Now For Something Really Amazing

Bashing Time magazine just never gets old. Nearly every month, there seems to be something that makes it worth taking a screenshot of and then laughing about. Here's this month's screenshot:

Image credit: Screenshot and annotations of this Time magazine page by Cujo359

There I was, gazing at this seemingly amazing sight of two 100,000 light year-wide objects colliding with each other at some ungodly speed (BTW, thanks, Mary), when I glance at the lower right corner of the screen and notice the headline that's part of the magazine's "While you're here, you might want to waste more time reading..." feature, which I circled in green to make sure that you, too, do not miss what's really amazing today:

Kate Middleton's Amazing Fashion Evolution

Now, I get the idea that not everyone is interested in astronomy, and I also get the idea that some people actually are interested in fashion. Yes, I'm not one of those people. However, even assuming I were interested in fashion, I suspect I'd be less than amazed by Kate Middleton's fashion evolution, whatever that might be.

If your interests run more along the lines mine usually do, you might need a bit of background here. Kate Middleton is married to some British prince or another (Andrew? No, it's the other one), and is thus very famous. I mainly find her recognizable because I'm a heterosexual male who isn't dead yet, and she's frequently featured on the magazine covers one sees in the checkout lines at the supermarket. Why others find her interesting, I'm less sure, but I suppose they have their reasons.

The reason I don't think it's terribly amazing that Ms. Middleton has changed her fashion sense is that she's a young woman, and she's now a member of one of the more visible families on the planet. Heck, I'd be amazed if she didn't change her wardrobe. Anyone who remembers how girls dress in high school and college should know what I'm talking about with the "she's a young woman" part.

So, why does Time magazine, who surely must understand these things better than I, think this is so amazing? I have no idea. I didn't check the link. If you do, please feel free to let me know.

To get full credit, though, be prepared to tell me why I should care.

For any U.K. readers who might have happened by, please understand that this isn't about some distaste or disinterest in your culture. I can name the last three Prime Ministers, although I keep having to remind myself that Mr. Blair's first name is not "Phony". This is about Time magazine's seeming desire to keep us entertained with trivia, when there are so many genuinely fascinating things to be interested in.

Where Priorities Lead: Spaceflight Edition

Caption: An artist's conception of the SKYLON space plane doing something that isn't possible with current aerospace technology - taking off from a runway and heading into orbit.

Image credit: Reaction Engines Limited publicity art.

The British Broadcasting Corporation featured an interesting article on a British technology effort last week:

UK engineers have begun critical tests on a new engine technology designed to lift a spaceplane into orbit.

The proposed Skylon vehicle would operate like an airliner, taking off and landing at a conventional runway.

Its major innovation is the Sabre engine, which can breathe air like a jet at lower speeds but switch to a rocket mode in the high atmosphere.

Reaction Engines Limited (REL) believes the test campaign will prove the readiness of Sabre's key elements.

Key Tests For Skylon Spaceplane project

The BBC article explains in some detail what the "key element" is, but essentially it's a means of using the space plane's own fuel to cool the air coming into the engines enough so that it doesn't melt them. At the speeds such a craft must travel, both entering and leaving the atmosphere, that's a big consideration.

Cultural Idiocy

It's astonishing how foolish our political debates have become here in America. Bill O'Reilly is often a classic case in point, but he outdid himself this week. Robert Reich explains:

Bill O’Reilly, the tumescent personality of Fox News, said on his Friday show “Robert Reich is a communist who secretly adores Karl Marx.” (This came after Fox News’ Neil Cavoto called me a “sanctimonious twit” for suggesting the rich should pay more in taxes.)

O’Reilly’s accusation is odd, to say the least. If we were living in the 1950s, amid Senator Joe McCarthy’s communist witch-hunts, the claim might have some bite and cause me injury. But these days it’s hard to find a full-throated communist anywhere in the world.

Why Anyone Should Care that Bill O’Reilly Calls Me A Communist

Then he punctuated that response with this picture:

Image credit: Robert Reich

O'Reilly would be foolish to do that in any forum where he didn't control the mike button. A couple of rather different perspectives on why that is, first from Mad As Hell And..., a blog that is decidedly conservative in its outlook:

Since several of us here at Mad As Hell And… have had the pleasure of seeing Robert Reich speak on many different occasions and we have met Reich a handful of times going back his days of working for Brother Bill Clinton as U.S. Labor Secretary we have to agree that Bill O’Reilly if off-his-rocker on this one because if Robert Reich is a “Communist” then the word “Communist” has lost all meaning and is no longer effective in identifying REAL Communists like Fidel Castro and the Nutcake now running Venezuela into the ground!

