I was going to comment on this strange and hyperbolic broadside at the Shuttle, and the manned space program in general from John Derbyshire, but Mark Whittington (who really should spell check his posts) and Clark Lindsey have preempted much of what I would have written.
Briefly, while I agree with his conclusions, he gets there by accident, because his premises are mostly wrong, and his numbers exaggerated beyond any semblance of reality.
There is a good, but incomplete proposal for landing slot auctions at Chicago O’Hare at AW&ST, June 6, p.31. (Subscription required)
It includes the following:
One thing that is not decided is “who should get the increased revenues that [the Justice Dept.’s] regime would likely generate or what should be done with them.”
My proposal is that the money go to the current rights holder for existing rights and the airport for new rights. That includes the auction winners. I.e., the rights would be resold and the former owner would get the proceeds. This gives the airport the right incentive to make improvements that allow more landings. It also turns the rights into capital assets. We might see better stewardship of them.
We might also see less screaming from existing rights holders because if they get the money, they are no worse off than under the current system. (Unless they were going to go bankrupt and stiff their creditors.)
I was on the phone with someone in South Pasadena (CA), and he just reported an earthquake to me in real time out there.
[Quick check at USGS]
Yup, a 5.3 north of Yucaipa. They should have felt that all the way from San Diego to the high desert. I didn’t feel a thing here in Florida, though.
The Japanese are foolishly teaming up with the French to build what they call “Son of Concorde“:
The new plane will have 300 seats and cut the flight time between New York and Tokyo to six hours, reports said.
While there’s unquestionably a market for such a plane, assuming the right ticket price, they provide no clues as to how they can build a supersonic plane this large, with that much range, let alone one that won’t be unaffordable to fly, given its fuel consumption. They do pretend to, though:
The ministry added that Japan had successfully tested an engine that could theoretically reach speeds of up to five times the speed of sound.
Whoop de doo.
That’s nice, but it has zero to do with building an affordable, boom-free supersonic airliner, about which they seem clueless. One can only imagine that government money is involved.
At least it’s no longer US government money.
This effort will share Concorde’s ultimate fate, if it’s lucky. More likely it will simply be a black hole of tax dollars, ending in nothing but paper, just like NASA’s equally poorly-conceived, and disastrous High-Speed Research program in the 1990s.
Here’s a great roundup of cartoons.
That’s exactly what James Lileks has:
The [ant] colony continues its descent. The population was ten a week ago; now it
Robert Samuelson says that Europe is going out of business.
A few countries (Britain, Ireland, the Netherlands) have acted, and there are differences between Eastern and Western Europe. But in general Europe is immobilized by its problems. This is the classic dilemma of democracy: Too many people benefit from the status quo to change it; but the status quo isn’t sustainable. Even modest efforts in France and Germany to curb social benefits have triggered backlashes. Many Europeans — maybe most — live in a state of delusion. Believing things should continue as before, they see almost any change as menacing. In reality, the new E.U. constitution wasn’t radical; neither adoption nor rejection would much alter everyday life. But it symbolized change and thereby became a lightning rod for many sources of discontent (over immigration in Holland, poor economic growth in France).
With the recent drop in the Euro, they may in fact be about to have a going-out-of-business sale.
Robert Samuelson says that Europe is going out of business.
A few countries (Britain, Ireland, the Netherlands) have acted, and there are differences between Eastern and Western Europe. But in general Europe is immobilized by its problems. This is the classic dilemma of democracy: Too many people benefit from the status quo to change it; but the status quo isn’t sustainable. Even modest efforts in France and Germany to curb social benefits have triggered backlashes. Many Europeans — maybe most — live in a state of delusion. Believing things should continue as before, they see almost any change as menacing. In reality, the new E.U. constitution wasn’t radical; neither adoption nor rejection would much alter everyday life. But it symbolized change and thereby became a lightning rod for many sources of discontent (over immigration in Holland, poor economic growth in France).
