July 5, 2008
CNET visits the JSC
CNET's Road Trip 2008 blog visits the Johnson Space Center in the Clear Lake area of Houston (photos here). The article and accompanying photos are a good primer for the always interesting visit to the JSC.
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May 25, 2008
Flying high
Check out what Michel Fournier is doing for fun today.
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April 15, 2008
An eternal optimist
Don't tell Ray Kurzweil that we ought to be all gloomy about the prospects for mankind. This WaPo op-ed reflects that he is downright bullish:
MIT was so advanced in 1965 (the year I entered as a freshman) that it actually had a computer. Housed in its own building, it cost $11 million (in today's dollars) and was shared by all students and faculty. Four decades later, the computer in your cellphone is a million times smaller, a million times less expensive and a thousand times more powerful. That's a billion-fold increase in the amount of computation you can buy per dollar.
Yet as powerful as information technology is today, we will make another billion-fold increase in capability (for the same cost) over the next 25 years. That's because information technology builds on itself -- we are continually using the latest tools to create the next so they grow in capability at an exponential rate. This doesn't just mean snazzier cellphones. It means that change will rock every aspect of our world. The exponential growth in computing speed will unlock a solution to global warming, unmask the secret to longer life and solve myriad other worldly conundrums. [. . .]
Take energy. Today, 70 percent of it comes from fossil fuels, a 19th-century technology. But if we could capture just one ten-thousandth of the sunlight that falls on Earth, we could meet 100 percent of the world's energy needs using this renewable and environmentally friendly source. We can't do that now because solar panels rely on old technology, making them expensive, inefficient, heavy and hard to install. But a new generation of panels based on nanotechnology (which manipulates matter at the level of molecules) is starting to overcome these obstacles. The tipping point at which energy from solar panels will actually be less expensive than fossil fuels is only a few years away. The power we are generating from solar is doubling every two years; at that rate, it will be able to meet all our energy needs within 20 years.
I just thought I'd toss in that third paragraph for those in the oil and gas industry that believe that a period like the mid-to-late 1980's can't happen again. Meanwhile, light, sweet crude oil futures for May delivery settled yesterday at $111.76, a new record, on the New York Mercantile Exchange.
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February 21, 2008
Hope for a hog solution?
Texas' feral hog problem has stymied many a smart scientist over the years, but it appears that the Aggies may have discovered a possible solution(H/T: Craig Malisow)
If you're a land owner and animals such as coyotes or wild pigs are driving you hog wild, help may soon be on the way to control their numbers in a humane way - in the form of a birth control pill for animals being developed at Texas A and M University's College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences. The concept would be to get it to wild animals through baited food, researchers say. [. . .]n Texas, feral hogs have become a severe nuisance to farmers and ranchers, and the state has an estimated 3-4 million feral hogs, by far the most in the country.
Gig'em Ags!
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September 12, 2006
Thinking about global climate change
Andrew Dessler is an associate professor in the Texas A&M University Department of Atmospheric Sciences. A couple of months ago, I came across his interesting new blog that focuses on the science and politics of climate change. In this Chronicle article, the Chronicle's science reporter, Eric Berger, interviews Professor Dessler, who makes the following common sense observation about the climate change debate:
[T]here are a lot of really legitimate uncertainties [about global climate change] that people don't seem to argue about. It's a little bit disappointing that people are still arguing over whether the Earth is round or not. Whether humans are causing the increase in CO2 is really like arguing whether the Earth is round. We know it is. There's no question. We've got lots of evidence. The debate isn't really where it should be at this point: We need to view climate change as a risk. It's a somewhat uncertain risk, but it's a risk nonetheless. The question really becomes, as a policy, how do we address this risk?
Eric has a podcast of his entire interview with Professor Dessler over at his SciGuy blog.
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June 18, 2005
New Chron blog reports on medical research funds
The Houston Chronicle has added another blog -- Eric Berger's SciGuy -- to its impressive and expanding Chronicle bloglist that Chronicle tech writer Dwight Silverman has spearheaded. Kudos to Dwight and the Chronicle editors for being pioneers in this emerging method of delivering their product to customers.
