Miscellaneous political stuff

I agree with this guy 100%.  THIS country should be able to continue into the future with space exploration as well as take of the needs of its citizens.  Very few things in life are an either/or situation.  This isn’t one of them.

From the Washington Post…

“Opinion: The billionaires’ space efforts may seem tone-deaf, but they’re important milestones”

Opinion by Miles O'Brien
July 19, 2021|Updated today at 12:00 p.m. EDT

Miles O’Brien is the science correspondent for the PBS NewsHour and an aerospace analyst for CNN.

“On Tuesday, Amazon founder (and Post owner) Jeff Bezos plans to travel into space on his own rocket. He follows Richard Branson, who on July 11 became the first owner of a privately built spacecraft to take it for a suborbital ride.

The idea of billionaires reaching deep in their pockets to fund their own gold-plated bungee jumps may seem frivolous and tone-deaf. Given the aching wealth disparities and environmental catastrophes confronting the spaceship we all share — Earth — it’s hard to stomach such a narcissistic spectacle.

If we don't solve those existential problems, nothing else really matters. But I don’t believe we face a choice of either solving what ails our planet or moving beyond it. We can — and must — do both.

My enthusiasm for civilians in space predates the recent billionaires’ race. For four years starting in 1999, I worked diligently, along with my bosses at CNN, to secure a seat on a space shuttle for a mission to the International Space Station. Then-NASA Administrator Sean O’Keefe and his team had become convinced that the idea of “embedding” a journalist on the shuttle crew — from training to touchdown — would be an effective way to engage the public in the agency’s mission. We had planned to publicly announce it all in early 2003, a few weeks after the space shuttle Columbia arrived home safe and sound.

So when I reported for duty at CNN Center in Atlanta in the early hours of Feb. 1, 2003, I had a lot on my mind. I was the network’s space correspondent, and on that morning the shuttle Columbia and its crew of seven were due to land in Florida at 9:16 a.m. EST. At the anchor desk, my attention was divided between other news of the morning and the NASA Television audio feed I had dialed up on my cellphone. When I heard astronaut Charlie Hobaugh unsuccessfully trying to reach Columbia for a “comm check,” I knew that the crew was lost.

During a commercial break, after it became clear that the shuttle had broken up upon reentry, I began sobbing. Mostly I was crying for the loss of my astronaut friends and the lifelong repercussions for their families. But I wouldn’t be honest if I didn’t admit that I thought about myself and my family. Had my pursuit of this goal really been fair to my children? Regardless, I knew instantly all my efforts to fly were moot — quixotic. I knew the shuttle program was on a short path to retirement. So, too, any chance of a reporter hitching a ride.

Less than two years later, I was in Mojave, Calif., covering an event that changed my outlook. On Oct. 4, 2004, a tiny craft called SpaceShipOne won the $10 million Ansari X Prize by demonstrating it could reach the edge of space twice in as many weeks. This dramatically reduced the time NASA normally needed to launch, recover, refit and relaunch any space vehicle in its inventory. A successor to that vehicle, SpaceShipTwo, was the craft that safely lofted Branson into the record books last week.

Another billionaire with stars in his eyes, Elon Musk, traveled to New Mexico to see Branson fly. His rocket company, SpaceX, is in a whole different league. His hardware puts a payload into orbit — orders of magnitude more complicated than a suborbital hop. So far, he has flown 10 astronauts to the International Space Station under contract to NASA. The company plans to launch the first private orbital flight this fall. Musk has not given himself a ticket to ride on his own rocket yet, but he has apparently bought his way onto the waiting list for a ride on Branson’s.

While NASA (and its Pasadena, Calif.-based Jet Propulsion Lab) are unmatched at unmanned space probes, the agency’s record for manned missions has lagged, to say the least. For decades, NASA has acted like that guy bragging in a bar about winning a state championship 50 years ago. You may not love them, but the billionaires behind these private-sector efforts have both the resources and the impatience with government bureaucracy to put Americans back in space — where they belong.

They’ll help the rest of humanity along the way. Solar power can be generated in orbit with much greater efficiency and beamed back to Earth, and asteroids can be mined for minerals. We need to find cheaper, faster ways to launch sensors into space to help climate scientists quantify the calamity back home.

And who knows what else? It’s worth remembering the X Prize was modeled after the $25,000 Orteig Prize — offered in 1919 to the first aviator to fly an airplane nonstop between New York and Paris. When an unknown airmail pilot named Charles Lindbergh won it in 1927, who would have imagined complaining about Internet connectivity while flying cross-country near the speed of sound?

So the Branson and Bezos efforts are important milestones. Eventually, many more of us will have the chance. Who knows what inspiration and innovation these missions will spark to solve some pressing earthly problems?

That’s a far better story than the one I had hoped to tell years ago.”

Not political but worth a gander with the sound on.

From the Washington Post…

“Opinion: A war on truth is raging. Not everyone recognizes we’re in it.”

