The Hand-Me-Down Hubbles

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It's no secret that the people at NASA have had problems lately. They've suffered cuts in funding, the space shuttle had to be retired with no viable replacement ready, and their next generation "Constellation" rocket program got canceled. One of their signature achievements, the Hubble Space Telescope, is getting old and creaky, and there's really no good way to maintain it without the shuttle or something like it.

NASA got some good news recently, however, when the folks from the National Reconnaissance Office rang them up.

You may never have heard of the NRO. They don't go out of the way to promote themselves, because, as we shall see, they really don't need to. They're the agency, working under the aegis of the Department of Defense, that's "in charge of designing, building, launching, and maintaining America's intelligence satellites," to quote their website.

Their motto is "Every Breath You Take We'll Be Watching You." (Actually, I made that up. Their real motto is "Vigilance From Above," which is slightly less creepy.) To carry out their mission, they've got lots and lots of cool gadgets and gizmos.

So many, in fact, that they apparently haven't gotten around to using them all, as NASA discovered when the NRO called and said, "Hey, we've got a couple of space telescopes we aren't using. They're sitting in the warehouse, still in the original shrink wrap. You want 'em?"

Apparently, the Spooks in Space have these satellites with telescopes at least as powerful as Hubble's. You know, the type of high resolution lenses that may not be able to read your newspaper over your shoulder like in the movies, but which can pick out an object the size of a baseball from hundreds of miles above the Earth. This will be very useful if the Chinese ever want to field a World Series contender.

The truly amazing (and somewhat frightening) thing is: Those are the ones that they let sit in the warehouse because they're already using better ones. Lord knows what those things can do. Probably count the change in your pocket.

So it occurred to some bright boy or girl at the NRO (a place, one assumes, that has no shortage of bright boys or girls) that if you turned a high tech spy satellite around and pointed it at the stars rather than at the Rooskies or the Chinese or whomever, you'd have a couple of Hubble-level scientific instruments.

The NASA people, of course, immediately accepted the unexpected gifts. Although they're not completely sure how they're going to use them yet, they're happy to have them, and I'm happy for them. But I have to confess to a certain amount of annoyance as well.

Think about it. The Hubble cost, at last estimate, $2.5 billion. Considering the amazing discoveries scientists have made and continue to make about the universe using this device, I'd argue that it was well worth it. Still, NASA had to lobby hard for funding, and it's having to hunt even harder trying to find the cash for the Hubble's planned replacement, the $5 billion James Webb Space Telescope (named after a NASA administrator, not the Virginia senator).

Some scientists are worried that the Webb telescope will eat NASA's entire astronomy budget. Meanwhile, the Department of Defense has two Hubble-level telescopes it never even bothered to use.

Look, I'm all for a strong defense. And I think keeping an eye, electronic or otherwise, on the people who would do us harm is a great idea. I'm glad the fact that there's an organization like the NRO means that a massive, bolt-from-the-blue strike like Pearl Harbor can never happen again (although as the catastrophes of Sept. 11, 2001, showed, an attack doesn't have to involve fleets or armored divisions to be devastating).

Still, there's something wrong with our priorities when science goes begging and the DoD has high tech wonders just lying around. That's not fully funding defense, that's wastefully overfunding it in a time when the rest of us are being told that what we peons need is austerity, austerity, and more austerity, and when the men and women who do the actual fighting are scandalously underpaid.

But, hey, maybe we should ask the NRO to poke around in the warehouses some more. Who knows? Maybe there's another shuttle in there somewhere. Or even a Millennium Falcon. It'd be one wild garage sale, that's for sure.

Don't Bother Them With the Truth

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One of the online spots I visit regularly is the blog of Dr. David Brin. Dr. Brin is not only a crackerjack science fiction writer who's won every award in the genre, but also an honest-to-goodness rocket scientist in his day job, with degrees in astrophysics, applied physics and space science. His blog topics run a fascinating gamut from musings on our future in space to appreciation of the "metaphysical irony" of Three Stooges films. Clearly, this fellow is no dummy.

However, I had to respond to a recent post in which Dr. Brin proposed what he called the "wager challenge" as a way to deal with wingnuts, science deniers and other infuriating yay-hoos of the "ignorant and proud of it" school.

Dr. Brin's solution? "Make it a matter of money." In other words, demand that wingers back up assertions like "illegal immigration is worse under Obama" or "abstinence-only policies are the way to prevent teen pregnancies" or "we're being taxed worse than ever" by pulling a Mitt Romney: demanding that they bet on it, like Mitt did when debating poor, hapless Rick Perry.

Unlike Romney, most of us aren't vulture capitalists who can afford to put up 10 grand, but you get the idea. In fact, it's been shown that because of the slowing U.S. economy, Mexicans returning to their country, beefed-up funding for the Border Patrol, and other factors, illegal immigration has balanced out and is now at "net zero."

