Buried in the depths of the trade press is notice that one of the 1950s ‘dreams of the future’ had come true. The Terrafugia Transition became the first officially-approved flying car. “The FAA assigned the machine a special exemption as a ‘light aircraft/car,’ meaning drivers need only 20 hours of flight experience to operate the thing.” Because it is actually a car the vehicle had to conform to the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards in ways aircraft do not. “Items such as airbags, an energy absorbing crumple zone, and a protective safety cage will increase safety both on the road and in the air.” But why aren’t people, despite the Transition’s $195,000 price tag, celebrating? Maybe because we don’t dream of flying cars any more any more than we fantasize about rocket ships and Martian princesses. The last human being walked on the moon more than 40 years ago. We’ve turned away from the sky and are glad of it.
Once upon a time the future was going to be fun and the assumption was that things were always going to get biggest, faster and better. But today a significant current in public thinking holds that the coming years are going to be dark — that they literally should be dark. The UN’s has promulgated indicators to indicate how much of anything we shouild be allowed to use. Today efforts are being focused on the degree to which we can reduce energy consumption, limit intensity of materials use, cut down on water consumption, limit land use and curb mobility. The dream of the future is no longer the man in the flying car but the man/womyn/transgender person living in the smallest possible cubicle, limited to the narrowest geographic circle possible and consuming his own waste.
And we are getting there.
A future in which America will have no capability to send a human being into space is already in sight. And good riddance to it, some would say. Along with the other crazy old white man’s ideas, we’ve also purged the idea of Progress; already returned to the ancient idea that the natural state of the world is continuous decline. Entropy. Some ancients believed that everything would be worse in the future. “In Works and Days Hesiod divided time into five ages:–the Golden age, ruled by Cronos, when people lived extremely long lives ‘without sorrow of heart’; the Silver age, ruled by Zeus; the Bronze age, an epoch of war; the Heroic age, the time of the Trojan war; and lastly the Iron age, the corrupt present.” The Hindus saw future as headed for the Age of the Demon, the Kali Yuga. It’s attributes may interesting reading. In the Kali Yuga:
- Rulers will become unreasonable: they will levy taxes unfairly.
- Rulers will no longer see it as their duty to promote spirituality, or to protect their subjects: they will become a danger to the world.
- People will start migrating, seeking countries where wheat and barley form the staple food source. But then, they will also love their subjects so much that they will sacrifice their lives for them.
- Avarice and wrath will be common. Humans will openly display animosity towards each other.
- Ignorance of dharma will occur.
- People will have thoughts of murder for no justification and they will see nothing wrong with that mind-set.
- Lust will be viewed as socially acceptable, and sexual intercourse will be seen as the central requirement of life.
- Sin will increase exponentially, whilst virtue will fade and cease to flourish.
- People will take vows only to break them soon after.
- People will become addicted to intoxicating drinks and drugs.
- Men will find their jobs stressful and will go to retreats to escape their work.
- Gurus will no longer be respected and their students will attempt to injure them. Their teachings will be insulted and followers of Kama will wrest control of the mind from all human beings. Brahmins will not be learned and honoured, Kshatriyas will not be brave, Vaishyas will not be just in dealings and shudras will not be honest and humble to their duties and to the other castes.
And there will be no flying cars. In one sense the difference between the unlimited optimism of the 1950s and the dystopia we are being sold today was that the first was predicated on the bountiful universe of a Creator and the second on the cheese-paring, rationed, desperate world of men. In the first the stars were put there for us to explore. In the second the stars were placed at such distances so that we could not despoil them. In one we are children in the playground of a Creator; in the other we “children of the night, who have never been happy or good”.
But the Hindus also believed that the corruption could not last forever. Eventually even the Age of the Demon would end. “When flowers will be begot within flowers, and fruits within fruits, then will the Yuga come to an end.” Perhaps for us the sign will be an outbreak of joy; a time when people will find themselves unshamed to play and dream again. The corner will have been turned when we can take a flying car out of the garage, look up at the still distant stars and recite near forgotten lines the Fifties and be aware of the change in the second quatrain:
Gully Foyle is my name
And Terra is my nation
Deep space is my dwelling place
And death’s my destination.Gully Foyle is my name
And Terra is my nation
Deep space is my dwelling place
The stars my destination.
To look up once and know that of all the lifeforms in all the galaxies we have been chosen to defend the frontier against Zur and the Kodan Armada.
Tip Jar or Subscribe for $5
All right an Alfred Bester reference.
You Da Man.
It’s funny to look at the archetecture of the future and realize that there are those that want it to be hovles if not TPs made of human flesh.
Future ha. I’m bummed. Three heavy days of job interviews and negotiations with two companies. I’m very luck to have any offers at all, I got two – and am taking the worse one, because the “better” one falls so short of what it ought to be. Most people would decide it the other way, I know. So I second-guess myself that much more.
This is *too* on topic, because it’s more doom and gloom about the current economy, about the current economic practices being cheap rather than seeking even competence. “I want the very best employees” that pennies can buy. Swell. “No, really, great opportunities here, we promoted 12 guys just this quarter,” gave them an extra peanut per week no doubt.
Remember when we used to have books with titles like “In Search of Excellence”? Excellence, yeah, we should have brought back more of that from the Moon, while we had the chance. I guess all the excellence has leaked out of the well and washed up useless on the Florida beaches.
Y’all ever read Larry Niven’s, “The Magic Goes Away”?
’nuff said
There, fixed that for you.
You might want to google the following (I would provide links but I think your spam filter killed my last comment for doing so):
Armadillo Aerospace
Masten Space Systems
Virgin Galactic
SpaceX
Blue Origin
United Launch Alliance
Bigelow Aerospace
Er, what? We were optimistic in the 50′s because we didn’t realize the Earth had a limited capacity to absorb our pollutants and produce resources. Then the Cuyahoga River became a lifeless void and caught fire. Whoops.
In the first world we could do anything allowed by the laws of physics. In the second world we have to work within the constraints imposed by Earth’s biosphere. The latter world is better because we have to live on Earth, so it would be nice if the water is potable and the air breathable. Or would you like to live in an Arcology overlooking a moon-like wasteland?
Have some people given up on progress? Yes, and many of them work at the UN. But not everyone.
(I honestly think the flying car is a mixed blessing though. Cool as hell, and I do want one, but consider how many people are killed by non-flying careless or drunk drivers each year …)
P.S. Vorga! Gully is an inspiration to me, because he is a reminder that no challenge is insurmountable, nor any decision difficult, to a man with clear priorities. Whenever I find myself hesitating out of fear or indecision I always remember now to step back and examine my priorities. Then I act, effortlessly and happily.
We are governed by infantile Alvy Singers convinced the Universe is expanding or something, so we might as well give up and submit to the Cosmic Will.
Marxists used to claim they believed in History, that is both the past and the future. In fact the current crowd of anarchic nihilists believe in neither. In fairness to him Engels had contempt for people like that.
What can these people offer? Not even anything beyond immediate gratification by pleasure. Once a boy would offer a girl the moon and the stars and a future. Now they can’t even offer breakfast. Why does anyone put up with it?
In the second world we aimed low, so that no one would “lose,” totally unaware that that’s we all lose.
Lowest common denominator…Dewd, let’s party, ’till 1999! After that? Whatever…
With my own eyes I saw the Sybil of Cumae hanging in a bottle; and when the boys said to her: “Sybil, what do you want?” she replied, “I want to die”.
Somewhere along the way, we didn’t wish for the right thing. We wished to do for the world what we had done for ourselves. We wished to feed the world’s poor – to give medicine to the seething throngs, to share with them what we had accomplished for ourselves, to lift them up to us. We thought that if we showed them a smile, reached out with our open hand, gave them part of our lunch money, they certainly could not help but love us. But they didn’t love us.
Another day, another dreary lecture by another android parrot. One of these days I’m going to vomit on some hapless parrot that yammers about “green” whatever. In the meantime, tomorrow night I’m having a ginormous bonfire so the grandsons can roast a couple weenies and marshmallows. Without any regrets.
The world is getting to be a generally dreary place full of very dreary people who are afraid of their own shadow on the face of the earth. Kinda sad actually.
We now are experiencing the blowback from how an American communist and her child experienced The Year of Living Dangerously. We persist as a nation in our romantic delusions that we are not in the Age of the Demons but still in The Year of the Cat.
Sorry I didn’t get out in one post.
What is progress and what is not? Perhaps the flying car is like the amphibious car — a Gee-Whiz with very limited practical application.
On the other hand, there are still people working today who trained on slide rules. Yet now we have the functional equivalent of unlimited computing power at our fingertips; an unpredicted Internet; and e-mail inboxes full of offers for cheap multi-terabyte portable hard disks. Cell phones that took us by surprise, and then took over our lives. Affordable big screen TVs. Medical advances that transform the heart attack from a death sentence into 3 days off work.
The future is fantastic! And it is here now! But the magic has gone.
Perhaps what has been lost is the sense of room, the belief that there is a big world out there, and that people can just go out and do things. In reality, the big world is still out there — today, ordinary people fly between continents and can see first-hand how huge the planet really is, and how small human impacts are in the big scheme of things.
The constriction in our living space is not physical. Instead, we have become oppressed by human rules and regulations — words that can’t be said, trash that can’t be dropped into that particular bin, speed limits that make us all criminals, factories closed by environmental extremists, children who have to wear bicycle helmets and be whisked around in motor vehicles to keep them safe from the pedophiles who suddenly lurk behind every tree. Our futuristic technology simply cannot relieve the gloom cast by the zealous regulator.
Today I took my family to the Air & Space Museum in Downtown Wasington DC to see The IMAX 3D hubble flick. Here’s the trailer – Hubble 3D HD.
The flick ends with a long zoom to the edge of the known universe.
Its kind of weird to drive down Independence Ave after just being shown animated pictures edge of space time.
I don’t think that was a bad call by the O’s to privatize the launch industry. I liked the rationale behind the decision. The US government privatized the satellite communications game back in the early 60′s. Now its a multibillion dollar business. The feds now figure if they just pay launch companies to send their stuff into space they’ll do it ever faster better smarter and launch a whole new giant industry.
SpaceX did a successful launch a month or so back and they promptly got a couple contracts to launch stuff into space.
Much as I agree with the material in the essay, I feel that I must make note of a bit of an historical inaccuracy.
Apollo 17, the last time anybody walked on the moon, was in December of 1972. The 40th anniversary of that mission won’t be for two and a half years.
What I find amusing is that Redstone has built a workable Ion drive that is more then capable of powering spacecraft that can reach Mars and the Asteroid belt.
Dubbau wanted to send a manned flight to Mars and I think that if the WTC attack hadn’t changed things, he would have.
The money spent fighting terrorists is more then enough to fund a Mars program. Once the asteroid belt is opened for exploitation, we will all find out what comes after a trillion. An entire planet’s worth of mineral broken out and ready for the taking. The technology spin-offs would dwarf the current global GDP.
Now that the technology is there, the will has gone. I’m hoping that greed will power the leap into space.
We should all be celebrating. I spent 6 years at the university. The one thing relentlessly pounded into my head was, estrogen=good, testosterone= bad. I’m throwing out all my hard liquor and switching to herb tea and watching Oprah reruns. Well except for tomorrow night when my totally hot girlfriend comes over, I may have a relapse. But, I will repent.
Congressional Support Grows For Heavy-Lift
An ironic aspect of the space program is that going back to the Moon is an essential victory condition for defeating al-Qaeda. Going to Mars is important too, but creating and maintaining a lunar base is centrally important to defeating an enemy who adheres to a lunar calendar.
The United States is missing an obvious opportunity to awe tribal peoples with American technological prowess and de facto control over a symbol that is sacred to billions of people. Yet, how can one expect any better from a man who got elected by presenting himself as a sun god? I’m glad the world isn’t worse off than it is!
Well, I go on a trip and return to see the club on fire. Lately, between family and work and saving the republic that there’s been precious little time to spend with my compatriots here at the BC. So I’m feeling like it’s time for an extended riff…
America is struggling as a nation, as a society, not because we can no longer to go the moon, but because we have spent the last 100 years destroying our mediating institutions, those social structures that connect the ordinary, sovereign citizens with those entrusted with the responsibility for leading. These institutions – religions, political parties, social clubs, etc. – serve four crucial functions in a democratic republic:
Mediating institutions are essential components of a democratic governance system. Without them, we would be left with “pure” democracy, which eventually is captured by the demagogue, and then the tyrant.
But we have systematically undermined our mediating institutions. Religions have been marginalized, attacked, and pushed out of the public square. Their moral authority has been compromised, and the scope for action limited. Political parties have been enervated, and now serve the interests of incumbents, rather than holding them accountable. Social clubs have been enfeebled, their members prevented from choosing whomever they want, forced instead into a politically correct posture of anti-discrimination.
Now, all of these changes were justified on the basis of individually damning, non-typical anecdotes. Most priests are not pedophiles; most party members were not corrupt; most clubs were not racist. But the existence of a few examples was conflated into a reason to strip the entire institution of its proper, and hard-earned authority.
This has been accomplished, for the most part, by the imposition of rules. An exception is found, and a new rule is promulgated to “fix” the resulting problem. Layer upon layer of rule is added. Lawyers, as makers and enforcers and administrator of rules, are especially susceptible to this approach.
But as rules are added, discretion is necessarily reduced.
Rules need not be a problem, however, if the scope of the rule is limited. For instance, to pick a recent, controversial example, consider a rule against the repeated use of inflammatory, racially-charged language. If that rule is only applied at the Belmont Club, society is not materially harmed. There are, after all, plenty of other places Whiskey can comment. The reaction to the imposition of that rule will vary widely: there are those who will be glad to see him go elsewhere; there are others who will not feel strongly about this rule; there are others who will miss Whiskey, even though they strongly disagreed with him, but for whom life will go on (I’m in that group, BTW); there are some who will miss Whiskey because he spoke for them, but will still hang around the club because they still find the conversation engaging; and others who will leave the club, either in protest or to follow Whiskey wherever he goes; and many others.
But society is not harmed because there is still a place for Whiskey to go, and to be heard.
On the other hand, if the scope of this rule is the entire nation – that is to say, inflammatory, racially-charged language is outlawed everywhere – well, that’s a real problem.
That’s why our nation relied on mediating institutions. We would, effectively, move up the hierarchy until we reached the level at which the problem could be solved. And then it was solved. End of discussion.
Now, however, we have an entire generation of people who believe it is their duty, their calling, their mission to force the federal government to right every wrong. When faced with a problem, it is Washington DC’s responsibility to solve it. Our President, of course, was steeped in this thinking. But their actions enfeeble the populace, dulling the edge of husbandry. (For many in the ruling class, of course, this is a feature not a bug.)
For where did that thinking come? From nowhere. It has always been thus. It is the arrogance of the ruling class, an arrogance that is the natural result of unconstrained power.
America, at its heart, is a radical attempt a self-governance. Throughout almost all of human history, there have been rulers and ruled – masters and slaves – lords and serfs – kings and subjects. Once power is gained, the natural impulse of the powerful is always to remove all fetters on the use and further accumulation of that power.
The American people knew this, because they had experienced it personally, and chose to leave their home country and go to a new, wild, and dangerous land. In this New World, there was no lord to rule them – since they were farming their own land and taxing themselves, two other radical experiments – so they set about ruling themselves. Then, after 150 years or so of growth, with a citizenry self-selected for their desire and ability to govern themselves, King George tried to re-assert his authority. But it was too late. We were already free.
Now, it is easy to think that American was just lucky to have the 56 Founding Fathers, or the 55 Framers of the Constitution. That it was a freak, historical accident to have so many talented people assembled at the right time and the right place to change the direction of history.
But this view is fundamentally wrong. These men appeared on the scene because the American people were already free, and because there existed mediating institutions that selected leaders who reflected the views of the people. There were town meetings, county caucuses, state assemblies, committees of correspondence, and many other political institutions. In these groups, leaders were selected to represent their constituents, and were held accountable by them.
The Founders were, of course, remarkable men. But today, all across the land, there are men and women who are of equal or greater merit. I know this to be a fact, because I read what they have to say here and elsewhere on the blogosphere; because I work with them in the business community; because I go to Mass with them every Sunday; because my kids play with theirs in the park. These leaders will emerge, but we need to create the institutions that will find those who share our beliefs, encourage them to represent us, see to it that they’re elected, and then hold them to their word.
Starting with the Progressive Era, in our zeal to rid the mediating institutions of corruption, we have gutted them. But the corruption remains, because the power was not dispersed. In fact, without the check of mediating institutions, the power has grown far greater, as has the corruption. We were told that our system needed to be more “democratic,” but the resulting actions have left us with a less democratic, less responsive ruling class.
We have thrown out the baby, and are left with the bathwater.
The Tea Party movement case be understood as an attempt to rebuild a political mediating institution. People all over the nation are organizing, first into small groups, and then networking into a larger hierarchy that might, perhaps, evolve into a permanent and powerful force in politics.
There are others as well who are working to recreate these institutions in the form of private political infrastructure. You will probably be hearing more about some of these efforts in the coming months. It is a slow process, but efforts like these represent the best hope for reclaiming power from the ruling class.
I encourage everyone to look for institutions with which to engage. Tocqueville referred to these groups as associations, and he saw them as the distinct feature of America. But they were really the result of a deep yearning for freedom, self-governance, and self-determination that has always existed in the heart of America, brought here by those who understood tyranny best, as evidenced by their flight from it.
On this July 4 weekend, let us thank God for the many blessings we enjoy, and commit to securing those blessings for ourselves and our posterity.
The way to do this is by rebuilding our mediating institutions. Only then can our government recover its legitimacy, and be restored to its proper, limited place in American society.
We must come together to rule ourselves, so as not to be divided and conquered.
L3
C’mon, Wretchard. Don’t be so morose. The Terrafugia is not the wonder of the age because, well, it’s not the wonder of the age. It’s neither a very good flying machine, nor a very good car. And anyway, nobody ever really meant for a “flying car” to actually drive on the roads–it’s just supposed to be a flying machine as safe and simple to operate as a car.
Men on the moon was just a flash-in-the-pan because, well, it was just a couple of test pilots. It’s not a new age of discovery unless people see profit in going to the stars. There’s gold in them thar asteroids, perhaps.
All that aside, be just a little patient. Wonders await us, and soon. What’s required to make a real flying car is just higher power density and energy density. Such things lurk now, just beneath the headlines….
Dear L3,
Your comment puts me in mind of a certain manager at a children’s educational software company where I labored for a time.
Don’t need to burden everyone with detail – He was one of those managers who actually believed he’d conducted a successful meeting if people didn’t yell at each other.
The company had way too many managers like that.
Describing all the incidents & effects of our biologically-determined behavior is fine but it sure could use a disclaimer –something about human beings and a self-awareness which either strives for an ideal or falls below the beast of the field.
otherwise it gets to be the very softness that it decries: “There, there, don’t worry if you feel that way, you can’t help it, it’s your fate, and it can’t be escaped.”
i think that’s why fatalism is a little crazy-making –to say “you’re like this because you were destined to be like this” is to negate the listener’s status as a free agent –to say, ‘you ain’t shit, pal, i hate to tell ya’.
Whiskey, for example, i’m sure all he was being asked to do is quit seeming to incite –to say that all the identity groups must inevitably lock up in a spiritual if not bodily fight to the death –which even then wouldn’t have bothered anyone had his presentation not been so persuasive, so nudging toward “well hell, lets just get it ON then!”
I’m not joining that chorus –well, maybe some, sometimes –just offering my opinion on why wretchard may have done what so many are disagreeing with –which BTW i’m taking to’ve been a request to tone it down a bit, and not a ‘ban’.
that would run more true to form –butt it’s none o my biz, and/or i could be rong, et cetera, i often is. TOO often. ENTIRELY too often.
speaking of MIA, where dave and geez louise & mongoose and whoever other Brain Trustards who slithily neglect to pop into my mind at the beck and call –
When I was a little boy (and later a not-so-little boy), I kept a scrapbook of all of the astronauts and all of the missions, from MR-3 to Apollo 17.
I never imagined that the first words from Mars would not come in my lifetime.
And now that I have turned 60, so what if they do? I don’t speak Mandarin.
Of course, Gully Foyle learned how to teleport himself when he was pretty desperate. Then he didn’t need a flying car. What does desperate look like for a failing human system?
Factory Jobs Return, but Employers Find Skills Shortage
All candidates at Ben Venue must pass a basic skills test showing they can read and understand math at a ninth-grade level.
A significant portion of recent applicants failed, and the company has been disappointed by the quality of graduates from local training programs. It is now struggling to fill 100 positions.
I get the feeling sometimes we are watching the same events but from different planets.
One the one side, there are those who look up into the night sky from their books, computers, televisions, work, whatever tasks they happening to be doing, and are paralyzed or driven mad by what they see.
On the other, there are those level-headed types who look out into the darkness and see things that need to be done right now. It’s like some gigantic dust cloud is passing through the solar system. We know that the stars will not be there for a time, but we take measures to see that someone will be there to see their sparkling return–when the cloud obscuring creation, our powers of vision, passes.
In a sense, we must think of ourselves as pioneers, staking out a little mental territory in the Future, looking after ourselves, our families, our friends, Tomorrow, if you will. It may seem like a pointless task. It is certainly a thankless one. But it is what we do. If there is to be a Tomorrow, someone must first be able to imagine it. It might as well be us.
The Nebulous Menace
Astronomers had seen it first. They could
Do nothing but track it when it arrived,
Eating at the constellations. Man
Was not to be informed. He was. The void
Grew visible—ink spilled among the stars—
With nothing there to soak it up: no
Blotting paper—no salvation. God,
There goes Orion—Betelgeuse—all gone
Beyond the small, bright corpuscle of Mars.
(Mars has a few more months to shine, you see.)
I think about my sister, in that dome,
The weather station on Olympus Mons,
Counting devils in the peach twilight,
Rusty, dusty devils dancing on
The edge of night. Good for asparagus
She says—the soils of Mars. She built a bed
Beneath the dome she calls her Homestead. There
She harvested a hundred spears this spring—
As Jupiter went out. She didn’t know
What Earth expected her to do. To shout?
Sometimes I wonder if we here aren’t just an echo chamber of old geezers. The average age of BC posters would be prolly well above fifty. But then I see this and I know that there is hope.
In other words we need another Reagan. Real hope and change.
25. twobyfour
I’ve been suspecting that about several blogs I read.
Here’s another hopeful article:
New Generation of Supersonic Jets Aims to Get Rid of the Boom
(subtitled “NASA: Fixing what Yeager broke.” lol)
Science fiction as metaphor.
Okey-dokey.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHva0-ckVMw
The problem arises when deciding to whom it most closely resembles.
So many now to choose from.
I trust they’re one and the same.
I also trust that because we still can discern them after so many centuries we still can beat them back.
Once again.
You’ll have to excuse me now as its Saturday morning and my yard work has gotten away from me. Time to first rewind my weed whacker.
I hate when that happens.
Great find, two by.
29. heyyoukidsgetoffmylawn
You’ll have to excuse me now as its Saturday morning and my yard work has gotten away from me. Time to first rewind my weed whacker.
I hate when that happens.
You and me both. I’m trying not to think about it. If I’m going to do anything in the yard this weekend, it better be today because the next couple of days are going to be fiendishly hot.
I tried to edit my #28 comment, but ran overtime. (How come the countdown clock disappeared?)
Anyway:
The ancestor of NASA was NACA, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. It was created in 1915 in order to do research and make its findings available to engineers in private industry, with the aim of improving airplane design. Note that NACA did not design and manufacture its own airplanes. It only provided technical assistance.
It became NASA in 1958, and within a few years was given a mission of the highest national priority and a virtually unlimited budget. By the time the moon landing goal was achieved, it had become a massive Federal agency, and like all bureaucracies, its main goal became one of self-perpetuation.
As the Apollo program was gutted by Congress and President Nixon, NASA created the Space Shuttle in the mid-70s and sold it as a way to make spaceflight routine and inexpensive. It has turned out to be anything but. It has also turned out to be the most dangerous manned spacecraft ever flown.
A few years ago NASA announced the Constellation program to return to the moon atop a new giant NASA-designed rocket. It has been nicknamed “Apollo on Steroids” and promised to become yet another bloated, inefficient, insanely expensive program that would continue to restrict space flight to infrequent missions flown by a handful of government employees.
So returning NASA to a NACA-like agency to provide technical assistance to upstart private aerospace companies might not be a bad idea.
Rand Simberg’s blog, Transterrestrial Musings, is a good place to keep abreast of the doings of private space companies. Some of the commenters are actual aerospace engineers.
Dang. I was going to blow off yard work today too.
Doug @ 23: Factory Jobs Return, but Employers Find Skills Shortage
All candidates at Ben Venue must pass a basic skills test showing they can read and understand math at a ninth-grade level.
A significant portion of recent applicants failed, and the company has been disappointed by the quality of graduates from local training programs. It is now struggling to fill 100 positions.
Even assuming the cost of living is pretty good (low) in a suburb outside of Cleveland, $31k/year is pretty modest pay. I have to wonder at these reports, knowing that the “shortage of high-tech workers” reports are entirely bogus.
Now, that’s not to say things aren’t tough, running a business is always tough. What if he offered $40k/year? I mean, why not $90k/year? Because it would drive up his costs and prices and the business would fail, of course – because the competition, in China, can pay $21k/year, or maybe $2k/year, I don’t know, and even after transportation costs, that wins.
But hey, we’ve encouraged everyone to go to college, everyone who can read and write competently, and then moan and groan about not filling $13/hour jobs? What’s wrong with this picture?
FTA:
Here in this suburb of Cleveland, supervisors at Ben Venue Laboratories, a contract drug maker for pharmaceutical companies, have reviewed 3,600 job applications this year and found only 47 people to hire at $13 to $15 an hour, or about $31,000 a year.
…
“You would think in tough economic times that you would have your pick of people,” said Thomas J. Murphy, chief executive of Ben Venue.
/FTA
LL III @ 17
Nice piece but I dunno about the Obiter Dictum obsession with the notorious Mister Whiskey: “Repeated use of racially-charged language” Wow.
Seems like the W-man has a talent for getting under the thinner intellectual skins; a thorn in the proverbial paws of the enlightened, as it were.
When LL III and LOTM finally get mister badboy banished or discouraged, he can always crawl off to somewhere further down the intellectual food chain, right?
Anywhere, as long as it’s not in their back yard.
This ad hominem stuff is getting to be a bit of a drag.
Drag? Did I just say drag?
Homophobically-charged language!
Dang. A guy just can’t be too careful these days.
I feel we are doing quite well in space, currently the ISS is as much a space ship as it is a station since it can move about in orbit.
So we have a permanent space ship in orbit isn’t that something to be proud of?
A few comments here, folks…
Brock # 4; Of those companies you list only two even have any realistic plans to attain a capability to place people into orbit. One of these, United Launch Alliance, owes its existence entirely to the USAF, which gave up joint launch efforts with NASA in 1994 and struck out on its own. NASA’s Shuttle replacement effort in that time frame, the X-33, proved to be a complete failure before it ever flew.
Our space launch efforts have always been “commercialized” in that essentially all of the work was done by private companies, like United Launch Alliance. Attempts to more fully commercialize launch by getting the government to step back out of its oversight role in the 1990’s proved to absolutely disastrous and had to be abandoned.
What is important about this is what we proved we could not do, at least not any longer. On 28 Jan 2010 we had the 24th anniversary of the loss of the Shuttle Challenger. Now go back 24 years from the date we lost the Challenger, to 28 Jan 1962. At that point we had yet to place a single man in orbit. 24 years later we put had men in orbit many times, had multiple manned Moon landings, built and abandoned a space station, and developed the Space Shuttle. On that day in 1986 we found out that the Shuttle could not hack it, but 24 years later we were still launching Shuttles. Note that this is the same kind of management Obama wants to bring to health care – and just about everything else.
As for Everyman Airplanes, I own one, a 1946 Ercoupe, an airplane designed to be simple and safe enough to operate and cheap enough to allow anyone to fly one. They succeeded in the design but failed in the concept. The vast majority of people could not fly an airplane, even if they could afford to own one. It is too demanding and especially too unforgiving of error. The recent rejuvenation of light aviation with Light Sport Aircraft is associated with the Federal Government backing off a bit on its requirements for a simpler, more limited form of pilot licensing. Traditionally, the FAA ratcheted up requirements almost every year for both aircraft and pilot licensing. Backing off just a little bit helped the industry a great deal.
“An ironic aspect of the space program is that going back to the Moon is an essential victory condition for defeating al-Qaeda.”
One of the Urban myths about Islam is that the Koran says Islam shall last until a man walks on the moon. I have an English version and there isn’t anything about moonwalking in there. Despite spending years working in the Islamic crescent, I never learned to read Arabic. My brain just couldn’t get around going right to left. Plus all those squiggles look like pecker tracks to me.
So it might be there and just didn’t make the cut when it was translated. Translation errors can kill.
I watched one the other day. To a German native, ‘little people’ is the same as ‘small people’ To Americans, it isn’t.