In this post, Mr. Berger notes the National Institutes of Health annual ranking of U.S. medical schools by the amount of research funding, which is a key indicator of a medical school faculty's research capabilities. Here is a listing of medical schools of local interest:
1. John Hopkins University, Baltimore, Md., $449 million
11. Baylor College of Medicine, $248 million
21. UT Southwestern Med. Center, Dallas, $172 million
35. Cornell Univ. Medical School (Methodist Hospital) $124 million
39. UT Medical Branch at Galveston, $104 million
48. UT Health Science Center at San Antonio, $80 million
64. UT Health Science Center at Houston, $51 million
In addition, although not a medical school, UT's M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in the Texas Medical Center generated another $145 million in research last year. Consequently, as Mr. Berger notes, the institutions in the Texas Medical Center pump almost half a billion of research funds into the local economy.
By the way, the NIH list dovetails nicely with the ranking of university endowments that was noted in this earlier post. Given the size of Baylor Medical School's endowment and annual research funding, one has to respect the risk that Baylor took in ending its longtime partnership with the even better-endowed Methodist Hospital ($2.3 billion endowment). Hopefully, the competition between the two institutions for research funds will enhance the amount and quality of research being performed at the Texas Medical Center.
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June 13, 2005
NASA shakeup continues
As noted in this earlier post, new NASA chief administrator Michael D. Griffin is shaking things up at the space agency. This Washington Post article reports on Mr. Griffin's latest moves, which include the building of a less political and more scientifically-oriented management team to implement the initiative to return humans to the moon by 2020 and eventually send them to Mars. One particularly interesting part of the article is the following:
"[Mr. Griffin] wanted to be NASA administrator for a long time and has given a lot of thought to what has been done well or badly," one congressional source said. "Because of that, he is not going to take a year or two to get to know the organization."Instead, the sources said, he expressed dismay that NASA over the past several years had put a lot of people in top management positions because of what one source described as "political connections or bureaucratic gamesmanship -- not merit."
Several sources spoke of a corps of younger scientists and engineers, including Griffin, who had been groomed in the 1970s and 1980s as NASA's next generation of leaders only to be shoved aside during the past 15 years. They said Griffin hopes to bring them back.
"The people around him will be quite outstanding," one source said. "The philosophy is that good people attract outstanding people. This is going to be a very high-intensity environment, and NASA needs experienced, outstanding people."
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May 9, 2005
New NASA chief is shaking things up
This Washington Post article reports on new NASA Administrator Michael D. Griffin's ambitious plan to shave four years off the timetable for building a next-generation spaceship to replace the obsolescent space shuttle. Dr. Griffin's accelerated plan is to launch the new spaceship by 2010.
As noted in this previous post, Dr. Griffin faces entrenched opposition within the federal government and from government contractors to his efforts to revitalize NASA. This is story worth following closely, for its outcome will have a dramatic impact on the future of U.S. spaceflight, NASA, and the local Houston economy.
Update: Aerospace engineer Rand Simberg comments on Mr. Griffin's initiatives in this TCS piece.
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March 24, 2005
The Schiavo case
A number of friends have asked me why I have not blogged on the Terri Schiavo case, to which I have stolen Eugene Volokh's reply that "I know nothing about the Schiavo matter, and -- despite that -- have no opinion."
As we have seen with the Enron case, when a case becomes as sensationalized in the MSM as the Schiavo case has over the past several weeks, battle lines get drawn politically, increasingly shrill views compete for the public's limited attention, and wise perspectives tend to get lost in the shuffle. Bloggers can find thoughtful views -- such as those of Professors Bainbridge and Ribstein -- but, let's face it, the vast majority of the public do not read blogs.
At any rate, I wanted to pass along a couple of informative articles on the Schiavo case that will appear in next month's New England Journal of Medicine. Timothy Quill, M.D. is a nationally-recognized expert in palliative care and end-of-life issues who is a professor of medicine, psychiatry, and medical humanities at the University of Rochester, School of Medicine and Dentistry. In this article, Dr. Quill dispassionately reviews what has occurred in the Schiavo case, and then makes the following observation:
In considering this profound decision, the central issue is not what family members would want for themselves or what they want for their incapacitated loved one, but rather what the patient would want for himself or herself. The New Jersey Supreme Court that decided the case of Karen Ann Quinlan got the question of substituted judgment right:If the patient could wake up for 15 minutes and understand his or her condition fully, and then had to return to it, what would he or she tell you to do?If the data about the patient’s wishes are not clear, then in the absence of public policy or family consensus, we should err on the side of continued treatment even in cases of a persistent vegetative state in which there is no hope of recovery. But if the evidence is clear, as the courts have found in the case of Terri Schiavo, then enforcing life-prolonging treatment against what is agreed to be the patient’s will is both unethical and illegal.
