Category: Current Events

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Offensive Tactics

One of these things is not like the others. Question: does this image offend you?

How about this one?

Maybe this one?

The correct answers are:

a. Yes

b. Probably

c. Hell No and get a life.

So what’s different about them if our cultural elites have decided we’re all of a sudden enlightened and mature enough to take down rebel flags wherever they may be found?

Context, that’s what.

Flag (a) is the infamous banner above the South Carolina confederate memorial on Statehouse grounds in Columbia. Until a few years ago it actually flew atop the dome, after being placed there in the early 60’s by Gov. Fritz Hollings. Who, by the way, was a Democrat who did it to thumb his nose at the burgeoning civil rights movement. It’s been there ever since because Tradition and Heritage.

Bull$#!+.

Flag (b) hangs in Charleston inside the cadet chapel at my alma mater, The Citadel. It was given to the school by some nice lady from a Connecticut yacht club in the mid-1930’s. It’s a replica of the Confederate naval ensign which was replaced (along with all the other flags in the chapel) in the early 80’s. So not even the original, which itself wasn’t even original. Again, still there because Tradition and Heritage. And again, I call B.S.

Flag (c) is from an image I culled at random from a Google search of Civil War reenactments, where one would expect to see lots of rebel colors. What are they gonna carry, rainbow pride flags? Then again, maybe that’s where we’re headed…

So back to my point on context. (A) has clearly outlived its usefulness and deserves to be removed, considering why it was raised in the first place. It took a hundred years to finally throw off the last remnants of state-sanctioned racism, and for my home state to keep flying a banner erected in defiance of what was clearly a just cause really pisses me off. Gov. Haley was right to demand its removal.

(B) was not hung in such a fashion, but considering all it has come to represent I think it’s best to remove it from such a prominent position at a place of worship. I wish things were different, but alas they are not.

If you have a problem with (C), then you need to have your head examined. The people I know who do these reenactments take their roles quite seriously – and I don’t mean the play-acting (though there is that) – I mean their drive to present history in a way that’s far more powerful than a classroom lecture or third-rate drama on the History Channel. To expect them to fly anything else is just absurd.

When I was a young man growing up in South Carolina, rebel flags were everywhere. We’d get the t-shirts at Myrtle Beach and put the plates on our front bumpers. And not a single damned one of us thought of it as a way to rub black folks’ noses in it.

Unfortunately, that’s precisely what we were doing. Doesn’t matter now that we didn’t intend it that way. To us it was a “southern and proud of it” symbol, back when thousands of Northern hordes were moving down our way, driving up property values and pointedly informing us of exactly how stupid and backwards we all were.

I am not kidding.

So, ya’ll don’t like Charlotte? Then move back to Newark or whatever other blue-state Yankee nightmare you came from.

Yeah, I didn’t think so. So why don’t you shut up about how much better hockey is than NASCAR or ACC basketball, and just have some more BBQ and sweet tea? Bless your heart.

Southern Pride is a funny thing: eccentric, like so much of the South can often be. Seriously, have you ever read any Pat Conroy? I used to wonder if the dude wasn’t hiding in our attic, taking notes.

But enough about my childhood dysfunction: back to our national dysfunction. The ugly truth is that the rebel flag has always made certain segments of our populace decidedly uncomfortable. I honestly think a lot of blacks tolerated it because they knew most of us didn’t intend it as a White Power Nazi Skinhead symbol. But the sad truth is that over the past few decades it has been fully co-opted by exactly those types of racist militant douchebags. And that sucks.

The Nazis didn’t invent the swastika, either. So think of it like this: if you saw one in a museum or at a WWII reenactment, would you be offended?

No? Then what about at a Neo-Nazi march?

Exactly my point. There is a difference between recognizing history and using a particular image to rally your troops, so to speak.

The Citadel endured a similar family spat several years ago. When I was a cadet in the mid-1980s, rebel flags were still prominent at home football games. And with good reason: Citadel cadets actually fired the first shots of the war (I dare any pantywaist civilian fratboys to match that prank). But over time, we couldn’t escape just how much that flag was becoming associated with some pretty unsavory groups. It was eventually replaced with this:

That’s “Big Red,” our battle colors during the war. Seems to me a quite appropriate and hopefully inoffensive replacement. But there’s just no satisfying some people. And if that offends you…too bad.

