Rocket Man Blog

Last month a couple of leftist professors at Berkeley released a "study" where they looked for "consistent underlying motivations" to conservative beliefs. The "study" is not online, but the "Rocket Scientists" at Berkeley were so pleased with it that they wrote a press release advertising the conclusions the "study" reached.

The "study" has been widely criticized in conservative circles for the authors comparison of Reagan to Hitler, their assertion that Joseph Stalin and Fidel Castro "might be considered politically conservative" and their assertion that conservatives are "less integratively complex" than liberals. I could go on, but I don’t have to.

John "The Writing Machine" Ray from Dissecting Leftism has an article on Frontpage Magazine titled Academic Fakers that deconstructs the methodology used in the "study" -

The reason they get themselves into this awful muddle is that they have no idea what conservatism actually is. To define what it is, they consulted dictionaries and social science encyclopaedias and their fellow Leftist writers but they do not appear to have consulted a single conservative! And they have certainly studied no political history. They have fallen into the simplistic trap of equating conservatism with rejection of change. It is of course true that conservatives DO reject some changes -- the foolish changes advocated by Leftists in particular -- but it is also true that conservatives WANT change -- change that will get the government off their backs in particular. If Jost and his colleagues had talked to almost any conservative they would have found out very rapidly that there are a HEAP of things about our present society that conservatives would like to change. It is only Leftists talking to one another who think that conservatives are motivated only by a rejection of change.

After reading John's whole article, you will be amazed that this "study" got published in "The Psychological Bulletin -- one of the premier journals of academic psychology." It really is a travesty for Berkeley and The Psychological Bulletin to promote and print this drivel.

John is a prolific author (I once told him he could write faster than I could read) and if you are ever looking for a reference on liberalism, his blog should be the first place you turn. If you like his current article on FrontPage Magazine (and even if you don't), I highly recommend you read the first article of John's that I ever read titled What Are Leftists?. The article has one of the best observations on leftists I have ever heard -

One thing that Leftists will not allow themselves to be seen as is racist. Leftists can grudgingly be Nationalists -- Gough Whitlam, the great hero of the Australian Left, certainly was an unashamed nationalist, as were those great champions of the Argentinean "descamisados", Juan and Eva Peron, and as is the Communist Kim dynasty in North Korea with their catastrophic doctrine of "juche" (national self-reliance) -- but Leftists cannot admit any significance for race. If they do, they are immediately relabeled as Rightist. Being racist is enough in the Left lexicon to make you Rightist regardless of anything else you might believe or advocate. (emphasis mine)

Do yourself a favor and read the whole thing.

Orlyn Swartz from the Sioux City Journal has written an interesting article titled Which party has worst Social Security record?.

Many of us have paid into FICA for years and are now receiving a Social Security check every month -- then finding that we are getting taxed on 85 percent of the money we paid the federal government to put away for us. This money was already taxed once when we earned it.

You may be interested in the following:

Which party took Social Security from an independent fund and put it in the general fund so that Congress could spend it? It was Lyndon Johnson and the Democratic-controlled House and Senate.

Which party put a tax on Social Security? The Democratic Party.

Which party increased the tax on Social Security? The Democratic Party with Al #(the vote counter) Gore casting the deciding vote. He probably did this while inventing the Internet.

Which party decided to give Social Security money to immigrants? That's right n immigrants move into this country and at age 65 get Social Security benefits. The Democratic Party gave them benefits even though they never paid a dime into the fund.

Then, after doing all this, the Democrats turn around and tell you the Republicans want to take your Social Security. And, the worst part of it is, people believe it.

As H. L. Mencken once said - No one in this world has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.

The movie October Sky was based on a book called Rocket Boys written by Homer Hickam. If you have never seen the movie I would highly recommend it. Homer Hickam is currently an engineer working for NASA and he has an article titled Not Culture but Perhaps a Cult that discusses the problems with the Space Shuttle. He makes some of the same points I made in this post.

The flawed design of the Shuttle is all in its history and it's more than the way the stack is assembled. For instance, the Shuttle uses hydrogen fuel, the most difficult, cranky fuel there is. Hydrogen is the smallest atom in the universe and leaks through molecule-sized pinholes. When it gathers in an enclosed space (such as under the shuttle stack on the pad), it's a bomb waiting to go off. Hydrogen leakages grounded the Shuttles for three months before Columbia was launched and scares a lot of NASA engineers to death. So why do they use hydrogen and all its cranky plumbing? Because the Shuttle's original designers had to wring the last ounce of performance out of it to haul those mains into orbit along with the heavy payloads that the Air Force demanded at the time (the Air Force long ago gave up on the Shuttle). And what about those solid rocket boosters, unstoppable once lit? They leave the crews with no choice but to hang on until they've wound down even if their spaceplane is being torn apart. They were added not because they were the best boosters around but because they were relatively cheap. If his engineers had brought my father something to dig coal as flawed in its suppositions as well as its design as the Shuttle, he would have chased them out of his coal mine.

The odd thing is that the Shuttle was designed by great engineers. The problem is they were forced to fit their designs to fit what has proved to be an impossible concept, a chemically-propelled rocket ship that would carry humans and heavy payloads into orbit routinely, then land to be refurbished and sent aloft again within days. They also had to do it on the cheap. It was inevitable that a flawed design would be the result. In my second memoir The Coalwood Way, I wrote about me always complaining about the past until Roy Lee, a fellow Rocket Boy, tells me to stop it because "You can't beat history." And he was right even though, as I wrote, "It placed my heart in the icy vise of truth where hearts tend to suffer." The heart of every NASA engineer suffers today in this icy truth: the Space Shuttle is an inherently flawed design and will destroy American human spaceflight if we don't get it behind us. It's nearly done it already.

So what should be done? Let's get practical. We can't just shut the thing down instantly. History's got us by the throat. We need the Shuttle to finish the space station and to also keep the Russians and Chinese from dominating space. I for one am not willing to see that occur while we dither. Human spaceflight is important to this country. But I think the Shuttle is as safe as you're going to get it pretty much with what is in place today. Let's fire the managers responsible for Columbia (they are not difficult to identify) so as to warn the next crop they'd best be competent, put the toughest engineers we can find to be in charge of the program, fly the thing eight to ten more times over the next four years to finish the space station and meet our international obligations. Then let's close the program down in a controlled fashion and replace it with proven expendable launchers and a shiny new spaceplane. And, this time, put it on top.

I agree wholeheartedly.

Lemondust has abandoned his straw man/ad hominem attack on my post One of many problems with socialism and has moved to an unfounded assertion/ad hominem attack.

In Lemondust's first comment he claimed I had asserted "that complaining to the government only happens in socialist countries." Unfortunately for Lemondust, the word only never appeared in my post. Hence the straw man argument. The ad hominem attack is easy to spot.

His first argument shot down, Lemondust tried again by claiming that "police and fire could have gone door to door, checking on shut-ins." I agree that if the French government had a list of all the shut-ins in France and did not make any effort to contact them, then the government would be culpable in the heat wave deaths. But no such list has ever been mentioned in any news story on the subject. "Air-conditioned relief centers" and recalling "doctors and nurses from vacation" would only have helped if the government had a way of contacting the shut-ins.

What the French government could have done was run radio and TV commercials asking the people of France to look out for their elderly neighbors. As Howard Veit over at ORACULATIONS said in an email to me -

The point made was that in the U.S. we are so "mean" to the elderly that when we have one or two in our apartment buildings several of us will always "check" on the person, sometimes twice or three times per day just to be nice because we know they don't have health care. It is this "checking" that prevents deaths like those that took place in France. All I do know is that we have two very old and sick people in my building and people do look in on them; we recently had a heat wave of 92+ for about ten days, which is not unusual for SoCal but the apartments had air conditioning and the old people get a break on their power bills. Our valleys had 104+ and nobody died either. Palm Springs had 115 to 120 but that is normal there.

But I agree with you that it can't be the government's fault unless people want to make it the governments fault. So if the government is accountable for health care in France people better be willing to pay for it.

So maybe our way of unprofessional "care" is better.

Lemondust's second unfounded assertion is that I am "amazingly uninformed" and do not know about heat wave deaths that have occurred in Chicago and Washington D.C. Well I am aware of them, but they are not analogous to what happened in France. The President of France is being blamed for the heat wave deaths in France, but the President of the United States was not blamed for the heat wave deaths in Chicago or Washington D.C.

Again the ad hominem attack is easy to spot.

Frankly, it is tiresome to debate with someone who bases his arguments on such transparent fallacies and I have no desire to continue debating with someone who does so.

I have my very first blog child Hold The Mayo. He is just getting started, but when he starts posting I will let you know.

Update: StMack has an interesting post about taxes and proposes a strategy for a second Bush term.

VodkaPundit has a list of 50 Things al Qaeda Hates about America. By far the best one is -

You bastards fight back

Unions are an idea who’s time has come … and gone. At one time unions were necessary to help protect workers from their employers. But in today’s world, with increased government oversight and the almost unlimited mobility people have, unions have outlived their original purpose.

If you have ever worked in a union environment you know what I am talking about. Unions have made it next to impossible to get rid of bad employees, and they seem to make it as difficult as possible to get any work done. In my company, you cannot empty your own trash without risking the janitor filing a grievance against you. You cannot move a part from one building to another without risking a transportation grievance. 20 people often have to wait hours for the “left hand thread, deep welled socket w/ 12” extension, 1” or over, stainless steel bolt torque specialist” to show up so you can get a job done. OK, the last one is a joke, but it's not to far off the mark.

Like any bureaucratic institution unions have stuck around long after their original usefulness has diminished. AFL-CIO Seeks New Members From 'Working America' -

Acknowledging that little more than 10 percent of the U.S. workforce belongs to a union, AFL-CIO President John Sweeney announced Thursday the launch of a new union called "Working America."

Membership in the AFL-CIO national affiliate will be open to any American worker "who supports the union's goals." The announcement came after the union leader verbally pummeled the Bush administration's economic and labor policies.

"President Bush has pulled the rug out from under America's working people and rolled out a red carpet for the wealthy and giant corporations," the leader of the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations said.