When I was making my career decision about 1970 in favor of nuclear power engineering, one of my thoughts was that with unlimited power, a civilization could do anything it set its mind to. With nuclear, we’d have the power to go into space.
The environmentalists saw this too and soon the 1970s saw a focused attack on nuclear power. The battle wasn’t over safety or the trivial normal radiation releases but over the future of American (and hence, human) development. Were we to reach for the stars or were we to be happier spending our lives looking at the back end of a mule? The mule represented an “organic” power source, clean of technology and recyclable, so “noble” in a serf-ish way.
Today, the forces of a radical retrenchment and neutering of American society have the upper hand. The battle is not yet settled and this next election is a battle we must win.
One upbeat note is that fact that my employer, a very famous name in the nuke business, is reconstituting itself. At one time it was world-dominant but was carved up into tasty bits with the collapse of the new construction business in the 80′s.
Today, our company is growing faster than Apple Computer, building new nuclear plants around the globe.
Maybe I won’t live to see man walking on Mars, but I’m again building the part of economic infrastructure that could someday launch us back into space.
Flying cars? Look too dangerous too me. I’m pass.
Cosmeau Bugleweed @ 35,
When LL III and LOTM finally get mister badboy banished or discouraged, he can always crawl off to somewhere further down the intellectual food chain, right?
Uh, wrong. I had nothing to do with getting Whiskey “banished.” As I said above, I will miss him. Hard to see why I would feel that way if he got “under my skin.”
For the record, I had no objection to Whiskey’s membership in the BC, nor with Wretchard’s decision to ask him to take his business elsewhere.
Wretchard’s place has a distinctive culture, one that reflects his tastes and values. It is that culture that attracts us to the place. He has the authority to shape that culture, and the associated responsibility. It is a difficult job to do, and I think he does it exceedingly well. Far better than I could ever do. Which is why I’m a customer, not a proprietor.
“Repeated use of racially-charged language” Wow.
Do you really deny that Whiskey engaged in “repeated use of racially-charged language”? My view is that fact is undeniable; the differences of opinion are around whether this was a feature or a bug.
Anywhere, as long as it’s not in their back yard.
Wrong again. Whiskey and I have peacefully co-existed with many others for several years in Wretchard’s backyard. I have never had an objection to Whiskey. And when I disagreed with his ideas, I generally ignored them or – on rare occasion – responded in public. Hard to see how I could have discouraged him.
This ad hominem stuff is getting to be a bit of a drag.
Strike three. Never did I attack Whiskey in an “ad hominem” manner. If I took issue with any of his posts, it was always with the ideas contained in them, not with him or his right to express them.
Besides, if you object to ad hominem arguments, you must have despised most of Whiskey’s posts. How many times did he begin a comment with “Wretchard just doesn’t get it”? Wasn’t his literary conceit essentially one, big, hairy, audacious ad hominem argument aimed at women, blacks, SWPL Yuppies, and the elite? So your protest is, well, a little precious.
At the end of the day, I stand by my original comment:
I will miss Whiskey’s presence at the Belmont Club.
I strongly disagreed with his worldview.
Life goes on.
Cheers,
L3
I do not know how to write a private letter to Wretchard that he will read, consider, and discuss with me, much less act upon. I am not a College Professor with advanced academic qualifications awarded by a Prestigious Institution. I graduated from the racially segregated public schools in Charleston, South Carolina in 1958. I am not aware that those bad old black schools gave diplomas to people who could not read and write. Perhaps Starling would elucidate?
I worked my way to a Batchelor of Science Degree by means of a competitively awarded job in Federal Civil Service with Army Ordnance. Before I graduated,a bi-partisan Congress eliminated the tests established by the Civil Service reforms instituted by Teddy Roosevelt.
Have you noticed any difference in the quality of Government performance since that time?
I must say that I only skimmed over Whiskey’s prose most times, but I am sorry to see him gone. P.C. is wrong.
L3 @ 17
TV is the culprit. The death of the political parties was precipitated by the 1960 Presidential election – the first TV election. Politicians could henceforth go directly to the people rather than being vetted by the party.
It’s only in an age of demons that we get to test the better angels of our characters.
And history shows WF Buckley was right to read the Birchers out of conservative circles.
rwe @ 37: Brock # 4; Of those companies you list only two even have any realistic plans to attain a capability to place people into orbit.
Yah, I was going to say. Heavy lift, as in manned lift, even to orbit, much less further, is about as far above Virgin Galactic, as Virgin Galactic is above you standing on a chair.
OK, a small numerical exaggeration? Well, I can drive from sea level to 8,000 feet at Mammoth Mountain. Wait, what does Virgin Galactic promise … 100km. Hmm, 330k feet at a peak speed of 2,500mph. OK, I can only drive to 1/3 of 1% of the VG flight at about 1/2 of 1% of the velocity. The VG flight is about 1.5% of orbital velocity and about 2% of the energy to orbit, if I recall a previous calculation, be generous and make it 3%. So, they’re better than standing on a chair, by about 6 to 10 times linear.
Not really in the game, is the bottom line.
And if you want to cross the galaxy … trust me, they’re not in that business either, by another ten orders of magnitude. Maybe they’re in the virgin business, don’t quite have the math on that one.
Since the subject of Whiskey has been broached, permit me to weigh in here. Although a long-term reader I am an infrequent commentator, but I think since monitoring this site since 2004 I have a fairly good “feel” for the “atmospherics” of this blog and the nature of the discourse. I would state out-right that I considere Wretchard’s decision to be ill-considered and the very sort of PC-like thinking most here so decry. While realizing that Whisky’s single-track analytical interpretative lens could at times become predictable and, to some I am sure tiring–if not offensive–I am reminded of the coda which is the mast-head at “Harry’s Place”: “Liberty, if it means anything, is the right to tell people what they don’t want to hear.” In his little tome/essay “On Liberty” J.S. Mill made the point–indeed his central point–that the worse the idea the more widely it should be disseminated so the people can see how truly horrible it is. It seems to me that in hanging out his shingle Wretchard is implicitly buying into the philosophy of the public square of civic discourse–a place where all ideas are welcome to be openly debated. And, under that theory, if all ideas are welcome, should not all idea’s ADVOCATES also perforce be welcome as well?
Perhaps it is because of Wretchard’s multi-ethnic background that he grew weary of Whiskey’s constant drum-beat of seeing racial/sexual/ethnic identity politics as the single driver/explanatory power for all events. Be that as it may, while perhaps understandably grating to Wretchard, it seems to be this sort of thing comes with the territory when one hangs out one’s single. At no time did Whiskey come EVEN CLOSE to the functional equivalent of “yelling fire in a crowded theater” or hurling “fighting words”–like personal invective carelessly around. M’thinks some people have needlessly thin skins here if they have objected about Whiskey to Wretchard. The rough and tumble of open debate about “sensitive” subjects is only judged “rough & tumble” to me because of the long PC conditioning to which this culture has been subjected. Wretchard, were I you I would think long and hard about banning someone whose only sin–as far as I can tell–is to make people uncomfortable with inconvenient thoughts. But I thought one of the driving justifications for blogs like this was exactly that–to take people out of their “comfort zone.” Or was/am I wrong?
Whitehall @ 39: “The environmentalists saw this too and soon the 1970s saw a focused attack on nuclear power.”
Environmentalists (as opposed to conservationists) have been running an all out war on ALL forms of energy. Hence their promotion of scientifically-laughable Anthropogenic Global Warming; and their simultaneous rejection of carbon-free nuclear power as an alternative. They may seem to be in favor of so-called “renewables” such as wind and solar, but that is only because they know those are non-sustainable Subsidy Sluts — doomed to die the day that borrowed money for subsidies runs out. Environmentalists are pretty conflicted too on hydro-power, even though it is proven to work.
The strange thing is that we (and the environmentalists) know already what a society without plentiful power looks like. At best, we are talking about France before the Revolution; more likely, a society that relies on the original form of sustainable renewable green energy — slavery. It is always worth remembering that we owe the Carnot Cycle to Monsieur Carnot’s realization following the French Revolution and the subsequent Napoleonic Wars that France needed to catch up with Britain on the productive use of fossil fuels.
So environmentalists want the sort of society that pre-dated the French Revolution, with themselves as the idle aristocrats picking out the more comely milk-maids for unwilling games in the hay. Do environmentalists remember what happened when those French aristocrats met Madame Guillotine?
The Terrafugia Transition might have better been called the Terraplane were the name not already taken. I knew a man who courted the woman who would become his wife in just such a car. Let’s go back to a time when you could put up your auto’s top and look at the stars and listen to the radio alone on a hilltop with your sweetheart and dream… Let’s go Terraplaning, shall we?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVh7sZl2H8c
A yard? What I wouldn’t give for a yard, except here in Arizona where the sun bakes your brain this time of year.
Happy 4th ! God bless the land of the free because of the brave!
trangbang68 #48
except here in Arizona where the sun bakes your brain this time of year.
Thankfully your governor’s brain seems to be working just fine in spite of the heat. A blessed Fourth to you and yours too.
Rickl #32: Good points and largely correct. To amplify:
“As the Apollo program was gutted by Congress and President Nixon…”
Because of the political requirement to “put a man on the Moon by the end of this decade” Apollo could only send expeditions that could spend an average of less than 24 hours each. The larger Nova rocket that could have done what Constellation was supposed to do – put more men on the Moon for a longer time – never got built because of the politically required timeframe. Apollo had done all it could by 1972; it was only supposed to be an impressive stunt, anyway. The 1968 recommendation by NASA for post-Apollo manned space operations amounted to “go back to 1958 and start over.” And while that was exactly what should have been done, it is not surprising there was no political will to do so.
“A few years ago NASA announced the Constellation program to return to the moon atop a new giant NASA-designed rocket.”
While Constellation had the right spirit it essentially was trapped in amber by the Apollo and Shuttle programs. They needed to keep those people employed in order for NASA to have the political support to get the program funded. Obama “cleverly” indicated his support and then withdrew it at the earliest possible opportunity.
Hep-T #36:
The reality is that putting people into Earth orbit is for all practical purposes useless. It was a WPA jobs program handed out as a consolation prize after Apollo was cancelled. If you can gain useful scientific data by cutting the heads off of live rats in orbit then you can do that just as well on the way to Mars.
See the articles “When About Time Equals Too Late” and “Not in Our Stars” at TheSpaceReview.com.
Kinuachdrach: At best, we are talking about France before the Revolution; more likely, a society that relies on the original form of sustainable renewable green energy — slavery
Emphasis added. The only problem may be that the slave looks just like the slaver. But looks can be deceiving. There is one piece of tech that the sustainabilitiers want to keep. It involves telomeres and it would make all the difference.
One of the Urban myths about Islam is that the Koran says Islam shall last until a man walks on the moon. I have an English version and there isn’t anything about moonwalking in there. Despite spending years working in the Islamic crescent, I never learned to read Arabic. My brain just couldn’t get around going right to left. Plus all those squiggles look like pecker tracks to me.
I am utterly unaware of any such urban myth. What I do know is how central the Moon is to Islam. For that matter, the Moon is also a central motif in pre-Islamic Arab religion.
The Moon is a central cultural motif in Islam. He who controls it has a massive psychological advantage. The United States is throwing that advantage away.
Twobyfour @ 51: “The only problem may be that the slave looks just like the slaver.”
There is an interesting recent Russian movie, “1612″, about the Time of Troubles in Muscovy — well worth getting it from Netflix or one of its competitors. It follows the story of a talented ingenious serf through troubled times. With all due allowance for movie-making embroidery, it certainly reminds us that the Russian serf was for all practical purposes a slave, right down to the floggings for stepping out of line. And the serfs were (to our eyes) indistinguishable from the Russian Ruling Class.
Another accessible example might be Sir Walter Scott’s novel “Ivanhoe”, which features (inter alia) a Saxon serf in thrall to his Saxon master, with his master’s brass ownership ring welded around the serf’s neck.
Historically, there has been no need for slaves to be physically distinguishable from their masters. Since renewable green-energy slavery apparently started back about the time our ancestors became farmers following the last Ice Age, the likelihood is that the earliest slaves were hapless members of defeated neighboring tribes — genetically almost identical to their victorious masters.
If the history of the human race is a guide, environmentalists would have no problem treating all of us as slaves and using our daughters as disposable toys — if we let them.
The prophecies of the Kali Yuga echo another ancient source rather eerily:
“This know also, that in the last days perilous times shall come. For men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, without natural affection, trucebreakers, false accusers, incontinent, fierce, despisers of those that are good, traitors, heady, high-minded, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God; having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof…”
The natural state of the world IS continuous decline. I know – I live in Entropy House.
But I think that we were meant to fight it. It’s that or succumb to the dictates of your Flying Car Luddites: in that direction lie boredom and madness.
If I may resort to a Christian perspective:
~Then the uncaring battlements of the Dark Tower crumble, and the gates of the Dark Lord crash down like the last furious thunder of a mighty storm, and the Eye trembles and in a final gout of malice flames out and dies and is nothing, and the mountains round about fall, and the steams swirl apart and the dust is blown by a clear west wind, and there upon the plains of that vast and fruitless ruin comes a still, small voice:
“And he that taketh not his cross, and followeth after me, is not worthy of me.”
~And now I can see clearly again and there is a green world beyond the edges of this dying one; we are ringed about with Life and Light and sweet new air; there, though my eyes were blinded and I could not behold them, are all the Shire-gardens we could ever desire, and the leaves of the forests are golden-bright, and the walls of the city gleam white in the sun—forever and ever and ever. ~
Richard,
Attending to reality, how much ‘fun’ the future will be depends upon actions taken now. A barren, polluted, resource-strained world will not be ‘fun’ for many/most. Some people “dream” of a time when we don’t need to do this. Some “dream” of stopping destruction of ocean ecology (no, I’m not talking of the Gulf spill). Some wish to find alternatives to the human health impacts that result from the production and burning of filthy fossil fuels. I do not view any of those objectives as “dark”, anti-”fun”, or anti-human, I view them as worthwhile. More than sending a tiny minority of humanity to walk upon a barren satellite. But, to each their own dreams, right?
Kinuachdrach, if history is any guide, the slavers always lost in the end. The would be slavers want this time to be different. They want a demarcation line that would be impenetrable from then on. They would ensure that the sons of Sustainability God can’t have children with daughters of men, same as now the sons of man can’t have offspring with daughters of sheep.
They are funding and buying out the telomeres research. They would have the key to Tree of Life. Themselves, with a treatment, they will be able to extend their lifespan to 120-150 years. Their offspring, though, will be a new breed. They will be virtually immortal, beside some additional traits that would be included for the exclusivity and separation sake. The sheep (men) lifespan, on the other hand, would be limited to 45-50 years.
Well, that is their plan–a “better world”.
Many of us grew up under the aesthetics and techno-optimism of Norman Bel Geddis and the Jetsons.
I remember a childhood dream of blitzing along a between-urban clusters bi-way, in seamless gear on a frictionless ride personal conveyance, past designer whimsical topiary trees and artificially sparkling stage-set pasture lands. I’m thinking the envionmentalists will give way to Candyland fantasy engineers in the future. Sort of a back-to-nature meets Hollywood hologramers’ themed virtuality as the new reality.
Technologization will beget specialization and customization, faux individualization and real centralization in an over-directed/ controlled environment. I zation.
Virgil X @ 45
No, you’re not wrong. However I just returned from Europe and did not read anything on the web for a month.
Perhaps Whiskey said something “racially charged” in June but I don’t remember anything of that nature before I left and I always read his stuff.
I know he always p!ssed off the ladies but that was always kinda funny and in any event would appear under a parallel category of forbidden language: “sexually charged”, no?
So I missed all the fun; I didn’t know he was banished. He musta done something real bad but I can’t imagine what.
I live in a jurisdiction where everything not compulsory is pretty well forbidden, so I always rather enjoyed mister badboy even when I disagreed with him.
LL III:
You’re right, it’s the owner’s site and we play by his rules or else.
You mention that Whiskey expressed irritation at the behaviour of women, yuppies, and the elites. Fine, he is an irascible person but I cannot recall him being offensive about non-whites and your remarks seemed to hang on the “racially charged” character of his language which, prior to June 1st, I didn’t pick up.
I’m sorry he’s gone too.
William Strauss & Neil Howe discribed this cycle in terms of generational cycles in a series of books, primary the books Generations (Amazon: http://preview.tinyurl.com/33hwwgl) and The Fourth Turning (Amazon: http://preview.tinyurl.com/3862qb4). According to them, society goes through 4 different periods much like Hesiod’s description Wretchard paraphrased in the OP, and that these periods repeat in a roughly 80 year cycle that they traced back to the War of the Roses.
According to their theory, the cycles are:
1. A Crisis where everything is driven to the brink
2. An outer focused High where every thing is new and possibilities run rampant, which would be the 1950′s equivalent
3. An Awakening where a generation turns away from the ways of it’s elders to form a new social conciousness, the 1960′s-70s equivalent
4. An inner focused Unraveling where the old systems decay, 80′s, 90′s and part of the 00′s.
What’s interesting is that their theory predicted a time of severe economic and international instability on the order of the Glorious Revolution, American Revolution, Civil War, and Great Depression/WWII that would be beginning around 2005-12 and would last ~20 years.
So have no fear Wretchard, in 20 years or so, we should recapture that spirit of the 50s. This time, if we have flying cars already, we’ll have to dream bigger dreams. In the meantime, buckle up and hang on for the ride, there’s turbulence ahead.
Nemo
56. twobyfour
re: the Sustainability Gods’ plan
This had an eerily familiar ring to it. It reminded me of Zecharia Sitchin’s theories and books about the ancient Sumerian accounts of the creation by genetic manipulation and hybridization of the human slave race (the lulu) by the so-called gods (the annunaki) in the Epic of Creation (enuma elish). There are also hints of the Epic of Gilgamesh (the Tree of Life) and the nephilim (the fallen angels) of the Bible who were the sons of gods who took wives from among the daughters of men and earned the displeasure of God/the gods (elohim).
Perhaps they’re just trying to reclaim their birthright/heritage… /grin
Tharkum, no reclamation, they are just copycats. But yea, they think that they see where the Anunaki/Nefilim erred, thus establishing the primal sin. They think that they are smarter, by nipping the miscegenation temptation in the bud by a genetic barrier, splitting off the species, as it were.
Will they succeed? No. (I am on to they!
)
50. RWE
Thanks! I’ve caught hell for saying things like that in the past. It’s nice to know that I’m not completely out to lunch.
I’m of the opinion that we need to look back to the visionaries of the 1950s, such as Arthur C. Clarke and Wehrner von Braun to see the path forward to the widespread utilization and colonization of space. Don’t get me wrong–Apollo was a magnificent achievement, and everyone who was associated with it should be proud. But looking at the larger picture, it was a wrong turn and a cul-de-sac. Its main purpose was to get to the moon as quickly as possible, in order to meet Kennedy’s goal and to beat the Russians. However, it did not build the infrastructure for a sustainable presence in space. This is why I was never excited about Constellation. It just seemed like a reprise of Apollo.
I’d rather see a gradual, step-by-step evolutionary process that builds up infrastructure for a permanent presence in space. A space station could be constructed in Earth orbit that would then build specialized lunar and interplanetary craft which would be larger and more capable than anything that could be launched from Earth. I think a true interplanetary craft would resemble the ISS more than a beefed-up Apollo. Eventually the only manned spacecraft launched from the Earth’s surface would be ferries taking people back and forth to the space station, which would be an embarkation point for journeys to other destinations.
None of this is new; as I said it dates back to the 1950s and still seems pretty sound to me.
Nemo, there are other factors involved, there is not a simple wave form; there are several ones with different duration that either create interference patterns or increase amplitude by resonance.
But in the nutshell, they have the cycle mapped out.
Timeline points:
2012-2015 – Really really sh!tty time
2019-Turnabout start
2028-Not 50′s yet, but decent
2035-50′s! (in spirit, materially on a somewhat different track).
End of wars? No, the next one would be about 2075-2078, but really a skirmish in comparison with 2012-2019 period. And it would be sui generis.
Thence my crystal ball gets really really fuzzy.
wretchard: “But today a significant current in public thinking holds that the coming years are going to be dark — that they literally should be dark.”
Who would have thought we’d be consecrating an hour to celebrate the Dark Ages?
Comment #17:
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Leo Linbeck III.
Or if you want a slightly more ancient and irrelevant source that we outgrew long ago, Exodus 18.
shropshirelad (#24):
See Isaac Asimov’s Nightfall.
rickl (#32): “So returning NASA to a NACA-like agency to provide technical assistance to upstart private aerospace companies might not be a bad idea.”
In principle, I fully agree with you. But that assumes that the private companies aren’t bound with red tape.
Rosinante (#38): “One of the Urban myths about Islam is that the Koran says Islam shall last until a man walks on the moon.”
Just last week (June 25th), we commemorated the loss of our best weapon against Islam…
Kinuachdrach (#46):
As you say, environmentalists have opposed hydro-power. Similarly, they (or an unknown portion thereof) have opposed geo-thermal-, wind- (“What about the poor birdies?”), and even large-scale solar power (“What about the fragile desert eco-system?”).
Lazar (#55):
I join you in your call for a switch to nuclear power.
Cosmeau (#58): “I know he always p!ssed off the ladies but that was always kinda funny”
Har-de-har.
Oh, was that “thin-skinned” of me? I’m sorry. I’ll try to atone for this by p!ssing off the Hebrews.
“I cannot recall him being offensive about non-whites … prior to June 1st”
[very quick search:]
“I live in a jurisdiction where everything not compulsory is pretty well forbidden”
Not much of a leap from anarchy to tyranny.
Rickl, glad you haven’t mentioned tethered elevators, cuz they won’t work. Electricity is a harsh mistress.
Baillie @ 54: ~Then the uncaring battlements of the Dark Tower crumble, and the gates of the Dark Lord crash down like the last furious thunder of a mighty storm, and the Eye trembles and in a final gout of malice flames out and dies and is nothing, and the mountains round about fall, and the steams swirl apart and the dust is blown by a clear west wind, and there upon the plains of that vast and fruitless ruin comes a still, small voice:
“And he that taketh not his cross, and followeth after me, is not worthy of me.”
wazzat? googling … hmmm. interesting project.
but don’t worry about the entropy, without water falling we could not generate power, without the old passing on there would be no room for the new. kali dances and fascinates, could there be a universe without her?
to mix a few cryptic mythopoeic metaphors …
bl@20: RE “Brain Trustards”
Did you just call me a Brain Turd? Busta, you won’t have Louise to kick around no more if you keep that up!!!
I’m hollowed out. The financial and electoral reversals of 2008 (not to even mention the personal reversals which I won’t) have been tough-ish. I’m thinking stress fractures. And growing old.
See the Elephant Bar for some interesting soul searching.
Desperately Seeking …
Just Desperately Seeking for now.
Some very good world-after-Whiskey comments, noteworthy being Starling and the least common denominator phenomenon (so very true); Annoy Mouse on the undertone of baiting (I came to regard Whiskey’s muscular prose as a combination of Nietzsche, Rush, and Rev Wright – desperately seeking their inner Peggy Noonan); the gender antipathy extrapolated from sub-group behavior into macro-cultural trends as a deeply disturbing indicator of resurgent misogyny; concerns that the muzzling of raw rhetoric would disincentivize commenters (not likely in my lifetime); and lastly Charles’ post about Whiskey trying to find a vocabulary to argue the unionism of national borders without race at the core: if you can’t hack Whiskey’s racially centric way of expressing the need for national boundaries–then you’re going to have to figure out a way to say it without race. If the concept of America can NOT be defined independently of racial concerns, then it will not endure.
twobyfour @ 65: Rickl, glad you haven’t mentioned tethered elevators, cuz they won’t work. Electricity is a harsh mistress.
Heh. Among other problems.
What are the possible new ground to orbit technologies? I’ve said for years that ought to be NASA’s focus for a decade or more. Nuclear – fission batteries? Mass drivers at least for material payloads? Hundred kilometer tall towers at the equator? Or just mass-produced chemical rockets? Could nature be so parsimonious that that’s an optimal strategy, because it doesn’t look like it would ever be cheap.
Hmm, if ultracapacitors were realized, would the energy density be greater than oxidation chemistry? I think that’s possible, anyone know?
Kinuachdrach
The strange thing is that we (and the environmentalists) know already what a society without plentiful power looks like. At best, we are talking about France before the Revolution; more likely, a society that relies on the original form of sustainable renewable green energy — slavery. It is always worth remembering that we owe the Carnot Cycle to Monsieur Carnot’s realization following the French Revolution and the subsequent Napoleonic Wars that France needed to catch up with Britain on the productive use of fossil fuels.
hmm, you’re imagining France like a caricature, before the pre-Revolution, France wasn’t a African colony, but a country fast as much developped as UK, genenrally more of artesan kind (our very industrialisation started at the beginning of the 19th century, while the Brits’ did at the end of 18th century, the US’ and Russia’s, in mid 19th century), except that we didn’t practiced “mercantilism” (banking already), but trades for goods we need and or we sold ; otherwise how come that we managed to beat our ennemies, the Brits, on seas, via our “Corsaires”, and that they didn’t try to invade us for good reasons. Wars in Netherlands and German landers, could be also labelled as wars with England, as England was their convenient allie whenever we went at wars on the continental Europe. Napolean’s wars with England were wars of imperialism, who’s gonna shape the world to her cultural image, also as territories which would buy our goods.
About serfdom, it’s true that the Revolution officially abolished it, though it wasn’t in use since a few centuries, or exceptionnally in deep countrysides. Comparatively, England had no better treatment for her farms and or industry workers. Some practices were desuet before their abrogation, it’s how a law of 1804 that forbids women to wear throusers is still not abrogated, though women wear throusers since the end of the 19th century (ie george Sand, in the intellectual middle), but it was in WW1 that the practice generalised (women in factories)
Bob/64–in your reply to #64 about the ‘birdies’, you were mistaken. In his book Power Hungry, Robert Bryce details how all around the wind farms–Altamont Pass, for example–the ground is littered with dead birds, golden eagles among others. The nature/earth/animal lovers have been curiously silent about this and those charged with wildlife enforcement have done little or nothing.
entergy density
ouch. according to this, currently isn’t even close.
but I thought I’d read some halfway credible stories of nanotechnology improving things by several orders of magnitude, fractal capacitive surfaces down to nano-levels.
Oops–meant to say “#46″.
The problem with the idea of “progress” is figuring out what “progress” means.
Who gets to define the word “progress”?
Is progress something that can be measured, or does “progress” merely mean whatever “progressives” say it means?
When we use any political term, we ought to use definitions that can be readily understood by large numbers of people. The problem with this rule of thumb is that it often contradicts the definitions mainstream media use.
When “The Nation” magazine defines the word “progress”, anybody who disagrees with “The Nation” magazine is labeled as a reactionary. When Enron defines the word “progress”, anybody who disagrees with Enron is labeled as a reactionary.
Who controls ideology?
A Ultracapacitor Built From Carbon Nanotubes and Nanowires
Still only gets up to about the same energy density as an oxidative fuel cell, so doesn’t look like a breakthru for propulsion – alternative yes, breakthru no.
fta:
The performance for the device, storing at an energy density of 1.29 Watt-hour/kilogram with a specific capacitance of 64 Farad/gram is a very good start indeed. The familiar conventional capacitors usually have an energy density of less than 0.1 Wh/kg and a storage capacitance of several tenths of millifarads. The USC device is quite a performer.
/fta
Guess it’ll have to be fission – or fusion! But neither is easy nor safe to stand very close to.
those god-humans tharkun and others mention, were all over the ancient greek myths and legends –in fact the legends themselves refer to a whole nuther far earlier set of myths and legends concerning the “Titans” –who –in the mythology –pre-dated the sort of sloppily demarcated current ancient gods and men of ancient greece, and were the true god-men who apparently time-degraded into the ancient ‘active’ pantheon of gods and men who could and did, on a selective basis, interact on the human plane.
So there were all sorts of one-offs, like Ares the god who wasn’t that good a warrior, a really good mortal could defeat him, and always there were the especially exceptional mortals who enticed gods (usually the mortal wasn’t the active agent but a frightened-yet-interested acolyte) and got them into saturday night trouble, and reproduction situations, et cetera.
Pretty messy –like real life. i think the Titans were always in the background, much cleaner and formal, and probably tsk-tsking even the ‘modern’ gods of the era.
Not an un-useful religion, really –lots of space in myriad ad hoc situations, since mankind WILL have a deified zone and something WILL be in it, even if it’s No Thing, even it’s just substance and self.
L3:
I’m not quite so concerned about “rebuilding our mediating institutions”. They naturally exist as part of human nature. The problem I see is that the government has a vested interest in atomizing human relationships.
Perhaps we should accept that newer forms of organization sometimes supercede churches, clubs, and fraternal orders. Although I passionately disagree with much of what the Daily Kos, the Democratic Underground, and the Huffington Post stand for, I do see them as mediating institutions. For that matter, Facebook groups can spontaneously act as “mediating institutions”.