Here, have some BBQ. Bless your hearts.

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Virgin Territory

His name was Mike Alsbury, may the Lord rest his soul. Not yet forty years old, with a family, and no doubt with the future literally in his hands.

I spent much of the weekend scouring the space blogs for this news, as I served in the Marines with one of Virgin Galactic’s pilots and feared it might have been him (it wasn’t). It’s not like we were great friends, but like a good teacher he was one of those officers who left a lasting good impression.

This had to happen eventually, just as airline accidents are going to happen. Flying is inherently risky, something too many people lose sight of thanks to decades of learning how to mitigate those risks. Every now and then, the holes in the swiss cheese line up and something nasty falls through.

Spaceflight is even riskier and less forgiving. Machines are often performing at the edge of their capabilities, both the craft which have to withstand tremendous aerodynamic and gravitational forces, and their motors which contain (and release) enormous amounts of energy.

The nexus of these forces is something called Maximum Dynamic Pressure, or “Max Q,” a function of air density and velocity. If you’ve watched any space launches, you’ve probably heard this term. Put simply, it’s the point at which an aircraft or rocket experiences the greatest aerodynamic stress. Think of it as the normal static air pressure being amplified around a speeding vehicle; the air squeezes harder as the vehicle accelerates.

This generally happens around Mach 1, the transsonic flight regime. This is also the speed at which SpaceShip Two’s reentry feather was deployed, according to NTSB. They say it’s normally supposed to be unlocked at M 1.4, which makes sense. Standing shock waves and related compression drag are Max Q’s ugly sisters, and I wouldn’t be surprised if NTSB finds the tail booms were overwhelmed by them once unlocked.

Tail booms feathered for re-entry. This is not supposed to happen at Max Q.

It frankly doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see how that would be very bad thing at Mach 1 while still down in the relatively thick air at 50,000′.

I’m alternately relieved and concerned that they’ve already figured this out. To be released this soon, it must have been face-poundingly obvious. While this is currently a “finding of fact” and not a “cause” there’s plenty of reason to think it’ll eventually end up that way. “Root cause” is a whole other matter, something that could easily take a year to determine. Ignore the credentialed talking heads on TV, as they’re certain to be talking out of their collective ass.

There was an awful lot of early speculation that this had something to do with the already-troublesome hybrid motor, but the oxidizer tank and solid fuel core were both found largely intact and appear to have functioned as expected. That’s only a partially good thing, as hybrids are reputedly difficult to scale up in size and this motor has a lot of development work left in it. I’ve seen them used frequently at amateur/high-power rocket launches, but am told that N2O starts to behave in strange ways when it’s pressurized at the kinds of volumes SS2 needs to use. Then there’s the fear that a chunk of solid fuel breaks off during the burn and clogs the nozzle. So yes, there’s lots of ways for a supposedly “safe” rocket to go boom (back to my point about containing enormous amounts of energy).

The problem is the airframe was designed around the shape and mass properties of the motor, so it’s not like they could just walk over to XCOR’s hangar and buy a couple of their liquid bi-prop rockets (or substitute the liquid motor Virgin’s working on separately, either). It’s created a pretty nasty sunk-cost trap, and this accident may be the only way VG can break free of it.

What little solace there may be here is found in the knowledge that it happened during testing and not on a revenue flight with paying passengers. One can only imagine how infamous (especially considering their clientele) that would be. What frightens me for the industry is that it almost certainly will happen at some unknown point in the future – the question is whether space tourism is far enough along that it can recover. Think about it: how many ocean-crossing passenger blimps have there been since the Hindenburg? A similar horrific accident during the early stages of passenger spaceflight might doom this new industry in the same way.

