Wretchard asked:

“A provider of business intelligence services asked me whether “reality always won” in the face of a determined disinformation campaign.”

The disinformation campaign has succeeded. The US Treasury has been looted, refer to:

http://thehill.com/leading-the-news/watchdog-treasury-has-failed-to-adopt-bailout-safeguards-2009-07-20.html

Key quote:

“Barofsky said that while the TARP program that Congress passed amounts to $700 billion, the total federal government support since 2007 for the economy and the financial sector could reach a far higher figure of $23.7 trillion.”

Note: $23.7 trillion. That’s nearly double the nation’s GDP.

Ever wondered how the stock market Sucker’s Rally continues even though the S&P 500 P/E ratios are over 134? Refer to:

http://www2.standardandpoors.com/portal/site/sp/en/us/page.topic/indices_500/2,3,2,2,0,0,0,0,0,1,11,0,0,0,0,0.html

All that’s keeping the economy alive are lies and government market intervention. The Fed through Goldman and Sachs, and other middlemen has been buying up stocks to keep the market indices up. When that buying stops, the whole house of cards will collapse.

RWE asked:

“We celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing today, but did the people working on that program really think that they could just keep on going the same way, so that we would now be up to, say, Apollo CXXXXXXI? And when they devised the Shuttle program did they really think it was a good idea – and it just happened to use the people and infrastructure of Apollo?”

The people working on the Apollo program knew that the best they could hope for was Apollo-20 and then the money would run out. In truth they only got to Apollo-17 before the money ran out. The Saturn-V for Apollo-18 became Skylab while the Saturn-Vs Apollo-19 and 20 where hauled outdoors and became bird nests (they’ve since been hauled back indoors and turned into museum pieces).

The Space Shuttle was a dead duck after they opted for the expendable external tank and the solid rocket booster. That fatally flawed design passed the US Senate by only one vote (it was the best NASA could do). This was back in 1972 when NASA was having its guts ripped out through massive budget cuts. One might argue that NASA in 1972 should have been honest and presented the American people with a binary option, i.e.

Adequately fund a viable Space Program –OR– terminate it cleanly and spend the money on something else.

However NASA knew that the American public would have opted for complete termination so NASA created the fiction of the fully reusable Space Shuttle. NASA kept telling itself the lie that it would fix the problem later with a “second generation Space Shuttle”, but it never happened (could not get adequate R&D funding). The aerospace community and the American people have been living with that lie ever since.