If you have silly laws, and silly enforcement, the object of any judicial exercise isn't to make little excuses de novo, or find loopholes for the privileged or those who somehow qualify for 'special treatment'.
In this particular case, yes, the 'trial should proceed' long enough to establish what the conditions were, clearly illustrate the problems both with the implementation of statutes and with mistaken efforts to 'enforce' them with excessive strictness, and perhaps THEN to exercise reasonable leeway (but only based on precedent or other legally-established criteria -- not whim) either in verdict or sentencing.
This is really a problem with poor legislation, and poor low-level enforcement policy driven by aspects of poor legislation, not a proper judicial issue. Because once you allow a judge's preferences to dictate enforcement, you've destroyed equality before the law... unless some people or groups are more equal than others...
Lochner? Plessey v. Ferguson?... I could go on, but I'm still amazed at the stretching of the Commerce Clause in various ways, and waiting for the ticking time bomb in Article III, section 2 regarding 'such regulations as the Congress shall make'. (Granted, opening that can of worms is one Constitutional-interpretation analogue of a nuclear option... )
If the wrong things are set in stone, start thinking about where to use the chisel of truth...
And there's nothing quite like a system with high latency on implementing editing changes, like putting a qualifier after the word 'albeit'. (Seriously, though, THAT is a mistake that a grammar-checker would have caught before the post was released to the wild!)
Praise the Lord, someone who uses the subjunctive correctly! (Albei, perhaps, t someone who needs to work on the proper use of serial conjunctives!;-})
And yes, it would be 'ellipses' as mwvdlee worded it. Truth to tell, though, NONE of them are, in fact, used correctly -- because an ellipsis per se is used to show the *omission* of something; hence the name. Using the three little dots to show... well, perhaps indicate... that there's a pause in the flow of the sentence is a different convention.
And we STILL haven't 'taken up the cudgels' for the difference between grammar and rhetoric...
optimization-compulsion disorder... not CDO compulsive desktop obsession... not quite right (but part of what we've been discussing?) compulsive desktop optimization obsession... not CDO... [insert Dave Van Ronk's sigh at the end of Garden State Stomp]
It's OCD for CDO where ATL are RGO. (Just sayin'... it makes about as much sense...)
No, the proximity of hand to ear is one of the issues after the call is made and you're talking.
The lion's share of the problems involve dialling while looking at the phone, texting while looking at the phone, fumbling with the interface and buttons to get to the phone function in the first place. Gets worse on smartphones where you have visual media, games, etc that HOLD your foreground attention on some little bright screen up close, or distract your attention at what turns out to be a 'wrong moment'.
Look at all the previous posts that reference 'looking DOWN at the . It's looking, not talking, that's the root of most of these problems. (I'm staying out of the discussions that show it's better and safer to keep both hands on the wheel, let alone what you do with stick or paddles...)
What would YOU call it when it can be revoked if you fail to pay child support, or don't document enough of the right kind of insurance coverage? Or drive away from a gas pump without paying?
(Or, to put it in a bit more appropriate context, for things utterly unrelated to your competence at operating a vehicle safely...?)
Guys - it's not the phone, it's the interface. Distraction of foreground attention = death. Shifting visual focus from far to near and THEN requiring foreground attention = even more death. Problems with talking on the phone 'were' mostly associated with holding the thing to your ear and driving one-handed (and fumbling in traffic if the ridiculously-streamlined chiclet-size thing squirts out of your grasp) than talking.
I do know firsthand of two accidents that occurred *because* a driver was reaching for the cigarette lighter. That all by itself is two too many. Let the ban involve smoking while driving, if it has to be a 'blanket' prohibition, before it involves telephone communications.
TEXT is the more significant issue for 'smart phones': foreground attention requiring (often one-handed on tiny keyboards) manual dexterity to produce, foreground attention squinting at tiny screens and perhaps scrolling up and down to read. Very little of this problem can be fixed with ANY UI change... other than text-to-speech conversion both ways, which I very, very strongly advocate for anyone who feels they just *have* to try TMs (or, for that matter, e-mailing) while driving something.
I could go into proper haptic interfaces for use in vehicles, but it's not really on topic in this discussion.
Seriously though, the 'Climategate'-style science is more out of the same system that brought you phlogiston, phrenology, and eugenics... and tried gaming the system and the ways of academe when it didn't get things exactly its way.
