“Do Aliens Go Invisible by ‘Going Green,’” the Discovery Channel asks for reasons unknown, other than perhaps it being a slow news day:

Canadian science fiction writer Karl Schroeder has come upon a novel solution to the failure of astronomical observations to solve the Fermi Paradox. He proposes: “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from nature.” (This is a takeoff on Arthur C. Clarke’s posit: “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”)

In other words, smart aliens have “gone green” and generate no waste products that we could detect. They therefore blend into the galaxy. Therefore, “artificial and natural systems are indistinguishable,” writes Schroeder.

Our response is in video form at the top of the post.

Beyond that rebuttal, the Discovery Channel doesn’t appear to be any hurry to do their part to accelerate this process by discontinuing their cable TV channel and deactivating their Web server, but it is a reminder of the end game of radical environmentalism: putting the toothpaste of western civilization and technological progress back into the tube and returning mankind to a primitive pre-industrial state.

Andrew Cuomo, New York’s Democrat Governor, appears to be particularly eager to help.

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Ralph Cramden’s early 1950s calls for a lunar exploration made much more fiscal sense than Newt Gingrich’s Florida-pandering proposals today. Just ask Doug Ross, whose new post boils the US’s budget woes down to a Hooneymooners-sized annual budget. He finds an illustration that takes the United States’ tax revenue, the federal budget and our debts, and removes the zeros, which notes “I love it when complex things are simplified so that we can all understand:”

You know it’s effective, because this lefty Seattle Website (found at the top of Google when searching on the previous sentence, naturally) raises its upturned nose at both the concept, and those who wish to see the budget brought back to Planet Earth. “This kind of thinking may be fine for rural types who have nothing better to do than pray, go to church, buy guns, set traps, and tip cows. But it’s completely useless information if you live in the real and very social world.”

Funny, I never thought of Mark Steyn as being into cow-tipping. But perhaps his henchmen do that sort of thing during some of the quieter moments at his Blofeldian New Hampshire lair. Likely while Mark is writing his weekly column:

The president’s first term has added $5 trillion to the debt – a degree of catastrophe unique to us. In an Obama budget, the entire cost of the Greek government would barely rate a line-item. Debt-to-GDP and other comparative measures are less relevant than the hard-dollar numbers: It’s not just that American government has outspent America’s ability to fund it, but that it’s outspending the planet’s.

Who gets this? Not enough of us – which is exactly how Obama likes it. His only “big idea” – that it should be illegal (by national fiat) to drop out of school before your 18th birthday – betrays his core belief: that more is better, as long as it’s government-mandated, government-regulated, government-staffed – and funded by you, or Warren Buffett, or the Chinese Politburo, or whoever’s left out there.

What of his likely rivals this November? Those of us who have lived in once-great decaying polities recognize the types. Jim Callaghan, Prime Minister at 10 Downing Street in the Seventies, told a friend of mine that he saw his job as managing Britain’s decline as gracefully as possible. The United Kingdom certainly declined on his watch, though not terribly gracefully. In last Monday’s debate, Newt Gingrich revived the line and accused by implication Mitt Romney of having no higher ambition than to “manage the decline.” Running on platitudinous generalities, Mitt certainly betrays little sense that he grasps the scale of the crisis. After a fiery assault by Rick Santorum on Romney’s support for an individual mandate in health care, Mitt sneered back at Rick that “it wasn’t worth getting angry over.” Which may be a foretaste of the energy he would bring to any attempted course correction in Washington.

Newt, meanwhile, has committed himself to a lunar colony by the end of his second term, and, while pandering to an audience on Florida’s “Space Coast,” he added that, as soon as there were 13,000 American settlers on the moon, they could apply for statehood. Ah, the old frontier spirit: I hear Laura Ingalls Wilder is already working on “Little House In The Crater.”

Maybe Newt’s on to something. Except for the statehood part. One day, when America gets the old foreclosure notice in the mail, wouldn’t it be nice to close up the entire joint, put the keys in an envelope, slide it under the door of the First National Bank of Shanghai, and jet off on Newt’s Starship Government-Sponsored Enterprise?

As Mark concludes, “Before we can make any more giant leaps for mankind, we have to make one small, dull, prosaic, earthbound step here at home — and stop. Stop the massive expansion of micro-regulatory government, and then reverse it. Obama has vowed to press on. If Romney and Gingrich can’t get serious about it, he’ll get his way.”

Related: Roger Kimball on “The Suicide Club.”

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Allahpundit links to the above surreal video of the funeral motorcade for Kim Jong Il and asks, “One thing I wonder about Orwellian spectacles like this: Who’s the intended audience?”

