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Color me unimpressed with Colorado’s cyberbully OnFire / PolitiComm: The Lamest Twitter Argument Ever Offered?

If someone as transparently dishonest and histrionic as OnFire / PolitiComm is the best the Colorado Progessive Machine can do, it beggars belief that the center-right in the state does as badly as it does. Unfortunately, Colorado’s center-right is essentially unfunded, so its activists have regular non-political jobs. This tends to eat into the time we might otherwise spend (for instance) sending 100+ angry and hate-filled Tweets a day the way the Progressives here do.

As I noted in the article, though, it’s people like OnFire / PolitiComm who have been teaching me a lot about the deceptive and manipulative argumentation techniques employed by the left. For all his faults, OnFire / PolitiComm is a wonderful example of bad practice, presenting in one Twitter feed a continuous stream of unsubtle examples of the tricks, tropes, and tactics used by the left throughout social media and more traditional channels.

I suspect that this is one of those unexpected side-effects of the internet. It used to be that one would be confronted with or witness fallacious reasoning, hectoring, and the like in person or in public forums in only isolated incidents. Emotional appeals, bad information, spin, bullying, and the other methods the real-world counterparts of OnFire / Politicomm employed could go unchallenged – and all too often persuade people – because without some exposure to debate or philosophy, it was difficult for the Average Joe or Jane to see that someone was actively manipulating them. But now, the internet puts hundreds of public forums in front of us in the form of social media channels (Twitter, Facebook, blog and newspaper comments, etc.), and unlike the town square, watercooler, city council meeting, or other traditional forums these can be experienced in a rapid, continual flow on devices which afford us a degree of emotional distance from what is being said and how. The internet makes it possible to see the same patterns of thought and argument repeat themselves over and over, across many channels and platforms. Over time it’s like learning to ‘see the Matrix in the numbers’: one begins to recognize these attempts at manipulation and deception, and recognize the common motives behind each of them (the “Ds” I mention at the link). In short, when exposed to a larger set of data, the larger number of examples to compare make it much easier to recognize patterns and relationships. And recognizing and naming manipulative tactics, of course, is the key to diminishing their power to manipulate.

Posted on March 1st, 2013 under Colorado Politics, politics. Tags: OnFire, Politicomm, progressives, social media, Twitter. Comments Off

Kids aren’t going into technical trades anymore, at least not at the levels needed, and not with the proficiency in foundational skills they need to start off well.

I agree that the problem really does stretch back to at least the Reagan era – I entered junior high in 1981, and even then “the trades” in the form of shop classes were looked down upon. (And don’t get me started on the counterproductive-verging-on-malpractice “guidance counselor” advice I received urging me to go into social science instead of engineering.) While I abhor the straitjacket elements of the German educational/career system (the part about making your life’s career choice at thirteen and being stuck with it, in particular), they do seem to have the right idea in exposing students to industrial work early and in the intensive training in trades those with interest and inclination in them receive. Even the German engineers I’ve worked with have had what to me seems like an extensive trades-level education in relevant areas as part of their engineering program — it’s embarrassing to call myself an engineer around them, given that they typically have extensive hands-on experience with machining and lab work and the like that I somehow managed to obtain a BSME without. (Sadly, I have far more hands-on experience from my summer internship in Germany and my various at-home engineering projects than I obtained even in fifteen years of employment with Lockheed Martin.)

What the article seems to overlook (consciously or otherwise) is the reason for pushing more kids into college prep courses and then into college, regardless of inclination or ability: status consciousness.

As noted above, the trades path was looked down upon even in the early 1980s. It was considered low-class, something the poor or dumb kids did – the ones too dumb to get into the military, which career was held in similar low regard at that time. Those of us in the “gifted and talented” sham track were most certainly conditioned to see ourselves as “better” than that, as destined for college and white-collardom, and therefore above getting our hands dirty with shop classes or candystriping or the like even if they might later enhance higher-status careers like engineering or medicine. And no doubt this was pushed on the parents as well – my hometown at that time was extremely status/class conscious, so imagine the horror of your average doctor or lawyer parent being told by a teacher that their brilliant little snowflake has an aptitude and potential interest in something as crude as a trade: “No, no, my little Johnny is going to college, to be a doctor/lawyer like me, or at least something white-collar or academic enough that I won’t be embarrassed when the boys at the Country Club ask about his career. Tradesman just won’t reflect well on my status at all.”

