Something positive, at last.

It's been long-awaited, long-delayed, and undoubtedly will no longer live up to the hype I've mustered for it, but, nonetheless, I type.

Almost two weeks ago, NASA announced the beginning of a new plan to return us to the moon by 2018, laying the groundwork for a manned mission to Mars. (The press release is here, and more information will be available for a little while here.) The proposal has been greeted with a great deal of skepticism and derision, particularly in the face of the nightmarish damage done by hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Why are we thinking about spending more money on space, it is asked, when so many things demand our attention here on earth? Why are we talking about risking more lives in space after the Columbia has been destroyed and our shuttle fleet has proven too unreliable to continue flying? The New York Times even published an editorial entitled "The Dark Side of the Moon," listing reason after reason why this is a bad, even ridiculous, idea. (I'd link to it, but the editorial is now part of the pay-only portion of their site. Assholes!) In it, Robert L. Park decried the costs and said that human space exploration is over; robots can find the information we are searching for and, after Mars, "there is no place humans can go in a foreseeable future." All this proposed expense, he says, is just a political hot potato, put out by the Bush administration so that the next guy can be the one saddled with the blame of ending human space exploration.

Why, then, should we spend money for human beings to ride fire to the stars?

I have been pondering the answers for days. The costs of rebuilding after Katrina and the knowledge of the Columbia's dead are powerful arguments against it; they weigh heavily against the gleeful joy of exploration that spaceflight brings to mind. If pushed hard enough, the fear they engender can crush that joy-but fear is rarely a source of wisdom.

Republican government is an ideal. It is supposed to be the rule of the peoples' representatives, chosen for their adherence to the peoples' dreams while having the wisdom to avoid their baser instincts. It falls short much of the time, so much so that the ideal has been forgotten in many minds, and only the failings are left to define government for them. Frustration and anger at government then lead to the belief that the very concept of government is itself an evil, and lo, you have a modern conservative. I do not, of course, share this belief, but anger is certainly the primary emotion I feel when I look at government actions today. Anger at the arrogance, frustration at the stupidity; conservatives and liberals alike feel it, and we are all dragged down by it sometimes.

Spaceflight is hope. That simple truth is the greatest argument for it. It is one of the greatest expressions of the ideal of government that can be imagined: together, we have strived, and struggled, and fallen, and risen once more, and finally made real a dream as old as humanity itself-to reach out our hand and touch the heavens. Who can look at the images of Earth taken from space, of Neil Armstrong walking across the surface of the moon, of the images of distant galaxies taken by the Hubble telescope, and say that they feel no stirrings in their soul? Sultan bin Salman bin Abdulaziz, a Saudi astronaut, said of his flight, "The first day or so, we all pointed to our countries. The third or fourth day, we were pointing to our continents. By the fifth day, we were aware of only one Earth." Who can read these words and say we should not have gone?

A few, of course, and they do, but they make up a tiny minority even of those who say that we should not return to space. Even those who no longer want to risk lives for exploration find it difficult to denigrate the achievements that have already been made. Almost no amount of worry or fear is enough to dampen the inspiration and pride that that memories of that July day in 1969 raises up in our hearts.

Dreams and pride alone are not enough to justify a return to the moon, however, or a journey on to Mars and beyond. An understanding of the risks, the costs, and the potential gains are necessary, or else an inspiring pursuit can quickly become folly.

The costs in terms of resources are really quite basic. Contrary to many critics' claims, NASA is not talking about spending a single extra penny on their new initiative; instead, they are talking about reallocating their budget towards this end. The primary reason for this, I would imagine, is to defeat opponents' arguments of frivolous spending and to try to move forward in an atmosphere where almost all government spending is subject being called frivolous. This is, of course, wrong. Not nearly enough money is spent on space.

NASA's current budget is $16.2 billion a year, out of a budget of over $2.4 trillion-less than a hundredth of our tax dollars. When Kennedy gave his famous "we will go to the moon" speech at Rice University in 1962, he justified the expenditure with an apt comparison: NASA's $5.4 billion per year budget was "somewhat less" than was spent that year on cigarettes and cigars. Today, we spend $16.2 billion on space and over $25 billion on poison. Perhaps the two should keep pace.

