that has kept Obama in Wright's pews, and at Wright's mercy, for so long and at such a heavy cost to his aspirations? Even if he pulls off a mathematical nomination victory, he has completely lost the first, fine, careless rapture of a post-racial and post-resentment political movement and mired us again in all the old rubbish that predates Dr. King. What a sad thing to behold. And how come? I think we can exclude any covert sympathy on Obama's part for Wright's views or style--he has proved time and again that he is not like that, and even his own little nods to "Minister" Farrakhan can probably be excused as a silly form of Chicago South Side political etiquette. All right, then, how is it that the loathsome Wright married him, baptized his children, and received donations from him? Could it possibly have anything, I wonder, to do with Mrs. Obama?

This obvious question is now becoming inescapable, and there is an inexcusable unwillingness among reporters to be the one to ask it. (One can picture Obama looking pained and sensitive and saying, "Keep my wife out of it," or words to that effect, as Clinton tried to do in 1992 when Jerry Brown and Ralph Nader quite correctly inquired about his spouse's influence.) If there is a reason why the potential nominee has been keeping what he himself now admits to be very bad company--and if the rest of his character seems to make this improbable--then either he is hiding something and/or it is legitimate to ask him about his partner.

It's looking more and more like 1992 all over again. Except this time, there's no Ross Perot (at least so far) to save the Democrats from themselves.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:17 PM

Reason #254

...why I am a libertarian, but not a Libertarian:

In a column in today's Sarasota Herald-Tribune, Billy Cox notes that Hoagland's presence stands in contrast to efforts by Libertarians to tone down UFO talk within their ranks. Joe Buchman, running for Congress in Utah as a Libertarian, told Cox that state LP officials are "fuming" over Buchman's push to declassify records that he believes would prove evidence of... well, something to do with alien life. "At least I won't be the biggest nut case at the convention now," Buchman said upon learning of Hoagland's talk.

The party does tend to attract a lot of nutballs. I can't take seriously a party that takes Richard Hoagland seriously enough to feature him at its convention.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:57 AM

The Fundamental Problem

Jeff Foust and Charles Miller talk about the real issue with space--the fact that we still can't afford to get there on any useful scale.

On a related note (though it's not obvious that they're related, other than the fact that both pieces appear in today's issue of The Space Review), Greg Zsidisin wonders whether we are going to repeat the Apollo debacle.

Well, that depends on what you think "the Apollo debacle" is.

If I read him correctly, Greg seems to think that it was abandoning the Apollo hardware and its capabilities and replacing it with the flawed concept of the Shuttle:

It's déjà vu all over again, of course. Shortly after Apollo 11, NASA triumphantly presented its funding list of "next logical steps". These included human Mars exploration, Moon bases, and a large space station in Earth orbit serviced by a reusable "space shuttle". At the time, the US was engaged in the costly, divisive Vietnam War, while the economy was beginning a big slide that would result in double-digit inflation in the early '70s.

With the race against the Russians having been won, and a decidedly anti-technology attitude settling in, Congress and President Nixon readily pulled the plug on everything but the shuttle, which nevertheless struggled for funding and support. The vehicle that emerged was a highly compromised version of what had been envisioned, and sure enough did not bring the vastly cheaper and more routine space access promised.

The Apollo infrastructure, meanwhile, was almost entirely discarded. We lost the Saturn launch vehicles, their engines, most of their directly associated manufacturing and launch capability. This, despite the huge cost and effort it took to create them.

The problem is that "the next logical steps" weren't necessarily all that logical, but they did fulfill the von Braunian vision (which is what it was based on). In a sense, the Shuttle was the "next logical step," but only in the sense that it was an attempt to make space affordable--something that Saturn never would have done, had we continued it, as so many now nostalgic for that era would prefer. In fact, such misplaced nostalgia for large expendable rockets is at the heart of the cargo-cultish approach of ESAS--it is an attempt to return to the glory days, when we went to the moon, and the whole world watched.

The mistake of Shuttle was not in seeking CRATS (Cheap Reliable Access To Space, which is essential, as Foust and Miller point out). It was in the approach taken to do it. And in that, I don't mean a reusable system. It was in thinking that it was a task for a major government, Manhattan-Project-style initiative on the scale (or even on a smaller scale) of Apollo, in which the government would develop, build and operate a fleet of vehicles (of a single design) to handle all of the nation's (and hopefully, much of the world's) space transportation needs.