The people crying might believe that the outside world is impressed by their tears, but does the leadership, which has a better sense of international opinion, understand how creepy and contemptible this looks to its enemies? It’s the most pitiful, cultish case of Stockholm syndrome on this scale that we’ll ever see (I hope). Or is the spectacle not aimed at foreign audiences at all but exclusively at the inmates of the North Korean gulag? These lines from Michael Totten stick with me: “Especially in full-bore Stalinist systems like North Korea’s, would-be dissidents feel like they’re completely alone, that no one else has any idea the emperor is naked. That’s why these regimes will mobilize massive state resources just to locate and punish a single graffiti artist. It’s critically important that everyone who hates the government feels like they’re the only people who do so.” If you’re a dissent-minded North Korean watching this clip, that’s precisely how you’d feel.

The day after Kim Jong Il’s death was announced, John Derbyshire wrote at the Corner, in a post that was the source of the first half of our headline above, “More often than not, those North Korean tears are real:”

There were similar displays in China when Mao Tse-tung died. In conversations over the years I’ve asked many Chinese friends & relatives who were adults at the time whether they wept, and if so whether sincerely. The answers fall into three groups.

Those three groups, according to Derbyshire, are “Sincere weepers,”  “Swept-alongers,” and “The Awkward Squad.” Regarding that last group, Derbyshire writes:

A few have told me: “I pretended to cry, because I might have got in trouble for not crying, but it was fake: in my heart I hated the s.o.b. and was glad he’d died at last.” Those few all had a certain distinct type of personality: skeptical, contrarian, prickly, stubborn, and antisocial — the Awkward Squad. The first job for anyone serious about being a totalitarian dictator is to identify these people and hustle them off to the camps. They are only a small minority: the rest can easily be manipulated. There were similar displays of collective grief when Stalin died. The movie The Inner Circle gets a good scene out of it.

Speaking of movies, if you ever get chance to view it via DVD, Netflix or one of the cable movie channels, don’t miss Sophie Scholl: The Final Days, the 2005 dramatization of Scholl, her brother, and colleague Christoph Probst. The three were guillotined by the Nazis on February 22^nd of 1943 for having dropped anti-government leaflets out of the third floor onto the atrium of a building on the campus of Munich University less than a week earlier, in the wake of the Nazis’ monumental losses at Stalingrad.

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Last week, it was Thomas Friedman, Luddite:

Here is a typical evening at a major cable TV network: arrive at Washington studio and be asked to sign in by a contract security guard. Be met by either a young employee who appears to still be in college or an older person who seems to have hung on with tenure. Have your nose powdered by that person. Have your microphone attached by that person. Be positioned in the studio chair by that person, and then look directly into a robotic camera being manipulated by someone in a control room in New York and speak to whoever the host is wherever he or she is. That’s it: one employee, a robot and you.

Think of how many jobs — makeup artist, receptionist, camera person, producer-director — have been collapsed into one.

Today, it’s Thomas Friedman, techno-futurist visionary, praising the man who pioneered much of the technology Friedman was moaning about just last week:

THE melancholy over Steve Jobs’s passing is not just about the loss of the inventor of so many products we enjoy. It is also about the loss of someone who personified so many of the leadership traits we know are missing from our national politics. Those traits jump out of every Jobs obituary: He was someone who did not read the polls but changed the polls by giving people what he was certain they wanted and needed before they knew it; he was someone who was ready to pursue his vision in the face of long odds over multiple years; and, most of all, he was someone who earned the respect of his colleagues, not by going easy on them but by constantly pushing them out of their comfort zones and, in the process, inspiring ordinary people to do extraordinary things.

There isn’t a single national politician today whom you would describe by those attributes, which is why the fake Jobs obituary published in The Onion, the satirical newspaper, struck such a nerve. It began by saying: “Steve Jobs, the visionary co-founder of Apple Computers” — and the only American in the country who had any clue what he was doing — “died Wednesday at the age of 56.” It went on to quote President Obama as saying that Jobs “will be remembered both for the life-changing products he created and for the fact that he was able to sit down, think clearly, and execute his ideas — attributes he shared with no other U.S. citizen. ‘This is a dark time for our country, because the reality is none of the 300 million or so Americans who remain can actually get anything done or make things happen.’ ”

Ouch! Fortunately, the last part is not true. There are still thousands of U.S. innovators who embody Steve Jobs’s most important attribute: They didn’t get the word. They didn’t get the word that we’re down and out. They didn’t get the word that we’re in a recession. They didn’t get the word that Germany is going to eat our breakfast and that China is going to eat our lunch, so they just go out and invent stuff and make stuff and export stuff. Like Jobs, they just didn’t get the word — and thank God.