The risk, then, is little, but what of the gains? Science is not a pleasant topic for those who demand concrete, expectable, definable gains, because it is one of the greatest demonstrations of the universe's irritating refusal to be what we want it to be. It is not simple, safe, or obedient. It is dangerous, uncertain, and confusing. It is, nonetheless, wondrous and, in small pieces and at odd times, understandable. Scientists cannot tell us what we will find out there. We may find more information about our planet's beginnings. We may find life so different from ours that it staggers the imagination. We may find nothing but dust and ice. We may find that aliens have latched on to the Voyager probes and have been feeding them false data for years and that Neptune is actually a giant frozen serving of Chicken Saltimbocca that was put there as a defense against Galactus. The danger, the worry, and the beauty of it all is that we simply don't know.

We can, however, point to past benefits that have come from space exploration. Technologies developed for, and in, space, are used every day: scientific instrument calibrators made in orbit without the hassles of gravity and air pressure, radiation shielding, MRI technology, self-inflating rafts, firemens' lightweight air tanks, advanced semiconductors. Athletic shoes use padding from moon boots. NASA aerodynamic models are used to make better golf balls, for fuck's sake! And, to boot, we've gotten a better idea of the age of the solar system and how often we're going to have to deal with the danger of life-ending-sized asteroids. We have lost lives in the pursuit of space, to be sure; the Apollo 1 disaster, Challenger, Columbia, and others have cost us eighteen lives. How many have been saved because of their sacrifice? How many people have survived cancer, strokes, fires, shipwrecks, car accidents, that wouldn't have? We can never know an exact number, but it is enough.

Future space exploration may yield more advances and more wonders, or it may not-but the risks are worth it. NASA's astronauts are willing. Are we?

Frontiers still beckon, and the hearts of the greatest of us still yearn to find out what is there. Contrary to the pessimism of the the Times editorial I pointed to earlier, there are many places to explore within our reach. Callisto orbits Jupiter, and has a 10-kilometer-deep salt-water sea 200 kilometers beneath its crater-ridden surface. The craters may tell us of what has passed through our system; the sea may hold single-celled life, or more complex life, or none at all-but almost any liquid water has potential enough for us to look. Io is another of Jupiter's satellites, the most volcanically active place in the solar system. Our own volcanoes churn up all manner of geological wonders-and fertilize soil that quickly teems with life. Titan, orbiting Saturn, is the only moon in the solar system with a real atmosphere, primarily nitrogen (95%; Earth's is 78%). Volcanoes explode with water and methane and ammonia instead of lava. Neptune's moon Triton also exhibits this cryovolcanism in plumes up t0 8 kilometers high, and geological data points to significant internal heating. The water and the heat together may have made an underground liquid sea possible, creating an even likelier birthplace for life than on Callisto. And Jupiter's Europa, perhaps the most enticing of all of the outer moons, has another liquid sea beneath its surface, kept warm by Jupiter's gravity causing tidal friction. It also has an atmosphere, a very thin one only worthy of the name in the scientific sense-but it is a thin layer of oxygen. Astronauts might well explore Europa and build a base there using some of Europa's own natural resources.

These examples are the product of just a few minutes of research on my part, and I can't even be called a space enthusiast, merely a supporter. The experts will be better able to tell us where it is most likely to find life and where it will be easiest to begin building colonies, but there are places to go. The unknown beckons to us. Life may be there waiting for us, and if it is not, knowledge will be, and we will all be the better for it.

The rage less vented...

In the wake of Katrina, it's understandable that the news media is primarily focused on the relief efforts. Even if other news is covered, it's not put front and center, because people want to know that things are getting better down on the Gulf Coast.

Somewhere, there's some kind of pithy quote about what governments do when they have a distracted populace, but rather than actually searching for it and quoting it, I direct your attention to the front page of today's Washington Post.

It's the front page, yes, but what percentage of people read the newspaper anymore? Not enough.