In the same issue, George P. Annas, J.D., the Edward R. Utley Professor and Chair Department of Health Law, Bioethics & Human Rights at Boston University School of Public Health, pens this article in which he reviews the legal precedent relating to the Schiavo case and criticizes Congress for ignoring it. In so doing, Professor Annas observes the following:
There is (and should be) no special law regarding the refusal of treatment that is tailored to specific diseases or prognoses, and the persistent vegetative state is no exception. "Erring on the side of life" in this context often results in violating a person’s body and human dignity in a way few would want for themselves. In such situations, erring on the side of liberty — specifically, the patient’s right to decide on treatment — is more consistent with American values and our constitutional traditions.
Hat tip to the HealthLawProf blog for the links to these articles.
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March 22, 2005
Rocket Boy disses the Space Shuttle program
Homer Hickam, the former NASA engineer and author whose brilliant October Sky was made into one of the best family films of the past decade, urges President Bush to discontinue the obsolescent Space Shuttle program in this devastating Wall Street Journal op-ed ($), in which he observes:
I left NASA in 1998 to pursue a writing career. I'm glad I did, because I could no longer stand to work on the Space Shuttle: 24 years after it first flew, what was once a magnificent example of engineering has become an old and dangerous contraption. It has killed 14 people and will probably kill more if it continues to be launched. It has also wasted a generation of engineers trying to keep it flying on schedule and safe. Frankly, that's just not possible and most NASA engineers in the trenches know it. Einstein reputedly defined insanity as repeating the same behavior and expecting different results. The Shuttle program is a prime example of this.
Mr. Hickam describes a phenomena of big governmental agencies that Robert Coram examined in regard to the Defense Department in Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War -- i.e., the tendency of power elites in governmental agencies to perpetuate their pet projects at the expense of progress and innovation. Secretary Rumsfeld is confronting much the same inertia in the Defense Department as he attempts to transform America's military, a topic that is addressed in these earlier posts. This is not a story that the MSM covers to any meaningful degree, but it remains one of the most important to America's survival as a superpower.
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February 27, 2005
Tsunami pictures from the beach
John and Jackie Knill of Vancouver, British Columbia were killed in Khao Lak, Thailand when the December 26, 2004 tsunami struck the resort at which they were vacationing. Afterward, their digital camera was found, and though the camera was destroyed, the photos of the oncoming tsunami on the camera's memory card were salvaged. Check out these spectacular photos.
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December 11, 2004
A man with "the Right Stuff"
Earlier this week, Astronaut John Young resigned from NASA. I was dismayed with the short shrift that the local newspaper gave to the retirement of this legend in spaceflight -- indeed, there is not even a mention of Mr. Young on the Chronicle's spaceflight section.
But make no mistake about it, John Young is an American hero. Mr. Young served as a NASA astronaut for an incredible 42-year career, which included spending more than 800 hours in space. His unprecedented career began with the first manned flight of the Gemini program in 1965, included two Apollo moon missions, and concluded with two flights on the space shuttle, including its first flight. John Young is the longest serving astronaut of them all.
Mr Young was a US Navy test pilot when he signed up for the second astronaut class in 1962. His first mission was to pilot the first manned voyage of the Gemini program -- Gemini 3 -- which was the first American space flight to have more than one astronaut on board. In 1966, Mr. Young commanded Gemini 10, which performed the first dual rendezvous procedures during a single mission.
Three years later, and two months before Neal Armstrong set foot on the Moon, Mr Young performed the test mission to the Moon in Apollo 10, in which he orbited the Moon in the command module. He subsequently returned to the Moon in 1972 as commander of Apollo 16 in which he piloted the lunar module to its perfect landing and drove a mooncraft 16 miles across the surface of the Moon. Including the liftoff from the Moon's surface, Mr. Young was the the first man to blast into space seven times.
In 1981, Mr. Young piloted the space shuttle�s inaugural flight and guided the Columbia to a perfect runway landing, which was also a first. Two years later, Mr. Young commanded the Columbia in his sixth and final mission. He is also the only astronaut to pilot four different kinds of spacecraft.
