Oct
19
2024

To the Moon, Alice!

[Amazon Link]
(paid link)

Our Amazon Product/Eye Candy du Jour, LEGO's "NASA Artemis Space Launch System", will set you back a mere $259.95. The box says it's for ages 18+. And when assembled, stands a mighty 27.5 inches high!

So: expensive and doesn't actually fly. Not unlike…

Well, take it away, Michael Bloomberg: NASA’s $100 Billion Moon Mission Is Going Nowhere.

There are government boondoggles, and then there’s NASA’s Artemis program.

More than a half century after Neil Armstrong’s giant leap for mankind, Artemis was intended to land astronauts back on the moon. It has so far spent nearly $100 billion without anyone getting off the ground, yet its complexity and outrageous waste are still spiraling upward. The next US president should rethink the program in its entirety.

As someone who greatly respects science and strongly supports space exploration, the more I have learned about Artemis, the more it has become apparent that it is a colossal waste of taxpayer money.

In the interests of equal time, there's this guy, who has apparently dubbed himself "The Angry Astronaut".

It's 23:19, and I didn't make it past six minutes or so, but you may have more tolerance for Angry Astronaut than I. His YouTube page features other videos with provocative titles. You may like "UFO Propulsion discovered? NASA Engineer unveils Antigravity Drive!!" or "Government Whistleblower: Alien Craft recovered! Pentagon, NASA reveal more spherical UFOs!"

Why bother with SLS when we could just reverse-engineer alien antigrav drives?

Plus: "Shut up" doesn't have the argumentative heft it did in Ring Lardner's day.

Anyway, one more zinger from Daniel Vergano at Scientific American: The Next President Should End NASA’s Space Launch System Rocket.

In the annals of U.S. pork barrel spending, NASA’s Space Launch System rocket towers over rivals like Alaska’s “bridge to nowhere” or the U.S. Air Force’s $10,000 toilet seat, and not just on account of its eventual 365 foot height. At $5.7 billion for the first launch, a throwaway SLS rocket and its Orion capsule will costs orders of magnitude more than their reusable competitors per launch.

Those costs matter to the $25 billion space agency, which hopes in the next decade to return astronauts to the moon, deorbit the International Space Station, visit the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, and much more. “For NASA, this is not a time for business as usual,” said Norman Augustine, chair of a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) panel that released a report on NASA in September warning of risks to the agency’s future springing from a mismatch of its ambitions and means.

Yeah, I know: Scientific American is insufferably woke. Read it anyway.

Also of note:

  • Efrem Zimbalist Jr. would not have done this. John Lott notes (in Real Clear Investigations, RCI below)a Stealth Edit: FBI Quietly Revises Violent Crime Stats.

    When the FBI originally released the “final” crime data for 2022 in September 2023, it reported that the nation’s violent crime rate fell by 2.1%. This quickly became, and remains, a Democratic Party talking point to counter Donald Trump’s claims of soaring crime.

    But the FBI has quietly revised those numbers, releasing new data that shows violent crime increased in 2022 by 4.5%. The new data includes thousands more murders, rapes, robberies, and aggravated assaults.

    The Bureau – which has been at the center of partisan storms – made no mention of these revisions in its September 2024 press release. 

    RCI discovered the change through a cryptic reference on the FBI website that states: “The 2022 violent crime rate has been updated for inclusion in CIUS, 2023.” But there is no mention that the numbers increased. One only sees the change by downloading the FBI’s new crime data and comparing it to the file released last year.

    That seems pretty damning, and the FBI would seem to have an interest in not revealing statistics that make the current administration look bad. But we'll see if this holds up.

  • Oh, oh, oh, Ozempic! J.D. Tuccille throws some cold water on election-year pandering in a specific area: Medicare-Covered Ozempic and Long-Term Care Would Be Very Pricey.

    It's no surprise that campaigning for office is largely a matter of buying votes with unrealistic promises of largesse to be funded—if the promise is ever fulfilled—on the backs of those to be named later. As befits a particularly awful election season, 2024 features some true doozies when it comes to pie-in-the-sky promises. But among them are new schemes to relieve people of covering their own healthcare costs by having Medicare pick up the tab for weight loss drugs and in-home, long-term care.

    With 41.9 percent of Americans adults obese, according to the Centers for Disease Control, Ozempic, Wegovy and other GLP-1 weight loss drugs have soared in popularity. As many as one in eight Americans have tried these drugs, which promise to succeed where dieting, exercise, and willpower often fail. And, in fact, obesity rates do appear to have turned a corner, dipping down after years of the population getting ever more massive. Weight loss drugs may have made the difference.

    But nothing comes without a cost, and the price tag for these drugs is substantial. "A monthly supply of Ozempic costs almost $1,000 before discounts or rebates," Bloomberg reported in May. That said, those discounts and rebates can make a big difference in a medical system where prices are as slippery as those in a Middle Eastern bazaar. A 2023 paper by the American Enterprise Institute found that for weight-loss drugs, "net prices received by drugmakers are 48–78 percent lower than list prices."

    But there turns out to be a local angle too:

    "Should the legislation become law, the implications could extend beyond seniors," claimed the office of Rep. Paul Ruiz (D–Calif.) as he announced the bipartisan Treat and Reduce Obesity Act with other lawmakers, including Rep. Brad Wenstrup, (R–Ohio). "Medicare coverage might prod other health insurers to pay for weight-loss medications, as private health plans tend to follow Medicare's lead."

    Is your CongressCritter a co-sponsor? Mine, Chris Pappas, is. Ironically, his family restaurant, the Puritan Backroom, in Manchester NH, may well be a leading cause of obesity in the Granite State. I haven't been there in a while, but I have to admit: the portions are huge, and also delicious.

    And finally, if you recognized that little jingle at the top of this item, you might be interested in reading the NYT story: How Ozempic Turned a 1970s Hit Into an Inescapable Jingle.

  • As we've said in the past: Martin Gurri saw it coming. And now he's taken to the Free Press to confess: I Refused to Vote in the Last Two Elections. Now, I’m Voting for Trump.

    Kamala Harris or Donald Trump—the empty pantsuit of elitism or the eternal master of disaster? We must pick one or the other on November 5.

    For many years, I belonged to the “a plague on both your houses” party. In the last two presidential elections, I abstained: I found both candidates unequal to the task and refused to endorse either with my vote.

    But I feel I can’t refrain this time around—and I want to explain why.

    And, durnit, the rest of the article is paywalled.