One essential element in turning this situation around needs to be a change in perspective on the economic status of trades. This seems to be happening, given the trend in articles over the past several years musing on how plumbers and electricians and the like are making good use of their scarcity to rake in white-collar-level incomes (on top of often being independent small businessmen, something that in itself should afford one a healthy economic status anyway). Once these SWPL parents realize that Johnny’s choice nowadays is between fixing plumbing, running wires, programming a CNC machine, etc. and making a decent and productive living at it, or putting both himself and them on the hook for tens of thousands of dollars of student loan debt to fund a college-level credential in a trendy niche subject whose job prospects consist exclusively of fast-food management, telephone customer service, stripping for truckers, or a futile chase after increasingly scarce Non-Hierarchical General Assembly Facilitator positions at what’s left of the local Occupy squat, they may find new competitive value among their status peers in aggressively pushing their kids in the former direction.

(Note that “Johnny” here is your average kid – many kids have certain aptitudes, for instance in STEM subjects, which make it economically worthwhile and personally rewarding to go on to college and then compete for comparatively scarce career positions. The problem is treating all kids like this by default, forcing them onto the white-collar college track when there are insufficient career positions to support such a policy and when they as individuals may have other – or no – inclinations and talents. It’s just as unfair to the “Johnnys” as it is to the kids with aptitude but fewer resources, who bear the opportunity cost of indifferent kids getting unwanted and unusable credential degrees instead of the useful educations the latter might have obtained in their place.)

Hat tip to Rand Simberg, who observes: “The entire educational establishment in this country is a disaster, from top to bottom.” Indeed.

Posted on January 9th, 2013 under Economics, politics, Science & Engineering. Tags: career, education, employment, trades. Comments: 1

Walter Russell Mead observes the latest solar power corruption fiasco and asks:

Is there anybody in the world of tax-funded green energy who isn’t a sleazy thief or an incompetent idealist?

(WaPo article here.)

Regardless of who is behind any “green energy” undertaking, my inclination nowadays is to suspect it is some sort of scam run by people connected to the Obama administration (or merely taking advantage of a golden opportunity for graft), or at best a utopian enterprise run by people with more dreams than good engineering or economic sense.

SolarCity at least responded to WaPo, and sounded sincere enough about their pricing being competitive with Treasury Department guidance. Maybe Elon is the one Mead is looking for? Dunno.

Posted on December 17th, 2012 under Economics, Enginastery, Luddism, politics. Comments Off

Let me state up-front that I am NOT claiming that any of this is true, so don’t anyone accuse me of being a crackpot conspiracy theorist here. This is simply a thought experiment/thriller plot that I found entertaining to think through.

On the way home from the victory party funeral last night, it struck me that I hadn’t heard the left rant about “Diebold” and “Ken Blackwell” in a while. In a long time, in fact – at least since 2008, possibly since 2006. This seemed odd, given that it was once a frequent topic/hobby horse on lefty talk radio (esp. on Randi Rhodes’ show), but I guess if you’re winning elections you no longer need to contrive explanations for why you’re losing.

This observation intersected with the results from last night being so unexpected across the board (given polling, energy, etc.) to put me in a Dan Brown frame of mind. How might you write a technothriller around these observations? If one were to read these unexpected election results as the result of a conspiracy, how would you make the conspiracy work in a way plausible enough for fiction?

It’s outside my usual genre, but here’s what I came up with as a backstory:

