Marcia Dunn, reporting for the Associated Press, has an article on the Hubble Space Telescope repairs that are underway. NASA astronauts on the space shuttle Atlantis are in orbit and have secured the space telescope. Now the astronauts can begin to make various repairs the telescope needs after 19 years in orbit. The repairs almost didn’t happen. NASA was going to allow the telescope to fall into disrepair until it had a change of heart in 2006.

To learn more about Hubble, I would recommend Phil Plait’s “Ten Things You Don’t Know About Hubble” at the Bad Astronomy Blog. (For even more geekery, you can follow Astronaut Mike Massimino on Twitter.) Hubble has enabled us to see stars 1/ten billionth as bright as what we can see with the naked eye. This, in turn, has led to scientific break throughs. For example, (per Wikipedia) it has allowed us to calculate the rate of expansion of the universe.

Scientific advances often go hand-in-hand with technological advances. It’s probably no accident that Western science began to take off around the same time as telescopes and microscopes were invented in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. (It also helped that Constantinople was threatened and conquered by the Turks leading to a lot of books and scholars fleeing to the West.) Since then, we’ve been off to the races. The difference between the past 450 years as compared to the 450 years that preceded is staggering. In Europe, the year 1100 probably looked quite a bit like the year 1550. But, clearly a time traveler from 1550 wouldn’t know what to make of the year 2000. The Hubble Space Telescope is part of this process. I’m frankly happy to live in such a time. All too often, it’s easy to lose site of how far humans have progressed –for all our failures– in such a short period of time.

The Post-Tribune has an editorial entitled “Daniels turning IDEM into a rubber stamp.” It is prompted by Gov. Daniels hiring of longtime coal industry lobbyist David Joest as the new attorney for the Indiana Department of Environmental Management. Says the Post Tribune:

First, Daniels is applying the lessons he learned from his mentor, George W. Bush, who regularly made Department of Interior appointments from a roster of pollution industry lobbyists.

Second, Daniels is systematically turning IDEM into a rubber stamp for industry, operating under the archaic and disproven belief that jobs are solely important and environment is solely not important.

One of the main problems with not enforcing environmental standards (aside from, you know, the degraded environment) is that failing to enforce such standards causes the market to send the wrong signals. Pollution is a cost of manufacturing. But, when environmental standards are not enforced, it is a cost that is not reflected in the price of the product. Where price does not reflect costs, the marketplace is not operating at its most rational. With coal pollution, for example, the breathers of polluted air and the drinkers of polluted water and the travelers through a despoiled countryside are, in effect, subsidizing the manufacturers and purchasers of coal-produced energy. Subsidies are sometimes necessary for other reasons, but generally speaking, they aren’t good business.

Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Richard Posner is half of the Becker-Posner blog. Their conversation at the moment has to do with the state of conservatism. Judge Posner has some unkind things to say about the current state of intellectual conservatism. But, the upside for this way of thinking is that it had largely succeeded by the time it fizzled out. Friedman and Buckley were replaced, most recently, by Sarah Palin and “Joe” the “Plumber.”

My theme is the intellectual decline of conservatism, and it is notable that the policies of the new conservatism are powered largely by emotion and religion and have for the most part weak intellectual groundings. That the policies are weak in conception, have largely failed in execution, and are political flops is therefore unsurprising. The major blows to conservatism, culminating in the election and programs of Obama, have been fourfold: the failure of military force to achieve U.S. foreign policy objectives; the inanity of trying to substitute will for intellect, as in the denial of global warming, the use of religious criteria in the selection of public officials, the neglect of management and expertise in government; a continued preoccupation with abortion; and fiscal incontinence in the form of massive budget deficits, the Medicare drug plan, excessive foreign borrowing, and asset-price inflation.

I’ve bolded my favorite bit of that passage. “Substituting will for intellect.” To me, this immediately calls to mind that conversation Ron Suskind had with a Bush aide:

The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” … “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

And, really, there is probably a lot of that willing rather than analyzing to be found in the roots of the recent economic collapse. The Masters of the Universe (Wall Street edition) sought to impose their will for fun and profit, reality be damned. But, as Ms. Rand (along with others before her) pointed out, “A” = “A,” and eventually reality has a way of crashing the party.