One thing that we know for sure about Robert Reich is that he is smart and he has the ability to see forward into the future which is always a nice attribute to have when you are working on a college campus which is often filled with Complete Morons that are often lucky to get their shoes tied in the morning.

Look no further than Robert Reich’s ability to see the future than his great book from 1992 The Work of Nations which very accurately identified what was actually going to happen over the past two decades which has been dominated in OUR country by large American corporations that no longer see the United States of America as [anything but] just another market to be dominated and most certainly in many cases not a “home country” that should receive any kind of special attention over say….Burma, Brazil, India or any other country where consumers and/or businesses buy products in the marketplace.

Bill O’Reilly Says Robert Reich Is A “Communist?” – Come on Bill….Robert Reich May Be A Wacko Liberal Nut But He Is NO Communist! – One Thing We Know That Robert Reich Is….Reich Is Smart – Robert Reich’s 1992 Book The Work of Nations Predicted Almost Exactly What Has Happened Over the Past Two Decades and Although We Wouldn’t Agree With Reich’s “Fixes” For the American Economy Then or Today….Reich Sure the Hell Know What He Is Talking About – Robert Reich A “Communist?” – Please, That Is Just Dumb!

Yes, that really is the title of the essay. Another perspective from James Ala completes the thought that maybe O'Reilly's view of the world is from a much different time:

You may have missed it, but Communism, dead and buried since 1989 is back. Well, at least it is back in the fevered imagination of TEA Party Politicians and Fox News commentators.

It is passing strange that the Red Menace has returned, I thought that the Sainted Reagan had single-handedly torn down Communism, and its Berlin Wall with his bare hands in a feat of super-human strength and will. After all, Don Reynaldo had told the evil Gorbachev to “tear down this wall” and Gorby complied. How did the evil, rotten, feral, traitorous, soulless, and no-good Commies come back after the Gipper had stomped them flat?

But we have the word of Congressman Allen West that the nefarious Commies, those termites of liberty are at again. They have regrouped, they have reformed and true to character (or is that caricature?) have taken up false colors to fool the unwary. They have gained electoral office and become the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

Commie, Pinko, Bedwetting Socialists

I've occasionally used the term "communist" here as sarcasm, trying to imply that the accusations someone is making are so wildly off the mark that they remind me of the days when people like Joe McCarthy made such accusations, because it was better than discussing their own failings as people, as intellectuals, or as leaders.

Now folks like O'Reilly and Allen West have willingly joined that class of politician, in an era when most of us, even the folks who might be inclined to agree with them, know better.

That's where we are in early Twenty-First Century America, when China is eating our lunch and our own population is slowly sliding into ignorance and poverty. We're debating nonsense as though we were idiots.

A Bit About China's Economy

Caption: A Chengdu J-10 fighter airplane, designed and produced in China. This fighter, which looks like a cross between an American F-16 and a Swedish Gripen, is considered to be as advanced as Western and Russian designs.

Image credit: mxiong/Wikimedia

At his blog Beat The Press, economist Dean Baker made a point about China's economy that is especially interesting in light of my article on world military spending:

On a purchasing power parity basis, which assigns the same set of prices to goods and services produced in both countries, China is already almost 80 percent of the size of the U.S. economy. There is also some serious research suggesting that because of mis-measurement of prices in rural areas, China's economy is already larger than the U.S. economy.

Ruchir Sharma's Entry in the "Most Things Wrong in a Short Column" Contest

[inks from original]

It's possible that their GDP is already as big as ours. If it's not, it will be soon. Given that their economy has grown by actually manufacturing things, as opposed to passing increasingly complicated-sounding "financial instruments" back and forth to make a few people very rich, I think there's reason to think they will very quickly overtake us in the ability to produce military hardware, if they have not already.

Yet another reason why an arms race would be very bad. As if we don't have plenty already.

World Military Spending, 2011

Caption: Landing Helicopter Dock (LHD) USS Essex, sailing the East China Sea in 2008. As large as her predecessor, the World War II fleet carrier USS Essex (CV-9), she can carry eight Harrier fighter bombers and two dozen helicopters, as well as several landing craft and a battalion of Marines. She would be the capital ship in just about any other navy in the world. The U.S. Navy operates eight LHDs, as well as a similar LHA amphibious assault ship, and 11 fleet carriers.

