View 693 Monday, September 19, 2011

AAAARRRRRRRHH!! This be International Talk Like a Pirate Day!

Probably not the appropriate picture, but in looking for the right one I found this.

http://www.talklikeapirate.com/piratehome.html

Apologies, I let this get away from me. A discourse on the latest financial plans from President Obama is in preparation and I’ll get that up in an hour or so. Today we had to go looking for American made washing machine and dryer – Maytag is still made in America – and that used up some of the day. And I discovered I had not recorded subscriptions for a while and got way behind; I am not caught up yet but I am getting there.  Apologies.

Yesterday I got up a View for last week and a good mixed bag of mail. I’m dancing as fast as I can.

The President of the United States in essence declared war on the traditional understanding of America today. He has put it all in very stark terms: there are people with money. The rest of us need it, for food, clothing, medical expenses, Christmas presents for the children, shelter from the storms of life. We do not have those things. Others have far more than they need. Therefore we shall take what we need from them.

Now of course he did not put this in quite such stark terms, but what he did say is that the rich must pay their fair share; if they do not, then we will not be able to have drug research, Medicare, education, and all those things which we need so much. And therefore we must make them pay their fair share.

There was no discussion of the Constitution or where in that document the Federal government derives either the obligation or the power to collect taxes and distribute largess; and indeed the original Framers of the document would have been horrified at the notion. The Constitution was intended to insure the blessings of liberty on ourselves and our posterity.

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Of course it can be said that the President desires nothing more than to promote the general welfare, and the general welfare requires a reduction in the vast disparity between the very wealthy and the rest of us. Perhaps so: but note that the President does not offer the alternative of giving up some of the regulations and rules and the swarms of officers who harass the people and eat out their substance. It is not “raise taxes or we’ll have to fire bunny inspectors,” or “raise taxes or we won’t have all those education experts on the Federal payroll telling all the schools how to be great” (look how well the Federal government does with the DC schools over which it has absolute control)! It is not “raise taxes or the EPA will have to go out of business and leave all that environment and pollution stuff to the states and the local communities”. No. It is raise taxes or you will not get the goodies from the Obama Stash.

This is a fairly stark declaration.

Regarding discrepancy of wealth:

First, I don’t much like the concentration of power into fewer and fewer hands. I have less concern over concentration into the hands of individuals than I do over the creation of huge corporations and entities that are too big to fail. I have often said that an institution that is to big to fail is too big to exist; that there ought not be 5 Enormous Banks, but rather 50 Pretty Good Sized Banks; that the defense industry should never have been allowed to become as concentrated as it is; that the domestic automobile industry was far better off when we had Packard and La Salle and Studebaker and Nash; that companies ought to grow by giving better service or offereing better goods; that a steady profit with steady employment ought to be more important than “growth” and there ought to be enormous obstacles in the way of “growth” by buying up the competition. Were I emperor I would make it much harder to buy up the competition, and I would have tax policies that encourage stability over high flying “growth”. But that’s another story.

If we truly believe that great fortunes ought not exist, then confiscate them in the name of reducing the gap between rich and poor – but do not reward the government for doing it! Don’t pay the robbers for plundering the victims. I would far rather take Warren Buffet’s money and drop it in small bills from airplanes than to use it to pay unionized civil servants.

Of course it could be argued that Mr. Buffet will do more good with the money than if we confiscated his $50 billion and distributed it to everyone legally in the US at, say, $182.47 per person. Or perhaps we could be satisfied with confiscation all but a few million of his money so that we each get onl7 $175 or so. However we divide the spoils, I am quite certain that we would be better off letting him keep the money than we will be if we use it to hire unionized bunny inspectors.

And of course you can only despoil Warren Buffet once. Then you move on, to Bill Gates, and Paul Allen, and the thousand richest people in the US. After a while you discover that you run out of people to despoil. Once we have made it clear that anyone who has more than you is fair game, who’d next? And who is safe? But that too is another story.

The reason for resisting new taxes is not the taxes themselves, although it is difficult to see how there can be much economic recovery if those who are successful with their investments are to be taxed to subsidize those who are failures. Certainly the tax code it absurd, but this is not an attempt to reform it for rational reasons. This is simply a way to get more money for government.

