Rocket to nowhere

Over at FrumForum, my latest: "NASA's New Rocket Won't Reach New Frontiers," about the just-unveiled plans for the Space Launch System. Excerpt:

The impetus for this rocket was congressional pressure. First the Obama administration scrapped the Bush administration’s Constellation project of renewed lunar exploration, and as the Space Shuttle Program began to end. In response, lawmakers pressed for a new heavy-lift rocket that, far from incidentally, would preserve some NASA and contractor jobs, particularly in states such as Texas and Florida that are heavy with space facilities.

There is tremendous uncertainty about future space funding and whether any future administration — or for that matter, the Obama administration — will take seriously the President’s stated goal of sending humans to an asteroid by 2025 and to Mars at some later time.

Thicket

Posting may be light as we get through the tall grass of catching up on various projects. But you can never be too sure what's coming -- there were deer in this scene a split second before I took the picture.

A look back

Myles Dannhausen Jr., journalist at the Wisconsin Peninsula Pulse, spoke to me about 9/11. Excerpt:

Ten years after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks killed 2,977 people and shook the nation to its core, Ground Zero is still a construction site, the United States is still embroiled in two wars, and our defense budget is conservatively pegged at more than twice what it was before the attacks.

Yet, Ken Silber, an economics and politics writer and native New Yorker, says that the state of the nation today is "pretty far to the optimistic end of the spectrum."

                         

"If you had told me then, in the days after Sept. 11, that life in America would be the way it is now, I would have said that it was a relatively good scenario."

 Whole thing here.

Debate 9/7

I participated in FrumForum's liveblogging of tonight's GOP debate. The transcript is here.

Perry vs science

My latest at FrumForum: "If it's Perry: Anti-Science Label Sticks." Excerpt:

If Rick Perry is the nominee, we will hear stepped-up criticism that there is a Republican “war on science,” that the GOP is anti-intellectual and antipathetic to facts and analysis. Such criticism will resonate with many voters, precisely because Perry’s nomination will be evidence that it’s true.

In August, shortly after entering the race, Perry generated controversy with comments about climate change and biological evolution. He dismissed anthropogenic global warming as an unproven assertion by scientists who have “manipulated data” to spur funding for their projects. He described evolution as a theory with “some gaps in it” and said that it’s taught alongside creationism in Texas (which if true would raise questions about the constitutionality of Texas’ science curricula).

 Whole thing here.

Ten years later

In the September issue of Research, I look back to 9/11 and ahead to future crises: "Wall Street at War."

Cover art by James O'Brien.

The view from 6 million miles away

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech. More info here.

Deadliest Warrior redux

Welcome, readers of STORMBRINGER. I was quite pleased this weekend to discuss "Deadliest Warrior" with Sean Linnane, an actual warrior, and am honored that he took interest in my FrumForum piece on the subject.

Alien reading list

When I have a chance, I intend to read more thoroughly this paper, which I've only skimmed so far: "Would contact with extraterrestrials benefit or harm humanity? A scenario analysis." (I wrote on a similar theme a few years ago.)

The paper has caused a bit of kerfuffle, involving sensationalism, misunderstanding and politicization. See:

"Some important points of clarification," by one of the paper's coauthors.

"Bad news from NASA: If we don’t reduce carbon emissions, the aliens might come and kill us; Update: Not a NASA report," Hot Air.

"Right Wing Blogs in Massive Anti-Science Fail Mode," Little Green Footballs.

UPDATE: "Space Aliens Are Probably Progressive Liberals," National Review.

No thanks, Perry

One of my major differences with prevailing sentiment in the GOP is over climate change -- accepting the reality of it and the anthropogenic nature of it, and then developing policies (such as carbon taxes) aimed at limiting its extent and impact. Another major difference I have with today's Republicans overall is about the Fed -- partly over the particular policies it's implemented in recent years (which strike me as basically on the right track even if monetary policy alone cannot solve our economic problems) but more fundamentally that the Fed fulfills crucial functions and needs a degree of independence to do so, hence it should not be demonized (or for that matter abolished).

Rick Perry has come down powerfully on the wrong side of both issues, in substance and in tone, in his first week of campaigning. What will he do next week?

Economic Principals update

Long ago, I wrote a review for Reason of Economic Principals: Masters and Mavericks of Modern Economics, by David Warsh. This was so long ago in fact (1993) that Reason's online archives don't go back that far, though my review can be found here. In the interest of examining the diversity of ways for trying to generate income through writing for the Web, I note that Warsh now runs his former newspaper column as a website that's free but that gives an early edition and a quarterly newsletter to buyers of a $50 subscription.

The Great Stagnation

At FrumForum, I review The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better, by Tyler Cowen. Excerpt:

For several hundred years, Cowen argues, the Western world in general and America in particular have benefitted from relatively abundant or accessible sources of economic growth — “low-hanging fruit” — such as newly opened land, expanded education, and technological breakthroughs ranging from electricity to pharmaceuticals.

The trouble is, he contends, the low-hanging fruit has been getting sparse in the past several decades. Yes, there is still much technological innovation but it’s largely focused on Internet-related sectors that don’t necessarily produce a lot of jobs or revenue. A great deal of financial innovation has been occurring but that only enriches small numbers of people without necessarily producing much social benefit.

The rest includes discussion of Ayn Rand, John Horgan and the social status of scientists. Whole thing here.