• Premises:
  • Democrats (and especially leftists/Progressives) have a habit of publicly accusing Republicans of corruption or dirty tricks or the like, accusations which are completely bogus and often verge on the paranoid. But in digging for proof these allegations, they sometimes figure out how to do exactly those things themselves and then proceed to do so (justifying it by claiming they’re just fighting back against what the Republicans are already doing). For example, the Democracy Alliance owing its origin to a delusional belief in a vast right-wing media/nonprofit/activism conspiracy – Rob Stein, et al, imagined such a conspiracy on the right, and then proceeded to create a real one one of their own to fight it.
  • The once-common-as-air Democrat complaints about “Diebold” and “Blackwell delivering Ohio” have been utterly absent. Since around the time Democrats elected Obama, if not when they took over Congress in 2006. The obvious explanation there is that they stopped losing elections, and so no longer required a conspiracy theory to explain how they were being wrongfully denied the offices and power to which they were naturally entitled (if you’re winning elections, it sucks the energy out of fantasies that your enemies are rigging the vote against you). But what if there was another reason for their abruptly shutting up about voting machine fraud…?
• 2004: The obviously superior and demonstrably more-qualified war hero Democrat challenger loses a gimme election to the increasingly unpopular hayseed Republican incumbent. Dems in some quarters blame the loss on electronic voting machines in key swing states having been rigged for the incumbent. Angered by being denied their rightful victory, Progressives start looking for proof of this manipulation, and find that – yes indeed! – there is in fact an exploitable security hole in many e-voting machine software. Certain that Republicans left those back doors there so as to rig elections (when in fact they may simply have been poorly-secured diagnostic or debugging elements), the Democrats who discover them are outraged…but keep silent. Given that Republicans manipulated election results to unjustly deny their man the presidency, they bitterly ask themselves why shouldn’t we do the same to them? And after a micro-second of agonizing have little trouble finding self-serving rationalizations to support doing so.
• 2005: A small group of insiders (always keep your conspiracy small in number if you want a chance of keeping it secret!) share this information amongst themselves, and quietly exploit their connections in the tech sector to develop ways to exploit it, always keeping the knowledge compartmentalized to prevent discovery of what they’re up to. Additional security holes are discovered and exploited, providing extensive if not complete control over the most-common models of electronic voting machines. The group infiltrates trusted people into the companies who manufacture and program the machines in order to keep abreast of upcoming software revisions and, where possible, to insert their own subtle and harder-to-find back doors. The more obvious back doors are left in place, so that their occasional easy discovery in audits adds to public confidence that security holes are routinely and reliably plugged before election day.
• 2006: The group uses the mid-term election (where they were going to make substantial gains anyway given the shift in public attitude against the GOP President and Congress) as an experiment, tweaking totals in a few precincts here and there. They manipulate small numbers of votes, spread out geographically, via entirely remote means, all to keep the tampering small and unobtrusive: if it’s subtle enough to be invisible, no one will think to look for it. They see that they can both get away with the tampering, and that in a couple of the test races, tampering on the margins can be done in a way that doesn’t raise suspicions and swings an otherwise close race. Armed now with a tool they know works on the small scale, the group persuades left-aligned organizations and media personalities to tone down or avoid discussion of voting machine manipulation to avoid the tool’s exposure.
• To further help conceal their activities, the people behind the method help launch an organization much like the Secretary of State Project to get progressive Secretaries of State elected. The organization doesn’t need to know why they’re getting help, only that they need to assist candidates who approve of electronic voting and will if elected be responsible for auditing the security of the machines used in their state. The SoSs aren’t actually in on it, beyond getting a midnight phonecall with a helpful suggestion that they appoint the “right people” to do the auditing.
• In 2008, they widen the deployment and hone their skills. Its first large-scale deployment is in the primaries, where it is used to shift enough votes over to the more Progressive candidate to deny the anointed and “sure-thing” candidate the nomination. Microtargeting data used elsewhere in the nominee’s campaign is also used to pinpoint districts where usefully large quantities of votes can be shifted to him and other left-leaning candidates without appearing out of place with the demographics and ideological flavor of the place.  The sleepwalking Republican nominee being a non-threat electorally means the tool can be applied to down-ticket races in the general election and not focused solely on the Presidential race.
• 2010: The group continues to hone its skills where possible, but refrains from a major intervention in the election due to an unexpected center-right grassroots uprising – given the sentiment of the country, maintaining Democrat control of Congress would require intervention on a scale the group still cannot pull off invisibly, which would risk exposure if it tried it. Instead, it focuses its efforts on a few strategic races, like the Senate Majority Leader’s reelection, and combines it with new frontiers in old-fashioned targeted character destruction to assure the retention or election of key political assets at the federal and state levels amid the generalized loss.
• 2011: Where the group can’t elect Progressive (read: controllable) Secretaries of State, it puts into place a tactic referred to (curiously) as “gesslerizing”, in which the opposition/non-cooperative Secretary of State in a swing state finds himself tied down (especially just before in-person early voting begins) with lawfare actions targeting him with ethics allegations and criminal investigations. “Gesslerized” SoSs will be either too distracted to look for or notice the remote-control tampering during early voting and on election day, or they will be too discredited via the allegations and similar bludgeoning over vote integrity (e.g.: the equation of voter ID efforts with racism) for any exposes they offer to be taken seriously.
• 2012: The tool has been fully debugged and integrated with microtargeting data, and is ready to deploy on a large scale with special focus on swing states. As the election approaches, polls all show the challenger gaining on the incumbent and then pulling into the lead amid a surge of voter enthusiasm for him, but a few left-leaning pollsters are fed results which predict the incumbent winning handily…exceptions which are greeted with derision as delusional outliers. After the votes are tallied, however, those polls are shown to be dead-on accurate. Uncannily so. Perfectly so. These polls allay any suspicion of the election results by giving an “independent” confirmation of the outcome, in which the status quo was unexpectedly maintained despite record discontent with the incumbent and Congress alike. In reality, for all its sophistication the tool isn’t perfect and can only do so much. Even with improved scale and finesse since 2010, the discontented national mood again placed limits on its invisible use – too much of its power had to be focused on protecting the President and the Senate majority for it to swing the House to the Democrats at the same time without being noticed…ergo, status quo.
• By now, the tool has become so refined that it can’t be discerned from its effects without complex statistical analysis. But, since no system is perfect, occasional machine glitches reveal the tool at work – for example, a number of widely-separated polling places reporting votes cast for the challenger being recorded as for the incumbent. Anticipating this (based on prior experience where it happened in 2008 or 2010 on small scale), Democrat operatives are unwittingly directed to wear campaign clothing, put up campaign posters, and engage in other blatantly illegal electioneering in the polling places, to distract public and media attention away from the vote tampering: “oh sure, there have been a few minor instances of unintentional ‘electioneering’ at the polls, but it’s just trivial stuff that GOPers are overreacting to as usual…nothing to see, move along!”