Before Social Security, fraternal orders acted as a safety net to protect widows and orphans. I think the rise of Social Security led to the demise of fraternal orders such as the Masons and the Oddfellows during the twentieth century.
I also think the seeming decline of “mediating institutions” is directly connected to transience. And yet, transience has often been culturally synonymous with freedom, even with the modern idea of America. Transience has certainly helped homogenize American culture! How transient should our mediating institutions be, and by extension, how transient should the people be?
What place is there for rootedness is America?
Geeze Louise (#67):
I’m sure you wrote a wonderful comment, but I’m afraid I can’t respond to it: my mind has simply been overwhelmed by the image of Rev Wright desperately seeking his inner Peggy Noonan.
Gordon (#70):
If you plug in the relevant terms into a search engine, you’ll have no trouble finding environmentalist objections to wind power. I’ll grant you that these objections might only have picked up steam recently, but that only strengthens Kinuachdrach‘s point.
Bob/77
environmentalist objections to wind power. I’ll grant you that these objections might only have picked up steam recently,
That reminded me of Eric Berne’s Games People Play
There was one that exactly matches the above–don’t recall how he labeled it.
The opponent presents a problem. You come up with a solution. The opponent presents a problem in your solution. You offer another solution, the opponent finds another problem (it does not matter if it is contradictory to any of his previous objections to your solutions), and so on, etc., and so on, until you exhausted all possible solutions or your patience and you end up in silence. The opponent savors his victory despite that noting positive came out of the discourse.
Had a friend that mastered it to perfection and left a trail of exasperated mind husks in his trail (he grew up out of it eventually). The difference was that it was just a conversational item and did not have influence on well being of people beside the participants.
my mind has simply been overwhelmed by the image of Rev Wright desperately seeking his inner Peggy Noonan.
I concur. I am still in a loop after that one!
Rickl #62 and Josh #68:
I think we are going to HAVE to assemble interplanetary ships on orbit. NASA says the ISS experience indicates that you can’t do that, which is another way of saying that we can’t ever get past the Moon. NASA is looking at really big boosters so they can do direct ascent, Saturn 5 style, and I think that is dumb. All the ISS experience means is that they did not do it right. The USSR was doing automatic docking in space in the 70′s and we have yet to do even that – because Astronauts are in charge of manned space and they want hand controls, just like USAF pilots were opposed to UAVs for many years. I have only been a mechanical engineer for 36 years and have only worked in the space program for 32 years but coupling two vehicles together in orbit remotely and robustly does not sound very hard to me. Just quit thinking in terms of docking as with a LEM and using the personal hatch as the main structural member.
The main problem i have with outfits like SpaceX is they (1) refuse to learn from the past because they want to do it all their way and (2) have not done anything really new. A new booster with a bunch of regeneratively cooled LOX-Kerosene engines. Ho Hum. Wake me up when we get to 1970.
SDI began development of a nuclear rocket engine in the 80′s It was so simple it could not fail to work and so safe before launch you could haul it to the pad in the back of a pickup truck. You probably can’t get to Mars with a manned mission without it. But the USAF had no need for it (we are not Starfleet Command yet) and it did not fit an existing NASA program so it was killed.
twobyfour (#78):
As Alexis (#76) might say, it depends on how you define “positive”.
Case study: Israel has been suffering from an increasingly acute water shortage, acute enough for the bureaucracy to finally permit the construction of large-scale desalination plants. The plants have the added advantage of decreasing the harm done to the “Sea” of Galillee, the “mighty” Jordan River, the Dead Sea, and the aquifers. Sounds good? Of course not, you naive fool! The usual suspects [TUS] (greens etc) have started complaining. Why? Because desalinated water does not contain magnesium and other minerals that are desirable in drinking water, from a health point of view. Well that makes sense, you might say; TUS want minerals added to the drinking water. Ha! Silly you! That is not what TUS are demanding; instead, they are trying to block all work on the desalination plants. Why? Kinuachdrach (#46) only knows.
Once we return to the land and plow only with oxen and mules, we will be upbraided for our cruelty to animals.
yeh –Airplane! had that scene –peggy noonanish woman doing a rev. wright harangue –belly laffs!
When we had the Pajamas Media Tech Editor here to beat up on over the site format and comment threading we all should have joined hands together and beat the **** out of him over indexing and the need for a decent search feature.
My blog is 90% my comment archive, with a few additions and embedded pics and vids, and thanks to Blogger™ a search feature, so I was able to go back and do a search on whiskey. Interestingly I found where I defended him (and Habu) about two months ago. My four criticisms mentioned above stand as not new with three additions.
1) His tendency to issue declarative predictive assertions without in fact any accompanying criteria for scholarly evaluation, factual support or subsequent self criticism. Remember his assertion about the North Carolina vote? President McCain sure is glad that came through as predicted.
2) The fact that he introduced his tangents not after the thread topic proposed by the host was exhausted, as others often did on subjects ranging from small arms comparisons to the history of cheese eaters, but on live discussions. Over time a by-play developed in which whiskey would introduce his theory, with plausible deniability as to his desired goals, and others would then pick up the ball and run by suggesting apocalyptic and violent outcomes. Over the last couple of months he reduced his efforts to deny his own sympathies, as in pushing the idea that he wished he was a black woman, and he also pushed into assertions of not only cultural but genetic distinctions between groups which even if worthy of exploration were simply not what the host had desired a discussion on. That could be seen as thread hijacking and over a long period of time if persisted in could wear out a welcome.
3) Each blog reflects the tone desired by the Owner. There are a diversity of blogs, even among those with similar subject interests and close political biases. On the Left the Kos Kiddies are not identical to the HuffPo writers, although they do overlap. For real foaming infantilism you have to wade into DemUnderground, where things are written that Kos would not tolerate. On the right we have many venues also including the Freepers, Malkin, and many on our hosts blogroll. It is perfectly reasonable for him to desire a certain tone in his blog and feel that some comments are more appropriate to another forum. One day he may decide that I am a windy bore or conversely given that I have been much less visible the last 6 weeks he might feel that my influence and credibility are declining.
By “mentioned above” I meant my comment #102 on the closed “What the Russian Sleepers Did” thread. It seemed appropriate to go into my archives and blog this but if our host feels that it only opens a wound then I have no problem with him deleting it.
We are guests in a house and in a club. When someone from the Left comes in and acts with courtesy it is noticed. When they come in and call us idiots it is noticed. When we get so wrapped up in our own obsessions that we ignore the hosts admonitions to be careful of his furniture we should expect him to defend the time and effort he has put into this.
Those who feel that they have a perfect license to go anywhere on the internet and say anything they please to anyone and that any effort to prevent that is fascism or communism are simply wrong. You have a right to speak but not a right to make others provide a forum for your speech or a right to make others see or hear your speech. The host has an interest in encouraging the widest possible range of discourse to keep the blog a lively place. The weighing of interests he must perform in that role is a marketing decision, even if no money but only reputation and influence are involved. My view is that he does a pretty good job of it.
To be blogged under the title “The Forum II.”
Thanks twoby for the link. I have seen and continue to see in my grand children and their friends hope for our future. But my concern is – are there enough of them?
And yes, I too thought I would live to see Americans land on Mars. It was a childhood dream I might be one of them.
But I have flown high and even after the fall still remember – that even if you can’t take your treasures with you, you can leave it for your children.
Hopefully out of the reach of the government.
Papa Ray
P.S. A link: “Obama’s Brave new Deal, cont.”
rickl @ 62:
I’d like to see space manufacturing Earth orbit, too, but it ain’t gonna happen if we have to bring up the raw materials from Earth. And, it they aren’t coming up from Earth, might as well put them on the Moon: enough gravity to be convenient, not a deep enough gravity well to make lift to orbit prohibitive. We take Earth’s gravity for granted because we evolved in it, but when you start trying to put stuff in orbit, it gets real expensive real fast.
2×4 @ 65:
Not for Earth they won’t. But Moon is another story. So, arguably is Mars and you wouldn’t have to go so far to catch your asteroid for the up end.
Josh @ 68:
One doesn’t have to reach orbital speed by launching vertical. Yeah, know most things angle over pretty soon to take advantage of the free angular momentum, but you more of it by being closer to the Equator and you get less air drag if you start out at a high altitude. Consider an inclined track up the West slope of an Andean peak, maybe with a mass driver powered by local nuke plant. Just needs the engineering, financing and political obstacles to be removed. Which is true of many things where the science is done but not going anywhere.
RWE @ 79
I think I know the one you refer to. It is unlikely that we are going to see nuclear powered launch from Earth, but to build the ship in orbit and turn on the drive already at orbital velocity, it is probably the way to go, probably heating a light metal as reaction mass?
Rockets for the Fourth of July? How appropriate. Best wishes all.
May each and every one of you please accept my best wishes for a safe and joyful 4th.
May I suggest a Liberty Cocktail that goes well with barbecue?
1. mix equal parts of alcohol, small explosives, and high speed water craft
2. observe results with friends on large video
3. say what ever the heck you want
4. eat
Kaboom
To be blogged as “The 4th.”
#82 LOTM
For real foaming infantilism you have to wade into DemUnderground, where things are written that Kos would not tolerate.
For your amusement, it looks as if DU has instituted a new speech code forbidding criticisms of the Lightworker:
“With a Democrat in the White House whose approval ratings have fallen well below 50 percent, liberal websites are entering some new territory–how to handle users who are reliably liberal but are not fans of President Barack Obama.
Case in point is Democratic Underground (aka DU), a liberal discussion forum started in 2001 that, up until recently, was united in its hatred for former president George W. Bush. But now that many Democrats have withdrawn their support of Obama, DU responded last week with regulations on how its users may express opinions about the current occupant of the Oval Office and Democrats generally.
It turns out Democratic Underground is a safe haven for all Democrats too faithful to their party to say anything beyond ‘constructive criticism’ of Obama or other Democrats in office. The last thing they need is another voice telling them that maybe Obama should have factored hurricanes into the oil cleanup plans. Oh, and don’t you dare think about calling our president ‘Barry.’”
[snip]
“Here are some more samples of the ludicrous list of rules violations:
* ‘Telling someone to ‘shut up,’ ‘screw you,’ ‘go away,’ ‘f–k off,’ or the like;’ ‘belittling someone for being new or having a low post count’; ‘negatively ‘calling out’ someone who is not participating in the discussion.’
That is just the beginning…
* Insensitivity, which includes ‘weight or other physical characteristics’ and ‘use of insensitive terminology.’
* ‘Over-the-top assertions of bad faith’ in Obama, or ‘advocating voting against Democrats, or in favor of third-party or GOP candidates; broad-brush smears against Democrats generally; broad expressions of contempt toward Democrats generally.’
* ‘A sustained or organized effort to demean, belittle, bully, or ostracize another person; digging up or posting personal information about any private individual, on DU or elsewhere; stalking someone across discussion threads or forums.’
The final tally of new rules: 60. Whew.”
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/blogs/beltway-confidential/Faced-with-internal-division-democratic-underground-clamps-down-on-Obama-criticism-97704504.html
It’s too bad my time ran out on my previous post before I discovered this:
“Video: Leno demonstrates effectiveness of American education on history”
I want you to be aware that I was appalled at the lack of education my grand kids received concerning American History. I have had to educate every one of my grand kids in this subject much to my disgust and anger that our so called educational system wouldn’t.
The excuse from almost every teacher over the years was that there just wasn’t enough time to completely cover American History. Yet when I read the school text books it was all (almost all) there, as if each student would just take the time and individual effort to read it on their own.
Small chance of that for the majority of them.
And this is in Texas. I have heard that the textbooks of other states teach even less (if that is possible).
And some wonder why we are worried about the future of our Republic.
Papa Ray
P.S. A Link: “The Fourth of July: Throughout the Decades”
In the early 1960′s I read of a fellow who designed a spaceship that would have got us around the solar system right smartly. Since it was a half century ago, I may not remember it exactly but here goes. It utilized a series of low yield (actually tiny — smaller even than the Nagasaki device) nuclear explosions. You just shove a nuclear bomb out the back and set it off. Works on the same principle as a firecracker launching a tin can. The back of the spaceship would have a strong blast shield (plus shock absorbers) and, like most things, the timing and placement of the blast (or rather. series of blasts) was important. So it would kind of putt-putt to Mars and back.
They actually built and launched a “proof of concept” vehicle that used conventional high explosives — taking the firecracker/tin can launch concept to a much higher stage of development. If I remember correctly, the guy who came up the design also came up with a way of building compact nuclear warheads using beryllium as a neutron reflector.
The idea ran afoul of the “Keep nukes out of outer space” agreements. Still, we could have been all over this solar system by now using technology availabe in the early 60′s.
I goggled it and the wiki’s have an article on something called “Project Orion”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_pulse_propulsion
So, it seems we decided not to return to the moon or, for that matter, go to Saturn.
PA Cat,
It takes courage and a full Hazmat/MOPP suit to go in there and find out.
i’ve heard there’s some interest among the congressional democrats to investigate Uranus
buddy larsen
To boldly go where hundreds have gone before?
OK now stop this, didn’t I just torture electrons warning about, well something or other? I get sleepy by the end of my posts so I’m not sure how they finish. Is this a trap?
hdgreene :
Freeman Dyson may have supported Obama, but I’ll still say: if only we had many more like him.
ADDED:
Speaking of the Mahabharata, after the Trinity test, Oppenheimer famously quoted from the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
After the Hiroshima bombing, this is what Dyson had to say: “Once we had got ourselves into the business of bombing cities, we might as well do the job competently and get it over with. I felt better that morning than I had felt for years.”
Well, as Wretchard has introduced The Mahabharata, I can’t resist appending Yudhishtira’s speech on the Age of Kali, as interpreted by Peter Brook in his filmed version of the epic. This is a good introductions for Westerners who don’t know the story; it’s stylized, but we like that sort of thing, instead of the “straight” version filmed in India in the 80s (which was about 96 hours long):
“I see the coming of another age, where barbaric kings rule over a vicious, broken world; where puny, fearful, hard men live tiny lives. White hair at sixteen, copulating with animals, their women perfect whores, making love with greedy mouths. The cows dry, sterile. Trees stunted, lifeless. No more flowers, no more beauty; ambition, corruption: it is the age of Kali, the black time.
The countryside a desert. Crime stalks the cities. Beasts drink blood and sleep in the streets. All the water is sucked up by the sky. Scalded earth, scorched to dead ash. The fire is borne by the wind. Fire pierces the earth; cracks open the underground world. Wind and fire calcinate the world. Immense clouds gather, glow yellow and red. They rise like deep sea monsters, like shattered cities. Forked with lightning, the rains fall. The rains fall and engulf the earth. Twelve years of storm. The mountains split the waters.
I no longer see the world.
Then the primary god – when all that remains is a grey sea without man, beast or tree – the Creator drinks the terrible wind, and falls asleep.”
Wretchard wrote:
In one sense the difference between the unlimited optimism of the 1950s and the dystopia we are being sold today was that the first was predicated on the bountiful universe of a Creator and the second on the cheese-paring, rationed, desperate world of men.
I think the 1950s outlook, in America anyway, was much more complex than people looking back now give it credit for. We already know the contempt with which the tranzi Boomers hold it, they who heap coals of scorn on the Beaver Cleaver-ness and Father Knows Best-ness of it, and make smug movies like “Pleasantville” to lecture us on how the boinking-for-all sexual revolution of the ’60s made the world an oh-so-much better place than the B&W cage of Eisenhower’s term.
I wasn’t personally around for the 1950s — in fact, I didn’t appear for nearly another generation (one BC commenter here who’s no geezer yet!) — but my parents were, and due to my close relationship with my Dad, who fought in WWII, I ended up becoming fascinated by that era and American culture & society in particular from about 1940 to the early 1950s.
And the conclusion that I’ve come to is that you can’t understand the 1950s without the context of the 1940s (and, to some extent, the 1930s, but the ’40s is the direct and most important forebear). The mistake most people make is in looking at the 1950s in isolation … or just in material terms, e.g. the home-building & home-appliance explosion, the interstate highway – car – suburb boom.
I don’t claim to have the definitive & most accurate view of the 1950s but I do think the “unlimited optimism” label is too simplistic and that reducing the references of the decade to material terms is a disservice to the folks who were there.
Aside from the Communist thundercloud that hung over the country for the entire decade, there were dark, uneasy rumblings in the culture that were deeper still, not politically themed but existential. A lot of sci-fi and horror movies in the 1950s were obsessed with the theme of man as both small and impotent in universal terms, but incredibly self-destructive in his own sphere. The possibility of humanity being wiped out entirely — either as a self-inflicted act (esp. of science gone bad) or the result of annihilation by extra-terrestrial beings — was the ghost haunting American consciousness. To people who had seen first-hand the unprecedented level of destruction of WWII, the self-annihilation fear was not unjustified.
The building & breeding boom of the 1950s was as much, if not more, a spiritual & existential response to the slaughter of WWII as it was an attitude of traditional Yankee “can do” and “oooh, honey, it’s *automatic*!” But the flip side of “Leave It to Beaver” was “The Incredible Shrinking Man.” Whatever optimism there was in the 1950s was, it seems to me, not a naive optimism but the heroically willed sort. The kind of optimism that is sweeter because you have clawed it out of the fiendish grasp of the shadow. An optimism that is part survivor’s buzz, if you will. The kind you might feel after jumping in a river & escaping a pursuing grizzly bear.
Flying cars? Sure, hell, why not? If you were a combat vet the fact that you were still here at all might well have seemed like an overcoming of greater odds than flying cars or putting a man on the moon. And yet here you were. So, sure, what the hell, build big and live large. It could all be gone tomorrow. Or tomorrow some guy in a lab could invent THE FORMULA that changes everything. Why are you still here? What was the reason you made it through? You’re not really sure, except that when you visit your kids’ room at night just to sit on the edge of their beds and watch them sleep, you sense that the why is somehow all bound up in the little breaths that cycle in and out of their bodies. And you know that THEY think that flying cars would be The Best Thing Ever. So let’s go for it.
*****************
Diminished expectations, malaise, if you will, are the typical psychological response to an episode of glut and indulgence. The greater and grosser the glut, the more severe the hangover and inner voice urging restraint and repentance will be. Whereas optimism, the muscular kind, the kind that actually accomplishes things instead of evaporating at the first few obstacles, is one response to an episode of harrowing. The more acute the harrowing, the more resolved the optimism.
It’s too bad that grit can’t be forged except through suffering, but that seems to be a universal law.
Lifeofthemind@82/
Much of what you say has merit, but I remember a time some three years ago over at “Winds of Change” when I defended Whiskey after he was under severe criticism for calling Michelle Obama a “jumped-up affirmative-action Queen in a no-show job” at the Univ of Chicago and suggesting further in his critique IIRC that he was “laying in extra ammo.” Some took that to be incendiary (no pun intended) while I and others (and Whiskey in his own defense) took it to mean he wasn’t waiting for gns/ammo to be outlawed. My point is that whatever his comments here OR there–they all seemed to fall WELL within the bounds of spirited debate. Are we to ignore the racial overtones to the current thrust of government policy? Or the nature of the black “advisors”/”Czars” Obama has surrounded him-self with–especially with the current charges regarding Holder’s OBVIOUS racially motivated dropping of charges against the Phila New Black Panthers voting intimidation case now swirling around us? “Identity politics” seems to be at the very core of much public-policy decision-making under the Obama Administration–the Presidency of a BLACK man staffed heavily with blacks in key positions throughout the government power structure. We have seen how having a black President has even affected the media, with organizations like CNN, etc., bringing black correspondents/analysts to the forefront in heavier than usual numbers–as though only blacks/”minorities” are capable of analyzing black/”minority” politicians–a meme that should have been thoroughly intellectually discredited by now. It would seem, therefore, that given the nature of the decision-making process used by the Obama Administration–a process in which race/ethnicity seems to play heavily–the sort of analytical approach used by Whiskey is more valuable than ever–if only to raise debating points–sensitive as it is to matters of race. Or can only blacks critique and say irritating/nasty–even hurtful, things about other blacks? If this is the case then we are headed down the road to intellectual PC madness.
bogie wheel,
You are correct. Those fuddy duddy Dads of Leave it to Beaver and My Three Sons were the same guys, like my father, who had landed at Oran or Anzio or Normandy or Guadalcanal or Okinawa or who flew those bombers over Ploesti and Schweinfurt and Tokyo or who manned ships under kamikazi attack. Only the self obsessed boomers who as perpetual children evaded Vietnam and then claimed credit for the suffering of all the others who fought over 3 generations could think that the world was soft and dull before they showed up. The Boomers are the people who think they invented sex. Pity they never let their parents in on the secret.
The Man In the Gray Flannel Suit had quite a life.
virgil xenophon,
For the record I agree with whiskey‘s assessment of Michelle Obama’s job at the University of Chicago. I was there and I am confident it was arranged at the behest of Penny Pritzker, as was her prior job for the Dean of the College.
PS: I might add that the PC racial factor is the reason one black comedian has said in all seriousness that no white male will ever be elected President of the United States again. Meaning that only another minority or white female will be able to publicly say cutting things about him and his policies–no matter how correct–without being seen to be racist. And if a white female succeeds Obama the same will hold true for “feminist” cultural reasons–only another female or “minority” male would be PC enough to have the PC “moral standing” to challenge–and so it goes down the road. Any attempt by white male candidates to be fiercely critical being seen as “culturally insensitive” given the “past history” of discrimination against women and minorities and thus “out of bounds” in any Presidential debates/campaign. We already saw this self-censorship effect in this last election cycle, reinforced by a highly active Obama campaign of pre-emptive admonitions about racial remarks.
With the banning of Whiskey I fear we are seeing the continuation of this “cone of silence” surrounding all things racial regarding public policy by those fearful of being adjudged as crass and insensitive moral ogres in matters of racial and sexual politics and an early unfortunate precursor of future trends regarding the ability to speak plainly about all aspects of public policy. We are putting our heads in the sand if we pretend that we are “above it all” and that frank discussions concerning the racial and sexual components of public policy are not allowed in “polite company.” Lets not whistle past the grave-yard here. While racial and sexual identity politics as driving forces behind public-policy decision-making are not everything in terms of explanatory power, they are not nothing either.
bogie wheel@94/
Hedonistic me was never much for the wearing of hair shirts. I’ll take every energy-intensive labor-saving device they can invent. Considering today’s date, I wonder if either side at Gettysberg would have turned down air-strikes if they had been available?
The one thing that always surprises me about space discussions is how often the economic aspect is forgotten, but worse, how it has already mostly been addressed by Gerald K. O’Neill in his work “The High Frontier”. He very astutely pointed out in the late 70s that without an economic driver, it will be hard to get large numbers of people into space (which he stated was necessary for humanities’ growth and further development in freedom, rather than closely controlled bondage).
The big thing O’Neill pointed out was that the value of space had to do with energy. On the Earth, solar energy is limited- the sun only shines a set number of days a year on the panel, environmental effects degrade efficiency, and transmission from optimal locations is difficult and expensive. In space, however, you can build a solar station that will always receive sunlight. Environmental effects are minimal, and through the use of microwave or laser beaming systems, the power can be beamed directly to the destination.
Now, it would be entirely uneconomical to launch the material needed into space to build those stations. Fortunately, we don’t have to do that. We just need to launch the “builder robots” that would assemble the stuff, and other robots that will fly over to NEA (Near Earth Asteroids) to pick out the materials needed for construction (a bit of surveying shows that most asteroids have everything we need).
NASA can serve a very important need for this project- they can make a fueling station in orbit. That way, our probes can fly up with empty tanks (thus saving weight and allowing more launch mass be diverted towards the probe rather than the fuel), fuel up for their journey to the NEAs, and then shoot those bits of material back (to the manufacturing units) via mass driver.
There, cheap, clean energy at a reasonable cost. The next step is the use of large space stations rather than planetary surfaces for further habitation. O’Neill points out that both the Moon and Mars are not particularly hospitable, but also have very low gravity versus Earth (but still enough to make landing and launch expensive). Why sit at the bottom of a gravity well? His book has several designs for large space stations that allow for Earth gravity, Earth-like habitation and greenery, but also sit at the top of the gravity well.
The funny thing about all these things I’ve discussed is that as whiz-bang as they sound, they’re much more readily achievable with our modern level of technology than flying cars, and will have a much greater positive effect. I can think of several applications for large amounts of cheap clean power directly beamed to the necessary source.
LOTM #96
The Boomers are the people who think they invented sex.
Only those boomers who didn’t know about the gay subculture of the so-called Mauve Decade (the 1890s) and the general free-for-all of the 1920s. Frederick Lewis Allen had several chapters on the mores of the post-WWI generation in Only Yesterday, which was published in 1931, long before the Pill. Those of us who had competent history teachers were well aware that there was little left for us to invent. I think the major difference in the ’60s was that the libertine attitudes and behaviors formerly limited to the upper classes and the intelligentsia spread into mainstream culture.
As for The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, I first encountered Sloan Wilson’s novel on my (very conservative) aunt’s bookshelf when I was in junior high. It struck me as just as much a product of the ’50s as Father Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver. I would agree with bogie wheel #94 that the ’50s were more complex than is sometimes acknowledged.
PA CAT/
Ever read Sloan Wilson’s “Away From it All”?–his autobiographical description of his attempt to escape his own personal “tread-mill to oblivion.”
L3 @ 17 wrote:
America is struggling as a nation, as a society, not because we can no longer to go the moon, but because we have spent the last 100 years destroying our mediating institutions, those social structures that connect the ordinary, sovereign citizens with those entrusted with the responsibility for leading.
… Tocqueville referred to these groups as associations, and he saw them as the distinct feature of America. But they were really the result of a deep yearning for freedom, self-governance, and self-determination that has always existed in the heart of America, brought here by those who understood tyranny best, as evidenced by their flight from it.
Okay, I’m glad you brought up Tocqueville, because now I don’t have to.
I think we put ourselves in quite perilous territory when we think of political equations as having only two entities, the individual and the state. There is IMO a third entity, society, expressed in what you call mediating institutions, which needs to be accounted for when one speaks of how laws are developed and enforced, and how behavior and speech are or aren’t regulated.
The reason I consider myself a conservative is that I think conservatism is the one political philosophy that gives this third entity its proper weight. Libertarianism and progressivism both IMO tend to focus too much on just individual vs. state. Much as I value individual liberty, and will stand shoulder to shoulder with libertarians against statists, I find I can’t and won’t jump into the deep end of the libertarian pool because I believe there’s a giant sucking drain down there. And that giant sucking drain is called social disintegration.
Having a child out of wedlock used to be rare not because the state would toss a young woman in jail for it but because society at large, and the young woman’s family and friends and neighbors and church in particular, condemned it. Social institutions restrained a lot of personal bad behavior and prompted a lot of constructive behavior via a mixture of shaming, role modeling, peer pressure and social reward. If Dad is present in the home and is an effective “policeman” of Little Johnny’s behavior, age 5, then it’s far less likely that Officer Krupke will have to police Johnny when Johnny is 15. And Dad is far more likely to be present in the home if (A) he’s married to Mom and (B) he feels his role in the home and his children’s lives is significant and crucial. And, even prior to that, Dad and Mom are far, far more likely to get married in the first place if all those social institutions mentioned above adhere to and promote the standard that marriage is the only truly acceptable arrangement in which two people should be having sex.
Social institutions perform a parallel function of the state (regulating behavior through incentives and punishments) without the iron fist of the state. As I said in a previous thread, government is force. Social institutions are not force but coercion. It’s the difference between Dad applying the glare or the belt.
Unfortunately, the dismantling and delegitimizing of social institutions removes the absolutely crucial citizen-making role they play in influencing behavior, leaving only the individual to control him/herself or be controlled by the state. As for privacy and invasions thereof? Please. The most gossipy church or nebby neighborhood cannot destroy a person nearly as completely as the state can, esp. with all the modern devices the state has at its disposal.
We’ve gone from “The Scarlet Letter” to “The Lives of Others.” If nothing else, that should be an object lesson in “careful what you wish for.”
I know I was asked to personally appeal to Wretchard about Whiskey’s attitude towards LOTM. I would not do it because I felt it was a cowardly and immature move not unlike tattling to the teacher about a classmate hurting your feelings. IMHO if you can’t defend yourself on the playground you deserve to be kicked around.
That said, I took my issue with Whiskey to the playground itself, and I’m saddened that he won’t be commenting further because it was almost an honor when he did engage with me. For instance, Marie Claude has made snide and rude comments about me when I’ve made comments that for whatever reason offended her, and I didn’t run to Wretchard crying that her “tone” was unacceptable in the forum. Lotm, who I considered to be an colleague in the real world, did not have my back when MC was ridiculing me, yet he expected me to not only defend his honor to Wretchard, but call for a reprimand on Whiskey because he was somehow violating the BC’s PC.
So in the end I am disappointed that Whiskey won’t be coming around here anymore. If Wretchard had asked him to leave without any prompting from any commenters, then I would feel his decision was justified and not coerced. However, given that Wretchard admits he didn’t entertain speaking to Whiskey about his commentary until the subject of it offending certain commenters was brought to his attention, I feel like Wretchard was intimidated into doing something that has utterly backfired. Here people are talking about him relentlessly for over two threads; if I were Whiskey I would feel like the victor.
