Just how ignorant are network news anchors?

Don’t ask, but consider that while cruising the channels, the guy on CNN Newsnight said that the new object discovered, several billion miles away, was the “most distant object found in the universe.”

I think that John Kerry’s…revelation…that he’s the preferred candidate of some unnamed foreign leaders is a mistake on several levels. It will obviously sell well among his base that the oh-so-sophisticated-and-nuanced-himself Jacque Chirac thinks that Kerry is his man (and who else does Mr. Kerry intend for us to infer as his hopeful future counterpart?). But it’s not at all clear that this will sell that well with independents and undecideds. What will the campaign slogan be–“Vote Kerry–The French Choice”? I suspect that in fact most American want their president to be vetted and supported by Americans, not “furriners.”

But an even bigger mistake is making the claim, and then feigning outrage when someone questions him on it, or wants more details. It opens up an opportunity for his opponents (so far not capitalized on, at least by the White House).

Their current response is to claim that if he won’t name names, then he must be making it up. Maybe this will be an effective tactic, but it sounds dumb to me. There’s no doubt in my mind that there are foreign leaders, even former US “allies” who would prefer Kerry (or any Democrat, or even any non-simian cowboy) in the White House to George Bush, so the charges that he’s a liar or making it up don’t have much weight to me.

I think that a much more effective commercial would be something like:

John Kerry says that some unnamed foreign leaders would prefer him as president to our current president. If this is true, why will he not name them?

Is it because among those names might be Kim Jung Il, the brutal North Korean dictator whose state-controlled press has been extolling Mr. Kerry’s virtues? Or Bashir Assad of terrorist-supporting Syria? Or Yasser Arafat, who continues to sponsor terrorism in Israel? The mullahs in Iran?

Or Osama bin Laden?

What is Mr. Kerry trying to hide?

We believe that an American president should be the choice of Americans, not unnamed foreign leaders.

It would serve him right for such an odious and dumb campaign tactic, and considering that I just saw a poll indicating that sixty percent of registered voters think that terrorists would prefer Kerry to Bush, I suspect that it would be a very effective ad.

And you know what else? I’ll be that, despite his supposed chumminess with Bill Clinton, Tony Blair isn’t on that list.

Maybe, but there’s no way to tell from this article.

I keep seeing these reports of how NASA and DARPA are coming up with techniques to “shape” shock waves and sonic boom, and how this is going to lead to a brave new world of overland supersonic flight. But I never see any quantification of the benefit of such techniques. The other thing that I never see is a discussion of the effect on wave drag, which is the other big factor that prevents economical supersonic flight.

As I’ve written before, there actually may be design solutions that can significantly reduce, and even approach elimination of both sonic boom and wave drag, but NASA and DARPA continue to refuse to consider them. Perhaps when this latest attempt doesn’t pan out, they’ll be willing to finally do so.

[Update a few minutes later]

Here’s a Usenet discussion on the topic from a few years ago among yours truly, and several others.

I just discovered via an inbound link that space/science writer James Burke has started up a weblog dedicated to Project Constellation, the new Crew Exploration Vehicle.

In response to Rand’s request, here is my little bio. I am awful when it comes to telling my personal story, so you might want to skip this unless you have some time to waste.

I will tell you about my writing and reporting experience in a few paragraphs, but first…

Continue reading McDade: Man or Astroman? →

I see that Andrew has introduced himself. I have to relate that when he told me that he was going to Botswana for a family emergency, I told him that it seemed funny (not the family emergency–the fact that he had a family in Botswana, and not in the squirting-flower-trick sense) because, being a Person of Pallor, he didn’t look Botswanan.

He replied that that was because he was actually Zambian.

[rimshot]

Well, I thought it was funny.

He also said that he’s been tempted to check the “african american” box on various forms, but couldn’t quite work up the moxie, to which I replied that it seems to work for Theresa Heinz.

Mark Whittington has a cogent point about the congressional handwringing over the potential and uncertain costs of a mulit-decade space program.

I suspect that had Medicare been subjected to these kind of requirements back in the mid 1960s, it would never have passed.

Not to mention the president’s recent prescription drug program.

Well, ask, and ye shall receive.

I don’t have a lot of time to post, but I want to welcome Jim McDade. He brings a different (should I say more traditional?) space policy viewpoint to Transterrestrial, and I suspect that some intrablog sparring will liven up the discussion here. While I agree with him that a Kerry presidency shows no signs of boding well for our future in space, there are a number of other things with which I would take issue, particularly in his follow-up comments (particularly his trotting out of the old “broken window” fallacy). Unfortunately, I don’t have time to do so right now, because, as I said, I’m busy househunting in Florida, so I’ll let others discuss it for now.

I also hope that Jim (and Andrew) will put up a brief description of who they are, for the edification of the readership.

[Update around noon eastern time]

Jim responds in comments on breaking windows. My response:

With respect to boosting economies post hurricanes, no one disputes that it benefits the local economies of the people whose communities get rebuilt. The problem is that they’re not the ones who pay the opportunity costs–the taxpayers are. It’s easy to make things boom locally by taxing others globally (just as it’s easy to decrease entropy locally, at a greater cost in the rest of the universe). It’s also easy to boost a bank robber’s income by letting him rob banks. That doesn’t mean that turning everyone into bank robbers will increase the national wealth.

The point is not that we shouldn’t help people out after hurricanes and that it’s a benefit to them when we do so, but rather that we shouldn’t fool ourselves that this is in any way a good thing for the national economy, and that we should therefore wish for hurricanes.

Space programs have to be justified by their benefits to society as a whole, not by how much they benefit communities with NASA centers, at the expense of the taxpayers. If we make bad and easily refuted arguments in support of space expansion, it can be worse than making no arguments at all.

I’m going back down to Fort Lauderdale tomorrow to do some house hunting. I’ll check in intermittently, but I won’t have constant broadband, and I don’t know how good the dial-up will be. I’m sure that my other mysterious co-bloggers here will pick up the slack any minute, though.

Right?

[crickets chirping]

Any minute.

Sure is quiet in here…

[High lonesome howl of a coyote in the distance]

Anyway, I’ll be back next Tuesday, and by then, I hope that things will be in full swing.

Jim Oberg reminds me that, had he lived, Yuri Gagarin would have been seventy years old today. Here’s a piece that Jim wrote about him, and his significance, a few years ago.