No, it was no mistake to set as a goal the dramatic reduction of costs, and increase in routine access to space, which was in fact the original goal of the Shuttle program, and why, despite its many successful flights with useful accomplishments, it was an utter failure programmatically. It should still be the goal, but we have to take a different approach, and not just technically, (again) as Foust and Miller point out:

Any new initiative to achieve CRATS must address the repeated national failures (Shuttle, NASP, X-33, X-34) to achieve CRATS. Instead of trying the same old thing over again, and expecting different results, a new initiative would address the core reasons for the failure, and provide some ideas on a new approach.

Unfortunately, the core reasons for the failure lie at heart in our overall approach to, and thinking about spaceflight. I've often noted that we got off on the wrong track half a century ago, when space technology (at least for human spaceflight) became an expression of technical ability in a race between two Cold Warriors, rather than a utilitarian development for commerce and national security. In so doing, it created a mindset on the subject from which it is difficult for most policy analysts, let alone the general public, to escape. It also created a politically potent iron triangle between NASA, the contractor community, and the Congress that makes it difficult to implement new or innovative policy solutions, because the success of those rent seekers is not contingent on actual progress in space. As long as the contracts continue, and the jobs remain in place, and the lobbyists make their political donations, it doesn't really matter that much whether or not the human space program is expanding humanity into space, or making us a spacefaring nation, because those goals are not nationally important.

The good news is that there is pressure from outside that system to force change. One, as is noted in the Foust/Miller piece, is the growing awareness in the military of the vulnerability of our space assets, and that the only real solution to this is responsive space, not just in terms of access, but also in terms of replacement systems. One of the several ways in which NASA has completely flouted the recommendations of the Aldridge Commission is to propose an architecture that contributes almost nothing to national security. Another way, equally if not more important, is that it contributes almost nothing to nurturing private space enterprise.

Even ignoring all of the technical problems with it, these two factors are probably what will doom it. When the budget crunch comes, unlike the Shuttle, NASA will be unable to call on the Pentagon to come to bat for it. And while private space companies will continue to support the Vision for Space Exploration in the abstract, none of them have any motivation to support ESAS itself. Particularly when there are much more lucrative, and less fickle markets, as they start to satisfy private desires to go, and ignore NASA's continued emphasis on a voyeuristic program that allows us to watch a few civil servants go to the moon while we foot the bill.

I have long said that NASA's approach is essentially socialist, but I realize now that I've been wrong in that assessment. Since reading Jonah Goldberg's book, I've slowly come to realize, over the past few months, that a much more accurate phrase for it is fascist (not that there's anything wrong with that).

Chair Force Engineer recently came to the same conclusion:

In order to justify the enormous expense of the space shuttle borne by the American taxpayers, and to get the flight rate up to levels which would make the vehicle economical, the shuttle was used to launch commercial payloads during its early years. The thought of a government-funded, government-operated vehicle launching commercial payloads should be anathema to freedom-loving Americans. But the shuttle served its need as "the moral equivalent of war." After all, the Russian efforts to duplicate the shuttle capabilities with Energia-Buran helped to bankrupt the Soviet Union. And the shuttle & space station continue to serve as symbols of national pride, promoting the religion of the state.

Exactly. We are supposed to contribute to the glorious State's Space Program, and be content to watch the chosen Representatives of the State, our Celestial Gladiators, go out into the cosmos for us. That is the von Braunian vision (hey, anyone remember where he got his start?), and Mike Griffin (who I'm pretty sure sees himself as von Braun's successor) is eager to continue it. And it doesn't help that neither he, nor any of his other OSC compadres--Tony Elias, Bill Claybaugh, Doug Stanley, et al--even believe that CRATS is achievable. It's a convenient belief, of course, if one wants to build big rockets at taxpayer expense. But we shouldn't fool ourselves that it has anything to do with classically liberal American values. Or becoming a truly spacefaring nation.

Fortunately, we are reaching a point at which we will no longer be able to afford such grand visions of "One NASA" (Ein NASA, Ein Volk, Ein Administrator), and will instead be focused on actual mission needs by the military, and commercial desires of people who actually want to do stuff in space, with their own money. At that point, perhaps, the Cold War will finally be over for the one agency that, like a few Japanese soldiers on remote islands, who hadn't gotten the word, even into the sixties, continued to fight on well past its end.