Yes I felt weird when I was asked to write to Wretchard on someone’s behalf but mostly because it felt like I was suddenly on the opposite side of a feeling I myself have experienced in blogworld: being excommunicated from a community for having one’s own beliefs and expressing them. I used to comment on Gawker and Jezebel, two stridently liberal blogs with strict commeting policies, and you can imagine that it was only a certain amount of time before it was off with my Palin-loving head. I really don’t care if my viewpoint offends liberals, conservatives, or the brain-dead; silencing me isn’t going to stop me from having them. Silencing Whiskey has NOT ended the spread of his viewpoint because we are ALL now speaking them for him.
He wins.
101 virgil xenophon
I read A Summer Place, which I thought was an overrated novel, though I can see why it was made into a movie. Wilson struggled with alcoholism for much of his life, and unfortunately some of his later books and short stories showed it. Would you recommend his autobiography as a better book? Perhaps I should try to locate a copy.
Whiskey had gotten boring as hell. His posts had become like a constant auto-rant generator – name the problem, and it will be the fault of women, blacks, and mexicans, in that order.
and like all great bores he couldn’t be brief; he always had to go on and on and on about whatever it was. And he had no sense of humor, just the grim and unsmiling determination of the true fanatic.
but that wasn’t why Wretchard had to do what he did – he had to do it because he is the one who has to worry about the overall reputation of this blog, because that reputation to a large extent is HIS reputation. Whiskey’s rants made this blog look like a hangout for white supremacists, and that impression was the fastest way possible to make *anyone* who posts here look like a lunatic just for being here. Wretchard just did *all* of us a favor by showing that he actually does have the backbone to lead and to act rather than to sit out around and invent wonderful sophistic reasons to do nothing.
Gresham’s law states that Bad Money drives Good out of circulation; I propose Wretchard’s Blogging Corollary, which states that bad posters drive good ones off the blog, since anyone with a reputation worth protecting can only be hurt by hanging out with an apologist for the Aryan Brotherhood. Wretchard did all of us a huge favor by clearing that stain from our name; and he did it knowing that he would probably earn nothing but condemnation from a lot of people who he respects.
And that deserves a debt of gratitude in my book.
RWE @ 79 said:
“I think we are going to HAVE to assemble interplanetary ships on orbit. NASA says the ISS experience indicates that you can’t do that, which is another way of saying that we can’t ever get past the Moon.”
I agree that we will have to assemble stuff on orbit. However our experience with ISS has shown that doing any sort of fine work with tools in a pressure suit is extremely difficult (it’s like threading a needle while wearing boxing gloves). I believe the solution is to use large airtight Kevlar bags, e.g. 10-20 meters in diameter. Put the hardware to be worked on in the Kevlar bag and pressurize it to 0.2 bar with pure nitrogen (this protects against fire). Then have technicians dressed in short pants and tee shirts enter the Kevlar bag while wearing oxygen masks driven by re-breathers and work on the hardware with their bare hands. I would argue that this work environment is slightly safer in terms of meteoroid/orbital debris impact than a conventional pressure suit due to the larger mass of air that would leak out after a puncture plus the technician breathing pure oxygen that he’s carrying with him.
RWE also said:
“NASA is looking at really big boosters so they can do direct ascent, Saturn 5 style, and I think that is dumb. All the ISS experience means is that they did not do it right.”
I would counter-argue that the dumbest thing NASA ever did was to get rid of the Saturn-V. The Saturn-V was the enabling technology for a von Braun type manned Mars Program. The cost of building the ISS would have been significantly reduced if we could have launched the components in large pieces with a Saturn-V. Of course keeping the Saturn-V was a non-option given the politics behind the Space Shuttle and termination of the Apollo Program.
As an aside, the biggest technological barrier to getting humans on the Martian surface is slowing them down from hypersonic velocity in the Martian atmosphere to zero velocity on the planet’s surface. The Martian atmosphere is so thin that the laws-of-scale become prohibitive when the payload mass is significantly greater than the Viking Lander. All of the complexity in the Entry-Descent-and-Landing (EDL) shown in the Mars Exploration Rover (MER), Mars Phoenix Lander and Mars Science Lab (MSL) are a consequence of the Martian atmosphere being so thin. MSL will probably fail because its EDL scheme is so complex that Murphy’s Law will demand failure. One way to beat the laws-of-scale limitation concerning Mars EDL is to use a really big aeroshell, e.g. 20 meters in diameter or bigger. By making the aeroshell really big, the ballistic coefficient is set really small and the terminal velocity becomes small enough that the vehicle is subsonic when the terminal braking rockets are activated. However how do you send a 20 meter diameter aeroshell to Mars? How do you launch the thing from the Earth’s surface into Low Earth Orbit (LEO)? Obviously you need to build it in LEO. You’re not going to build something like that with astronauts in pressure suits working pop rivet tools and MIG welders. Doing the work in a big pressurized bag is the obvious enabling technology.
PA Cat (#100): “I think the major difference in the ’60s was that the libertine attitudes and behaviors formerly limited to the upper classes and the intelligentsia spread into mainstream culture.”
I am too tired to remember which opinionator has as a regular theme that much of our problems have their roots in this. The upper classes could afford this libertinism as their wealth (and other assets) protected them against its effects, but that libertinism when adopted by the lower classes proved destructive to them.
bogie wheel (#102):
Agreed, for the most part. Note also that you have “liberaltarians” who claim (sincerely or disingenuously) that as this social pressure can sometimes be too overwhelming, the state needs to step in.
Stephanie (#103): “IMHO if you can’t defend yourself on the playground you deserve to be kicked around.”
Alternative 1: “Got to hell, you racist SOB.”
Alternative 2: “Please understand Massa, I’m one of them good Negroes, we’re not all bad like you say…”
Yes, that would certainly be a wonderful playground to spend time in.
Hi Stephanie
how ya goin ?
uh, I might have to defend my position, though, if I remember well, it was you who was the “snide” one, throwing into my face that my taylor couldn’t even speek your smart NY english, and whatever else, that my position can’t fit with the smarties’ of your kind…
Anyway, I never pretended to be one of yours, but of the Belmont’s kind, with foreign colors, though, normal, rather snarky (and rude at moments, when I’m, or my popole are the target: self-defence deformation that I got from frequenting military blogs)
Of course you didn’t ask for my ban, though what is it that you’re doing right now ?
I am too tired to remember which opinionator has as a regular theme that much of our problems have their roots in this. The upper classes could afford this libertinism as their wealth (and other assets) protected them against its effects, but that libertinism when adopted by the lower classes proved destructive to them.
Bob -
I think that would be Jonah Goldberg. He has made a specific point about Madonna & “Papa Don’t Preach” … far, far easier to raise that child out of wedlock (“he says he’s going to marry me” … riiiiiiight) if you’re a millionaire entertainer than if you’re one of her millions of listeners, an ordinary Jersey/Texas/Iowa Jane with a high-school education working the Kwicki Mart or a nail salon in a scrubby part of Newark/Amarillo/Dubuque. Behavior glamorized by celebrities is disastrous to ordinary people. Celebrity-obsessed teenagers are some of the most prone to fall into the emulation tarpit.
#105, I humbly disagree.
Not about Whiskey becoming boring, but about him ruining BC’s reputation. Not sure Gresham’s Law is the correct analogy.
“The theory holding that if two kinds of money in circulation have the same denominational value but different intrinsic values, the money with higher intrinsic value will be hoarded and eventually driven out of circulation by the money with lesser intrinsic value.”
Never seen any evidence to support Gresham’s Theory. It seems like something two drunk Englishmen would cook up while killing an evening at the club.
One has to presume that the goal of the exercise is hording. Crank investment and spending into the theory and it breaks down. Since the two most commons uses of money are investment and spending, it seems foolish to base a theory on them not happening.
To apply that bogus theory to internet blogging is at least as outrageous as anything Whiskey ever wrote.
The difference is that his rants were on a subject that you found distasteful and had already formed an opinion on.
I disagree with Whiskey, since My opinion is that race isn’t real, but a perception. Perceptions are held by an individual and can be controlled by the individual holding them. As far as females, they are nice. If you buy them stuff, they are nicer.
Regardless, Whiskey’s civil rights WERE violated. Will yours be next? What goes around, comes around.
The 1st amendment was created to protect unpopular opinions, NOT popular ones. Popular opinion doesn’t need protection, having numbers on it’s side.
bogie wheel (#109):
Goldberg? Could be, thanks.
Rosinante (#110): “The 1st amendment was created to…”
… force publishers to publish, at their own expense, material they do not wish to publish?
WWS@105′
Granted that Whiskey had become somewhat of a one-size-fits-all one-note commenter at times, but your comments about being worried that this place “being labeled as a hang-out for white supremacists,” worries me more than anything Whiskey posted–going a long way to prove my point about overly sensitive PC attitudes stifling legitimate debate. Apologist for the Aryan Brotherhood? Sounds like typical mindless argument by assertion unaccompanied by a scintilla of grounding in any factual content. Wretchard ought to ban YOU, WWS, for so lightly, wildly tossing around such racially-charged bullshit. Ever read Whiskey’s blog? One may not always agree with his conclusions, but almost all the arguments he advances are grounded in empirical research–which is more than I can say for the personal ad hominem attack you just casually mounted against Whiskey by implication.
People like you are the EXACT reason I so worry about the quality of future public discourse regarding policy debates involving racial matters. I fear WWS would have serious debate involving these matters couched in such neutered tones and watered-down with pre-emptive apologetic qualifiers as to be almost meaningless. If opining about obvious manifestations of racial/sexual identity politics makes one a white supremacist then I would say half the nation qualifies. Grow up, WWS. Your obvious “white guilt”–like squeamish inability to entertain any strongly argued criticism of identity politics as practiced by blacks or females may suit you–but please don’t project your inability to cope maturely with matters of race and sex onto others here. My interpretation of your statements indicates to me that you hold the view that the only valid way to discuss the topic of identity politics is to gingerly tip-toe up to the subject with the appropriate apologetic qualifiers. I totally reject that view. Whiskey’s views are controversial only to those who believe American blacks cannot be racist because of the wrongs perpetrated against them in the past and that whites are morally unfit to criticize their actions.I totally, unalterably, reject that viewpoint. Whiskey may be strident, he may in the event be wrong in whole or in part about his conclusions, but nothing in his statements or background of record suggests he is racist.
You have made very serious charges against Whiskey here tonight, WWS. I am formally calling you out to either prove them or withdraw them and apologize to Whiskey and Wretchard for making such explosive, racially tinged charges without foundational proofs. I don’t know about others, but I, for one, will not let such unsubstantiated crap go unchallenged. Talk about “Civil” discourse! It’s because of people like you that it’s almost impossible to honestly discuss the politics of race in a rational manner save for the most bland pablum possible. It’s sanctimonious statements such as you have just made in attempts to slime those with whom you disagree that make honest discussion of identity politics–whether of pure opinion or research-based–almost impossible.
Back up your charges or apologize.
Josh @ 66
“wazzat? googling … hmmm. interesting project.
but don’t worry about the entropy, without water falling we could not generate power, without the old passing on there would be no room for the new. kali dances and fascinates, could there be a universe without her?
to mix a few cryptic mythopoeic metaphors …”
Not bad cryptic-ness, considering that my name IS Callie. My great-grandmother once put a hex on a cornfield,and her name was Callie, too. And the old mill is right on the road bearing her family name.
Entropy is in the blood, you might say. And the water, too.
virgil (#112):
I went to Google. I typed in (my first attempt) “site:pajamasmedia.com/richardfernandez whiskey black african”. The very first result was a post in which whiskey had one comment. A quote from that comment can be found way back in comment #64.
People are free to be uncomfortable about a regular contributor being made unwelcome. People are free to be free-speech absolutists. But for people to claim that whiskey’s sole sin was being un-PC means either that they have not followed the evolution in his comments, or that they are remarkably obtuse.
Oy! Fireworks!
I don’t see why wws should have to do anything in this matter. As far as I am concerned, Near Beer was a complete jerk whose allegedly “researched” opinions could not withstand scrutiny. The conclusions he reached were in the finest traditions of Robert S. McNamara and several other charlatans I could name.
I do think that wws’s concerns about this being regarded as a haven for racists are
both exaggerated and well-founded. We are/will be so accused whether or not some intemperate remarks find their way into the thread. But his remarks hardly constitute
impropriety.
And if Wretch thinks “prohibition” is needed, then it is his blog, decisions must be according to his best judgement———which may be sorta sound after all.
twobyfour (#115):
Heh.
And it’s not even November fifth.
Let’s please dispense with the misreading that the only possible reason anyone could object to whiskey’s posts was that said person found the posts “distasteful” or that the posts made them “uncomfortable.”
A couple people have mentioned his sweeping generalizations as a reason for objection. This is a methods-based objection and not a content-based one. I myself disagreed with him on more than one occasion over his sloppy and skewed use of statistics (most recently, his cherry picking the results of a Gallup poll; in the past, the ham-handed attempt to portray the TV show “Gossip Girl” as a sort of all-influencing ratings powerhouse and cultural omnipresence). And those occasions where I did point out flaws in his methodology were the result not of my assiduously combing through every statistic he brought forth in his loooooong posts but rather the result of things that quickly leaped out at me as being suspect & that I knew I could counter-argue with research done in the limited time I had.
That is to say, his methodology was likely a LOT more flawed than what I was able to point out. Then why didn’t I refute him more often? Well, because he (1) never, ever changed or retracted his opinions, (2) routinely, to the point of predictability, posted on his three or four favorite themes regardless of what anyone else said, and (3) tended to dump huge amounts of prose at a time, I determined that pawing through the prose piles of undetermined caca-quotient in search of the occasional valid pony-point, was not going to be the best use of my time or effort.
I will certainly give whiskey props for never, in the posts that I read, resorting to personal invective. His tone was always very deliberate. So the “plays well with others” was never a point of objection with me, since I thought he did/does.
Another objection was not so much content-oriented as purpose-oriented. I asked him on one occasion why he bothered to post about any of this in the first place if he truly believed, as he so relentlessly jeremiad-ed the rest of us with proclamations of iron-clad certainty, that America was ruined, gone, done, stick a fork in her, no use trying to resist, etc. Please consider: someone who arrives with what they are convinced is a prophecy of sure doom is NOT here to (1) learn anything (since they are convinced already know what will happen), (2) engage in a genuine back-and-forth debate (since prophecy is never wrong), or (3) present us with the worst-case scenario so that we can go out and do something to change the outcome (since they view their prophecy as inevitable). Someone who behaves and asserts thus is here … why, exactly? Who benefits? Who benefits when, if a meteor is about to fall on a house, someone stands in the corner and repeats “Doom doom doom doom doom” until the moment of obliteration? The answer is no one, with the possible exception of the doom-mutterer, who might feel a little better that he got to say *something* before the curtain came down.
And you know what? That’s okay. If the only point of whiskey’s posts was for whiskey to feel a little better, fine. We all do our share of kvetching here.
But let’s not pretend that it was genuine dialogue that was stifled. whiskey’s posts were essentially a monologue. And Wretchard has every right to choose not to let his bandwidth be consumed by someone else’s monologues. whiskey has his own blog for that, and Wretchard has linked to it on the blogroll.
I have been away, off my lurk for a while, and upon return, I find that Whiskey is Prohibited.
I suppose now I can only drown my sorrow in Waltskey,
The best
for the depressed.
And yes, I’m over Fifty.
Er, make that Sixty.
Happy birthday America.
As I live in Scotland the toast will be in whisky.
We consider the idea of whiskey to be somewhat odd over here. However, it is tolerated.
whiskey has his own blog for that, and Wretchard has linked to it on the blogroll.
And that should be that. Also, if some here think Whiskey’s voice is missing here, what prevents them to post in the same vein (though with less monotony, please)? (Note to myself: Maybe I can channel Whiskey under a nick “Gin”
).
Can we move on, please?
And yeah… Happy 4th of July! Let it be celebrated for many more a century and millenia!
And here I thought we were referring to rum…
Happy Independence Day to all, including Marie Claude.
To help y’all get in a more festive mood, and since we wouldn’t want to commit the cardinal crime of being PC, here’s a fun little video about date rape.
The ‘what is the limit, if any, of free speech’ question has pretty much been settled by the ‘yelling fire in a crowded theater’ and the ‘fightin’ words’ (incitement to riot) doctrine. Ergo, there’s two questions here: 1) wretchard’s rights as blog owner, and 2) was whiskey yelling fire in crowded theater and/or speaking fightin’ words?
The first we can dispense with –let’s just hold wretchard to the highest public use, most open, unlimited ingress/egress standard, tho he never made any promise nor led any belief that that is in fact the truth. Let’s just assume it.
He’d still be morally obliged to attempt to hew to the ‘fire’ and ‘fightin” doctrine, unless he wants to ruin his enterprise, which he’s no doubt obligated on other fronts (what he owes himself & his family and associates) not to willfully do.
So we’re left with the question of whiskey’s commentary, was it ‘fire’ and ‘fightin’ or not?
well, heck, that’s gonna be subjective isn’t it? OK, so to me, if the world is exclusively jungle rule and i’m the prey of every identity group but my own, and furthermore if all the groups are type-bound and permanently pavlovian, and if intercession by conscience or vision or higher power is therefore forever & always an irrelevant temporary surge against relentless tide, then yep, them are fightin’ words, and ‘fire in a crowded theater’ words.
No, no threat to anybody likely reading here, where they’ll be subject to their own thesis and their implications no call to arm and go slay them bastards trying to get you first. But the same sort of coldly clinical dispassionate identity-sorting in the intellectual-realist argot went pretty far in some recent religiogovernments that in time built extermination camps on the idea.
I know, i’m blowing it out of proportion –but fires star low and slow, and looking back, there was no way it would’ve ever been out of proportion to’ve refused to leave such ideas intellectually respectable and laying around where Herr schickelgruber could find them and go mad on them.
To me, the thing that was so unsettling about Whiskey – and no, I wasn’t one of the ones complaining about him, it never would’ve entered my mind to do so – the thing that got me was not so much his outrageous pronouncements so stridently and confidently asserted over and over again, but more the tone that came through loud and clear, an aggrieved tone of being forced to suffer a horrible injustice, most every post practically a cri de coeur, a passionate treatise on contemporary evils as he saw them. Yet at the same time, we know that he is a strict Darwinian materialist. Every time I would read one of his thousand-word analyses, it would put me in mind of one of my favorite quotes -
The human race is an enormous agglomeration of bubbles which are continually bursting and ceasing to be. No one made it or knows anything worth knowing about it. Love it dearly, oh ye bubbles. – J.F. Stephen in Liberty, Equality, Fraternity
- and I would wonder, “Why does he care so much?”
If we are, at bottom, only soulless blobs of matter, why does he get so worked up over it all? Yes, the obvious answer is that the new order of the PC universe negatively effects him on a personal level, but that is merely a purely selfish motive for complaint, and I never got the sense that Whiskey was that thoroughly self-centered. (Or am I wrong here – is he that self-focused?) If his complaint were purely selfish, there are many ways that a totally selfish person can ingratiate himself with The Way Things Are Now even if you’re not an official member of the anointed (see all the Liberals that do so). Why not just mutate and adapt? Many others have done just that, why can’t he, if all he’s concerned about is his own well-being, so much so that he swears he would turn himself into a black woman if he could? No, instead he goes on blogs and rails against the wrongs. Wouldn’t a true Darwinian materialist simply accept that things change and what is, just is? On what basis does he complain about injustice?
He wants to have it both ways.
As in this snippet from Papa Ray’s link @83, quoting Charles Kesler from the Imprimus article:
Obama’s ambivalence is, in many ways, the perfect symbol of the dilemma of the contemporary liberal. How can Obama argue that America and liberalism reject absolute truths, and in the same breath affirm—as he did recently to the United Nations—that human rights are self-evidently true? You can’t have it both ways, though he desperately wants and tries to. Here, surely, is the deepest crisis of 20th-century American liberalism—that it can no longer understand, or defend, its principles as true anymore. It knows that, but knows as well that to say so would doom it politically. Liberals are increasingly left with an amoral pragmatism that is hard to justify to themselves, much less to the American public. The problem for liberals today is that they risk becoming confidence men, and nothing but confidence men.
Whiskey: one of the little bubbles. Who cares deeply.
On the other hand….
***
KY, maybe not just a black woman, but a black woman slave, with fate fixed forever in the firmament, by the firmament –
Bob #64
I’m glad that you do.
For those of you who missed it, I think Whiskey’s comment #43 in Ye Olde Shell Game was probably the last straw, or close to it:
http://pajamasmedia.com/richardfernandez/2010/05/27/ye-olde-shell-game/#comment-108719
It was inevitable that Whiskey’s intense attentiveness to race in the race vs. culture argument would eventually involve our host personally. When I read the comment, I cringed, and thought to myself, “Man, wretchard is incredibly tolerant to put up with this”.
KY @ 124,
“Whiskey: one of the little bubbles. Who cares deeply.”
I don’t recall Whiskey ever stating that what he cared about was the preservation of Western Civilization, but let us hope that was the foundation of his critiques. That is certainly what most of us are concerned about. Western Civilization welcomes all (Japanese, Filipino, Nigerian) who wish to join, but multiculturalist anti-white racism is, first and foremost, an attack on Western Civilization.
Buddy @ 123,
That’s the slickest argument for political correctness I’ve ever seen. Much more subtle than the proposal in Britain to ban all knives except those for buttering toast.
gokart-mozart @ 127,
Would you please point out what sentences in the linked post you considered offensive to Wretchard? I don’t see any.
Happy Independence Day!!!!!
r/129; –let me return the compliment, you just made the easiest argument there is to make on the subject at hand. Much easier to trot out a feel-good ‘PC’ charge than to labor thru the ‘no-good-answer’ question of where and what a limit ought to look like.
put it this way, drop the speech in question down into some topic with no politics in it –suppose somebody started posting testaments to satan-worship or child-molesting or shooting junk as the answer to modern problems –you’d want him to quit it, wouldn’t you?
But what would you do?
Would you stand on no-limit free speech –and either read the stuff, and the reaction to it, every time you visited?
–or more likely, would you just drift away from the blog and quit checking in?
ultimately, extending to logical end, to leave wretchard holding the bag for your no-limit free speech, with a dead blog, but politically-correct in his reverse PC?
don’t get me wrong –i didn’t complain to the host or anybody else about whiskey –in fact i didn’t even think about it much, until this debate came up and started sharpening the points. What i did, was read about every fifth whiskey comment, and even that with scan rather than read, to catch anything new. So my unexamined impression of his effect was as it was on me, that is, about 20% of what it might be on some young person trying to form their politics.
To try to show a glimmer of optimism about the potential of free will has got to be some sort of minimum speed for skating just ahead of that old entropy stuff.
While her physical condition is an excuse I must apologize to this community for introducing someone emotionally unstable. Those I contacted on her behalf when she was being bullied know how I put myself out for her. Given that this is someone I met at a job and why it is reasonable for most of us unlike L3 to use a nome de plume I must now be concerned for my privacy. whiskey did not cyber-bully me. His problems were as listed.
LotM, I feel like I descended into some high school foyer. Could you kids sort it out between yourselves? Thanks!
twoby –LOL –brutal but kind –we all need a bucket of water now n then –
Buddy @ 132,
I’ll grant that there is a lot of blame to go around. I should have challenged Whiskey by saying, “OK, I’ll stipulate that there is a lot of black racism in this country, but what is your practical response to it? Buy weapons or challenge said racism as antithetical to our ideals?” I think the biggest deficit at BC is that discussions don’t often get down to prescriptive conclusions. If there were such a tradition, Whiskey would have been challenged as above, and we would have found out if he was a serious fellow or just disgruntled.
Wretchard should have opened a thread devoted to the problem of limits before he shipped Whiskey out, with Whiskey as the case in point. Of course it’s his site and he can do as he wishes, but a single discussion that could have perhaps gone on until it reached a consensus would have been preferable to having the issue revisited over many threads. Wretchard had other alternatives as well. Tell Whiskey that if he wanted to contribute he would have to run his comments through an editor, and let the editor report on the resulting submission process. As for the PC charge being the easiest to make, that doesn’t mean it’s false. Certainly, the manner in which the BC community learned of Whiskey’s departure supports dark interpretations.
Yea, Buddy, hope someone would have one mercifully around when I need one.
ridgerunner/136
I believe you are mistaken about challenging Whiskey. Several of us did, in the fashion you describe. Anton, Tcobb amongst others if my memory serves well. Based on his ignoring the challenges, my conclusion was then that he is very “focused”.
An excellent analogy 2×4. Having been there and having absorbed criticisms of you two the high school approach to social and political forums is what we need to get America past. It is important though to consider that this is the level of emotionally based engagement in what should be political analysis we are dealing with. It can happen with people on either side of the big political divide. Just because someone says that they like Sarah Palin you cannot assume that their judgments will be either reliable or not on other matters. Now this may be seen as an iteration of a whiskey thesis or as a one off in that people do act out for personal reasons or as a datum for a larger argument of some less despairing theory regarding modern culture and education and the impact on personal values and reasoning of young people.
My biggest criticisms with whiskey were;
1. he was bad for the blog for reasons that wws and you both set forth,
2. his negativity was so relentless as to leave no room for growth or hope.
Regarding this little episode I have adjusted my Facebook “Friends” list. What voices we listen to and who we share our precious time with matters. My hope is that I remain worth your time.
To be blogged under the title “Reliable Voices.”
twobyfour @ 138,
Many people challenged Whiskey about the validity of his descriptive viewpoint. Did anyone challenge him to post a prescriptive proposal? That is what I don’t recall seeing.
134. twobyfour & 135. buddy larsen
With apologies to Lee Dorsey’s “Working In A Coal Mine” (and a nod to Devo – their styling of it better fits this subject… /g):
“Sittin’ here online, going down, down, down
Working here online, whoop, about to slip down…”
“Five o’clock in the morning, I’m still sittin’ here logged on
Lord I am so tired, how long can this go on?”
“Cause I’m sittin’ here online, going down, down, down
Working here online, whoop, about to slip down…”
“Whiskey sometimes was funny, spewing cant by the ton
But despite how we all got here, I’m no longer having fun”
“I’m just sittin’ here online, going down, down, down
Working here online, whoop, about to slip down…”
“Lord I am so tired, how long can this go on?”
ridge, it doesn’t mean it’s false, nor does it mean it’s true. PC is an orthodoxy –the PC we decry is totalist political but the method is to short-circuit having to rassle with foggy cases and fuzzy rules to indefinite ends.
So, in casting out PC (which here amounts to hollering at wretchard, “Let’s you and him fight!”), don’t we also have to cast out reflexive anti-PC orthodoxy? –which also short-circuits having to rassle with foggy cases and fuzzy rules to indefinite ends?
***
tharkun –LOL –ok so we’re back in the 10th grade fir awhile
What can I say, LotM… I love my fellow man (and woman too!) and willing to help out any time.
[twobyfour fades out]
LOL, tharkun, ever heard of Insomniacs Anonymous?
Though it may be Delayed sleep phase syndrome (DSPS): inability to awaken and fall asleep at socially acceptable times.
Actually, when I decide to sleep, I drop in within a minute and can REM in 5 minutes. So, I am antisocial when it suits me.
http://vodpod.com/watch/3881196-the-watson-report-bp-oil-spill-criminal-negligence-or-deliberate-sabotage-34
for anyone who wants to watch a ‘what happened in the gulfa mexico’ -vid
***
me too, twoby –sleep an hour or two per day for 3 or 4 days running, then bomb out 20 hours (with zombie rest walks to the oak tree out de do) –with in between hypershort hyperdeep sitting up narcoleptic naps –meaning i don’t know about ‘em til they’re over –they seem to work as a substitute for half a nights sleep –yeh it’s antisocial and ya look like shit all the time –but FUN!
Talking about race. Growing up I, like almost every other kid loved to listen to rock. Not the rock like it now of course, but the ol’ Rock and Roll. I and my fellow teen rebels with the slicked back hair with the “duck tail” (if your under fifty you won’t have a clue) and the turned up collar and such, we rebelled against the man as much as our parents and community would allow. Looking back I can see we were all pretend rebels but it was all we had and all West Texas society would or could stomach.
But I developed other musical tastes also. The one man responsible for that was Ray Charles.
In West Texas, race never was a big issue or concern, at least to us teens. Mexicans were just part of our culture and back then I don’t think we even knew the difference between legal or illegal. Another reason I guess is that there weren’t many blacks or actually many other different races around us white, redneck, Texas kids and another big reason was that we were raised to respect others and didn’t even really know about racial tensions or such.
Anyway, when Ray Charles released his famous Country album it was an immediate hit not only around the country but even in West Texas. I remember that we all went out and bought every Ray Charles record we could afford, and we were introduced to a (to us) new, unrealized fantastic wide range of other music.
Of course, Rock and Roll and other Country still played a big part in all our music, but the addition of Ray’s excellent interpretations of other Country singer’s hits was a turning point in most of our music appreciation and general education.