Sweeney complained about tax cuts promoted by the Bush administration and the president's move to limit the raises available to federal union employees. He also disparaged Bush's successful campaign to prohibit collective bargaining and strikes by union members working for the Department of Homeland Security and the Transportation Security Administration.

Dan Cronin, director of legal information with the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, called Sweeney's words a "pretty clear wake-up call" for President Bush.

"These folks are never going to be [Bush's] friends," Cronin said. "No amount of kowtowing or sucking up or giving them favors is ever going to make them his friends."

Cronin also found Sweeney's complaints about tax cuts ironic.

"That's fine, but a majority of his members supported the tax cuts in 2001," Cronin recalled.

…

To increase the pool of potential union recruits, the AFL-CIO is going outside of the workplaces it controls. Sweeney said that, in a public appearance planned for Detroit next week, he will announce the creation of "Working America," a new union. Membership in the AFL-CIO affiliate will be open to "millions of working people who want to be part of the AFL-CIO's efforts.

"Working America will give them that chance," Sweeney explained. "We will recruit for Working America in communities nationwide, including knocking on doors to build support for an even bigger push for legislation and policies that help working families."

Cronin called the "Working America" campaign "just another way they've come up with to raise more money.

"That seems to be all they're interested in...getting as much money as possible, whether it comes from people who join this 'Working America' organization or it's from compulsory dues that they seize from workers," Cronin alleged. "These guys are only interested in keeping the money flowing in so that they can spend it on political activities and their agenda, not on taking care of the needs of workers."

Unions have become just another democratic political action committee. The only difference is that they get mandatory political “contributions” from their members to spend as they see fit, without any concern for what the average union member wants.

I don’t see why anybody would join “Working America” when they could just contribute directly to the Democratic party.

When I talk to a children’s car seat nazi, I always say how amazing it is that children survived riding in cars before car seats were invented. Well Peter Worthington from the Toronto Sun agrees with me and has a list of other things "regulators and bureaucrats" did not protect us from as children.

"According to today's regulators and bureaucrats, those who were kids in the '30s to the early '70s, probably shouldn't have survived. For example:

* Our baby cribs were covered with bright, coloured lead-based paint.

* We had no childproof lids or locks on medicine bottles, doors or cabinets.

* When we rode our bikes, we had no helmets.

* We played hockey and baseball without helmets and mouth guards. Our parents rarely attended shinny games.

* Then there were the risks we took hitchhiking.

* As kids, we rode in cars without safety belts or air bags.

* Riding in the back of a pickup truck was a special treat.

* Public swimming pools actually had diving boards - a low one and a high one on which we tested our nerve.

* We actually went swimming without a lifeguard or adults present to make sure we didn't drown.

* We drank water from a garden hose, not from a bottle. Horrors.

* We ate cupcakes, bread and butter and soda pop with sugar in it, but we were never overweight because we were always outside playing.

* We shared pop with four friends, all drinking from the same bottle, and no one actually died from this.

* We spent hours building go-carts out of scraps and then rode down hills only to find we had forgotten about brakes. After running into bushes, we solved the problem.

* We would leave home in the morning, play all day and as long as we were home when the streets lights went on, no one worried. No one was able to reach us all day. No cell phones.

* We didn't have Playstations, Nintendo 64, XI-boxes. No video games, no 99 channels on cable, no videotaped movies, no surround sound, personal computers, no internal chat rooms.

* We had friends. We went outside and found them.

* We played dodge ball, and sometimes the ball really hurt.

* We fell out of trees, got cuts and sometimes broken bones and teeth, but there were no lawsuits from these accidents. No one was to blame but us. Remember "accidents?"

* We had fights and punched one another and got black eyes and learned to get over it.

* We made up games with sticks and tennis balls and although we were told it would happen, we did not poke out any eyes.

* We rode bikes or walked to friends' homes and knocked on the door, rang the bell, or walked in. Doors were seldom locked.

* In the fall, we raked dead leaves off lawns for cash, piled them on the street and then set fire to them. Rarely did we burn down the neighbourhood or contaminate our lungs with smoke, or break pollution laws.

* Some of us in small towns actually owned .22 rifles and went shooting groundhogs in farmers' fields on weekends.

* Little League had tryouts and not everyone made the team. Those who didn't learned to cope with disappointment.

* In school or organized games, we kept score and had winners and losers - not bland, no-score contests.

* Some kids weren't as smart as others, so when they failed a grade in school, they returned next year to repeat the year. Horrors.

* Tests were not "adjusted" for any reason.

* When teachers were cross with us or punished us, our parents never threatened the teacher, but were inclined to side with the teacher.

* Our actions were our own. Consequences were expected.

* The idea of parents bailing us out if we got into trouble in school or broke the law was unheard of. They actually sided with authority.

* These generations have produced some of the best risk-takers, problem solvers, inventors and self-sufficient citizens in our society.

* We had freedom, failure, success, responsibility and, yes, disappointments. But we learned to deal with them.

Are you one of these? If so, congratulations."

Update: If you are wondering what a "children’s car seat nazi" is, here's an example. I was watching a friend's child and she did not leave their car seat with me. I told her the only place I was going was to the hospital if her child got hurt. Her reply was "Not without a car seat your not!"

I was struck by a quote from this story "Japan Delays Second Spy Satellite Launch To September 22" -

The satellites are set to be launched atop Japan's domestically developed H-2A rocket.

Japan has been trying to make a domestic launch vehicle for quite some time with limited success. After a couple of launch failures, they contracted with Lockheed Martin to help them with their engineering. The launch vehicle this work was contracted under was the J-2. I don't know how much of the engineering from the J-2 went into the H-2A, but I suspect some of it did.

I point this out because some people think engineering in the United States is dead, or that engineers in Japan are better than in the United States. This example goes to show that engineering in the United States is alive and well, and we still have some of the best engineers in the world.

As the United States economy continues to heat up, France's economy continues to flounder. French unemployment climbed to 41-Month Peak in July and the economy shrank 0.3 percent in the second quarter.

French unemployment rose to the highest in almost three and a half years in July, threatening a recovery in consumer spending after Europe's third-largest economy contracted in the second quarter.

The number of jobseekers climbed by 20,000 from June to 2.62 million, the highest since February 2000, the Paris-based Labor Ministry said. The jobless rate rose to 9.6 percent from 9.5 percent last month.

"The economic situation is mediocre and the jobless rate will peak at 9.9 percent or 10 percent at the end of the year,'' said Philippe Brossard, head of research at Euler Hermes SA, the world's biggest credit insurer, in an interview earlier today. "Bankruptcies, which rose 8 percent in the first half, will continue to climb in the second half and so will unemployment.''

France's economy, Europe's third biggest, shrank 0.3 percent in the second quarter, more than in Germany and Italy, as household spending declined for the first quarter since the end of 1996. Companies including Alstom SA and Schneider Electric SA are in the process of cutting jobs, and manufacturers in July said hiring intentions are at nine-year low.

........

"Rising unemployment and falling spending could send the economy in a vicious circle,'' said Christian de Boissieu, head of the prime minister's Council of Economic Analysis, in an interview Thursday.

Economists polled by Bloomberg News had expected an increase of 14,300 jobseekers in July, according to their median forecast.

French unemployment started rising in July 2001, and 322,000 workers have joined the jobless ranks since then. Consumer confidence is near a six-and-a-half-year low. The French economy will grow as little as 0.3 percent this year, the weakest pace since the 1993 recession, according to Olivier Gasnier, an economist with Societe Generale SA.

Socialist systems are not conducive to robust economies, and the French economy is finally showing the effects of its socialist policies. Socialism creates to many barriers to productivity in the form of regulations, high taxes and excessive social spending to ever be viable in the long term. Unless France enacts some sensible market based reforms, the French economy will continue to languish. If government control of the economy was the path to prosperity, the Soviet Union would have been the most prosperous nation in the world.

A reader wrote –

I discovered your blog today, and was intrigued by your comment about needing better rocket engines in order to build cheap launch vehicles. What you wrote about the high cost of an engine failure, causing loss of vehicle, payload, and crew, reminds me very strongly of Maxwell Hunter's plea for continuous intact abort capability.

What characteristics would an engine have to have in order to get launch costs down dramatically? I have a vague idea that there are tradeoffs between engine weight and the risks of various kinds of engine failures, and that these tradeoffs are different for the first and second stages but that's about as far as my understanding of engine design goes. Max Faget talked about the Shuttle having "race car engines" when it needed "truck engines."

That is a great question, and I will try to answer it to the best of my ability (for my previous comment on the subject of launch costs see here).

The reason all current launch vehicles use chemical rocket engines is because they are the only type of engine that works in both the atmosphere and in vacuum (i.e. space) and because they have a very high thrust to weight ratio. Chemical rocket engines are most efficient when they have high combustion temperatures and pressures, which is why the space shuttle engines could accurately be described as “race car engines.” The theory behind a chemical rocket engine is pretty straightforward. Mix an oxidizer and a fuel in a combustion chamber and eject the exhaust thru a convergent-divergent nozzle. The practice on the other hand is not so easy (which is why it is called rocket science).

The best fuel-oxidizer combination for a chemical rocket engine is liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. This is what the space shuttle uses, and the shuttles engines are the most efficient engines in use today. However liquid hydrogen (LH2) and liquid oxygen (LO2) are both extremely cold: -423 °F for LH2 and –297 °F for LO2 both at 1 atm. These cold temperatures create many problems with vehicle design: having to use materials that do not get brittle, designing for the shrinkage of components caused by thermal contraction and having to vent the gases as they boil. Plus LH2 and LO2 are each in their own way extremely dangerous. A rocket launch has been described as a “controlled explosion.” If the explosion is not controlled in the combustion chamber, catastrophic failure will destroy the vehicle.

Another fuel-oxidizer combination that is used today is nitrogen tetroxide-hydrazine. This is what the Titan IV and the Proton use. Nitrogen tetroxide-hydrazine is not as efficient as hydrogen-oxygen, but they have both have the advantage of being liquid at room temperature. The disadvantage is that they are both toxic to humans in EXTREEMLY small quantities.

