Category Archives: History

History

Auschwitz

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A photoessay from Rachel Lucas:

You think of Auschwitz, or Poland in general after the Nazis invaded, and you think of bleakness and dreariness. Dark dank sickly winter and snow and death. I took that picture five minutes away from the camp, and there is little doubt in my mind that it looked generally the same way 65 or 70 years ago. The same green grass and the same bright sunshine. Those things didn’t disappear in 1939 and magically regenerate in 1945.

It cracks the heart open to fully comprehend that things like the large-scale industrial genocide that happened at Auschwitz-Birkenau took place in the middle of a perfectly normal world like we saw on that bus ride. It didn’t happen in hell, or in some bleak desert, or any permanently winter-bound nightmare landscape where you can explain away these things more easily. It was just in the middle of this gorgeous countryside.

It’s long, but well worth the read.

Economics, Education, History, Philosophy, Political Commentary, Popular Culture

The President’s Reading List

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I would have expected Das Kapital, myself, but I wish that he’d read Hayek, this time for comprehension. Actually, I think that he should have brought along a copy of HR3200, if he’s got that much free time for reading. But as commenters there note, this list is likely more for public consumption than what he’s actually going to be reading.

On a related note, Will Wilkinson asks an interesting question:

Here is a good debate proposition: It ought to be less embarrassing to have been influenced by Ayn Rand than by Karl Marx.

Yes, it ought to be. It’s really quite appalling that being a Marxist remains a sign of prestige in academia, instead of being met with opprobrium.

Business, Economics, History, Political Commentary, Space, Space History, Technology and Society

A Space Program For The Rest Of Us

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I know, you’ve all given up, and just assumed that the piece in The New Atlantis was just another drug-addled Simberg fantasy of grandeur. That when I kept saying it would be Real Soon Now, that it was just vaporware. Well, Now has finally arrived.

As I wrote in an early draft, if extraterrestrial aliens had contacted the White House after the last lunar landing in 1972, and told the president that humans wouldn’t be allowed to move into space beyond earth orbit, and to pass the message on to his successors, but that the public was not to know this, it’s hard to imagine how policy actions would have been much different. Let’s Hope that this can finally Change with the new administration. That (unlike most of the rest of the agenda) would be Hope and Change that I could believe in.

[Late Friday update]

I want to thank everyone for the kudos, but I can’t accept it (did you know that kudos is not plural?) without acknowledging that this was a collaboration. Adam Keiper, the first and only (to date) editor of The New Atlantis, encouraged me to write this piece and, more importantly, played a key role in making it what it was. While we lost some things in editing (that I’ll rectify in a later Director’s Cut, and perhaps expand into a book), he focused it and almost certainly helped make it more influential in getting more to read it now, when we are at such a critical cusp of policy decisions.

But beyond that, he really helped write it. I was tired when I finished, and had a weak ending. The final paragraph, one of the best in it, if not the best (and it may be), is his.

And I’m grateful for the opportunity that he provided to get this message out, not just with The Path Not Taken five years ago (was it really that long?) but this and other pieces. The links in it are his, which indicates to me that he’s been following this topic closely. The most amazing thing is that this collaboration is a result of a snarky criticism by me of his own space-policy punditry, over half a decade ago. Rather than taking umbrage, he opened his mind to new possibilities, and the result is this (so far at least) collaborative magnum opus.

[Bumped]

History, Humor, Political Commentary

Apollo Memories, And A Modest Proposal

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…from Iowahawk:

Today, America still has a space effort, but sadly it just doesn’t inspire like it once did in the heady days of Apollo and Gemini. Unmanned probes and orbiting space labs are fine, I guess, but where is the glamor? Where are the crewcut astronaut he-men with names like ‘Deke’ and ‘Buzz’ and ‘Gus,’ driving around Houston in matching big block Corvettes and Ray-Bans? Nowhere, that’s where. They’ve all been outsourced by space computers and floaty-haired National Junior High Science Teacher of the Year nerds. You tell me — do we really want dorks like these as Earth’s first line of defense against invading intergalactic aliens? No wonder my brother and I have to be half-blotto before we play pretend astronauts anymore.

If America wants to get back on the right track, scientific space mission-wise, we need to once again pick an inspiring, audacious goal, and man it with the kind of inspirational crew to make it happen. At long last, let us realize mankind’s most cherished dream — sending the entire United States Congress to the Moon by 2010.

When I mention this proposal to my space engineering friends at Meier’s Tap, they are often skeptical. They’ll argue it’s impossible, that even NASA’s most powerful booster rockets never anticipated a payload of 535 people including Charlie Rangel and Jerrold Nadler. Look man, I’m just the idea guy, and I’m sure those details can be worked out. When John F. Kennedy first proposed going to the Moon in 1961, did you people expect him to already have a formula for Tang? The beauty of my proposal is that our Astro-Congress is already on payroll — and chock full of crisis tested problem-solving engineers. If they can take over the entire US auto industry and re-engineer the American heath care system in two weeks, surviving a Moon mission will be a snap!

If only he’d been elected president last year. I’d be space czar now.

History, Media Criticism, Popular Culture, Space

Apollo Thoughts I’d Missed Monday

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From James Lileks:

As I’ve said before, nothing sums up the seventies, and the awful guttering of the national spirit, than a pop song about Skylab falling on people’s heads. “Skylab’s Falling,” a novelty hit in the summer of ’79. It tumbled down thirty years ago this month, and didn’t get much press, possibly because of the odd muted humiliation over the event. But it wasn’t end of Skylab that gave people a strange shameful dismay. It was the idea that we were done up there, and the only thing we’d done since the Moon trips did an ignominious Icarus instead of staying up for decades. So this wasn’t the first step toward the inevitable double-wheel with a Strauss waltz soundtrack, or something more prosaic. Wasn’t that the way it was supposed to work? Moon first, then space station, then moon colonization, then Mars.

If a kid could see that, why couldn’t they?

…Robot exploration is very cool; I’d like more. As someone noted elsewhere, we should have those rovers crawling all over the Moon, at the very least. It’s just down the street. But think how much grander we would feel if we knew that our first mission to Jupiter was coming back next month. (Without the giant space-fetus.) How we would imagine our solar system, how each planet would feel like a blank page in a passport waiting for a stamp. Perhaps that’s what annoys some: the aggrandizement that would come from great exploits. Human pride in something that isn’t specifically related to fixing the Great Problems we face now, or apologizing for the Bad Things we did before. Spending money to go to Mars before we’ve stopped climate turbulence would be like taking a trip to Europe while the house is on fire.

I had forgotten that Skylab fell a decade after the first landing. What a metaphorical fall, in only ten brief years (though they seemed longer at the time, I being much younger).

Oh, and the astronaut punching the guy in the face thing? As long-time blog readers know, it was a hoax. Never happened.