The main reason to resist those tax increases is to force the government to stop the exponential growth of spending. A 7% exponential means a doubling in under 12 years. It is inexorable: and as government grows, those dependent on government become more so, and soon enough you reach the situation of Greece or Spain, where enough of the population is so utterly dependent on government that the people have no notion of how to get out of the situation: where they have little choice but to riot and make things unpleasant for all in the hopes that it can all continue for a few years more. Does anyone see a graceful way out for Spain? Much less Greece. The President would probably recommend Green Jobs for Spain, but those more familiar with Spanish investment in the Green Bubble know better.

Despair is a sin.

At the end of World War II, much of Germany was in ruins. Large parts of its infrastructure was attacked or bombed by the Allied Forces. The city of Dresden was completely destroyed. The population of Cologne had dropped from 750,000 to 32,000. The housing stock was reduced by 20%. Food production was half the level it was before the start of the war; industrial output was down by a third. Many of its men between the ages of 18 and 35, the demographic which could do the heavy lifting to literally rebuild the country, had been either killed or crippled.
During the war, Hitler had instituted food rations, limiting its civilian population to eat no more than 2,000 calories per day. After the war, the Allies continued this food rationing policy and limited the population to eat between 1,000-1,500 calories. Price controls on other goods and services led to shortages and a massive black market. Germany’s currency, the reichsmark, had become completely worthless, requiring its populace to resort to bartering for goods and services.
In short, Germany was a ruined state facing an incredibly bleak future. The country was occupied by four nations, and soon it would be divided into halves. The Eastern half became a socialist state, part of the Iron Curtain that was heavily influenced by Soviet policy. The Western half became a democracy. And caught in the middle was the former capital of Berlin, which was divided in two, eventually separated by what became known as the Berlin Wall.
But by 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell and Germany was once again reunited, it was the envy of most of the world. Germany had the third-biggest economy in the world, trailing only Japan and the United States in GDP.

Read more: http://www.investopedia.com/articles/economics/09/german-economic-miracle.asp#ixzz1YRwTIuT4

There is a way out of this Depression. Our lands do not lie in ruins. Our fields are not cratered from bombs and filled with mines. Many of our idle factories still exist. Wonderful machine tools and laboratory instruments are sold at scrap value on eBay and at public auction. There is lots of unused productivity in this land, and we know the formula for prosperity. It is liberty. That has always been the secret of American exceptionalism. We had founders whose goal was to insure the blessings of liberty for themselves and their posterity.

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free. We have always known this. We know it still.

View 692 Sunday, September 18, 2011

Summarizing the week: President Obama wants to spend a lot more money. His advisors tell him that the reason TARP and Stimulus failed is that the Recession he inherited from Bush was just a lot worse than everyone thought it was, and the stimulus just wasn’t big enough. Time to top it off with another round of stimulus spending, which will spark an economic recovery.

The Republicans observe that the Democrats claimed the Bush Recession ended over two years ago in June, 2009 and this is the Obama Depression, brought on by Obama’s economic policies following July 2009. Conservatives claim that the problem has always been that government spends too much money while keeping taxes high and multiplying regulations, and more spending will never get us out of an economic hole. The Tea Party repeats that we are Taxed Enough Already, and we have got to stop spending so much money.

I do not believe the Obama American Jobs Act has been introduced into Congress; a Republican from Texas introduced a three page tax cut bill under that name after the Democrats failed to come forward with a specific act. The leaked details of the 153 page Bill that President Obama has shown during some of his speeches indicate that it is a tax and spend bill with no outstanding features, and with some features rejected by the Congress when the Democrats held veto and filibuster proof majorities in both Houses.

The news tonight says that the Obama proposal is now over a trillion dollars in new spending. Stimulus Indeed.

This coming election appears more and more to be on the fundamental question: are we citizens or subjects? Is the primary responsibility for your life yours or your government’s? A long time ago there was a saying about Uncle Sam: “He’s your Uncle, not your Dad.” It was denounced by the left as a right wing extremist notion. We now expect the Federal government to pay our bills for us whether it can afford to or not; and few seem to feel an obligation to take care of themselves or their family. That’s a fine sentiment in good times, but when things go bad, someone else should step forward.

There was a time when local associations did that.