The only other type of fuel-oxidizer combination currently being used is liquid oxygen-RP-1. This is what the Atlas V vehicle uses. RP-1 is essentially rocket grade kerosene, and it is relatively benign and liquid at room temperatures.

Other fuels and oxidizers have been tried, but they all have problems of their own. Liquid Ozone (LO3) will decompose into LO2 when a shock is applied resulting in a large, dangerous release of energy. Liquid Fluorine has a bad habit of burning thru piping systems unexpectedly.

The bottom line is that we do not have any fuel-oxidizer combinations that are both benign and liquid at room temperature. The problems with all these fuels could be overcome with more robust vehicle designs if not for one problem. To make it into orbit around 90% of the entire weight of the vehicle has to be fuel. For reference, the Atlas V 401 weighs a maximum of 745,850 lbs at liftoff. The vehicle weighs 62,850 lbs and the fuel weighs 672,000 lbs. All this mass of fuel and vehicle will only get 11,000 lbs into low earth orbit. Any increase in the vehicle mass will reduce the already small payload the vehicle can carry, which means exotic materials and one of a kind components have to be used with very small factors of safety. These components have to be extensively tested because of their low margins, resulting in a very high cost per part.

If we could find a fuel-oxidizer combination that was more efficient than hydrogen-oxygen, or just as efficient but benign, launch costs could be reduced dramatically. I am no chemistry expert, but to the best of my knowledge no such combination exists.

In my opinion, the only way launch vehicle costs will be reduced significantly in the near term is if a two staged fully recoverable vehicle is used. The first stage could use a benign combination of fuels by using a combined cycle engine, and the second stage could be made robust enough to overcome the dangers associated with having to use the more hazardous fuels. Of course, launch costs could also be reduced by eliminating launch vehicles altogether and using a space elevator or by leaving the engine on the ground or perhaps by some other method I am not aware of.

A lot of people smarter than I am have studied this issue for years. You can find a lot of great articles on the Internet with more detailed explanations than I have given here if you spend a little time googling.

I had to laugh when I saw this article.

Several years into the phenomenon, even with solid tools like Blogger available, the blogging community is still, for the most part, self-absorbed and elitist. There's only minimal evidence that anyone is using the blog format as a business tool. And, other than Drudge and Pud, can you think of anyone making a living off of blogging? Even the often interesting and provocative postings from top-tier bloggers like Dan Gillmor, Dave Winer, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger are endlessly self-referential. They're all quoting one another, sending readers in a circle. It's like a revolving door with no escape. And so much of the talk is inside baseball: "RSS," "Daypop," "Technorati," "Blogdex," and "Link Cosmos" mean nothing to those not steeped in blog culture. The medium itself is still the main topic of conversation. Boring. No wonder so few people read blogs.

You don't have to believe me on this. Finally, some data asserts that blogs are hardly a popular pursuit. If anything, blogging is more marginal than its critics contend. Forrester Research (FORR) conducted an online survey of 3,673 people and found that 79 percent of its respondents had never heard of blogs, 98 percent had never read one, and 98 percent said they'd never pay to read or write one. Blogs can be wonderful things, but if a mere 2 percent of Internet users read blogs, the pastime is far from mainstream. The Forrester survey notes that the typical blog reader has been using the Web for an average of six years. For the most part, blogs feature the Net elite writing to the Net elite. This continues to be the case only as long as the elite are underemployed.

Are you out of the mainstream, or are you part of the elite?

Update: This is the same type of argument the detractors of talk radio made when it started to become popular. Blogging is still in its infancy, and who knows how much influence it will eventually have.

Mars is closer to the Earth than it has been for 59,619 years. Check out the pictures the hubble took of Mars here.

There are just so many problems with this story.

The French government, struggling with the aftermath of a deadly heatwave this month that killed up to 13,600 mainly elderly people, yesterday suggested cancelling a public holiday to fund better care for the aged. The secretary of state for the elderly, Hubert Falco, said the idea was one of the possibilities being explored "to try to establish genuine solidarity in the nation. It would be a holiday on which people would work in the cause of national solidarity."

National solidarity. A very collectivist notion. Smacks of the Soviet Union if you ask me.

Mr Falco said the additional social security payments and taxes that the government would receive from an extra day's work could be used to set up and finance a special fund for the aged, as has been done in Germany. In a snap poll, 81% of respondents said yesterday that they approved of the plan.

A typical liberal solution to a problem. Throw more money at it. And how exactly would a special fund for the aged have saved lives in this instance? France has a socialized health care system that does not allow you to buy more or better health care if they spend more money. Are they implying that the elderly should bypass the socialized health care system and get better care somewhere else?

The centre-right administration of prime minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin has come under heavy public criticism for its handling of the two-week heatwave, with polls showing more than half the population feel it failed to respond adequately.

Only in Europe could the government of France be described as "center-right." In the United states, we would call a government like this far left. And more than half the population feels the government was somehow responsible for the deaths (see my previous post on this subject here).

Controversially, President Jacques Chirac has refused to reprimand his government and instead promised to avert similar catastrophes in the future by patching up the most obvious failings in the national health system and boosting the emergency services' funding.

But Mr Chirac also said the tragic consequences of the freak weather showed French society had to become more "responsive and attentive" to the vulnerability of the aged and unwell - a notion which could well explain the unusual proposal to scrap one of France's 13 public holidays.

How about just asking people to look after their neighbors if this happens again? What happened to National solidarity? Predictably the liberals in France want to throw more money at the problem, but the government can not do it all no matter how much money they spend.

There remains the thorny question of which holiday to cancel. The most likely appears to be May 8, which marks the end of the second world war in Europe. Picking Armistice Day, November 11, would be too sensitive a choice in a country which lost 1.4 million men in the first world war; May Day would be politically unacceptable on the left; and the religious feast days are out of the question.

If there is one holiday the French will never cancel it is the communist holiday of May Day.

The suggestion was greeted with enthusiasm by the employers' federation, whose chairman, Ernest-Antoine Seillìre, said it was "a great novelty in France to believe that problems can be solved by working harder".

Yes, it would be a novelty if the French worked harder.

But the head of the powerful Force Ouvrière union, Marc Blondel, said the idea smacked of the Soviet Union and was a "wholly unmodern" approach to the problem.

Just as I said at the beginning.

It is amazing that the only voice of reason in this article comes from a union leader. I guess in France unions are to the right of the government, which lets you know just how far left the government is.

This post by John Hinderaker over at Powerline made me realize that the programs I am associated with are not that well known to the general public. The program John talks about in his post is called the High Altitude Airship (HAA) (another link with picture).

Lockheed Martin Naval Electronics & Surveillance Systems-Akron, a unit of Lockheed Martin, with its partners —Stratcom International and others—have developed an unmanned lighter-than-air vehicle that would operate above the jet stream and above severe weather in a geostationary position to serve as a telecommunications relay, a weather observer, or a peacekeeper from its over-the-horizon perch.

According to the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), 11 high-altitude airships would provide overlapping radar coverage of all maritime and southern border approaches to the continental U.S., and may be a significant asset in homeland defense efforts. The Stratospheric Platform System (SPS) dirigible operates just barely within the outer limits of the earth's atmosphere and is emerging as part of the military's 21st century transformational mindset.

SPS is an unmanned, powered airship that can maintain a relatively geostationary position at 70,000 feet. Lift is provided by helium that is contained in its envelope. Differential thrust, electric-powered props control the pitch and roll and keep it in position. With the advent of thin-film photovoltaic solar cells (capable of producing voltage when exposed to radiant light), commercially available fuel cells, and lightweight/high-strength fabrics, a high-altitude airship could stay on station weeks or even months at a time by generating its own power and keeping helium loss to a minimal amount.

One of the engineers in my group is working on closed cycle fuel cells to power these HAA's, so I have known about them for quite some time. I did a little work on recovering the water from the fuel cell reaction so it could be recycled. The fuel cells would generate power at night and then the water would be seperated back into oxygen and hydrogen during the day when the solar cells were generating power.

It is programs like this that prove the United States is still the leader in new technologies.

For those who do not live in Colorado, Mike Rosen is a local conservative talk show host and columnist for the Rocky Mountain News. A couple of years ago Mike wrote a column titled SEPARATING LIBERALS FROM CONSERVATIVES. The whole column is worth reading, but some of the things Mike feels separates liberals from conservatives are -

* Conservatives believe in individual freedom and responsibility. Liberals believe in sacrificing individual freedom for socially desirable outcomes. Liberals believe that one of government's primary roles is social engineering.

* Conservatives believe in limited government. Liberals believe in intrusive government when required to achieve societal needs. (Exception: social-issues conservatives advocate government intrusion on matters of abortion, drugs and pornography.)

* Conservatives believe in free markets. Liberals believe in government controls and central planning.

* Conservatives believe that some problems have no solution, that they can only be mitigated at best. Liberals believe that most every problem has a government solution.

* Conservatives are concerned about the production of wealth. Liberals are concerned about the redistribution of it.

* Conservatives believe in equality of opportunity. Liberals believe in equality of outcome.

* Conservatives believe that human nature is what makes us imperfectible. Liberals believe that human nature can be changed and perfected.

* Conservatives are nationalists. Liberals hope for world government.

* Conservatives believe in peace through strength. Liberals believe in peace through cooperation and good will.

In this post Joe Katzman over at Winds of Change writes –

This coming decade has the potential to be the most exciting time in the history of human space travel since the 1970s - maybe ever. All the pieces are there. Will we grasp that opportunity? What will it take?

While I agree with most of what Joe says in the article, I have to strongly disagree with his assertion that “All the pieces are there.” The biggest piece missing is an engine capable of making launch costs affordable. Joe links to an article where the assertion is made that “No new breakthroughs are needed in the basic technology of propulsion,” but nowhere else is the topic of engines discussed. The sad fact is that no engine available today has the capability to significantly reduce current launch costs to affordable levels.