Image credit: Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Joseph Pol Sebastian Gocong/U.S. Navy/Wikimedia

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute has once again published its 2011 Yearbook, which includes information about world military spending. I didn't publish this list last year, but I'd like to make this something of an annual tradition. Toward that end, there's not much commentary this year, just the facts.

A Couple Of Blue Dogs Go Down In Pennsylvania

Dusty covered the basics pretty well:

PA’s Rep. Tim Holden, a conservative by any standards, lost last night to a rich guy named Matt Cartwright, who spent nearly $400,000 of his own money in the race.

Alrighty then! A rich guy winning doesn’t warm the cockles of my little black heart, but a Blue Dog losing sure as hell does.

The other PA Blue Dog who became unemployed was Jason Altmire. He was defeated by Mark Critz. Critz isn’t very left of center by any stretch of my imagination, but the labor unions backed him over Altmire who also voted against the HCR Act and with the R’s on many other issues.

A few Blue Dogs lost last night! Yes indeedy!

As change goes, it's not much. I'm not sorry to see either Altmire or Holden gone, but whether their replacements will be anything besides more of the same remains to be seen.

Meanwhile, there was also some bad news from Pennsylvania:

Self-funded coal-mining millionaire Tom Smith won a five-way Republican primary to take on Sen. Bob Casey (D). While the moderate Casey isn’t considered vulnerable, Pennsylvania is a swing state and Smith could force Democrats to spend some money on this race.

Mark Critz defeats Jason Altmire, Matt Cartwright beats Tim Holden

Pennsylvania isn't the most progressive state on the East Coast. In fact, there's reason to think it doesn't get much more conservative north and east of the Mason-Dixon line. Nevertheless, Bob Casey, an anti-abortion, anti-pretty much anything progressive whose principal political asset seems to be the undying support of the Pennsylvania Democratic Party machine, is an example of progressive underachievement when it comes to electing people who represent our values.

Bob Casey is also a prime example of why the idea of mounting primary challenges enough to make Congress more progressive is a non-starter. As a symbolic gesture, it’s great, but as we’ve seen time and again, the machine protects its own. Pennsylvania and DC Democrats are both run by machine politics. The machine in PA loves it some Bob Casey, so Casey will get whatever he needs to get back in office. Any primary challenger, and Casey did have one this time, will be up against the full resources of the Democratic Party. Ask Joe Sestak what happens when the machine doesn’t get what it wants.

Unless progressives can be a somewhat united front that tells these machines that in order to get our support this and this and this will happen, then they will continue to treat us with the contempt we’ve earned by not doing the things we obviously have to do politically to get what we need.

And yes, I mean that progressives have to demand this, which means they'll have to sit out or find alternatives to Democrats when they don't play ball. Until we're as ruthless about this as the NRA or the TEA Party, we aren't going to see anything but more of the same crap we've been getting.

Of course, if you like that, keep voting for it, and keep letting all those "progressive" front groups continue to support it.

Another Cost Of War

Caption: An unexploded cluster bomb somewhere in Laos, another reminder of an industrial war gone by. It was dropped in the 1970s during the Vietnam War either by U.S. forces or those of one of our allies.

Image credit: Project Pineapple

There's been only one true industrial war in America - the Civil War. It was one of the first, and in many ways we were lucky we got it out of our systems when we did. In an industrial war, it's not fun being the home team. Most Americans, I suspect, have no idea what that means. They should ask Cambodia, or they can ask most of the countries of Europe.

A couple of recent articles in Der Spiegel help explain why:

After the end of World War II the Baltic became a dumping ground for unused munitions. After decades of rust and decay in its grey waters, old mines, bombs and torpedoes pose a threat to the sea and the people who cross it, fish in it and live on its shores. Fishermen inadvertently net up to 3 tons of ordnance each year, says environmental expert Stefan Nehring.

Earthquake measuring devices regularly detect explosions in the sea, environmental engineer Marc Koch told an international conference on munitions in the Baltic in Berlin last weekend.

Toxic munitions are expected to wash up on Germany's coast in increasing quantities, warned Robert Zellermann, formerly in charge of bomb disposal in the northern German state of Lower Saxony. Most bombs have rusted and been spread by currents he said, adding that around one-third of the Baltic seabed was now strewn with munitions.