So…..I would like you to listen to this song by Ray Charles on this 4th of July, 2010. A time in all of our lives when we need some gentle but firm reminder of just what it is that we love and what we must protect and preserve.
If you have children or grand children, gather them around you and please listen to this great American and his rendition of:
God Bless America and may God bless you and yours.
Papa Ray
143. twobyfour
Most of us have favorite little sayings and quips we like to use. One of mine has long been “You can often accomplish more with a kind word and a twobyfour than with a kind word alone”.
I have frequently seen the truth of it demonstrated but never actually personified, until now… /g
Virgil X @ 95, 97, 112
Absolutely correct. Thank you.
Whiskey’s fate is an object lesson in something or other; I’m not so sure I really want to know what.
67. Geeze Louise
If the concept of America can NOT be defined independently of racial concerns, then it will not endure.
…..
So give us a concept of America that includes defensible
borders.
PR, that album was one of my high points growing up too –”You are my Sunshine” –with that crazy two note intro –and the Raelettes soaring way up in the rafters –i’m gonna find it if its –hang on –
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8o4os6Um6g
watch margie Hendricks come in at 1:30 with “you told me once dear…”
ridgerunner @ 140:
There was no point in asking for a prescriptive proposal. whiskey’s thesis was that nothing whatsoever could be done to alter the course of impending doom. Period. End of story. Biology (skin color & ovaries, mostly) had already written the last chapter of our demise. That kind of fatalism, by definition, excludes prescriptive proposals.
His fatalism (or, as KY puts it, Darwinian materialism) was itself logically unsustainable insofar as it assumed an omniscient POV that he did not, in reality, possess. And several people challenged him on this level as well. None of this made any difference. Ever.
It’s one thing to say, “Here’s what I see all around me” (descriptive). It’s quite another to say, “Here’s where it’s all headed” (predictive). Extrapolating and interpreting one set of data points, while completely ignoring loads of other data points that don’t “fit the narrative,” is, as I said above, poor methodology. When a person making an assertion moves from the descriptive to the predictive, and members of the audience point out his poor methodology, but he never, ever, backs off from the predictive claims, esp. the dire and imminent kind, why is it then incumbent upon the audience to keep indulging him?
I honestly think it wasn’t the descriptive portions of whiskey’s posts that people objected to so much as it was the predictive passages (and there were many). At a certain point you realize you are dealing with someone who has a completely closed information loop. Who is completely wedded to & invested in, for whatever pscyhological/emotional reasons, their predictions as such.
A person genuinely concerned about the actual outcome, as opposed to merely *calling* the outcome, pays more attention to the integrity of their data & methodology than they do to hammering on predictions. The prediction-obsessed personality OTOH should, in and of itself, be a red flag to the audience. Unless one is God, one is working from an incomplete data set.
rwe @ 79: I’d never heard of a 1980′s nuke rocket. did it have any new technology?
hdgreen @ 88: You never read Niven & Pournelle’s “Footfall”? Not to ruin the story, but the human race ends up building one secretly to save the day!
“Futurists” have outlined dozens of perhaps workable plans for boostrapping into space. Just orbiting the space shuttle’s hydrogen launch tank for integration in a space station, is perhaps the easist step, 10x the internal volume. Settle and ride comets and asteroids for space and raw materials. Orbital solar for immediate ROI on space.
Non-vertical launch doesn’t decrease the total energy needed to orbit, but it probably allows something safer and more gradual than current boosters.
All of our technology is miles better now than in 1960, how hard would it *be* to build a new technology rocket equivalent to the Saturn 5, for the short term?
–
So, in these misbegotten times should we be “wasting” money on space? Well, the orbital solar is an immediate reason, Japan has realized this and moved it to the top of their list, such as it is. And, we need to build and maintain our technological infrastructure, here in the US, give kids a reason to study math and science, pay them WELL to practice it, and for the spinoffs, and for the national defense. Of all the threats to the US, the outsourcing of jobs and manufacturing, the importing of cheap labor even for science, has driven a wedge between our kids, our schools, our population, and our culture – and science. There is not a more serious – and less visible – threat to our SURVIVAL than this.
The demon, laughs.
“If we are, at bottom, only soulless blobs of matter, why does he get so worked up over it all?”
I always saw Whiskey as making a cry for help. I base that on the simple fact that BC isn’t the sort of place where bigots congregate. The vast majority of posters here are of the open-minded type. Whiskey is smart enough to know that he needs help and he won’t get it at a typical site for bigots. Racist and bigot ARE NOT synonymous. Whiskey did show signs of both.
Enough about Whiskey, we have already burned enough BW on him. I will just agree to disagree with those that wanted him banned. My disagreement is based on personal fear. Once the banning starts, where does it stop? Which non-PC opinion will be next?
Meanwhile, back at the flying car, or drivable airplane…..
No money in it. Ultralights are cheaper and much more practical. Sort of like the car/boat from a few years back. I don’t think sales ever hit double digits.
And as Berry and the Liberals ( a garage band?) are about to learn, If it isn’t cost effective, it won’t work. Putting billions into solar panels is great so long as the sun shines. A little cloud and it becomes obvious what a truly bad idea it is.
Just as our car/plane cannot compete with the ultralight, solar cannot compete with conventional power generation. As much as the 4th world hates it, competition is here, it has always been here, it will always be here. Like terrorism, it will not stop because some nutter in San Francisco wants it to go away.
Tying together several of the threads here:
Alexis makes a good point that mediating institutions still exist. True; the question is whether, once they reach a certain scale, the state either squashes them or takes them over. bogie wheel’s excellent discourse on Tocqueville makes just this point – there has to be something between the citizenry and the leaders. It can be a hierarchy of self-organizing, independent, free associations, or it can be a state-created, politically-driven, corrupt bureaucracy.
I have a friend who used to work as a congressional aide in Washington. Every week, a woman in the district would call to complain that the trash collector had not put her trash can back on the curb. Every week. Two thoughts on this anecdote:
The point here (and it’s a bit of a silly example, but it illustrates the incentives) is that when the mediating institution is stripped out, the incentive is for rules to get passed and bureaucracies to be created to enforce those rules.
This situation leads to an increasing enfeeblement of the citizenry, a dependence upon the state. And that is a major problem for a democratic republic.
Now in the case of Whiskey’s departure, what we see is a mediating institution at work. Comment moderation by a blog owner is just such an institution. But, since it is not the state, everyone is free to express their opinions on the matter, and take their business elsewhere. The state, on the other hand, is a monopoly and the bureaucracy has a vested interest (along with its co-dependents like the unions and the lobbyists) in eliminating any competitive space – see Education, America, K-12, Post-War Era.
In the case of space, we see a very similar effect at play. The state has dominated space exploration for decades. They have made competition difficult and expensive. So the question is whether the state’s waning interest in spaceflight will mean the end of American ambitions in outer space, or whether it will free up entrepreneurs and dreamers to fill the newly-created void.
The reality is that not only is there no such thing as “too big to fail,” but too big always fails. It’s only a matter of when and how.
Those of us working for systemic change realize this, and are working to pull authority back from the Federal to the states, where at least a modicum of competition exists. In a sense, the only way to preserve the continued growth of America for the next 100 years is to assure the shrinkage of the Federal Government.
And, in a final linkage, consider that one of the biggest impediments to the devolution process is the connection between “States Rights” and “Institutionalized Racism.” When we paint the world in purely racial terms, then, we actually undermine our ability to devolve power to states because, once and not that long ago, “States RIghts” were code words for “Keep Power With Whitey.”
President Obama and I disagree on many, many things, but when he says we have to move beyond race, he’s right. We need to do this to preserve our nation. And to keep Washington DC from taking us down the road to ruin. Including, ironically, his profligate and ideologically-driven Administration.
Happy Fourth of July!
L3
As a trivially-small contribution to the remembrance of Independence Day, I have to second Virgil Xenophon @ 112 in his critique of wws @ 105.
wws wrote, inter alia: “Whiskey’s rants made this blog look like a hangout for white supremacists”
That, wws, is pure empty-headed Political Correctness. It has no place in intelligent discourse, and speaks volumes about the kind of person who would make such a dumb remark.
Where are the “white supremacists”? They are a favorite of the distorted & brain-dead lame-stream media, but do they even exist? In the course of my life, I have met English supremacists, black supremacists, Asian supremacists, Arab supremacists, Russian supremacists — but never a white supremacist. (The English & Russian supremacists were just as willing to look down on the French as on the Africans).
Political Correctness is corrosive to human society and totally unacceptable. It must be resisted everywhere. And you, wws, are guilty of inventing bogeymen to justify your disgusting Political Correctness.
It is worth remembering that signing a piece of paper did not win independence for the young United States. That took years of war, deep privation, and even the intervention of the French. Eliminating brain-dead, self-satisfied, immoral Political Correctness from human discourse may turn out to be just as costly.
Papa Ray -
I’ve long been of the opinion that country music & jazz/soul/blues/gospel (sorry to lump the last four, but it was for purposes of setting off from the first) were quite natural cousins: Southern roots, and a delight in the downbeat. Crossover artists between these genres — and Ray Charles was one of the best if not THE best crossover (though Elvis was no sloucher at artfully blending the styles) — seemed therefore a pretty comfortable fit. Kevin Eubanks on the Tonight Show once kiddingly remarked about a country band playing the “music of my people” … funny at first take, yes, but it would be nice if people could look beyond the joke & grasp the truth therein.
This point, the coexistence of multiple native musical styles in the South, is related to my personal theory of why the South routinely produces so many excellent musicians. But I will leave this item for another day.
Happy Independence Day, America. God help us to see many more.
**************
My Fourth of July musical offering:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAONYTMf2pk
Okay, so it’s not country or soul, but it’s ABOUT both country and soul. As Ms. Anderson so beautifully sings and illustrates: “from every mountainside, let FREEDOM ring.”
Amen, sister.
LIFOTM@138–bogie wheel@151
I would only point out that Churchill was “relentless” in his strident prognostications to an audience who regarded his voice as needlessly unsettling chances for peace and the maintaince of the social order, and that most of the generally accepted/recognized “data-points” regarding the West’s military capacity and ability to resist a resurgent Germany went against the facts as Churchill saw them. And as history proved and we all know, Churchill was proved correct. Of course Churchill proffered many prescriptive solutions to the dilemma which confronted England and the West, while Whiskey does not. But I would only opine that it is often enough to be Paul Revere. Revere offered no “solutions” either–nothing but a one note–”The British Are Coming!”–warning, but he is forever lionized and his place in history no less secure for that. And his country grateful for his efforts.
bogie wheel @ 151,
I agree with most of what you wrote, but I don’t think it was ever put to Whiskey directly and that clearly.
whiskey, what is all this whiskey?
I’d stopped reading his rants long before he departed.
To mostly repeat what I said at least once before:
Running a public blog, or any discussion, has its own imperatives. Whiskey couldn’t buy a ticket to the symphony, stand up in the middle of the performance and start enlightening the crowd without someone or other suggesting he not do so at that place and time, pretty much no matter the content of his perorations. I liked his general perspective, but often found him wildly speculative (and often certainly, laughably wrong) mostly due to overgeneralizations. Fun stuff and in some part valuable, but he needs his own forum. Which he has. So why the fuss?
virgil xenophon @ 157:
But I would only opine that it is often enough to be Paul Revere. Revere offered no “solutions” either–nothing but a one note–”The British Are Coming!”–warning, but he is forever lionized and his place in history no less secure for that.
Emphatically not true, sir! The popular remembrance of Paul Revere’s ride is that he called out *two* things: “The British are coming!” AND “To arms! To arms!”
A description and a prescription. We’re being marched on. Now here’s what you need to do about it.
whiskey’s version would be: “The British are coming! Too late! We’re all screwed!”
See the difference?
bogie wheel #109:
There is a book out on the subject of how the new lifetsyles promoted by the rich or even by the merely comfortably safe middle class kids was disasterous to the people in the lower socioeconomic levels: “The Dream and The Nightmare: The 60′s Legacy to the Underclass” by Dr. Myron Magnet.
Josh #152:
The program was classified (I still will not say the code name and if Eggplant does Mulder and Scully will no doubt show up at his door) and when it became unclassified was noted only in some areas in DC. One of the more baffling aspects was that there was one congressman and some “scientists” that were dead set on not only killing the program but in excoriating anyone who even thought about it. The engine would have used hydrogen as the reaction mass and the only way we would have used it would have been in orbit.
Eggplant: The Saturn 5 was both too large and too small to be useful for anything past Apollo. We could have launched large LEO payloads with TIIIC and plugged them together. My vision of on-orbit assembly is not guys in spacesuits building a erector set but things that unfold, deploy, and plug together. Zenith Star was supposed to do that.
Finally relative to Whiskey, I at most skimmmed over his stuff. It was pretty much a case of the same thing over and over but he did have a few gems in there on occasion. And whatever his shortcomings he was nowhere near as bad as C4, who was not only a one-idea poster but attacked not just people’s ideas but the people themselves.
Boy, this thread has been active since I was here last night.
79. RWE
SDI began development of a nuclear rocket engine in the 80’s It was so simple it could not fail to work and so safe before launch you could haul it to the pad in the back of a pickup truck.
That reminds me of one of my favorite launch pad photos. I love the juxtaposition of an ol’ pickup truck in front of a Futuristic Space Rocket. It looks like a scene Ray Bradbury would have described. (I know, it was an Atlas ICBM, but it was the newest and biggest rocket we had at the time.)
84. erc rodson
I wonder whether it would be feasible to find a small near-Earth asteroid, attach an ion engine to it, slowly alter its orbit until it reaches one of the Lagrange points, and then mine it for building materials. Then again, it would probably be easier to just get the material from the Moon. I do think that an interplanetary craft would have to be built in space and not on the Moon’s surface, though. So you would still need an orbiting space station/manufacturing facility.
94. bogie wheel:
Great comment about the 1950s–and today.
99. A Nobody
I read O’Neill’s book back in the 70s when I was a teenager and was very inspired. But not enough to become an engineer, alas.
What would be an optimum orbiting altitude for a space station? It would have to be high enough so its orbit wouldn’t decay, but not so high that it would make ferrying crew members back and forth to Earth too expensive.
106. Eggplant
I’ve never heard of the Kevlar bag idea before. That sounds great! As you say, it would protect the workers from the vacuum and micrometeroids, but what about temperature extremes and solar radiation? Maybe they could position a radiation shield outside the bag in front of the Sun.
I agree with you about discarding the Saturn V. After all the expense and hard work developing it, it was simply tossed aside. What a waste. I’ve read that there was an unmanned Earth-orbital cargo version on the drawing board which would have been very useful in building space stations. I’ve often wondered whether there was any resentment in the U.S. government or military over the fact that von Braun and his team had come from Nazi Germany. Once the Moon was reached, they had outlived their usefulness to the U.S.
(I just refreshed the page before posting and see that RWE has already addressed the Saturn V post-Apollo.)
—
I’ve also read the comments about Whiskey, and I don’t have anything to add other than I found much of what he said thought-provoking, he was very repetitive, and I’m sorry he’s gone. Still, this is Wretchard’s place, and it’s his call. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a “banned” member’s blog linked at the site from which he was evicted. That’s remarkable.
buddy larsen@132-ridgerunner@136/
EVERYTHING in life is a slippery slope, varying only in angle/degree of slope, degree of slipperiness and the available hand-holds/type of cleated-footwear or no available while negotiating any particular travail. Which is why politics is at base an art and not a “science.” To say that Whiskey and child-molesters are on the same continuum and “where do we stop” is a straw man argument. We continually make such discriminating choices all the time. Such artful distinctions are the choices we constantly make when we enter into collective social conversation about the human condition. NOBODY says: “All or nothing” when discussing almost ANY topic. The topic of what constitutes obscenity being el numero uno case in point. To say that if one allows Whiskey a voice one must allow proponents of child-molesting theirs too is a fatuous remark disingenuous at best and unworthy of the subject at hand.
I am reminded of the remark Orwell once made in Parliament immediately post-war when the subject of Japanese war atrocities was being brought up to a Parliament and war-weary public who wanted to wash their hands of anything having to do with the war by a particularly blowhard MP to whom no one paid any attention anyway. In his defense Orwell arose and said: “What you have to understand is that these things actually happened, DESPITE the fact that Lord Fitzroy says they happened!”
Bogie thanks for the link, I had never seen it before. Here is one from more contemporary times, one that I had the good fortune to be in the audience:
“Amanda singing My County Tis of Thee, LaPorte Symphony”
I was visiting the parents of one of my great buds who never made it back. My recent visit was a surprise and they were going to this event that night. Of course they invited me and I reluctantly went along. I am not the best person to be around sometimes and am not receptive to public gatherings. I was/am sometimes too deep into guilt, self pity and drink.
Anyway, I later found this clip of the event and would like to share it. Even I, who was so bitter and guilt ridden and so messed up that it took me years to recover, I was moved by this wonderful rendition in the great state of Indiana of this heartfelt expression of our great Republic.
I tried to hold it in, but I sobbed and had to leave the auditorium, but stood in the hall listening and wishing my friends were there with me, in their country that they loved and died for.
It was an illuminating beacon, for a brief moment, in my self created dark world, that I am so hard trying to escape from.
We desperately need such a beacon now.
Papa Ray
Bob@77: my mind has simply been overwhelmed by the image of Rev Wright desperately seeking his inner Peggy Noonan.
As well it should
(FWIW, the comedic image came from several places one of which is The Rock Star Rhetoric – the kind that creates multiple wave action responses in crowds. Discovered it first in the church of my youth. Didn’t like it then – even less now.
Then, there’s the rose by any name idea. We are still taught – and it is still true – that presentation can overwhelm if not substitute for content. Some here have argued that the content of Whiskey’s rants were not inciteful let alone offensive. That readers were confused by the self-assurance of his prose. I am not confused.
Third, everything I have observed over – say the last thirty years as an adult – has convinced me that the race-gender-ethnicity thema so tightly integrated into a borderline theory of socio-cultural evolution is wrong at it’s very core.
Last, one generational attribute that many, here especially, miss is that the coming (and some of the present) generations are being raised right and will do better. I am sick of hearing of The Greatest Generation. Greater Ones are coming.)
tbf: Sometimes I wonder if we here aren’t just an echo chamber of old geezers.
Nah, ya got some post-modern over-the-hill “whining feminists” who still dress with a sense of extremely well honed style thank you very much that does not include tie-dyed anything or excessive neck wear dangles.
Rules ultimately are made to modify behaviors. The civil contract between an individual and a group is intended to facilitate Is it not the prerogative of a group to attempt to modify or at the very least to limit communications that are by agreement offensive to the group. The individual has no right to impose offensively but is welcome to defend or persuade within the framework of community standards, so long as those standards are not a blatant attempt to restrain only that one individual and so long as the standards allow all who which the opportunity to communicate.
My question, in situations where the ability of an individual to learn and modify their behaviors or adapt their communication to meet the approval of the community, is any violation of rights that occurred during the learning process something to be pursued with vigor or does society in the guise of the court officers have the discretion to cry no foul, even when harm has occured.
What then is the difference between Whiskey and the New Black Panthers? The NBP Acted on their ideas, pure and simple, taking their expressions to a level that society ought not tolerate. Whiskey did not act, as near as I can tell, but neither did he attempt to moderate his expression in delivering his message. In one case it is Whiskey’s choice of expression, in the other it is an imposition of an individuals will. One is a criminal act against society, the other merely a debatable choice in a private place.
Josh@152
hdgreen @ 88: You never read Niven & Pournelle’s “Footfall”? Not to ruin the story, but the human race ends up building one secretly to save the day!
I wrote a draft screenplay about 15 years ago where the planet was attacked by a death star! We didn’t realize at first what was going on because the death star came at night and snuck up behind the moon. They were Lizoid creatures and sent down one of their ships which hovered over Manhattan. The next day they got 8 million double parking tickets and a visit from the health inspector. They was lucky they weren’t towed.
They then bought property in the desert and built a settlement. It was declared a wet land. At the court hearing trilobites and petrified catkins were entered into evidence. They won that one (after paying huge legal fees and hiring lobbyists). Then a bunch of Arbs showed up and claimed they lived their first. Twenty-six UN resolutions later the Lizoids decided to leave the planet.
Actually, the Lizoids weren’t bad sorts, more misunderstood than anything. You see, they had simply run low on supplies and were looking for another planet to totally trash. Problem was, they didn’t find humans very palatable. But their real problem was low self esteem. You could tell right off cause they got addicted to ho-ho’s and Little Debbie snacks (Don’t even let them near moon pies!).
The reason this is all on topic, though, is at the end of the story we give them all of earth’s 4,384,631 nuclear weapons (every last one of them) — so as to help them get “The Death Star” back up to speed by dropping them out the back and blowing them up.
Also, to help them with their self esteem problems we send along therapist, self-help gurus, financial advisers and social workers — about 120 million in number. And the entire UN bureaucracy and diplomatic corps. Not that I want to ruin the ending (how could I?), but the whole lot of them head off to that star Alpha, ah, Alpha…Sorry, I’m bad with names.
Bob@92, I believe I read the article in the New Yorker around 1964 and Freeman Dyson may well have been the subject. If he was, it would have been the first time I heard of him, though not the last.
bogie wheel@160/
Touche! I was deficit in my historical memory–caused either by lack of proper education, early onset of Alzheimers, or the “mass quantities” of Barbancourt 5-Star “Rhum” I have been consuming. Take your pick–probably all three. But you DO bring up an interesting psychological/moral point. Consider this: You are the Capt of an airliner full of passengers flying the Pacific route to Japan-Aus-whatever–at an alt of 35,000′. It is 3am and almost all the pax are asleep. Due to unrepairable fuel flow problems all engines flame-out. You calculate it will take 35 minutes to glide/descend before you inevitably hit the water. Plus your controls have malfunctioned such that any attempt to ditch would be impossible. Everyone is headed to their inevitable doom. (They are “screwed”) Now, the quandry: Does one wake the passengers and let them spend the last minutes of their lives in sheer terror even as they pray and scribble last notes to their loved ones–or does one let them continue to sleep the undisturbed sleep of the innocent until moment of impact?
I have to laugh and cry at the same time. 91% of African Americans approve of the President who refuses to secure the border over which daily come thousands who, unlike most Caucasian Americans, have no shared history with AA’s and who are ethnically cleansing AA’s from parts of Los Angeles. And the guy who harped on these mega-demographic events that will shape the future of the country is the one who is deemed a crazy and a dangerous liability.
“The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers”. – (Act IV, Scene II).
http://www.enotes.com/shakespeare-quotes/lets-kill-all-lawyers/print
When the majority of our betters are lawyers, we get to the point that prior to going to the outhouse, you need to get permission.
+++++++++
In regards to whiskey, I had wondered what happened to him, checked his blog on occasion and did not see anything updated in quite a while. There is nothing that prevents him from making comments on his own blog relating to the BC.
++++++++
My own concerns have been for the safety of the US and not-so free world. I have asked for suggestions of how we can avert, what I see as, a coming war in the next 6mos.
How do we take back our country, when the Washington czars refuse to honor elections and leave – moon-bat alert.
Happy 4th to all!
Happy Fourth of July, everyone!
And lots of thanks to Wretchard for hosting a place where we can shout “Free Speech” in a crowded fire…
Josh @ 152- It wouldn’t be too difficult to build a similarly large and powerful design as the Saturn V, but our best bet at the moment involves cheaper designs like the Falcon IX, in-space assembly of components, and an LEO “fueling station” to provide the additional propellant needed. Or at least, the best bet as I can see it.
Rosinante @ 153- that’s where space solar power becomes important. Generation in space (as I briefly touched on in #99, and expanded upon in O’Neill and other’s writing) overcomes that issue, and the use of in situ materials avoids the expensive lift costs. Power beaming is already proven (microwave, at least- the laser concept still needs work), and the Japanese are planning a prototype station. Manufacture in space will use a lot of telepresense and robotics, but even at a slower pace it can be made affordable.
RWE @ 161
That design sounds similar to Bussard’s proposal for a Nuclear Thermal Rocket, NERVA, and a bit like Project Timberwind (though Timberwind was on a much less well-developed line). It is very unfortunate that it was cut, as the potential for exploration and development was so great with a design like that.
rickl @ 162
The optimum orbit would be at one of the Lagrange points- a place where Earth and the Moon’s gravitational effects tend to cancel each other out, so that the station is neither pulled towards the Earth or the Moon. Any object at that point “…with the correct initial location and velocity would stay forever”. The L5 point is in particular an important one, as it is never blocked by the Earth or Moon from sunlight.
LEO is cheaper to get to, but the difficulty with LEO is that other than that it isn’t all that useful for a station. It’s expensive to keep a station there, and there are limits to the utility of a station being there. The better solution is to have a fueling station at LEO, so our craft can top up the tanks and continue on to the L5 station.
The big problem with Space Solar Power is the initial cost. Convincing someone with money to put the outlay of cash out is hard. Yes, it is clean. Yes, it will produce inexpensive power over the lifetime of the project, and it will also make further work in space much less expensive (as an example- we could use mass drivers to propel spacecraft, and the mass drivers could be powered by our Solar Power Stations), and yes, it will provide good jobs. The problem is that initial launch costs are expensive, and looking at my bank account, I think I can probably cover the cost of maybe a bolt or two.
Happy Independance day
don’t thread on wws, he is my witted Texan lawer
Whiskey for president !
He must have some good ideas to save the world from bankrupty and from oil spoiling
http://news.goldseek.com/GoldSeek/1278088963.php
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_thermal_rocket
Hmm, … not as easy as one might hope, not to mention dirty.
But when I mentioned “fission batteries”, relatively new nuclear tech, creating short-lived fissionable isotopes. Find one with a half-life of a few hours to a few days, and you could use some of the dirtier designs even for ground-launch.
Or wait for a fusion rocket design that Niven sort of waves his hands at for asteroid miner’s craft, also Motie space technology, presumably deuterium/tritium, strong magnetic fields, additional hydrogen or other (water) mass, and maybe a small fission/neutron igniter.
I’d spend some real NASA money on such ideas.
Too bad about Whiskey. He showed that racism is in our genes and why. A group with a strong self-identity will impose itself (and its genes) on a group lacking such strength. That is also part of the biological imperative behind religion.
Religious intolerance and racism exist, and have always existed, because they WIN and they WORK! A strong civilization can offer a better deal but since civilization is a human cultural (ie mental) construct, it is fragile and ephemeral.
Whiskey could be overly strident and Wretchard needs to ensure that his efforts are not shut down or dismissed due to one fringe commenter. It’s a tactical decision.
As to making space pay, most proposals ignore basic economics and finance, specifically, the cost of money. If one makes a huge capital investment, it has to earn a rate of return competitive with alternate investments. In a perfect world, the project with the highest rate of return gets the allocation of limited capital.
Most schemes ignore the mortgage as part of the fixed costs of the project. Those are usually the killers.
For the record I have asked LOTM several times to remove a posting from his blog wherein he cites my real name. As you all know his blog consists of his comments on websites such as this; for some reason he decided to repost a comment he made on a FB status update of mine. The title being “Comment on “Stephanie *Real Last Name*s Facebook.” I do not appreciate that he refused to remove this from his blog when I asked or at least remove my real name, nor do I see how someone who is so obsessed with his own personal privacy on the web can so flagrantly violate someone else’s. My FB is private so that no one googling me can know I even have a FB, and now when my real name is googled, one of the first hits is LOTM’s blog. Not only that but the nature of the comments alludes to my views on the Catholic church, so anyone googling my name for a job or such will have an insight into my viewpoints on religion. They could also follow LOTM to the BC and see my real name I post under and make further assumptions on my character.
LOTM has violated my privacy on the internet when I helped him in the past find work and was nothing but kind to him. He has shown up to a job I work at unannounced- why a 50 something man thinks it’s appropriate to come calling for me at a bar for 20 somethings, I have no idea, but it certainly could not have left a good impression on the people I worked with when a senior citizen comes looking for me at a frat bar- I was not asked back. I do not even know LOTM’s real last name.
I apologize to anyone who feels this is a private feud being broadcast to the non-interested public. On the contrary I feel it is important that the character of Whiskey’s detractor be made known since it is essentially Whiskey’s character on a blog that got him censored- not any real violation of Pajama Media’s commenting terms. Someone else pointed out that they would rather Whiskey have been defeated on ideological grounds rather than political-and that is why this site is now on the same level of Gawker. People can gang up on someone who gets more attention than them behind that person’s back and have them silenced.
I will continue to read and comment on the BC as I see fit, but I am disappointed that this site has succumbed to the left’s methodology of censorship. This blog now lacks its most original and boldest voice. I hope Whiskey that you read this statement as a plea for you to continue to air your viewpoint on your own blog; at least YOU come up with original material there. And for the people who say he does nothing but inject pop culture references with no credentials behind them, you all have no problem when people like LOTM post links to movies and such from 50 something years ago as evidence of whatever point they are making. The pop culture of your youth is relevant but criticizing that of today’s is not?