I work in a propulsion laboratory at an aerospace company, and I have either directly worked on or been associated with a number of different engine designs. Designing, building and testing rocket engines is by definition rocket science and it is not easy. Or cheap. The amount of work that goes into qualifying a component for a launch vehicle is enormous and even more so and if the component is going to be used on a man-rated vehicle. There are many reasons for this, but the main one is that you do not want to risk losing a $1 billion satellite plus a $350 million launch vehicle, or a spacecraft or two, or even a single astronaut because you were trying to save a few bucks.

There are currently a lot of novel ideas for either new engines, new vehicle designs or for bypassing engines altogether. One of these ideas might eventually work to reduce the cost of space access but unfortunately, most of them are still in the concept phase, which means they still have to be designed, built and tested. The time and money required to do this is not trivial, and the odds of a company (or an individual) accomplishing this without government support are negligible.

One day somebody like Burt Rutan is going to design a craft to win the X Prize, but a suborbital flight of 62 miles is still at least 38 miles inside the Earth’s atmosphere. Plus Rutan’s vehicle has no payload capacity and only caries a crew of three. Scaling Rutans vehicle up so it had the payload capacity to carry satellites that weighed thousands of pounds would be problematic at best. However, it could be used for “space tourism” which, in my opinion, is the only way to generate a profit from space travel at this time (and the profits could be potentially enormous).

Now don’t get me wrong. I would love to see a cheap, reliable way to get into space. I have been fascinated with space travel ever since I watched the first Lunar landing on a TV set in my kindergarten class back in 1969, and I have always wanted to go into space myself. I love the idea of the X prize because, as Joe pointed out, our current Aerospace infrastructure is not doing a very good job advancing the technologies needed for cheap, reliable launch vehicles. I have no doubt that one day some individual or company will build such a vehicle, but I’m afraid it won’t happen soon. The technology is not mature enough, and the costs associated with designing and testing the technologies needed are currently to high for anybody but the government to afford.

    |     Permalink     |     Posted by Rocket Man @ 8/26/2003 01:46:00 AM

My Blog has moved to www.RocketManBlog.com. Please visit me at my new site.

The pentagon is offering a $1 million prize to any team who can design and build a robot vehicle that can complete a race from Barstow to Las Vegas, a distance of between 200 and 250 miles, in 10 hours or less.

The Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, an arm of the Department of Defense, created the race it calls the Grand Challenge.

It is offering the $1 million in a push to develop technology for unmanned battlefield vehicles. It provides no funding for the participants, but the winner might also receive a contract to do further research or production, said Air Force Col. Jose Negron, who leads the DARPA project.

There are 49 entries so far for the March 13, 2004, race of 200 to 250 miles from Barstow to Las Vegas. The eventual number is expected to drop to about 20 after an October deadline to submit technical papers.

Teams won't know the exact route until two hours before race time. Then they must program the chosen path, over unpaved roads, snow-covered rocky surfaces and desert canyons, into on-board computers, push a button and let the unmanned machine make its way through an area with mountains that rise up to 8,000 feet.

A couple of years ago my company built and tested an autonomous humvee. The test was conducted in hilly, shrubby terrain with a few trees. It was a cool test to watch. There was a helicopter flying around, a tank and some other humvees in the area that the vehicle was supposed to identify and track. I don't know if the vehicle met its performance objectives or not, but I suspect it didn't because the program was canceled soon afterward. As an observer, I was not impressed with the performance of the vehicle. It moved extremely slow and had many problems navigating the rough terrain.

I don't know the exact amount of money spent developing the autonomous vehicle, but I bet it was well over a million dollars. This technology does not seem to be ready for practical use yet, and I seriously doubt any of the competitors will complete the race, although I would be happy to be proved wrong.

I have spent a lot of time thinking about what separates the “left” from the “right” in the world and I have posted some of my thoughts here, here and here. Left and right are two terms that are frequently used to describe people’s political beliefs, but there is a lot of disagreement over what they actually mean. There is a similar problem with the words Conservative, Libertarian, Liberal and almost any other word used to describe a group’s political philosophy.

The tag line I use on my site is “Politics is not Rocket Science, but all the Rocket Scientists I know are Conservatives.” I use this line because it is catchy, and all the people I know who work in Aerospace are right of center politically. Plus saying “Politics is not Rocket Science, but all the Rocket Scientists I know are right of center politically” would not sound as good. The fact that I have to explain what that simple sentence means goes to show just how difficult it is to define a person’s or group’s entire political philosophy with just one word.

I have previously described myself as a fiscal conservative and a social libertarian. By fiscal conservative I mean free markets, smaller less obtrusive government, lower taxes and less regulation. By social libertarian I mean I am in favor of letting people do whatever they want to as long as it does not harm somebody else. These things are generally considered conservative, but I am not an absolutist. A free market does not mean we should share all our technology with everybody in the world, lower taxes does not mean that there should be no safety net for those who desperately need it, less regulation does not mean that companies should be free to pollute the environment, and so on. Some of my libertarian views would also not be classified as traditionally conservative. I think drugs should be legalized and I have no problem with gays marrying (but they should not get any benefits from the government for doing so).

As you can see, defining somebody’s views with a one-dimensional left-right label is constructive to determine generally what they believe on the issues, but does not work as well to tell you what they believe on any single issue. However, Bill Whittle over at Eject! Eject! Eject! has proposed that there is indeed a single indicator that separates people into two distinct political philosophies. RESPONSIBILITY.

The article is long, but it is a must read. I have included some excerpts below that I think highlight the main points if you do not have the time to read it all.

I contend that there is a single litmus that does indeed separate the nation and the world into two opposing camps, and that when you examine where people will fall on the countless issues that affect our society, this alone is the indicator that will tell you how they will respond.

The indicator is Responsibility.

Political Correctness, Deconstructionism, Trans-National Progressivism, Liability mania, Crime and Punishment, Terrorism, Welfare, Gun Control, Media Bias, Affirmative Action, Abortion, Education Reform, Social Engineering – all of it – will divide people according to their idea of Responsibility.

I suspect that there are really only two schools of political thought, and these are based on competing theories of how the human creature is constructed.

Again, a caveat about the ever-changing quicksand about labels. But with that said, it appears that people we generally group as ‘the left’ are convinced that society is responsible for pretty much everything that happens in our lives, that group responsibility trumps individual responsibility because they see the forces of the group – culture, history, economic background – as overwhelming determinants to individual outcome.

……

The idea of individualism, of personal responsibility, is the centerpiece, the granite foundation, of the very idea of a free people. For that reason, it is under direct attack on many fronts from people, who, through motives well-intentioned or ill, find such an idea intolerable because a nation of individuals is immune to repression, coercion, social engineering and control by the elite.

……

A society, like any other complex mechanism, will seek, and eventually find, equilibrium. If you create a society with unparalleled human freedoms, you must build into it a corresponding counterweight, and that counterweight is the idea of individual responsibility for your actions. That’s why you can do no better, as a blueprint for a happy society, than the folksy sentence, Your freedom to swing your arm ends at my nose.

……

And so we have group identity advocates. Because if you can convince someone that they are not responsible for their failures and shortcomings, and that someone else is – not a hard sell if you think about it – then they will be willing to subsume their responsibility into that of the group – and with their responsibility goes their political power. Then all the responsibility of the group – and all their power – is concentrated in the hands of the very few who have led them to this position.

People like Jesse Jackson. Or Pat Robertson. Take your pick.

Who controls a nation of free individuals? No one. That is deeply unsettling to people who crave political control the way a heroin addict needs his fix. What would Bill Clinton have been without politics? A wildly successful, Little Rock car dealer – that’s what I think. And his wife? What of her? Who would have heard of this obscure partner in some backwater law firm? What power and prestige and ability to tell others what to do would she have wielded? And it’s not just Democrats – Nixon was cut from this cloth. Truman – a Democrat – clearly was not.

What do you think drives such people? Power. Control.

How do you convince free people to surrender their power? Well, one way is to go in and take it by gunpoint. Sadly for them, Lincoln’s – and our, hardy, brave, and patriotic, but now lamented and departed race of ancestors, foresaw this probability and put the gunpoint in the hands of the people. They assumed that if our system was worth having, if their theory of people was correct, then they could be trusted with such absolute power because they were willing to accept responsibility for it – as by and large, we have been.

So, taking our power was out of the question. Our power, and its concomitant responsibility, had been granted to us by the Founders. They’d have to talk us out of it. They’d have to con us out of it.

No one wants to give up power. But lots of folks cheerfully want to abandon responsibility. The two are flips sides of the same coin. Get people to abandon responsibility, and their power and freedom goes with it. That’s the way in.

……

Keep this in mind, my friends: when someone tells you It Takes a Village, remember that the corollary to that philosophy is It Also Takes A Village Leader.

……

Give your responsibility to the group, and you give your freedom to the group. Freedom without responsibility becomes – very rapidly – a farce. When laws become farcical, the result is anarchy. Anarchy is unacceptable – so measures are taken to reduce freedom and increase controls on the population.

……

To be Politically Correct these days, you must accept the collectivist belief that words are like weapons, endowed with their own internal, innate power, and this power, like that of a chambered bullet, cannot be trusted to be used responsibly and so must be outlawed and banished from the community.

……

Implicit in this belief is that I have the power to harm you by my use of language. Notice that all the responsibility falls on the speaker; the listener, the subject, is completely powerless, and has achieved the highest status with the group: victim. Note also that this worshipping of the victim, is in essence, the elevation of the most powerless and the least responsible to divine status. It is a very basic sleight of hand, that allows the controlling elites to maintain that they are only trying to help the poor and downtrodden, when in reality their actions are clearly nothing more than a naked grab for power that would shame the most ruthless corporate CEO.

……

that is precisely where the Politically Correct movement wants to take us, to a world where language and thought is rigidly controlled – by them.

……

This idea of individual responsibility is a new one. It works. It needs to be defended. If only a small portion of the mass of humanity can see clearly that this is the key to escape the bondage of history, class, race, sex and economic status, then that is simply a message we need to preach to anyone who will listen.

As you can see fron the size of this excerpt is is a long article, but well worth your time to read.