The gist of my anger is this: following the insanity of the Bush Doctrine, so broad a doctrine of preemption that under it we could invade Sweden, you'd think that feedback would have caused Pentagon planners to come up with a more sensible update for military procedure next time around. Instead, a draft is now making the rounds in Pentagon circles of a new preemption doctrine under which we will preempt states (or terrorist groups) that may have weapons of mass destruction by attacking them first-with nuclear weapons.

Our one example of the Bush Doctrine in action has worked so well, it seems, that it's only logical to expand the size of the hole we can dig for ourselves. The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons came into force in 1970, one of the few moments in international political history where sanity and reason overcame paranoia and the lust for power...or so it seemed at the time. The treaty lays down guidelines for containing nuclear weapons technology only to those states that have it; lesser-known are the guidelines within it for reducing the number of nuclear weapons worldwide, with a stated goal of total elimination of nuclear weapons.

That last bit is the trickiest, of course, and everyone has managed to awkwardly avoid discussing it for 35 years. This new proposed doctrine, however, will shred even the tiniest of hopes of that happening. It calls for the development of bunker-buster nukes, which Congress has so far refused to fund (quite wisely). It calls for the use of nuclear weapons to sterilize bioweapons that we think may be used against us. Nuclear weapons would move from being an ugly remnant of the Cold War standoff to a viable weapon in our country's arsenal.

When Robert Oppenheimer helped develop the atomic bomb in 1945, he was horrified by what he had created, and spent much of the rest of his life warning desperately against their use. When Edward Teller redeveloped atomic weapons into the hydrogen bomb in 1952, he became a rabid militarist and advocated the use of hydrogen bombs in wider and wider applications, at one point suggesting that they should be used to create artificial harbors (never mind the centuries of radioactivity, fish and gentlefolk). That both these men were geniuses, but only one was wise, is virtually undeniable. Teller died in 2003, after a lifetime of feuding with collegues. He had been given an Ig-Nobel Prize (a mocking parody prize) in 1991 for his "lifelong efforts to change the meaning of peace as we know it;" a genuine Nobel Prize winner said "it would have been a better world without Teller."

Why, then, is the Bush Administration determined to follow the example of his arrogance?

Unexpected fury.

I've had a pretty decent week, so I looked forward to writing up a first post that wasn't full of angry rantings. My new job is working pretty decently, life is calming down somewhat, and so forth.

But no. A week without in-your-face bullshit from the Bush administration is like a week without food and water, and lo, we have the wonder that is Michael Brown.

I have a particular view of government service, one that is strict enough that I've had more than a few people call me crazy for it. I believe that when you work for the government, it is more than a job. It is more than a responsibility. It is a sacred trust (and believe me, being a godless athiest, I call very little sacred), serving the people-and the people deserve the best they can get. If you hold a position, it should be because you were the best-qualified for it, not because of who you know or who your parents are.

The system we currently have, of course, is corrupt. It's so corrupt that the corruption has become ingrained into the system, almost unrecognizable as the poison that it is. The House of Representatives has no centralized method of publishing job openings and making them competitive. The closest thing is the job openings listing published each week in Congressional Quarterly, which gets an average of two new openings a week. There are over five thousand jobs in the House of Representatives staff alone, and it is renowned for its high turnover, so why only two a week? Because most openings never make it that far. Openings are filled before they can get competed for because someone knows someone and you are expected to use contacts to get jobs. Knowing someone is worth more than any job experience anywhere, and this has become not only all right, but the way people think things are supposed to be.

I had an internship one summer in the House of Representatives. Over the course of the summer, there were about twelve interns. Of all twelve of us, only one got there on merit. All the rest of us (including me, which I now bitterly regret) were there because our parents knew people in the right places. The results? We came in late, did half-assed jobs, and generally made the Congressman look bad. All except for Andrew, who was better than all of us put together. He took his work seriously, and fulfilled his responsibilities amazingly well. I imagine he's working at a McDonald's somewhere now, because we've created a system that disdains that kind of hardworking honesty.

