John J. McKay is a grumpy, aging liberal who lives in a small house with his wife, two cats, and a couple thousand books. To comment on anything in archy, send an e-mail.
Bad moon rising I was a kid in the sixties. Among other things, that means I grew up during the waning days of whiggish faith in technological progress, which is just a big-word way of justifying being a space geek. By the twenty-first century, I expected to be able to take a monorail, jetpack, or flying car out to the nearest spaceport and whiz off to a cheap lunar vacation or even just a weekend jaunt on my three-day weekends. And although my enthusiasm for all things space related continues unabated, I am not in the least impressed with Bush’s Moon and Mars proposal.
There are endless reasons to object to this plan, but let me mention just the three that tick me off the most.
We can’t afford it. I hate to have to say this because this is the perennial objection of opponents of basic research in general and the space program in particular. As a fan of science and space it really gripes me to have to be on their side on this one. I think a big open-ended project with an inspiring goal like the original moon program is a great idea. It would do wonders for the country, by giving people something bigger than their grubby lives to work toward. It would provide a huge works program for middle class professionals, the people who contribute the most to charity and local economies. It would have countless positive unintended consequences (the opponents of space research sneer that the moon program’s only practical results were Tang and Teflon. They are wrong. It produced quantum leaps in materials technology, medical monitoring, and computing). However, in three short years, the Bush administration has made such a basket case out of our economy that we can’t afford a big investment in anything that won’t produce an immediate financial return. Clinton could have afforded it and Bush could have afforded it before his first idiotic tax refund for his rich peers. Today our government can’t afford science.
It’s bad science. There is very little to be learned by going to the moon that hasn’t already been learned by going to the moon. Sending a robot to the moon is vastly cheaper than sending a human to the moon, and we don’t declare an entire generation traumatized when a robot makes a crater instead of a smooth landing. We have two space programs that are in direct competition for the same dollars. One program is for pure science; what can we learn about the universe beyond the surface of our planet. The other is to learn how to send people into space; the goal of such is to solve engineering problems, not to create knowledge. The former can help the latter quite a bit. The latter can only very rarely help the former. We need both, but a very careful balance must be struck between the two. A massive manned program will destroy that balance. The Bush administration is aware of that and has decided to completely give up science.
Sources said Bush will direct NASA to scale back or scrap all existing programs that do not support the new effort. Further details about the plan and the space agency's revised budget will be announced in NASA briefings next week and when the president delivers his FY 2005 budget to Congress.
The space shuttle nearly destroyed hard space science for NASA. During the entire eight years of the Reagan administrations, no new scientific missions were initiated. The United States can only support a couple of big science projects at a time. During Republican administration we can usually afford one or two, and those are safest if they can claim some military utility. Bush’s space fleet might sound cool, but it would essentially mean the end of federal science spending in the USA. We would have no particle research, no advanced biotech, no fusion research, no nanotech, and no global warming research. Maybe that’s the point.
They aren’t going to do it anyway. But my biggest objection is that I think it’s a load of crap. This is the most nakedly political administration in the history of the republic. As we work or way up to the State of the Union address, Bush’s handlers will come up with a whole slew of “bold” initiatives (I know, “bold” was last year’s word. I haven’t yet received the RNC memo on this year’s word). “Old people dieing because of the price of medical care? Promise them cheap drugs. Soccer moms think we’re cold hearted; Hispanics aren’t voting for us? Promise to be nice to immigrants. Educated boomers think we lack vision? Promise them Mars. Just make sure there are no measurable milestones before the election.”
Even Greg Easterbrook knows it's a boondoggle: "[W]hy might George W. Bush endorse a Moon base or Mars mission? Either he's a science illiterate surrounded by advisors who are science illiterates, or it's a blank check for aerospace contractors." Bastards. They're just ridiculing our dreams. I wouldn’t trust this crowd if Rove himself came to my house and gave me my jetpack.
posted by John at 11:34 PM
Sweaters are not bad I want to like Maureen Dowd. I know a lot of bloggers want to bash her as just another media whore, but I’m inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt. As a regular reader of the New York Times op-ed page, I enjoy her as a breath of fresh air among the solid, pontificating, testosterone-laden males that dominate that page. So I find her latest column about Wesley Clark’s sweaters a bit disappointing. She could have taken a fresh angle on this piece or she could have repeated the Oh-my-God-Al-Gore-wears-brown silliness from 2000. She chose the latter. In case we missed the point, she even repeated the Gore canard, “Al Gore sprouted earth tones in 2000, hoping heathery brown sweaters and khakis would warm him up.” Sigh.