I always have a hard time reading one of Krugman's pieces. He frequently makes assertions he does not back up, and quite frequently cannot be backed up. There are so many good, knowledgeable writers on economics in the world that it makes the New York Times look bad (as if they need any help from Krugman) when they publish his puff pieces.

Krugmans latest offering "Conan the Deceiver", is just another in a long line of his poorly written articles.

Hindrocket over at Powerline only has to spend a couple of minutes finding the egrigous fault in the piece.

This bit of coyness is particularly striking: "with the recent plunge in revenue they're [California taxes] now probably below average." Consider that modest turn of phrase: "they're now probably below average." What, exactly, is Krugman suggesting? That data on state and local tax burdens hasn't become available since the mid-1990's? Or is he telling us that even though he is a highly paid, full-time columnist for the New York Times, it's just too much trouble for him to look up the current data, and he prefers to speculate that California taxes are "probably below average"?

Krugman is revealing something, I guess, about his own indolence, since it takes less than one minute to locate 2003 data on tax burden by state. And it turns out--surprise, surprise--that California, far from being "probably below average," actually has the 8th highest tax burden of the 50 states, at 10.6%.

Hmmm. Maybe Krugman should stop calling other people liars until he gives up his nasty habit of tossing out factual assertions that are the exact opposite of the easily-verified truth.

To steal a phrase from Glenn Reynolds - Indeed.

Update: Donald Luskin, who is is chief investment officer of Trend Macrolytics LLC, highlights more of Krugmans errors.

I got to watch a video of of the Tactical High Energy Laser (THEL) testing.

The missile was approaching fast and gathering speed on a column of flame. Inside a trailer, miles away, it appeared on the radar screen of a soldier on-watch. From its radar signature, he realized it was a Katyusha, a ten-foot long missile launched from a truck and capable of delivering a powerful explosive charge or chemical weapon. Acting quickly, he commanded a device resembling a large spotlight mounted on the roof of the trailer to whir into motion. After panning for a few moments, the device locked onto the distant rocket arching overhead. It shot an invisible high-energy laser beam into the side of the Katyusha, following the target even as it continued to fly at several times the speed of sound. Seconds later, the missile exploded into a ball of flame, disintegrating into shards which rained harmlessly onto the desert below.

Is this a scene taken from a science fiction story? Not at all. Instead, it's a description of an actual test which took place over three years ago of the Tactical High Energy Laser (THEL), developed by the U.S. Army in a joint project with the Government of Israel. Laser weapons are not just the stuff of Buck Rogers any more, and the THEL program is just a small component of a multi-billion dollar effort by the U.S. military to introduce laser weapons to the battlefield. Within ten years, the U.S. military plans to mount powerful laser weapons on tanks, Humvees, fighter jets, and other aircraft. Research is even underway to develop a Humvee-mounted non-lethal microwave energy weapon capable of incapacitating people by causing severe pain. If these efforts are successful, energy weapons will revolutionize warfare in the 21st century.

This is not just the stuff of science fiction anymore. The system works, and it works well. The THEL system is quite large (it took 3 trailers for the whole system if I remember correctly) but my group, among others, has been working on improvements to the THEL that would make it portable. As long as we have weapon systems like this supporting our brave men and women in uniform, the United States will continue to have the best military in the world.

I once read a quote attributed to an ancient Greek philosopher lamenting how the youth of his time were irresponsible, and that Greek society would not survive when they were in charge. Whether the quote is true or not, it is a very old complaint. The same thing was said when I was a youth, and it is being said about the youth today. People are irresponsible in their youth and become more responsible as they get older. It was that way 2000 years ago, and it is the same way today . I sometimes wonder how our society will be different when the youths of today, who were raised on a steady diet of political correctness, sensitivity, collectivism and an endless list of leftist philosophies, grow older.

Well, things do not look as bad as they could. I was heartened to read this article from The American Conservative describing how today’s youths seem to be rejecting leftism and moving towards conservatism.

If you ask the average American Conservative subscriber about the kids today, he will probably put down his cigar and complain, “They’re a bunch of knee-jerk liberals still brainwashed by the communist propaganda that worked so well on their parents. They’re against invading Iraq because ‘all war is bad.’ They’re against Israel because when it comes to light skin versus dark skin, the latter is always right, and they’re pro-immigration for exactly the same reasons.” I’d like to argue, but he’s right.

I should know. I run a $10 million corporation called VICE that has been deep inside the heads of 18-30s for the past 10 years. According to the Cassandra Report (a trend-spotting “cool hunter” that charges corporations tens of thousands of dollars to tell them what’s hip), our magazine is the number one read for women aged 19-24 and for men aged 25-30. That’s better than Maxim, Jane, or even the New Yorker. Since the Cassandra Report was made public, our magazine has branched out into retail (stores in Toronto, Los Angeles, and New York), film (four in production including director Spike Jonze’s next picture), and TV (on Showtime). We are a successful company that has made its money recognizing cool, and the one thing that has been painfully clear to us over the years is that it is not cool to be conservative. In fact, the majority of our readership (white, straight, middle-class, American) is only totally positive about one thing: being white, straight, middle-class, and American is wack—or, at least, it was wack.

Call me a blind optimist, but I see a light at the end of the anti-American tunnel, a new trend of young people tired of being lied to for the sake of the “greater good.” The New York Times dubbed them “Hipublicans.” Demographics expert Michael Adams labels them “Social Hedonists,” and when our magazine did a feature on them we called them “The New Conservatives.” We did the piece because it became impossible to ignore a difference in the reactions to some of our more right-wing reporting. A new group was emerging, and the vitriolic “You dudes are all Nazis” letters were being replaced by ones saying “You dudes are finally telling the truth.”

Perhaps there is hope for the future of our society after all.

Swen over at A Coyote at the Dog Show has an interesting series of posts on ballistics that I was able to contribute some thoughts to. Swen's readers are very knowledgeable about firearms and provide great insights into the subject. If you find the discussion of firearms interesting, I would highly recommend you visit Swen's site.

If you read blogs regularly (and you wouldn't be at an obscure site like mine if you didn't) then you will thoroughly enjoy The Lifecycle of a News Story from The Lemon.

This summer in Europe was hotter than normal, with temperatures in France often exceeding 104 °F (40 °C). Now I know this does not sound that hot to Americans (and probably Australians as well), but in France air-conditioners are not as common as they are in the US, so temperatures this high can be a health risk to the elderly. Up to an estimated 10,000 people have died due to this heat wave. Tragedies like this happen from time to time, but what amazed me about this article, Chirac squirms over heat 'massacre' was the assumption that these deaths were somehow the governments fault.

President Jacques Chirac vowed to fix shortcomings in France's health system Thursday as he battled mounting public anger over his absence and government inaction during a record-breaking heatwave earlier this month that may have killed up to 10,000 people.

Since most heat related deaths are due to dehydration, what was the government supposed to do, force people to drink more water? What rational person would expect the government to protect them from the weather? A person who has been raised in a socialist state, that's who.

People in socialist societies are conditioned to believe the government will take care of their health care, their jobs, their pensions, their utilities, etc. Just look at the chaos that ensued when France tried to enact modest pension reforms. And since France has socialized medicine, it is not a big leap for their citizens to view deaths related to the weather as being the fault of the government.

Update: Lemondust comments, although he is arguing with a straw man. Notice the word "only" never appears in the post.

Update 2: Lemondust has abandoned his straw man/ad hominem attack and has moved to an unfounded assertion/ad hominem attack. For my rebuttal, see here.

This is typical of how the educational establishment wastes money while at the same time complaining they are underfunded.

DiAnne Cagle Leitermann represented the Oakland Schools in typical style when she attended a wintertime seminar in San Diego.

She took her husband.

She stayed five nights in a five-star Marriott -- for a 3-day conference.

And she signed up for two short workshops: Stress Management and Internet Made Easy.

The cost to taxpayers?

$3,295.

For the Oakland Intermediate School District, the 2001 trip by the board member was nothing unusual. A Free Press review of expense records found a freewheeling environment with few controls over spending on travel, meals and gifts in a district that serves special education and vocational students.

While school officials spent freely, some special-needs students were put on waiting lists for services.

.....

Some school board members and employees bought sweaters, handheld organizers, pillows, wallets, beach chairs, candy, silk flowers, plants, potpourri, candles, a vacuum, crystal, jewelry and movie videos, often listing the purchases as training or school improvement supplies.

Records obtained by the Free Press show district officials also traveled widely in the last five years -- to Germany, France, Poland, India, Slovakia and the Czech Republic, always saying they were on official business. They attended conferences in San Francisco, Las Vegas, Florida, New Orleans, Arizona and Atlanta. They took sight-seeing tours and played golf on the public dime.

If I did this at my job, I would be fired. But I seriously doubt if any of these people will be. The educrats and the teachers unions will circle the wagons, and protect the liars and thieves who are stealing from the poor and giving to themselves, the rich (one of the women mentioned in this article makes $119,000-a-year!).

This type of mismanagement is endemic in large beaucratic institutions. It is high time we broke up the public school monopoly and switched to a voucher system for delivering public education.

Brazil Space Rocket Explodes, Kills 19

An explosion on Friday destroyed a Brazilian rocket due for blast off in coming days and killed 19 people at its jungle launch site, ending Brazil's third attempt to fulfill a long-held dream of becoming a space power.

.....

There was no immediate explanation for the cause of the blast at the base where roughly 800 people were preparing the $6.5 million, 65-foot rocket for its scheduled launch next week.

.....

Brazil had been hoping to make the first successful venture into space by a Latin American nation. Rockets launched by Brazil in 1997 and 1999 were destroyed shortly after lift-off because of technical problems.

My condolences go out to the families of those lost in the explosion.

Although the theory behind rockets is easy (mix a fuel and an oxidizer together in a combustion chamber and let the exhaust flow out of the combustion chamber thru a converging-diverging nozzle), the application of the theory is extremely difficult.

This tragic accident is just another reminder that launching rockets into space is not easy.

I don't have much time to post today, so I will leave you with things to say during a colonoscopy -

Take it easy, Doc -- you're boldly going where no man has gone before.

Could you write me a note for my wife, saying that my head is not, in fact, up there?

