Tag: politics

Romney, the Republicans, and Space

3:47 pm

The Republican Party, as part of their national convention taking place in Florida this week, yesterday released their party platform for the upcoming election campaign.

Normally, I don’t waste my time with party platforms. No one really reads it, and no president ever follows it. Granted, it can give you a general sense of where a party and candidate is headed philosophically, but this is politics. If you think philosophy is their number one priority then I have a bridge in Brooklyn I want to sell you.

However, this document is helpful to us, at least when it comes to the nation’s space effort, as it actually devotes one entire (though short) section on the subject. Considering how vague Mitt Romney has been on what he will do with NASA and space, and how schizophrenic the Republicans in Congress have been, any hint on how they might approach this particular program should they win the election is helpful.

Here is the entire statement of the Republican party platform on the subject of space exploration:
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Cave exploration the astronaut way

11:18 am

How not to go cave exploring:

An international crew of six astronauts will start training for a caving adventure designed to prepare them for spaceflight. CAVES, an abbreviation of Cooperative Adventure for Valuing and Exercising human behaviour and performance Skills, prepares astronauts to work safely and effectively and solve problems as a multicultural team while exploring uncharted areas using space procedures.

Or to put it more bluntly, overly complicated, bureaucratically organized, and not very efficient. For example:
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Todd Akin, whose stupid comments about rape have practically destroyed his campaign, is receiving death threats to himself, his family, and his staff.

9:41 am

Modern political civility: Todd Akin, whose stupid comments about rape have practically destroyed his Senate campaign in Missouri, is receiving death threats against himself, his family, and his staff.

I don’t know if the threats are coming from either the left or the right. The left kind of wants Akin to stay in the race so that Claire McCaskill has a better shot at winning. Yet, the left has also been quite willing in recent years to express and even commit violence against their opponents. For these kinds of death threats to come from the left would not be unusual or surprising. The right meanwhile is furious at Akin, mostly because of the absolute stupidity and ignorance exhibited by his comments. It is likely that the comments will cost them an easy Senate win, which in turn might cost them control of the Senate. Yet, threats of violence from the right are rare.

Thus, it is hard to say what politics might be instigating these threats.

It really doesn’t matter. The threats are horrible, and are far worse than anything Todd Akin said. I hope the police find and arrest every single person who sent a threat.

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NASA scientists in a battle with astronomers over who gets to name things on Vesta and Mars.

10:01 am

A rose by any other name: NASA scientists are in a battle with astronomers over who gets to name things on Vesta and Mars.

This is not a new problem. The International Astronomical Union (IAU) has maintained its power over naming everything in space since the 1960s, even though the IAU has sometimes ignored the wishes of the actual discoverers and explorers and given names to things that no one likes. For example, even though the Apollo 8 astronauts wanted to give certain unnamed features on the Moon specific names, the IAU refused to accept their choices, even though those astronauts were the first human beings to reach another world and see these features up close.

Eventually, the spacefarers of the future are going to tell the IAU where to go. And that will begin to happen when those spacefarers simply refuse to use the names the IAU assigns.

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NASA has announced its next planetary mission, a lander to Mars that will drill down thirty feet into the planet’s surface

3:36 pm

NASA has announced its next planetary mission, a lander to Mars that will drill down thirty feet into the planet’s surface.

Though exciting in its own right, this mission is far less ambitious than the two missions which competed against it, a boat that would have floated on the lakes of Titan and a probe that would have bounced repeatedly off the surface of a comet. I suspect the reason this mission was chosen is the tight budgets at NASA, combined with Curiosity’s success which makes it politically advantageous to approve another Mars mission. As the NASA press release emphasized,
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The modern leftwing disconnect from reality.

7:27 pm

The modern leftwing disconnect from reality.

[L]ast week a man called Floyd Corkins shot another man called Leo Johnson, the security guard at the Family Research Council, a “conservative” group, according to the muted media coverage, or a “hate group,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, who spray that term around like champagne on a NASCAR podium. Mr. Corkins, an “LGBT volunteer,” told his victim, “I don’t like your politics.” In his backpack, he had one box of ammunition and 15 Chick-fil-A sandwiches. Had he had one Chick-fil-A sandwich and 15 boxes of ammunition, he might have done more damage. Or then again perhaps not, given that, as bloggers Kathy Shaidle and “the Phantom” pointed out, he reached his target and then started “monologuing,” as they say in The Incredibles….

I’m not blaming Floyd Corkins’s actions on the bullying twerps at the Southern Poverty Law Center or those thug Democrat mayors who tried to run Chick-fil-A out of Boston and Chicago. But I do think he’s the apotheosis of narcissistic leftist myopia. He symbolizes that exhaustion of the other possibilities — the dwindling down of latter-day liberalism to ever more self-indulgent distractions from the hard truths of a broke and ruined landscape. Our elites have sunk into a boutique decadence of moral preening entirely disconnected from reality: A non-homophobic chicken in every pot, an abortifacient dispenser in every Catholic university, a high-speed-rail corridor between every two bankrupt California municipalities.

Read the whole thing. Steyn once again notes the bankruptcy of modern liberalism and the Democratic Party, which — unless the American public rejects it — will lead to the bankruptcy of our country and probably the world.

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A modern intellectual looks at the Syrian revolt and immediately concludes it was global warming that caused it

1:02 pm

A modern intellectual looks at the Syrian revolt and immediately concludes that it was caused by global warming!