A reminder of Tocqueville’s associations

Reminds me of Tocqueville’s associations. I’d have to call this "doing the work of the angels."

http://www.cnn.com/2011/HEALTH/09/15/cnnheroes.keatley.nutrition/index.html

Gary

But we don’t read Tocqueville in high school, or in college, or indeed anywhere else now. Ask your kids’ teachers how many have read Tocqueville. Many will not even have heard of him. http://www.tocqueville.org/ 

There have been several new articles about new handicap diagnoses and education. This raises again the question of the purpose of public education. I suggest that for a start we have a law that reserves at least half the money expended on education for students of average and above intelligence who do not have any handicaps. That might or might not be enough to turn education from a useless entitlement into a meaningful public investment, but it would at least be a step in the right direction.

Is public education an entitlement or an investment? If an entitlement, who is entitled to what? And why is the public obligated to pay for it? If an investment, then allocation of education resources ought to have some resemblance to payoff. If the goal is to educate a flexible job-ready work force, then perhaps there are better investments than paying for home tutorial education for young people unable to go to public schools, either because of physical handicap or because they have Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and just can’t bring themselves to go to school classes.

“Investing” in expensive training of those unlikely ever to be in the work force is probably not an optimum investment. If we have the money to spend on making them feel better about having Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, or Attention Deficit Disorder, or Down’s Syndrome, or muscular dystrophy, then perhaps that is a good thing to do: but it is not an investment. If it be an entitlement, then surely there must be a debate about who is entitled to what, and who is obligated to pay.

The notion that intensive training of an IQ 85 student to enable that student to get a D instead of an F is a good investment of educational resources is certainly not obviously true. The notion that educational resources would be better spent on those of normal and above normal abilities seems quite intuitive.

The result of this entitlement mentality is that anyone who can afford to give their children a Head Start by getting out of the public school system entirely will do so; this makes for a hereditary caste system. Is that what we are investing in?

But of course one can’t say these things. Do we not live in Lake Wobegon, where the men are strong, the women are all good looking, and all the children are above average?

Wave of New Disabilities Swamps School Budgets

Christina Gustavsson says she loves school. But her teachers have had a tough time educating her.

In her freshman year at Kennett High School, 15-year-old Christina racked up five months’ worth of absences and never completed a full day of school. Sometimes, she had difficulty remembering assignments, completing homework or even waking up in time for school. Other times, she didn’t.

Christina has chronic fatigue syndrome, a condition whose symptoms have long confounded many medical professionals and now pose peculiar challenges for educators as more adolescents are diagnosed with it. In a time of tight budgets, public schools must consider how far to go to accommodate students with CFS and a range of so-called hidden disabilities that are difficult to observe, evaluate or understand.

By federal law, public schools are required to provide a "free appropriate public education" in the "least restrictive environment" to children with special needs. Interpreting those terms is a thorny task often left to the courts. But with CFS, there’s an added challenge: "It is very difficult to assess what the need is," said Sharon S. Bennett, director of special education for the Kennett Consolidated School District near Philadelphia. <snip>

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111904103404576558730329067142.html 

Why is there a federal law dictating entitlements to eduication resources? Precisely where in the Constitution is there any grant of power over education to Congress?  Of course Congress is sovereign in the District of Columbia and can deal with these problems as it will – as if it were a state. And perhaps Congress can show the rest of us how to set up schools that deal with the situation. But it has no right so far as I can tell to dictate education policy to Tennessee or Texas or California…

Right to Bear Arms

California has had an “open carry” law for a long time. At one time that insured one’s right to carry loaded firearms. In the wake of some demonstrations by the Black Panthers that was changed to the right openly to carry unloaded firearms – pistols, rifles, shotguns, whatever. I was against the change at that time, but many Republicans in those days were more concerned with suppressing the Black Panthers than they were with preserving the right to self defense, and they went along with the change.

There is now a law on Governor Brown’s desk removing the right openly to carry an unloaded firearm. I don’t know if it applies to gun racks in the back of a truck, or to carrying a firearm on your own property. I do know that it is of a piece with the move to convert citizens into subjects. Citizens are armed. Subjects have been disarmed.

Not that the protection was all that good to begin with. Long Beach police some months ago shot a man seated on his friend’s porch because the man aimed a garden hose nozzle at them. The nozzle looked like a firearm. The police had not told him of their presence, and so far as I can see the incident is quite accurately described as “the police snuck up on him, watched him a while, and shot him without warning when he aimed what they thought was a gun in their general direction.” To the best I can tell no one has been charged or even reprimanded, and it isn’t likely that anyone will be. His right to bear arms turns out not to have been very meaningful.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2010/12/man-killed-by-long-beach-police-was-holding-a-water-nozzle.html

What he was brandishing looked a bit like a gun. The police said he aimed it at them, but it turns out that he was entirely unaware that there were any police – or anyone else – in his immediate vicinity. He was just sitting there playing with a toy gun. Subjects are not permitted to do such things, lest they offend their protectors, whose first concern is self defense.