You know, in some states, we're now legally married.

Hey! Now I know how a Muppet feels!

And my personal favorite -

Hey, Doc, let me know if you find my dignity.

In these two posts I discussed the limitations in labeling political philosophies on a one-dimensional left-right scale. Today, I ran across a site that called The Political Compass that ranks political philosophies on a two-dimensional scale from left-right and from authoritarian-libertarian.

The site will rank you in both categories based on your responses to a series of questions. I was listed as a 6.12 on the right side of the left-right scale and a 3.08 on the libertarian side of the authoritarian-libertarian scale (both on a scale of -10 to +10). This fits well with the description of myself as a fiscal conservative and a social liberal. There are, however, some problems with the rankings in my opinion.

The people who designed the site rankings (a political journalist with a university counselling background and a professor of social history, both Brits) appear to be left of center politically, and the "center" (i.e. 0,0) of their rankings seem shifted to the left. This is entirely consistent with my observations of people on the left. Most people who are left of center politically seem to define the center of the left-right political spectrum as somewhere around where their own beliefs are (plus in Britain the center of the political spectrum is shifted to the left when compared to the US). A quick look at the rankings of some current political figures on their chart bears this out. Jacques Chirac, Gehard Schroder and Tony Blair are all ranked right of center, yet France, Germany and Britain are socialist leaning countries. On this chart, Hitler is also ranked right of center. They have obviously been asked a lot of questions about this, because they explain Hilters ranking in the FAQ.

Why is Hitler slightly right ? The Nazis were socialists, so they weren't fascists either.

Let's start with the second part first. Some respondents confuse Nazism, a political party platform, with fascism, which is a particular structure of government. Fascism legally sanctions the persecution of a particular group within the country - political, ethnic, religious - whatever. So within Nazism there are elements of fascism, as well as militarism, capitalism, socialism etc. To tar all socialists with the national socialist brush is as absurd as citing Bill Gates and Augusto Pinochet in the same breath as examples of free market capitalism.

Economically, Hitler was well to the right of Stalin. Post-war investigations led to a number of revelations about the cozy relationship between German corporations and the Reich. No such scandals subsequently surfaced in Russia, because Stalin had totally squashed the private sector. By contrast, once in power, the Nazis achieved rearmament through deficit spending. One of our respondents has correctly pointed out that they actively discouraged demand increases because they wanted infrastructure investment. Under the Reich, corporations were largely left to govern themselves, with the incentive that if they kept prices under control, they would be rewarded with government contracts. Hardly a socialist economic agenda !

We wonder if respondents who insist on uncritically accepting the Nazis' self-definition of 'socialist' would be quite as eager to believe that the German Democratic Republic was democratic.

Economically, Hitler was well to the right of Stalin, but that does not make him right of center (The US is south of Canada, but that does not place the US on the equator). And the fact that "Post-war investigations led to a number of revelations about the cozy relationship between German corporations and the Reich" also does not make Hitler right of center. The main customer of German businesses at the time was the government. Businesses had to cozy up the Reich, or they would no longer be in business. Hitler, through the government, indirectly controlled businesses, which puts him left of center politically.

With these points in mind go take the test for yourself and see where you rank politically.

Update: John Ray over at Dissecting Leftism has a couple of posts deconstructing The Political Compass.
POLITICS: ONE DIMENSION OR TWO?
AUTHORITARIANISM/LIBERTARIANISM AS THE SECOND DIMENSION OF SOCIAL ATTITUDES

California has finally ended its harebrained law requiring automakers to sell battery-powered cars.

But California regulators, repeating a sentiment often expressed by electric-vehicle loyalists, last week mourned the apparent demise of battery-powered models. "Virtually everyone who has ever driven one of those vehicles loves it," said a spokesman for the Air Resources Board. "They run great; they're quiet and reliable. Unfortunately, the auto companies don't want to make them anymore."

And unfortunately, most consumers do not want to buy them either. Even with the massive tax credits passed out to anyone who buys a battery-powered car, the price is still to high.

despite their quick acceleration and quiet ride, battery-powered vehicles lacked the range, quick recharge time and cost that the auto industry said it needed.

In other words, they were not convenient and they were too expensive. But it is the auto company's fault because they don't want to make them anymore, even though consumers avoided them like the plague.

Regulators and environmentalists, however, never fully accepted the automakers' contention that it couldn't be done. "Most of the automakers vehemently opposed the rules and tried various ways to avoid them, including legislative lobbying and outright lawsuits," said the Air Resources Board spokesman.

Yea, regulators and environmentalists know much more about making cars than us stupid engineers do.

When will liberal bureaucrats realize they cannot bring about outcomes they hope for just by passing laws?

The Chicago Sun Times has a nice review of How Ronald Reagan Changed My Life by Peter Robinson.

[I]t was Reagan who brought about the collapse of communism, even though the Bush administration handled that collapse with extraordinary diplomatic skill. Yet Reagan received little credit. Even as communist regimes were toppling like ninepins, his reputation was in decline. Academic historians gave him poor ratings in rather silly surveys of presidential greatness. And the liberal left repeated the dismissive formula of Washington insider Clark Clifford that Reagan was an ''amiable dunce'' who had simply been standing by when things went right.

In recent years, however, Reagan's reputation has risen again to reflect his undoubted achievements. Several biographies have contributed to this revival, even the much-criticized official biography, Dutch by Edmund Morris, by demonstrating that Reagan was a much more attentive and diligent chief executive than either the media or even self-described ''insiders'' realized at the time.

I am proud to say that the first president I ever got to vote for was Ronald Reagan.

Anthony over at A Coyote at the Dog Show comments on my post Liberals - You have to laugh at them.

Things that make me laugh
I get a chuckle out of Rocket Man's 'a liberal is. . .' and 'a conservative is . . .' post. However, I'd rewrite most of them to replace 'conservative' with 'libertarian', as here:

Rocket Man sez: A Liberal believes that the Government is the best solutions [sic] to most problems. A Conservative realizes that the Government is the cause of many problems.

I would suggest: Liberals believe that the Government is the best solution to most problems. Conservatives agree, they just don't agree on the problem. Libertarians realize that the Government is the cause of many problems and the solution to few of them.

After all, if conservatives didn't believe that the government was the solution to all our problems would we have the ghastly Department of Homeland Security or the Patriot Act? If these aren't Big Government programs then I don't know what a Big Government program is. In my not so humble opinion, modern liberalism and modern conservatism are just the Janus faces of the Big Government party.

My first reaction is that I thought I had spell checked that post! Damn Engineers spelling deficiency showing itself again.

But seriously, I have to agree that the Department of Homeland Security and (some if not most of) the Patriot Act (in addition to the Education Bill and the ill conceived Steel-Tariff's) are far from being conservative. In fact, most of George W. Bush's domestic policies have deeply disappointed me.

But would I remove most of my references to conservative and replace them with libertarian? I could, but using Anthony 's phrasing would not make fun of liberals in the same way, which was what I was trying to do.

The problem with trying to label things as left-right or liberal-conservative or conservative-libertarian is that people disagree on what the definitions of these labels are. Ironically, I wrote a short post yesterday on this very subject, but Steven Den Beste wrote a much more detailed post describing the very same thing (which also describes my views pretty well).

I would describe myself as a fiscal conservative and a social libertarian. I would describe George W Bush as a fiscal liberal and a social conservative (as well as a hawk). Classifying people's views on a one dimensional scale inevitable leads to confusion. I tend to use the term conservative as a synonym for right of center views (which encompasses both conservative and libertarian) not for Republican. George W Bush's liberal social policies (i.e. compassionate conservatism) does not change my definition of conservative.

Anthony's final point is that -

modern liberalism and modern conservatism are just the Janus faces of the Big Government party

There is a lot of truth to that statement if you replace liberalism and conservatism with Democrats and Republicans. In our two party system, neither party can venture to far from the political center and still win elections (there are of course exceptions). So unless you are close to the political center, the Republicans and the Democrats look a lot alike. Being right of center politically, I choose to associate myself with Republicans rather than Libertarians (although I am extreemly sympathetic to the Republican Liberty Caucus), because unfortunately, Libertarians can not win national elections. I hope to move the center of the political debate closer to my views, and I feel the best way to do this is by using one of the two national parties.

From Jane Galt at Asymmetrical Information -

Partisan silliness of the day

From Joe Conason:


If your workplace is safe; if your children go to school rather than being forced into labor; if you are paid a living wage, including overtime; if you enjoy a 40-hour week and you are allowed to join a union to protect your rights -- you can thank liberals. If your food is not poisoned and your water is drinkable -- you can thank liberals. If your parents are eligible for Medicare and Social Security, so they can grow old in dignity without bankrupting your family -- you can thank liberals. If our rivers are getting cleaner and our air isn't black with pollution; if our wilderness is protected and our countryside is still green -- you can thank liberals. If people of all races can share the same public facilities; if everyone has the right to vote; if couples fall in love and marry regardless of race; if we have finally begun to transcend a segregated society -- you can thank liberals. Progressive innovations like those and so many others were achieved by long, difficult struggles against entrenched power. What defined conservatism, and conservatives, was their opposition to every one of those advances. The country we know and love today was built by those victories for liberalism -- with the support of the American people.

The attitude of Joe Conason, like so many on the left, is that all good things must come from liberals. After all, the dictionary defines conservatives as being opposed to change, so any change must therefore have come from liberals.

The problem with this way of thinking is that the political spectrum is impossible to define as either "liberal-conservative" or "left-right." JFK was liberal on many social issues, yet he passed massive tax cuts. Johnson supported the war in Viet Nam, yet he proposed the "Great Society." Were Kennedy and Johnson liberals or conservatives? The answer is that, using today’s definitions, they were both.

And that is one of the underlying problems with trying to define things from the past as either liberal or conservative. The definitions have changed over time. Yesterdays Democrats held political positions that today’s Democrats are strongly opposed to. And today’s Republicans hold positions that are significantly different from the Republicans of 100 years ago.

Sometimes market research can make a difference. To see for yourself, check out these rejected crayon colors.