This backstory sets the stage for the actual plot of the thriller and inevitable big-budget Hollywood adaptation. Picture now a beautiful, young, vaguely (but non-threateningly) exotic do-gooder journalist, fresh out of J-school and looking to make a name for herself by investigating the inherent racism of Republicans and their racist “voter integrity” laws. She crosses paths one evening with an implausibly well-adjusted computer-scientist-turned-bartender with mysterious links to a voting machine manufacturer, intending to grill him for information supporting the (banal and cliched) thesis of her expose that Republicans are racists attempting to racistly deny the vote to minorities, because Republicans are (ipso facto) racists whose racist motivations require no further onscreen exploration. Of course.

Their ensuing night of passionate stenography takes an unexpected turn when the improbably-hunky computer scientist/bartender reveals to the iron-willed-yet-romantically-vulnerable journalist that he was blacklisted from programming work after discovering the back doors into the voting machine software. Certain that the real culprits are the racist Republicans who were rumored to have used such underhanded (not to mention racist) methods to steal the 2004 election, she enlists his aid to find the proof she needs to support her a priori conclusion…only to come face-to-face with the real conspirators after a completely unnecessary parkour chase through a vast warehouse of tampered-with voting machines, stolen yard signs, and slightly-used Greek columns fashioned from polystyrene.

Will she expose the truth, thereby undermining the sweep of victories over the racist Republicans in the just-concluded election, shattering her faith in (non-GOP) humanity, and discrediting the man she believes to be a messiah walking amongst us (the incumbent, not the nerd/bartender)? Or will the conspirators convince her to sell out her lofty journalistic principles and turn a blind eye to the massive ethical lapse of the people and party she thought represented everything good and non-racist in America?

[Spoiler alert: well duh, of course she covers up the truth about her party comrades at the end - she's a journalist.]

Posted on November 7th, 2012 under Entertainment, Miscellaneous, Movies, politics, PPC, Uncategorized, Writing. Tags: books, humor, vote fraud, voting machines, writing. Comments Off

Bruce Webster is making some: The coming liberal meltdown.

Interesting. Plausible. Maybe or maybe not likely — who knows?

What I liked about his post was the element of prognostication from current trends and social/political circumstances, and how it resembles what Carl and I have been doing for the backstory for In the Shadow of Ares and its in-work sequels (the first of whose outline I plan to finalize today, given the crappy weather here in Denver). Whether or not his predictions materialize, it’s fun to take them as a set of initial conditions for a fictional near-future history — for example, the future-history potential of the Obama-Clinton feud:

• Imagine it escalating from the low-intensity political warfare he describes into an all-out factional “civil war” as 2016 approaches.
• Blue collarists, liberal-leaning Jews and Latinos, and other center-left Democrat constituencies line up with Clinton loyalists and erstwhile PUMAs behind Hillary.
• Blacks along with Progressives, ivory towerists, callow youth,  union extremists, and other hard-left Democrats follow Obama.
• Democratic women split between the two on similar lines, with Hillary not automatically winning the bulk of Democratic women due to Obama’s appeal to the more radical youth demographic.
• What happens next?
  • Does the Democrat party then split into two, or see the smaller faction peel off and join an existing third party?
  • If the party doesn’t split, does the internal divide render the Democrat Party nearly irrelevant for several election cycles, say through 2020, as they focus on factional infighting and sabotaging each other instead of running against Republicans?
  • Does Andrew Cuomo (as Webster hints) emerge as a “neither-nor” figure who is able to glue the factions back together while (under the pressure of emerging fiscal/economic necessity) bringing the party back towards the reasonable center from where Obama, Pelosi, Reid, and the Progressives have shifted it?
  • If not and the Democrats (as a single or split party) experience waning influence, what happens to Republicans, who experience show tend to drift from principles and platform quite rapidly in the absence of competition from an energized opposition?
  • Under such circumstances, could the GOP itself experience a loss of factional cohesion, with a non-negligible contingent of center-left, center-right, socially-liberal, and Progressive Republicans defecting to join Hillary Clinton’s “less extreme” new party? Would this result in a major two-party reconfiguration along the lines of the Whig-Republican split in the 1850s, or would we end up with a new equilibrium state involving three stable medium-large parties in place of two very large ones? If the latter, would there be an evolution to more discrete special interest factions akin to (say) the small parties in the Israeli Knesset, with the three parties becoming more explicitly coalition-based and the new equilibrium maintained via coaxing these factions to jump parties (difficult under the current party system, but since this is all speculative anyway, why not assume changes to it)?
  • If any of the outcomes above involving party splits emerge, would existing third parties (Libertarians, Greens, etc.) see greater influence? Presumably some not-insignificant portion of Democrats in the Obama/Clinton split scenario would be disgusted enough with both resulting parties to seek a third alternative. Same for libertarian Republicans in the diminished-competition scenario, with disgust with the squishiness and corruption of one-party GOP dominance motivating them to switch to the Libertarian Party. If the large parties get smaller and the small parties get larger, would the equilibrium necessarily stop at (say) three core parties? Why not four or five?