(Rob Dobi for The Washington Post)
Opinion by Lee McIntyre and Jonathan Rauch
June 25, 2021|Updated July 16, 2021 at 12:09 p.m. EDT

Lee McIntyre is a research fellow at Boston University and the author of “Post-Truth.” Jonathan Rauch is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the author of “The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth.”
Lee McIntyre and Jonathan Rauch discuss this piece in more detail on James Hohmann's podcast, "Please, Go On." Listen now.

In 2015, word spread online that a routine military exercise in the southwest, called Jade Helm 15, was a plot by President Barack Obama to impose martial law and seize everyone’s guns. The paranoia was “fueled by conservative bloggers and Internet postings,” the New York Times reported. So far did the claim spread that Gov. Greg Abbott ordered the Texas State Guard to monitor the exercise.

At the time, Americans responded to such bizarre online happenings with exasperation and bemusement. But the paranoia was fueled by more than conservative bloggers and Internet postings. Former CIA director Michael Hayden later said that Russian propagandists were behind the campaign. They were probing for vulnerabilities to disinformation — and found them. “At that point I think they made the decision, ‘We’re going to play in the electoral process,’” Hayden said.

Americans are no longer so naive about foreign attacks on our information space. The news media, the government and the public did a better job of recognizing and resisting information warfare from outside adversaries in 2020 than four years earlier.

But what if a far larger, more sophisticated and more ruthless disinformation campaign against American democracy originated within the United States? Would we recognize and respond to the threat? The answer so far is no — or, at best, only partially.

Most people regard Republicans’ #StopTheSteal campaign, also known as the “big lie,” as an attempt to re-litigate the 2020 election and pander to a radicalized, Trumpy base. It is that, but it is also a massive and devastatingly effective deployment of Russian-style information warfare against American democracy — by Americans themselves — with an eye toward the future. We should think of it not as a momentary partisan outburst but a kind of epistemic 9/11: a moment when a menace that has been developing for years reaches maturity and displays its full prowess.

Attacks on the concept of objective truth are not new. Left-wing attacks on objectivity date at least to the 1970s, with the rise of academic trends such as deconstructionism and postmodernism. Not long after, conservative media began attacking truth systematically, for example, through the rise of demagogues like Rush Limbaugh, who railed against the “four corners of deceit” (government, academia, science and the media).

The digital era raised the stakes by making misinformation easy to spread. GamerGate and online trolls refined viral outrage. Anti-vaccine groups pioneered digitally amplified misinformation. Russia spread divisive hoaxes and conspiracy theories. Misinformation became weaponized as disinformation — not a mistake but an intentional obfuscation created by those with interests at stake.

Specialists in the U.S. intelligence and military communities understand the power of information warfare to divide, disorient and demoralize the public. The Army Cyber Institute at the U.S. Military Academy has published a graphic novel warning against it. But few others have paid much attention, and many who do still blame cognitive bias and social media.

The rise of Donald Trump brought a turning point. He and his allies in conservative media and Republican politics seized upon Russian-style disinformation techniques and applied them to domestic politics. In his 2016 campaign, Trump lied so frequently and flagrantly that the media couldn’t keep up and the public lost track, a favorite Russian tactic known as the fire hose of falsehood.

With the #StopTheSteal campaign, the turning point became a point of no return. In April 2020, Trump launched a propaganda onslaught against mail-in balloting. Much as the Russians had used Jade Helm 15 to test their disinformation methods, Trump used the attack on mail-in balloting to organize the propaganda campaign he would launch if he lost the election. The already-high rate of Trump’s falsehoods ticked up sharply. After he lost, he and his allies unleashed a flood of exaggerations, lies and conspiracy theories through the White House, conservative media, social media and even the courts.

#StopTheSteal is not merely Trump’s way of being a sore loser or clinging to relevance (though it is those things). It is the most audacious disinformation campaign ever attempted against Americans by any actor, foreign or domestic. And it has been devastatingly effective. According to a recent Ipsos-Reuters poll, the majority of Republicans think the 2020 election was stolen, and almost half of independents either think the election was rigged or are unsure. Vladimir Putin could only dream of creating so much cynicism, doubt and distrust.

The “big lie” is a wake-up call, and not just about Trump. Even today, most scholars and commentators talk about America’s rising levels of polarization, extremism, and distrust of institutions and expertise as if they were natural disasters or products of generalized forces such as social media quirks, institutions’ failings and individuals’ gullibility. While those explanations have validity, they miss the more immediate threat: For years, Americans have been targeted with epistemic warfare — that is, with attacks on the credibility of the mainstream media, academia, government agencies, and other institutions and professionals we rely on to keep us collectively moored to facts. Those doing the targeting are nameable individuals and organizations, including Trump, conservative media outlets, Republican politicians, anti-vaccine groups and Russia’s Internet Research Agency.

Since epistemic warfare has proved its mettle so spectacularly in U.S. politics, it is likely here for good. Measures may allow us to fight back, such as revamping social media and teaching media literacy. But our primary means of defense is to be awake to the scope and origin of the threat. The first step toward winning the war on truth is to accept that we are in one.”

😀

He is absolutely right to do so.

So it’s hearing happening today…



Ah the irony of a known liar suggesting/claiming someone may be lying.