MC I was merely using you as an example of someone who made personal attacks on me when you did not like what I had to say, and instead of my supposed friend LOTM mediating the situation in the forum, nothing was done to help us find common ground and cease the personal insults. I do have the right to defend my opinions by counteracting personal attacks that detract from my meaning, but I’m not losing sleep over what is lost intranslation. LOTM seemed to originally take offense that Whiskey characterized him as a coward, and I made the effort to counteract that opinion by saying from what I know of him LOTM is more of a peacenik than a wuss. By not defending himself and going to Wretchard, as well as asking people like myself to go to Wretchard to deal with his offense at this characterization, LOTM only proved Whiskey right. And he further cemented this image when in the last two threads people were asking who it was who talked to W, and LOTM did not come out and state plainly that he had done this.
GL: If the concept of America can NOT be defined independently of racial concerns, then it will not endure.
C@149: So give us a concept of America that includes defensible borders.
OK Charles, I’ll bite, just to walk away from the Whiskey hangover.
Three prongs: economic stability, physical security, and national pride. I describe it as a (post-) modern Jacksonianism.
I expect you will draw each back into a racial/ethnic context, but I submit that is not required.
Papa Ray @ 164: went to the link and cried a bit. Not “despite” the hokey hand-held quality and the small-town gym thing. BECAUSE of them. That is America singing. Thanks, man.
Dang, Stephanie, I thought I let it all hang out.
You take the cake.
God bless you and keep you sane and allow you understanding and tolerance.
Life is too short, take it from an ol’ man.
Papa Ray
From W’s original post: Along with the other crazy old white man’s ideas, we’ve also purged the idea of Progress; already returned to the ancient idea that the natural state of the world is continuous decline. Entropy.
This relates to one of the most vexing dilemmas conservatives face: That America has already changed so much, in so many different ways, from the America that the Founding Fathers knew that there’s almost nothing left for conservatives to, well, conserve. As I’ve pointed out before, there’s virtually no one left alive in America who has any firsthand memory of what it’s like to actually live in a nation without a massive and ever-growing federal government (i.e. before the advent of Prohibition and the New Deal; and I do realize that even that demarcation point is questionable) – and absolutely no one alive today with living memory of the USA’s formative years. Historical knowledge of American heritage is one thing; actually living through it is something else altogether.
Conservatives often lament that their fellow Americans have forgotten what liberty means, or what its value is. I disagree; after all, you can’t forget something you never really knew in the first place. And on that admittedly ironic note, I wish everyone here a great Independence Day. And that includes Whiskey too.
Well..We, like millions of other Americans are celebrating our Republic’s birthday, I started smoking meat at dark thirty this AM, have grilling, salad making and such waiting and making sure my kids have a great time today.
I leave you with these wise words:
Have a great day and remember to tell everyone how much you love them. One day, you will not be able to.
God Bless America and you and yours.
Papa Ray
Thanks Papa Ray. Don’t worry about me. Over and out.
Papa Ray #164
I also thank you for the link. And here’s one in return: Gerard at American Digest has posted a medley of music clips for celebrating Independence Day, from Baxter Black talking about why he’s lucky to be American, through a clip of Elvis, “Shenandoah,” “Dixie,” “Rally ‘Round the Flag,” “America the Beautiful,” the theme from “Blackhawk Down” and many more, finishing with the clip of the Tea Party Marine veteran singing the last stanza of our national Anthem. After you and your kids have your well-deserved good time, you can listen to these– and if they bring tears, don’t feel bad. My dad, who was a WWII vet, always teared up at hometown celebrations of the Fourth.
http://americandigest.org/mt-archives/american_studies/o_beautiful_a_concert_for.php#012799
PS. I had to smile about your reference to “Duck Tail” haircuts– my dad, God bless him, always called them “D.A.” cuts, the “A” referring to a less polite synonym for that part of the duck. Did any of your West Texas friends ever wear a “Don Eagle” cut? I can remember when that was a fad among small-town Pennsylvania guys.
154. Leo Linbeck III
President Obama and I disagree on many, many things, but when he says we have to move beyond race, he’s right.
Just please don’t forget, when you say it you sincerely mean it. When he says it, he’s lying.
That said, I hope you and yours have a safe and wonderful Independence Day!
Whitehall @ 175: As to making space pay, most proposals ignore basic economics and finance, specifically, the cost of money. If one makes a huge capital investment, it has to earn a rate of return competitive with alternate investments. In a perfect world, the project with the highest rate of return gets the allocation of limited capital.
Absolutely. That’s why we must do lift technology first, to dramatically reduce the cost of getting a pound to orbit. That’s why the current ISS is a joke, a money-hole in space.
HOWEVER, it may be that space solar could pay for itself even with current lift technology. The technological challenges and risks to doing it on a small scale right now are modest. It might take a century incremental development to get durability, reliability, and efficiency all up to where the direct economic advantages are clear, but the lack of negative environmental damage is its biggest benefit and hard to quantify monetarily.
It will have to survive solar storms, too, but so far our various satellites seem to be getting by on those regards, so I gather this is manageable.
Our first tiny step towards the Dyson sphere – a sphere that completely surrounds a star to capture all of its energy!
The only thing better than space solar *might* be fusion, but we might be able to survive a millenium on solar before we find a way to make fusion work. Hey, fusion already works great – on the sun.
Stephanie @ 176,
Bless you, lady, for telling us the real story. As for your privacy, see an attorney. One phone call from him will probably solve the problem.
Josh @ 185: “it may be that space solar could pay for itself even with current lift technology”
And if it can pay for itself, let’s just get governments & regulators & lawyers out the way and get on with it.
English investors just about bankrupted their country in the early 1700s with the South Sea Bubble. Scottish investors succeeded in bankrupting their entire country in the late 1600s with the Darien colony. Let’s give modern investors a chance to risk all on an orbiting satellite beaming a highly-concentrated stream of power back to a single point on the surface of the planet.
More seriously, isn’t it amazing what we will consider rather than the existing technology of proven scaleable nuclear fission, with known fuel supplies enough to power the entire human race at First World standards for between one & two millenia!
Papa Ray (#146):
That’s one of my favorite renditions.
Other Independence Day offerings:
Elvis Presley performing An American Trilogy.
Marvin Gaye’s famous performance of the Star Spangled Banner (not for the purists).
(I never cease to be amused by jaunty renditions of “John Brown’s body lies a-moulderin’ in the grave”.)
Hdgreene: Also, to help them with their self esteem problems we send along therapist, self-help gurus, financial advisers and social workers — about 120 million in number. And the entire UN bureaucracy and diplomatic corps.
Where are them Lizoids? Sounds like a plan!
Wait! … No lawyers and politicos?
169. ridgerunner
I have to laugh and cry at the same time. 91% of African Americans approve of the President who refuses to secure the border over which daily come thousands who, unlike most Caucasian Americans, have no shared history with AA’s and who are ethnically cleansing AA’s from parts of Los Angeles. And the guy who harped on these mega-demographic events that will shape the future of the country is the one who is deemed a crazy and a dangerous liability.
…………
Its also the case that if these demographic/border issues take down the USA–they will take down Israel–because US foreign policy will come to look more like that of Mexico and be as influential. So the guys who took down Whiskey are the greatest enemies of blacks and Israel.
Joshua/180, a valid point, but a bit abstracted in absolute terms.
The Founding Fathers envisioned that there would be a “drift” that you describe. Thus they framed the foundation in terms that were designed to leave the foundation resistant to weathering and fashions.
That is what is there to conserve. Notice that the proglodytes want to reframe the foundation in terms of “living constitution”, which is another way of saying they want to trash-can it.
July 4th — Happy “Presbyterian Rebellion” Day!
CALVINISM IN AMERICA
Charles/190
I think that your causality chain is a bit … what’s the word … contrived.
Today’s National Church a Sorry Excuse for defining deviancy (and most everything else) down.
A Nobody @ 172:
Photon power beaming has been demonstrated: but it’s expensive compared to other technologies for atmospheric aircraft. Southwest Research Institute did an experiment with a electrically powered mylar balloon with tiltable solar cells the transparent envelope! (Pretty clever!) There’s a video on the NASA website showing a PV powered airplane flying around a inside a hanger down at Edward AFB powered by a searchlight. True, these aren’t laser applications, but photons are photons, whether they are synchronous or not. The reason to go laser power beaming rather than microwaves is less beam spread, so greater range for the same power density. Unfortunately, laser power beaming seems to be an answer in search of a problem at this point.
Yup, the LaGrange points avoid the problem of needing reaction mass to maintain a stable orbital position, but I believe that our experience with the ISS, inter alia, shows that working in freefall is a lot harder than working in some gravity. And, in light gravity, you don’t have to tether all your stuff so you don’t lose it when you let go of it. I do like the big balloon manufacturing facility in space idea, though, and you could certainly grid it off with filaments so that you could get around inside it “hand over hand”. What ho! Let a thousand ideas contend!
Josh, Whitehall, Kinaudrach:
You are all correct. Space power and space industries and space travel to the outer System would all be wonderful if we had them, but the problem is that the first step is a really high one and we haven’t found any way to produce significant payoffs short of the final product. So, that either leaves it up to governments, whether in the interests of national prestige or perceived military advantage, or up to those wealthy individuals who can indulge their enthusiasms. No disrespect meant to those who can and do, more power to them.
Note, Star Trek (and many other science fictional products) avoid this high first step by positing that we get the key to space from some outside alien beings. That just kicks the can down the road, never explaining how such critters would have achieved that high first step on their own. Of course, living in a shallower gravity well near a convenient asteroid belt would certainly lower it a bunch.
Ridgerunner: Thank you for your support. I know speaking truth to power always has its downside; LOTM is making statements about my “physical condition”. In other words, if I weren’t pregnant and my female hormones weren’t so wacky, I would have kept myself in line and not blown up his spot. For everyone who thought Whiskey’s views made him a sexist pig, just look at the contrast now. I doubt he would say someone disagrees with him because she is pregnant, and I never saw him resort to personal invective describing his detractors as emotionally unstable. I don’t see how PJM’s commenting rule 3. Disagree, but avoid ad hominem attacks. doesn’t apply to LOTM here. It certainly never applied to Whiskey.
193. twobyfour
we’re talking here about the law of unintended consequences. So if you don’t like the use of the word “enemies” then perhaps the communist expression “useful idiots” would better serve.
Stephanie (#196):
I neither know nor do I care what your history with LOTM is. But given your previous comments on this very thread, for you to now appeal to commenting rule 3 is quite rich.
Charles (#197):
If I understand your causality chain, it goes as follows:
Ah, if only whiskey were still commenting here! If so, he would be weakening the influence of Blacks (and Hispanics, and other non-Whites, and women, and beta males) in the US. As they are the ones who provided Obama with his margin of victory, this would somehow bring to a stop Obama’s policies which are weakening the US (and most of its citizens, and Israel, etc).
But no, some guys, damn them, “took down” whiskey, and now we shall all suffer the consequences. (And the terrorists will have won!)
Did I get it right?
#195. erc rodson
You make a very valid point. There has to be an initial breakthrough that would start the ball rolling. The main obstacle is getting enough equipment (mass actually) up into space economically to create an infrastructure that is capable of utilizing the resources there and sending them back to earth. Once that barrier is broken the monstrous Earthlings will fan out to conquer and colonize the solar system.
My fantasy, and it is a fantasy, is that the US government would provide a one time deal. We would build one and only one Orion ship–a rather huge spacecraft powered by atomic bombs. It was on the drawing boards in the 1960′s. Go to amazon.com and lookup Project Orion: The True Story of the Atomic Spaceship by George B. Dyson The project was canceled when we signed a treaty with the USSR relating to a ban on atomic tests in the atmosphere.
Some of the plans on the drawing board envisioned craft with a payload of 100,000 tons. But anyway, we would send up one, and only one, and the government would sell space on the space ship. You could either be dumped off in high earth orbit, lunar orbit, or the asteroid belt. That might provide what it takes to get it all started.
Once the right pebble is rolling down the mountain the avalanche will begin.
But ahhhhh–its just my fantasy. It will never come true.
Charles, so…
1. Some people complain about Whiskey.
2. Richard asks Whiskey, after months of Whiskey’s posting the same tome again and again, to tone down certain aspects of his discourses (not the part that points out that there are apparent racial trends in AA and HA niveau; the part where Whiskey states [paraphrased]: “therefore we have to become racists too”) or take a blogroll.
2. Whiskey takes the blogroll option.
3. A butterfly beats its wings with relentless abandon stirring large quantities of air when tabulated.
4. Doom and WWIII ensues as a result.
Do I get it right?
er @ 195: we could always spin a space station for centrifugal gravity just like everyone always said.
Bob, hehe. I think yours wins, though the butterfly effect hafta be there too.
Josh, my inner dervish says: “Spin, baby, spin!”
twobyfour (#203):
Feh. Butterflies. Typical beta male.
Well, forgive me for returning to the original topic. It’s a dirty job but somebody
has to do it.
The problem with the aero-car concept is that it is simply not a practical idea at least not on this planet. The reason is Air Traffic Control. With any kind of volumn of aircradt up there, airborne traffic control is far more rigid than road-bound traffic control.
Most folks think an aer-car means taking it out of the garage, levitating a ways then heading in a straight line to the desired destination. The truth of the matter is that after leaving the garage you would have to drive on city streets to the nearest airsrip, check in with your flight plan, drive on the taxiway and wait for your turn on the runway, take off, go to whatever altitude the tower tells you to go to, take the routing you have been told to take, enter the traffic pattern of the receiving airstrip and follow their instructions on how to set it down. Then check out and drive on roads to wherever you are going to park.
You would have to fly it a good 300 miles or more before you would save any time. And with any of the propulsion systems currently available there would be no such thing as fly and forget about itwhenit came to maintenance. Very frequent safety inspections would be needed. Last but not least, fuel consumption would n-o-t be lessened nor would the price of fuel decline.
Technology could take care of the safety and fuel problems. But not the traffic control ones,
Best we forget the aero-car and tell Scotty to get that transporter room working.
So now readers who visited here after getting pleasantly buzzed will leave thinking: “Belmont Club? Isn’t that where everyone drinks whiskey and talks about butterfly-powered space stations spinning with relentless abandon around their inner Peggy Noonan?”
Yep, Bob, that about sums it up!
Dave, they’re working on an anti-gravity device –prblem is they turn the last screw and *whoosh*
working on a 40′ long Phillips –
***
vx/ –no wasn’t comparing anyone to child molester –point was, limits exist, and something sets ‘em. but have it your way –your straw man can boot my straw man, mine is not proud of his argument.
***
91% sux but do we make it easier or harder for the 9% to expand?
Bob #205
Feh. Butterflies. Typical beta male.
You calling Muhammad “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee” Ali a beta male?
Dave (#206):
Returning to the original topic? Spoilsport!
Your comment raises the issue of just how much liberty we can actually have in our modern society. How much of the rules and of the state power is necessary? Are there bright lines? If there aren’t, how can we hope to avoid the steady erosion of liberties?
Hey, this is no fun. Back to what’s become our regular programming:
L3 (#17): “Well, I go on a trip and return to see the club on fire.”
The club, the club, the club is on fire! We don’t need no whiskey, let…
(At the risk of getting all PC and overly sensitive and solicitous, I’ll add that however much I disagreed with whiskey (and don’t miss him), I have no personal animosity for him.)
The interesting thing about a pivotal point/crisis/emergency is that you learn whose compass points North and whose doesn’t.
About the problems with going to space: We really should move both Ballistic Missle Defense and strategic bombardment into orbit. This is a hang-the-expense
proposition simply because of the effectiveness of spaceborne systems. But doing the job(s), starting with what we now know, will surely lead to improved and less expensive systems and methods.
In addition, offer a prize or even prizes to whoever can come up with the Holy Grail.
That is SSTO or Single Stage To Orbit. There seems to be more than one way of doing things, so prizes (plural) would seen to be in order. SSTO itself might or might not be commercially viable. However, sucessfully developing it will at least
open the doors to less expensive systems than we now have.
Last but not least, offer that huge “Shipstone Prize” to those people who can come up with advanced means of storing electrical energy. The ability to put a megawat
in a (small) suitcase, a gigawatt in a footlocker and a terrawatt into a storage shed
will make photon propulsion and the like a reality. Be sure to include hefty consolation prizes for all those useful near-misses that are sure to come about.
“Overspending” in this regard will help make up for lost time and will enable inventors to round up financing for their efforts.
BTW, new pizza parlor in the asteroid belt. Free pitchers of beer included. Gay Deceiver standing by. You’all coming or what?
Bob (#207):
Old Testament soldiers? Aren’t they the ones that a lot of wolves dressed up in gold and purple ate them?
PA Cat (#210): “You calling Muhammad ‘Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee’ Ali a beta male?”
Come on, if someone tells me that he wants to “float like a butterfly”… Not to mention that he’s the one who referred to himself as “pretty”, and to his opponents as powerful bears and gorillas. Oh, and before we forget: “Float like a butterfly”. Float. Butterfly.
Butterfly.
I rest my case.
Butterfly.
(I thought I had already done so, but apparently not: Thanks for your link (#183).)
201. twobyfour
3. A butterfly beats its wings with relentless abandon stirring large quantities of air when tabulated.
/////////
This is the mistake that a lot of the Jersey guys at Freerepublic are making. They think that what goes on in California stays in California and good riddance.
that ain’t the way it works.
Buddy: 91% sux but do we make it easier or harder for the 9% to expand?
Let’s see how fast someone accuses you of trying to expand affirmative action!
(Sometimes I get an impression that the world is being taken over by the most insidious creatures of all — straw men)
Charles, of course not. Lot of Californians are leaving, and were so for the past 20 years or so. One hopes that they are not leaving just to export California elsewhere, though I wouldn’t rely on it.
But it is a matter of scale. To claim that Whiskey not posting here is causal to demise of the US and Israel is …. there is this word again… contrived. If you said it may be symptomatic, I would be conceding your point.
199. Bob
Charles (#197):
If I understand your causality chain, it goes as follows:
Ah, if only whiskey were still commenting here! If so, he would be weakening the influence of ….
…………
Whiskey is weakening no one. He was showing what weakness looks like.
217. twobyfour
Charles, of course not. Lot of Californians are leaving, and were so for the past 20 years or so. One hopes that they are not leaving just to export California elsewhere, though I wouldn’t rely on it.
But it is a matter of scale. To claim that Whiskey not posting here is causal to demise of the US and Israel is …. there is this word again… contrived. If you said it may be symptomatic, I would be conceding your point.
…………
Both the words “causal” and “symptomatic” are your words. If I were to choose between them, I would choose “symptomatic”.
Charles: Whiskey … was showing what weakness looks like.
I think you have no idea how right you are.
Charles (#218): “Whiskey is weakening no one. He was showing what weakness looks like.”
Despite the overwhelming temptation, I won’t make the obvious snide response, as whiskey isn’t here (responding). I will say that you are leaving out enough steps in your reasoning so as to make the remaining ones seem like non-sequiturs.
UPDATE:
twobyfour (#220): Obvious, I guess. As they used to put it in another site I frequented: “The single brain cell sharing must stop!”
Charles, If I were to choose between them, I would choose “symptomatic”.
Let’s ask the referee whether moving goalposts is allowed. Your original post implied a causal relationship, and I were not the only one that interpreted it that way.
[Warning: whiskage]
ridgerunner (#212): “The interesting thing about a pivotal point/crisis/emergency is that you learn whose compass points North and whose doesn’t.”
I suspect that everyone here agrees with the statement, though not necessarily with your intent.
I somehow seem to have missed a previous comment of yours (#128):
It’s certainly what I’m concerned about. Which is why I don’t mourn the loss of someone who makes statements such as:
or
Tcobb@200 said “… Project Orion: The True Story of the Atomic Spaceship by George B. Dyson The project was canceled when we signed a treaty with the USSR relating to a ban on atomic tests in the atmosphere.”
No. Orion was canceled because it wouldn’t work as calculated. Had Dyson consulted with a materials scientist early on, he might have had second thoughts about his pet idea. The concept will not be revived.
We know that Project Plowshare, which involved the use of nuclear explosives for peaceful uses, lasted into the 70s. Had the only sticking point been the Russian treaty, Orion could have proceeded.
Josh@152. No new technology is needed. The 35 inch engine developed in the NERVA program has been tested with complete success. Should a deep space mission arise, it is available. It is scalable. I had not heard of the SDI program RWE mentioned but, since no new R&D was needed, that doesn’t surprise.
Tcobb. I think the engine designed in the NERVA program can provide the technical basis for your fantasy, should the need ever rise to send large payloads to Mars or beyond.
Bob, Despite the overwhelming temptation, I won’t make the obvious snide response
Awww, auch. I sinned, I sinned! Now I get my water bucket…
Bob
I don’t see that Whiskey is wrong in the excerpt you brought in, the best exemple that could illustrate his statments is the french soccer team last prowess, the players hadn’t the cultural and patriotic fiber because of their race (and religion)
“The Brussels Journal
Happy Birthday America
From the desk of Thomas F. Bertonneau”
“A Conservative Obligation: David Lean’s The Sound Barrier
Cinema means movement, hence the nickname, “motion pictures.” Right from its beginning in Eadweard Muybridge’s stop-motion films of horses – and of male and female nudes – the “movie camera” has demonstrated understandable fondness for things robustly animate, the more impressive the hyper-kinesis the better. Visiting aliens might be excused for thinking that the main subjects of film are the galloping horse, the steam locomotive, the automobile, and the flying machine. A remarkable Georges Méliès (1861-1936) production based loosely on Jules Verne, Le voyage à travers l’impossible (1904), deploys all of these modes of transportation in a mélange of mechanical and transcontinental fantasies in the auteur’s inimitable style. [Clip] In the aftermath of “The Great War” (1914-1918), filmmakers began to see the possibility of theatrical spectacle in aeronautics. For Wings (1927), director William Wellman (1896-1975) put together an air force in San Antonio, Texas, that must have rivaled the United States Army Air Corps of the time; he installed cameras in a variety of “platform” aircraft and shot “dog fights” (below) of astonishing realism. [Clip]”
[...]
“I also owe a good deal of what I know about flight and airplanes to my older brother, Dan (born 1936) – an aerospace engineer with stints at Lockheed, where he redesigned the ejection seat of the F-104, and at North American, where he worked on the J-5 engine of the Saturn V Moon Rocket at the managerial level.
My male students at SUNY Oswego, where I teach in the English Department, know almost nothing about flight or airplanes. They have never read Pylon (1935) by William Faulkner or Pilote de Guerre (1942) by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and they have never heard of Flying Aces or the Supermarine Swift or the Sabre Jet. This deficiency belongs to their general spiritual emasculation in a world dominated by sensitivity, emotions, free-association, “smiley faces,” “fairness,” “comfort food,” soccer leagues for girls, “women’s studies,” “bad hair days,” “offense” and other specifically female institutions, conspiracies, and phenomena. In a Spenglerian mood, I say that fathers should instill in their sons careful appreciation for powerful, dangerous, and extravagant machines.”
http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/4475
A little palate cleanser (literally) for all BCers: the moonshine/Fourth of July/”Down with the British” scene from The Great Escape:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vf36rz-Wb90
I trust we can all raise a glass (filled with each one’s favorite toast) to the USA on its birthday.
And I will try to find something appropriate for Marie Claude for la fête de la Bastille ten days hence.
Dave #206:
“…airborne traffic control is far more rigid than road-bound traffic control.”
Nope, just the opposite. You only talk to a tower if you are using a controlled airport and only talk to ATC if you are above 18,000 ft or in a TCA or ARSA or just want radar flight following. And I have not filed a flight plan in almost 20 years.
At an uncontrolled airport you don’t even need a radio, although they are cheap enough now that doing without is very dumb. Admittedly within a 30 mile radius of many major cities you will need a radar transponder with altitude encoder.
I have no idea how they will handle the strict and getting stricter limitations imposed by the FAA on Federally Funded Airports stopping people from bringing aircraft in over the roads and taking off using the runway. For some reason that upsets them and would seem to defeat the purpose of a roadable aircraft.
MAz 227: “For Wings (1927), director William Wellman (1896-1975) put together an air force in San Antonio, Texas, that must have rivaled the United States Army Air Corps of the time;”
It did not rival it. It WAS it.
NERVA might work, sort of, with great risk and huge radiation even if it works, but from the Wikipedia articles, and if I even understand them correctly, they just aren’t that much better than chemical, maybe 2x. Runs out of mass to heat and eject, I guess. Hardly worth the bother. We need 10x more efficient lift.
I always wondered if the Orion concept would really work at all, if ScenarioA says not, then so be it. We do have better materials now, and better engineering. After all, it doesn’t have to work for long.
220. twobyfour
Doesn’t sound like you’ve ever heard of a tar baby.
MC, in the European context, maybe. But the USA (and Canada to a large degree) are “melting pot” cultures. That was their strength. Once the multicult was introduced, the clayification begun. Multicult was an invention of KGB and was a part and parcel of the demoralization package. Though first introduced through Western Europe, the plan was for the infection to spread to the USA through euro-enamored tools.
Marie Claude,
…the best exemple that could illustrate his statments is the french soccer team last prowess, the players hadn’t the cultural and patriotic fiber because of their race (and religion)
So, how then do you explain the exemplary performance of the German team? With Gomez, Özil, Boateng, Cacau, Tasci, Aogo, etc. they’re hardly a bunch of Aryans…
Or the Dutch? With Babel, Elia, Afellay, Braafheid, and Boulahrouz, you got more than your average Hollander..
No, I’m afraid the French team failed this time because they had a bunch of prima donnas who didn’t play as a team, and lacked good leadership (both players and coach).
Come to think of it, isn’t that always the reason the French lose?
Cheers,
L3
#233 L3
Come to think of it, isn’t that always the reason the French lose?
You don’t consider Guillaume le Bâtard, aka Guillaume le Conquérant, sufficiently French?
MC, some levity (I hope that you have a sense of humor!)
French Military History in a Nutshell
Gallic Wars: Lost. In a war whose ending foreshadows the next 2000 years of French history, France is conquered by of all things, an Italian.
Hundred Years War: Mostly lost, saved at last by a female schizophrenic who inadvertently creates The First Rule of French Warfare – “France’s armies are victorious only when not led by a Frenchman.”
Italian Wars: Lost. France becomes the first and only country ever to lose two wars when fighting Italians.
Wars of Religion: France goes 0-5-4 against the Huguenots.
Thirty Years’ War: France is technically not a participant, but manages to get invaded anyway. Claims a tie on the basis that eventually the other participants started ignoring her.
War of Devolution: Tied; Frenchmen take to wearing red flowerpots as chapeaux.
The Dutch War: Tied.
War of the Augsburg League/King William’s War/French and Indian War: Lost, but claimed as a tie. Deluded Frogophiles the world over label the period as the height of French Military Power.
War of the Spanish Succession: Lost. The War also gave the French their first taste of a Marlborough, which they have loved ever since.
American Revolution: In a move that will become quite familiar to future Americans, France claims a win even though the English colonists saw far more action. This is later known as “de Gaulle Syndrome”, and leads to the Second Rule of French Warfare: “France only wins when America does most of the fighting”.
French Revolution: Won, primarily due to the fact that the opponent was also French.
The Napoleonic Wars: Lost. Temporary victories (remember the First Rule!) due to leadership of a Corsican, who ended up being no match for a British footwear designer.
The Franco-Prussian War: Lost. Germany first plays the role of drunk Frat boy to France’s ugly girl home alone on a Saturday night.
WWI: Tied and on the way to losing, France is saved by the United States. Thousands of French women find out what it’s like not only to sleep with a winner, but one who doesn’t call them “Fraulein.” Sadly, widespread use of condoms by American forces forestalls any improvement in the French bloodline.
WWII: Lost. Conquered French liberated by the United States and Britain just as they finish learning the Horst Wessel Song.
War in Indochina: Lost. French forces plead sickness, take to bed with Dien Bien Flu.
Algerian Rebellion: Lost. Loss marks the first defeat of a Western army by a Non-Turkic Muslim force since the Crusades, and produces the First Rule of Muslim Warfare -”We can always beat the French.” This rule is identical to the First Rules of the Italians, Russians, Germans, English, Dutch, Spanish, Vietnamese, and Eskimos.
War on Terrorism: France, keeping in mind its recent history, surrenders to Germans and Muslims just to be safe.
Marie Claude (#226): “I don’t see that Whiskey is wrong in the excerpt you brought in, the best exemple that could illustrate his statments is the french soccer team last prowess, the players hadn’t the cultural and patriotic fiber because of their race (and religion)”
This indeed explains why France did not even advance while Italy is now a favorite to win it all.
maz2 (#227): “fathers should instill in their sons careful appreciation for powerful, dangerous, and extravagant machines”
“Fathers”? What’s that?
Charles (#231): “Doesn’t sound like you’ve ever heard of a tar baby.”
How dare you, err, tar whiskey with that racial epithet?!
Combining comments 227 and 228, here’s a drive through Paris. Close enough to a flying car.
Bob, ahm… ahm… Slovaks beat Italy before round of 16 and sent them packin’. Speaking of primadonas, that was a general consensus as Italians were concerned.
twobyfour (#237): “Bob, ahm… ahm… Slovaks beat Italy before round of 16 and sent them packin’.”