It’d be fun to tackle his other predictions in similar fashion (which I intended to do before spending too much time on the one above), but I’ve got too much to get done today.

Posted on October 27th, 2012 under Colorado Politics, Entertainment, politics, Science Fiction, Writing. Tags: future history, Hillary Clinton, Obama, politics, Science Fiction, speculative fiction. Comments Off

Rand Simberg thoroughly dismantles it: An Examiner Hit Piece on SpaceX

No quotes, because his response is wedded to excerpts from the original and is best read in full (i.e.: Read the Whole Thing™).

As I mentioned on Twitter (and then didn’t have time to follow up on myself), I heard some scuttlebutt about this at CPAC Colorado last week (along with the James O’Keefe voter registration expose and the Obama campaign’s questionable credit card donations). The implication was that Musk is getting new attention from watchdog and media organizations on the right because of his green energy businesses and his donations to and occasional chumminess with Barack Obama.

Which in itself is a reasonable thing – given the strange frequency of late for green energy businesses owned by Obama friends and fundraisers to get subsidies, lax oversight, stimulus funds, etc. (and to then go bankrupt, stiffing the taxpayers), a watchdog group would be remiss if it didn’t look into a campaign donor who might potentially fit that same pattern. As for the center-right media, there is obvious story potential in digging up and exposing “the next Solyndra” if they can find one, and when you see advertising like this (seen at the Home Depot near my house) it’s natural to wonder whether Musk’s Solar City might or might not be it:

In each case, these things are as they should be: the news media and watchdog organizations, however partisan their interests might be, can serve a useful role in keeping public figures, civic organizations, lobbyists, and the like (a little more) honest via transparency. I say “can”, because of course it doesn’t always work that way – obviously media and watchdogs alike will have less incentive to investigate people and organizations with whom they share a common political persuasion or worldview (which is why the overwhelming left bias seen in both institutions is unhealthy), and when they are so determined to find some dirt on their political enemies that they resort to incompetent hack pieces like this one by Richard Pollock in the Examiner, their efforts at transparency are easily dismissed as partisan BS without substance.

Posted on October 13th, 2012 under politics, Space Commerce, Space Policy. Tags: CPAC, elon musk, Examiner, Richard Pollock, Solyndra, spacex. Comments Off

The audacity of bribery – White House Moves To Head Off Sequester Layoffs:

Some defense companies—including Lockheed Martin, BAE Systems and EADS North America—have said they expect to send notices to their employees 60 days before sequestration takes effect to comply with the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, which requires companies to give advance warning to workers deemed reasonably likely to lose their jobs…

So the Office of Management and Budget went a step further in guidance issued late Friday afternoon. If an agency terminates or modifies a contract, and the contractor must close a plant or lay off workers en masse, the company could treat employee compensation costs for WARN Act liability, attorneys’ fees and other litigation costs as allowable costs to be covered by the contracting agency—so long as the contractor has followed a course of action consistent with the Labor Department’s guidance. The legal fees would be covered regardless of the outcome of the litigation, according to the OMB guidance issued by Daniel Werfel, controller of the Office of Federal Financial Management, and Joseph Jordan, the Administrator for Federal Procurement Policy.

This is obviously and quite brazenly about election optics. I suspect that Congressional Democrats and the White House, when agreeing to the sequestration arrangement, simply assumed it would have no effect until after the first of the year — they didn’t do their homework and so had no idea that shutting down defense contracts would require WARN notices to be sent out right before the election.  The delicious twist to this is that in states like Colorado with both a large defense industry presence and mail-in early voting, the WARN notices could very well arrive in the same delivery as the recipients’ general election ballot.*

Breaking it down, when the effects of a particular law will look bad for the President’s reelection, he offers to pay back those subject to the law if they break the law on his behalf. How can this possibly be legal? And what sort of precedent could this set? Could he next pressure large corporations to withhold until after the election critical negative information that might put the lie to his campaign’s claims of economic recovery, with the promise that the fedgov will pay their legal fees when the SEC or other regulatory agencies come after them for violating accounting and reporting laws? (I know, what a ridiculous suggestion…)

It took a much less personal last minute controversy to turn voters against Colorado’s GOP Senate candidate in 2010 — imagine the impact on the vote in Colorado of tens of thousands of residents getting their layoff notices in mid-October due to Obama’s inability or unwillingness to do his job as President.