A previous teacher of mine had his early academic career ruined because he claimed there were chemical influences in nerve transmission. Since it was so well known in the '30s that neurotransmission was electrically (I lump positive-ion conduction in there), his claims were obviously 'unscientific'. We are STILL denying with some fervor that there is any potential mechanism whereby S. marcescens coinfection might induce apoptosis/regression in tumorigenesis.
Sure, science ain't perfect. But there's a very long history of 'scientists' using jargon and wacky models to justify pet theories, and demonizing those who disagree with them, sometimes on a suspiciously well-oiled basis. Scientists ought to shun such people whenever possible...
'Splits' just fine, you divide the contents equally and use one new gelatin capsule. The 'mix' of immediate and time-release granules will statistically reflect the original mix fairly closely for all practical purposes...
Perhaps a better way to address this: What if the B-70 development hadn't been stillborn at just this time?
THERE is your construction basis for practical reusable RVs (and, dare I say it, SSTOs when the right propulsion comes about?)
All of it realized, and developed through to production tooling in many cases, by the early '60s. Think of the fun with synergies from those things.
I'll be the first to admit that the XB-70 (and WS-110A) program couldn't have been done without enormous gobs of OPM -- at that level, taxpayers' M. And I will also be among the first to admit that the warfighting justification for most if not all those gobs of money was easily short-routed by the existence of that reliable Korolev booster system in 'buildable' quantities. But wouldn't a costed-down infrastructure for hypersonic construction have been a much better ticket to practical LEO (and all the other places that spacecraft assembly in reasonably LEO might then enable, practically)?
Can somebody tell me what a reusable liquid-fuel booster would consist of? (That being one consideration iianm why there wasn't a Saturn V parachute recovery...) Conversely, I remain to be convinced that reusable SRBs would have needed to be an integral part of '60s STS, especially if contemporary ICBM research with solids could be co-adapted to suit production for use as first-stage engines for an orbital spacecraft...
Good analogy. Note how many profitable, self-supporting commercial colonies have been set up in Antarctica since its discovery in 1820.*
*Zero. In fact there has never been a single permanent resident of Antarctica. It had no human population at all during the winter until 1956 when the first year-around base was set up. Permanent settlement of Antarctica and setting up a self-sustaining economy there is orders of magnitude easier than settling Mars.
Well then, I guess all those claims by Argentina are imaginary. (Or perhaps Argentine colonization of the Antarctic would necessarily be no more 'real' than those possibly-apocryphal 'African space programs', Argentina obviously having no industrial presence or capable technical people?) [Note: sarcasm.]
And the problems of Antarctica are so much greater than those of, say, the North Slope of Alaska that no one would undertake them?...
For one thing, we might have practical fusion power by now.
No. We wouldn't.
I've noticed one thing about fusion: it's *always* "twenty years off" and has been since the early fifties. Tiny little steps, "we need more funding", and "maybe we'll get something in (this year+20). And over the past forty years, a lot of bold proposals for testbeds that, while crude and inefficient, might actually have WORKED so they could be improved, have been shot down. (cf. Bussard's proposal to use heavy, water-cooled high-strength magnets to brute-force a solution.)
See you in 2032, when "We'll have fusion in 2052." will be the rallying cry.
You're forgetting the key word in your own statement: 'practical'.
I still remember Mel Gottlieb (successfully) talking me out of studying plasma physics in the mid-Seventies - the closing part of his argument being 'get into some field that makes lots of money, so that if we get the technology workable in 40 years there'll be someone in a position to build it, with the money to build it.' Unfortunately, I studied some economics after then, and learned about opportunity cost...
Problem is, 'practical' fusion isn't just a technical thing like satisfying the Lawson criterion, or achieving stable sustained reaction, or even successful breeding in the blanket. It's about being cost-effective, compared to the alternatives, for generating electrical power, and/or supporting the thorium cycle... surely portability isn't a practical thing, even given a functional Riggatron, in these terror-prone times?
And until the revenue per, let's say, billable KWh over the plant lifetime comes up to... well, the cost to build the plant, commission it, run it with reasonable uptime, and then decommission it and deal with all the nasty little leftovers... you'll be waiting for your practical fusion power. Whether the theoretical physics, or the experimental demonstration of net energy production from the apparatus, is done. My informed guess is that it'll be twenty years out indefinitely...
