Category Archives: Media Criticism

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, War Commentary

Why We Should Support Israel

4 Comments

Armed Liberal explains:

As I never tire of reminding people, the disparity in power between Israel and the Palestinian proto-states (and the entire Arab world) is immense, driven in large part by the cultural gap between the westernized Israelis and the balance of the Middle East.

I’m no expert, but I have to believe that the day Israel gets tired of this stalemate and simply starts playing by Hama rules, it will be a matter of days before there simply are no more Palestinian people.

And here’s the problem – the same problem I’ve worried about since 2001. How do we prevent this from seeming like a good idea?

Well, the strongest way is for Israel to know that it’s not alone.

And we’re doing a worse and worse job of that.

I also think that Joe Katzman’s comment about the Juan Coles of the world is spot on:

You assume that the hatred of people like Juan Cole is rational.

If Israel falls, and million of Jews are murdered, Cole and his ilk will just smirk and enjoy the victory their Islamist friends have won.

If Israel wipes out the Palestinians, it serves as full justification to them for all the loony things they blieve about Western Civilization (and the Jews), and in their minds they were the “heroes” who tired to stop it. On some level, I suspect they may desire this; it fits their ideological fantasies too well. The fact that [they] would have done a fair [b]it to cause the situation will not, of course, be allowed to enter their minds.

So, their position is one in which nothing of theirs is held at risk, and either way they “win.”

Logic is not relevant to any of this. Only the hate that animates them.

And there are far too many of them, particularly in Europe.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space

Enough With The “Military Rockets” Already

19 Comments

Andy Pasztor makes the same mistake as Bloomberg and many others have in this WSJ piece about the potential new administrator:

One of the first big questions confronting NASA is whether the new team will embrace the Bush administration’s concept of building a new fleet of space shuttle-derived rockets to reach the orbiting International Space Station and return to the moon. In the past few weeks, there have been increasing calls by outsiders to scrap some of those plans in favor of using existing military rockets.

The Atlas and Delta are not “military rockets.”

They are commercial launch vehicles, developed partly with a subsidy from the Air Force. Anyone can fly on them who has the money, and they are built and operated by commercial contractors. They fly out of a military range, but almost all commercial vehicles do. There is nothing “military” about them. Why can’t people get this straight?

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space, Space and Campaign 2008

Pots And Kettles

3 Comments

…in which Keith Cowing accuses me of being “snarky” (in comments). Guess his irony meter is on the fritz. Oh, well, can’t complain. I’ve been getting steady hittage off it for the last hour or so.

Anyway, with regard to the pick for White House liaison to NASA, I’d just like to see something more to his qualifications than that he raised money for Obama (and of course, his sexual orientation is entirely irrelevant, at least to me).

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, War Commentary

Still Time To Vote

15 Comments

The voting for best Middle-East/Africa blog is pretty much down to Juan Cole and Michael Totten. Please don’t sully the award by allowing Cole to win.

Something I just noticed, which is typical of leftists — false advertising. From the Bolsheviks (no, they weren’t really the majority), to “progressives” and “liberals” and support of “appropriate technology,” they have to steal a base with their misleading (to be polite) names. Not to mention, of course, Democratic. “Informed Comment” is just the latest (and even more presumptuous than usual) in the sham names.

General Science, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

Daisyworld

2 Comments

…meet rainmaking bacteria:

Barbara Nozière of Stockholm University, Sweden, and colleagues suggest that surfactants secreted by many species of bacteria could also influence the weather. While these are normally used to transport nutrients through membranes, the team have shown that they also break down the surface tension of water better than any other substance in nature. This led them to suspect that if the detergent was found in clouds it would stimulate the formation of water droplets.

This is the kind of thing that makes me skeptical about bureaucratic solutions to planetary engineering, natural or otherwise.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Reason Number 32,467

13 Comments

…that I won’t miss George Bush. He did an interview with the Star Telegram the other day. He talked about a range of things (including space policy, which I’ll discuss in a separate post), but this makes me crazy:

No question that the economic — the current economic situation is very difficult and it obscures the fact that during my time in office we had 52 uninterrupted months of job creation, which was a record. The current economic crisis began before my presidency. All of us who have held office during — from the genesis of the crisis until today bear responsibility.