The Bush team has managed to take this disdain and turn it into an art form so disgusting that it disturbs everyone. Even people who think that contacts should matter over merit are disturbed, whether or not they realize why. To me, it is anathema. And so the topic returns to Michael Brown.

He is the man in charge of FEMA, the man in charge of any large-scale disaster relief effort, and the only disaster-relief-related thing on his resume is a fraudulent claim that he was head of Edmond, Oklahoma's emergency services division from 1975 to 1978. The truth? He was an administrative assistant to a city official, the head of exactly nothing. (He also lied about being a Professor of Political Science at Oklahoma's Central State University. He was there, at least-as a student who didn't even make the Dean's List, let alone the faculty.)

The results of Brown being the head of FEMA should be apparent to everyone. New Orleans has been treated to an uncertain, stumbling response, followed by freakish bravado. FEMA has turned away firefighters, barred the Red Cross, refused donations of food and drinking water from Wal-Mart, barred Coast Guard members from delivering diesel fuel, cut one Parish's emergency communications line, and turned away a five-mile-long caravan of 500 boats ready and willing to help locate and evacuate survivors from New Orleans. Why? Because FEMA doesn't need the help, and they claim that their authority supercedes the local government's. (Jefferson Parish restored their own communications line, then posted armed guards to protect it from FEMA.)

(Oh, and the U.S.S. Bataan, an extraordinarily well-equipped hospital ship, has been sitting off the Gulf Coast since the day before the levees broke. Their helicopters have been ordered to go help with the relief efforts, but the six operating rooms and hundreds of beds onboard are quite, quite empty. I'd say this is more Bush's direct fault as Commander-in-Chief, but I thought I'd just throw it in there. The U.S.S. Comfort, meanwhile, the Navy's media-flagship relief vessel, was due to arrive yesterday.)

FEMA's response to this disaster could only conceivably have been worse if they had decided that the New Orleans survivors would soon become zombies and began shooting them. This is what fucking happens when you take a guy who was fired from the International Araban Horse Association and put him in charge of national disaster relief, but it makes perfect sense according to Bush logic, because Brown has the ultimate qualification: he was the previous FEMA head's college roommate.

To those who think that getting a job through contacts is harmless and does no damage, look at this. This whole disaster exemplifies what is wrong with being given a position through contacts; the employer may be able to convince himself that you're the most qualified for the job, that they're not being swayed by personal knowledge of you, but the reality is that this is impossible. We are all biased, all more swayed than we think we are, and no one can be trusted to hire someone that they know for work this important. Those who serve the people must be the best there is, chosen impartially. A centralized system for publishing openings in government must be created, and people applying for those positions should be chose through some sort of double-blind system.

That's the long-term solution, anyway. The short-term solution is that Michael Brown should be fired, then put in prison for the rest of his life on hundreds of charges of Criminally Negligent Homicide. I suppose him being taken off Katrina disaster relief and eventually promoted or given a medal is a distasteful second best.

Minor musing.

From today's NY Times: "An administration whose tax policy has been dominated by the toweringly selfish Grover Norquist - who has been quoted as saying: "I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub" - doesn't have the instincts for this moment. Mr. Norquist is the only person about whom I would say this: I hope he owns property around the New Orleans levee that was never properly finished because of a lack of tax dollars. I hope his basement got flooded. And I hope that he was busy drowning government in his bathtub when the levee broke and that he had to wait for a U.S. Army helicopter to get out of town."

God, I love Thomas Friedman.

I also love the California Legislature and their passage of a bill legalizing gay marriage in that state, or, as I prefer to say it, taking homophobes and fuckin' 'em in their fuckin' stupid noses.

(Bush still sucks, though.)

Finally!

New Orleans police yesterday shot and killed at least five of eight people shooting at contractors attempting to repair one of the levees.

All I can say is, it's about fucking time.

Too much.

Rehnquist is dead. Gas just hit $3.79 a gallon near me, but I managed to snag a bargain at $3.35 a gallon before the next round of price surges hit one particular gas station. New Orleans is burning.

I have a full gas tank, so I can manage for a while, and relief efforts finally starting really getting into the disaster area yesterday, and other good things are happening, but...this is just too damn much.