Nuts all right -- the reason the bases went into Cuba in the first place was because Khruschev et al. thought Kennedy was young and naive enough... and from his track record in foreign policy up to that point, I'd say they had more than a little justification... to accept the fait accompli when they chose to divulge it. There is utterly no connection between this and the moon program; it's possible with some tortured logic to claim the moon program was intended to help 'close the missile gap' or some similar handwaving, but that's another discussion.
Plenty of discussion over the years on exactly who 'won points' when the Jupiter Cs came out as the quid pro quo. Face-saving? Elimination of worthless technology? ISTR Kennedy being furious when he heard the Jupiters were still emplaced -- he'd ordered them removed some time before, and apparently no one on his own side took him seriously, either...;-}
Why does there have to be justification for Kennedy's call for the moon program being anything else than what he said it was? Contemporaries knew perfectly well that better rocket tech would make better weapons. They also knew perfectly well that the future of practical ICBMs did not involve LOX; it would either be solids or hypergolics. I guess there are still lots of people who... how can I say this delicately... aren't exactly rocket scientists when they post on this thread...;-}
Early scientific minds were willing to chance being charged as religious heretics in order to study and eventually publish information about the solar system and basic physics models.
Yeah, that's why Leonardo spoke in code.
Ahhh.... no. Not at all.
We'll overlook that he wrote in 'code', not spoke. Exactly where do you find da Vinci being hereticized by the Church? Where do you find him being actively impaired by the powers-that-were?
Principal reason for his writing in 'code' as I understand it (from a seminar with Pam Long) was to keep competitors *in the private sector* from stealing his ideas and discoveries... without proper compensation. He shares with the Wright Brothers an important attitude... one not ungermane to the present discussion... which was a recognition that the most significant use of many of the technologies being developed was... war.
And I was born long before Apollo 7, and unless this is an alternate reality it did not 'blow up'. Apollo 13... yes, sorta. Apollo 1... didn't blow up, it caught fire, and it was on the ground at the time. For an unalloyed rocket disaster, you need to look past anything von Braun developed to STS-51L, perhaps more particularly at why it was launched with the OAT where it was... not really a technical 'failure' at all, in the sense of something not well understood by the developing teams...
Ok so it doesn't suck, but it really isn't that useful a place to go on its own. There's nothing there. I could see a base there as being useful for launching further deeper space missions, but then we first need to solve some other issues. Really right now the space research we should be focusing on seems to be launch costs. It costs WAY too much to put shit in space. Like $10,000/pound. We need to bring that cost down, then maybe we can look at putting more things (like a moon base) out in space.
Once we get more efficient launch methods, then maybe we talk about a moon base.
Yeah, just like we were doing so well with instantiated launch methods (either measured on our own or against Korolev) before the moon-shot development underwrote the Saturn HLV platform?
The issue isn't design of better platforms for heavy launch -- it's the development of them, with a mission that brings the marginal instantiated cost of overall launch down to something reasonable. I believe that anyone posting on here needs to have read 'The Case for Going to the Moon' (to say nothing of later commentary) before starting to make statements, no matter how sensible they are when taken by themselves. The justification for going to space is a synergy of details, just as the ostensible benefits from space development constitute synergistic benefits.
I think you may've overshot a point here. Yes, he could just order it shut down, but that doesn't mean he wouldn't amass very powerful entities. If Congress or the Senate or another committee hates the President, they're petty enough to vote against all of his initiatives regardless of merit..
According to my professor of public administration in the mid-'80s, that is precisely what happened to Jimmy Carter as President. But for slightly different reasons -- he went in saying he'd clean house and fix the problems with entrenched line and staff bureaucracies. Many of the potential 'reformees' took the not-nonsensical view that 'we were here when you got here, and we'll be here after you're gone' -- and sabotaged his policies in as many ways as they could (which was plenty!)
Not to say that Carter's administration wouldn't have self-destructed for other reasons -- there were certainly plenty of other reasons. But the specific point was significant to me then, and still is.
Now, are there enough 'powers' solely connected with shutting down Gitmo to have this happen? Powers that already weren't opposed to Obama in some way, suddenly deciding on the strength of *that one decision* to see him destroyed or discredited? Or that the shutdown were the 'straw breaking the camel's back'? Frankly, I don't think so. (And it might be instructive to consider just what 'countervailing actions' might be taken, at what levels, to deflate any concern about the shutdown...)