I’ve been to the NTSB Academy and seen their reconstruction of TWA 800, the 747 that exploded off of Long Island several years ago. It is a creepy thing to stand in front of that big open nose, stare down the empty rows of shredded passenger seats, and contemplate what those people went through as they continued to climb before falling out of the sky with the entire front end of the airplane blown off. I don’t envy the go-team that has to pick through this, but in the long run I have high hopes that whatever they find will benefit the whole industry.

Some investors and ticket holders are predictably starting to bail, and we can only hope Mr. Branson’s commitment to the project is enough to see it through this tragedy. It took the Apollo 1 fire to uncover latent problems with the program, and one can make a pretty good argument that we might not ever have made it to the moon without it.

Here’s hoping Mr. Alsbury is remembered with the long list of other test pilots who have given their lives to open up previously-unknown frontiers for the rest of us.

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I Was Told There Would Be No Math…

Said every journalism school graduate everywhere. I don’t want to hear another damned word about Fox News’ presumed stupidity:

No one can accuse the Scots of not giving this 110%…

Just keep thinking to yourself, “THIS IS CNN,” in your best James Earl Jones voice. And while we’re on the subject:

“What is ‘Your Ass or a Hole in the Ground?'”

That is not an SNL skit, it is a real screen-cap of real CNN anchor and pompous empty haircut (but I repeat myself) Wolf Blitzer, on the real Celebrity Jeopardy in 2009.

We now return you to our regularly scheduled blogging.

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Evil Descends

America has not had war – real, society-devastating war – brought to our shores in the modern era. I’m talking large-scale, sweeping invasions. Pearl Harbor, as jarring as it was, is not in Kansas. The Japanese island-hopping campaign into North America never made it past the Aleutian islands. We saved western civilization in WWII but were spared the suffering of Londoners during the Blitz or the despair of the French as they watched Nazi divisions march into Paris. We did not have to endure travails like the siege of Leningrad or the rape of Nanking.

The horror of 9/11 is as close as war has come in our time, and even that was limited in scope. And sadly, for too many of our fellow citizens even that was not enough for them to take our enemies seriously. Our success (thanks to the unfailing devotion of the men and women who work in the shadows against our enemies) has lulled us into a dangerous complacency. Over the last century, our fellow citizens have overwhelmingly remained safe in their homes and travels.

Try to imagine going out for groceries or taking your kids to school or meeting friends for lunch while haunted by the knowledge that at any time, any location, your world could literally explode in your face. Randomly, for the simple offense of your existence. Or that you (or your children) might be kidnapped and dragged through a tunnel into enemy territory to God knows what fate.

Welcome to life in Israel, coming soon to the United States of America. We have essentially abandoned our southern borders so the Democrats can recruit an army of future obedient voters and the Republicans can provide their Chamber of Commerce buddies with an ample supply of cheap labor. In the meantime, the most savage enemies of our civilization have the ability to infiltrate our country in ways they probably couldn’t have dreamed of. So far, it is their only way of projecting power and we’d better be ready for it.

Ironically, our fellow citizens are finally waking up to this threat while our leaders hoped to sweep it under the rug. Thank God there are men like Ted Cruz who get it, perhaps he and the few other clear thinkers in Congress can persuade our Commander in Chief that we can deal with this threat quite readily. The IslamoNazis have finally semi-organized themselves into a stand-up army, a problem which we are really good at dealing with. Out in the open, in the desert. It’s what one might call a “target-rich environment.” But time is not on our side.

This is just begging for an air strike.

This is what happens when we abandon the battlefield. It emboldens our enemies, and now they have the means to bring the fight to us. Whether or not it was a good idea to go there in the first place doesn’t matter: the ugly truth is that once you’re in the fight, you’d damned well better be in it to win it.

As the saying goes: you may not be interested in war, but that doesn’t mean war isn’t interested in you.

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When Republics Fall

…they start to look a lot like this:

The Ferguson, MO, riot police. Oh, wait…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wrong photo. Here are the actual Ferguson, MO, police in action:

One could be forgiven for confusing the two.

I don’t cite this because I’m against law and order. I cite this because the militarization of our police forces has frightened the hell out of me for a long time. This is just the latest and most egregious example.