With the recent drop in the Euro, they may in fact be about to have a going-out-of-business sale.
Robert Samuelson says that Europe is going out of business.
A few countries (Britain, Ireland, the Netherlands) have acted, and there are differences between Eastern and Western Europe. But in general Europe is immobilized by its problems. This is the classic dilemma of democracy: Too many people benefit from the status quo to change it; but the status quo isn’t sustainable. Even modest efforts in France and Germany to curb social benefits have triggered backlashes. Many Europeans — maybe most — live in a state of delusion. Believing things should continue as before, they see almost any change as menacing. In reality, the new E.U. constitution wasn’t radical; neither adoption nor rejection would much alter everyday life. But it symbolized change and thereby became a lightning rod for many sources of discontent (over immigration in Holland, poor economic growth in France).
With the recent drop in the Euro, they may in fact be about to have a going-out-of-business sale.
January 13, 1945
MINNEAPOLIS (Routers) The Roosevelt administration reeled today from new revelations of atrocities at POW camps in America’s heartland, where German and Italian prisoners have been worked to exhaustion, and many have died. Amid rising calls to shut the camps down, the international community has expressed shock at news of the harsh treatment of the Axis prisoners, eliminating any pretense at moral underpinnings for our war efforts in the Pacific and western Europe.
Produce Farms of Death
For many, the lachrymose ordeal begins when the prisoners first arrive, as they are housed in an onion-drying shed on the Odegard Farm in Isanti County. Many deaths have been reported, as some of the new arrivals are killed by the veteran prisoners, perhaps while camp guards simply look the other way.
But if they survive the first few days, new horrors are in store for them. There have been reports that prisoners were forced to toil in the fields for eleven-hour days, from seven in the early morning, until the late evening at 6 PM. For this, they get only three dollars a day, with no overtime pay. Thus, the local farmers are benefiting in this cruel war from what many say is tantamount to slave labor. Harvesting potatoes and onions in the fields of despair, they come back to their harsh camps each evening, in tears from the onion fumes (a chemical weapon precursor), dirt and “tater” skins under their fingernails, their lives an unending slog of spud-infested misery.
An Archipelago Of Torture
There is no relief for the POWs when they return to barracks. In the long hot, muggy summer twilight, the mosquitos come. Dubbed “swamp eagles” by the locals, they feast like locusts on the flesh and blood of the brutalized men who dare to venture out beyond the safety of screens in their rough-hewn cabins.
There have been claims, so far unsubstantiated, that some prisoners have been cruelly tortured, often kept awake at night by camp guards playing the Andrews Sisters on the radio. Some of them were made the butt of jokes, and forced to put womens’ nylons on their heads. One poor wretch was reportedly given repeated wedgies by the camp staff until he would reveal the words to all of the verses of “Lili Marlene.”
But sadly, this goes beyond physical deprivation and hardship–the prisoners’ spirituality has often been attacked as well. In many cases, the Germans’ beliefs have been ridiculed by their unfeeling captors, with one man’s copy of “Mein Kampf” reportedly torn up by an angry prison guard. Some claim that Adolf Hitler’s picture is used as a dart board at some of the camps, in plain view of the prisoners. There have also been failed attempts to deprive them of their own cultural traditions, forcing them to conform to midwestern mores, with severe punishments for using the word “scheisse,” instead of “uff da.”
The situation at the Odegard “Death Farm” isn’t unique–such conditions reputedly apply across many camps throughout the upper midwest. Olivia, Owatonna, Montgomery, all the way out to Algona, Iowa–like Manzanar, the formerly bucolic names may now go down in history as a vast network of brutal work camps that will shame America for the rest of its existence.
Good Hamburgers
The administration, of course, attempts to defend the camps.
The commanding officer claimed that “…the Italian POWs in Princeton drew illustrations, carved wood and played sports, including baseball and soccer. The POWs cooked their own meals and some visitors sampling the POWs