On the other hand, given the stark nature of the financial situation and the dangers inherent with it, I have moved and moved very aggressively. We have abandoned free market principles and did what it took to prevent the financial system from melting down.

The implication of that last was that we were in the midst of some sort of riot of laissez faire up until September, then had to suddenly “abandon free market principles.” But what happened had nothing to do with free-market principles. Unless, that is, you consider strong-arming by Congress into handing out dodgy loans to unworthy home buyers is somehow a “free market principle.” Or that putting so much paperwork requirements on the accounting of public corporations (see Oxley, Sarbanes) that it has almost shut down the IPO market, and inhibited the formation of new startups is a “free-market principle.”

This kind of foolish rhetoric plays right into the hands of the people who demagogued the Democrats into power, with their talk about all of the mythical “deregulation” under “Republicans” that somehow resulted in the current financial mess, even thought they cannot point to a single actual instance of such “deregulation” (at least not in the Bush years). If they think that repealing Glass-Steagal was a bad idea (I don’t, in and of itself), that happened under that famous free marketeer, Bill Clinton.

I expect the Democrats to rewrite history, but I’m not going to miss a supposedly Republican president who acquiesces to it. And John McCain would have been no better.

[Update a few minutes later]

OK, here’s reason 32,468:

Two more former top Bush Justice Department officials have endorsed the nomination of Eric Holder for attorney general, the latest in a growing list of GOP backers for Holder.

In letters obtained by Politico and expected to be released shortly, Paul McNulty and Larry Thompson, both of whom served as deputy attorney general under President George W. Bush, threw their support behind Holder, who was a deputy attorney general under former President Bill Clinton.

James Comey, another Bush deputy attorney general, has also backed Holder.

This says much more to me about the poor quality of Bush Justice Department picks than it does about the merits of Eric Holder. I hope that the otherwise worthless senior Senator from Pennsylvania puts up the kind of fight against Holder that he’s been hinting at (though I wish that someone would also ask him about his views on the Second Amendment and Heller).

[Afternoon update]

For anyone interested, I’ve put up a post about the space portion of the president’s interview now.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space

Still Floundering

15 Comments

Once again, we have a pathetic defense of the current architecture, in which (following up on the Friday Griffin speech) we are once again assured that NASA looked at all the options, and this really is the best one, trust us. And once again, there is no data or supporting documentation or assumptions provided to support the bald assertions:

NASA looked at a wide variety of launch concepts — from the Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle (Atlas V, Delta IV), Space Shuttle (including Shuttle C, Direct type approaches and other solid and liquid rocket booster propelled systems) combinations, foreign systems and clean sheet designs.

The Exploration Systems Architecture Study (ESAS) was chartered in the spring of 2005 to recommend a fundamental architecture for supporting International Space Station, Lunar and Mars transportation.

Using data from previous and ongoing studies (several hundred vehicles), and consisting of a team of knowledgeable experts from inside and outside NASA, this study compared many launch and staging options for safety, effectiveness, performance, flexibility, risk and affordability.

This reminds me of the last scene in the first Indiana Jones movie:

“We have top men studying this.”

“Who?!“

“Top. Men.”

Well, in this case, we know who the “top men” are — names like Doug Stanley, and Scott Horowitz, and Mike Griffin. But we still have never seen the actual process by which these top men came up with this travesty.

And they wonder why we don’t trust them.

Clark Lindsey responds:

Just to give my same old refutation in a different way, I’ll list the major weaknesses of the program as seen by someone who wants humanity to become genuinely spacefaring:

  • Ares I/V/Orion will be stupendously expensive both to develop and to operate.