Let’s have a quick mental exercise. When people who already have tremendous power over our lives start tooling up like SEALs, what kind of mentality do you think they’re going to adopt:

1) Serve and Protect?

or

2) Kick Ass and Take Names?

My money’s on option 2, and current events are proving that choice correct. Let’s recall that this whole sickening episode began with what appears to be a completely unjustified shooting of a black college kid by a police officer. It’s tragic, it’s outrageous, and it’s becoming all too common. Trigger fingers are getting too itchy out there and cops are forgetting that OUR safety is supposed to be their priority, not their own. In some cases, they put their own convenience above the safety of the citizens they’re supposed to protect.

Like journalists. While they as a group largely deserve most of the scorn heaped upon them, they do not deserve to be arrested for doing their jobs. Nor do homeowners deserve to be tear-gassed in the face for standing in their own front yards because the police don’t like being yelled at by an angry populace.

A cop shoots an unarmed kid in the back, so people protest. It would be understandable if it had ended right there. But naturally, protests turned to riots because too many people behave like they just came out of a Jerry Springer audience rather than the progeny of a nation built on liberty enabled by rational thought and sober debate.

So the people riot and the cops overreact because, hey, we’ve got all that cool Spec Ops kit out back so we might as well put it to good use. Right?

So the cops overreact, and the people riot some more.

And now the federal government sticks their nose in it, declaring the area a no-fly zone because the police claim one of their helicopters was shot at. Which is absurd on its face: what good will a no-fly zone do for that problem unless the people are sending up their own air-to-air interceptors?

It’s a farce, of course, as the real targets are undoubtedly the news helicopters which would otherwise be happily recording everything.

Our nation is a tinderbox surrounded by fools playing with lit matches.

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11 plus 45

cropped-apollo-121.jpg

 

Forty-five years.

Neil Armstrong is dead now, as are many of the men who followed in his footsteps.

Those of us who, as children, experienced the grand spectacle of NASA’s greatest achievements grew up expecting even greater things. Those of us who continued to follow it closely into adulthood grew perplexed at the notable lack of achievement.

For a while, we believed the PR that projects like Skylab were the natural evolution of our expanse into the solar system. Everyone intuitively got that Mars was a very long way away, so if we were going to send people there it would be wise to get our arms around real long-duration spaceflight. There was even supposed to be a second Skylab, in orbit around the Moon, that would give us a strong foothold at the edge of deep space as we pushed on to Mars.

That was cancelled, of course. The massive Skylab II module now resides in the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum. You can even walk around inside of it and imagine what it would’ve been like to live in it while orbiting the Moon.

Everything at NASA became focused on the Space Shuttle, which we were promised would be the key to reliable space access and the first essential step to building the kinds of massive ships that would be needed to venture beyond the Moon. The idea made sense, but the execution never did. Shuttle became a victim of mission creep, needing to be all things for all users. In the process, it became so big and so over-complicated that economic access would be impossible.

The International Space Station was conceived as a necessary destination, and then it got turned into a make-work program for unemployed Soviet engineers in order to keep them from selling their skills to, say, Iran.

But think about that for a minute: the shuttles were built to service a station which ended up being there to give the shuttles something to service. And now we have no shuttles. Just as well, really, since they turned out to be inefficient death traps – because that’s what happens when you try to make an experimental vehicle your workhorse.

Through this time, the space agency we all grew up in awe of flailed around. We were told it was because they had no defined goal, no destination like Apollo. That made sense for a while, as we really had no other experience to judge it against. A few “voices in the wilderness” cried out that there were better ways to do it, but nobody really listened since everybody knew space was Dangerous and Mysterious and Expensive, therefore it could only be done by a big government program using big government rockets bankrolled by big government money.

Thankfully, this paradigm has begun shifting in the last few years.

But I didn’t sit down at the keyboard today to sing the praises of SpaceX and XCOR and Blue Origin and Orbital Sciences. I am here to lament what could be happening right now with NASA, but never will because of myopic bureaucrats and idiot congressmen who can never see past their own reelection.

Rand Simberg points to a series of Houston Chronicle essays about the state of our space program, the most recent installment of which is alternately depressing and infuriating. It describes a study commissioned by NASA which determined we could pretty readily be sending people back to the Moon to do useful work within the next few years. And we could do it with existing launchers (Delta IV-heavy, specifically).