A Rusting Timebomb in the Baltic

As the article goes on to emphasize, much of that explosive hazardous waste was dumped there after the war, including a substantial stockpile of nerve agent left there by the United States. A planned natural gas pipeline may be presented with additional dangers, thanks to various bombs strewn on the ocean floor. It looks as though that stuff will be washing up on Baltic shores for decades to come.

What happens when it washes ashore? Here's a recent example:

Two women combing a beach on the German Baltic coast were taken to the hospital with serious burns to their hands and legs after accidentally touching pieces of phosphorus that had washed ashore and are believed to have come from World War II incendiary bombs, police said.
...

Phosphorus ignites when exposed to oxygen and burns at a heat of 1,300 degrees Celsius. The flames can only be extinguished with sand. Running into the water accelerates the fire.

Two Hurt by WWII Phosphorus on German Shoreline

There are lots of hidden costs to modern war - broken minds, lost opportunity, and delayed karma being just some. This is another hazard - the near-certainty that long after the last shot is fired, people will still be engaged in the dangerous business of cleaning up the mess.

It's hard to believe that we need more reasons to not start wars, but there's another one.

RomneyCare: Par For The Course

Caption: No, that's not Mitt Romney, that's Micheal Moore. The rubber glove seems appropriate, though.

It's hard to believe, but if the Los Angeles Times analysis is correct, Mitt Romney may have come up with a worse health care plan than President Obama and the Democrats did. Talking Points Memo summarizes:

What the Times arrived at is a plan broadly similar to the widely derided blueprint John McCain ran on in 2008.

The underlying idea is to wipe out one of the main fiscal tent poles of the existing health care system [tax breaks for employer-provided health care], and use the resulting revenues to finance billions of dollars in subsidies to buy insurance on the existing private market. The result, according to experts, would likely be a significant increase in the number of uninsured Americans, in an economy where, for better or worse, employers would likely no longer provide their workers with health care coverage.

Romney Hints At Radical Health Care Reform Plan To Replace ‘Obamacare’

For those who don't have to buy their own health insurance, let me introduce you to the central idea of this situation:

It's you against the insurance companies. That means you will lose.

When a medium- or large-sized company buys health insurance from an insurance company, it has some power in that relationship. If it decides to change insurance plans, the insurance company will lose a significant amount of revenue. While the company is not as motivated as its employees, it still will want its insurance provider to actually provide coverage for its employees, so they aren't sick all the time or leaving for an employer with a better health plan. Individual buyers, on the other hand, have little to no power in that relationship.

Of course, as the LA Times notes, this is another case when the Free Market Pony will gallop to our rescue, according to the "experts":

Conservative healthcare experts offer several reasons for such a change. The main one is that the tax law needs to be revised to bring free-market competition to the healthcare system.

"It is absolutely essential if you are going to reform the health insurance market to change the tax treatment of health insurance," said Robert Moffit, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation. "It is the 800-pound gorilla in the healthcare debate."

Moreover, the current system effectively discriminates against Americans who do not get health benefits at work. They must buy coverage on their own and do not get the same tax break.

Romney's healthcare plan may be more revolutionary than Obama's

There are any number of things wrong with what these "experts" are saying, not the least of which is that health insurance is not, and will never be, a "free market". It is a risk pool, and that in itself says it's going to be rather less than free, because bigger risk pools are inherently safer. Since market forces are almost inevitably affected by costs, it pays to leave people out of those pools who actually need health care services. Leaving insurance companies to compete has gotten us where we are now - with people who need insurance not able to buy it or afford to use it.

Which is a long way of saying that the LA Times is right when it says this:

For example, if workers had the ability to shop anywhere for a health plan, and if companies no longer got tax breaks, some employers would likely stop providing health coverage. That might be fine for young, healthy workers who could buy plans on their own. But older or sicker workers would lose the protection they now receive by buying insurance within a group. If young adults opted to buy low-cost plans that provided limited benefits, prices could rise sharply for middle-aged workers who are more likely to have chronic health problems.

Under the [Presidential candidates John] McCain [health care reform] plan, more than 9 million fewer people would have received health benefits through their jobs, according to an estimate from the Lewin Group, a healthcare consulting firm.