It's also a fact that states with abstinence-only education policies have the highest rates of teen pregnancy and STDs, and that most Americans, particularly the wealthy, pay less in federal taxes than they have in 60 years. These are provable facts.

So you'd think asking people who blithely assert the opposite to put up or shut up would be a way to make them, well, shut up. Sadly, no. As I responded in the comments to Dr. Brin's post, there's one problem with the plan, namely that there's no way to settle the wager. Right-wingers steadfastly refuse to accept any source that contradicts them as valid because anyone that contradicts their narrative is, ipso facto, part of the "liberal conspiracy."

For example, a recent article in USA Today reports that President Obama leads Mitt Romney 5-1 in campaign contributions from people identifying themselves as service members or Department of Defense employees, and a wingnut who clings to the fiction that "our troops hate Obama and love the GOP" will simply ignore the fact that the story is based on actual analysis of campaign finance reports and dismiss it out of hand, since it comes from the "lamestream media."

Of course, if you're a Republican in the N.C. legislature, you could simply use your majority to try to enact laws to actually make science that disagrees with you illegal. As reported in The News & Observer, when a state-appointed science panel warned that sea levels could rise as much as a meter by the year 2100 (a change which would flood many coastal counties), Republican legislators decided to try to "win" the scientific debate by legislating it out of existence.

They circulated a bill that would require scientists to use only "historical data" and "linear projections" to predict rising water levels. In other words, they're required by law to make calculations based only on the way things have always been, ignoring the fact that changes don't often move in straight line - they increase faster and faster, like a snowball getting bigger as it rolls downhill.

This, as an article in the online Scientific American points out, "is exactly like saying, do not predict tomorrow's weather based on radar images of a hurricane swirling offshore, moving west toward us. Predict the weather based on the last two weeks of fair weather."

Facts, it's often been said, have a liberal bias. It's meant as a wry joke. But wingnuts have apparently taken it to heart, but in the wrong way. Rather than adjust their world view to fit the facts, they choose to dismiss and mock any factual source that disagrees with them - or kill politically incorrect (and economically inconvenient) theories via legislation.

The Republican-led North Carolina legislature is acting like the church hierarchy that tried to suppress Galileo's idea that the Earth moves around the sun by fiat and intimidation, because it didn't fit the established narrative. And we all know how well that worked. I'd like to believe that actual science might prevail in this case, too. But I'm not betting on it.

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The Birthers Are Back!

 Latest Newspaper Column: There's no link because the Pilot has, once again, forgotten to put my column up on the web site. But I'm getting crazy people e-mailing me about it (we'll have more on that soon), so I know it ran.

If you thought the ridiculous movement known as "birtherism," which holds that Barack Obama has not sufficiently proven his U.S. citizenship, was dead, then think again.

A person of normal intelligence might think that the whole kerfluffle had been put to rest by the long-demanded release of the President's  "long form" birth certificate, a document which I'll wager 99% of Americans never knew existed before the birthers asserted that that was the only proof they'd accept (except as it turns out, that didn't make them happy either). But if  you think that, you've forgotten one of the basic tenets of the right wing: if something fails miserably, then it's just because we didn't do it enough. If the economy tanked despite eight years of tax cuts under The President That Must Not Be Named, then the solution is clearly more tax cuts. If poorly regulated investment houses lost billions of their clients' money and/or failed to disclose risks to their clients, then clearly what we need is less regulation. And so on.

And so, apparently on the theory that that  birtherism failed because they just weren't crazy enough, it returns, this time in the presence of no less an august personage than The Honorable Ken Bennett,  Secretary of State of Arizona, a state which is apparently trying to supplant Florida as the nuttiest one in the Union. (I heard Dave Barry is thinking of relocating there because of the wealth of material). Mr. Bennett recently called up a deputy attorney general in Hawaii and requested "verification" of the President's birth record. After a few days (and, one imagines, a fair amount of eye-rolling), Deputy AG Jill Nagamine e-mailed Bennett back, apologizing for taking so long while pointedly noting that she had "been tied up with some legislative deadlines that take precedence." She then provided Bennett with the sort of links any half-bright person with access to Google could find, links to official websites that covered the whole issue. In short, Deputy Attorney General Nagamine told Bennett: "look, pal, I got a lot of stuff on my plate here, we've been over this a hundred times, look it up yourself." But politely.

Unable, apparently, to take a hint, Bennett e-mailed back, again requesting verification of the President's American birth. He did not, it should be noted, ask for a similar verification of the birth records of Millard Mitt Romney. Maybe Mitt had already given him one in person, since Bennett is the co-chair of Romney's campaign in Arizona. I'm sure that's  just a coincidence, right?

Nagamine's e-mailed response was a classic: she turned the tables and demanded verification that Bennett  was eligible to make the request. She also asked a slew of other questions, such as what list he was updating and  if he was asking any other candidate this information. He would also, of course, need to send verification of all of that.

