Raising our eyes to the stars

Happy Moon Day!  On this day, in 1969, people first set foot on the surface of the moon.  I was nine years old.  The computer in the Apollo spacecraft had less computing power that the cheap digital watch you might get today in a Happy Meal.  There was a lot of math involved, of course, but it was generally done on the ground, and much of it with slide rules.  It's hard to remember, sometimes, just how much has changed.

Apollo was a decade-long, incremental, and monumental project.  Only two countries could have assembled the raw power necessary to get to the moon, and one of them pushed so far past the limits of their capabilities that their best minds died in an explosion linked directly to the politics of an arbitrary deadline.  Today there are billionaires in the process of building orbital hotels.  Some are making plans to skip the moon entirely and head directly for Mars.

It was, in many ways, the equivalent of building the pyramids.  It was a contest for bragging rights with the USSR, and when it was done it rolled on by inertia for only a few more missions.  But it was also an achievement "for all mankind."  This was a day for every person on Earth to be proud.  How many of those have there been?

It was the dawn of a new age.  And then we paused to catch our breath and lower our sights.  Leave it to government to make the world's greatest adventure boring.

But maybe we are waking up again.  Today, more people are coming to wrap their heads around the fact that we must go and live (and yes, die) out there.  This planet is too small.  Too vulnerable.  We are still in a race, not just of nation versus nation or corporation versus corporation, but as a species against time.  To survive, we have to become a multiplanetary civilization.  And today, forty-nine years ago, was the first step.

Photo taken from the Moon.  July 20, 1969.

Leaders and the "common good"

On day one I give my foreign policy class three "laws" that explain ninety percent of what states do:

1. What people *believe* is real determines what they will attempt.
2. What *is* real determines what will work.
3. Leaders will do whatever is in their power to stay in power.

There are other factors, but these are the big ones.  It's odd how the hardest one to get people to believe is rule #3.  Now the Economist publishes an interview with Alastair Smith (New York University) in which he gives some great examples of what I've been talking about all these years.  For example,

It is virtually impossible to find any example where leaders are not acting in their own self interest. If you are a democrat you want to gerrymander districts and have an electoral college. This vastly reduces the number of votes a president needs to win an election.  Then tax very highly. It’s much better to decide who gets to eat than to let the people feed themselves. If you lower taxes people will do more work, but then people will get rewards that aren’t coming through you. Everything good must come through you. Look at African farm subsidies. The government buys crops at below market price by force. This is a tax on farmers who then can’t make a profit. So, how do you reward people? The government subsidises fertilisers and hands it back that way. In Tanzania vouchers for fertilisers are handed out not to the most productive areas but to the party loyalist areas. This is always subject to the constraint that if you tax too highly people won’t work. This is the big debate in the US. The Republicans are saying that the Democrats have too many taxes and want to suppress workers. But when they were in power five years ago they had no problem with taxing and spending policies, but now it’s taxing their supporters to reward Democrats. 

Or, as Harry Browne is supposed to have observed, the state breaks your legs, gives you crutches, and claims credit for the fact you can still get around.


And what about the common good?  I don't deny there might be one, but I'd never count on it being the basis of policy.  As Smith observes, "If you’re working for the common good you didn’t come to power in the first place. If you’re not willing to cheat, steal, murder and bribe then you don’t come to power. "

What if WWIII had hapened?

I wrote my dissertation on nuclear war planning.  This stuff has always held a fascination for me.  With the passage of time, we now know more about what kind of world the leaders expected they would see when it all went down.

The British have released the 1962 Cabinet Office War Book, including the password to activate the secret bunker that would hold the key 230 politicians and bureaucrats responsible for picking up the pieces.

The code word, by the way, was "orangeade."  Just in case you ever need to know.

Meanwhile, courtesy of FEMA, the NRDC, and War News Updates we have this estimate of the targets to be struck in the US in the event of nuclear war.

Thank God that didn't happen.  Pray it never will.