[Update about noon eastern]

OK, maybe Mike Griffin isn't von Braun's heir:

Werner Von Braun's body was found in China this week after making the trip from D.C. No, he wasn't exhumed, he just churned in his grave until he augured all the way through after an unidentified visitor paying respects whispered to him graveside about the latest hare-brained scheme to make ARES 1 lift off and fly right.

OK, so it's not simple or soon. But as noted at the link, if it never flies, at least it will be safe.

[Late Monday evening update]

Based on his comments, Mark Whittington apparently hasn't read Jonah's book, despite the fact that he attempted to review it.

From the first edition, pages 210-211 (my annotations are in square brackets, and red), "Even Kennedy's nondefense policies were sold as the moral analogue of war...His intimidation of the steel industry was a rip-off of Truman's similar effort during the Korean War, itself a maneuver from the playbooks of FDR and Wilson. Likewise, the Peace Corps and its various domestic equivalents were throwbacks to FDR's martial CCC. Even Kennedy's most ambitious idea, putting a man on the moon, was sold to the public as a response to the fact that the Soviet Union was overtaking America in science..."

"What made [Kennedy's administration] so popular? What made it so effective? What has given it its lasting appeal? On almost every front, the answers are those elements that fit the fascist playbook: the creation of crises [We're losing the race to the Soviets! We can't go to sleep by a Russian moon!], national appeals to unity [They are our astronauts! Our nation shall beat the Soviets to the moon!], the celebration of martial values [The astronauts were all military, the best of the best], the blurring of lines between public and private sectors [SETA contracts, anyone? Cost plus? Our version of Soviet design bureaus?], the utilization of the mass media to glamorize the state and its programs [No Life Magazine deal for chronicling a bowdlerized version of the astronauts' lives? Really?], invocation of a "post-partisan" spirit that places the important decisions in the hands of experts and intellectual supermen, and a cult of personality for the national leader [von Braun? "Rocket scientists"? Not just Kennedy Space Center, but (briefly) Cape Kennedy?]."

Bold type mine (in addition to red annotations).

Nope, no fascism here. Nothing to see here, folks.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:26 AM

An Omen?

As Halperin writes, you can't make this kind of thing up:

Hillary Clinton enthusiastically picked a filly named Eight Belles to win the Kentucky Derby and compared herself to the horse. Eight Belles finished second. The winner was the favorite, Big Brown.

Eight Belles collapsed immediately after crossing the finish line, and was euthanized shortly thereafter.

Like Mark, I too have no other comment.

Oh, and while we're on the subject, does Hillary! live in a permanent state of denial and fantasy? Mickey makes a good case.

[Mid-morning update]

Speaking of denial, Jim Geraghty explains (once again, for those who continue to miss the point, or obfuscate it with straw men) that the issue with Wright is not the concern that Obama secretly shares his views (though that is certainly a possibility). It's the judgment, stupid:

In Wright, Obama saw what he wanted to see. He wanted a wise, shrewd, kind, funny, educated man who could show him the ways of the world (and Chicago politics), one who perhaps went a little too far every now and then, but who was overall a good person.

Instead, we see that Wright is a toxic figure, arguing that blacks and whites have different brain structures, that the American government created the AIDS virus for genocidal purposes, that U.S. policy can accurately be called terrorism, that the U.S. Marines can be compared to the Roman soldiers who tortured Jesus, who calls Italians "garlic-noses," who calls the Secretary of State "Condoskeezia" and "Con-damn-nesia", etc.

Here's where the example of Wright is truly disturbing when contemplating an Obama presidency. If Barack Obama looked at Jeremiah Wright and saw only what he wanted to see... how sure can we be that he wouldn't look at say, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and see only what he wanted to see?

Also, as a bonus, some psychoanalysis based on Obama's book. So now both Hillary! and Obama are put on the couch in this post.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:49 AM

May 04, 2008
House Painting

That's why no posting this weekend. We tore out some shrubbery, and it was a good opportunity to paint the house, which we had never done since we bought it, four years ago. New landscaping, too, so drive-up value should be improved considerably.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:18 PM

May 03, 2008
Rube Goldberg, Take Two

Thomas James has more thoughts on the kludges.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:47 AM

May 02, 2008
What Goes Down, Must Come Up

Has the dollar hit the bottom?

