Ben Stein's Diary - Attention Must Be Paid

The truth about the shutdown.

Wednesday NightI am in Houston. It’s raining clichés and nonsense on the TV news channels. Since I am old and have no plans to run for office ever, I think I will tell you the truth as I humbly see it about the budget/debt default crisis that just was very temporarily averted tonight…

1. It was not a waste of time for the GOP in the House to fight very hard to get the President to change Obamacare in a comprehensive way. The law is already a gigantic miscarriage of the legislative process. For the GOP to fight to straighten out a badly miscreated law was good, not bad.

2. No one, and I mean, NO ONE, can say with any certainty that the government shutdown cost $28 billion or any other sum. It might well not have cost anything. The fact that S&P says the shutdown cost $28 billion is like saying they know there are men on Mars. It is just meaningless. It cannot be calculated.

3. The debate was not valueless in another way. It showed how angry many middle class voters are about what I would call “the entitlement society.” They feel they do all of the work, pay the taxes, and others get the benefits. The debate showed that there are real seams in the fabric of the society and they are being pulled dangerously close to the breaking point. Attention must be paid.

4. There is endless talk on the talk shows about how this affects the voters and upcoming elections but the debate was about more than that: this has become a high entitlement, low tax nation. That cannot last. Either taxes must go up a lot or entitlements must go down. That will be true no matter who is President in 2017.

5. The racial polarization in this country is becoming extreme. The black voting block is solidly liberal Democrat. The Republican conservatives are all white except for one or two stragglers. The anger on both sides is profound and getting worse. This is dangerous.

Via: The American Spectator

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NASA rover 'Curiosity' lands on Mars

PASADENA, Calif. –  In a show of technological wizardry, the robotic explorer Curiosity blazed through the pink skies of Mars, steering itself to a gentle landing inside a giant crater for the most ambitious dig yet into the red planet's past.

Cheers and applause echoed through the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory late Sunday after the most high-tech interplanetary rover ever built signaled it had survived a harrowing plunge through the thin Mars atmosphere.

"Touchdown confirmed," said engineer Allen Chen. "We're safe on Mars."

Minutes after the landing signal reached Earth at 10:32 p.m. PDT, Curiosity beamed back the first black-and-white pictures from inside the crater showing its wheel and its shadow, cast by the afternoon sun.

"We landed in a nice flat spot. Beautiful, really beautiful," said engineer Adam Steltzner, who led the team that devised the tricky landing routine.

Via: Fox News

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NASA spacecraft speeding toward a landing on Mars

PASADENA, Calif. (AP) — After an 8 1/2-month voyage through space, NASA's souped-up Mars spacecraft zoomed toward the red planet for what the agency hopes will be an epic touchdown.

The fiery punch through the tenuous Martian atmosphere at 13,000 mph Sunday night marks the beginning of "seven minutes of terror" as the Curiosity rover aims for a bull's-eye landing inside a massive crater near the equator.

The latest landing attempt is more nerve-racking than in the past because NASA is testing out a new routine. Curiosity will steer itself part of the way and end on a dramatic note: Dangling by cables until its six wheels touch the ground.

That's the plan at least.

"Can we do this? Yeah, I think we can do this. I'm confident," Doug McCuistion, head of the Mars exploration program at NASA headquarters, said Saturday. "We have the A-plus team on this. They've done everything possible to ensure success, but that risk still exists."

Via: CNS News

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