In any event, California will shortly forbid its subjects from openly carrying even an unloaded weapon. Concealed weapons permits in California vary from easy to get – I had one when we lived in Buena Park because the permit is discretionary with the local Chief of Police and he was very reasonable about such things – to nearly impossible in places like Los Angeles and San Francisco. (Permits are also discretionary with the County Sheriff, which is an elected position in California, and it is said that sufficient campaign contributions plus an arrest-free record will get you a carry permit in Los Angeles; I wouldn’t know how accurate that rumor is.)

Salve, sclave.

It’s ugly in Libya. Qaddaffi has abandoned Tripoli and taken to the desert. He probably took much of his stash of Kruger Rands and other gold coins with him; it is likely that he has enough to pay for a mercenary army capable of holding portions of Libya for years to come. He can hire people to conduct guerrilla warfare including assassinations of rebel leaders, use IED’s to create terror and unrest anywhere he likes, and generally keep Libya in a state of unrest. A Rebel attempt to dislodge him from his latest stronghold were repulsed, and the rebel forces fled in disorganized array to regroup.

The question now is whether the rebels can induce NATO to continue air strikes to aid their war of liberation against area increasingly less willing to be liberated? NATO can break things and kill people. Its UN mandate is to break things and kill people in order to prevent Khadafi from slaughtering civilians. It is not clear that the US or NATO understands how to use air and sea power to prevent a desert-based guerrilla force from terrorists acts. Our experience in Iraq and Afghanistan may be relevant here. Perhaps the SAS, the Foreign Legion, and the Italian special forces will do better in Libya.

Left to themselves, things will probably go on about as they have. Most of Tripolitania has been freed of pro-Khaddaffi organized forces; covert Khaddafi terrorists remain. Do recall that he was able to recruit agents for international terrorist actions before the uprisings began.

Historically the outcome of situations like this has been the rise of a Caesar who will come as the Friend of the People to Restore Order. Or Caesar’s son, or nephew. Or an adopted son. Or anyone who can command the allegiance of the arms bearers.

It’s ugly in Egypt. Egypt was “liberated” by huge crowds in Cairo and smaller demonstrations in the rest of the country, aided by the Egyptian Army which was receptive to the notion that Mubarak should step down without automatic succession by his sons, but is increasingly uncomfortable with the view of their former leader on display helpless on a gurney in a cage. They of all know that the uprising wasn’t a genuine act of the Egyptian people. Many of those camped out in the public squares were there because they could afford to be there – they didn’t have to work. And someone else was feeding them. And while they were there the tourist industry was dead. The bizarre incident of the camel drivers and others mounted on horses attempting to drive the insurgents out of the square was a desperate attempt by the bankrupted tourist workers to end the madness so their livelihood could be restored.

The Lara Logan incident was precursor to the recent sacking of the Israeli Embassy. The Egyptian Army doesn’t want a new war with Israel. It is unknown what most of the Egyptian people want. The Cairo mobs want a war with Israel. The Mamelukes do not, but don’t quite know what to do now. The Israelis are quietly mobilizing while the UN debates the notion of granting statehood to Palestine. Perhaps the US and Britain will veto the notion. Perhaps not. Israel quietly mobilizes, which is prudent.

We live in interesting times.

We have a lot of interesting mail. I’ll see how much of it I can put together. I have been a bit under the weather for the week and I have fallen far behind. Apologies.

View 692 Friday, September 16, 2011

If you ever doubted the truth of the Iron Law of Bureaucracy, perhaps this will make you believe.

NASA revealed its new design for its next-generation heavy-lift rocket today (Sept. 14), unveiling a giant booster that will eventually carry astronauts on future deep space missions.

The new rocket, called the Space Launch System (SLS), will include hardware and technology that are legacies from the space shuttle and now-defunct Constellation programs. The $10 billion booster will use liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen fuel, and will have solid rocket boosters for initial tests flights, agency officials said.