There are many ways of communicating. Talking, writing, pictures, gestures, etc. One method of communication I know very well is Engineering drawings. An Engineering drawing has to convey 100% of the information about something in order for it to be built. Anything less than 100% makes the drawing useless.

Other types of communication can be useful without 100% of the available information being presented. Writing is a form of communication that can be useful even if no information is presented (just read any Democratic press release, or perhaps this Blog). However, any competent writer should be able to write about something and present enough information to adequately inform the readers about the subject. Once in a while though, an article is written so badly it that leaves you wondering what in the hell the writer was thinking.

In today’s Rocky Mountain News was an article that made you think just that ('Blogs' right on money for site by Kirk Ladendorf). Ladendorf writes about Blogs, yet he only provides a single URL (Blogger.com) and only mentions two Blogs. EasyJournal and Howard Dean. How can an informative article about Blogs not mention Glenn Reynolds, or Steven Den Beste or if you are looking for a leftie, at least Joshua Micah Marshall?

This article just adds to the mountain of data showing print journalists do not get Blogs. And they never will.

In the run-up to the Iraq war, the leaders of France, Germany and Belgium calculated that there would be no price to pay for opposing the United States. These three (led by France) used every diplomatic tool at their disposal to prevent the removal of a brutal fascist dictator. After all, France was making money from Iraq thru the oil for food palaces program and even more money was to be made from sweetheart oil deals they would get if Sadam remained in power.

Well, it looks like they were wrong (Europe pines for big-spending US tourists). While some in Europe are still burying their heads in the sand as to the reason -

But no one has yet managed to lure back the high-rollers of the tourism industry - the Americans. Some have stayed away due to war and terrorism concerns; others have adopted an "America first" patriotic approach to vacationing; still others are deterred by the weak dollar, which makes foreign holidays more expensive.

The simultaneous collapse of American tourism to France and the drop in French wine sales in the US leaves little doubt that France is being punished by American consumers for its hostility to the US. And the best part of this is that the US government never even suggested Americans boycott France. This has been a classic demonstration of democracy in action, with people voting with their dollars.

I also find it interesting that Americans are always accused of caring only for "the almighty dollar," but it is the French who base their foreign policy on economic concerns, and it is the French who try to whitewash their feelings towards Americans just so American tourists will spend their money in France.

With Mars closer to the Earth than it's been in 60,000 years, Nasa has launched two new rovers to the red planet. But did you know that there are currently two spacecraft orbiting Mars that will be used as relays for these rovers? Mars Global Surveyor (which I worked on) and 2001 Mars Odyssey.

If you are the least bit interested in space exploration, there is some great info if you follow the links above.

Also, if you are interested, here are some pictures of a few things I worked on for Mars Global Surveyor.

I designed the stand the Spacecraft is sitting on

I designed the fixture used to assemble the nadir panel

I designed the fixture being used to lift the spacecraft

I designed the assembly platform the spacrcraft is sitting on

An excellent article in The Atlantic Monthly by David Brooks titled People Like Us discusses diversity in America. Brooks writes -

It is a common complaint that every place is starting to look the same. But in the information age, the late writer James Chapin once told me, every place becomes more like itself. People are less often tied down to factories and mills, and they can search for places to live on the basis of cultural affinity. Once they find a town in which people share their values, they flock there, and reinforce whatever was distinctive about the town in the first place. Once Boulder, Colorado, became known as congenial to politically progressive mountain bikers, half the politically progressive mountain bikers in the country (it seems) moved there; they made the place so culturally pure that it has become practically a parody of itself.

First of all, Boulder is not practically a parody of itself, it IS a parody of itself. I have a friend who drives over an hour to work each way, just so he can live in Boulder (he is, of course, a liberal). The reason he and everyone else can live where they choose is because we have much greater mobility than was available in the past. As our mobility has increased, so have our choices of places to live.

What I found interesting in the article is that even liberals who worship at the shrine of diversity do not practice what they preach.

In the Washington, D.C., area Democratic lawyers tend to live in suburban Maryland, and Republican lawyers tend to live in suburban Virginia. If you asked a Democratic lawyer to move from her $750,000 house in Bethesda, Maryland, to a $750,000 house in Great Falls, Virginia, she'd look at you as if you had just asked her to buy a pickup truck with a gun rack and to shove chewing tobacco in her kid's mouth.

As our mobility increases (will we ever get the flying cars we have been promised?), this type of cultural grouping will inevitably increase. Is this a good or a bad thing? I am sure to a liberal it is a bad thing. But if this is what people choose to do, I have no problem with it.

UPDTAE: Even some leftists realize the benefits of mobility. From We should learn to love our cars -

But in LA, the shops are built at the back of the site, and in front of each shop, a coupla parking spaces. It is designed for human beings to use, not to support some socialist orthodoxy which claims to care about humanity but makes no effort to understand the membership. And it means that Los Angeles is the city not only of the car but of the flourishing independent retailer. And the car is the essence of the independent human being, the individual human being.

I just deleted my god-only-knows-the-number spam email of the week. It amazes me how many people buy products from a company who starts out by deceiving them. Everybody has seen an email with the subject "Re: The weekly get together" or "You haven't called me in a while," that is masking an ad for penis pills or viagra. But believe it or not, people DO actually buy this stuff. According to Swollen Orders Show Spam's Allure -

An order log left exposed at one of Amazing Internet Products' websites revealed that, over a four-week period, some 6,000 people responded to e-mail ads and placed orders for the company's Pinacle herbal supplement. Most customers ordered two bottles of the pills at a price of $50 per bottle.

Do the math and you begin to understand why spammers are willing to put up with the wrath of spam recipients, Internet service providers and federal regulators.

I guess as long as there are idiots in the world, we will continue to have spam.

If you have a good sense of humor and are not easily offended, check out If Women Ruled the World.

Hat tip: Sgt. Stryker

When I saw this article, I had to laugh.

"Homosexuals excel as artists, thespians and other playful, mimetic professions. Being playful is at the heart of being human. It's something that should be celebrated. You could say that homosexuals are at the pinnacle of human evolution."

I don't agree that homosexuals are at the pinnacle of human evolution, but they are definitely the pinnacle of their own DNA's evolution. After all, (most) homosexuals are not going to pass their genes on to another generation, so their evolution stops with them.

NOTE: Please do not write and tell me I am a homophobe or that I hate gays. I couldn't care less what sexual orientation people are.

In the September 2003 issue of Scientific American, the editors recommend two books Y: The Descent of Men by Steve Jones and The X in Sex: How the X Chromosome Controls Our Lives by David Bainbridge.

The review describes the books as -

Jones and Bainbridge arrive in different ways at the same conclusion: women are the more resilient sex. Jones, professor of genetics at University College London, puts it bluntly: "[M]ales are wilting away.... From sperm count to social status, and from fertilization to death, as civilization advances those who bear Y chromosomes are in relative decline." Bainbridge, lecturer in comparative anatomy and physiology at the Royal Veterinary College in London, focuses more on the biology of sex differences. "Almost every woman is, inside and out, a patchwork of two different cells--some using one X chromosome, and some the other.... What more all-encompassing way could one want for women to be more complex than men?" Consequently, they are less vulnerable to such sex-linked diseases as hemophilia, muscular dystrophy and color blindness.

Anybody want to take a bet that the authors of these two books are Emasculated Liberals? Buying into liberal philosophy inevitably leads to men who are closer to feminism than to masculinity, so it is no wonder that these two reached the conclusions they did.

Warren Buffett, who is now the financial adviser to Arnold Schwarzenegger's campaign for California governor, suggested that California's property taxes need to be higher. Since, Mr. Buffett is a liberal, it comes as no surprise that his first inclination is to raise taxes. That is what liberals do after all.

California's property taxes are held low due to Proposition 13, a wildly popular citizens initiative passed in 1978 that set a properties assessment at 1% of the market value at the time of purchase and capped the increase on this assessment at 2% yearly. Less well known is that it also required that all state tax rate increases be approved by a two-thirds vote of the legislature and that local tax rates also have to be approved by a vote of the people (more info). For Mr. Buffett's suggestion to work, proposition 13 would have to be changed, which is not going to be very popular with the voters in California. A suggestion like this shows a serious lack of knowledge about the political situation in California, making one question why Buffett was hired by Schwarzenegger's campaign in the first place. Financial savvy does not necessarily translate into political savvy.

But, just for a moment, lets assume that a modification to Proposition 13 is possible. Buffett gives an example of two homes he owns. One in Omaha, Nebraska is valued at roughly $500,000 and has a $14,401/yr. tax bill. The other one in Laguna Beach, California is valued at $4 million and has a $2,264/yr. tax bill. Assuming a 6%/yr. interest rate for a loan and 0% down, the monthly loan payment for the house in Nebraska would be ~$2,998 and the monthly loan payment for the house in California would be ~$23,982. The monthly tax payment for the California house is only 0.7% of the loan payment, but the monthly tax payment for the Nebraska house is an astonishing 40% of the monthly payment! I do not know how Buffett's two houses compare (I do know that Laguna Beach is a much more desirable place to live than Omaha), but it is no surprise why the house in Omaha is only valued at $500,000 with this type of confiscatory tax rate.

If the tax rate in Nebraska were the same as in California, Buffett's $500,000 house would be worth ~$700,000. Or conversely, if the tax rate in California were the same as in Nebraska, Buffett's $4 million house would be worth about $2.4 million. A loss of almost 40%. This type of devaluation in the property values in California would have disastrous effects on the economy. Overnight, people would owe more on their home than it was worth. No one would be able to sell their home, and people would just walk away from their mortgages, making the savings and loan fiasco of the 90's look rosy by comparison. Now I don't think even a liberal would advocate changing California's property tax rate from 1% to 40% overnight, but even small increases in the tax rate will have a negative impact on already depressed property prices. You would think that a man as financially savvy as Buffett would realize this, but then he is no Rocket Scientist.

UPDATE:
Arnold nixes Buffett advice over Prop. 13

I found this article on How NOT to Use Light Armored Vehicles by William S. Lind interesting. Mr. Lind seems to have some impressive credentials, but the fact that he worked as a "defense staffer for Senator Gary Hart" in the 1970's kind of dampens his credentials in my mind.