Given that the Fed is signaling no more rate cuts, I think that it's a pretty good bet. Which means that it's also a peak for oil prices (at least if they remain denominated in dollars). And (more) bad news for the Dems in the fall.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:11 PM

He's Got His Number

I think that Victor Davis Hanson has diagnosed the situation spot on, and it's good news for Republicans, because it means that a) Obama is almost a lock on the nomination and b) there's no way he can win the general election. Particularly since Hillary! will do everything she can to prevent it, as long as her fingerprints aren't on it.

...privately they acknowledge:

--that their candidate made a devil's bargain with a racist to create an authentic black persona in order to jump start a political career in Chicago;

--that their candidate was so inured to de rigueur anti-American speech from his church days, black-liberationist friends, assorted reverends, and former radicals like Ayers, that he never really thought things that Wright said were all that big a deal -- hence his deer-in-the-headlights approach to the initial scandal and serial hedging. After all, in Obama's adopted world, his church really isn't "particularly controversial;"

--that their Obama messiah is hardly a new politician, but instead a very gifted and charismatic actor, who, in skillful fashion, can talk about utopian politics but then backstep, hedge, and get away with more than anyone since Bill Clinton in his prime in 1992 (one of the reasons that those two dislike each other so is that they are so much alike) -- and that is not such a bad thing after all.

Yes, I can easily imagine letting such talk pass, while not necessarily agreeing with it, accepting it as well within reasonable discourse. I remember doing it a lot in college.

But I grew up.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:35 PM

Many Were Called

But few showed up. Workers of the world apparently didn't unite all that much today, at least in Portland, according to a photoessay by Patrick Lasswell.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:05 PM

A New Strap-On Design

No, not that kind of strap on. Get your minds out of the sewer.

A strap-on helicopter:

Tiny rockets at the tips of the helicopter's rotor blades take the place of a tail rotor, a component which couldn't be safely attached to a human body. According to the company, the Libelula would be the lightest helicopter in the world, so light that it could be strapped to a person's body with a carbon fiber corset.

"The best [part] of this technology is that [these] kinds of helicopters don't need a tail rotor because they don't have any torque, so with a simple vane they can turn - being the simplest form of an helicopter and the easiest and safer to fly," the company says on its Web site.

So, first question is: how do they prevent the pilot/passenger from rotating with the blades (there's bound to be non-zero friction in the bearing)? Seems like you'd get kinda dizzy, and it would be hard to steer.

There would also seem to be safety issues for bystanders--that thing could easily decapitate someone.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:28 PM

Show Me The Science

Jim Manzi reviews Expelled. He's not impressed.

And John Derbyshire is appropriately dismayed by Jews like David Klinghoffer and Ben Stein latching on to this anti-science schtick:

One of the best reasons to be a philosemite in our time is sheer gratitude at the disproportionate contribution Jews have made to the advance of Western civilization, and to our understanding of the world, this past two hundred years. The U.S.A. dominated the 20th century in culture and technology, to the great benefit of all mankind, in part because of the work done in math and science by the great tranche of pre-WW2 immigrant Jews from Europe.
Now you have joined up with people who want to trash the scientific enterprise and heap insults on one of the greatest names in intellectual history. For reasons unfathomable to me, you and Ben Stein want to sneer and scoff at our understandings, hard-won over centuries of arduous intellectual effort. Don't the two of you know, don't Jews of all people know, where this anti-intellectual agitation, this pandering to a superstitious mob, will lead at last? If you truly don't, I refer you to the fate of Hypatia, which you can read about in my last book (Chapter 3), or in Gibbon (Chapter XLVII). Your new pals at the Discovery Institute no doubt think Hypatia got what she deserved.

Civilization is a thin veneer, David. Reason and science are bulwarks against the dark.

The mistake that these people make is to equate science with atheism. It is true that, as science advances, and more scientific explanations are put forth, much of the need for God, at least insofar as an explanation for natural phenomena, is removed. But then, that's the nature of natural phenomena--if they require the supernatural, they are by definition not natural.