What?! How can that possibly be? The Italians are talented, and unlike France, they are mostly ethnically pure, so what could possibly explain their failure to advance? I am mystified!
[Here's a fiver for your fine work as a straight-man
]
2=4,
“community” or “multicult” aren’t of french tradition, where rather Colbertism and forced assimilation is promoted, it has worked until the last decades, but not anymore with the fashionable “victimisation” of the african immigration.
LL3, “prima donnas” and “lack of good leadership” also enter into the prosecution, not alone, new factors like described in the following articles were more than a light consideration.
If you analyse our team that won the world cup in 1998 and the EUrope cup in 2000, they were also mixed “black-white-beur” (Maghrebin) the black were from our Antilles Islands, the Maghrebin were from families that hadn’t experienced assimilation problems, as they were in France from the early seventies, and, of course, the coach selectionned players that were complementary, and he was more severe on the rules and discipline, no TV interview for the sponsors… etc. But, as this team won everything, french players became priced in european clubs, and as soon as one was discerned by “hunters” he was bought for his high (and or future) value. So this is what happpened to these black players. They had no time, nor the envy, to feel in solidarity with their comrads, at the difference with the German team, where only players that played in german clubs were selected, that had the habit to work together, and plus, younger players that still had hunger, not yet “prima donnas”, and the coach of course is excellent.
http://www.politicsweb.co.za/politicsweb/view/politicsweb/en/page71627?oid=182474&sn=Detail
http://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/20100626/OPINION/6261039/1042?p=2&tc=pg
like in the Alain Finkielkraut video that I brought in a former post, this new team is the reflexion of what are our minoritities suburban “rebellion” today
Also Lilian Thuran, a former Black Antillais, and winner of the 1998 cup said that these players must be punished and not accepted in the french team again
MC, commune et communard not French?
Multi-culti definitely a KGB invention and established through Netherlands first. French did not buy it entirely, to their credit.
Dutch have a buyer’s remorse.
Well, 2=4, “Community” in my mind was “communautarisme”, different meaning, much more like “multi-culti”
uh, as far as your panegiric of french victories, you must have copied it from a french-bashing site, dated with 2003 great campain !
Wickipedia has a few arguments that explain french bashing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-French_sentiment_in_the_United_States
now check our “true victories:
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=french+victories&aq=f
hmm, American victories alone? still not yet in history books
Pat Cat
MC, yes, copied from a frogbash site, but despite the conspicuous absence of Charles Martel at Poitiers victory that stopped the invasion of Islam, it is pretty funny, don’t you think?
Anerican victories… with exception of losing to Canucks, a winning streak until Korea (tie) and Vietnam (lost) just about the time that the idea “we must be more like Europeans” started to percolate. Panama: won. Gulf War I: won (but a big mistake made that it was not finished and Saddam remained whole). Not sure if Somalia can be considered a war: lost. Balkan War: won. Iraq: probably won. Afghanistan: probably lost (despite Petraeus’ optimism).
So you can only win when you invade a Greek like island territory!
Balkan, not finished, the fights will restart as soon as the Nato troops will leave
Bob@223: “Which is why I don’t mourn the loss of someone who makes statements such as:
[Whiskey] The West’s safety margin, was always this. People who all looked and acted like distant cousins. Culture, in the form of the mish-mash of the late Roman Empire, of the Byzantine Empire, of the Crusader states, of the Holy League, has never been enough. Ever….”
Well, Bob, no more Whiskey, yet,
E pur, si muove
Dave@213
In addition, offer a prize or even prizes to whoever can come up with the Holy Grail. That is SSTO or Single Stage To Orbit.
Oh ,Oh, Oh! I got a way to do it. In fact, I thought of it while I was writing the comment about the Lizoid Space Invaders earlier. But then I thought, “This is will never work, it’s like health care reform.” But then, Nancy Pelosi might be reading this blog, wondering why her Kid Whiskey ain’t contributing to the comments no more.
Just in case someone important is reading (and because I don’t care about my reputation) here goes.
I would use a pop gun. But one with a very long barrel. If the barrel is 1,000 yards long, and the projectile/rocket accelerates at 1 mile an hour per yard traveled, it would be going 1,000 miles an hour when it hits the air (the barrel would be a near vacuum). If it accelerated at 5 miles per hour/per yard it would be going at 5,000 miles an hour.
The problem is creating a smooth and continuous acceleration without wild surges. This might be done by injecting gas into the barrel behind the projectile to keep the under pressure pushing it up. The gas would need special qualities of elasticity and compressibility. I like the idea of using Freon because it is illegal (free Freon!).
Let’s say pressure of 100 lbs per square inch will move the projectile/rocket down the barrel. Gas would be added slowly at the bottom but, as the velocity increased, more rapidly at the end. A hydraulic plunger might inject gas at the bottom, while a plunger pushed by a high explosive charge might be used at the top.
Originally I thought in terms of getting the rocket up to speed for using a “Scram Jet” once it enters the atmosphere — a bullet shaped, air breathing hydrogen fueled rocket pointed pretty much straight up. But I will leave that to the Rocket scientists, of which I am not one (Notice I did not use ninth grade math?)
hdgreen @ 245: if you do 18mph/yard you get orbital velocity, except you lose about half of it in the atmosphere between sea level and 50,000 feet, oops. Plus the last 100 yards of the barrel are probably destroyed by mechanical, electrical, or heat effects. If you launch from say 10,000 feet, you probably only need about 22,000 mph, … etc.
Maglev much better idea than compressed supersonic gases.
ran across this -
We are in danger of becoming not ‘from many, one’ – E Pluribus Unum – but its opposite
http://www.lexingtoninstitute.org/library/resources/documents/Education/TeachingofAmericanHistory.pdf
++++++++
MC – Preview and spell-check is my friend.
MC, So you can only win when you invade a Greek like island territory!
You seem to have a pretty myopic view of France!
Sea only on the West, Northwest and Southeast. Check the map!
2=4
I questionned for American alone ! for France, you weren’t alone, Canadians Brits, Polish, even French were in the operation
f47 hein ???
2×4,
The Normans were Norsemen, tough characters those Danes. They make cartoons of their enemies and so frightened the French King that he ceded his northern seacoast. Then they invaded England and defeated the Saxons on October 14th after King Harald had to race 241 miles South from stopping another Norse invasion at the battle of Stamford Bridge on September 25th.
The secret of the Saxon tradition of mocking history is that it encourages self deprecation. This works to make you look more powerful, not less. The English have a tradition of that, think of “1066 and All That.”
To be blogged under the title “Less Heroic Sounding History.”
250. Marie Claude
f47 hein ???
I read and frequently agree with you but many times your English skills leave me wondering what you meant.
maybe http://translate.google.com/#fr|en| will help.
no sarcasm intended
gokart-mozart, how well are you versed in history? I suspect you have some gaps, else you would realize how farcical Whiskey’s argument is. The main factor of fall of every great civilization was not a lack of cousinship, but decadence. Beside many other factors that contributed, per culture. It was the monocultures that were unable to lend and borrow, strictly limited to their cousinship that usually did not survive, a great majority you’ve never heard of.
253. twobyfour
as in ‘let them eat cake’
RWE: I am (sorta) familar with the standards that you describe. But what if you
had,say, 25% of the cars on the road in any given city, then things could not be so lax, now could they? Sheer quantity of traffic at currently uncontrolled altitudes would seem to mandate skycops everywhere. And uncontrolled airports would seem to be a thing of the past.
What I meant by “rigid” was simply that you cannot violate the space between aircraft without having mid-airs. This is in contrast to cars where you simply have to sit and fume in gridlock for a while.
Probably better ways of sying things, but I don’t know what they are.
F47,
your suggestion would have a worse result, it doesn’t make correct grammatical sentences
Any chance this hoo-raw is a test to define character ? I see some of the conspirators are gloating. Management by latrine-o-gram is so very juvenile.
On the topic of Space Travel, I have not seen any consideration of the role interservice rivalry played in our effort. If you remember the TV reports of launch pad explosions, all were Air Force rockets. The Army stuff worked every time. The Redstone was used in Mercury because it had the best record- 50 consecutive perfect launches. The Air Force was jealous-in word and deed.
The Shuttle was pure pork. In the article on the investigation of the Challenger explosion, “…besides the SRB O-Rings, there were more than 700 other problems, just as bad.” Consider that, alongside the number of launch attempts, and conclude that the record is a tribute to the ground crews who prepared the beast for flight. Those guys were lots better than I thought they were. A little noticed part of the Challenger explosion was the performance the SRB’s in free flight. They did not scat for the horizon when they were relieved from attachment to the Orbiter and the External Tank. They weren’t lifting much more than their own weight.
Josh,
The magnetic rail gun is one of those ideas I’ve read about for thirty years. Fifteen years ago I read of a great advance some fellow made in Texas with a new super- capacitor (I think) that would make it possible. Since then, not much.
I meant “the canon” to replace the first stage of a rocket stack. I figured the barrel would not withstand the higher velocities, and atmospheric friction would be a bear (but a Ram/scram jet could take advantage of that).
Saddam before 1991 had large artillery with a range of about 600 miles — directed at Israel. The Canadian who designed it (and got a bonus bullet from Mosad) seemed to think suborbital canon launch a possibility.
I just looked it up: Gerald Bull was the guys name. From the NYT:
If the big guns had operated as designed, they would have been able to hurl a 135 kilogram, or 300-pound, projectile nearly 1,000 kilometers, or lift a much larger payload into orbit if it was outfitted with a small rocket engine.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/10/world/africa/10iht-saddam.2755025.html
hdgreene: Channelling Jules Verne again I see. “From The Earth To The Moon And A Trip Around It” was the title as I recall. That one was shot from a cannon. For a deeper subject, try to get in touch with Captain Nemo of the original Nauitilus which used a power system like that of the Seawolf. He was last scene polishing his 20,000 League Undersea boots on some Mysterious Island acessible by balloon
Your system might work as a demonstration project for the ultimate .17 Caliber Wildcat utilizing a necked down 20millimeter cannon shell, loads of 4341 and a barrel
’bout a country mile in length. But remember that would be your rifle and not your gun.
“The Normans were Norsemen, tough characters those Danes. They make cartoons of their enemies and so frightened the French King that he ceded his northern seacoast”
not true, the king of France was a wise politician and diplomat, he made them vassal of France by giving them a territory, and it work, The Vicking forgot their language and rude manners to embrace french court style, and intermarried with the French
yup, if it twernt for the Normans, we wuld bea espellig eour wurdes liken thise.
MC, yes but first they scared all of Paris out into the countryside at least once.
it is said that afterword the captured weapons were sold in London, with a sign saying “Franch sordes and sheelds heer, as goode as New, onlye been droppede Once”
Marie Claude,
Yes but it was an invasion and they were not totally assimilated. My point was to encourage all of us, you included, to occasionally embrace a humorous play on History. It only makes us look more confident. Think of Asterix.
Not that the 4th is the best day for the idea, it may not be. I would not mock American History on that day and I would not make a point of mocking French History on Bastille Day.
Is there a French equivalent of Blackadder?
Mrie Claude; Lotm: Funny you should mention Norsemen. Some of my ancestors were
of that breed. Rather pverty stricken but did aspire to become propertied.
In their quest they aquired certain portions of the British Isles in the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program of 1066 AD. Their shields were seen in
various hotspots for the next 600 years or so.
“Gules Crusily Or
Three Lions Rampant Argent”
Also: “On A Fess Sable
Between Three Escallops Azure
Six Lozenges Enjoined Argent”
The first would denote being distinguished servants of the Plantagenets. The second
was when they were condonterri in one part of Europe and mideast or the other,
Then they pulled up stakes and came to Old Virgiddy as part of what Dr Fischer called “recon elements’. After that they kept their skills sharp in various and sudnry disputes on the North American continent not returning to their ancestral homeland until 6 Jun 1944. Still at it too. ‘Till Gabriel Blows His Horn!
MC, I questionned for American alone ! for France, you weren’t alone, Canadians Brits, Polish, even French were in the operation
Yes, even French. True, usually one has allies during the great wars. But considering vast expanses of Pacific Theater (with help of Ozzies and Kiwis) and the whole western portion of Europe, you have to acknowledge that it was no small feat.
BTW, I am a Canuck and an American, and wereCzech, FYI (thus I am never alone, I am multitudes!
)
Fireball XL-5 took off on a big catapult track.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oboly57qxjg
Dave,
Yes, I did read that book. But Jules used the 24,000 mph muzzle velocity for his projectile that Josh objected to. I saw a movie they made of “From the Earth to the Moon” in 1960′s where they used an “anti-gravity device” instead of a large canon. Anti-gravity was going to be my next suggestion (not that there is anything wrong with gravity).
Dave,
Good for you. There is nothing snobbish or wrong in studying genealogy. Everyone comes from somewhere, obvious disclaimer inserted to prevent thread hijacking, and a good exploration of the shepherds, goats and sheep, white or black, decorating the family tree is a fine thing.
MC,
The Carolingian who made the deal with Rollo the Norseman was called Charles the Simple?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuj4Q24NX1M&annotation_id=annotation_552987&feature=iv
Chuck Yeager breaks sound barrier
***
http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/yea0bio-1
(see last vid at this link –the X-1A spin)
***
when he was born, 1923, the USA fighter (then, ‘Pursuit’) aircraft was was probably the Jenny.
http://cdn-www.airliners.net/aviation-photos/middle/9/2/4/1235429.jpg
hdgreene, 1954-56 about, Popular Mechanics published a purdy detailed scheme of anti-grav propulsion. Then poof. Not a word anywhere.
PA Cat (#234) : “Guillaume le Bâtard”
Oh my God, he killed Kenny!
gokart-mozart (#244): “Well, Bob, no more Whiskey, yet, E pur, si muove”
To the contrary. The more whiskey, the more si muove.
Marie Claude (#249): “for France, you weren’t alone, Canadians Brits, Polish, even French were in the operation”
Well, given the expert opinions expressed in this thread, I’d have to say that not many French were involved. After all, “à l’époque deux tiers des troupes françaises sont composées de soldats originaires des colonies, notamment d’Afrique de l’Ouest”.
(#260) “the king of France was a wise politician and diplomat, he made them vassal of France by giving them a territory, and it work, The Vicking forgot their language and rude manners to embrace french court style, and intermarried with the French”
And it would have worked towards the middle of the last century too, if only those Anglo-Americans weren’t so impulsively hasty. (Or eager to bomb France’s cultural treasures, but far be it from me to impute such negative motives to those barbarians.)
Josh -
work on this project should be used for low energy lift to LEO. lots of possibilities from this project, with a farsighted admin it could still be a GO.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-altitude_airship
The United States Department of Defense Missile Defense Agency contracted Lockheed Martin to construct a high-altitude airship (HAA) to enhance its Ballistic Missile Defense System (BMDS).
An unmanned lighter-than-air vehicle, the HAA, was intended to operate above the jet stream in a quasi-geostationary position to deliver persistent station keeping as a surveillance platform, telecommunications relay, or a weather observer. They proposed to launch their HAA in 2008.
The airship would be in the air for up to one month at a time and ca survey a 600-mile (970 km) diameter of land. It would use solar cells to provide its power and would be unmanned during its flight.
It was intended to have the capability to survey a 600-mile (970 km) diameter of land whether that be for surveillance, weather observations etc. It was to be composed of high strength fabrics to minimize weight as well as lightweight propulsion technologies.
It was intended to operate at a height of above 60,000 feet (18,000 m) and will have a payload for military use. It was designed to be 500 feet (150 m) long and 150 feet (46 m) in diameter.
The HAA program was cancelled in 2008.[1]
@223: I don’t see what’s so offensive about some of the statements (granted, the last comment is outrageous hyperbole). Consider:
“America’s First Black President. A man who like Mavericks Forward Josh Howard, does not care about the National Anthem — he’s Black. I understand it. I might feel the same way had I been born Obama.”
What exactly is wrong with that comment? Did 0bama ever give a coherent reason for putting his hands over his crotch that day? I must have missed it. If certain “conservatives” want to pretend that Obama and Howard are unique, that’s unfortunate. America’s non-Asian minorities are decidedly honest about sharing the Rev. Wright view of US History. 0bama laid bare his own racial fixations TWICE in written form, for anyone who cares to read about them. Why is it so disturbing to point out that such fixations are (1) largely responsible for his detatchment from mainstream Americana and (2) widely held by people who identify as NAM’s?
Also note that Whiskey did attempt to empathize with 0bama’s viewpoint (albeit crudely).
“It would be nice to think that race does not matter, but it does. … Trust and sacrifice shared is obviously only achievable in mono-ethnic groups. Torpedo Squadron 9 [sic] would not have taken off at all, if the US Navy had been half Black”
Hyperbolic, but partially true. Few would deny that clannish identity politics make for effective sub-conventional warfare but ineffective modern armies. So no, Torpedo 8 would NOT have taken off in a multi-ethnic navy. Witness, for instance, Brazil’s attempt to build a modern navy circa WWI. Its bluejackets ended up at war with one another instead of the Kaiser’s fleet. Black and white sailors murdering one another, mutinies, racially-selected “bosses” with no allegiance to the true chain of command, and battleships in the same unit shelling one another.
As a matter of fact, consider the race riot on board the “USS Forrestal” (Vietnam) and Black Muslims’ attempted murder of the “USS Ranger’s” captain (Gulf War I), if you’re inclined to believe these rules don’t apply to the Great Melting Pot’s conventional forces.
To clarify, a multi-cultural society – civilian, military, whatever – will usually function so long as historically marginalized cultures are willing to assimilate AND only comprise a small percentage of the whole. Under these conditions you get a small number of “Forrestal” and “Ranger” incidents. As the %age of marginalized groups reaches a critical mass, and as “ethnic” powerbrokers secure a strong political base (inside or outside of official channels), get ready for wholesale disorder or a tyrannical peace imposed from above. Pretty obvious, and not all that controversial if you’re willing to be honest with yourself.
I wish to apologize to the Belmont community for my previous comment (#270): “if only those Anglo-Americans weren’t so impulsively hasty”.
I obviously should have written “if not for those meddlesome Yanks and their bulldog”.
Again, I apologize.
We must first specify the composition of the army of William. While half of the troops consisted of the Normans, the other half comprised of the Britons, of Anjou, Poitou and the of northern French. The army of William was prepared as follows: while the Normans are in the center, the French allies are either on the left wing (Bretons, etc. .. Poitou) or the right wing (northern French). Tactically, William placed his archers in the front line, his foot on the second line and, finally, his knights in the third.
So the Norman invasion was half French, but probably that the common norman sodier spoke a mixed dialect of french and viking language.
LOTM, we don’t have such jokes on our history facts, as they were always cheated by the Anglo-Saxons, and that we had/have to retablish the truth.
Buddy the Vickings were pirats like the Maures in the south, and some said the same thing on french weapons from your Revolution times
Dave, my ancestors were villans, Schade !
Bob, but the colonial army was composed, at least, with Nationals too, not counting the fighters in Resistance.
yeah, not very fond of close combat, and, you, Anglo-Americans lived in retranched caserns too, close contacts with the french population were avoided, in case you would have got some villan viruses, because of the lack of yardley soap !
Nine-of-Diamonds/272
No one is denying that a sudden influx (in relative terms) of different ethnical and cultural elements spells trouble. Pretty much everyone agreed with that part of Whiskey’s message.
As the %age of marginalized groups reaches a critical mass, and as “ethnic” powerbrokers secure a strong political base (inside or outside of official channels), get ready for wholesale disorder or a tyrannical peace imposed from above.
Exactly. In fact, I believe that is the plan and intent. Whiskey’s solution? Buy into it, became a pawn in the big boys game, do as they want. Not his words, but his suggested course of action has that effect.
I don’t have a solution, admittedly, at this time, but by default I refuse to play this game.
the reason you don’t have a solution, twoby, is that there IS no solution. Well, there is race war, but that’s crazy. Not that it won’t try to flare up –but if it does, well, we can cross that bridge when we come to it.
meantime we look at the big picture, and that’s of a large nation that has, every decade since the Civil War, broken down the barriers a little more than before. We need to make sure that if this model doesn’t work, it’s because as whiskey says it *can’t* work, that it IS beyond human agency.
But if it can work, it will do so only if we support it. What’s the ‘it’? Just steer clear of identity politics –try to stay above prejudice –pre-judging. After all there’s statistics on the ‘melting pot is doing okay’ side of the debate, too.
That said, something mightly foul has been gathering force ever since BDS was launched by the 2004 Dem election campaign. I think the string-pullers on the left really are in the Kremlin –for a variety of reasons i think this –and just as they usually float a coming attraction, that ‘USA will break into six regions soon’ is a major front of the world-domination master plan. you saw it in mr X’s valedictory, in his elliptical way of testing notions.
IOW, the ‘breakup USA’ clique is doing all it can to piss off people along race lines. And i second twobyfour, i don’t wanna do their bidding –and so i’m gonna concentrate on supporting the many many ethnic voices coming forward in support of the model that is, the Constitutional model. don’t give it up –make ‘em come and get it –make ‘em take it from you.
I don’t like the elements of tyranny that have crept into over-centralized gov’t –not by a long shot –but we need to re-federalize OUR way on OUR schedule –not under the light of burning cites. Search [ Wyoming yellowstone sale ] and see the proper template in action already.
MC, we don’t have such jokes on our history facts, as they were always cheated by the Anglo-Saxons, and that we had/have to retablish the truth.
I understand. It is pretty hard to find any humor in constantly losing!
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jlCbxFljgvXYCoX5jh0-_9BCYUKwD9GOAU500
try that instead of the search terms –i guessed, and lost –it’s all backpack vendors –
gets back to 17th Amendment –had the senate stayed as the founders intended, regions would HAVE the autonomy they sorely miss now.
2=4,
uh, stop writing into the soviet propanganda style
uh something funny
http://www.turkishweekly.net/columnist/3359/should-turkey-declare-war-on-iraq.html
hey, some want to imitate your style
Those spies, and Al Gore –this kinda slipped past the radar, the Gore interest being currently the usual sex sensation. Those committees and commissions Mr. Feurth set up –hope we get more info on them. hey, can’t have a ‘one-world’ without merging the foreign intelligence agencies and top academic circles, can we? now look at what them crew-cut recalcitrants @ FBI have gone and done!
Ah, MC, you failed! Your sense of humor is very selective. C-
As for the turkish dude suggestion, they have been incursing into Iraq territory for years now. But if he hallucinates about reviving Ottoman glory, not sure, it may turn out to be a turkey shoot.
Buddy, not sure. So far, what I read seems to indicate that these people were more milking SVR than anything else.
If you want to pinpoint one-worlders, there is one certain name as Russians go–Gorbachev. Connections to Gore, Strong. The later is more important, Gore is not that high on the pecking order. The Core picked Gore to sell the CO2 scam, but he is becoming an embarrasment and I predict he’d be dumped soon. But even Strong and Soros are front men, though with a significant tasking and spoils for services rendered. Semi-decoys, while the real McCoys are totally off the radar. But I think they leave trails. The areas to look into: 1. commodities (food production and related sphere – Monsanto, ADM), 2. microbio and genetics, 3. insurance, 4. drug trade, 5. organ trade, the last three comprising criminal activities in order of severity as noted. If you find names that sit on BofD of the fist 3 (or through relatives), then chances are it’s getting warmer. As far as I know, Soros is definitely involved in #5 for disbursement of funding and Strong in trafficking. And of course in the CO2 scam, but they are coming up with scams all the time… though they really really hopped the CO2 one would work out.
Twobyfour @ 253: “The main factor of fall of every great civilization was not a lack of cousinship, but decadence.”
There are those who would disagree. Archaeologist J.A. Tainter, “The collapse of complex societies”. Author/financier M. Ridley, “The rational optimist”. Both ascribe the fall of once-successful civilizations to excessive growth of government, regulation, overhead. That has happened already — many, many times.
Sam W #257:
“If you remember the TV reports of launch pad explosions, all were Air Force rockets. The Army stuff worked every time.”
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!!!
twoby/283; –check this out:
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/andy-stern-joins-sigas-board-of-directors-2010-06-21?reflink=MW_news_stmp
[snip]
Andy Stern was responsible for growing the SEIU from 1.0 million members into a powerful 2.2 million member union. Under his leadership, the SEIU had been widely recognized as being an engaged and influential force driving healthcare reform and, ultimately, passage of the 2010 Health Care Reform Act.
“Andy is a strong leader and a great addition to our Board of Directors. His insight, experience, and leadership, particularly his understanding of how our federal government works, will complement the skill sets of our existing board members,” said Dr. Eric Rose, SIGA’s Chief Executive Officer.
Mr. Stern has been cited in numerous publications as being one of the most influential leaders on healthcare and a frequent White House visitor. In 2010, Stern was named a Presidential appointee to the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform.
Mr. Stern also serves on the board of directors of Broad Foundation, the Open Society Institute, and the Economic Policy Institute, as well as a lifetime Trustee of the Aspen Institute, and the President of the Kaiser Permanente Partnership.
Andy Stern is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and author of the book “A Country That Works” (Free Press).
About SIGA Technologies, Inc.
SIGA Technologies is applying viral and bacterial genomics and sophisticated computational modeling in the design and development of novel products for the prevention and treatment of serious infectious diseases, with an emphasis on products for biological warfare defense. SIGA believes that it is a leader in the development of pharmaceutical agents to fight potential bio-warfare pathogens. SIGA has antiviral programs targeting smallpox and other Category A pathogens, including arenaviruses (Lassa fever, Junin, Machupo, Guanarito, Sabia, and lymphocytic choriomeningitis), dengue virus, and the filoviruses (Ebola and Marburg). For more information about SIGA, please visit SIGA’s web site at http://www.siga.com/.
(end snip)
***
There might be something more sinister, i dunno tho. Seeing as how the SEIU pension fund is at about 60% of the red zone line, maybe he’s joining Maurice Strong in thinking he needs to DO something about “over population”.
Flower children always did hate to miss a party –maybe now that the grim reaper is breathing down their necks, they want to move Woodstock to the River Styx –
bl: We need to make sure that if this model doesn’t work, it’s because as whiskey says it *can’t* work, that it IS beyond human agency.
Long-term I am optimistic (that’s an easy why not! call since I won’t be here), short-term I am fully pessimistic. Seems to me that history is on the brink of another Greatest Generation challenge.
Despite all the frustration and negative navel-gazing, though, the American DNA is resilient and deeply stamped with the belief that a bad situation can, with the right elbow grease and ingenuity, be turned around.
Normally I would agree, but the sense of betrayal is strong. One doesn’t have to be a brainiac to understand what happened with mortgage underwriting and securitized investment vehicles. All of the dominos failed. All of them. This one’s going to take some time to turn around – tidy little trifecta of energy, socialist trendlines and Islamic threat unwinding to the backdrop of concentrated pools of global capital fully integrated with criminal activity. One has to have faith that the system can be disentangled rather than accommodated.
Anybody Else See This?
In fact, CBNC seems to have gone fully negative. I haven’t decided if the issue is ratings or something else.
Kinuachdrach, I don’t see any disagreement, I am not that concerned with the overt manifestations, but the underlying stratum.
The excessive growth of the government, excessive regulation and overhead (excessive spending) that is the result of the two, which are a result of rent-seeking, corruption, lack of responsibility, greed and lust.
What may be the common denominator here? Aren’t they all an expressions of a loss of the moral fiber, IOW, decadence?
Geeze Louise, saw projections of one of the major Swiss banks and the have a dip towards near ground zero sometimes between spring 2011 and spring 2012. A wipeout. I am not sure what they know, but that graph is seared, seared I say, into my memory.
Buddy, and interesting catch. Keep on file.
GL, 2X, Obama should resign, tomorrow. The people’s spirits are crushed.
twobyfour @ 288: “Aren’t they all an expressions of a loss of the moral fiber, IOW, decadence?”
Let’s be careful to avoid circular reasoning — the civilization collapsed, therefore the people were decadent, therefore decadence causes collapse. Might be true, but it is not useful. What makes people decadent?
Ridley’s book is interesting on this one. He ties progress to specialization & trade — the guy who is good at making arrowheads makes arrowheads; the guy who has great accuracy as an archer hunts instead of spending time making arrowheads; everyone is better off.
But then rulers arise, who take part of the output of the arrowhead-maker and the hunter. Initially, that diversion of output may make society stronger — feed the orphans so they grow up to be hunters; hold back the tribe next door that wants to take it all. But eventually the leaders do Bread & Circuses and build Versailles. Collapse follows, since the overhead crushes productive efforts.
Where is decadence in that cycle? The arrowhead-maker and the hunter who give up producing anything and instead consume Bread & Circuses are responding rationally to incentives. It is the incentives that are irrational and destructive. Kings, dictators, and “elected” politicians are all capable of creating irrational incentives — which ultimately destroy the pedestal on which they stand.
How to prevent the creation of irrational incentives? No society so far in human history has cracked that puzzle.
