Left Flank

Stephen Hawking's quip in this Charlie Rose interview about humans "dropping the basket before distributing the eggs", referring to the urgency of human colonization of space before the current Earth-challenged generations destroy themselves through "stupidity and greed", prompts this comparison. What's more important, space traffic control, or Cape Canaveral?

On one hand, there's practicality.

The traditionally festive Space Day at the Capitol last Thursday was transformed from a purely symbolic event into a series of hurried, closed-door pleas for state incentives. Teams from Lockheed Martin, Space Florida and NASA scrambled to hit all 160 members of the state Legislature. Their tactics were exhaustive, and so was the wish list.

They asked for a new $45 million space incentive fund to lure companies looking to relocate. They also wanted a grab-bag of other financial sweeteners for aviation and aerospace companies willing to do business in Florida.

These included extending tax breaks previously offered to defense contractors, and pumping $20 million into a multi-university research and technology center that could cluster space-related brain power. State budget writers are also being asked to extend work-force retraining dollars for the thousands of soon-to-be unemployed shuttle workers.

Legislators have already filed bills to give future commercial space ventures immunity to lawsuits in the event of deaths except in cases of negligence -- similar to what Virginia and other states have done. And it is not just Virginia that Florida needs to worry about. Experts point to developing launch sites in New Mexico, Texas, California and Oklahoma, as well as pads in South America and Russia.

Competition can be a good thing, but space is limited.

"The real crucial thing is some system for collision avoidance and a process to ensure that people don't run into each other," she says. It may look like space leaves plenty of room to maneuver, but objects are moving so fast that once they swing into sight, it's too late.

Between the how of launching vehicles from the ground to the stars, and keeping those phallic-shaped fuel containers from creating big fireballs, there's a debate larger than how Florida's Brevard County–or even how the Mars program–pays the bills. The debate at Space Politics is a lively place to end.

Look, there's no doubt that there is, and should be, an emotional component to our space policy decisions. But it's not at all clear that getting someone excited by watching a Shuttle launch is going to lead to good decisions. For instance, it might lead to a decision to continue to fly the Shuttle, just because it's so awesome, and wouldn't it be a shame to not be able to watch it any more? Or it might lead to a decision to support Ares because it's «Shuttle-derived» (never mind the fact that there's not much Shuttle derivation left in it). Or it might lead to a decision that because the launch of a large vehicle like the Shuttle is impressive, that building smaller, but more cost-effective vehicles is a waste of money, and not a useful goal.

I repeat–the fact that a Shuttle launch is awesome doesn't, in and of itself, indicate that Shuttle flights are important. If space is important, we need to understand what's important about it, and formulate policies that will emphasize those goals. Unfortunately, we're a long way from that, partly because people who grew up on Saturns and Shuttle have developed a big-rocket fetish, and because the primary basis on which congressional decisions are made are pork, which can be the most emotional basis of all.

I agree, Rand Simberg.

Donald F. Robertson also has this colorful site related to this topic!

Former Senator Sam Nunn (D.,GA) and former Clinton administration Secretary of Defense William Cohen (R.,ME) plug The Concord Coalition, discussing a range of topics from the Iraq War to the budget deficit.

Noteworthy is Cohen's anecdote about dissuading former Presdient Jimmy Carter from pulling US troops from ROK.

I read Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy because of an unflattering review of the movie, The Golden Compass. in The Atlantic. What first impressed me about that article was the author's canny honesty about his role as the original author on a Hollywood movie using an adapted script.

In discussing the film, he chose his words carefully, acknowledging that his role now is to be «sensible» so that the next two films get made. Nonetheless, he was honest about what was missing: «They do know where to put the theology,» he said, «and that's off the film.»

Long silence. Then, «I think if everything that is made explicit in the book or everything that is implied clearly in the book or everything that can be understood by a close reading of the book were present in the film, they'd have the biggest hit they've ever had in their lives. If they allowed the religious meaning of the book to be fully explicit, it would be a huge hit. Suddenly, they'd have letters of appreciation from people who felt this but never dared say it. They would be the heroes of liberal thought, of freedom of thought … And it would be the greatest pity if that didn't happen.

«I didn't put that very well. What I mean is that I want this film to succeed in every possible way. And what I don't want to do, you see, is talk the other two films out of existence. So I'll stop there.»

I did watch the movie, and I can only say, that Sam Elliot and Nicole Kidman are Lee Scoresby and Mrs. Coulter.

And then, I learned the books were based on Pullman's appreciation for John Milton, and the Enlightenment. Having studied Milton in college for a seminar one semester, all his poems and political works included, I chose immediately to read the first children's fiction I've read since I was actually a child. I only read the first book of C.S. Lewis' Narnia series, which I cannot really recall distinctly, and only Tolkien's The Hobbit. The first of Pullman's trilogy, The Golden Compass (all three books are named for idiosyncratic gizmos essential for understanding), is mostly set in the snowy sub-arctic wastes, like the other two volumes, and, although I recognized the allusion, I labored to keep reading. What Amanda Marcotte says, that the "...books are incredibly imaginative, so I churned right through them, even when the prose was tepid" is an experience I can second. Unlike a child, I bent my head into the reading for the payoff at the end.

