Description: The opening of Congress for debate.

Source: Paine, Albert Bigelow Th. Nast: His Period and His Pictures (New York, NY: The Macmillan Company, 1904) [url]

This will be relevant 100 years from now as well, but with lasers.

In light of a small conversation on NASA, here are some thoughts by Daniel Sarewitz,

In fiscal 2012, NASA spent on the order of $10 billion on space exploration. Perhaps 70 percent of that total was devoted to human spaceflight, both to operate existing facilities like the International Space Station (which alone got $2.8 billion), and to plan future programs. The rest of the budget went to unmanned (a word that, in other contexts means emasculated or castrated) exploration—space based telescopes, robots on Mars, solar probes, and the like. Are we spending enough or too much on space exploration? Is the balance between human and unmanned appropriate? Scientists, politicians, and interested citizens have been arguing those questions for decades.

Besides the direct beneficiaries of NASA’s programs—engineers, scientists, government administrators, aerospace contractors, and others—there are apparently many Americans who view space exploration as a worthy, even noble, goal of humanity. At one extreme are those who see planetary exploration and even colonization as humanity’s manifest destiny. At another are more economically or environmentally minded people who see space exploration as providing access to a potentially unlimited source of natural resources (especially certain strategically important metals found in asteroids), or to future habitats for a species that is ruining its home planet. A third perspective views space exploration as intrinsically worthwhile, for intellectual, aesthetic, or even spiritual reasons.

All of these are valid, of course, but they are also largely post-hoc rationales for a space program originally justified and funded during the height of the Cold War for military and geopolitical reasons. Landing on the moon was cool, but if we hadn’t been trying to show the Soviets—and the world—that the U.S. was truly the Master of the Universe, then one wonders if the nation would have been so enthusiastic about spending on the order of $170 billion (inflation-adjusted 2005 dollars) for the Apollo project—or about three times today’s entire annual government investment for all non-defense science and technology.

Since Apollo, successive major NASA initiatives (especially the space shuttle and the space station) have been justified by the government as “the next logical step” in building humanity’s capacity to explore space. One might ask “logical step toward what?”, especially given that our reach into space, at least through human spaceflight, has contracted rather than grown in the four decades since a man last hopped on the moon. To a considerable extent, today’s national space program needs to be understood not as a vision for the exploration of the unknown, but as a relict of the budgetary, bureaucratic, and political momentum created by the initial investment in Apollo, an investment made for reasons that have almost entirely disappeared in the intervening years.

In a world that doesn’t exist, one might restart the space program from the ground up, building an entirely new federal program—one that’s lean, risk-seeking, efficient, and not ham-strung by incumbent interests that depend on NASA’s current organization of programs, contractors, and political patrons. One might canvass the interested public to get a sense of what vision of space exploration was most exciting to a wide variety of citizens, what they’d be willing to pay for it, and where the money would come from. Higher taxes on the rich? Cuts to Medicare? Even as an act of imagination, it’s hard to see how the nation’s space exploration program can possibly escape from the political and technological inertia of its Cold War origins.

Image source: Edwin J. Houston, The Elements of Physical Geography, for the use of Schools, Academies, and Colleges. (Philadelphia: Eldredge & Brother, 1891) 10 [url]

From kohenari:

Just when supporters of a strong military were celebrating their success with a petition to urge the Obama administration to begin building a small moon with the capacity to destroy an entire planet, Gregory Koger returns to the Monkey Cage blog to urge against both wasteful government spending and the potential destruction of trillions of lives.

He is now urging people to sign a new petition to ban the development or deployment of a Death Star or Death Star-esque weapon. Thus far, the petition looks to be as unsuccessful as the original pro-Death Star petition was successful.

Its only signatory is of its creator, one Luke S.

Honestly, if this upstart Luke S. can’t even get noted galactic pacificists and anti-interventionists like Han S., Lando C., Ron P., and Chewbacca W. to sign on, what chance does he think he’s got against a military industrial complex that relishes both a challenge and the chance to push back against the claim that a weapon could ever be too expensive?

But what about the government jobs it can create for independent contractors? [from the film Clerks, “Death Star Politics”]

It’s worth considering, at least.

From guardiancomment:

The world did not end this year, as some people thought it would following a Mayan prophecy (well, at least one interpretation of it), but it seems pretty certain that next year is going to be tougher than this one.