And although a NASA lifer, Mr. Young never compromised his aviator principles for his position in the agency. In 1987, he was abruptly removed as NASA's chief astronaut when he accused NASA's chiefs of putting "launch schedule pressure" ahead of safety in the wake of the Challenger accident. His criticism was later vindicated by the report of the Presidential Commission that investigated the Challenger accident.
Just like the late astronaut Gordon Cooper and his fellow Mercury astronauts, John Young has "the Right Stuff." Here's hoping for a long and fulfilling retirement for this local Houston and American hero.
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December 7, 2004
DeLay delivers for NASA
This Washington Post article reports on how Houston congressman and House Majority Leader Tom DeLay secured NASA's $16.2 billion portion of the $388 federal omnibus spending bill that Congress passed on November 20:
NASA was identified as a major sticking point when Senate and House conferees sat down to craft the final version of the omnibus spending bill near midnight Nov. 19, but Bolten, Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) and DeLay were holding out for more money.The negotiators appeared to agree on $15.9 billion for NASA, but that wasn't good enough, DeLay said later at the Space Center. "The main responsibility of the majority leader is to set the agenda for the House floor. I wouldn't schedule the bill until NASA was taken care of," he said.
And it was.
"Once you get into an omnibus bill, the leadership takes over, and you need to have an advocate in that circle," Walsh said. DeLay "was getting me more allocation every time he stepped up to the plate. He made the difference."
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November 18, 2004
The 2004 Scientific American 50 Award
You can review them here.
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November 17, 2004
Scramjet rocks
Following on these earlier posts here and here, this Washington Post article reports on yesterday's test of the unmanned X-43A "scramjet" that broke the aircraft speed record for the second time this year. The X-43A flew at nearly 10 times the speed of sound as scientists continue their quest for "hypersonic" flight.
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November 12, 2004
Interesting developments in aviation
This BBC News article describes something that Houston's Katy Freeway commuters would support enthusiastically:
Commuters could soon be taking flying taxis to work instead of waiting in line for a street cab, experts suggest. British developers Avcen say Jetpods would enable quick, quiet and cheap travel to and from major cities. The futuristic machines will undergo proof-of-concept flight tests in 2006 and could be ready for action by 2010.As well as taxis, which would use a network of specially-built mini runways, there are military, medical and personal jet versions as well.
London-based Avcen say Jetpods would be able to travel the 24 miles from Woking, Surrey, to central London in just four minutes.
And because it could make so many trips, fares for a journey from Heathrow to central London could cost about £40 or £50.
Meanwhile, this Washington Post article reviews ongoing research into scramjet technology, which is already achieving incredible speed levels:
Next week, NASA plans to break the aircraft speed record for the second time in 7 1/2 months by flying its rocket-assisted X-43A scramjet craft 110,000 feet above the Pacific Ocean at speeds close to Mach 10 -- about 7,200 mph, or 10 times the speed of sound.The flight will last perhaps 10 seconds and end with the pilotless aircraft plunging to a watery grave 850 miles off the California coast. But even if the X-43A doesn't set the record, it has already proved that the 40-year-old dream of "hypersonic" flight -- using air-breathing engines to reach speeds above Mach 5 (3,800 mph) -- has become reality.
Under NASA's $250 million Hyper-X program, engineers at Langley Research Center here and the Dryden Flight Research Center in Edwards, Calif., designed and built three aluminum scramjet aircraft, each one 12 feet long and weighing about 2,800 pounds. . .[The second scamjet flight] on March 24, reached Mach 6.83 (5,200 mph), shattering the world speed record for air-breathing, non-rocket aircraft, previously held by a jet-powered missile. The highest speeds by manned aircraft were achieved by SR-71, the U.S. spy plane known as the "Blackbird," capable of flying in excess of Mach 3 (2,300 mph).
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October 5, 2004
R.I.P., Gordo Cooper
Gordon Cooper, one of the original Mercury Space Program's astronauts, died of natural causes on Monday at his home in Ventura, California at the age of 77.
Mr. Cooper's death leaves just three of the original seven Mercury astronauts still living -- John Glenn, the former senator from Ohio, Walter M. ("Wally")Schirra, and M. Scott Carpenter. Virgil I. ("Gus") Grissom was one of three astronauts killed in a 1967 fire inside an Apollo capsule on the launching pad, and Donald K. ("Deke") Slayton and Alan B. Shepard died of natural causes several years ago.