* – depending on how early they are sent out…60 days before January 2, 2013 is November 3, but if it is the case that WARN notices are required to be received no less than 60 days in advance, they would need to be mailed out roughly two weeks before that date.

UPDATE (10/1/2012): Lockheed Martin blinks…sorta: At White House Request, Lockheed Martin Drops Plan to Issue Layoff Notices

In the corporate email announcing this to us this morning (from which I think ABC is quoting), it was explained – persuasively – that even if sequestration happens as of January 2, it will be some time after that date before contract suspensions or cancellations are issued. So, putting out WARN notices on November 3 would be a bit premature.

Hm. I still believe from the earlier reporting that the admin was putting undue pressure on private companies to keep them from harming Obama’s campaign — I don’t think there’s any question about it. But here, either the matter has just been rendered moot as far as the election connection goes by the belated 0realization that the cancellations would take time to work through the system, or the administration has found a legal way to avoid the prompt issuance of WARN notices by promising to delay the triggering actions. Either way, however, their actions reveal their willingness to use that undue pressure, which is…illuminating.

Posted on September 29th, 2012 under Colorado Politics, politics, PPC. Tags: election, sequestration, WARN Act. Comments Off

That’s what George Landrith over at Big Government is calling SpaceX, which is amusing considering Musk’s involvement with Solar City — SpaceX: Solyndra in Space:

We now pay the Russians $65 million per seat to take our astronauts to and from the space station. And the Obama Administration’s unimaginative and amateurish vision for space exploration — even if successful — will not revive the dying program. It merely follows the disturbing pattern of the Solyndra scandal, funneling tax dollars to Obama donors and fundraisers.

So, it’s bad that we might pay the Russians $260M to send four U.S. astronauts to the space station on Soyuz each year, but it’s worse that we might pay three American contractors an average of up to $667M total per year (depending on milestone performance) to develop multiple new indigenous crew vehicles capable of launching up to seven astronauts to the ISS on each flight…presumably for a lower cost per seat, and with the added bonus of enabling follow-on commercial space development?

How is that like going against advice to give loan guarantees to a nearly-bankrupt politically-connected company producing an overpromised product with obvious problems at the basic physics level in a market glutted with competing products thanks to government-subsidized overproduction? Sure, Musk has been chummy with Obama on occasion (and his brother was one of the board members of the leftist Democracy Alliance that helped get Obama and other “progressives” elected since 2006), and donates to Obama (among others, including a GOP rising star), but one can’t seriously make the claim that Musk started SpaceX simply to milk the taxpayers of money being lavished on cronies via a government-stoked fad. SpaceX is solvent and predates the commercial crew-cargo program in question, and at no point has there been the same “popular delusions” mania around commercial space as around “green energy”…the sort of mania that drives the bubble of speculative schemes and crony scams we’ve been watching pop over the past year or so.

This bit is so short-sighted that Landrith must have left nose prints on his screen while writing it:

However, whether the space station will be in service in a decade is not clear. So we may be paying top dollar for the development of something we will never use. In the mean time, we continue to rely on Russia. Even if SpaceX can eventually safely carry astronauts to the space station, it will not constitute a serious space exploration program. The space station is in low-Earth orbit and we cannot explore space or even the moon if we cannot travel beyond low-Earth orbit.

“…the space station…”: George, meet Bob.

The shortsightedness here is a failure of imagination and a static view of the world in which all changes occur in isolation. A new invention will only be used for that for which it was originally invented, and won’t open up new opportunities and unexpected applications. How does he know that a product line of operational Dragon spacecraft won’t be used by NASA or others (civil, military, academic, or commercial) for a program of exploration? How does he know that someone (like…Musk?) won’t get an itch to go to the Moon or Mars, and use/modify/upgrade Dragon spacecraft accordingly? How does he know that with a commercial spacecraft fleet providing less expensive crew and cargo access to LEO that a market for other space stations or for other destinations or other applications of the technology won’t form? He doesn’t – he simply can’t imagine it happening.

And why would the three companies involved have an obligation to form a “space exploration program”, serious or otherwise? They don’t, any more than Bath Iron Works is obligated to implement a “serious ocean exploration program”. These companies are building transportation systems. Exploration is supposed to be what NASA is for, no?