At one point in his latest column, Friedman writes:

We cannot bail or tax-cut our way to prosperity. We can only, as Jobs understood, invent our way there. That is why America needs to be for the world in the 21st century what Cape Canaveral was to America in the 1960s: the place where everyone everywhere should want to come to start up and make something — something that makes people’s lives more productive, healthy, comfortable, entertained, educated or secure.

But whatever happened to the Cape Canaveral of the 1960s? In Charles Murray and Catherine Bly Cox’s brilliant 1989 book Apollo, the authors sum up the insular world of NASA in 1968, maintaining a breakneck pace to fulfill Kennedy’s vision of landing a man on the moon before the decade was out — and knowing that the clock was ticking down fast:

Within the world of Apollo, the outside world looked completely different. “I missed the entire Vietnam War,” said one, typical of many. “I watched no television, read no newspapers, came to work at six in the morning and worked until nightfall, six or seven days a week for years.”

The people of Apollo were barely aware that the Vietnam War was going on, barely aware that this was a Presidential election year, barely aware that there was such a thing as a War on Poverty or L.S.D. or Sgt. Pepper or race riots.

At some point in the last 20 years or so, NASA decided to embrace the PC ethos of Friedman and the New York Times, becoming more obsessed with global warming, multiculturalism, and feminism than manned space flight. A legendary Freudian slip by Howell Raines, the Times’ disastrous former editor was that “This campaign has made our staff better and, more importantly, more diverse.” Similarly, these days, NASA has more important things on its mind than sending men humans into space.

Victor Davis Hanson posits “The Coming Post-Obama Renaissance.” But in the meantime, why would anyone want to take Friedman’s advice and come to America and to start up and make something? Why risk spending millions to build a business or acquire an existing one, when the feds could kick your door in at any moment? Or legislate it out of business at any moment? Why risk starting a business only to have a major newspaper praise those who are protesting it?

To paraphrase H.L. Mencken, the Gray Lady knows what the common people want — and the Timesmen have gone out of their way to ensure that they’ll get it — good and hard.

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Kathy Shaidle recently found the quintessential moment when the Gray Lady that is the New York Times finally admitted that she could really use a dye job. Here’s the opening to a Times piece titled, “In Woodstock, Values Collide Over Housing:”

If they had decided to pave paradise and put up a parking lot, the issues might have seemed simpler.

Instead, a protracted battle over a 53-unit affordable housing project is dividing this still-crunchy town where mellow ’60s vibes and liberal politics coexist uneasily with real estate prices increasingly out of the reach of the humbler classes.

When workers finally began clearing land for the Woodstock Commons project in July, it looked as if the uncomfortable dispute might finally be ending. Instead, new issues kept popping up: the plight of black bears and endangered Indiana bats threatened by the construction; a botched permitting process; uncertainty about water service.

In some ways what is playing out in this Ulster County town is a more colorful microcosm of affordable housing controversies elsewhere. Still, the collision of environmental, neighborhood and social justice issues is making people squirm in a place where the only thing more important than making the world better can be keeping Woodstock the same.

Or as Kathy wrote quoting the above bolded text,  “NYT accidentally summarizes ‘progressivism’ in half a sentence:”

“Progressives” live in the past — a past that (like the one they so often accuse conservatives of romantically yearning for) didn’t exist:

Rosa Parks wasn’t just “tired” — she was a semi-professional activist, trained at a Communist “school”; Alger Hiss was guilty; so were Sacco and Venzetti; there really were Communist spies in the State Department; FDR prolonged the Depression; “busing” increased racial hatred; Bush’s verbal SATs were higher than Kerry’s…

Once you realize that liberals live in a nostalgic past of their own invention and on-going promotion (like Mrs. Havisham or a tragic Tennessee Williams “heroine”) almost everything “progressives” do then makes “sense.”

Freeze-dry the (mostly imaginary) past, but hurry up and change the entire existing social and economic order, seem to be the two modes the left seems to operate in, sometimes simultaneously. You can see it in Barack Obama, with his love of 1930s-era socialism, and his ’70s-era sci-fi obsessions with “green” jobs and global warming.  But it’s folly to cast all of the blame on Obama; it’s been the mindset of the left for the last decade or so.  At the end of 2004, Paul Mirengoff, then with Power Line wrote:

The Democratic party, [Michael Barone] argues, is defined by 1930 era views on social security, 60s views on the state of race relations and the use of military force, and 70s views on feminism. Cosmetically at least, this state of affairs constitutes a reversal of roles from 1996 when the Democrats claimed they couldn’t “stop thinking about tomorrow,” while Bob Dole promised to be “a bridge to the past.”