"The next chapter of America’s space exploration story is being written today," NASA administrator and former space shuttle astronaut Charles Bolden said during a news briefing held today in Washington to unveil the new rocket design. "In combination with the crew capsule already in development, extension of activities on the International Space Station, fresh focus on new technologies, the new Space Launch System is key to implementing the plan laid out by President Obama and Congress in the bipartisan 2010 NASA Authorization Act."

http://www.space.com/12941-nasa-unveils-giant-rocket-space-launch-system.html

It proves that NASA has learned nothing and forgotten nothing, and the purpose of NASA is to provide work for NASA employees. Given the task of coming up with a new national space program now that the Shuttle has eaten much of the dream, NASA comes up with a giant expendable that uses hydrogen fuel, Shuttle Recoverable (Solid Fuel) Boosters – SEGMENTED Shuttle Recoverable Boosters – monopropellant boosters on a giant expendable rocket. This bird is optimized for employing the NASA standing army.

The Shuttle was enormously successful. I think of no other large project that so thoroughly did the work it was designed to do – which was to employ a large standing army of development scientists, engineers, and technicians, and give them plenty of meaningful work to do.

Now the poor design of Shuttle wasn’t all NASA’s fault. A misconceived idea of making Shuttle relevant to the military got the Air Force involved, and the Air Force mission given for Shuttle was one that caused an enormous complication in the system design and was ultimately responsible for the Columbia disaster. There was also the political requirement that the Shuttle use solid boosters built in Utah, which required that the SRB be segmented, which was responsible for the Challenger disaster. NASA didn’t choose those primary hampers. Even so, the whole purpose of Shuttle was to employ the oversize crew of development scientists, engineers, and technicians brought about by Apollo. Apollo was run in the military manner like D-Day. It was a Cold War operation. Of course we had won the race to the Moon by 1967, but no one knew that yet, and by then it was too late anyway. We had created the standing army that needed employment after Apollo. They designed Shuttle to keep that standing army employed. The fact that the basic design was fatally compromised did not keep Shuttle from completing that primary mission.

The Standing Army Full Employment Program

The SLS rocket will incorporate technological investments from the Space Shuttle Program and the Constellation Program in order to take advantage of proven hardware and cutting-edge tooling and manufacturing technology that will significantly reduce development and operations costs. It will use a liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen propulsion system, which will include the RS-25D/E from the Space Shuttle Program for the core stage and the J-2X engine for the upper stage. SLS will also use solid rocket boosters for the initial development flights, while follow-on boosters will be competed based on performance requirements and affordability considerations. The SLS will have an initial lift capacity of 70 metric tons. That’s more than 154,000 pounds, or 77 tons, roughly the weight of 40 sport utility vehicles. The lift capacity will be evolvable to 130 metric tons — more than 286,000 pounds, or 143 tons — enough to lift 75 SUVs. The first developmental flight, or mission, is targeted for the end of 2017.

 
This specific architecture was selected, largely because it utilizes an evolvable development approach, which allows NASA to address high-cost development activities early on in the program and take advantage of higher buying power before inflation erodes the available funding of a fixed budget. This architecture also enables NASA to leverage existing capabilities and lower development costs by using liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen for both the core and upper stages. Additionally, this architecture provides a modular launch vehicle that can be configured for specific mission needs using a variation of common elements. NASA may not need to lift 130 metric tons for each mission and the flexibility of this modular architecture allows the agency to use different core stage, upper stage, and first-stage booster combinations to achieve the most efficient launch vehicle for the desired mission.

http://www.nasa.gov/exploration/systems/sls/sls1.html

Now what’s wrong with this picture?

First, there’s not even a discussion of an alternative to developing a large expendable booster. There is not even a hint that reusable spacecraft would work better. OK, concede that we need a huge expendable. There is no reason for this one. It makes use of Shuttle Main Engines. Those were developed to be reusable, and they are expensive because of that. They are in fact magnificent engines and thoroughly reusable if operated at 90-95% of rated capacity; it’s not their fault that they had to be run at 103% and above to fly Shuttle. But they were developed to be reusable, and that adds greatly to their cost.

The primary goal of the SSX program we proposed to Vice President Quayle in 1988 was not just reusability: it was also SAVABILITY. A properly designed operational ship ought to be savable. After all, the payload (human or instrumental) is worth more than the rocket. The goal ought to get that payload up or get it back. The implications of savable designs reach insurance, operations risks, and a number of other factors. None of these seem to have been considered in the NASA proposal.