• We are entering 2013 as the Republican hardliners in the United States Congress does its utmost to weaken the federal government, using an anachronistic law on federal debt ceiling. Until the Republicans started abusing it recently, the law had been defunct in all but name. Since its enactment in 1917, the ceiling has been raised nearly a hundred times, as a ceiling set in nominal monetary terms becomes quickly obsolete in an ever-growing economy with inflation  (…)

• Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, the eurozone is entering a make or break year, with the social fabric of the periphery countries stretched to the limit. With its GDP 20% lower than in 2008, with 25% unemployment rate and with the wages of most of those still in work down by 40% to 50%, it is a real touch and go whether the current Greek government can survive another round of austerity. (…)

• As for the UK, 2013 may become the year when it sets a dubious world record of having an unprecedented “triple-dip recession”. Even if that is avoided, with high unemployment, real wages that are at best stagnant and swingeing welfare cuts, many people will struggle to make ends meet (…)

• Things look brighter in the Asian countries, with their economies growing much faster and with even Japan ready to make a dash for growth through more relaxed monetary and fiscal policies. However, they – especially the two giants of China and India – have their own shares of social tension to manage.

• Growth is slowing down in China. It is estimated to have grown by 7.5% in 2012, well below the usual rate of 9% to 10%. Some forecast that its growth rate will pick up again to above 8% in 2013, but others believe it will fall below 7%. Given the country’s heavy reliance on exports to the US and the European Union, the more pessimistic scenario seems likely, as things don’t look very good in those economies. With slower economic growth it will become more difficult to manage the social tension that has been bubbling up thanks to runaway inequality and high levels of corruption.

• Management of social tension will be an even bigger challenge for India. Its economic growth has significantly slowed down since 2010, and few predict a major reversal of the trend in 2013. Add to this economic difficulty deepening economic, religious and cultural divisions, and you have a heady mixture, as we see in the social unrest following the recent gang rape and death of a young medical student.

Ha-Joon Chang: We avoided the apocalypse – but 2013 will be no picnic

Illustration: Andrzej Krauze

From kohenari:

ThinkProgress compiled the ten most unbelievable quotes from Wayne LaPierre’s astonishing NRA press conference, which was the first official word from the gun-loving lobby since last Friday’s mass shooting in a Connecticut elementary school:

1) Gun-free schools zones “tell every insane killer in America that schools are their safest place to inflict maximum mayhem with minimum risk.”

2) “There exists in this country a callous, corrupt and corrupting shadow industry that sells, and sows, violence against its own people.

3) “[V]iolent crime is increasing again for the first time in 19 years! Add another hurricane, terrorist attack or some other natural or man-made disaster, and you’ve got a recipe for a national nightmare of violence and victimization.”

4) “We need to have every single school in America immediately deploy a protection program proven to work —and by that I mean armed security.”

5) “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. Would you rather have your 911 call bring a good guy with a gun from a mile away … or a minute away?”

6) “And throughout it all, too many in our national media … their corporate owners … and their stockholders … act as silent enablers, if not complicit co-conspirators.”

7) “Then there’s the blood-soaked slasher films like ‘American Psycho’ and ‘Natural Born Killers’ that are aired like propaganda loops on Splatterdays and every day, and a thousand music videos that portray life as a joke and murder as a way of life.”

8) “In a race to the bottom, media conglomerates compete with one another to shock, violate and offend every standard of civilized society by bringing an ever-more-toxic mix of reckless behavior and criminal cruelty into our homes — every minute of every day of every month of every year.”

9) “Through vicious, violent video games with names like Bulletstorm, Grand Theft Auto, Mortal Kombat and Splatterhouse. And here’s one: it’s called Kindergarten Killers. It’s been online for 10 years. How come my research department could find it and all of yours either couldn’t or didn’t want anyone to know you had found it?”

10) “Isn’t fantasizing about killing people as a way to get your kicks really the filthiest form of pornography?”

My personal favorite — which is flying around the internet this morning — is, “This is the beginning of a serious conversation. We won’t be taking any questions.”

David Frum’s recent tweet captures my feelings on America’s love affair with guns nicely:

The NRA loves to claim that it’s the “oldest civil rights organization in the United States”, just think about how ridiculous that seems for a second.