But the problem for some factions of the far left is that Dole didn’t go far back enough. Or as Pete Seeger once told the New York Times, “I like to say I’m more conservative than Goldwater. He just wanted to turn the clock back to when there was no income tax. I want to turn the clock back to when people lived in small villages and took care of each other.”

Just as long as it’s the right village, somewhere far out of sight, where the low-income housing won’t clash with the namesake of the location where half a million high-income hippies had their ultimate moment of nostalgie de la boue.

Speaking of music and “progressivism,” back around 2004, libertarian blogger Radley Balko explored the intersection of  “Tower Records and the Conservative Left.”  When the Tower Records chain fell apart in 2004, a New York Times columnist wrote:

But we have reached what to me, back in 1966, was an unimaginable place — an America where the small-town variety stores have gone out of business because a Wal-Mart opened up out by the highway; an America where with a few keystrokes and a valid credit card you can own virtually any recording you want, the instant it’s released. Somehow it sounds more inviting than it actually is.

It sounds pretty darn amazing to me — it’s also an America where you can read just about any newspaper from anywhere in the world online, or start your own digital version, should you so desire. And the flip-side is that any musician is guaranteed of getting listened to, particularly if he applies just a modicum of self-promotion. If you make it to the top, the odds are greatly decreased that you’ll have your own private plane to tour in, ala Led Zeppelin, but given the Times’ obsessions with equalizing income, that should be a feature from their perspective, not a bug, right?

But then, as Balko wrote, in words that echo in the recent Times article at the top of this post:

You know, you sometimes get the feeling the day after the polio vaccine was invented, today’s left would have run editorials lamenting the good ol’ days, when we were a little more cautious about what swimming pools we jumped into, and expressing sadness that we’d now have no new stories about the afflicted overcoming their disability to inspire the rest of us.

I’m not kidding. They’re that resistant to change. Every mill that shuts down is a “sign of our sad times.” No matter that the new mill will do things better, faster and cheaper than the old one. New farming techniques grow more food on less land. But dammit, if there wasn’t something romantic about the old-stye “family farm” that’s deserving of government protection. Innovation isn’t celebrated, it’s excoriated for displacing some idealized vision of the way things once were. In matters of progress and dynamism, the left is far more conservative than the conservatives are.

Getting back to Woodstock, it occurred nearly concurrent with the Apollo moon landing in the summer of 1969. Apollo marked the apogee of the postwar industrial era and its massive engineering projects. And yes, NASA in the 1960s was simultaneously JFK’s Moral Equivalent of War as Jonah Goldberg wrote in Liberal Fascism, and LBJ’s TVA-style project to help further modernize the south, as space journalist Rand Simberg once noted. But it was still an era that was obsessed with building something, unlike today’s NASA’s obsession with multiculti emotional pablum. Mark Steyn explored this extensively in the early chapters of After America; including quoting from Bruce Charlton, a professor of theoretical medicine at England’s University of Buckingham, who posited last year that “Human capability peaked before 1975 and has since declined:”

I suspect that human capability reached its peak or plateau around 1965-75 – at the time of the Apollo moon landings – and has been declining ever since.

This may sound bizarre or just plain false, but the argument is simple. That landing of men on the moon and bringing them back alive was the supreme achievement of human capability, the most difficult problem ever solved by humans. 40 years ago we could do it – repeatedly – but since then we have not been to the moon, and I suggest the real reason we have not been to the moon since 1972 is that we cannot any longer do it. Humans have lost the capability.

Of course, the standard line is that humans stopped going to the moon only because we no longer wanted to go to the moon, or could not afford to, or something…– but I am suggesting that all this is BS, merely excuses for not doing something which we cannot do.

It is as if an eighty year old ex-professional-cyclist was to claim that the reason he had stopped competing in the Tour de France was that he had now had found better ways to spend his time and money. It may be true; but does not disguise the fact that an 80 year old could not compete in international cycling races even if he wanted to.