  • Furthermore, these systems do not provide any technology development path towards future vehicles that would be less expensive to develop and operate.
  • They do not contribute to the development of a robust in-space transportation infrastructure.
  • And thus they do not lead to lower cost in-space transportation either.
  • Even if Constellation performs as promised, the very modest lunar surface capabilities it provides will not compensate for its staggering costs.
  • The opportunity costs will be enormous as well:
  • Money going to Ares I/V will not go towards development of crucial technologies such as fuel depots, orbital tugs, in situ resource extraction systems, etc.
  • And the money will also not go towards buying the services of commercial providers who would drive down the costs of spaceflight via the economies of scale arising from large scale delivery of propellants, components, and crews to orbit.

Now does NASA disagree with these characterizations of their plan, or do they disagree that these are worthwhile figures of merit? Do they think those conditions unnecessary to become spacefaring? Or do they think that our becoming spacefaring is unnecessary?

It must be one or the other, but these topics never even seem to be discussed.

[Update early afternoon]

It occurs to me that, sometime during the accumulation of all of his degrees, Dr. Griffin was likely to have been penalized (or at least warned about a penalty) for turning in an assignment requiring math and physics with just the answer, without showing his work, including assumptions. In fact, even if the answer is wrong (because, for example, you punched a calculator button incorrectly), you’ll often get partial (and in some cases even full) credit, because the most important part of the exercise is understanding the problem and how to solve it, not just coming up with an answer. I certainly had this drilled into me, and I don’t know anyone with a technical or hard science degree who did not.

All we’re asking of you, Mike, is to show your work, just like you did in school. You don’t get a pass on this just because you’re NASA administrator. Not even when you have multiple engineering and management degrees and are a “rocket scientist.”

[Monday morning update]

Architecture, not point design.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

Why?

58 Comments

Dennis Wingo says that we need a compelling reason for a space program, and we don’t currently have it. I agree. This is the space policy debate that we need to have, and never really have, at least not since the early post-Sputnik period. There is no way to come up with the right transportation architecture/infrastructure if we don’t understand the requirements, and we don’t really understand why we’re doing it. People persist in thinking that the VSE was a destination (the moon, then Mars), and then proceed to argue about whether or not it was the right destination. But it was, or should have been, much more than that — it was a statement that we are no longer going to be confined to low earth orbit, as we had been since 1972. But the failure was in articulating why we should move beyond LEO. Dennis has done as good a job of that here as anyone to date.

I would also note that it’s hard to generate enthusiasm for spending money, or astronauts’ lives, when we don’t know why they’re doing it. As I wrote a couple years ago:

Our national reaction to the loss of a shuttle crew, viewed by the proverbial anthropologist’s Martian (or perhaps better yet, a Vulcan), would seem irrational. After all, we risk, and lose, people in all kinds of endeavors, every day. We send soldiers out to brave IEDs and RPGs in Iraq. We watch firefighters go into burning buildings. Even in more mundane, relatively safe activities, people die — in mines, in construction, in commercial fishing. Why is it that we get so upset when we lose astronauts, who are ostensibly exploring the final frontier, arguably as dangerous a job as they come? One Internet wag has noted that, “…to judge by the fuss that gets made when a few of them die, astronauts clearly are priceless national assets — exactly the sort of people you should not be risking in an experimental-class vehicle.”

What upset people so much about the deaths in Columbia, I think, was not that they died, but that they died in such a seemingly trivial yet expensive pursuit. They weren’t exploring the universe — they were boring a multi-hundred-thousand-mile-long hole in the vacuum a couple hundred miles above the planet, with children’s science-fair experiments. We were upset because space isn’t important, and we considered the astronauts’ lives more important than the mission. If they had been exploring another hostile, alien planet, and died, we would have been saddened, but not shocked — it happens in the movies all the time. If they had been on a mission to divert an asteroid, preventing it from hitting the planet (a la the movie Armageddon, albeit with more correspondence to the reality of physics), we would have mourned, but also been inured to their loss as true national heroes in the service of their country (and planet). It would be recognized that what they were doing was of national importance, just as is the job of every soldier and Marine in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But space remains unimportant, and it will continue to be as long as we haven’t gotten the public and polity to buy in on a compelling “why.”