The system proposed by NASA uses hydrogen. Hydrogen is an awful fuel. It’s great for exhaust velocity but it has a lot of operational problems, some of which were amply demonstrated in the DC/X program. You don’t want hydrogen. Kerosene and LOX, or propane and LOX are operationally a lot simpler and easier and the performance cost is low compared to the operations gain. Apollo was a single mission, and the goal was to do it before the USSR. If you want to build a spacefaring capability, you need to to pay attention to operations, because you are going to be doing this a lot.

If we need a big expendable there are better models to begin with. Starting with Saturn, which put one whack of a lot into Low Earth Orbit. There are other models to start with. Not that I concede the need for reusable systems as opposed to expendables.

The NASA proposed system uses SEGMENTED Recoverable Boosters. You don’t want recoverable solid rockets in the first place. The operations are a nightmare, and the design has to be compromised so that the impact on the water does not destroy the thing, and it has to float. All that changes the design and affects performance. There is no good reason ever to recover a solid booster, which is, after all, a big sewer pipe stuffed with guncotton and leached with nitroglycerine. It’s a mono-propellant, which is another name for very high explosives, and the operational difficulties of dealing with such stuff are not small.

Even if you want recoverable solid boosters, you sure as heck don’t want SEGMENTED solid boosters. The only reason we ever came up with any notion as mad as a segmented solid booster was that the SRB had to be made in Utah because of political constraints. If you make a booster that size in Utah it has to be segmented because you can’t ship it by rail or on the highway – the curves are too sharp and the tunnels are not big enough. You would have to make it in Michoud Louisiana and ship it by barge to Canaveral. That is possible but Louisiana isn’t Utah. Apparently the new NASA design is worried about the Utah Senatorial votes to this day.

There are other reasons why this is a far cry from an optimum design, but we don’t need any more.

The goal is an operations driven rather than performance driven system for exploring and exploiting the universe. There is no evidence that NASA has any goal in mind other than employing NASA workers.

The best way to get a payload up would be to contract it: you don’t get paid until you deliver the payload. The aviation industry was driven by among other things Air Mail – the government provided a market for air freight service. Private industry did the rest. That’s the way to develop space, too, now that we are not in a Cold War race.

NASA has other ideas.

NASA today told industry partners it would abandon the use of Space Act Agreements in the next phase of the program developing commercial crew taxis, despite many companies’ preference for them.
"We’ve made our decision and we recognize that not everyone will agree with it, but we’re at the point where we had to make one and move forward,” Brent Jett, deputy director of the Commercial Crew Program office, said during a meeting at Kennedy Space Center.
Space Act Agreements have guided the relatively low-cost development of rockets and spacecraft that SpaceX and Orbital Sciences Corp. will use to fly cargo to the International Space Station.
They’ve also been used in the first two rounds of the Commercial Crew Development program, or CCDev, which this year split $270 million among four companies.
But NASA says a more traditional contracting arrangement must be entered into when it awards another round of funding next summer for an "integrated design phase."

http://space.flatoday.net/2011/09/commercial-crew-program-shifts.html

It’s the same old Iron Law NASA, and the only cure for this is to declare most of NASA redundant and eliminate it. This is another Full Employment Ploy from the Old NASA.

I will say it one more time: if we want to explore space, determine what we think that’s worth and put up prizes. A $5 Billion prize for a reusable craft that goes to orbit and returns 11 times in 12 months, nothing to be paid until someone does it. A $12 Billion prize for putting up a Lunar Colony of 31 Americans to be kept alive and well on the Lunar surface for three years and a day, again nothing to be paid until the task is accomplished. If no one does it, there is no cost to the taxpayers. If someone claims the prize the world will cheer. But of course neither of those courses will employ the NASA standing army. The Iron Law Prevails. http://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html

I have been a bit under the weather for the week and plagued by minor but time consuming dental stuff. I’ll get a new Mail up tonight. Apologies.  If you were thinking of subscribing or renewing, now would be a good time to do it.

The President’s Jobs Program isn’t very interesting, even to him. I note that there has been no rush to have a Democrat (or establishment Republican for that matter) Congressman (it’s a money bill, so it has to originate in the House) introduce it so that it can be voted on. I doubt it is anything but a campaign ploy.

And I note that the President’s approval rating is below the magic 43% everywhere but in California, and it’s below 50% even there.  I told you that despair is a sin.

Those of you interested in what’s happening in the publishing world may find http://kianadavenportdialogues.blogspot.com/2011/08/sleeping-with-enemy-cautionary-tale.html worth reading.