However, technological progress in the form of computers, new businesses, and ultimately the Web accelerated exponentially in the 1980s ’til the fall of 2008. The Obama administration has worked hard to slow that progress to a halt as well. One reason for the lack of dynamism is that too many small businesses slows the amount of Federal palms that need to be greased, while simultaneously multiplying the number of cats that need to be herded. That’s a topic that James Pethokoukis recently discussed in his must-read column, “Solyndra, the logical endpoint of Obamanomics:”

No wonder many Democratic strategists predicted their party’s 2008 landslide win would usher in a generation of political dominance. Obamanomics, essentially, would divert taxpayer dollars to the Green Lobby – and then into the campaign coffers of the Democratic Party. This is what crony capitalism is really all about: politicians enriching favored businesses, who then return the favor. Or maybe it’s the other way around, Who cares, really. It’s an endless, profitable loop for both.

And Obama almost pulled it off. The Great Recession conveniently allowed the president to start the spendathon under the guise of economic stimulus. (“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.” – White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, 2009). As it turns out, the $38.6 billion loan program for clean energy firms that Solyndra benefited from has created just 3,545 permanent new jobs after parceling out half its dough. That works out to around $5 million a job.

Unfortunately for the Obamacrats, the financial meltdown also undercut political support for cap-and-trade on Capitol Hill. Voters worried the scheme would slow growth and cost jobs. But without permanently and continually raising the price of carbon-based fuels, many green businesses can’t make the numbers work.

But hey, what’s a little magic thinking when you’re riding the unicorn already? Even if it’s on a treadmill.

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If, as Space.com posits, the Earth had two suns, isn’t there a risk that Spartacus would fly his Piper Cub too close to them, Obama’s wings would melt, Al Gore would become president, and Princess Diana would rejoice during her interview with Tina Brown?

(Sorry, just trying to create the Grand Unified Theory of media what-ifs.)

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The collective Catholic response to the book and film probably were best summed up by a Jesuit theologian who responded to an earnest radio interviewer’s long and suggestive question this way: “I don’t mean to sound obtuse, but are you asking me whether a novel is true?”

– Tim Rutten of the L.A. Times on The Da Vinci Code, May 20, 2006.

But after initially touting “Apollo 18” as one of its upcoming fiction film collaborations, NASA — which, for the record, says the last manned mission to the moon was Apollo 17 in 1972 — has begun to back away from the movie.

“Apollo 18 is not a documentary,” said Bert Ulrich, NASA’s liaison for multimedia, film and television collaborations. “The film is a work of fiction, and we always knew that. We were minimally involved with this picture. We never even saw a rough cut. The idea of portraying the Apollo 18 mission as authentic is simply a marketing ploy. Perhaps a bit of a ‘Blair Witch Project’ strategy to generate hype.”

– “Did ‘Apollo 18′ happen? NASA backs away from found-footage space film,” Green Bay Press Gazette, yesterday.

And no doubt, lots of people think Oliver Stone’s JFK is a documentary.

But hey, as one wag in the Washington Post claimed last year, defending Sean Penn’s Plame-out, Fair Game, “In Washington, watching fact-based political movies has become a sport all its own, with viewers hyper-alert to mistakes, composite characters or real stories hijacked by political agendas. But what audiences often fail to take into account is that a too-literal allegiance to the facts can sometimes obscure a larger truth:”

Thus, the movies about Washington that get the right stuff right — or get some stuff wrong but in the right way — become their own form of consensus history. “Follow the money,” then, assumes its own totemic truth. Ratified through repeated viewings in theaters, on Netflix and beyond, these films become a mutual exercise in creating a usable past. We watch them to be entertained, surely, and maybe educated. But we keep watching them in order to remember.

Fake but accurate? A few years ago, Dennis Prager wrote, “As a famous Soviet dissident joke put it: ‘In the Soviet Union, the future is known; it’s the past which is always changing.’”

And if Hollywood speeds the process along, no big deal, right?

And yes, the Washington Post has their own issues in this department.

(Incidentally, when it comes to the real NASA, they’ve got such important things to do these days, they can’t be bothered with the lowly task of flying men into space.)

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Rand Simberg adds, understandably enough, NASA to the list of Michael Barone’s “The Surprising Roots of Liberal Nostalgia;” it was the last Big Government program to be looked on as fondly by the American public as say the TVA* was in the 1930s:

I would note that the current nostalgic longing among some for a big-government space program has its roots in that same “liberal” impulse, though many, perhaps most conservatives don’t understand what an unconservative project Apollo was. NASA was, after all, one of those big-government institutions in which so many had faith in the post-war, early sixties. If you take away the raw rent seeking on the part of those who don’t want to see their home-state pork going away, this nostalgia lies at the heart of much of the outrage over Obama’s sensible new space policy. But unfortunately for NASA, the current justifiable disillusionment with government institutions in general is bleeding over to them as well.