It wouldn’t be possible to throw everything up in one launch, instead needing several. But the bulk purchases of launchers would start to drive the costs down, and we frankly have plenty enough on-orbit construction experience now that it shouldn’t be that much of a stretch. The real enabling technology to be developed would’ve been long-term propellant storage and on-orbit refueling, which is technology we desperately need anyway (and is a proper R&D role for a government agency).

But that common-sense, low-cost approach ran afoul of the hogs at their troughs in Alabama, Florida and Texas, all of whom prefer a great big government rocket program:

The plan used the commercially available Delta IV Heavy rocket to conduct a steady stream of missions to the lunar surface, allowing humans to begin tapping into the moon’s resources.

“We briefed it to all the key NASA human spaceflight centers, giving them a chance to challenge the conclusion,” Miller said. “I thought it was a tremendous result for human spaceflight. We could have a plan that flies early and flies often.”

NASA never published the study and Miller’s contract wasn’t renewed.

Congress didn’t want radical change and instructed NASA to build a big rocket, the Space Launch System or SLS.

Much as I’d love to see a Saturn V class launcher again, it would make a lot more sense to use the tools we already have. But we all know government doesn’t work that way.

The Moon is there for us to use. Water ice has been detected, which would be the single most precious resource for a spacefaring society. Besides its obvious life-giving properties, it can be broken down into hydrogen and oxygen. That is, breathing air and rocket fuel.

NASA will not get us there. I wish they would, as it would make things much easier for the businesses who are ramping up to follow.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Here Be Dragons

SpaceX finally unveiled DragonRider last night, otherwise known as Dragon V.2:

Credit: SpaceX

Love the fins (though I’ve no idea what they’re for) and that the solar panels wrap around the trunk. And being a bizjet guy, I particularly like the Gulfstream-style oval windows. There’s lots of them, too, which seems entirely appropriate for a 21st century commercial spaceship. I freaking love saying that.

Beyond the awkward humility Mr. Musk displays in the video (the guy’s a real-life Tony Stark after all), what strikes me most is the pure beauty of the thing. Admit it, a lot of perfectly fine air and space vehicles are kind of funny looking if not butt-ugly. Think of the A-10 or the Apollo LM.

But this…this is what a brand-new spaceship ought to look like. They clearly didn’t throw out their aesthetic sensibilities while also building in features like propulsive landing and reusable heat shields. And check out the front office:

Credit: SpaceX

The pull-down flat screen control panel is a pretty slick way to save room and weight; making all the essential emergency controls hard-wired buttons is likewise a very smart touch.

Much more here, plus a nice roundup from Alan Boyle at Cosmic Log.

 

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After Midnight

If your blood pressure’s not high enough today, then head on over to American Spectator to read about the “Two Midnight Rule.”

This is precisely the kind of NHS-style bureaucratic nightmare we all worried about, and it came to pass even sooner than anyone imagined: a family’s beloved father is dead because of a turn of phrase in a law that nobody read, including the “man” who signed it. There are no words to describe how infuriating this is — it’s impossible to comprehend how this man’s family must feel.

Read the whole thing, if you can stand it. If not, here’s the key takeaway:

The “two midnight rule” became a death sentence for Frank Alfisi. An Obamacare Catch-22.

Simply put: Frank Alfisi could not be admitted to the hospital because he needed dialysis. Dialysis does not require a “two midnight” stay in the hospital. So, therefore, Frank would not be admitted as an in-patient and given dialysis. And since the lack of dialysis — which was deliberate per the Obamacare directive to the CMS — had now made Frank so sick that it resulted in two seizures and unconsciousness, a need for oxygen and a wheelchair, Frank certainly was no longer qualified to be an outpatient at DaVita.

This wasn’t even in the law, it was part of a 1500-page regulation as a result of the law. If you or a loved one rely on Medicare, this is your future.