The challenges of space exploration require a vastly different capability than SpaceX is trying to develop.

And the challenges of curing cancer require a vastly different capability than Ford is trying to develop…for cancer researchers to use in getting to and from work.

Cue the obligatory dollop of romantic “Golden Age” NASAtalgia and attendant fellation of the “Kennedy Vision” to which it seems even conservatives are not immune:

Since President John Kennedy energized the nation with the mission to put a man on the moon, NASA had always been about big ideas in space exploration, not politics. But this changed in 2010. NASA largely abandoned any serious goal to explore space when the White House directed NASA to concentrate on Earth-based projects like researching climate science which simply replicates the research being done by thousands of other institutions, universities and scientists. While NASA has a space exploration program on paper, its vision is unfocused and its funding is raided to support small-idea projects that are not worthy of NASA’s proud tradition.

Pining for a return to the days when nearly all activities in space were conducted under the technocratic auspices of a state bureau for space exploration doesn’t seem to jibe with a preference for free markets and limited government. Especially not when getting back to that “vision” would entail strangling in the crib the emerging commercial startups that would lead to a free market in space access and in-space activities, and thereby reduce the role of the state to those activities like basic science and pathfinding exploration to which it is arguably somewhat better suited.

While I’m with Landrith against duplicative global warming research (why is that not NOAA‘s domain?), the last time I checked it was one ‘big idea’ in space exploration, the Webb Space Telescope, which was hoovering up the money from other NASA projects.

NASA claims that these companies will “compete” with each other. But with only two trips per year to the space station scheduled over the next decade, it is unclear how these companies can profitably “compete.” This is what will likely happen — the taxpayer will provide massive funding to several companies to build the same thing and in the end there will not be enough work for the companies to compete over.

There is a limited manifest of flights to the ISS over the next decade because our ability to get crew to and from the ISS is limited at present to Soyuz, with its monopoly pricing and  political complications. A domestic option for crew rotations and cargo delivery at a lower cost than Soyuz would allow for utilization of the ISS at levels closer to what it was designed for (the full crew of six, plus visiting crew and maybe some space tourists; more and more-frequently-swapped experiments; etc.), and thus increase the market for commercial crew and cargo flights. And again, Landrith presumes that ISS is the only game in town – it may be that today, but given a commercial crew capability other destinations are already poised to enter the new market, and competition itself can drive new applications, activities, and markets by companies striving to stay afloat.

The real kicker is that if, and when, SpaceX’s development is complete, NASA will not own the technology, SpaceX will own it.

It depends. Based on prior experience, I’d expect new technology developed by CCiCap participants would be covered by agreements between NASA and the companies regarding IR&D spending and proprietary information. If a company spends exclusively internal funds developing a particular bit of technology, they retain ownership. If NASA pays for some or all of it, NASA has certain rights to it.

For example, when purchasing manned flight to the moon, designing the space shuttle, or a high-tech supersonic stealth fighter jet, the marketplace doesn’t have completed products sitting on a store shelf or in a warehouse waiting to be purchased. In these cases, we have a highly developed set of government contracting rules that require accountability and transparency and which are designed to ensure that the government achieves the desired results in a timely fashion and at a reasonable cost. That is how we got to the moon, and built the shuttle, the space station, and most of our world-leading high-tech military technology.

We got to the Moon on time, but via a fiscally unsustainable program whose firm deadline imposed high costs in money and lives.

The Space Shuttle entered service three years late and 30% over its initial cost estimate (and that’s not even considering the awful design compromises needed to keep the overrun on development costs that small, which in turn made the lifetime operational costs signficantly higher).

The Space Station was notoriously over-budget, to the point that vital elements like the Crew Return Vehicle (whose predecessor is the basis of what Sierra Nevada is building as part of CCiCap…), the habitation module, and the TransHab (whose technology Bigelow Aerospace licensed and improved upon for their future commercial space stations…) were cancelled to contain ballooning costs. It’s hard to find good numbers at the ready, but if this is any guide, the initial cost estimate was around $8B, and the final cost at the completion of construction was around $35B (excluding Shuttle costs).

As for high-tech military technology, many major new military procurement programs of late seem to have ended up behind schedule and/or over budget during development: F-22, F-35, DD-21, LCS, SBIRS, FIA, MUOS, GMD, V-22, RAH-66, E-I-E-I-O…

SpaceX collects tax dollars so that it can learn how to build and develop something that other companies were doing a generation ago.

I’m not aware any companies were sending people and cargo into space on a commercial basis a generation ago. Having been a space nerd since about 1972, I’m surprised I would have missed something like that.

It is curious that SpaceX is now receiving so much taxpayer cash given its stunningly thin record of success in space.