These days of course, NASA has more important goals in mind than aeronautics and space.

Update: Related thoughts on Barone’s piece from Matt Welch of Reason:

For more on the subject, read Brink Lindsey’s great Reason essay “Nostalgianomics.” Or buy our new book, The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What’s Wrong with America, which features a chapter titled “The Disorganization Man” that examines this and similar themes. The ongoing left-of-center brainscrub of its own 20th century anti-authoritarianism remains one of the great curiosities of our time.

Of course, there was plenty of “soft” totalitarianism lurking just around the corner back then as well.

(more…)

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After first quoting from a letter that went out from NASA’s administrator to its employees on the importance of LGBT month, Bookworm Room notes how NASA is trying to thread the multiculti needle:

Am I the only one who finds it amusing that NASA, of all the available government organizations, has taken upon itself the task of both LGBT and Muslim outreach?  It’s hard to imagine two more different constituencies.

But amazing how often those two seemingly disparate branches of leftwing identity politics intertwine isn’t it? No wonder the remarkably non-distaff non-Muslim “Gay Girl From Damascus” became such a hit with western liberals who wanted to have it all.

But this trend isn’t new with NASA. Back in early 2008, I spotted a USA Today headline titled,“For NASA, ‘The Right Stuff’ Takes On A Softer Tone.” As I wrote back then:

Well, that’s one way to put it, I guess. Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff and its movie version brilliantly depict America’s first astronauts fighting against NASA bureaucrats to keep their balls — the piloting skills they earned the hard way, by surviving dangerous, experimental aircraft.

It took NASA almost 50 years, but these days, since space is no longer about actually going anywhere useful, their bureaucrats have finally won that battle.

Besides, I’m sure that, to paraphrase Howell Raines shortly before the New York Times self-destructed on the launch pad, NASA’s absolutely certain that its obsession with identity politics has made it a far more successful organization today than it was during its prehistoric, caveman days, back when it was going to the Moon in the 1960s.

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The last two years have been a strike against economic reality; why should this be any different? At the Washington Examiner, Steve Chapman writes:

In 1977, Boeing was the target of a strike by the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, which represents its workers in Puget Sound, Wash., and Portland, Ore.The aircraft manufacturer had another strike in 1989. In 1995, workers went out for 69 days. In 2005, they struck again. In 2008 … well, you see the pattern.

Strikes are an expensive luxury. The last one, which went on for nearly two months, was estimated to cost Boeing more than $2 billion. “Based on previous strike experience,” reported the Seattle Times, “Boeing will not recoup that money for many years.”

At some point, a light bulb went on in the heads of those running the company: If we can’t avoid union walkouts, we can’t make aircraft deliveries. If we can’t make aircraft deliveries, we don’t get paid, we alienate customers and we endanger our livelihood.

After the 2008 walkout, Virgin Atlantic founder Richard Branson voiced exasperation. “If union leaders and management can’t get their act together to avoid strikes,” he said, “we’re not going to come back here again. We’re already thinking, ‘Would we ever risk putting another order with Boeing?’ It’s that serious.”

Something had to be done. Boeing tried to address the problem with the machinists, asking for a long-term no-strike agreement, but the union showed no interest, and the idea died.

End of story? Not quite. In 2009, the company had to decide where to open a second production line for its 787 Dreamliner. It could have put it where labor troubles were practically guaranteed. Instead, it built a plant in South Carolina, which is scheduled to go on line this summer with 1,000 nonunion workers.

The state offered tax incentives and a hospitable commercial environment. But a Boeing executive said at the time, “The overriding factor was not the business climate. And it was not the wages we’re paying today. It was that we cannot afford to have a work stoppage, you know, every three years.”

That may strike you as a blinding flash of the obvious — not to mention a choice fully within the discretion of any company functioning in a competitive marketplace, which penalizes idleness. But apparently not.

Last month, the National Labor Relations Board filed a complaint arguing that Boeing broke the law by taking account of possible strikes in making its decision. This, it said, amounted to illegal retaliation against the machinists union.

It wants an NLRB administrative law judge to force the company to transfer the production back to Washington. And it may get its way.

No, you are not hallucinating. If the NLRB succeeds, a federal official will command a private corporation it may not produce in one place and must produce in another. Never mind what makes business sense.

Atlas Shrugged, a warning for the rest of us, a user manual for the Obama administration.

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At Forbes, Daniel Freedman writes:

If all goes according to plan, by December 2012 a team of three young Israeli scientists will have landed a tiny spacecraft on the moon, explored the lunar surface, and transmitted live video back to earth, thereby scooping up a $20 million prize (the Google Lunar X Prize), revolutionizing space exploration, and making the Jewish State the third nation (after the U.S. and Russia) to land a probe on the moon. And they’re doing it in their spare time.

