Actually, what Pat Caddell (former top Jimmy Carter adviser) complained about was that the Hispanics “voted for what the rich people wanted” on the embryonic stem cell referendum in California.
Caddell is no pro-lifer, but he is anti-science. I mentioned the 1969 Mule Train betow, when the entire civil rights leadership showed up at the beginning of the Moon Launch in 1969 to protest the fact that the money for going to the moon didn’t go to welfare programs.
Liberals want every crisis to be an excuse for bureaucrats to take more power. Their answer to the gasoline shortage is for the government to decide who gets gasoline and to impose more regulations on cars, heat and everything else.
Technology ruins many great crises that could lead to a government crackdown. Science and the free market both deal with problems liberals want bureaucrats to deal with.
Opponents of the moon program were united with many conservatives. They all opposed “shooting money out into space.” One reader objected to my praise of the moon launch here and said we might as well have spent the money on Tang research.
It just shows how conservatives can be REALLY stupid. Every person with a pacemaker owes his life to the moon launch, not to Tang research. Silicon Valley was a product of the moon launch. This computer, this computer, is a product of the moon launch.
The list is endless.
So the nut right and the nut left are in cahoots again. Caddell wants all that research money spent on bureaucrats and the little bit of welfare money that those bureaucrats let filter down to the barrios.
Those who consider the lives of two fertilized eggs to be more important than a child are with Caddell.
Actually, you could save DOZENS of fertilized eggs for the money a desperately ill child uses up in the emergency room. All those tens of thousands of dollars we waste saving a child could be used to get in there and prevent poor women from miscarrying.
The problem is that nobody thinks that logic is actually sane.
#1 by Robert Reis on 11/07/2004 - 12:43 am
Dear Bob,
We are all descended from a long line of dead people.
Get used to it.
Cheers,
Robert Reis
#2 by Bedford on 11/07/2004 - 12:13 pm
Uh, Bob, the moon program was like climbing Mt. Everest, a great stunt, but not much real benefit. Robots could have gotten more science from the moon at less cost. I simply disagree about the computer and other inventions. The moon program did not exist when the first electronic computer was created and the IC was invented by Texas Instruments and there are many scientists who say that simply funding more basic research or giving corporations incentive for R&D would have produced more than the moon program. Space is a very hostile place to humans – it is not like the science fiction movies. I would like to see more private space activity like the recent Burt Ruttan venture.
#3 by Richard L. Hardison on 11/07/2004 - 1:08 pm
The IC was invented because of the pressures of the space program and military aerospace – aviation and ballsitic missles. Aviation places a premium on lite weight, but nothing like the space program. From personal observation I am forced to agree with Bob, no space program – no silicon valley.
#4 by Bob Whitaker on 11/07/2004 - 1:39 pm
Bedford, if you really wantto believe that, no one an ever convince you otherwise. There were computers on board the moon launch vehicle. I didn’t say the moon launch caused computers, I understand it was central to the growth of Silicon Valley.
You still haven’t said the heart pacer didn’t come from the moon program.
It’s like Creationism or racial equality. If you really want the earth to have been created in six days, you cannot find anything that contradicts that. I have actually never met anybody before who denied the enormous advances the space program caused before, once they checked it out, but I see no reason why you shouldn’t be the holdout if it’s important to you.
#5 by Don on 11/07/2004 - 4:28 pm
I will not argue about the technological advances spawned by the space program.
Could I have thought of other uses for the resources devoted to that venture at that time? Probably.
Its like a building. Someone proposes building a magnificent spire which reaches into the heavens. But the foundation is crumbling. What should be done next? But to address that problem would have required men of real character and understanding. Ironically, one of the few who might have qualified also helped usher in the new technology – William Shockley.
Is it time to take a hard look at the foundation yet?
#6 by Bob Whitaker on 11/07/2004 - 6:13 pm
Don, I would fascinated and astonished if you could come up with a program that Americans would have been willing to spend billions of dollars on that had all the scientific benefits of the moon program.
As you know, I knew Shockley pretty well.
And I think he would be in the corner we are. Back in 1969,the moonlaunch was a good way to promote technology, WITHIN POLITICAL REALITY.
But we both know that is out of date. In scientific terms, 1969 is Jurassic.
Those closed environments that cost many millions were financed by private money by rich folks interested in space colonization. There are rich people in Texas who put money into that stuff.
I personally saved the Hubble Telescope, but that is ancient history.
I have a long, long political story to tell about the present state of basic research and space technology.
But it would bore readers out of their minds.
Keep up the fight, Don!
You would have my moral support, but I was in politics, so I don’t have any morals.
#7 by Don on 11/07/2004 - 6:40 pm
A massive program of low flying shuttles would have been excellent. The shuttles could have loaded passengers in the US and debarked them in Africa. The long range technological and economic benefits would have boggled the mind.
This, of course, has nothing to do with the political realities of the time. This is just me spouting off again.
#8 by Don on 11/08/2004 - 9:33 am
The Hubble Telescope – and Storey Musgrave – made a fascinating tale. Why did they contract with a Congolese firm to grind the original lense? Just kidding. But the repair and subsequent photos were awesome. Good show.
#9 by Don on 11/08/2004 - 6:56 pm
RE: “You would have my moral support, but I was in politics, so I don’t have any morals.”
I will pray for you. Actually, I won’t, since that is not what I do. I would not devote too much time to praying while the opposition is preying.