This could have been a very pleasant story about a man who hasn’t had to dress himself since he left his mother, learning how to be a civilian. The current inhabitant of the White House dressed in a uniform he is not entitled to, in order to disrupt the home coming of an entire aircraft carrier full of honorable service members on their way back to their families, for an embarrassingly premature victory dance and photo op. Gen. Clark exposed himself to the intrusive glare of the press while he sheepishly tried to learn the dress of the most honored rank of all: citizen of the republic. He should get credit for this effort, not snide scorn.
Lucky stupidity isn’t a crime Jeralyn over at TalkLeft has this little goodie:
DENVER (AP) - A 24-year-old Army sergeant was removed from an American Airlines flight after an inert land mine was found in his checked baggage, the Transportation Safety Administration said.
TSA screeners noticed the land mine Friday, pulled the bag from the luggage system at Denver International Airport and confiscated the mine, TSA spokesman Mike Fierberg said. No flights were delayed. The soldier, whose name was not released, could face civil penalties for trying to put a prohibited item aboard a flight, Fierberg said. No criminal charges would be filed, he said. The man was released by police, but the airline refused to allow him aboard his flight to Dallas, Fierberg said.
For lack of more details, I’ll have to make a few assumptions here. I’m guessing that the term “inert” in the first paragraph means nonfunctional and that the land mine was rendered nonfunctional by removing the explosive charge. In other words, he was carrying the empty shell of a land mine home as a souvenir. At least that’s what I hope it means based on the fact that no criminal charges were made. I can’t imagine the authorities not bringing criminal charges against someone who tried to bring a functional explosive device, or any kind of explosive substance, on board a commercial flight. “Victor,” in the comments at TalkLeft suggests that this is the case and the civil charge the sergeant is for not declaring such an item.
What was the good sergeant thinking? Hasn’t he heard that there is a war on and that some people, especially around airplanes, are a wee bit paranoid? Actually, I do know what he was thinking; I’ve known too many people like that. He managed to rationalize his way around to talking himself into something really stupid. Oh, it’s not a real mine and they don’t check all of the baggage so they probably won’t even notice. He just doesn’t take that next step in his chain of thought: but what if they do notice? The sergeant is lacking in plain common sense. I hope his superiors give him a firm talking to when he gets back to the base.
Why libertarians hate us, why they shouldn’t, and what we can do about it I spend a lot of time thinking about the nature of the American Political spectrum. Over the years I have oppressed my wife and friends with long pedantic expositions on the subject and have produced a few posts on it since I took up blogging.
Jim Abrams of the Associated Press had an excellent piece last week on how thoroughly the Republicans have abandoned their states’ rights and libertarian and embraced the exercise of coercive power from the federal center. He doesn’t present much analysis, but he lists a large number of lesser-known usurpations by the federal government now that it is in Republican hands. We should all keep a copy on hand to produce during debates with libertarians.
He wasn’t the only one to discover how much the Republican leadership has abandoned some of the GOP’s core issues and core constituencies. Sheryl Gay Stolberg had a piece in the Sunday New York Times. She has some more analysis and focuses on some of the unhappy fiscal conservatives in the party.
Does this sudden love of the Federal government mean that the Republicans were lying hypocrites to begin with or that temptations of power are too strong for any of us to resist (except Gandalf)? Have they abandoned those issues and constituencies because the party has been taken over by a band of zealots pursuing some other agenda or because their leaders care about nothing but short-term political advantage and nothing? All of the above or none of the above?
As interesting as it may be to sort out the ideological evolution of the upper reaches of the Republican Party or trace the history of recent factional struggles in the same, for the moment I’m going to say it doesn’t matter. What matters for the purpose of this post is the simple fact that the Republican leadership and Bush administration have abandoned a core constituency. I want to use that observation for two purposes: first, to make some observation on the current state of the American political spectrum and second, to point out an opportunity for the Democratic nominee in the coming election.
My own interpretation of the American political spectrum rests on a few main points (some of these I’ve blogged on; some I have not). The familiar left-right or liberal-conservative political scale is an imperfect metaphor for the range of positions represented by the two main political parties. The scale is almost worthless for describing a broader world of opinions and positions not represented in the two party coalitions. The two parties are non-ideologically based; they are based on coalitions of interest groups (short digression re “special interest groups”: are there interest groups whose interest isn’t special?). There is no single objective philosophical criterion that can be applied to predict what position the parties will adopt on a new issue. The differences in the parties, and therefore the scale, are more psychological than anything else (this is point that I hope to get back to with a longer post someday). The parties periodically shift around on the scale. The scale itself periodically shifts around.