Of course, that’s merely the first step towards making this famous visionary science fiction film a reality:

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At NPR (I know, I know, but stick with this), a harrowing story of two Soviet cosmonauts, one of whom was Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, and the other is best friend, who ultimately sacrifices himself to save Gagarin from going up in what both men likely knew was a doomed mission at the height of the Space Race:

So there’s a cosmonaut up in space, circling the globe, convinced he will never make it back to Earth; he’s on the phone with Alexsei Kosygin — then a high official of the Soviet Union — who is crying because he, too, thinks the cosmonaut will die.

The space vehicle is shoddily constructed, running dangerously low on fuel; its parachutes — though no one knows this — won’t work and the cosmonaut, Vladimir Komarov, is about to, literally, crash full speed into Earth, his body turning molten on impact. As he heads to his doom, U.S. listening posts in Turkey hear him crying in rage, “cursing the people who had put him inside a botched spaceship.”

This extraordinarily intimate account of the 1967 death of a Russian cosmonaut appears in a new book, Starman, by Jamie Doran and Piers Bizony, to be published next month. The authors base their narrative principally on revelations from a KGB officer, Venymin Ivanovich Russayev, and previous reporting by Yaroslav Golovanov in Pravda. This version — if it’s true — is beyond shocking.

Don’t miss this one.

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“Nasa to shoot lasers at space junk around Earth to prevent collisions with satellites.”

Don’t take chances — you never know what’s hiding behind that space junk.

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Functionally and in terms of cost, the Space Shuttle has been a disaster; 25 years ago, after the Challenger explosion, Arthur C. Clarke dubbed it not the DC-3 of space, but the DC-1 ½ of space. But that doesn’t mean that the concept of manned space flight isn’t still thrilling, particularly via seldom-seen images such as these:

(H/T: BJ)

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It’s too bad Ed Bishop isn’t still around; there would have been a role for him here somewhere:

TWO PLANETS sharing one orbit. “Buried in the flood of data from the Kepler telescope is a planetary system unlike any seen before. Two of its apparent planets share the same orbit around their star. If the discovery is confirmed, it would bolster a theory that Earth once shared its orbit with a Mars-sized body that later crashed into it, resulting in the moon’s formation.”

What do you mean it’s unlike any seen before?

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Well at least at the movies, as Transformers III has this trailer currently playing in theaters…

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…And a horror movie called Apollo 18 (by the looks of it, with a much lower budget) will be splashing down as well around that same time:

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As I think Ron Howard mentioned wen he was shooting Apollo 13, it’s more than a little ironic that movies about moon shots are now nostalgia pieces. On the other hand, it could be worse — anybody up for Stretch Armstrong: The Motion Picture? Let’s spin the Magic 8-Ball and check; it’s also coming to the Big Screen near you.

(All of which answers this question by John Nolte of Big Hollywood.)

(H/T: 5′F)

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This is an actual New York Times correction, which ran yesterday:

An article on Jan. 16 about drilling for oil off the coast of Angola erroneously reported a story about cows falling from planes, as an example of risks in any engineering endeavor.No cows, smuggled or otherwise, ever fell from a plane into a Japanese fishing rig. The story is an urban legend, and versions of it have been reported in Scotland, Germany, Russia and other locations.

What is it about gravity that gets the Gray Lady into such trouble?

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At the Corner, Rich Lowry explores President Obama’s flawed Sputnik analogy, and notes, “In the wake of the moon landing, liberalism failed to understand that society is not an enormous engineering project:”

As Walter McDougall documents in his Pulitzer Prize–winning The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age, one of the heroes of the Apollo project, NASA administrator James Webb, fed the misunderstanding. He thought the space program constituted a breakthrough in the management of large systems that could be widely replicated.

McDougall writes that “the James Webbs had, by their talent and energy, made command innovation look easy — and ‘American.’” In a letter to LBJ, Webb told the president, “The space program lies in your first area of building the Great Society.” And build it he did. “A new political symbolism had arisen,” McDougall notes, “to discredit the old verities about limited government, local initiative, balanced budgets, and individualism.”

LBJ himself remarked on the catalyzing effect of the space program. According to LBJ, people said, “‘Well, if you do that for space and send a man to the moon, why can’t we do something for grandma with Medicare?’ And so we passed the Medicare act, and we passed 40 other measures.”