But it doesn't follow that a belief in science in general, or evolution in particular, requires atheism. Many (including Manzi in the link above) have pointed out numerous examples, going back to Aquinas, of the compatibility of rationality and reason, and theism. Stein and Klinghoffer would return us to the dark ages, even if they don't realize it.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:20 AM

It's Not Just A Bad Idea, It's The Law

There's a long piece on the the current state of space law over at the ABA Journal. I only have a couple issues with it. First, I don't know what they mean by this:

Even though the United States eventually outpaced the Soviet Union by putting men on the moon in 1969, the space race continued until the early 1990s.

No, the space race was essentially over by 1968 or so, once the Russians realized that they weren't going to beat us to the moon, and instead rewrote history to pretend that they'd never even been trying. There was no urgency or racing after that--had there been, NASA budgets would have been higher, and schedules faster. So I don't know what this sentence means, unless it just a vague reference to the fact that progress, such as it was, continue on both the US and Soviet side, until the fall of the Soviet Union.

On ITAR, I strongly disagree with Pam Meridith:

"I think the hysteria over ITARs is out of proportion," says Pamela L. Meredith, who co-chairs the space law practice group at Zuckert, Scoutt & Rasenberger in Washington, D.C. "They've been around for a long time now, so people have had time to adjust."

No matter how much "time people have to adjust," it still adds time and cost to projects, and prevents many from happening altogether. And it has a disproportionate effect--like most regulations, big space businesses (who despite leftist mythology, are no fans of capitalism or free enterprise) don't necessarily dislike ITAR, because they can afford to meet the requirements, and they represent a barrier to entry to smaller businesses and newcomers, who generally can't. (Though there's also no question that it's cost Boeing a lot of satellite business.) And as a perfect case in point, consider Mike Gold at Bigelow (in a long, but quite interesting interview):

Res Communis: Can you comment on a company's cost of implementing ITAR?

Gold: Yes, absolutely. Paying so much for export control is a bit like being asked not just to dig your own grave, but to jump in it as well. Our best estimates are that we pay roughly $130.00 per hour, per person, for every hour that a government official monitors us or reviews our documentation during the day, plus overtime, which can add up on overseas trips. What amazes me is that when we travel to Russia for meetings, we sometimes travel with not one, but two government officials, monitoring every word we say. Then, across the table from us are the Russians, all great folks, who came out of a Communist system, and they have no explicit monitors. If we were to have brought someone down from Mars to attend our meetings, and asked them which of these two nations represented the free country, the Martian would point to the Russians. The U.S. holds itself out as the bastion of freedom. But when I am sitting there at those meetings I have to wonder: which is the free country? Now again, this is a problem of policy not personnel. The monitors we get are often good, smart people, who can even be quite helpful at times. However, what I want is for these monitors to be able to spend their limited time and resources focusing on military sensitive technologies that really matter rather than wasting their efforts on us. The Russians basically do this. They have the unique policy of protecting information that is actually sensitive. They don't care about metal coffee tables. It makes a lot more sense. And, in regard to the financial costs, you know, the KGB may have spied on you back in the Soviet days, but at least they had the courtesy to do it for free. It is unfathomable to me what we have to pay for export control review and monitoring.

Res Communis: You do cover their travel expenses also?

Gold: Absolutely, including airfare and hotel. Specifically, in 2006, the year of the Genesis I campaign, we paid over $160,000 in monitoring fees alone. In 2007, when the Genesis II launch campaign took place, we paid the government nearly $150,000 for monitoring and reviews. Thanks to Mr. Bigelow's generosity and commitment, we're able to afford such fees, but there are a lot of small companies that can't. This is why the ITAR has stifled innovation and stunted development in the American aerospace sector. The ITAR should be re-named "The Full Employment for European and Foreign Aerospace Workers Act."

Res Communis: As between a new space company like Bigelow and the big aerospace corporations, is the ITAR burden disproportionate for the new companies?

Gold: Everyone has problems with it, but a large, well established company is better able to absorb the expenses and can pass the cost on to their customers relatively easily. Anecdotally, I have spoken to a number of friends and colleagues at small aerospace businesses and start-ups. They tell me that they don't even look at international collaboration because they know they can't afford to work through the export control problems without a hoard of attorneys. Frankly, it took a lot of work and diligence and a little bit of luck on our own part to have been able to survive the ITAR gauntlet with just myself, my deputy, and some limited support from outside counsel.