2×4 @ 288 and Kinuachdrach @ 292: think of society as a network where productive activity crosses from node to node. Think of government as the administrative load on that traffic. As the network gets bigger and the traffic has to traverse more nodes and longer links, the load goes up in a nonlinear way, until the system chokes. (Wretchard and others: please take me to school on this, I’m just thinking out loud). The way a healthy system deals with that nonlinear growth of overhead is to create sub-systems, hubs and “key nodes” where specialization (managers, arbitrators, curators, aggregators) allows the signal to be cleaned and boosted, or where information specific only to the sub-system can be filtered, given priority, etc. There is always a tension between signal and administrative overhead; but the good systems can deal with it. Up to a point. Eventually things get too complex; or there is too much legacy infrastructure to maintain; or that tension is exacerbated by events that reduce the fidelity/information content of the signal traffic (investors get swindled, the readers no longer trust the press, the voters no longer buy the incumbents’ promises and just want a housecleaning –or a revolution). I think I’m just restating, badly, the excellent observations previously made; that is, I have the same diagnosis in different terms. And from that diagnosis comes a similar prognosis. I wish it were otherwise.
Josh@230 said “NERVA might work, sort of, with great risk and huge radiation even if it works, but from the Wikipedia articles, and if I even understand them correctly, they just aren’t that much better than chemical, maybe 2x. Runs out of mass to heat and eject, I guess. Hardly worth the bother”
I’ve been aware that the perfect can be the enemy of the good, but the mythical as the enemy of the proven???
btw, while checking Wikipedia, I noticed reference to “Timberwind”, the SDI project RWE had mentioned. As I had suspected, it did not advance to the test phase. It did however, point to one possible way to enhance heat transfer with a resultant improvement in performance over the original 35 inch engine design.
It’s more than a passport.
http://www.vac-acc.gc.ca/remembers/sub.cfm?source=history/secondwar/citations/gray
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Birchall
Kinuachdrach,
the civilization collapsed, therefore the people were decadent, therefore decadence causes collapse.
Never said that. Just placed the manifestations under a common denominator.
Incentives are, again, one of the manifestations. What are incentives in their essence? Bribes. Somewhat sublimated in some cases, but bribes nonetheless. One side bribes another in order to gain something. It is not really a trade, because trade is usually governed by well defined rules (even if they involve bargaining; if you cheat, sooner or later the bill comes due and tar and feathers may be the least of your problem). Bribes go outside the normal rule set. It does not matter if they get institutionalized eventually, like panis et circenses, by that time they already corroded the society–people start inventing new forms of bribery–the imbalances that the initial bribes created are balanced out by further bribes that create further imbalances and the descent begins. A chain reaction that is at first largely moderated by the productive society. But as the ponzi scheme starts edging towards the saturation, the more produced wealth has to compensate for the wealth black hole that then increases in size.
Have to leave it at that, work calls.
History buffs will know this story, but for the remaining 1% on this site: O’Hare Airport [Snopes version of the popular email - still a good story.]
Obama should resign, tomorrow.
My anger does not focus on this one man, nor even George Soros or Maurice Strong, for the reasons noted by 2×4 above that the driving forces behind the public faces will remain anonymous for years to come. I know this as surely as I know that Obama does not have the intellectual depth to lead the country through this period of transitional history. Nor did Bush. Nor can I see any likely candidates in the current group of political wannabes.
Rufus over at EB keeps making provocative statements, such as: the Obama people have the right (basic) ideas but they don’t know how to execute. (I would add that they have timing issues as well.)
I composed a post about this but dropped it as I have so many others because I have little of consequence to add to any of these discussions. If the Obama people can’t execute, what am I supposed to do – hop a plane to Washington and have a chat?
I *think* (I know nothing) but I think FINREG was expeditiously passed as essentially a status quo piece of legislation in order to stabilize markets and the investment climate so corporations sitting on all that cash will … invest … in growth-producing activities. I might be giving the administration too much credit but I notice the bill passed rather quickly with a no harm no foul content.
As a footnote I also agree with 2×4 that decadence is the driver and that is a matter of individual choice, taking me back to the O’Hare story.
ScenarioA @ 294: Cost/benefit. Certainty of some radioactive contamination, risk of major nuclear accident, expense of handling fissionable materials in any case, all costs of various kinds, outweigh a “mere” 2x improvement.
297. Geeze Louise
Wikipedia has articles about both Butch O’Hare and his father. They’re quite interesting.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butch_O%27Hare
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_J._O%27Hare
(My father was aboard the Lexington on Feb. 20, 1942 and personally witnessed Butch’s Medal of Honor flight, so I knew about him at a young age.)
Regarding your #287 link, I got out of the stock market and into cash over a year ago.
Lately I’ve been getting out of hundreds and fifties and into twenties, tens, and even fives.
rickl:
Great story about your father. So many stories of personal courage enhanced, if possible, by the stark contrast with the cultural legacy of this generation. Who knew that the tag team of mortgage underwriters and Wall St investment bankers would make Lady Gaga look pristine and innocent? (As Rufus says, probably nothing we can do – every 50 years the bankers are going to get drunk and crash the world – might as well get used to it.)
Appreciate the feedback on your financial thinking. I am sweating a decision – complicated by my age which is too young to retire and too old to be gambling in this market where I doubt a ten year time frame would provide much of a return, certainly not if we are facing a depression as severe as some predict. In April I was convinced that the cash-heavy corporate “fundamentals” supported a stable path of slow (3%) recovery. Dopey old me. I think I’m going to wait until the end of this year for some recovery and then pull out, ala 2×4′s Swiss bank story above. If I were younger or older, easy decision, but this in between limbo is nothing but a coin flop – I mean flip.
Josh@298 : “Cost/benefit. Certainty of some radioactive contamination, risk of major nuclear accident, expense of handling fissionable materials in any case, all costs of various kinds, outweigh a “mere” 2x improvement.”
I don’t know how to make a cost/benefit calculation without a mission in mind, but I would assume that political and other considerations would limit use of nuclear technology to missions which are disallowed otherwise by technical factors. Then the role of the 2x improvement provided by the nuclear option would be to push possible missions from the infeasible to the feasible category. So, the cost/benefit analysis tends to collapse to a go/nogo decision.
For what its worth, I see nuclear technology as much safer and less risky than you suggest. I see some risk of radioactive contamination should there be a massive failure on launch of the nuclear payload to earth orbit. This risk of contamination following a massive launch accident can be limited by design of the containment of the nuclear fuel (probably easier in the very robust 35 inch engine NERVA engine than in the Timberwind designs). I think that the risk of a major nuclear accident can be effectively zero with proper protocols (ie, avoiding use of the shuttle to carry the nuclear engine to earth orbit and, on startup of the nuclear engine in earth orbit, keeping thermal shock within limits, etc). I see acceptable costs in the nuclear and parahydogen fuels, assuming a mission with balancing benefits. Against these risks and costs, you get feasibility and flexibility to define an expanded set of possible missions.
Disclaimer. I am not advocating any particular mission at this time.
I recent did a detailed engineering review of the NERVA project on my own time and initiative. I was impressed – they really were ready for flight testing and a usable path to Mars and back for a manned mission was within reach.
One point was that they had achieved some small percentage of mono-hydrogen in the exhaust. Expelling monoatomic hydrogen rather than diatomic hydrogen increases specific impulse significantly but needs higher temperatures in the core.
One of my colleagues worked on the controls for Timberwind but I’ve yet to be involved in anything BUT commercial nuclear power plants – if I exclude my work for Industrial Light and Magic.
Rickl @ 162 said:
“the Kevlar bag idea before. … but what about temperature extremes and solar radiation? Maybe they could position a radiation shield outside the bag in front of the Sun.”
Uniform interior surface temperature can be provided using the same technology as in present day pressure suits, i.e. have a white exterior (high emissivity) and tubes filled with flowing liquid coolant attached to the inner surface of the Kevlar bag. Essentially the Kevlar bag is a really big pressure suit. A radiation shield is unnecessary if the astronaut/technician spends less than 2 years outside of the atmosphere.
Rickl @ 162 also said:
“I’ve read that there was an unmanned Earth-orbital cargo version on the drawing board which would have been very useful in building space stations. I’ve often wondered whether there was any resentment in the U.S. government or military over the fact that von Braun and his team had come from Nazi Germany. Once the Moon was reached, they had outlived their usefulness to the U.S.”
The following link shows many of the future concepts that were planned for the Saturn-V:
http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/saturnv.htm
Along the lines of Robert Frost’s poem, “The Road Not Taken”, there was a very exciting future planned for the Space Program that could have followed the Apollo Program but was simply tossed into the trash can. I am of the opinion that the abandonment of that future path marked the beginning of the decline and eventual collapse of our civilization (a more vigorous civilization would have followed that alternate path “pedal to the metal”).
Von Braun’s history is interesting. There is an extensive biography about von Braun titled “Von Braun, Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War” by Michael J. Neufeld. I disagree with many of Neufeld’s conclusions about von Braun but find his book interesting as an information source and for insights provided about the period when the Apollo Program was abandoned.
Von Braun’s dilemma was the same that almost all aeronautical engineers face, i.e. we’re crazy in love with airplanes and spacecraft but are obligated to accept the government’s coin to stay in the game. Almost all aerospace technology is dual use, e.g. the same heat shield technology (carbon phenolic) used for the Pioneer Venus and Galileo Jupiter atmospheric probes was originally developed for ICBM Reentry Vehicles carrying thermonuclear warheads. Von Braun made a very significant technical achievement with the A4 rocket that later became the V-2 ballistic missile. The A4 is the basis for all modern day liquid fueled ballistic missiles and launch vehicles. If you look closely at the Space Shuttle Main Engine (SSME), you can easily see the A4 technology that it is based upon. However in order to build the A4, von Braun had to “play the game” and that included wearing the uniform of an SS officer. To put this in perspective, von Braun was a member of the old German aristocracy and for the most part that old aristocracy hated the Nazis. To some extent, when von Braun put on the SS uniform, he became a traitor to his own class. However von Braun did it anyway because (like the rest of us) he was crazy about Space Exploration and willing to pay the moral price. Von Braun did achieve some redemption when he was briefly sent to a concentration camp to frighten and force him toe the line. The Nazi government did that when it became apparent that von Braun was “wasting” too much effort on space exploration studies rather than working full time on munitions for the Reich. Von Braun had to make a similar Faustian bargain with the United States government. In the end after Nixon terminated the Apollo Program, von Braun left the Space Program and died a broken man from cancer. A rather tragic end for a brilliant engineer. However I can’t feel too sorry for von Braun because he achieved his dream two times successively in building the first ballistic missile to leave the atmosphere (the A4) and the launch vehicle enabling lunar exploration (the Saturn-V). If I was only 10% as successful as von Braun, I’d die with an idiot grin knowing that I had lead a life fulfilled.
Whitehall@302: “I recent did a detailed engineering review of the NERVA project on my own time and initiative. I was impressed – they really were ready for flight testing and a usable path to Mars and back for a manned mission was within reach.”
You’re right about NERVA. The decision not to land a man on Mars was not based on the lack of a means for getting there.
”I’ve yet to be involved in anything BUT commercial nuclear power plants – if I exclude my work for Industrial Light and Magic.”
Wonderful! I can learn from you, and I hope that, perhaps, I might be able to contribute something as well based on my own experience.
twobyfour @ 296 said of “decadence”: Never said that. Just placed the manifestations under a common denominator.
My apologies for mis-understanding your earlier reference to decadence; did not intend to mis-represent your views. I am in complete agreement with your assessment as you expressed it in 296.
You are right that, once the first ‘Rob Peter to Pay Paul’ bribe gets created, it is straight down from there to the rock bottom of unsustainable Bread & Circuses.
There is a story, possibly apocryphal, about a senior officer’s indigent widow following the US Revolutionary War. One Congresscritter proposed that the Continental Congress should vote her a stipend. A real Congressman got up & responded that he would gladly put his hand into his own pocket to help the deserving widow — but he would never vote to take money from someone else’s pocket for the same purpose. Where can we find more of that anti-decadence elixer?
It seemed to me that Whiskey’s antidote to the omnipresent government coerced PC/multicultural tribalism we all face, was just more tribalism, only his way of the White Supremacist kind. Not only is that “solution” racist, but in the end, such a solution would destroy our Constitutional protections and eventually our nation in order to “save” it.
Now in a little defense of Whiskey, LA County, in which he and I both reside I believe, has been absolutely overrun with illegals. They are everywhere except those areas frequented solely by the very wealthy or cultured. The most recent arrivals clearly are making little attempt to fit in to our American way of life. Our Local and State officials clearly favor them at nearly every turn. And there is also at present a deadly race war here between violent Latino gangs and those blacks who find themselves at the wrong place at the wrong time. It is a situation to drive one mad, and to drive one to make outlandish statements and ill conceived Judgements.
But even here in LA, there are situations that contradict Whiskey’s arguments; a couple of examples:
• I have been to several Latino family gatherings, which have very large extended families. What you find often in that family setting is open hostility and bickering between those Latinos that want and often are achieving the American Dream whole hog, and those who want to play the Reconquista victim/freeloader card. The Latino cohort is clearly not one big happy family/homogenized group, as Whiskey wants to paint it.
• There has been, here in LA, a huge influx of recent Armenian immigrants from Russia. They can be a rough group. Their community is fairly insular and many recent Armenian immigrants often want to give the appearance of ties to the Russian Mob, whether it’s true or not. They have their own gangs and they are not pretty. Many natives are somewhat afraid of them. That includes descendants of the first wave of Armenian immigrants from the twenties, who are clearly embarrassed by the new arrivals. These people are white, and yet they don’t seem to try to fit in. Among almost all immigrant groups, it’s clear the arrivals of yesteryear assimilated better.
The problem it seems is not the immigrants necessarily; it’s the way our government has handled the situation. Not only has government in this State at all levels, hardly attempted to stop illegal immigration, our politicians have actually encouraged the new arrivals, both legal and illegal to not fit it, not assimilate, and to burden our schools, hospitals, welfare system, our criminal justice system and inevitably our economy with a situation our public agencies and economy cannot hope to cope with. Our politicians, particularly the Democrats, are encouraging racial and tribal strife. It is the exact opposite of what E Pluribus Unum envisions.
Race and tribal wars are common throughout history, particularly when one tribe is oppressing another. The correct application of the original intent of our Constitution has been the difference that has limited racial strife and promoted racial harmony throughout our nation’s 200 plus years. One would think that minorities would understand that promoting Constitutional protections is the towering idea that is protecting them from a race war that they in the end will surely lose. Otherwise, without the ideas of E Pluribus Unum and the Constitution, and reduced to our own homogeneous tribes of ethnic identity, the allure of white supremacy will eventually win out, because whites are the clear majority now and will be in the foreseeable future.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mittelbau-Dora
A healthy animal — say, f’rinstance, a cape buffalo — can support a pretty substantial population of blood-sucking parasites. But if the population multiplies because the tick-eating birds fly off to the antarctic, or the tick and flea eggs all keep lodging in the buffalo’s hair, and hatching to add to the mass of suckers…
Sooner or later the animal is weakened to the point that the immune system can’t resist bacteria that are normally kept in check, and in just a few generations the host is dead. Collapse can come very quickly once the trends converge at a critical point. (For lotta bacteria, one generation can be a few hours.)
I gotta believe that neither the parasites nor the bacteria have any ill will for the cape buffalo — just “doin’ their thing.” Yeah, dude…
Gee, can’t we all just… get along????
Eggplant 303:
But Von Braun originally envisioned the manned exploration of space in the correct way, the logical way. He saw a series of steps, proceeding from unmanned expendable rockets to LEO expeditions that used reusable manned spacecraft. Then space stations would be built that would facilitate the construction of large orbiting telescopes and interplanetary vehicles. The interplanetary ships would use components from the manned ascent vehicles, such as the flight deck, to keep things cheaper and standardized. Vehicles going to the Moon would use “LEMs” designed and constructed in orbit for that purpose. For the exploration of Mars there would be a series of ships dispatched on a regular schedule.
But Von Braun of necessity got sucked into JFK’s “by the end of this decade” requirements, just like he got sucked into the A-4/V-2 as a weapon. This ensured that the Moon landing effort, and indeed the entire manned space program, was focused on an incredible stunt as a way of showing up the Soviets. JFK admitted he was not very interested in space and even at one point suggested that the USA and USSR combine their manned Moon program efforts.
I think that Von Braun never expected the unmanned space program to become so valuable. While they were focused on getting to the Moon for a few hours at a stretch the people on the other side of the Banana River and out at Vandenberg were changing the world.
The Shuttle was a reaction to the fact that the Apollo program was merely a magnificent stunt and that the real justification for the space program were the mundane unmanned satellites that had become invaluable.
I assume many of you have seen this, via Insta:
305. Kinuachdrach
There is a story, possibly apocryphal, about a senior officer’s indigent widow following the US Revolutionary War. One Congresscritter proposed that the Continental Congress should vote her a stipend. A real Congressman got up & responded that he would gladly put his hand into his own pocket to help the deserving widow — but he would never vote to take money from someone else’s pocket for the same purpose.
That was Davy Crockett. There’s an account of it here: Davy Crockett vs. Welfare
As to whether or not it’s true, who knows, but Crockett did have enough commitment to principles to die at the Alamo when he could have left.
Where can we find more of that anti-decadence elixer?
I wish I knew. Definitely not in Washington, DC.
Unsk –
Curious that you should mention Armenians. I lived & worked in Glendale for the better part of 10 years. (very large Armenian community for those not familiar) The Bank of America at the corner of Glendale Ave & Wilson, where I did most of my banking, had a dry-erase board in the middle of the lobby that contained customer messages in four languages: Armenian at the top, followed by Spanish, then English, then Tagalag.
Anyhoo, two young Iranian immigrants who were ethnic Armenians worked at my office. They and their families considered the Russian Armenians “thieves.” (their word, not mine) When I asked my friends to explain, they launched into a long complaint about how the Russian Armenians drove nice cars & wore nice clothes while collecting welfare, and chiseled everything they could get in the way of social services from the government.
I asked them if they thought that having lived in the Soviet Union had made these Russian Armenians view the government as something to be distrusted & cheated at every turn, and that they had carried that mentality here to the U.S. My Iranian Armenian friends said they thought that might be the case. But it still hacked them off that they were working their way up from the bottom, aka doing things the right way, while these others were cheating and getting away with it. And my friends were emphatic in differentiating themselves from the Russian Armenians, esp. to make sure that *I* knew that not all Armenians were the same.
I realize that whiskey lives in Southern California, and having lived there myself for many years I can well understand the sense of alienation and frustration that happens when you see your town, your neighborhood, and your street turn, slowly but surely, from, in the most basic sense, a place that works to a place that doesn’t work. But d-a-n-g, to habitually lump everyone from a particular ethnicity into one mindset is to me an indication of someone who doesn’t get out & mingle very much. If the Armenians in Glendale are trashing each other & divided amongst themselves, it is likely not that much different among other groups. As I consider my Iranian Armenian friends, to me the dividing line was not ethnicity but a mentality, the mentality of personal responsibility and independence. My friends & I were on the same side: you’re supposed to earn what you get by working hard, going to school & not taking shortcuts. The government-dependent chiselers are on the other side: some of them Russian Armenians, yes, but plenty who are whites who speak English and were born here.
heyyoukidsgetoffmylawn @ 307 referred to KZ Mittelbau-Dora which is located in the city of Nordhausen. Nordhausen is not far from Goettingen where I once did some post-Doc work in the 1980s for the German Aerospace Authority (DFVLR). During World War II, the DFVLR facility that I worked at was called the Aerodynamische Versuchsanstalt (AVA) and was run by Ludwig Prandtl. Much of the seminal work in aerospace was done at the AVA, Goettingen, e.g. supersonic and boundary layer theory, basic airfoil wind tunnel work, etc. Prandtl was a genius and unfortunately also a card carrying Nazi. After World War II ended, Prandtl’s former doctoral student Theodore von Kármán was sent by the US government to review all the surviving aeronautical engineering assets in Germany (these assets were regarded as war prizes). It so happened that von Kármán toured KZ Mittelbau-Dora just before arriving in Goettingen to tour the AVA. Legend has it that von Kármán read Prandtl the riot act and told Prandtl that he had disgraced himself and the profession by cooperating with the Nazis. Prandtl was never again allowed to hold any position of authority. If one visits the cemetery in Goettingen, one will notice that the tombstones of distinguished scientists are decorated with their most important equations. However Prandtl’s tombstone though quite large is not decorated because he had dishonored himself.
It’s difficult to say how much influence that von Braun had over KZ Mittelbau-Dora. Von Braun mainly did the research and development work for the A4 rocket. After development, the A4 design was handed off to other branches of the Nazi government for actual manufacturing and deployment. It’s quite possible when von Braun first saw KZ Mittelbau-Dora, he was already out of the management loop and on probation due to previously being sent to a concentration camp. It’s a sorry commentary that very few German scientists did not dishonor themselves during the Nazi period. Most of them like Prandtl and Heisenberg cooperated with the Nazis. Others like Einstein (who was in immediate peril due to being Jewish) simply fled Germany to the United States or England. Very few scientists chose to remain in Germany and try to change the system. I only know of one, namely Max Planck. Max Planck was steadfast in his opposition to the Nazis. His motivation was simply that he saw the Nazis as evil and was brave enough to oppose the system. Of course he had no significant impact but showed that not all German scientists/engineers were cowards, fellow-travelers or simply amoral.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but societies go to hell when they abandon God.
Bob @ 310 said:
“Charles Bolden, head of NASA, tells Al Jazeera that the “foremost” task President Obama has given him is “to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with predominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math, and engineering.””
I have heard people say that Charles Bolden has the distinction of being the most hated administrator in NASA’s history. I find this hard to believe because the hatred against Dan Goldin was white hot and can’t imagine anyone being hated more than Goldin. I personally can not take Bolden seriously and regard him as a “place holder” until Obama goes away and the Space Program is allowed to resume (assuming there is anything left of the Space Program). The whole Obama “thing” is like a very bad dream. I’m just waiting for it to end so life can resume.
I don’t know why, but upon reading this piece I immediately thought of Cheryl Crow’s toilet paper thingy and the Super Bowl commercial for Audi. Depressing indeed.
Kinuachdrach/306
No need for apologies, no offense taken. Understood you misunderstood. Need to be less sloppy, thus the clarification.
Eggplant (#315):
The Twilight-Zone-style twist would be that you wake up and find out that compared to the real world, this Obama thing was a utopia.
(This must have been used in fiction. Can anyone provide me with examples? (The Twilight Zone would be a good guess.))
Bogie Wheel, My intent wasn’t to broad brush all Armenians, recent arrivals or otherwise as chiselers as you put it. I have Armenian friends as well. My only point was to point out, however inarticulate as it was, is that there are portions of recent white, along with minority, immigrants that are not integrating into our society in an All America fashion as we would like it. The same goes also for native born blacks, latinos, whites or whatever. Much of the problem lies with our PC Welfare/Nanny State. We have in a sense created a large part of our immigration problem with our Nanny State, and the solution is not a white supremacist government without constitutional protections for minorities.
Bob,
Ever hear of the Canadian Twilight Zone?
You wake up and nothing has happened.
You toss a ball in the air and it comes back down.
You take a long plane flight and someone behind you snores.
This can continue until the audience rebels.
Davy Crockett was interesting. His (non)-attendance record in Congress lasted until Adam Clayton Powell. There was a story that he once boasted to his drinking companions about killing a large number of “bares.” His buddies reportedly refuted his claim with argument that he couldn’t count that high. He died well.
Lifeofthemind (#320): “This can continue until the audience rebels.”
A Canadian audience rebelling? We have truly entered the Twilight Zone!
A belated happy Dominion Day to them Crazy Canucks.
Unsk – I actually wasn’t disagreeing with anything you said. Guess I expressed myself poorly. I just thought it was interesting that you brought up “Russian Armenians” and that your description matched what my friends had said, who even though they were also Armenians did not consider themselves “fellow” Armenians to the ones from the former USSR in the sense of wanting to be identified with them.
And I wanted to raise the point, in contradistinction to whiskey’s portrayals of non-Asian immigrants, that even in the very particular & geographically concentrated community of Armenians in Glendale, they were most certainly not culturally homogeneous, that at least one contingent had a lot of hostility towards the other, and that the Iranian Armenians were much more “American” in their work ethic & independent spirit than many native-born Americans.
Eggplant:
Goldin had the unenviable job of having to downsize NASA in the post-cold war era in order to match capabilities with budgets. In order to do that with DoD you had to have Base Closing Commissions to prevent Congress form mucking up the process and essentially stopping it. (And even then Bill Clinton mucked it up.)
Goldin had to do it on his own with no equivalent of a base closing commission to give him cover. He seemed to make a suggestion to a USAF or DoD official about consolidating activities every time he bumped into one in the bathroom. At the first of these, began in 1993, I ended up being the DoD representative when the OSD guy assigned got pre-empted. And at that first meeting the closest NASA Center, Goddard, refused to even send a rep; they knew that their Congresswoman would protect them and basically told Goldin to buzz off. Maybe Goldin was trying to steal some DoD R&D missions for NASA or maybe he was trying to come up with a justification to close some NASA installations, but he had to try, and that proved to be unpopular. As soon as the first study was done, we started another one just like it.
“Better Faster Cheaper” was an albatross hung around Goldin’s neck and deservedly so. But he got the idea from SDI’s Delta Clipper and Moon probe programs. What worked, more or less, with lean mean SDI did not with NASA; that is not all his fault.
The news on NASA’s new task reminds me of John Kerry’s statement that he wanted NASA to focus on how to do things better faster and cheaper here on Earth. The poor fool apparently thought that Goldin’s famous initiative worked….
eggplant #@ 303: A radiation shield is unnecessary if the astronaut/technician spends less than 2 years outside of the atmosphere.
speak for yourself, and this excludes shielding needed during solar storms when even a few minutes might be disabling.
which relates to nerva missions to mars. nerva might get you there and back in a year or three, but that’s a lot of exposure time, and just generally time for stuff to go wrong. not clear that a manned flight between planets can be a minimum energy flight without excessive risk, but anything significantly better requires a lot more energy, proportional to the square (?) of the time saved?
and I’m always still fixated on the ground to orbit lift, once up you can use solar sails or ions or lasers or who knows what, including dirtier and more efficient nuke options, if you can build them.
the scifi fusion engines in Niven were probably space-only, it was never clear how he got stuff to orbit (in, say, Mote In God’s Eye). or I suppose it could have been an additionally baffled fusion variation.
eggplant #@ 303: ”A radiation shield is unnecessary if the astronaut/technician spends less than 2 years outside of the atmosphere.”
Josh@324: ”speak for yourself, and this excludes shielding needed during solar storms when even a few minutes might be disabling.
which relates to nerva missions to mars. nerva might get you there and back in a year or three, but that’s a lot of exposure time, “
The NERVA mars mission planning included a heavy radiation shield to provide dual protection against solar storms as well as radiation from the reactor. The mission envisioned that the space craft would orient itself so that the radiation shield was between the capsule and the sun at all times, both going and coming.
NERVA exists in our real world. Fusion engines exist only in scifi myth. Has myth become the enemy of reality?
tharkun @ 311 — Thanks for the link to the story about Colonel Crockett. That was a real “sockdolager”.
Bob @ 270,
“[...] if only those Anglo-Americans weren’t so impulsively hasty. (Or eager to bomb France’s cultural treasures, but far be it from me to impute such negative motives to those barbarians.)”
Hey! I resemble that remark!! Apology ex-cepted!
Marie Claude (and much of France, by extension) would do well to ponder an arborist’s appreciation of her nation’s Socratic imprisonment: a healthy oak tree survives to great age by abandoning its dead wood.
It’s my humble opinion that MC’s reflexive defenses of France’s aged Imperial monuments should stimulate some introspection in her and her fellow citizens. What could be more “Conservative,” really, than “Liberal” France’s unthinking fixation on her “fixed” historical monuments? Is this constipation France’s idea of “hope and change?”
I’m embarrassed for her, in fact. The more I think about it…it’s like Linus’ fixation on his baby blanket. Or, an eleven-year old thumb-sucker! Or, someone who peeks in the toilet-bowl before he flushes: all exemplify a pathological nostalgia for events that belong in the past.
Not pretty: Me thinks it’s time for France to grow up! She should jettison her Napoleonic, Pan-European pretenses and regroup around her Celtic heritage and administrable, national borders. Always good capitalists, eaters of lots of pig, her warriors unmatched – France’s Celtic marrow, her traditional reserves, is still retrievable. And Mohammedan vegans won’t stand a chance ‘gainst ‘em.
France should reach for what works! Look inside, MC. Fix France!
Bob @ 321
Thank you on behalf of the 33 million.
Yes, I suppose a great many of us are from others’ perspective.
Its not everyone who on finding themselves on the shores of four million square miles of freeze dried granite thinks to themselves…perfect.
Its particular rigours take a certain degree of adaptation to survive and succeed in for over 500 years.
And may I add, to you and all, a belated happy Fourth of July.
Here’s some nice clean-cut Canadian boys from Toronto.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUt8fQS9qEM