Bennett sent back references to various Arizona statutes, which he claimed gave him the right.  Nagamine, displaying the sort of mulishness that would make a birther proud, said "nope, not good enough." (Politely). None of those cites, she said,  "establish the authority of the Secretary of State." But, she said, Hawaii  "stands willing to provide you with the verification you seek as soon as you are able to show that you are entitled to it."

 Later that day, Bennett went on AM talk radio and suggested that, if Hawaii didn't do as he asked, President Obama may not appear on the Arizona ballot this year. Meanwhile, just to add in an extra dollop of lunacy, Maricopa County Sherriff Joe Arpaio  dispatched a deputy from his "threat unit" to Hawaii's Department of Health on the taxpayer's dime. Arpaio refused to identify the "threat" or to explain exactly why a division of the state government of Hawaii should do anything for a county Sheriff's deputy from another state except show him the door. Politely,  of course.

Finally, Bennett gave up and  pronounced himself satisfied that the President was, indeed, born in the USA and would appear on the ballot. That is, until the next opportunity arises for the right wing lunatic fringe to drag that poor dead horse out of the barn and flog him again. Because in the land of Wingnuttia,  if a dead horse won't run, it's because you didn't beat him hard enough. 

27 Percenters: Still Crazy After All These Years

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There's been a lot of talk lately about the 1 percent versus the 99 percent. But there's another number that's at least as important in American political discourse these days. That number is the "crazification factor": 27 percent. 

The crazification factor was first noticed by, of all people, television writer John Rogers. He first wrote about it as far back as 2005 on his blog, titled "Kung Fu Monkey." He'd observed the 2004 Illinois Senate election, in which Barack Obama ran against Alan Keyes. Keyes, as you may remember, was trotted in from out of state a mere 86 days before the election after the campaign of the Republican nominee, Jack Ryan, imploded because of a bizarre sex scandal.
Keyes was clearly a sacrificial lamb, a guy no one expected to win; not only did he have no base in Illinois, but he was also, as Rogers put it, "plainly, obviously, completely crazy ... head-trauma crazy."Both candidates were black, so race wasn't a factor. And yet, Rogers noted, Keyes still got 27 percent of the vote in Illinois.

"They put party identification, personal prejudice, whatever, ahead of rational judgment," he said. "Even 5 percent of Democrats voted for him. That's crazy behavior. I think you have to assume a 27 percent crazification factor in any population."

It seemed like a joke to me at first. But then I noticed that that 27 percent figure kept cropping up more and more, in poll after poll. Give or take a couple of percentage points, pollsters often find about 27 percent of Americans who believe in things that are against their own self-interest or that are just mind-bendingly ridiculous.

For instance, in the darkest days of the 2008 economic meltdown, after the bankruptcy of Lehmann Brothers, the federal bailout of AIG and the collapse of Merrill Lynch, approval ratings for President George W. Bush were still at 27 percent, and hovered around that figure for quite some time before taking their final nosedive.

(Yes, He Who Must Not Be Named, and not Barack Obama, was president when the economy tanked, with his beloved tax cuts firmly in place, something you probably won't learn from watching Fox News.)

After Sarah Palin flamed out in spectacular fashion and took John McCain's presidential campaign into the ground with her, 27 percent of people surveyed in one poll still thought she would have made a good president.

A poll in January of this year on the subject of gridlock in Congress found that 60 percent of those polled believed that President Obama was trying to work with Republicans; 27 percent believed that Republicans in Congress were trying to do the same. In January, an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found that 27 percent of people still supported the tea party.
Give a couple of points margin for error, and crazification becomes more obvious. After the 2008 election, 26 percent of those polled believed that it had been stolen for Barack Obama by ACORN, even though there wasn't evidence of a single fraudulent vote actually being cast as a result of a few registration workers boosting their paychecks by signing up nonexistent voters. (No, Mickey Mouse did not try to vote, something you probably won't learn from listening to Rush Limbaugh.)

During the health care debate, when polled as to what kind of reform bill should pass, 26 percent of respondents told a CBS poll "no bill at all."

Note well: We aren't talking about people who simply don't agree with the administration. That figure is, of course, higher than 27 percent. We're talking about people who do so for reasons that are completely and incurably crazy, people wedded to "facts" that simply aren't true and opinions with no support in reality.

They're immune to persuasion. They're aided by right-wing media outlets that reject the idea of objective facts and objective proof; any evidence you care to provide that does not fit their narrative is, to them, the product of "bias" or an "agenda," no matter how unimpeachable the source. That's one of the hallmarks of true delusional thinking: It's immune to reality, and so are the 27 percenters.

So what can you do? Well, if you're one of those people who roll their eyes at the idea that President Obama is going to send federal agents to check on your light bulbs, or who shake your heads in disbelief when people, after all this time, still put up billboards and bumper stickers asking "Where's the Birth Certificate?" - then you need to get out and vote.

Because the crazies surely will.

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