I’ve always been a little baffled by the alliance of libertarians and conservatives and by the hostility of libertarians to the Democratic Party. In their rhetoric, both the libertarians and conservatives rail at the supposed “big government” and intrusive “nanny state” tendencies of liberals and Democrats. Yet the conservatives and Republicans are have produced their own pet intrusive, bureaucratic programs—the War on Drugs has been a perennial favorite of theirs—and they have presided over the most fiscally irresponsible administrations of the last half century. During the same period of time, liberals and Democrats have been defenders of privacy and freedom in a number of spheres.
Libertarians do not fit well on the traditional political scale. In theory, at least, their position on most issues should be determined by a philosophical principle. At best, both sides of the scale have something to offer that pleases libertarians and something that annoys them. So, why do they focus their entire wrath on one end of the scale and not the other? What the hell is wrong with the libertarians?
I think the answer is that liberals and Democrats have suffered from their own successes. Generally, liberals and Democrats favor greater freedom in areas of personal conscience, morality, and artistic expression and greater regulation in the economy and property relations, while for conservatives and Republicans the stands are reversed. Libertarians favor greater freedom and less regulation in all areas. The liberals and Democrats have all ready delivered most of what they have to offer libertarians as part of their revolutions from the New Deal to the sixties. For the last thirty years, it has been the conservatives and Republicans who have had the most to offer libertarians through their attacks on government regulation and support for unfettered property rights.
This situation has clearly changed. The Bush administration is attacking many of the freedoms that the libertarians have been taking for granted. It is now the liberals and Democrats that have the most to offer the libertarians and the Republicans who are the greatest threat (at this point I have to separate the conservatives and Republicans because the Bush administration is clearly abandoning those traditional conservative issues and constituencies I mentioned above). Libertarians must now make a choice between the principles that they espouse and the alliance they have clung to for so long. In other words they need to choose which they like more, freedom or liberal bashing.
This election is the best opportunity the Democratic Party has had in a generation to peel a few Libertarian votes off from the Republican Party. It might be that this chance is only good for forging a temporary alliance of convenience, but it might be that a significant number of libertarians could be permanently convinced that the left is the better alliance. This is one of the messages that we need to cultivate this year.
Even if the libertarians can’t bring themselves to actually vote for a Democrat after demonizing them for decades, they might choose to stay home or vote for the Libertarian Party candidate next fall. It might be worthwhile for anyone who is very serious about getting Bush out of office to do what you can to see that the Libertarian Party has a place on the ballot in your state. Sign their petitions and when you talk to those friends and relatives that would rather die than vote for a Democrat convince them of the value of third party protest voting.
AWG disease The press has had a great week and a half obsessing on the mad cow discovered scattered across eight Western states. Yet we should all try to maintain a sense of perspective in these perilous times. No cow, no matter how mad, has ever blown up a federal building, stockpiled cyanide pipe bombs, or assassinated a doctor on his way to work. In our own lives we are far more threatened by angry white guy disease (AWG) that we are by mad cow disease.
posted by John at 9:28 PM
This is a test Most of my template has vanished making archy unreadable. It goes without saying that this sucks.
Update: Well, that was unpleasant. I’m still not sure what happened. I think that sometime yesterday a large portion of my template vanished and the FTP connection between my Blogger front-end and the Blogspot server was disrupted. I discovered it this morning. Only the upper left-hand corner of my blog, with about half of my blogroll was publishing. I spent about two hours digging through Google cached pages from my site to reconstruct the template into something resembling its former glory. At that point I ran into the FTP problem. No matter what I did at Blogger, nothing changed on the published page fragment. Now it seems to be back.
I’d still like to know if this was caused by some kind of crash at Blogger/ Blogspot or if I was hacked. The latter would be kind of cool because it would mean someone actually read me and cared enough about what I wrote to get cranky. I’ve considered staging a feud with one of my fellow low-circulation bloggers as a rating stunt. The trouble is, I’m a wimpy fighter. Even faking it, I’m too polite and reasonable to produce very entertaining flames.
Oh well, back to work. I don’t think I have all of the recent additions to my blogroll restored. Remember kids, keep a back-up copy of your template code in a safe place.
Another update:I think I have everybody back on the blogroll. If you were there a few days ago and are now missing, let me know. It’s not because I hate you (unless you want me to hate you (see previous update)).
posted by John at 1:02 PM
Copyright 2003-2004 John J. McKay. Use what you want, but give credit where credit is due.
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