Birdbrains in space

We need less regulation and more freedom

Space.com asked, “The 1st private moon landing just happened. Is it time for lunar law?”

The answer is a Little Red Hen no. The government did not build it, therefore, the government does not own it.

Once, government was a positive force, as NASA landed the first man on the moon on July 21, 1969, but the government forfeited any claim to the celestial body on December 14, 1972, when Eugene Cernan became the last man on the moon. On the 50th anniversary of that terrible decision to surrender a 50-year lead in space technology, Michael Neufeld explained why we did it.

He wrote, “Two years earlier, NASA had deleted Apollos 18 and 19 to save money and focus on the Space Shuttle. Congress and two presidential administrations had been cutting NASA’s budget since 1967 as the Vietnam War, poverty, urban problems, and environmental crises made the space program less and less popular.”

Congress decided that we needed to spend the money we spent on space to fix problems here on Earth first. The national debt was $354 billion then. Today it tops $34,000 billion ($34 trillion). Have any of the problems been solved? Back then, the Temptations sang:

People moving out, people moving in
Why, because of the color of their skin
Run, run, run but you sure can’t hide

The song also said:

The sale of pills are at an all time high
Young folks walking round with their heads in the sky
The cities ablaze in the summer time

So what has changed? The cities got worse and the drugs grew more powerful. And the bureaucrats played on.

But it is no ball of confusion. We know why the politicians did this. There are more votes in spending trillions on public schools — which are worse today than they were then — and more graft in spending on cities. That the spending may worsen things matter not. It’s all about votes and money to politicians.

We already have enough laws, thank you. They go unenforced. Cities allow people to loot stores with little or no penalty. Anyone who tries to stop the thieves faces arrest and jail. But by golly, the state of New York will punish Donald Trump for taking out a loan and paying it back on time and with interest.

Politicians sabotaged the war on drugs by legalizing pot and then hard drugs either by law or by refusal to enforce the law. The results are colonies of spaced-out zombies in city after city.

But we’ll let the politicians regulate the universe and this time, everything will be fine and dandy. Space.com said so. It wrote, “But while we've all surely caught the moon bug, lunar pioneers will soon need to contend with a pretty serious issue when it comes to space exploration.

“‘The thing about space is there is very little law,’ Martin Elvis, an astrophysicist at the Harvard & Smithsonian's Center for Astrophysics, said during this year's American Astronomical Society meeting.

“As Elvis says, the only firm type of space rulebook we have right now is the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which outlines tenets such as ‘states shall be liable for damage caused by their space objects’ and ‘states shall avoid harmful contamination of space and celestial bodies.’ But even that has its caveats.

“‘It’s not a prescription of laws,’ Elvis said. ‘It’s a set of principles.’”

The biggest red flag these days is when someone brings up principles because that means he has none.

He also said, “We've always seen the moon untouched and unblemished.”

Space.com concluded, “So, to keep it that way, it may be time to consider the ethics of lunar exploration — and consider how we can turn those ethics into actionable laws.”

Considered and rejected.

The government is about as ethical as a hooker is a virgin. Both began that way but then money entered the picture.

The government’s appetite for power is insatiable and destructive. Consider plastic pipes. They are a godsend that makes clean water and sewage possible cheap and easy across the world. The United Nations wants to end this.

The Washington Examiner reported:

Without so much as a whisper of pushback from Congress, the White House is bulldozing forward with a regulatory proposal that could cost the average household up to $10,000 extra in water costs. But it’s not only President Joe Biden‘s campaign that is scared of this latest forefront of the president’s green agenda — Biden’s own Pentagon is panicking over the proposal.

The World Health Organization now recommends that governments limit polyfluoroalkyl substances, also known as PFAS or “forever plastics” that are resistant to breaking down in either the environment or the human body, at a level of 100 parts per 1,000,000,000,000. This is the same level limited by the European Commission. Japan set a temporary PFAS limit of 50 parts per 1,000,000,000,000 in 2020, and Sweden limits most PFAS at an average of 90 parts per 1,000,000,000,000. As far as more restrictive measures go, Canada is trying to lower its limit to 30 parts per 1,000,000,000,000, while Denmark is trying to ban PFAS in specific, isolated sectors such as in paper food packaging.

And then, there is America’s Environmental Protection Agency, which is trying to reduce its advisory limit of 70 parts per 1,000,000,000,000 to a hard limit of 4 parts per 1,000,000,000,000 for two prevalent types of PFAS, PFOA and PFOS, for all drinking water.

Parts per trillion? How do you measure that? Why would you measure that? It would take a million such parts to make 1 part per million. How do we know that 3 parts per 1,000,000,000,000 but that fourth one will kill you?

The story used the acronym ppt. I changed that to “parts per 1,000,000,000,000” because I want readers to understand the issue in as objective a manner as possible. Using government jargon is a bias, a subtle and all-too-common one.

Forever plastic harms no one. Forever government harms every one of us.

We have conceded too much power and authority to nimrods who have no idea how what they regulate works. In most cases, they just assume the power. A month ago, Newsweek reported, “Joe Biden Halts Natural Gas Exports Over ‘Existential’ Climate Threat.”

Who the hell gave him the power to do that? Rescind it. He won’t stop the invasion of illegal aliens from Red China, South and Central America, and Africa. But by golly, he will stop American companies from legally selling a product overseas. It is none of the government’s business. Illegal aliens are an existential threat to American society, something Washington invites.

The government limits how much water we can use in our showers and how much we can put in our toilets. The same is true for washing machines. They government wants to ban gas stoves because one study in an obscure academic journal says they may be connected to asthma.

I have had it. I am not alone.

Clare Coffey wrote, “Things used to work in this country. This is the stock complaint of the Baby Boomers, and if you are lucky enough to inherit a piece of their technology, you may find yourself agreeing. But when I say ‘things used to work,’ the object of inherited nostalgia is not only manufacturing standards before planned obsolescence and offshoring. Things used to, literally, work. You turned a knob, and sound came on, because the knob controlled the mechanism that tuned the radio to the broadcast that the big metal radio towers dotting the landscape beamed at you. I am not a gearhead of any description and don’t care much about how the insides of electrical devices work, but I know exactly what I, personally, have to do to operate my end of the GE radio. There are no downloads, no platforms, no passwords, no little pull-down menus, no verifications or account recovery protocols. There is no streaming. Personal technology used to be a machine. Now it’s a bureaucracy.”

In linking her essay, Glenn Reynolds added, “Worse yet it’s an intrusive, dishonest, woke bureaucracy.”

Coffey’s nostalgia for things that work is the result of the government’s power. Those showers, toilets, washers and gas stoves I mentioned earlier worked. The government hates things that work. Once we built things but Gavin Newsom is destroying dams and Pete Buttigieg is destroying miles of interstates in the name of restoring the land back to what it was.

Hmm. DC was built on a swamp. Let the government destroy that city first and restore the wetlands before wrecking the rest of the nation.

Having spent nearly $34 trillion we don’t have (on top of the money we did have) to not fix the problems of the world, a nation of nattering busybodies in the bureaucracy turn their attention to the moon. They want to solve problems before there are any.

Space is the final frontier for government. We will develop space only if we protect the freedom of those who dare venture where no man has gone before. Let them seek worlds of wealth. Bureaucrats want to go where no communist or Nazi has gone before as they pursue a guaranteed pension and a lifetime job.

Who will regulate space? Not you, said the Little Red Hen as she launched her starship into the heavens and flipped the birdbrains the bird.