And because Bigelow is wealthy, and willing to foot the bill, he can afford it. Most startups aren't in this position. This is just one of the many ways that federal policy has been disastrous, and continues to help bind us to the planet.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:36 AM

The Tuskegee Libel

I had never heard that the Tuskegee experiment involved deliberately infecting people with syphilis. I always thought that the sin was leaving it untreated in men who already had it, so that the progression of the disease could be studied (a sin that was mitigated by the fact that at least at the beginning of the study, there was no known effective treatment, anyway).

But apparently, in the wake of Jeremiah Wright's lunacy, several news people have bought into the nonsense that the researchers infected healthy men. I guess that there's no libel that is too difficult for some people to believe, and even embrace, as long as it is directed against the US.

Anyway, Jonah has more (including the fact that it was a "progressive" project).

Someone should publicly, and loudly, confront Wright on this latest lie. There is a huge leap from studying men already infected, and deliberately inventing a disease and then infecting a race of people for the purpose of genocide, which is what he accuses the country of doing, with Tuskegee as a supposed existence proof.

But don't hold your breath.

[Update a few minutes later]

Jonah has more at The Corner.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:59 AM

May 01, 2008
The Banality Of Sedition

Some thoughts from Gerard Van der Leun, who really should be on my blog roll.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:42 PM

A Man Of No Influence?

Well, apparently David Petraeus didn't influence anyone at Time Magazine. I suspect that he influenced a lot of people in Iraq. I bet that he'll influence voters who elect John McCain this fall, too. In fact, to think that he's without influence requires a willing suspension of disbelief.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:32 PM

The Man Who Grew A Finger

I suspect that this is just the beginning of getting to the point at which we'll be able to regenerate whole limbs.

Interestingly, Patricia had a very similar injury a few years ago when we were diving in the Dominican Republic. She had it stitched up in Santo Domingo, and the nail is there now, but the finger is just a little shorter, and still a little numb at the end. This would have been a much better solution.

Anyway, bring it on.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:15 PM

State Department Issues New Language Guidelines

December 15th, 1941

WASHINGTON (Routers) In an effort to drive a wedge between moderate Germans and those more extreme, the State Department issued new rules today, stipulating that the word "Nazi" was not to be used by department employees to describe the enemy. Germany recently declared war on our country, as part of its alliance with Imperial Japan, which itself attacked us at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii a little over a week ago, and with which we are now at war.

"Nazism has a great many admirable features," said a department spokesman at Foggy Bottom, "and we want to make clear that despite the fact that the Nazi Party rules Germany, we have no quarrel with the vast majority of Nazis with peaceful intent."

She went on to describe the National Socialist universal health care plan, its youth programs that inculcate loyalty to the government, its strict and necessary control over unbridled private industry, its wage and price controls, its strict separation of church and state, its progressive views on food purity and safety, and other beneficial features of the fascist system.

"Many of the Nazi programs have their counterparts here in President Roosevelt's own New Deal, such as the NRA, the CCC, our price monitoring boards, and so on. In fact, many of the ideas of National Socialism were first developed in our own progressive country, and we in turn might want to consider examining their policies for more ways to improve our own."

She went on, "...if we call Hitler and his staff, who lack moral legitimacy, 'Nazis,' we may unintentionally legitimize their rule, and end up offending many of the peaceful National Socialist Germans with whom we can develop a productive relationship after the defeat of the extremist Hitler regime. We don't want to tar all Nazis with the racism and war mongering of the more fanatical members of the party."

"We are concerned that use of the term "Nazi" to refer to the murderous extremists may glamorize their racism, give them undeserved moral authority with the German people, and undermine our ultimate war strategy of winning their hearts and minds. We want them to understand that we recognize Nazism as an ideology of peace, and welfare for the common good and betterment of all Germans. Not to mention their understandable desire for lebensraum."

When asked what term employees were to use to refer to the enemy, she replied, "We haven't quite worked that out yet. We're considering 'the Hitler gang' for now."

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:26 PM

Civil Discourse

I probably shouldn't give him benefit of the link (it will probably up his traffic by an order of magnitude or two), but apparently we're nothing but "poo-flinging monkeys" here, because he doesn't like to lose arguments.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:00 PM

Time For Space Solar Power?