Hard money

David Frum has a valuable discussion of monetary history revolving around the 40-years-ago "Nixon shock." In light of Rick Perry's remarks yesterday about Bernanke's "near treason," I add a modest proposal about applying some hard-core free-market monetary policy in Texas first. I also note with amusement that the anonymous "businessman and investor" cited by Bill Kristol the other day on Fed policy has now made his way into a comment by John Podhoretz, who touts the unnamed guy's reputation as "unimpeachable."

UPDATE: Also recommended, Bruce Bartlett on "Nixon's Biggest Gamble..." And I wrote something on it here.

Bill Kristol's anti-Fed friend

Over at FrumForum, I ask: "Who Wants Higher Interest Rates?" Opening:

Over at the Weekly Standard’s blog, William Kristol reproduces an email he’s received from an unnamed “businessman and investor” for whose judgment Kristol says he has the “highest regard.” The email lambastes the policies of the Federal Reserve and Ben Bernanke in no uncertain terms.

Here it is with my comments appended...

Whole thing here.

UPDATE 8/11: I'll be participating in some live-blogging of the GOP debate at FrumForum at 9 ET tonight. UPDATE: Archived here.

UPDATE 8/12: Welcome to Marginal Revolution readers of "How Did Libertarians Lose Their Way?"

Monetary crankdom update

A few notes involving currencies. I mention these topics in passing for the moment, lacking the time just now to give them the more in-depth treatment I'd prefer.

George Will, lately a more libertarian-leaning figure than long thought to be, writes that "events seem to be validating [Ron Paul's] message, which is that the country's financial condition is awful." But isn't Ron Paul's message that the country's financial condition can be drastically improved by getting rid of the Fed and implementing a gold standard and/or competing currencies? And given that it is, what effect would such policies have in the current troubled financial situation? Would not a gold standard, insofar as it truly is binding, render the federal government actually incapable of paying its bills and thus cause vastly worse turmoil than we have now? Or is the whole question of a gold standard not worth discussing, because such a policy would be abandoned readily in times such as the present, thus raising a profound credibility issue that gold-standard proponents have never been able to resolve? And as for competing currencies...

... It wasn't that long ago, just a few months, that a wave of libertarian enthusiasm arose over the electronic currency Bitcoin and the liberation it offered from government oversight. How's Bitcoin doing now, you ask?

Point of Inquiry (UPDATED)

This afternoon, I spoke with Chris Mooney and David Frum for a "Point of Inquiry" podcast hosted by Mooney. It's a program produced by the Center for Inquiry, part of the skepticism/science/humanism complex that produces Skeptical Inquirer and Free Inquiry magazines. Our topic was "conservatism, science and reality," and I'm told the podcast will be available online by late Monday.

UPDATE 8/1: Here it is, with audio file.

UPDATE 8/2: I have some more at FrumForum: "Can Conservatives and Scientists Get Along?"

UPDATE 8/5: See also Mooney's later post and the writeup at ClimateCrocks, which includes a YouTube excerpt:

Save JWST art

The saveJWST Art Initiative has presented some artworks aimed at promoting public support for the James Webb Space Telescope. I particularly like the tagline "For when you positively, absolutely have to understand the universe." I described the telescope's political travails and what's at stake here.

FrumForum note

FrumForum has a new design, which makes it look more blog-like, one might say. I expect there will be more fine-tuning, as the only constant on the Internet is change. My posts are collected here, and there will be more to come. My latest piece, on the James Webb Space Telescope, continues to draw comments, including some pretty impressive ones. I like to think that when JWST is finally deployed, it will have been my post that tipped the balance in the delicate political situation and made it all happen. But I like to think a lot of things.

On not joining Google+ (UPDATED)

The advent of Google+ is going to cause some people—it’s doing this for me—to mull over just how many social networks they should be on, and how much time and energy such media merit. For now, I’m content to let Google+ go its way without me, though I’ve never been an early adopter of these things anyway.

Currently, I am on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, besides having an oar in the blogging stream here at Quicksilber as well as another at FrumForum. All of these serve distinct purposes, albeit with some fuzzy edges. For me, Twitter is primarily for communicating with people in their capacity as readers and writers; Facebook is primarily for keeping in touch with friends and relatives; and LinkedIn is for business contacts (albeit for me, in my present use, LinkedIn is pretty much for nothing).

Most of the above has had considerable benefits for me in maintaining or forming contacts I wouldn’t have done otherwise, in getting people to read my writing, and in learning things I would otherwise have missed. But there are real downsides of social media, such as being time-consuming and occasionally causing frictions such as when someone has blocked you or unfriended you, etc. If Google+ is all it’s cracked up to be, I’ll probably be there at some point, but let it not be soon.

UPDATE 7/19: Julian Sanchez has some interesting thoughts about Google+ and other networks' uses, privacy issues and the tradeoffs involved.

UPDATE 7/21: So much for that -- I'm now on it. I got an invite from someone at my current primary employer, and came to think I'm better off having some capability to use it. So much for the plan to start just in time for the election of 2028.

Save JWST

At FrumForum I come to the defense of the endangered James Webb Space Telescope. Excerpt:

JWST would operate about a million miles from Earth (Hubble is just a few hundred miles up) using advanced instruments to detect light from distant and faint objects; the far-off locale would provide excellent conditions for avoiding unwanted light and heat. The telescope would be optimized for infrared observations, enabling it to peer through dust clouds into the birthplaces of stars and the origins and early development of galaxies. No less exciting, JWST would be aimed at taking images of planets beyond our solar system and seeking signs of water and other factors relevant to possible life.

Whole thing here.