Instead of allowing Pullman to hit me over the head with what Marcotte rightly calls the "Christianist temper tantrum", I concentrated conscientiously on the themes of "...attachment to self and to others and how religion struggles to turn people against themselves and against each other so that we're weak and stupid and easier to control." The child who reads Harry Potter will not like Lyra Belacqua or Will Parry. Both girl and boy are precocious pre-adolescents with self-consumed parents, either for good or bad reasons, and have endured fuller lives stuffed with lessons both have mastered alone. The child who dreams of running away and finding the gypsies, or just wonders what homeless people do at night, not just despising his/her parents for their apparent conformity, is the target audience. In the end, religion is as much a crutch as a cause.

Those readers who have found the last installment, The Amber Spyglass, disappointing, are only half-right. The problem is that the second book, The Subtle Knife, doesn't pull its weight, leaving the third book to cover the chronology at a gallop. Pullman could have introduced Mary Malone, Lyra's and Will's ostensible mentor, earlier. Lord Asriel also seems to disappear until the third book. The mechanics of multi-dimensionality could also have been explored more fully. In The Amber Spyglass, as a result, Lyra's trip to the Land of the Dead is compromised. Here was a series of scenes with classical and biblical allusions that gave Pullman a chance to rebut Dante, and he balked. Resolving the conflict with the harpies guarding the dead by means of resolving Lyra's childish habit of telling lies is also excellent. If for nothing else, Lyra revealed torn from her soul, or shape-shifting daemon, caused me pages of anguish wondering if the two would ever meet again. Similarly, the battle sequences seemed narratively threadbare. Only Pullman's diction slowed down the rushing torrent of the badly scripted chronology.

Unfortunately, Pullman failed to update Milton for 21st Century, and leaves Dante the field for bold visions of the afterlife. Scripting God as an archangel tortured by Enoch, reinvigorated as the archangel, Metatron, with a role as a puppet ruler and forbidden to die, is a small flash of brilliance swamped by poor strategic judgment. There are also some wonderful characters, like Lee Scoresby, Farder Caram, Mrs. Coulter, and Iorek Byrnison. Lord Asriel and Mrs. Coulter are the archetypical self-consumed adults whose service to the universe is small compensation for the harm inflicted on their daughter, Lyra.

No matter what other readers might have felt, I thought the ending was surprisingly brilliant, although that doesn't compensate for the strategic mistakes getting there. Explaining first love without resorting to fairy tales that teach girls and boys to sacrifice themselves in ways adults cannot is laudable. Narrating the sequence of how a relationship begins and grows, and then ends, is also important. The picture of Lyra, resolute to live her life, yet grateful for the love given her, is a fortunate ending worthy of many new stories in many new worlds.

Naomi Klein suggests perhaps, not Leo Strauss, but Milton Friedman, one of whose ardent admirers was Donald Rumsfeld, deserves more attention for issues, ranging from Latin American debt, Iraq, and disasters because of his argument about using crises to impose a neo-liberal agenda on compromised societies and states. These arguments Klein draws from her latest book, The Shock Doctrine.

I might have to reappraise Naomi Klein, but this is a must-see interview.

First up, there's Mohamed ElBaradei. If we're rehabilitating public figures who were right about Iraq, the long-serving head of the International Atomic Energy Agency should be high on the list. But, he also makes a good point on Iran: you can't bomb knowledge!

Next, there's Francis Fûkûÿámá, who in his present anti-neocon pose, is almost a realist.

But the fundamental problem remains the lopsided distribution of power in the international system. Any country in the same position as the US, even a democracy, would be tempted to exercise its hegemonic power with less and less restraint. America’s founding fathers were motivated by a similar belief that unchecked power, even when democratically legitimated, could be dangerous, which is why they created a constitutional system of internally separated powers to limit the executive.

Such a system does not exist on a global scale today, which may explain how America got into such trouble. A smoother international distribution of power, even in a global system that is less than fully democratic, would pose fewer temptations to abandon the prudent exercise of power.

Finally,and more on the national security front, a little more budget help for the US Navy: Abolish the Air Force!

We aren't likely to see the end of the United States Air Force anytime soon, however. The institutional structure of the Air Force would resist its absorption into the Army and the Navy; friends of the Air Force in Congress and the public would fight to prevent consolidation. Strong proponents of the «Air Force way of war» remain, and aren't convinced by «boots on the ground zealots.» The Air Force would fight very hard to stay independent.

The consolidation of the services, of course, is no panacea for military difficulties. In spite of the formal unification of Israel's military forces, for instance, the Israel Defense Forces last summer embarked on a poorly planned strategic air campaign against Hezbollah and its Lebanese supporters. Israeli air attacks destroyed Lebanese infrastructure and killed Lebanese civilians without dealing serious damage to Hezbollah.

Nevertheless, the idea of an independent air force was not handed down on Mount Sinai. We have institutions because we've built them. When these institutions outlive their usefulness or fail as experiments, we can take them apart. In a post–September 11 world, we live with threats quite different from those that the Soviet arsenal used to pose. We can and should devise uses and a bureaucratic structure for American airpower better suited to our current challenges than those set out in 1947.

I'm grading midterms, and it's Friday movie night, so I'll leave you with this reading. It's either Gallipoli or Paradise Now tonight. Any votes, leave me a comment!