BTW, I presume you meant 'enemies', not 'entities', but correct me if otherwise.
Slashdot Mirror
If it's a Ball-mer reference, would you not use 0xB16BA775
Which, come to think of it, is a correct eight-digit hex reference that MS could use to be 'equal-opportunity sexist'...
Please tell me what the digit "M" denotes in hex...
I don't follow this 'logic' at all.
If you have silly laws, and silly enforcement, the object of any judicial exercise isn't to make little excuses de novo, or find loopholes for the privileged or those who somehow qualify for 'special treatment'.
In this particular case, yes, the 'trial should proceed' long enough to establish what the conditions were, clearly illustrate the problems both with the implementation of statutes and with mistaken efforts to 'enforce' them with excessive strictness, and perhaps THEN to exercise reasonable leeway (but only based on precedent or other legally-established criteria -- not whim) either in verdict or sentencing.
This is really a problem with poor legislation, and poor low-level enforcement policy driven by aspects of poor legislation, not a proper judicial issue. Because once you allow a judge's preferences to dictate enforcement, you've destroyed equality before the law... unless some people or groups are more equal than others...
... except when you get different activists.
Lochner? ... I could go on, but I'm still amazed at the stretching of the Commerce Clause in various ways, and waiting for the ticking time bomb in Article III, section 2 regarding 'such regulations as the Congress shall make'. (Granted, opening that can of worms is one Constitutional-interpretation analogue of a nuclear option... )
Plessey v. Ferguson?
If the wrong things are set in stone, start thinking about where to use the chisel of truth...
But this is so obviously Democrats acting like Democrats!
No, they should apologize to the Kingdom of Great Britain and offer to pull the arrow out of Harold's eye...
No, it's the supersonic sheep that's in French. But top points anyway! Fetchez la vache!
Well, it certainly made him sheepish...
And there's nothing quite like a system with high latency on implementing editing changes, like putting a qualifier after the word 'albeit'. (Seriously, though, THAT is a mistake that a grammar-checker would have caught before the post was released to the wild!)
Praise the Lord, someone who uses the subjunctive correctly! (Albei, perhaps, t someone who needs to work on the proper use of serial conjunctives! ;-})
And yes, it would be 'ellipses' as mwvdlee worded it. Truth to tell, though, NONE of them are, in fact, used correctly -- because an ellipsis per se is used to show the *omission* of something; hence the name. Using the three little dots to show... well, perhaps indicate... that there's a pause in the flow of the sentence is a different convention.
And we STILL haven't 'taken up the cudgels' for the difference between grammar and rhetoric...
Right order for what?
optimization-compulsion disorder... not CDO ... [insert Dave Van Ronk's sigh at the end of Garden State Stomp]
compulsive desktop obsession... not quite right (but part of what we've been discussing?)
compulsive desktop optimization obsession... not CDO
It's OCD for CDO where ATL are RGO. (Just sayin'... it makes about as much sense...)
Where is Tom Lehrer when we need him? I feel a song coming on...
No, the proximity of hand to ear is one of the issues after the call is made and you're talking.
The lion's share of the problems involve dialling while looking at the phone, texting while looking at the phone, fumbling with the interface and buttons to get to the phone function in the first place. Gets worse on smartphones where you have visual media, games, etc that HOLD your foreground attention on some little bright screen up close, or distract your attention at what turns out to be a 'wrong moment'.
Look at all the previous posts that reference 'looking DOWN at the . It's looking, not talking, that's the root of most of these problems. (I'm staying out of the discussions that show it's better and safer to keep both hands on the wheel, let alone what you do with stick or paddles...)
What would YOU call it when it can be revoked if you fail to pay child support, or don't document enough of the right kind of insurance coverage? Or drive away from a gas pump without paying?
(Or, to put it in a bit more appropriate context, for things utterly unrelated to your competence at operating a vehicle safely...?)
Guys - it's not the phone, it's the interface. Distraction of foreground attention = death. Shifting visual focus from far to near and THEN requiring foreground attention = even more death. Problems with talking on the phone 'were' mostly associated with holding the thing to your ear and driving one-handed (and fumbling in traffic if the ridiculously-streamlined chiclet-size thing squirts out of your grasp) than talking.
