This Time Magazine article does agood job showing the problems and issues with NASA:

The problem is that space research in its current form doesn't have a direct commercial driver (its mainly pure research so this is not surprising) so it needs to be funded by hobbyists or universities/governments. Unfortunately it seems to be way too expensive to be funded by anything except governments which means you end up in the nasty position of having a government bureaucracy acting as lead researcher and sole customer.

As everyone should be aware by now bureaucacies are hideously innefficient and terrible at making decisions, they also tend to produce bloated designs - "the elephant is a mouse designed by a government committee" - and are always incentivised to spend all their money rather than look for savings. Richard Feynman's Appendix to the Roger's inquiry on Challenger is, IMO, the classic expose of this. More and more I fear that what we saw over the weekend was a repeat of this institutional stupidity despite the undoubted dedication of the grunts.

Two web links to the appendix are:
http://www.fotuva.org/feynman/challenger-appendix.html
http://history.nasa.gov/rogersrep/v2appf.htm

I don't know what the solution is - but I suspect the ideal solution requires a billionaire with a passion for space travel. Anyone know any?

DD

Here's an interesting one. Julie Birchill is not someone I regularly agree with and the UK's Grauniad is not a paper where Pro-War comments are common. But nonetheless here is a coherent argument of why WAR NOW may in fact be the best option. Excerpts below.


Why we should go to war

Julie Burchill
Saturday February 1, 2003
The Guardian

In the mode of Basil Fawlty, I've tried not to mention the war. I know that Guardian readers are massively opposed to any action against Saddam Hussein, as are 90% of the people I love and respect both personally and professionally. But I am in favour of war against Iraq - or, rather, I am in favour of a smaller war now rather than a far worse war later. I speak as someone who was born and raised to be anti-American; ...

The new enemies of America, and of the west in general, believe that these countries promote too much autonomy, freedom and justice. ...

When you look back at the common sense and progressiveness of arguments against American intervention in Vietnam, Chile and the like, you can't help but be struck by the sheer befuddled babyishness of the pro-Saddam apologists:

1) "It's all about oil!" ... Are you prepared to give up your car and central heating and go back to the Dark Ages? If not, don't be such a hypocrite. The fact is that this war is about freedom, justice - and oil. It's called multitasking. Get used to it!

2) "But we sold him the weapons!" ... surely it is our responsibility to redress our greed and ignorance by doing the lion's share in getting rid of him.

3) "America's always interfering in other countries!" And when it's not, it is derided as selfish and isolationist. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

4) "Saddam Hussein may have killed hundreds of thousands of his own people - but he hasn't done anything to us! We shouldn't invade any country unless it attacks us!" ... On this principle, if we'd known about Hitler gassing the Jews all through the 1930s, we still shouldn't have invaded Germany; the Jews were, after all, German citizens and not our business. If you really think it's better for more people to die over decades under a tyrannical regime than for fewer people to die during a brief attack by an outside power, you're really weird and nationalistic and not any sort of socialist that I recognise. ... Military inaction, unless in the defence of one's own country, is the most extreme form of narcissism and nationalism; people who preach it are the exact opposite of the International Brigade, and that's so not a good look.

What this article doesn't touch on - quite - is the responsibility we in the West have to actually do some nation building in the oil states. Just about every oil producer (obvious exceptions are the US, the UK, Norway and the Holland) is or has been until recently an unpleasnant despotic government. We in the west have benefited from their tyrannies and have often funded and trained their armies and policemen. We have ignored and often profited from the corruption and nepotism that allows a small elite to become exceedingly wealthy from the oil while the rest remain in poverty. Unfortunately tyranny is unstable. The Russian version collapsed, the (first) Iranian version was overthrown and the second version may also collapse under the weight of its own hypocracy. In coutries such as Venezuela economic mismanagement has permitted a rabble-rouser to take control.

Some oil producers - like Russia, Iran, Venezuela, Indonesia - are gradually changing on their own. We need to help them and support mor representative goverments and the rule of law in these countries, but it is best to let them come to their own systems rather than imposing one of ours. However the real failure has been in the gulf, where the west has turned a blind eye to all sorts of injustice just as long as the oil flows. As a result we are seen as oppressors and hypocrites by the average man in the street. We need to correct that impression and the best way to do this is to overthrow the tyrants and organise the rebuilding of the nations they have so mismnaged.

Rebuilding the nations does not need war or conflict, but convicing the tyrants and the hangers on to quit probably does - at least it does for the first one or two. A swift defeat of Iraq now, as long as it is combined with the nation building afterwards, is probably the best way we can repay our debts to the inhabitants of the gulf.

DD

Thomas Friedman wrote an interesting article on Europe and the Europeans in the NY times recently (free subscription required) which touches on the refexive anti-american sentiment in much of Europe.

Wide sweeping generalizations are generally bad. But, having said that I have to say that the sweeping generlization of that article does seem to me to be reasonably accurate.

The chattering classes in Europe - i.e. the politicians, the media and the "intellectuals" are in fact depressingly reflexively anti-american and hypocritical. The reason for this is IMO a strong desire to not face reality because that would put them out of a job. The average European chatterer seems to hold the mutually contradictory views that a) all governments lie and cheat all the time and b) the government can and should fix everything. The result is that the USA which rejects the nanny state idea of b) is automatically tarred with a) whether or not there is any evidence for it.

GMOs are an excellent example this argument at "work":

A) GMOs are new therefore they are inherently dangerous
B) The scientists who fail to find harm in GMOs are clearly biased
C) Scientists that might find harm in GMOs are muzzled by the government and/or their evil capitalist lackeys
D) The "government" needs to fix this by banning GMOs until we can prove they are bad and then really banning them

Since the US government has not done D they must be doing C - evidence supported by the fact that the work done for B is often US based. Suggestions that the "harm" research parts of B&C could be caused by the fact that A is untrue are of course evidence that the suggestor is himself guilty of C.

the logical fallacies that abound in this sort of argument clearly escape the chatterers, presumably because their grasp of basic logic and statistics is somewhere below their grasp of quantum mechanics

DD