News out of the People’s Republic of Texas (or whatever Rick Perry and the secessionists are calling it these days) is that a 7-year-old boy died Saturday morning after a Liberty County couple opened fire on him and three other alleged trespassers. The picture of the property in the story reinforces so many stereotypes, it’s amazing. First – the Confederate Flag is flying. Whenever you see a symbol of Treason in Support of Slavery, you know good things are going to happen. Next – the sign: “Trespassers will be shot. Survivers will be reshot!! Smile I will.”

There appears to have been a family outing on a nearby river. The families parked on a county road in a subdivision near Dayton, Texas where the men of the families were, apparently, committing the heinous crime (time honored though it may be) of peeing next to the road in the dark. Sheila Muhs, property owner, ordered the group to get their vehicles off the property then opened fire and blew out the windows of the vehicles. They boy was killed. His 5 year old sister and father were injured but not killed.

In fairness, Indiana is not without its share of idiots misusing guns to hurt kids. The Indiana case, at least, was a bit of potentially lethal celebration. In most ways, that’s more forgivable than the callously reckless acts of a selfish, misanthropic asshole which seems to be the Texas situation.

Speaking of misanthropy, I really hate people some days.

Today I ran into a fellow lawyer from the area. One of his ongoing humanitarian efforts is in conjunction with the St. Mary Haiti Ministry. St. Mary’s in Lafayette was “twinned” with Pendus, an area in the mountains of Haiti about 120 miles from Port-au-Prince. Turns out, the project has a website, so I thought I would give it a mention. One of the things that struck me was how much good they are able to do for not that much money. So, if you are interested in such things, click through and see what they are doing.

Nate Silver at fivethirtyeight.com has an interesting post about political identity and the President in office when a person turns 18. There appears to be a reasonably significant correlation between a person’s political affiliation and the President in office when the person turned 18.

A good President in office tends to correlate with a person’s identification with that President’s political party, apparently for a lifetime. And a bad President tends to correlate with identification with the opposite political party. Correlation doesn’t equal causation and all of that, but Nate Silver’s hypothesis is that Bush’s exceptional badness might haunt the Republicans for generations to come (much as they have had ongoing benefits, generally, from Reagan’s tenure.)

The Journal & Courier ran a very bare bones story about the ongoing Congressional health care debates, saying there are three basic proposals:

One would look like Medicare. Another would be based on Medicare, but administered by an outside party. The third would leave it up to the states to set up a public insurance plan for residents.

Insurers say a public plan would put them out of business and Republicans say it would be a dealbreaker in reforming health care.

A couple of observations – putting the health insurance industry out of business may be a feature as opposed to a bug. The industry doesn’t appear to be serving us very well but instead seems to be a giant leach, leading to a situation where, by and large and with some exceptions, we pay more for health care but get less than in other countries. As a tool for managing risk, controlling costs, and efficiently distributing a scarce resource, the insurance industry has not been notably successful.

As for Republican opposition, it bears mentioning that many Republicans couldn’t even bring themselves to support SCHIP, a not very controversial measure. I don’t see them playing along with any significant health care measure.

Maybe he’ll come up with something good, but I don’t think the state budget and funding the Indianapolis Capital Improvement Board will be two great tastes that taste great together. But, apparently Gov. Daniels is going to take a stab at the CIB.

Legislators should probably just focus on the state budget in the special session. Full stop.

I think I’m going full-on Godwin with this one, but these things happen.

First they came for the latte drinkers; I remained silent. I’m a coffee drinker.

Then they came for those who eat swiss cheese on their cheese steaks; I remained silent. I don’t like cheese steaks.

Then they came for the arugula eaters. I did not speak out. I didn’t know what arugula was.

Now they are coming for the spicy mustard enthusiasts. And all I can say is, “are you guys complete morons?”