In some measure this can be chalked up to unintended consequences: pass a 3000-page bill that nobody had time to read before voting on it, and that’s what happens. Which is, of course, why I can’t think these consequences are “unintended.” In the long run this clause will save the government money by causing old people to die off sooner. The bastards knew exactly what they were doing and didn’t give a damn about who it might hurt, because Greater Good or whatever.

God save us from politicians hawking good intentions, because their intentions are rarely good. First, last, and always, they are about control. So what if a few eggs got broken; just look at that tasty omelet!

I’ve been ruminating about this for a long time, as it’s increasingly obvious that very few people in politics are actually working in our best interests. Washington is a company town, and the local industry is politics. Its products are laws and regulations, and so it becomes everyone’s interest to craft them in a way to bring in as much profit as possible.

Economics, in other words. But this isn’t private industry operating in a free market, and so the profiteers aren’t labor and management. They’re politicians and their various hangers-on, including the parasitic lobbyist class.

There are precious few national-level politicians whom I believe are honestly working for our interests — and even they have their own agendas. Which is fine, so long as it aligns with the nation’s and adheres to the Constitution. And that’s what it really comes down to: do you, or do you not, believe that our government must perform within the limits defined by our Constitution?

If you don’t, then we have no common ground for compromise. You must therefore be defeated at every opportunity, because your beliefs will ultimately end this nation. And we are getting dangerously close to that tipping point.

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Strangling the Baby

Why are the Feds so afraid to let humanity out of its crib?

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/370895/pilot-shortage-made-congress-jillian-kay-melchior

http://www.parabolicarc.com/2014/02/07/nield-moritorium-regulations-2015/

The above links are not entirely unrelated. While the flight crew experience minimums came down from on high (or wherever it is Congress resides), the sudden reversal on regulating spaceflight perfectly illustrates how our government looks at us lately. The FAA is just the branch I have the most personal experience with and they’ve been getting decidedly too big for their britches lately: Weight & Balance rules that will grind airline ops to a screeching halt, directing AMEs to assume anyone over a certain BMI needs a CPAP machine, classifying off-the-shelf R/C models fitted with GoPro cameras as “drones” to be regulated.

Deciding it’s time to regulate in-development spacecraft and orbital operations tells me the Feds have decided that literally nothing is beyond their reach. Pardon me, Mr. Nield, but you have not the slightest damned idea what you’re talking about. Assuming the past 50 years of NASA-centric spaceflight experience puts you in a position to dictate standards to companies who’ve set out to break that mold is the worst kind of hidebound bureaucratic “thinking.”

Over the last fifty years, how much demonstrable progress has been made on reusable launchers? If your answer is “space shuttle” then you’re missing my point. Each orbiter had to go through the rough equivalent of an airline heavy-check every single time they flew. If we did that, we’d be out of business just as surely as if we threw away our airplanes after each trip.

Did anyone anticipate SpaceX would be able to create a reusable first stage that lands on its tail like something from a 1950’s sci-fi movie? Or XCOR’s runway-to-suborbit spaceplane? How would either of those fit into standards that by Nield’s logic should be based on NASA legacy systems?

Those who can’t do, teach. Those who can’t even manage that, regulate.

Get out of our way.

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I Am So Smart, S-M-R-T…

homer xray2So I’m chilling in the family room the other day while the house is uncommonly quiet. The writer in me screams “get to work!” while the slacker in me argues “but ‘Idiocracy’ is on Comedy Central!”

Which brings us to the first blog post of the new year (“But it’s the middle of January,” you say? Yeah, well you might have noticed my Christmas theme was still up as of yesterday morning. Hard work may pay off eventually, but procrastination pays off right now).

Yes, I did turn off the movie but not before a few Deep Thoughts bubbled to the surface. Or maybe it was the burrito I had for lunch. Whatev. So I’m watching that scene where the only man left on Earth who knows how plants grow is arguing with a bunch of brain-dead ninnies (the President’s cabinet–so not much different than today) about why you can’t irrigate crops with Gatorade.