As the pilot of the last Mercury mission, Mr. Cooper was the last American astronaut to fly alone in space. His mission on May 15-16, 1963 covered 34 hours and 20 minutes, which was more than all five of the previous Mercury flights combined. When the automatic system that was supposed to control the descent of his Mercury capsule failed, Mr. Cooper took control manually and made a bull's-eye landing just 7,000 yards from aircraft carrier that picked up the Mercury capsules.
Mr. Cooper subsequently flew a long mission in the Gemini Space Program in which he demonstrated that a trip to the moon was feasible. Mr. Cooper's second and last trip into space was on Gemini 5, a two-man, eight-day mission in August 1965 that set a space endurance record of over 190 hours.
Among the many firsts in spaceflight that Mr. Cooper achieved was that he was the first person to sleep in space (seven and a half hours like a log, he reported). He was also the first astronaut to fly twice, and the first American to be televised from space.
Mr. Cooper was also immortalized in film by former Houstonian Dennis Quaid's excellent portrayal of him in the wonderful 1983 film of Tom Wolfe's equally superb book, "The Right Stuff." For anyone who grew up during the early days of the American space program, "The Right Stuff" is a must see. I recently watched it again with one of my teenage sons, and we thoroughly enjoyed watching how the original astronauts took enormous risks to do something that is considered commonplace by many in my son's generation. I also enjoyed sharing with him many of the stories of the original Mercury astronauts that are now an essential part of Houston folklore.
Rest in peace, Gordo Cooper.
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August 5, 2004
George Mitchell funds A&M and UT telescope project
On the heels of this earlier contribution to the University of Texas Medical School, Houston businessman and philanthropist George Mitchell has made a $1.25 million gift to provide initial funding for a massive project involving both UT and Texas A&M University that has a goal of building the world's largest telescope on the Andes Mountains in Chile by 2015. If successful, the $400 million Giant Magellan Telescope is expected to collect 70 times more light than NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and could produce images that are 10 times sharper.
The telescope's six large mirrors will surround a seventh central mirror, all on a single mounting, and its light-collecting area would be twice the diameter of today's largest telescopes. The world's two largest optical telescopes — each 33 feet in diameter — operate at the W.M. Keck Observatory on the summit of Hawaii's dormant Mauna Kea volcano.
Mr. Mitchell donated the money to Texas A&M University, which is his alma mater, and The University of Texas at Austin -- which runs the McDonald Observatory in the Davis Mountains of far West Texas, which is the third largest telescope in the world -- will match Mr. Mitchell's contribution over the next two years. Other partners in the project are the Carnegie Institution of Washington, Harvard University, the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Arizona and the University of Michigan.
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May 18, 2004
Revenge of the "C" students
In this Wall Street Journal ($) op-ed, novelist Herman Wouk addresses the serious implications arising from the fact that governmental funding of science research in America has become simply another political football. Mr. Wouk focuses on the poor political decisions that undermined the Texas Supercollider Project back in the early 1990's:
Back in 1993, Congress abruptly killed the largest basic science project of all time, the Superconducting Super Collider in Texas. With three billion dollars already spent, and the project pretty much on time and on budget, our lawmakers cut off all funding, and voted another billion just to shut the project down. This bizarre abort sent a shock wave through the scientific world which has never entirely subsided. The event remains in controversy, but one undeniable outcome has been the diminished international repute of American science.The Superconducting Super Collider would have been an oval tunnel 54 miles around, where some 10,000 magnets cooled by liquid helium would accelerate protons to collide almost at the speed of light, and thus to wrest from the subatomic debris a prime secret of nature: the Higgs boson, dubbed by one Nobel laureate the "God Particle," a possible key to the final understanding of the universe. Ronald Reagan approved the project, George Bush senior sustained it, and it died under Bill Clinton. Today a powerful super collider in Geneva is being upgraded by a consortium of European physicists, intent on beating the world to the Higgs boson, with the Americans out of the picture.
