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Saturday, March 20, 2004 |
Other Recent Reading
Why I Am Not a Conservative, F.A. Hayek, from 1960
As has often been acknowledged by
conservative writers, one of the fundamental traits of the conservative
attitude is a fear of change, a timid distrust of the new as such,
while the liberal position is based on courage and confidence, on a
preparedness to let change run its course even if we cannot predict
where it will lead. There would not be much to object to if the
conservatives merely disliked too rapid change in institutions and
public policy; here the case for caution and slow process is indeed
strong. But the conservatives are inclined to use the powers of
government to prevent change or to limit its rate to whatever appeals
to the more timid mind.
... When I say that the conservative lacks principles, I do not mean to
suggest that he lacks moral conviction. The typical conservative is
indeed usually a man of very strong moral convictions. What I mean is
that he has no political principles which enable him to work with
people whose moral values differ from his own for a political order in
which both can obey their convictions. It is the recognition of such
principles that permits the coexistence of different sets of values
that makes it possible to build a peaceful society with a minimum of
force. The acceptance of such principles means that we agree to
tolerate much that we dislike.
If Mary really wants to collect the
blood, it will entail wiping down the scourgers, who are splattered all
over with it. And at every later incident, new freshets of blood are
drawn from an apparently inexhaustible source. Enough is left in Jesus'
body to spurt out all over the people below when his side is pierced to
certify his death. If Gibson is making a theological point, that the
blood is an abundant source of salvation, one wonders why the scourgers
get more of it than the believers. It is not as though Gibson were a
Universalist when it comes to salvation. He told The New Yorker that
not merely non-Christians but nonorthodox Christians (including his
wife) are going to hell
Edgar Wisenant and his 88 Reasons, and Why all Church-Age Endtime
Prophets are False. For 2,000 years now Christians, starting with Jesus himself,
have thought they were living in the last days. Of course, they all
have been wrong. Why, then, should we believe anyone from now on who
says otherwise?
4:18:24 PM Permalink
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Man in Space
In the New York Review of Books, Stephen Weinberg discusses Bush's "New
Vision for Space Exploration" and makes a good case against man in
space, at least as far as science goes.
The President gave no cost estimates,
but John McCain, chairman of the Senate Commerce, Science, and
Transportation Committee, has cited reports that the new initiative
would cost between $170 billion and $600 billion. According to NASA
briefing documents, the figure of $170 billion is intended to take NASA
only up to 2020, and does not include the cost of the Mars mission
itself. After the former President Bush announced a similar initiative
in 1989, NASA estimated that the cost of sending astronauts to the moon
and Mars would be either $471 billion or $541 billion in 1991 dollars,
depending on the method of calculation. This is roughly $900 billion in
today's dollars. Whatever cost may be estimated by NASA for the new
initiative, we can expect cost overruns like those that have often
accompanied big NASA programs. (In 1984 NASA estimated that it would
cost $8 billion to put the International Space Station in place, not
counting the cost of using it. I have seen figures for its cost so far
ranging from $25 billion to $60 billion, and the station is far from
finished.) Let's not haggle over a hundred billion dollars more or
less—I'll estimate that the President's new initiative will cost nearly
a trillion dollars.
Compare this with the $820 million it cost to send both Spirit and
Opportunity to Mars. Given the massive costs of this stuff, it's hard
to figure that it has any justification. I know I'd rather see robots
crawling all over the solar system than people; for one, they can just
go so many places people can't. How many space telescopes and rovers
are we going to sacrifice for a few people in incredibly hazardous
missions to Mars?
Weinberg really gets to the center of things in his last paragraph:
n the foregoing, I have taken the
President's space initiative seriously. That may be a mistake. Before
the "New Vision" was announced, the administration was faced with the
risk of political damage from a possible new fatal shuttle accident
like the Columbia disaster less than a year earlier. That problem could
be eased by canceling all shuttle flights before the 2004 presidential
election, and allowing only enough flights after that to keep building
the space station. The space station posed another problem: no one was
excited any more by what had become the Great Orbital Turkey. While
commitments to domestic contractors and international partners
protected it from being immediately scrapped, its runaway costs needed
to be cut. But just cutting back on the shuttle and the space station
would be too negative, not at all in keeping with what might be
expected from a President of Vision. So, back to the moon, and on to
Mars! Most of the huge bills for these manned missions would come due
after the President leaves office in 2005 or 2009, and the extra costs
before then could be covered in part by cutting other things that no
one in the White House is interested in anyway, like research on black
holes and cosmology. After the end of the President's time in office,
who cares? If future presidents are not willing to fund this initiative
then it is they who will have to bear the stigma of limited vision. So,
looking on the bright side, instead of spending nearly a trillion
dollars on manned missions to the moon and Mars we may wind up spending
only a fraction of that on nothing at all.
A good piece -- read it quick, after they archive articles, they cost. While I'm talking about the New York Review of Books,
I want to note that while I used to have a subscription to the paper
product, I haven't read it in a while. But lately there have been some
really interesting pieces that I've meant to comment on. Jared Diamond
has a recent review of two books about Easter Island which was really
great reading, and Freemon Dyson has a puzzling review of a book on
psychic powers. I'll write those up in the next couple days.
One thing that occurred to me while reading these pieces is the
conventional wisdom that people don't read long pieces on web pages.
That may be true, but good writing, and good layout on a page can pull
you right through it, as it did in these articles. NYRB doesn't do much
to compromise their paper look and feel for the web; some might say
that's a mistake, but in this case I think it works. At least for these
pieces.
3:59:29 PM Permalink
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© Copyright 2004 Steve Michel.
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