"What we have here is failure to communicate." Evidently, the political class no
longer thinks they have to listen to the public. Take the recently passed health
Care Law poll which shows that the public doesn't want and hasn't wanted this all
along. But they pass it anyway. Obviously it didn't improve public confidence in
the Direction of Country which shows most of the public still thinks we are on the
wrong track. I am reminded of the aftermath of the 911 attacks. After this debacle
of national security, it came to light that the government knew enough to stop the
attack, but failed to connect the dots. The government failed to listen to itself
then and it seems an awful lot like the politicians aren't connecting the dots
now when they don't listen to the people. Again, from USA Today, the latest
polls say "From right and left, differing views of the government's proper role".
Why aren't the politicians connecting the dots? Could it be that they are getting
bad advice? One influential voice in the left's camp is Paul Krugman. In a most
recent editorial "Hey, Small Spender", Krugman repeats his oft stated opinion that
the government isn't spending enough money. Let's take a look at that with respect
to the Space program, shall we? Do you know what the International Space Station
(ISS) cost to build? Our part of this program cost 100 billion dollars. Yet,
despite all this spending, they could have used parts from the Apollo program
and the Shuttle program to save billions of dollars and accomplished much more
than what has been accomplished to this date. Some of this can be found in the
book "Mining the Sky". That and more from that book. But what they have now is
no manned space program (the shuttle gets shut down very soon) and no heavy lift
capability. This even though the Apollo and Shuttle programs did both. As of
now, Uncle Sam has gotten very little from all that money.
As for Krugman, another one of his articles- "Running Out of Planet to Exploit"-
repeats the claim that we are running out of natural resources. But the planet
isn't running out of resources as seen here: Ocean Floor Mining Equipment.
The ocean has hardly been explored. If it was up to the left, it will never be.
The problem isn't a lack of resources. The problem is that the left won't let us
have access to it. But what about space? In Mining the Sky, you can see that space
has virtually unlimited resources. But we can't access space either. Obama
cancelled the Constellation program. Bush cancelled the Shuttle program in favor
of the new Constellation program. Now we don't have either.
Where does Krugman believe all this money will get paid back? You can't get it from the Earth or from space. Or does Krugman believe that it doesn't matter if it ever gets paid back? You have to earn it before you are allowed to spend it. Can the government be put on a paying basis? Why does space exploration have to cost money? Can't it make money instead? Perhaps better questions are in order. Is politics more about ideological battles than getting results? Is the government "by and for the people" being perverted into a government by and for the political class? The US Debt Clock keeps ticking upward and upward while the US Manned Space Program is stranded on the ground. Uncle Sam can spend more to get back into space, but we were already there before and now NASA has to reinvent the wheel.
Sometimes you just feel like you are being scammed. Evidently some scientists think that way. Here's the story of a physicist who resigned over the Global Warming Scam. Who hasn't heard about Climategate? It seems that The Climatic Research Unit email controversy is a mild way of putting it. It seems like a whitewash. The truth is not being allowed to get out there. Debate is being suppressed. But then you just get back into the political wars. Politicians don't want the debate, but it's the debate that's really needed.
Politicians should stop serving themselves and serve the people instead. Allow debate.
You can't fix the problem if you don't know what it is. And you can't know what it
is until you start to communicate better. Throwing money at problems doesn't solve
any problems. An intelligent approach begins with better listening habits. You
just have to stop yelling at each other and start listening. The US is borrowing the Russian
space program to service the ISS. Perhaps they should borrow one of their ideas: glasnost.
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