Ten minutes, and I need an addendum already...

I forgot to mention my thoughts on Dennis Hastert.

I don't normally agree with Denny much, but he made a comment a little while ago about how possibly, maybe, kinda, we should consider abandoning New Orleans.

...and the overwhelming political backlash made him issue a statement within hours "clarifying" that he in no way was implying that New Orleans shouldn't be rebuilt completely. Now this, ladies and gentlemen, is silly.

Los Angeles is surrounded by a ring of mountains that keep all the smog in a nice layer above the city. Centuries ago, Indians noted that the smoke from their campfires when they visited there didn't quite dissipate, and they learned to avoid the whole area. It seemed silly to them that white folks actually wanted to live there.

On the slopes of Mt. Vesuvius, the volcano made famous by burying three entire Roman cities, Pompeii, Stabiae, and Herculaneum beneath lava and ash, the city of San Sebastiano now stands, population 2.3 million. The volcano erupted violently in 1944, and earthquakes have occurred in recent years so powerful that they raised the entire harbor district of San Sebastiano six to eight feet, making people have to build ladders to get down to their former dockside boats. When asked what would happen if the volcano erupted as it did in 79 AD, the Mayor of San Sebastiano replied (paraphrasing), "We are Italian. We will endure."

New Orleans has been described as "a Sisyphean, 300-year death match between engineers and the elements." It is less habitable a place than Los Angeles, but more habitable than San Sebastiano. However, given that the latter is a ticking fucking bomb upon which 2.3 million complete idiots sit, that doesn't say much. Thus, I think the idea that maybe, just maybe, a place where the flood waters are kept at bay only by constant struggle and catastrophic disaster is one bad storm away isn't a place we want to spend hundred of billions of dollars to rebuild. Maybe it's time to at least consider stopping hitting our head against the rocks.

And that we are such stubborn fools that we attack people for even suggesting such a thing says something quite sad about us. Maybe there most of the people of New Orleans will want to go back, and maybe they will show some determined grit to rebuild in the face of another certain disaster down the road. But maybe many won't, and it's not a bad idea for there to be a debate over whether my tax dollars will be spent to fund someone else's crusade against sense.

The day I never thought would come...finally has.

I never thought I'd establish a blog. They always seemed like a waste of space to me. I mean, my friends' blogs were often interesting, particularly since I have several friends who write well. But the rest of the world...6 billion non-friends. What the hell do I care what their innermost thoughts and daily mundanities are?

But the anger arising in me from the current situation is too much. Things need to be said, and my insane ego leads me to believe that without my voice, they're not being said enough. So here we go.

Marine One vanished into the skies of New Orleans about two hours ago. Six hours ago, President Bush stood on the White House lawn and spoke in a stuttering, almost-gasping, uneven voice, telling us that he would go to New Orleans. He would speak to the people suffering from the disaster, give them assurances of the aid that is on its way, and he would walk among them as a leader should.

Instead, he arrived, occupied desperately needed resources for a briefing from FEMA officials and his entourage, and gave a short speech, and departed to tour the rest of the Gulf Coast by helicopter. The instant he stopped speaking, CNN commentators noted that the briefing he took time out of the rescuers' schedule to receive could just as easily have been done over the phone. The speech, of course, was the true insult of his visit. Gulf Coast residents, he tells us, should take this tragedy as an opportunity. The death of thousands, the shredding of an entire city's infrastructure, the bodies floating in the streets, the insane attacks upon relief efforts, the rape gangs-all of this, we are told, is a blessing in disguise, for we are given the chance to rebuild New Orleans better than ever! Why yes, proud resident, what with the total destruction of your home, your community, and your livelihood, President Bush is looking forward to seeing the better, nicer home that you will build over the ruins of the old!

Perhaps this makes sense to a man whose every failure has been greeted with a promotion. Perhaps it doesn't occur to him that these people simply have nothing left, instead of a fat trust fund or rich parents they can fall back on. Perhaps this is a speech that could only have been given by someone who hasn't looked into the eyes of someone who has had to wade through corpses or dodge bullets or flee what used to be their home in the last five days.

