Potpourri XXIV

I had to update my bio for work. Here's the latest version, in case someone asks (or even if they didn't):

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Bart Leahy is a Senior Technical Writer at the Schafer Corporation, where he supports the Ares Projects at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. Since 2006, he has written conference papers, speeches, articles, web content, presentations, brochures and other outreach materials on nearly all aspects of the Ares launch vehicles and the Ares I-X test flight. He leads the Technical Communicators Working Group as part of the Ares Outreach Team.

Prior to coming to NASA, Bart was a proposal writer for the defense industry and a technical writer for the Walt Disney World Resort.

During his time at NASA, Bart has been a member of four teams that received a Group Achievement Award. As a professional writer, he has produced papers for the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), the International Astronautical Congress (IAC), and the Joint Army-Navy-NASA-Air Force (JANNAF) conference, as well as over 30 articles for Ad Astra, NASA ASK Magazine, NSS.org (the National Space Society’s web site), Science@NASA, ScienceCheerleader.com Space.com, Space News, and The Space Review.

Bart has a Bachelor's degree in English Literature from Northern Illinois University and a Master's degree in Technical Writing from the University of Central Florida. His master’s thesis described methods of using targeted marketing to enhance the appeal of space exploration advocacy.

Bart is a true believer in the space cause. In his free time, he is a member of the National Space Society (NSS), which recognized him with an Award for Excellence as an advocate. He has written for and led NSS’s Space Settlement Calendar; led a campaign to send letters to the editor into the top 100 newspapers in the United States during “World Space Week”; and has written position papers and talking points for citizen lobbyists as part of the NSS Policy Committee. Bart is also Vice President of the local chapter of NSS, the Huntsville Alabama L5 Society (HAL5), a member of the Mars Society, the MarsDrive Board of Advisors, a public outreach writer for the Mars Foundation, and a regular member of the International Astronautical Federation (IAF), Society for Technical Communication (STC), and AIAA. He has been a convention speaker and panelist on a variety of space exploration topics.

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New from Hu:

• Congressman Parker Griffin (D-AL) is doing his part to keep government money and jobs in the Huntsville area.
• Apollo 17 astronaut and former Senator Harrison "Jack" Schmitt will be giving the commencement address to UAH grads. He should have interesting things to say. Last time I heard about Jack, he had quit the Planetary Society for jumping on the global warming bandwagon.
• Jeff Foust makes a case for a suborbital version of the COTS program.

Another snappy article from my buddy Dauna over at Science @ NASA, this one on NASA-powered weather prediction hardware being used in Northern Alabama. I love Dauna's easygoing, reader-friendly writing style.

This one from Nick the Wiki Guru: Sending webheads over to the Middle East to inspire Web 2.0 businesses in Iraq.

That's MISTER Rocket to you, pal...a seriously big, 1:10 scale Saturn V rocket gets ready to fly.

Like we didn't have enough to worry about, Charles Osgood sounds an alarm about the state of our sun...and has some interesting things to say about global warming as well.

Another article about robots in warfare.

The Chief Financial Officer at Freddie Mac is dead from an apparent suicide. Things are getting tough out there.

Twitter tips for federal agencies.

I got the following Chicago Tribune cartoon from Father Dan. It's a rip on Obama's idol Franklin Delano Roosevelt, inked in 1934. What goes around comes around.

Here's a new one: personalized photos of the Earth, taken by a camera mounted on a satellite in geosynchronous orbit.

I owe my coworker Tracy some more thoughts on education reform/improvements (she's rather surprised that she, a hard-core Democrat, and I are in agreement about several things). And I also need to comment at some point about some comments I read about Obama on Facebook. As ugly as things have gotten from my point of view--and even according to some of my friends who voted for The One and are having a wee bit of buyer's remorse--there are folks out there who think he's doing a perfectly brilliant, superb job of handling the nation's affairs. Blue State America really is different. Wow.