One of Lowry’s readers notes that the deadline that JFK set for Apollo was “overcome by the power of infinite funding alone.” In reality, “A closer reading of the history demonstrates this position as fallacious.” Men with big steely cojones were willing to put them on the line to see Kennedy’s vision through, at considerable risk to their reputations. Witness:

1. George Mueller’s decision to adapt an ‘all-up’ testing regimen for the Saturn V booster
2. George Low’s decision to fly Apollo 8 in 1968

When Mueller was appointed Associate Administrator of the Office of Manned Space Flight he quickly realized that the conventional approach to testing new booster technology would result in years of delays and NASA would be unable to meet the objective of a manned landing by 1969. To the chagrin of many at NASA, he instituted the policy of testing the entire booster system as a whole rather than testing each individual component separately and conjoining them over time. This approach was anathema to the engineering community and broke with all tradition. I cannot speak to the psychology of his decision-making process but it is my belief that it derived from his desire to assist in meeting specified national goals. It was selfless to the extent that had the approach been a failure he would have been vilified in his community and his future prospects imperiled.

Needless to say, the modern NASA (when it isn’t cooking the books) has very different priorities these days, as the era of the Right Stuff has long been superseded by the PC world of not accomplishing very much — but not hurting anyone’s feelings in the process. Or to paraphrase John Derbyshire, better dead than rude — or in the case of NASA, better brain-dead than rude.

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Back in 2005, when President Bush appointed John Bolton to shake up the UN, Mark Steyn reminded readers of Reagan-era Secretary of State George Schultz’s test for incoming ambassadors:

Yet the assumption behind much of the criticism of Bolton from the likes of John Kerry is that, regardless of his government’s foreign policy, a UN ambassador has to be at some level a UN booster. Twenty years ago, the then Secretary of State George Schultz used to welcome the Reagan administration’s ambassadorial appointments to his office and invite each chap to identify his country on the map. The guy who’d just landed the embassy in Chad would invariably point to Chad. ‘No,’ Schultz would say, ‘this is your country’ — and point to the United States. Nobody would expect a US ambassador to the Soviet Union to be a big booster for the Soviets. And, given that in a unipolar world the most plausible challenger to the US is transnationalism, these days the Schultz test is even more pertinent for the UN ambassador: his country is the United States, not the ersatz jurisdiction of Kofi Annan’s embryo world government.

And not China, something that James Hansen, NASA’s most visible global warming zealot has yet to figure out:

November’s election made it quite clear that the people of the United States do not want to radically change our society in the name of global warming. Pretty much every close House race went to the Republicans, while the Democrats won all the Senate squeakers. The difference? The House on June 26, 2009, passed a bill limiting carbon-dioxide emissions and getting into just about every aspect of our lives. The Senate did nothing of the sort.

The nation’s most prominent publicly funded climatologist is officially angry about this, blaming democracy and citing the Chinese government as the “best hope” to save the world from global warming. He also wants an economic boycott of the U.S. sufficient to bend us to China‘s will.

NASA laboratory head James Hansen‘s anti-democracy rants were published while he was on a November junket in China, but they didn’t get much attention until recently. On Jan. 12, the hyperprolific blogger Marc Morano put them on his Climate Depot site, and within hours, the post went viral. In a former life, Mr. Morano was chief global-warming researcher for Sen. James M. Inhofe, Oklahoma Republican.

According to Mr. Hansen, compared to China, we are “the barbarians” with a “fossil-money- ‘democracy’ that now rules the roost,” making it impossible to legislate effectively on climate change. Unlike us, the Chinese are enlightened, unfettered by pesky elections. Here’s what he blogged on Nov. 24:

“I have the impression that Chinese leadership takes a long view, perhaps because of the long history of their culture, in contrast to the West with its short election cycles. At the same time, China has the capacity to implement policy decisions rapidly. The leaders seem to seek the best technical information and do not brand as a hoax that which is inconvenient.”

Has this guy ever heard of the Gang of Four? Or the Cultural Revolution, which killed those who were inconvenient? Or the Great Leap Forward, which used the best technical information to determine that a steel mill in every backyard was a good idea?

Clearly though, Thomas Friedman will love Hansen’s anti-American, growth-stifling rhetoric, presumably almost as much as the president does.

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“Wonderful: Military not sure yet who fired ‘big missile’ off California coast,” Allahpundit writes, linking to a CBS article that’s getting blown out (figuratively) by a Drudge-lanche, and offering three possibilities as to the cause. Plus this video:

Update: “Pentagon says it’s baffled, but scientists suggest it’s just a jetliner with spectacular contrail.”

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