I fear that our culture is rapidly heading that way, but you already knew that. It’s not like I’m the only one pointing that out. And it brought to mind an essay at The Federalist titled The Death of Expertise:

Today, any assertion of expertise produces an explosion of anger from certain quarters of the American public, who immediately complain that such claims are nothing more than fallacious “appeals to authority,” sure signs of dreadful “elitism,” and an obvious effort to use credentials to stifle the dialogue required by a “real” democracy…

Having equal rights does not mean having equal talents, equal abilities, or equal knowledge.  It assuredly does not mean that “everyone’s opinion about anything is as good as anyone else’s.” And yet, this is now enshrined as the credo of a fair number of people despite being obvious nonsense…

I fear we are witnessing the “death of expertise”: a Google-fueled, Wikipedia-based, blog-sodden collapse of any division between professionals and laymen, students and teachers, knowers and wonderers – in other words, between those of any achievement in an area and those with none at all.

Just so you know I’m not spending all of my time cruising the ‘net, I’ve come across a similar sentiment whilst doing background research for that long-awaited Perigee sequel:

Irate SF fans will sometimes attempt to refute scientific theories they find inconvenient. While this is permitted for SF writers (as long as they don’t make a habit of it and wash their hands afterwards) it is more worrisome with fans who think they can prove the Starship Enterprise’s warp drive is possible in the real world. Their self-confidence is good, but they have about the same chance of success as a child in a soapbox derby car winning the Indy 500. It ain’t gonna happen, and for the same reason. A dilettante with home-made gear cannot hope to compete with trained professionals with precision equipment.

That’s from the fantastic Atomic Rockets, your one-stop-shopping for understanding the physical realities of spaceflight. I particularly loved this bit:

So you know, university Physics is essentially three years of this discussion among like-minded enthusiasts. Done with supercomputers, access to the textbook collections of five continents and thirty languages.

On four hours sleep a night.

With no sex.

You’re not going to find the loophole these guys missed.

For the record, I’m just impressed that the dude finished in three years.

Ignorance is dangerous when practiced in large numbers, and I turn a special kind of angry when herds of muttonheads whip themselves into foamy froths of stupid. A few juicy examples:

1. The anti-gun movement. “High-magazine clips”, anyone? Never have so few with such little understanding tried to constrain so many with plenty of understanding. When ignorant TV hosts hyperventilate about the unbelievably powerful AR-15 (I’m looking at you, Piers), I have to laugh. Try an M-1A on for size, princess. Or for that matter, Browning’s semiautomatic BAR hunting rifle. Either one of them will send more powerful rounds downrange than a .223 poodle gun (though I wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end of an AR, either). My point is that everything is an “assault rifle” to these people, even a pump-action shotgun if it’s black with a telescoping stock and pistol grip. Because shut up. It’s for The Children.

The Supreme Court has ruled that the 2nd Amendment is an individual right and therefore membership in a state-sanctioned militia is not necessary to own or carry a firearm. I’m not going to get into what constitutes a “militia” for these purposes, go read the Heller v. DC decision for yourself. Just because some people find guns icky and frightening does not allow them to restrict or deny the rights of those who don’t. The anti-gunners wouldn’t be able to even if they were in the majority for the exact same reason the Westboro Baptists get to behave like assclowns at the funerals of fallen heroes: it’s a right protected by our Constitution. If you want to remove that right, you’ll have to repeal the 2nd Amendment. Period.

What’s even more ominous is that as a people we have an alarmingly superficial understanding of the contents and principles of our founding document. Just because something seems like the “right thing to do” doesn’t necessarily make it constitutional. These are the guardrails that protect our liberties by constraining our government from just making crap up as they go along (at least until recently).

When people who should know better prattle on about how we can’t divine the intentions of the Framers, they’re either willfully ignorant or intentionally misleading. Ever heard of the Federalist Papers? How about the Anti-Federalists? You can thank the latter for our Bill of Rights, because they wouldn’t vote to ratify the Constitution without a promise that the new Congress’ first order of business would be to vote on those amendments. Amazingly, the Federalists kept their word. Can you imagine such a thing happening in today’s Congress? The anti-Feds would’ve been rolled like a cheap cigar. This was back when men had honor and used words for something other than running cons.