There's certainly no reason to think that much has changed based on this latest call for it:

PV technology has improved considerably since this idea was developed adding to the argument that this source of energy should be revisited. In addition, the economics of the cost of energy have changed. According to Dr. Neville Marzwell and his colleagues at the Jet Propulsion Lab, an SSP system could generate energy at a cost including cost of construction of 60 to 80 cents per kilowatt-hour at the outset. He believes that "in 15 to 25 years we can lower that cost to 7 to 10 cents per kWh." The average cost of residential electricity was 9.86 cents per kWh in the U.S. in 2006.

The problem (as always) is that this doesn't account for the costs of competing energy sources dropping even more. And of course, the notion of building SPS with the existing space transportation infrastructure remains ludicrous. Get the costs of access down (a good idea for a lot of other reasons), and then see if it makes sense. Unfortunately, current space policy (or at least the vast amount of expenditures on space transportation) seems aimed at increasing the cost of access to space.

[Via Ken Silber]

[Early evening update]

Mark Whittington:

Rand's approach is just clearly wrong. There are no market incentives to decrease the cost of space travel, outside the COTS competition.

Nope, none at all. How will we ever do it without the government?

Oh, wait! How about the millions of people who want to take a trip, and can afford to do so if the price comes down? Mark ignores that one, though, because it doesn't require NASA getting billions of dollars, or giving them out for a few flights via COTS, that will do very little to significantly reduce the cost of access.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:43 PM

First Anniversary

Henry Cate has the anniversary edition of the Carnival of Space, with an emphasis on space and television.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:49 AM

Doomsday Has Been Postponed

Apparently, global warming is being delayed:

Commenting on the new study, Richard Wood of the Hadley Centre said the model suggested the weakening of the MOC would have a cooling effect around the North Atlantic.

"Such a cooling could temporarily offset the longer-term warming trend from increasing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

"That emphasises once again the need to consider climate variability and climate change together when making predictions over timescales of decades."

Gee, what a concept.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:08 AM

Green Fascism

There's an interesting post over at New Scientist on the new eugenicists. What's even more interesting, though, are the numerous comments, which repeat many of the myths about population growth and control, and feasibility of mitigating it through space technology, including space (to use the politically incorrect word) colonization.

I don't really have time to critique in any detail, other than to note that anyone who makes feasibility arguments on the latter subject by referring to Shuttle costs is completely clueless. Sadly though, years ago, Carl Sagan did exactly that.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:35 AM

New Look

Over at Keith Cowing's place. Interestingly, it looks much less like a blog now, what with the newspaper column layout.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:26 AM

Superfluous

These people seem to think (nuttily enough) that there's some kind of anti-government bias in the media, and thus a need for their web site. It's basically your one-stop fascism shop.

[Via you know who]

Hmmmm...

Well governmentisbad.com is already taken, though it doesn't seem to be a counterpart.

[Afternoon update]

"Government is good," eh? Yeah, government is great:

The problems first emerged in May 2007, when 1,400 handhelds were deployed for a "dress rehearsal." In the field, they proved to be slow and unreliable. The Bush Administration's official explanation is that the Census Bureau didn't get its requirements straight with the contractor, Florida-based Harris Corp. No doubt that's true - the Government Accountability Office warned all the way back in 2005 that Census did not have a good grasp of its technology needs or effective procurement. Even so, we doubt that "slow and unreliable" were part of the original specs in March 2006.

The Census Bureau decided as long ago as 2000 that handheld computers were the future, and spent four years trying to develop one in-house, with little to show for it. That earlier failure led to the contract with Harris in 2006. As usual in government, no one in particular seems to be taking responsibility for the serial failures - which of course is part of the problem. There is little incentive for getting it right, because no one below the level of a political appointee ever loses a job for getting it wrong. You can even lose your job for getting it right if it means more efficiency.

In the case of the botched handhelds, the result is that the Census will now have to deploy some 600,000 temporary workers to go door to door and get the forms filled out by hand. The handhelds will still be used for "address canvassing," although even at that they can't handle more than 700 addresses at a time. For this great leap backward, taxpayers will pay $3 billion more for the census than originally estimated.

This must be one of those awful articles "biased" against the government.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:20 AM