Mr. Lind complains that the Army is sending Light Armored Vehicles (LAVs) into Iraq and that "The magnitude of the idiocy involved in using Light Armored Vehicles in urban fighting, where they are grapes for RPGs, is so vast that analogies are difficult." He goes on to praise the use of LAV's by the Marines in Iraq, noting that the Marines did not lose a single LAV and "that is a testament, not to the vehicles, but to how they were employed."

Why does Mr. Lind fear the Army will not use the LAV's as effectively as the Marines (full disclosure, my father is a retired Marine Corps Gunnery Sergeant who fought in WWII, Korea and Viet Nam)? After all, he states that the first Army LAV's are just now being sent into Iraq, so he has no data on jow they will be used. Iraq is a big country, and it is still a dangerous place for the limited number of troops we have in country. Having a rapid reaction force of LAVs to support ground operations seems like a good idea to me, as long as they are used properly. Plus, the LAV can carry troops, which will make it safer to move around in dangerous areas, much safer than using Humvees.

It will be interesting to see how the LAV’s work out, but I think Mr. Lind’s pessimism is a bit premature. His closing statement however is priceless -

"When I first came to Washington in 1973, I was quickly introduced to an old saying about the American armed forces: the Air Force is deceptive, the Navy is dishonest, and the Army is dumb. It seems some things never change."

Dennis Prager's What makes a liberal (Hat tip: Powerline) postulates that the two greatest reasons smart people can hold liberal positions are naivet and narcissism. I would add an excess of emotion to that list, but as Prager said, there are many reasons, probably as many reasons are there are liberals themselves.

I do have one disagreement with Prager. He states -

"At the heart of liberalism is the naive belief that people are basically good."

And later he contradicts himself -

""Good and evil" are not liberal words either as they imply a moral standard beyond one's feelings."

I would change the first quote to: At the heart of liberalism is the naive belief that nobody is inherently bad.

I also have to disagree with deacon at Powerline. He states -

"This was probably true of Hubert Humphrey, but to ascribe this belief to, say, Hillary Clinton is far-fetched. To today's liberals, it seems to me, most people are considered either "haves" (at best "privileged," at worst oppressors) or "have-nots" (their victims). The former group is considered venal; the latter group contemptibly helpless. Neither group is seen as "basically good.""

I believe that Prager's analysis fits the rank and file liberals well, but does not fit the liberal elite like Hillary Clinton. The liberal elite are driven by contempt. Contempt for conservatives, America, capitalism and even for the rank and file liberals. I am sure rank and file liberals do view most people as being either "haves" or "have-nots." (with the exception of fellow liberals of course), but this observation does not invalidate Prager's basic premise.

I wrote this a couple of years ago. Some of them are recycled from other sources, and some of them are my own, but I can not remember which ones are which. Enjoy.

A Liberal is someone who will give you the shirt off of somebody else’s back.

A Liberal is someone who will fight to the last drop of somebody else’s blood.

A Liberal is someone who wants to help people, but only with somebody else’s money.

A Liberal believes that the further removed from reality a political philosophy is, the more morally pure it must be.

Liberals support the death penalty but oppose abortion. The mental contortions it takes to be a Liberal are amazing.

A Conservative worships a higher spiritual power. A Liberal worships Government.

If you’re not a liberal by the time you are 18, you don’t have a heart. If you’re not a Conservative by the time your 35, you don’t have a brain.

A Conservative presents his policies in terms of hope. A Liberal presents his policies in terms of fear.

A Liberal believes that Conservatives have no heart, but that is just because there is not blood leaking from a Conservatives heart all the time like there is from a Liberals heart.

A Liberal believes that the primary purpose of Government is to redistribute income from the rich to the poor. A Conservative realizes that the primary purpose of the Government is to provide equality of opportunity, not equality of outcomes.

A Liberal believes that all money belongs to the Government, and any of your own money you get to keep is a gift from the Government.

A Conservative believes that a problem is solved by solutions. A Liberal believes a problem is solved by throwing money at it.

Liberals hate what they call “Big Business.” What is their solution, to stop all small businesses from growing so that they will never get bigger?

Liberals hate the idea of “Profit”. If they hate Profit so much, they should give away whatever money they have left over after they pay all their bills. After all, isn’t that what profit is?

A Liberal believes that the Military is an outdated organization that should be an equal opportunity employer, a jobs program for the poor and a place where the feminist agenda can be advanced. A Conservative realizes that the Military’s job is to defend the country.

A Liberal believes that the Court System’s job is to advance the Liberal agenda that can not be passed into law through the normal Government process. A Conservative realizes that the purpose of the Court System is to enforce the laws, not make them.

A Liberal believes that the Government is the best solutions to most problems. A Conservative realizes that the Government is the cause of many problems.

A Conservative believes that the Constitution is meant to limit the power of Government. A Liberal believes that the Constitution is an obstacle to increasing the power of Governments.

Conservatives view Liberals as political opponents. Liberals view Conservatives as evil incarnate.

A Conservative believes that both the costs and benefits of a policy need to be examined. A Liberal believes that cost is no object, as long as somebody else is paying the cost.

A Liberal believes that it takes a village to raise a child. A Conservative realizes it takes parents to raise a child.

A Conservative wants to solve a problem. A Liberal wants a problem to continue so they can use it as an issue to scare people.

A Liberal believes that electricity comes from a plug in the wall. A Conservative knows that electricity is generated in power plants (Liberals in California might eventually learn this fact).

Liberals believe that gasoline comes from a gas pump. Conservatives know that gasoline comes from oil, and that the only way to have enough gasoline is to drill for more oil.

A Liberal believes that it is cruel to hunt animals. A Conservative realizes that is cruel to let animals overgraze and destroy their habitat and let them starve to death.

A Liberal believes that Government control of the economy is the most efficient way to run a country. A Conservative knows that if Government control of the economy was the most efficient way to run a country, Russia would have been the most prosperous country in the world.

Liberals are afraid to call themselves Liberals and instead hide behind the labels “Progressive” or “Moderate.” Conservatives are proud to call themselves Conservatives.

Liberals believe that the center of the political spectrum is what they believe, and that they are a “Moderate”. Anybody to their left is a “Progressive” and anybody to their right is a “Right wing political wacko.”

To a Liberal, an Environmentalist is someone who owns a house in the mountains, and a greedy Developer is someone who wants to build a house in the mountains

A Liberal believes that guns cause crime. A Conservative knows that a gun is an inanimate object and is incapable of performing any action on its own.

A Conservative believes in freedom of speech. A Liberal believes in freedom of speech as long as it doesn’t offend anyone, or contradict what they think, or hurt someone’s feelings, or question politically correct philosophies, or promote conservative causes, or question the power of the Government, or ....

A Liberal believes that schools should teach children about self esteem, the environment, diversity, etc. A Conservative believes that schools should teach children reading, writing, math and history.

A Liberal believes that people should have their cars taken away and be forced to use mass transit. A Conservative believes that people should be free to go where they want when they want.

Liberals want people to live in high density urban environments to combat “Urban Sprawl.” Conservatives want people to have the freedom to live where they choose.

Liberals believes that Conservatives want dirty water and dirty air. Liberals also think that water and air should be free of all pollution. A Conservative knows that it is impossible to completely clean the water and air, pollution will always exist and the only thing we can do is minimize the pollution.

Liberals want to eliminate all health risks. Conservatives realize that health risks occur naturally in the environment and can never be completely eliminated, only mitigated.

Liberals desperately want life to be fair. Conservatives realize life is inherently unfair.

Conservatives think people should be paid what they are worth. Liberals think it is unfair that some people make more than others.

Liberals believe that Conservatives are intolerant, bigoted, racist, sexist, homophobes, but it is Liberals who want to label everybody by their race, sexual orientation or gender. Conservatives believe each person should be judged as an individual regardless of their race, sexual orientation or gender.

A Liberal believes that there is no right or wrong. A Conservative knows that belief is asinine.

Only a Liberal could call an increase of 5.6% in the school lunch program a cut just because they wanted a larger increase.

Liberals blame Ronald Reagan for budget deficits and give Bill Clinton credit for budget surpluses, but they have obviously never read the part of the Constitution that gives Congress the responsibility for the federal budget. The Democratic congress under Ronald Reagan gave us deficits and the Republican Congress under Bill Clinton gave us surpluses.

Liberals believe that Conservatives want to destroy the environment, and Liberals want to preserve the environment as it is at all costs. Conservatives realize that the environment is going to change no matter what we do, and that environmental resources can be used in a responsible way without destroying the environment.

Liberals are certain that humans have caused the Earth to experience “Global Warming.” Conservatives realize that the temperature of the Earth changes all the time, and that the biggest causes of global temperature change is from the Sun, dust in the solar system and the Earths orbit around the Sun, not from humans. Conservatives also realize that the data used in “Global Warming” calculations is highly variable and not very accurate, and therefore inconclusive. In the 1970’s, Liberals were certain that the Earth was experiencing “Global Cooling.” They were wrong then, and they are wrong now.

If a man is drowning 100 ft. from the shore, a Conservative will throw him 75 ft. of rope and encourage him to swim the other 25 ft. A Liberal will throw him 200 ft. of rope and then drop his end to run off and help somebody else.

Liberals attacked Newt Gingrich relentlessly for accepting a 4 million dollar book deal, but said nothing when Hillary Clinton accepted an 8 million dollar book deal.

Liberals said nothing when Bill Clinton dodged the draft in a letter saying that he “Loathed the military,” but attacked George W. Bush relentlessly for his service in the National Guard.

Liberals called George Bush a warmonger when he used the military to free Kuwait after it had been invaded by Iraq, but they were eerily quit when Bill Clinton bombed places all over the world to divert attention from his impeachment trial.

Liberals found nothing odd when Bill Clinton argued over the definition of “is” is, or when he tried to claim oral sex was not sex. They would have crucified any Conservative who tried to make the same pathetic arguments.

Update: Averie over at Tinmen Don't Dance comments. Her comments on drowning are particularly funny.