I hear this complaint every time SpaceX accomplishes something. If launching a commercial EELV-class rocket successfully the first time, following it up by successfully launching and recovering the first commercial space capsule, and following that up by successfully rendezvousing and berthing a commercial capsule to a space station for the first time, from scratch, all in under ten years of existence as a company, while using far fewer people and far less money than comparable government-led efforts of the past is a “thin record of success in space”, I’m curious to know what real success looks like.

And it is even more troubling given that SpaceX’s founder and CEO is a big-time Obama donor. This is starting to sound like another Solyndra where friends of the administration get unsustainable sweetheart deals at taxpayer expense.

No, what this sounds like is someone allowing his distaste for the Obama administration to poison his opinion of a third party through guilt by association.

However, the problem with how the Obama Administration is pursuing its uninspiring and unimaginative space program goals…

…which include (mirable dictu) a program to jumpstart a commercial industry in crew and cargo delivery…

…goes well beyond picking donors to receive favorable contracts and guaranteed government cash with little accountability.

Boeing received a bit over 4% more from CCiCap than SpaceX. Are they corrupt and unaccountable crony capitalists in bed with Obama, too? Are they ~4% more corrupt than SpaceX, or is the difference in corruption in the noise at that level?

And how do “fixed price, pay-for-performance milestones” square with “guaranteed government cash” and “little accountability”?

Even if SpaceX accomplishes everything asked of it, it will not get us beyond low-Earth orbit.

Musk claims Dragon is being designed to do just that despite not having been asked to, and Falcon 9 is GTO capable…something which, to judge by the company’s launch manifest, has been asked of it. Not sure who “us” is, but SpaceX will get its paying customers beyond low-Earth orbit, as asked of it, and deliver a spacecraft capable of more than has been asked of it to-date. Assertion: FAIL.

Simply stated, the Obama administration’s vision for space exploration is essentially to replace the hauling capability of the shuttle — something that was developed more than 30 years ago.

With CCiCap, perhaps so. But that’s a little like saying Boeing’s vision for the 787 is merely to replace the passenger capability of the 757: it ignores the motivations for doing so and the means employed in the effort. There’s also a no duh element to his complaint whose utter banality I don’t think Landrith in his blue-faced demand for a space pony quite appreciates: the program is replacing the hauling capability of the Shuttle (for crew in particular) because we no longer have the Shuttle to haul anything with.

Okay, the space pony thing is unfair. Landrith doesn’t anywhere say he wants a space pony. Unfortunately, he doesn’t anywhere say what he does want. Which makes his rant rather impotent, don’t you think?

Beyond that, real space exploration is not a serious priority.

Good. It’s about damned time. The priority now (at least with CCiCap) is space commercialization. You know, like capitalism? And if we play our cards right, it could be the start of space settlement. I personally have had enough “real space exploration” to last me a lifetime. It’s long past time to start actually accomplishing something more than sending a few scientists a year into space to dink around with exotic materials and biology experiments.

Posted on August 25th, 2012 under Economics, politics, Settlement, Space Commerce, Space Policy. Tags: Big Government, bigelow, Boeing, Breitbart, CCDEV, CCiCap, CST-100, dragon, Dreamchaser, fisking, George Landrith, nasa, Sierra Nevada, spacex, TransHab. Comments: 5

…our book In the Shadow of Ares is one of the finalists for this year’s Prometheus Award. Sweet.

The Prometheus finalists for Best Novel recognize pro-freedom novels published last year:

• The Children of the Sky (TOR Books) – A sequel to Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep and in the same universe as Prometheus-winning A Deepness in the Sky, this novel focuses on advanced humans, stranded and struggling to survive on a low-tech planet populated by Tines, dog-like creatures who are only intelligent when organized in packs. The most libertarian of the three human factions and their local allies must cope with the world’s authoritarian factions to advance peaceful trade over war and coercion.
• The Freedom Maze (Small Beer Press) – Delia Sherman’s young-adult fantasy novel focuses on an adolescent girl in 1960 who is magically sent back to 1860 when her family owned slaves on a Louisiana plantation. With her summer tan, she’s mistaken for a slave herself, learning the hard way about her ancestors’ attitudes and about courage, respect, individual rights and personal responsibility.
• In the Shadow of Ares (Amazon Kindle edition) – This young-adult first novel by Thomas L. James and Carl C. Carlsson focuses on a Mars-born female teenager in a near-future, small civilization on Mars, where hardworking citizens are constantly and unjustly constrained by a growing, centralized authority whose excessive power has led to corruption and conflict. (more…)

Posted on April 8th, 2012 under Entertainment, politics, Writing. Tags: Award, Human Wave, In the Shadow of Ares, libertarian, Prometheus, Science Fiction. Comments Off