But the President is watching over their plight from the comfort of one of the nicest helicopters in the world, and looks forward to seeing what beautiful new home Trent Lott builds, so our newly tired and poor should take heart.

Is it any wonder that the New York Times published an editorial yesterday saying that his speech on Wednesday about Katrina was one of the worst in his life?

My griping at our leadership aside, the New Orleans disaster has reinforced my general hatred of people. Snipers shooting at a convoy evacuating critically ill patients from a hospital; a Chinook transport helicopter having to withdraw from evacuation operations because it was taking ground fire; police reduced to stealing cars, siphoning gasoline, and hunkering down for the night, because armed gangs roam the streets like it's a combination of Waterworld and Escape from New York. Bush needed to declare martial law three days ago, at the first reports of carjackings. Having not done so yesterday morning, when it became clear that relief efforts were being targeted, borders on criminal negligence. The local officials of Louisiana have discovered (to their chagrin) that the Napoleonic Code that they still operate under does not give them the authority to declare martial law, and some people need killing.

The violence in New Orleans is more blatant than in Iraq. In Iraq, there are IEDs, detonated remotely. Who is doing the killing is not immediately obvious. Here, there are people simply shooting at rescue workers, and the proper response to that is an RPG, or a missle from an Apache helicopter, or napalm. Things are too far gone for anything subtle here, and people who have already picked up weapons with the willingness to shoot innocents in the midst of this will only be deterred by it being made clear that if they do this, they will die. At this point, I'm not even opposed to summary field executions.

So...with the most angry, violent thoughts already out there, I also thought I'd take this opportunity to suggest something constructive. It's too late for this disaster, but maybe for the future...

I wanted to go down to New Orleans and volunteer with the Red Cross earlier this week. Local Red Cross chapters are giving training courses of about two to three hours for people who are willing to deploy immediately. The problem is, they require an absolute minimum of a three-week commitment. I was hoping I'd be able to go down there for a week, perhaps ten days; I could manage things around that, and that wouldn't be too devastating a blow to others taking time off from school, work, etc...but three weeks isn't feasible. Why? The ugly truth of it is money.

I, and, I imagine, many others (damn, this is a lot of commas), simply can't afford to take that much time off to go volunteer. Money is tight, and income has to be made in order to pay the bills that come in every month. It is, however, a fucking shitty reason to not go and help people in desperate need of aid, one I'm guilting over a great deal. Is my credit rating more important than other peoples' health and lives? Is my friend's job at Starbuck's more important? Of course not.

The solution? A government program. (I'm a liberal; what else did you expect?) The government should have a process by which you could quickly register as a volunteer with aid organizations, receive a volunteer number (or something similar), and then send the number to creditors. The creditors will be legally required to give you a deferral until the crisis you are volunteering for passes. Additionally, businesses will be legally prevented from firing employees for volunterring.

"But wait!" you say. "Won't people use this to dodge their bills? Might not people try and milk disasters to avoid paying people?" If the assignment of volunteer numbers/cards/whatever is worked out is done in a corrupt fashion, yes. However, criminal penalties for claiming the benefit without actually volunteering should be extraordinarily steep, and aid organizations making use of such volunteers would do an audit after crises passed to confirm who was where and for how long. (It might be double-checked another way, but that sounds decent off the top of my head.)

"But wait!" you say. "Might not people actually volunteer as a dodge?" In a word, no. The Red Cross representative I spoke to, for example, wanted to make extremely clear that deployment with them would involve long hours of hard work, uncertain access to food and water, and no real place to sleep for, let's remember-at least three weeks. If someone feeling overwhelmed by bills wants to go endure conditions like that for weeks to help people who are even worse off, I say more power to 'em. Hell, if there was some disaster that lasted for months, and people volunteered the whole way through, the American people would be faced with the nightmarish decision between having vastly increased response manpower or the credit card companies grumbling for a few months. Guess which one is more in the national interest?

(Expect this blog to continue in fits and starts, based upon my completely arbitrary levels of rage and/or inspiration.)

Take care, everyone.