And much to my delight, after a week of waiting I now have a working washer/dryer unit in my apartment. My grade school/Facebook buddy Janet thanked me for helping "save the Earth." I thanked her for giving me the benefit of the doubt (asked her if she'd considered a job in marketing), but pointed out that my carbon footprint would be right back up there once I got the machines working. Anyhow, for Janet's sake, I won't run the machines until the weekend. They do have more capacity than the older units, though, so maybe they're more efficient, too. They're at least a better color--white instead of some '70s-era "cream" color--so that's an aesthetic improvement right there.

The Shoe Thing















I know, a lot of media outlets today are just cheering happily about an Iraqi journalist calling President Bush a "dog" and throwing a shoe at him as "the worst possible insult" in Islam. (Funny, I thought humiliating a man naked was the worst possible insult--at least that's what I heard when Abu Ghraib happened.)

The cheering section has forgotten something. The guy thinks Bush is a tyrant, and now he's got people chanting in the streets as if he's some sort of folk hero. All well and good.

But consider an alternate scenario. Imagine the guy he'd thrown a shoe at was Saddam Hussein. What do you suppose would have happened in Saddam's Iraq if the most powerful man in that country had had a shoe thrown at him? Would he be alive today? Would there be crowds cheering in the streets? No. That man would have been captured by Saddam's secret police, beaten up, and slowly lowered into a wood chipper. There would have been no show of public support for fear of similar treatment.

Now, did we really need to go in there? Perhaps not. But imagine where that journalist would be if he'd had similar spunk with a very different leader.

Realpolitik, Paleoconservatism, and the Future

I just finished reading Henry Kissinger's Diplomacy, which is a serious investigation by a serious man on the ebbs, flows, and problems of foreign policy. Kissinger is a believer in "realism," which is to say interest-based power politics, not Wilsonian idealism. Diplomacy was written in 1993, thus closing with the end of the Cold War and the brief respite America enjoyed between the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the Islamic terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Kissinger, Secretary of State under Richard Nixon, starts with the Peace of Westphalia (1648) and ends in 1993. And while Kissinger probably bears the taint of association with Nixon, he also demands a hearing. Specifically, his focus on American interests rather than idealism provides an alternative viewpoint in the 2008 election.

Kissinger believes firmly in moderating (or enacting) American idealism through interest-based realism. He cautions (in Diplomacy) against the temptation to strategic overreach in our desire to remake the world in our own image. Now might be a good time to employ Kissinger's (and yes, Nixon's) foreign policy in the next presidential term or two. HK's take on Vietnam is instructive.

Let's start with one important point: we are in much better shape in Iraq today than we were in Vietnam in 1968. We have fewer troops there, have had fewer casualties, and have--despite the bombings and other al-Qaeda-based foolishness--more political stability. We still require "peace with honor" because a) our political reputation in the world is now at stake, regardless of what the next president thinks; and b) because we owe it to our troops, who DO value honor, even if Congress does not. There is not (yet) a political consensus to withdraw from Iraq in the face of totalitarianism or massive opposition here at home. We can draw down our troops gradually, enabling Iraq--a made-up post-colonial state like Vietnam--to have the military breathing space to establish stable political institutions. This is, essentially, what Bush and Petraeus are trying to do now. Taking HK's theory to heart, we got into Iraq for idealistic reasons (eliminate dictatorship, export democracy, elilminate a WMD threat); if the next president wants to get out, they can do so using this power-based theory--we finish the job because it is in our best interests to do so.

However, having said that about Iraq (and Afghanistan), we need not go forth in search of more dragons to slay. Further changes in the Middle East can be made through more traditional, Realpolitik methods: surrounding known or potential enemies with coalitions of the willing, economic isolation of rogue states, economic rewards for allied nations and nations that change their internal policies, punishing nations or specific individuals that harm our citizens without resorting to occupations, providing financial or military support to dissident movements or to terrorist-supporting nations that change their behavior--in short, sparing our legions of long-drawn-out bloodletting.

Unfortunately, I fear that both "conservatives" (neocons) and liberals have been bitten by the imperial bug, the desire to Do Good, as Jerry Pournelle might say, just because we can. We can still be a beacon to the world, Kissinger reminds us, but we needn't overreach ourselves in the attempt. Otherwise, we will eventually inspire the hatred and envy of a new coalition of the willing--this one directed at us.