Rocket to nowhere.

I’ve said for years (even before the first one blew up, I think) that the Shuttle is a dog. It’s the 1975 panel-sided Mercury station wagon of space. And that’s on a good day, when it doesn’t kill its crew. On Idle Words is an article which lays out the case in delicious detail that it’s time to stick a fork in it. (And in the ISS, too.)

The Apollo program showed how successful the agency could be when given a clear technical objective and the budget required to meet it. But the Shuttle program has shown the flip side of NASA, as rational goals detach from reality under constantly changing political and funding pressures. NASA has learned valuable bureaucratic lessons – it knows to spread its work over as many jurisdictions as possible, it has learned that chronic funding is always better than acute funding, however much money a one-time outlay might save in the long run, and it has demonstrated that ineffectual projects can be sustained indefinitely if cancelling them is sufficiently awkward. But these are lessons we have already learned for far less on the ground, with Amtrak, and building a more photogenic, spaceborne version of the Sunset Limited in orbit hardly seems like a space policy for the 21st century.

Are you Jewish? Do you read the New York Times?

Why?

While Jews consider the paper an ally in their battle against prejudice, they seem to ignore the paper’s treatment of their own community. Anti-Semitism is an awkward subject for many people, Jews included, to consider. Many might regard those who touch upon it as hyper-sensitive and too focused on their own well-being.

However, American Jews celebrate and support the self-regard that other groups display when they campaign to be fairly treated. Such self-regard is a fundamental principle of self-preservation. If blacks or Hispanics were treated the way Jews have periodically been treated by the New York Times, some Jewish readers would be outraged. So why the apathy regarding principles that Jews have always held dear: civility, justice, and equal treatment?

Is such a betrayal of principles a double standard? Aren’t double standards themselves a sign of anti-Semitism?

Pacifists do not bring Peace

The indespensible Thomas Sowell points out why pacifists bring war.

One of the many failings of our educational system is that it sends out into the world people who cannot tell rhetoric from reality. They have learned no systematic way to analyze ideas, derive their implications and test those implications against hard facts.

“Peace” movements are among those who take advantage of this widespread inability to see beyond rhetoric to realities. Few people even seem interested in the actual track record of so-called “peace” movements — that is, whether such movements actually produce peace or war.

Or, as Orwell put it:

“Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side you automatically help out that of the other.”