Romney's healthcare plan may be more revolutionary than Obama's

There's little reason to doubt any of that analysis, assuming the Times is correct about Romney's intentions.

So, what about the individual mandate, perhaps the most unpopular notion in the Affordable Care Act (ACA), and certainly one I've objected to often enough? Don't get your hopes up. The LA Times notes that Romney pooh-poohed the mandate during the primary campaign, but I remain skeptical. Obama and the Democrats gave the insurance companies the chance to put millions of uncovered Americans over the fence and bone the daylights out of us. They won't give that up without expecting something else in return. With our two current political parties, the insurance companies get what they expect.

Ergo, if you're expecting "RomneyCare" to be mandate-free, you're even dumber than the folks who expected Obama and the Democrats would hold out for a "public option". After all, when he was on the campaign trail, Obama's health care plan didn't have a mandate, either.

RomneyCare will, if implemented, be a fitting successor to ObamaCare. ObamaCare managed to make things worse than they were already, and RomneyCare will make them worse still. It's sad, when the GOP could have put forward a plan to change the ACA that would have followed their stated principles, and yet improved the system at least slightly, that they have chosen not to do so.

OMG! Now They're Recruiting Kittehs!

They had a cow when atheists put up this billboard in Iowa:



They went medieval on our butts when atheists put this one up in New Jersey:

Image credit: American Atheists

So, do you think there's any chance that they'll finally see that atheists can be kind, thoughtful people when this billboard goes up in Springfield, Missouri next week?

Image credit: Skepticon

Not a chance. I can't wait to read an editorial decrying how militant atheists are enlisting kittens in their campaign of evil. Actually, it's even worse. There's been an active campaign to recruit 400 lbs mutant St. Bernard puppies:

Image credit: Cujo359

What depths will they sink to next? Stay tuned.

There's one unalloyed good religion has done for us - it's been a perfect laboratory experiment demonstrating just how oblivious and small people can be when they put their minds to it.

Say Goodbye: Final Chapter

Space Shuttle Discovery was flown over Washington, DC one more time today on its way to the Smithsonian:

Image credit: NASA/Smithsonian Institution/Harold Dorwin

[Click on the image to enlarge. Go to image credit link to find more image size options.]

Say goodbye to that “vision thing”. This is a summary chart from NASA's FY-2012 budget (PDF):

It's a screenshot I took of that PDF document in the link, and then edited out all the sub-items. To see the full summary, check the first page of the PDF.

NASA’s entire budget, about $19 billion annually, is less than two months’ “supplemental appropriations” for the useless wars in Afghanistan and Iraq for this fiscal year (FY2012). In its FY2013 slideshow the Defense Dept. thinks it can save almost a third of that with “better buying practices”:

This is page six of that slide show. Note the items I've highlighted in yellow. They are all savings the Pentagon thinks it can achieve by doing various things more efficiently. Add them up, and that's $16.2 billion, nearly NASA's entire budget. By its own estimates, the DoD wastes almost as much money as NASA has to work with in a given year.

Let's skip to page 13 of that slideshow for another interesting tidbit:

Once again, I've highlighted an item, the DoD space budget. It's about a third of NASA's entire budget. What does the DoD do? Mostly, it maintains a network of surveillance satellites, including its own weather satellites. It has its own communications satellites, too, as well as the Global Positioning System satellites. Still, it's rather a lot of money.

Speaking of a lot of money, let's skip to page 20:

Assuming things don't get much worse in Afghanistan, that number I circled is the billions of dollars we'll be spending to keep our army there for the next fiscal year. That's four and a half times NASA's budget. Perhaps some day we'll compare that to what we ought to be spending more on here in America, but for now I think the point that it dwarfs the budget of a major agency, and that as I've mentioned before, almost no Americans are employed by that money, it should be obvious that we could find better ways to spend it than making the rubble bounce halfway around the world.

Despite all the money we've spent on being better at destroying other peoples' countries than anyone else, we never seem to have the money to make the world a better place. Discovery and her sister ships may be the last of their kind, at least as far as the American aerospace industry is concerned. Somehow, in the almost thirty years the Shuttle was in use, we could never fund a replacement.

There was a time when America, when confronted with a daunting problem, would look on it as an opportunity to make things better. We lost that urge a long time ago. Now, if we're afraid of it, our urge as a nation seems to be to destroy something. I hardly recognize the fearful and small-hearted place we've become.

(h/t Taylor Marsh for the picture.)