* * *
Nevertheless, even Benjamin Franklin, a founding father and a one-man interface of science and politics, could not have foreseen how this loose play in American governance might one day affect world destiny, nor how the pace of scientific advancement would lethally accelerate in times to come. It is a long reach from the capture of a lightning spark in a Leyden jar in Philadelphia, to the dropping of a uranium bomb on Japan. Yet the same intellectual curiosity that moved Franklin to risk electrocution from the clouds motivated the British physicist James Chadwick to discover the neutron, and so to unlock the horrific energy in the atomic nucleus. And it motivated thousands of high-energy physicists to venture their careers and years of their lives on the Superconducting Super Collider, only to be stranded by Congress, high, dry and unemployed at a vast abandoned hole in Texas.These scientists had been the darlings of Congressional budgeting ever since the end of World War II, when they delivered into President Truman's hands a weapon new in human history. The president, an artilleryman in World War I, said of the bomb, "It was a bigger piece of artillery, so I used it." It did stop the war at once, to be sure. The historical debate about his decision may never end, but the triumph of particle physics was brilliant, and the rise in its annual funding spectacular, until the ax rudely fell. One SSC physicist bitterly exclaimed on getting the word, "It's the revenge of the C students." A more philosophical colleague observed: "Well, our 50-year ride on the bomb is over."
And then, with the wisdom of his almost 90 years, Mr. Wouk makes an insightful observation for us to ponder:
I go through the days with good cheer and jokes, aware of dark threats looming ahead for our little global home, probably beyond my time, but close enough. The prime task of today's politicians, after getting themselves elected and re-elected, is to deal open-eyed and intelligently with those threats in the light of the best science. We who elect them bear the ultimate, inescapable responsibility to choose well.
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April 27, 2004
The Bush Administration and scientific research
Randall Parker over at FuturePundit has this excellent post that analyzes the Bush Administration's proposed funding of research in the 2005 budget, to which he concludes:
The Bush Administation's plans for research and development spending are short-sighted. Scientific advances can solve problems in ways that pay back orders of magnitude more than the original research will cost to fund. Budget deficits and huge unfunded liabilities for those who are going to become elderly in the coming decades combined with the threat of terrorism and the greater global competition for a limited supply of oil call for mammoth attempts to research and innovate our way to solutions.
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April 26, 2004
St. Augustine was right
Randall Parker over at FuturePundit points to an interesting Erin Anderssen and Anne McIlroy article in the Canadian Globe And Mail that summarizes recent research on child development and human violence. They report that Richard Tremblay has found that two year old babies are more physically aggressive than teenagers or adults but are simply too uncoordinated to do much damage to others:
Consequently, are human beings born pure, as Rousseau argued, and tainted by the world around them? Or do babies arrive bad, as St. Augustine wrote, and learn, for their own good, how to behave in society?Richard Tremblay, an affable researcher at the University of Montreal who is considered one of the world leaders in aggression studies, sides with St. Augustine, whom he is fond of quoting.
Dr. Tremblay has thousands of research subjects, many studied over decades, to back him up: Aggressive behaviour, except in the rarest circumstances, is not acquired from life experience. It is a remnant of our evolutionary struggle to survive, a force we learn, with time and careful teaching, to master. And as if by some ideal plan, human beings are at their worst when they are at their weakest.
St. Augustine was obviously much closer to the truth.
Read the entire post, as Mr. Parker includes a number of interesting links relating to the subject of this research. Hat tip to Tyler Cowan at Marginal Revolutions for the link.
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April 4, 2004
Nuclear winter
In this absolutely fascinating piece of photographic story telling, a Russian woman named Elana rides into the Chernobyl region of Russia and reports on what she finds. Don't miss this. Hat tip to Online Jounalismus via BuzzMachine for the link to this thought-provoking story.
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Professor Balkin on environmental policy
In this post, Professor Balkin points to this NY Times article regarding the Bush Administration's use of administrative power to restructure over thirty years of federal environmental policy. Professor Balkin's post insightfully points out how the Republicans' control of the executive and legislative branches of the federal government have allowed it to reshape a generation of federal environmental policy, and it is not at all clear that such restructuring was either necessary or in the public interest.
In one of the more important parts of Ron Suskind's "The Price of Loyalty," former Bush Administration Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill describes how the Bush Administration undermined the common sense environmental policies that former EPA administrator, Christine Todd Whitman was advocating that the administration follow in 2001. Mr. O'Neill used this incident as an example of his primary criticism of the Administration, which is its lack of policy analysis before establishing governmental policy.
As noted several times in this blog, I am generally supportive of the Bush Administration's handling of the war against radical Islamic fascists. However, I continue to maintain that the Administration's Achille's heel is its lackluster performance on a variety of domestic issues, such as health care finance, tax policy, and environmental policy. If President Bush loses this November, my bet is that its performance on these issues will be the primary reason for the defeat.
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March 27, 2004
Scramjets?
This is a cool research project. Update: the test was a success!
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