NEW INFOGRAPHIC PORTRAYS space debris circling the Earth.
Archive for 2010
February 2, 2010
BUDGET: How ignorance undermines bipartisanship. “President Obama has a Huffington Post understanding of the Right.”
WHY BARACK OBAMA is an even bigger spender than Bush.
BILL WATTERSON is still alive.
MICHAEL BELFIORE ON THE NEW OBAMA SPACE POLICY: HUMAN SPACEFLIGHT NEED NOT INVOLVE NASA.
The new budget calls for a course correction—for putting money back into the kind of basic research NASA does best, keeping the space station going through at least 2020, and hiring private contractors for crew and cargo flights. It’s a boon to private space flight companies such as SpaceX but an anathema to politicians who want to keep riding a very lucrative gravy train building paper spaceships. As SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said today during a commercial space telecon organized in response to the budget request, “There are certain members of congress who cannot be swayed by any rational argument. They simply want the answer to be that funding continues in their district independent of any sound basis for it.”
I would argue that the new direction is not just the best option for NASA, but the only one. NASA already has no choice but to rely on the Russians for rides to the International Space Station after the shuttle retires this year. It’s an embarrassment. Obama’s budget will open the door to homegrown solutions for crew and cargo delivery to the space station, while providing much needed research funding for the development of next-gen technologies such as heavy-lift rockets and on-orbit refueling depots.
It’s a step that’s long overdue, though not one without peril.
Read the whole thing. And here’s more from Alan Boyle.
Plus, Five winners in Obama’s new space budget.
UPDATE: Economics professor E.F. Stephenson takes a healthcare lesson from the Obama Administration’s space policy:
If human spaceflight—a technically challenging endeavor—need not involve NASA, then just maybe health care need not involve the meddling feds either.
Good point!
ANN ALTHOUSE ON JAMES O’KEEFE: “I thought Jim O’Keefe did a good job justifying himself while showing some remorse related to security issues. He admitted that he needed to think more carefully in the future about how he does his exposés, but he defended the practice of tricking people to do an investigation. I note that the government tricks people when it does undercover investigations, so how wrong is it to pretend to be someone you are not to try to find out something valuable?”
MEGAN MCARDLE ON HEALTH CARE:
I don’t think it is actually true that trying to pass a bill people hate, and then thinking the better of it because it turns out the electorate hates it, is no different from trying to pass a bill people hate, finding out that they really, really hate it, and then ignoring them and pushing it through anyway.
Moreover, I am sort of amazed that anyone does think this.
Read the whole thing.
OBAMA’S DEFICITS: Quite the rosy scenario.
Related: $1 Trillion Obama Will Never See. “Guaranteed future headline: ‘Obama administration surprised at lower than expected revenues from taxes on the wealthy.’ They never learn, do they?”
February 1, 2010
A STATE OF THE UNION REVIEW from T. Coddington van Voorhees VII.
JIM TREACHER: Andrew Breitbart: Master Of The Rope-A-Dope.
VALENTINE’S DAY kitchen and home gifts.
HEALTHCARE NEWS: Canadian Premier comes to U.S. for surgery. From the comments: “Seems to me that when our Premier goes to the US for heart surgery, the analogy that comes to mind would be if the President of General Motors said ‘Our GM cars are fantastic, but myself — I own a Ford.'”
UPDATE: Reader Geoff Coghlin writes:
I’m a Canadian in Australia, and a great fan of your blog.
The premier heading south is not new. The Canadian political elite has long headed to the US for medical services while – with straight faces – extolling the virtues of socialized medicine for everyone else. And US hospitals are always used to back up a system in Canada that can’t meet demand.
It prompts the question: If the US adopts Obamacare, how will the Canadian health care system survive?
Good question.
ANOTHER UPDATE: More from the Globe and Mail.
CLIMATEGATE UPDATE: Leaked climate change emails scientist ‘hid’ data flaws: Key study by East Anglia professor Phil Jones was based on suspect figures. (Via Tim Blair, who rounds up related items).
JOHN SCALZI IS unhappy with Amazon over the Macmillan dispute. “Hey, you want to know how to piss off an author? It’s easy: Keep people from buying their books. You want to know how to really piss them off? Keep people from buying their books for reasons that have nothing to do with them. And you know how to make them absolutely incandescent with rage? Keep people from buying their books for reasons that have nothing to do with them, and keep it a surprise until it happens.” I like Amazon, but this seems to have been poorly thought out.
U.S. ATTORNEY recuses himself from O’Keefe case.
CHINA TOPS VISITORS’ LIST at Oak Ridge National Lab.
MAYBE WE SHOULD NUKE ‘EM NOW, JUST IN CASE HE’S TELLING THE TRUTH: Ahmadinejad Predicts the ‘End of American Civilization’.
Of course, he may have just seen Jersey Shore. In which case, well, he’s got a point.
SOME CHILDISHNESS from Jonathan Chait.
HELPING CANCER TREATMENT by monitoring cell death.
BEES CAN BE TRAINED to recognize human faces. Thriller novel time: I’m thinking of an assassination plot involving a public figure who’s allergic to beestings, and a swarm of trained bees.
SECRETS TO A long, happy marriage.
POLL: Schumer’s Approval Rating At Lowest Level Since 2001. “For the first time in nearly nine years, Schumer’s approval rating has fallen below 50%. According to the latest Marist Poll in New York, 47% of registered voters statewide report Schumer is doing either an excellent or good job in office. 31% rate the job he is doing as fair, and 17% view him as performing poorly. This is Schumer’s lowest job approval rating since April 2001 when 49% of voters approved of the job he was doing.”
PRIVATELY OWNED PUBLIC SPACES in San Francisco.