It’s a media blackout for the Black Panthers and the (In)Justice Department.
[Update a few minutes later]
Well, at least the Al Gore sexual assault allegations have gone mainstream. As some have pointed out, part of his problem was his hubris in making himself a celebrity, which opened him up as fair game for the entertainment rags.
I wonder if he’s past his media sell-by date? Or they’re happy to toss him under the bus to give them a distraction from having to report corruption at the Justice Department?
A Russian robotic vehicle seems to be out of control, and unable to dock with the ISS. Probably a stuck or miscommanded thruster. Between this and the two Soyuz landing anomalies, I wonder if the Russian space program is falling apart? If so, it’s potentially bad news for ISS. We need to get a fire lit under the commercial crew and COTS programs.
The dirty little secret of politics is that most politicians are of barely above average intelligence and possess very narrow educations. They’re mostly people with IQs of around 120 and a law degree. So, they know literally nothing about economics and lack the capacity to see that what the experts are telling them doesn’t add up. Given those circumstances, it should come as no surprise that they so readily embrace the economic theory that tells them exactly what they want to hear. “Go, thou, and spend, and thus shalt the economy be saved. And lo, thou shalt be the savior of thy people!” That’s a lot more palatable than being told that the nation is in dire straits and their careers are in jeopardy due to the actions of their predecessors, and that there’s not much they can do about it. So, they listen to the self-interested parties and blindly go about making the situation worse.
I think that he overestimates the intelligence of the narrowly educated lawyer/politicians. Particularly the one in the White House.
Even ignoring the fact that the bad guys on the Broadview Security commercials are the most caucasian male demographic outside of a Klan rally, I’ve always been particularly annoyed by the commercial with the miscreant “AJ.” It never made any sense to me. Apparently, someone else agrees.
And would Broadview really take that much heat if they at least once in a while implied that some break-in artists have more melanin in their skin? Can’t they at least be equal opportunity, if not actually corresponding to reality?
I’ve had a lot of differences with John Logsdon over the years, but in this Space News piece (pointed out to me by Charles Lurio), he gets it pretty close to exactly right (i.e., we’re pretty much on the same page):
Yale University organizational sociologist Gary Brewer more than 20 years ago observed that NASA during the Apollo program came close to being “a perfect place” — the best organization that human beings could create to accomplish a particular goal. But, suggested Brewer, “perfect places do not last for long.” NASA was “no longer a perfect place.” The organization needed “new ways of thinking, new people, and new means.” He added “The innocent clarity of purpose, the relatively easy and economically painless public consent, and the technical confidence [of Apollo] … are gone and will probably never occur again. Trying to recreate those by-gone moments by sloganeering, frightening, or appealing to mankind’s mystical needs for exploration and conquest seems somehow futile considering all that has happened since Jack Kennedy set the nation on course to the Moon.”
Introducing “new ways of thinking, new people, and new means” into the NASA approach to human spaceflight has not happened in the two decades since Brewer made his observations. That was the conclusion of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board in 2003, and despite the positive steps taken since then to operate the shuttle as safely as possible, much of the Apollo-era human spaceflight culture remains intact. Trying to change that culture and thereby close out the half century of Apollo-style human spaceflight seems to me the essence of the new space strategy. There is no way of achieving that objective without wrenching dislocations; change is indeed hard. Gaining acceptance of that change will require more White House and congressional leadership and honesty about the consequences of the new strategy than has been evident to date.
Sadly, White House and congressional leadership and honesty have been in pretty short supply lately, on both this issue and others.