Climate change: is there anything it can’t do?

Seriously, the drought in Syria might be a factor behind the revolt, but to assert that the drought was caused by global warming is weak at best. There is no data to make that assertion, none at all. All we have is the opinion of some global warming scientists that such extreme droughts might happen more frequently as the Earth warms. And since the temperature increase as predicted by those very same scientists has not occurred, we should take all their predictions with a big grain of salt.

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An elderly leftwing protester spit in the face of at Romney supporter at a campaign event today.

9:02 pm

Leftwing civility: An elderly leftwing protester spits in the face of at Romney supporter at a campaign event today.

When the left made the accusation that a tea party protester had spat at a Democratic Congressman during the healthcare debate, Andrew Breitbart offered a $100,000 reward for anyone who could provide video proving it happened. Three years later that award remains unclaimed, since the only videos of the event show nothing of the sort took place. Today, not only was this disgusting act actually done by a Democratic protester, in mere hours the video is all over the internet.

Tells us something about who are the uncivil ones in this debate.

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New data now suggests that in swing states there has been a significant decline in Democratic registration

11:25 am

What does this tell us? New data now suggests that in swing states there has been a significant decline in Democratic registration contrasted with big gains for Republicans voter registration in the upcoming election.

The numbers are startling. Two key quotes:

In Florida, Iowa, North Carolina, Colorado, and Nevada — tossup states where direct election-year comparisons could be drawn — the numbers are striking. Democratic rolls increased by only 39,580, less than one-tenth the amount at the comparable point in the 2008 election. At the same time, GOP registration has jumped by 145,085, or more than double for the same time four years ago. Independent registration has shown an even stronger surge, to 229,500, almost three times the number at this point in 2008.

And this:

Based on recent data, Democratic registration has declined by more than 800,000, or 5.2 percent; Republican enrollments were down about 80,000, or 0.7 percent; and independents were up 486,677, or 6.4 percent, in [battleground] states.

These numbers favor the Republicans by 3.5 to 1 and 10 to 1, respectively, numbers that are astonishing. More significantly, these numbers are for the swing states, the very places where voters have been undecided and willing to shift from one side to the other. Thus, these numbers tell us that these voters are now swinging strongly in one direction, and that direction is towards the Republicans.

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It appears the Obama Justice Department is not going to prosecute Obama fundraiser and former Democratic Governor Jon Corzine for the embezzlement of customer funds at MF Global.

12:52 pm

The law is such an inconvenient thing: It appears the Obama Justice Department is not going to prosecute Obama fundraiser and former Democratic Governor/Senator Jon Corzine for the embezzlement of customer funds at MF Global.

What Corzine and MF Global did was the equivalent of a bank president digging into his customer’s private bank accounts in order to fund their own private investments. That is called embezzlement. It is a felony. That the Obama Justice Department is going to let Corzine off the hook is more evidence that this administration doesn’t believe in enforcing the law, but in using the power of government for its own ends. Disgraceful.

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“Obama lauds NASA for Mars landing, pledges continued investment.”

11:15 pm

“Obama lauds NASA for Mars landing, pledges continued investment.”

What a joke. This Reuters’ article is so busy campaigning for Barack Obama that it fails to note one fundamental fact: It is the Obama administration that gutted NASA’s science program so that there is little likelihood of any missions to Mars, or elsewhere, in the foreseeable future. As noted correctly in this Science article describing the same Obama telephone call to JPL,

The president’s sweeping endorsement of research, however, carefully avoids the fact that his 2013 budget would cut funding for NASA’s Mars exploration program by nearly one-third and end the country’s role in two Mars missions planned jointly with the European Space Agency for later in the decade. Both the House of Representatives and a Senate spending panel have added back money for Mars exploration, although Congress is unlikely to settle on a final budget for the agency until next spring.

Look, I freely admit the federal budget has to be cut. And I am freely willing to have those cuts occur in NASA. What I can’t abide is the kind of junk journalism seen in the Reuters piece above, selling Obama as a big supporter of space research when he clearly has not been.

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The Wall

6:01 pm

An evening pause: Fifty-one years ago today the Soviet Union and East Germany — in the name of ideology and communism — cut Berlin in half, putting a wall between neighbors, friends, and families. The documentary below was made in 1962 and will give you a sense of the evil of that wall, as felt by the people who were oppressed by it.

I think it a reasonable thing to remind ourselves again and again that the use of force in the name of any ideology, no matter how well intentioned, is always wrong.

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July’s violence against pro-live protesters.

5:20 pm

Leftwing civility: July’s violence against pro-live protesters.

  • An pro-life activist’s home was vandalized, including having a rock thrown through the front door in the middle of the night.
  • A 69-year-old pro-life volunteer was attacked while collecting petition signatures, fracturing his hip.
  • Another protester was shoved and injured while passing out fliers.
  • A homemade fire bomb was thrown at pro-life protesters praying in front of an abortion clinic.
  • Other pro-life protesters were threatened by the owner of an abortion clinic owner with a loaded gun.

I am not arguing for or against abortion. I am pointing out that there is increasing violence in the political arena, and it is almost all coming from the liberal and leftwing side. Worse, this violence is increasingly reminiscent of the brownshirts in Germany before World War II, attacking Jews and vandalizing their homes and businesses, in order to instill fear and wield power over others.

The article above focuses on how the media is not covering these attacks. I think it is even more important to call them for that they are: bigoted, hateful acts of violence intended to oppress those who disagree with them.

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