The Health Care Summit: Plumbing the depths of boredom

Jonah Goldberg has a funny column on yesterday's health care summit. He found it very boring. I had work to do and only caught some clips, but here are a few funny paragraphs from Jonah's column:

"More to the point: It was mind-bogglingly, soul-achingly, sand-poundingly, metaphysically, and ontologically boring. Watching it was like driving through Kansas on the interstate (something I’ve done many times): long, vast stretches of boredom punctuated by the occasional brief promise of excitement that would require detouring from the planned route.

It reminded me of that old Monty Python skit where British soldiers are equipped with the world’s funniest joke, a joke so funny that even to hear it guarantees you’ll die laughing. The British army translates the gag into German (different translators for each word so as to prevent their own deaths) and has its troops read the German version as they march through Ardennes forest. Suddenly, Nazi soldiers start falling dead from the trees.

Substitute “boring” for “funny” and you’ll get a vague sense of how dull this summit was. "

Believe me... I've driven through Kansas several times too and that IS the definition of boring.

Airborne Laser works! but Obama is taking a pass?

A post here about the success of the airborne laser program. This thing could stop a missile being launched off our shores that could lead to a crippling electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack, but the Obama administration is not pursuing the technology??? We have to be able to defend ourselves! That is the first responsibility of the President!

Bill Bennett takes on Glenn Beck

Bill Bennett has a lengthy post on the Corner criticizing Glenn Beck's CPAC speech. Good for Bill Bennett. There has always been some things about Beck that haven't quite seemed right to me. Certainly one of those things has been the kind of "pox on both their houses" rhetoric that Beck puts out. OK Glenn, if both the Democrats -and- the Republicans are no good, then what is the answer? He never seems to have a real response to that.

George Will on Sarah Palin

George Will has a good column on Sarah Palin. I have to agree with him. I enjoy watching her on Fox News and I like that she irritates the Democrats, but she doesn't seem to have the gravitas of a President (Obama doesn't either, but two wrongs don't make a right). It really scares me when I hear her being promoted as a presidential candidate because I think if she were to be the nominee in 2012, we would lose... and lose very badly.

Phil Jones of Climate-gate admits that there has been no warming since 1995

This is pretty amazing. Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (the place from which e-mails were hacked that led to "Climate-gate") has admitted that there has been "no ‘statistically significant’ warming" in the past 15 years. Al Gore are you listening?

Newt Gingrich favors the new commercial provider approach to getting to Space

Newt Gingrich and former House Science and Technology Committee chairman Robert Walker have a column supporting the new Obama space policy regarding using commercial providers to get to Low Earth Orbit.

There's also a more detailed analysis of the new policy here.

Krauthammer on the new Obama space policy

Charles Krauthammer has written a column on the new Obama space policy. He views setting Mars as an ultimate goal as a bait and switch ruse.

"Of course, the whole Mars project as substitute for the moon is simply a ruse. It's like the classic bait-and-switch for high-tech military spending: Kill the doable in the name of some distant sophisticated alternative, which either never gets developed or is simply killed later in the name of yet another, even more sophisticated alternative of the further future."

I would agree with that if Obama had even actually officially set Mars as a goal. There has been some verbiage to that effect, but I don't think it has been officially set as a goal. To the extent that it is a semi-official goal, I think there is a lot of concern about whether there will be follow-through to achieve the goal.

I disagree with Krauthammer that commercial firms can't take over launching astronauts to Low Earth Orbit and the ISS although, admittedly, it does remain to be proven.

Rand Simberg disagrees with a lot of Krauthammer's conclusions here.

The junk science of "Avatar"

Well, I finally broke down and went to watch Avatar today. Having read articles about how it is anti-military, anti-corporate, and how it pushes a pantheistic philosophy, I must say that while watching it, even above the latter criticisms, a two word phrase and a hyphenated phrase came to mind and those were: "junk science" and "anti-Darwinist". I'm surprised that I haven't read any critques of the movie that take it to task on the junk science in it.

With the disclaimer that I am not an expert in evolutionary biology, to the extent that I am familiar with it, I do know that it is based on Darwin's theory of natural selection. Natural selection is based on "the survival of the fittest"- well that doesn't seem to hold true on Avatar's world of Pandora. On Pandora, all the plants and critters are inter-connected so much so that when the Na'vi are threatened, all the critters come to their defense. I have to tell you, when I was watching that part of the movie, it seemed more like a Disney cartoon with all the forest critters coming to protect Bambi from the evil hunter.

I can see why this movie is so popular with the Libs who go on and on about how people are "destroying the planet". On Pandora, when you cut down a tree, you're literally putting a dagger in the heart of their planet's goddess. This is like fantasy wish fulfillment for the hard core environmentalists- their constructed vision of what we are doing to Earth made manifest in a planet with a fantasy ecosystem that is literally "all connected".

Don't even get me going on how stupid and utterly against scientific understanding of gravity floating mountains are...

still more diverse opinions on the new space policy

Buzz Aldrin has a column strongly supporting Obama's new space policy as does James Cameron. On the other hand, Paul Spudis makes some good points against it in this discussion thread. Spudis actually gets to the crux of my concern about the new policy with this statement:

"A plan to go anywhere and everywhere with this agency IS a plan to go nowhere.

Without the strategic direction provided by the Vision, the “new paradigm” will degenerate entirely into process, with hordes of bureaucratic committees engaged in “studies” and “roadmapping exercises'."

Two takes on the new Obama space policy

Here are two different takes on the Obama space policy. Rand Simberg argues that it is actually a conservative space policy. Tom Jones argues that it is an abandonment of human spaceflight.

Reactions to the proposed NASA budget

There have been a lot of news stories about the official release of the proposed 2011 NASA budget in Obama's proposed budget. The LA Times has a good summary. Also MSNBC's Alan Boyle has a good review of the proposed change to commercial providers for getting humans to Low Earth Orbit.

There are a lot of negative reactions to the proposals... oddly enough a lot of them are coming from towns and states that will be adversely affected by the shut-down of the Constellation launch vehicle program.

There are positive reactions too. The Planetary Society came out in favor of it. Also Rand Simberg at Transterrestrial Musings thinks its the right way to go. The new direction is also applauded by the Space Frontier Foundation. I still think that the devil is in the details so we'll see how those details work out.