2. Young-Earth Creationists. I can already hear my inbox filling up with hate-mail over this one, but hear me out: I want to agree with you. But I can’t, based on the available evidence. I believe that our universe has a divine Creator and that Man is His most cherished creation. The Bible is God’s inspired word but that doesn’t necessarily mean I want my kid using it to study for his Chemistry class. And I suspect God is okay with that.

Our translations of the Bible are just that: translations. I’m not suggesting they’re in error, but there are some words from ancient Hebrew or Aramaic or Greek that simply don’t translate well in modern English at all. In ancient Hebrew, Adam and Eve simply meant Man and Woman. And their word for “day” was commonly used to describe an “age”, such as we’d use to label, say, the Industrial Age. So let’s keep that in mind when someone tries to determine the age of the universe with nothing but a Bible and a calculator. Also keep in mind that we believe the Lord dictated Genesis to Moses six thousand years ago, how do you think He’d describe a complex matter such as the creation of the freaking universe? Think it’d involve subatomic particles, singularities and inflationary states? Me neither. It’s a big-picture view of the creation and fall of man written so that anyone can get the picture. Can’t we just leave it at that?

Here’s the deal, people: if you want to argue against something then you’d better make sure you understand what you’re arguing against. We may be uncomfortable with the theological implications of random selection, but you’re not going to change minds by bleating about “gaps in the theory.” I have faith that my God is bigger than all of this and that some things may remain beyond our understanding, but just because we may encounter something that’s beyond our current ability to explain does not mean it can never be explained.

And for that matter, stop with the “evolution is just a theory” nonsense. Everything in science is a theory, but that word has been tossed around so casually for so long that most people now conflate it with its first cousins, Hypothesis and Conjecture…

A scientific theory is a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world, based on knowledge that has been repeatedly confirmed through observation and experimentation. Scientists create scientific theories from hypotheses that have been corroborated through the scientific method, then gather evidence to test their accuracy. As with all forms of scientific knowledge, scientific theories are inductive in nature and aim for predictive and explanatory force.

Got that? Here’s a few more for you: gravity, relativity, and electromagnetism are all theories…anyone care to dispute them? Very few make it to the exalted level of “Law” and even those are extremely specific (such as Newton’s Laws of Motion or the Laws of Thermodynamics). Ever hear of the Germ Theory of Disease? Even though it’s “just a theory” it’s still a pretty reliable predictor of why people get sick. And if it weren’t for our understanding of certain aspects of evolution, we wouldn’t have a lot of the medicine we take for granted today. Relativity is likewise “just a theory” but your GPS wouldn’t work if all those satellites weren’t compensated for Einstein’s theories of time dilation.

Science is not inherently anti-God just because some scientists use it as a crutch to defy Him. Unfortunately they tend to be the most vocal, but that just means we have to be willing to understand their arguments and confront them head-on. And whenever one gets caught falsifying evidence to keep his grant money flowing (or to make inconvenient people shut up), make an example of them. But for all our sakes, know what you’re talking about when you do so, because all of the desperate “alternate theories” of creation that I’m familiar with are just plain embarrassing. There’s a reason they don’t show Flintstones reruns on the Science Channel, so try not to represent it as such. God did not call us to make fools of ourselves.

Science cannot prove or disprove the nature of God because He is supernatural. He cannot be directly observed or tested, which points to the fundamental weakness of Intelligent Design (a concept I agree with philosphically but fail to see how it could ever be considered “science”).

3. Global Warming. Good grief, where to start? This may be the single biggest source of the problem that originally got me on this rant. Let’s just postulate that real science is never “settled” and ultimately doesn’t rely on “consensus.”

There are a lot of bullies in this movement, a lot of manipulated data, falsified stories, and outright character assassination. Too many to recount here, in fact, and I’ve just about run out of steam. So check out Watts Up With That?, Climate Depot, and Dr. Judith Curry’s Climate Etc. blog for some contrarian points of view from people who know what they’re talking about.

In short this all comes down to one principle: we’re all entitled to our own opinions. We are not entitled to our own facts. For the good of our nation, our culture, and ourselves, it’s up to each of us to understand the difference.

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