I do know firsthand of two accidents that occurred *because* a driver was reaching for the cigarette lighter. That all by itself is two too many. Let the ban involve smoking while driving, if it has to be a 'blanket' prohibition, before it involves telephone communications.
TEXT is the more significant issue for 'smart phones': foreground attention requiring (often one-handed on tiny keyboards) manual dexterity to produce, foreground attention squinting at tiny screens and perhaps scrolling up and down to read. Very little of this problem can be fixed with ANY UI change... other than text-to-speech conversion both ways, which I very, very strongly advocate for anyone who feels they just *have* to try TMs (or, for that matter, e-mailing) while driving something.
I could go into proper haptic interfaces for use in vehicles, but it's not really on topic in this discussion.
This is the situation that TenFourFox was designed to relieve...
Electromagnats -- is that "I can has del dot B?"
Seriously though, the 'Climategate'-style science is more out of the same system that brought you phlogiston, phrenology, and eugenics... and tried gaming the system and the ways of academe when it didn't get things exactly its way.
A previous teacher of mine had his early academic career ruined because he claimed there were chemical influences in nerve transmission. Since it was so well known in the '30s that neurotransmission was electrically (I lump positive-ion conduction in there), his claims were obviously 'unscientific'. We are STILL denying with some fervor that there is any potential mechanism whereby S. marcescens coinfection might induce apoptosis/regression in tumorigenesis.
Sure, science ain't perfect. But there's a very long history of 'scientists' using jargon and wacky models to justify pet theories, and demonizing those who disagree with them, sometimes on a suspiciously well-oiled basis. Scientists ought to shun such people whenever possible...
'Splits' just fine, you divide the contents equally and use one new gelatin capsule. The 'mix' of immediate and time-release granules will statistically reflect the original mix fairly closely for all practical purposes...
Perhaps a better way to address this: What if the B-70 development hadn't been stillborn at just this time?
THERE is your construction basis for practical reusable RVs (and, dare I say it, SSTOs when the right propulsion comes about?)
All of it realized, and developed through to production tooling in many cases, by the early '60s. Think of the fun with synergies from those things.
I'll be the first to admit that the XB-70 (and WS-110A) program couldn't have been done without enormous gobs of OPM -- at that level, taxpayers' M. And I will also be among the first to admit that the warfighting justification for most if not all those gobs of money was easily short-routed by the existence of that reliable Korolev booster system in 'buildable' quantities. But wouldn't a costed-down infrastructure for hypersonic construction have been a much better ticket to practical LEO (and all the other places that spacecraft assembly in reasonably LEO might then enable, practically)?
Can somebody tell me what a reusable liquid-fuel booster would consist of? (That being one consideration iianm why there wasn't a Saturn V parachute recovery...) Conversely, I remain to be convinced that reusable SRBs would have needed to be an integral part of '60s STS, especially if contemporary ICBM research with solids could be co-adapted to suit production for use as first-stage engines for an orbital spacecraft...
Good analogy. Note how many profitable, self-supporting commercial colonies have been set up in Antarctica since its discovery in 1820.*
*Zero. In fact there has never been a single permanent resident of Antarctica. It had no human population at all during the winter until 1956 when the first year-around base was set up. Permanent settlement of Antarctica and setting up a self-sustaining economy there is orders of magnitude easier than settling Mars.
Well then, I guess all those claims by Argentina are imaginary. (Or perhaps Argentine colonization of the Antarctic would necessarily be no more 'real' than those possibly-apocryphal 'African space programs', Argentina obviously having no industrial presence or capable technical people?) [Note: sarcasm.]
And the problems of Antarctica are so much greater than those of, say, the North Slope of Alaska that no one would undertake them? ...
Nope, I wouldn't buy it for a quarter... ;-}
For one thing, we might have practical fusion power by now.
No. We wouldn't.
I've noticed one thing about fusion: it's *always* "twenty years off" and has been since the early fifties. Tiny little steps, "we need more funding", and "maybe we'll get something in (this year+20). And over the past forty years, a lot of bold proposals for testbeds that, while crude and inefficient, might actually have WORKED so they could be improved, have been shot down. (cf. Bussard's proposal to use heavy, water-cooled high-strength magnets to brute-force a solution.)
See you in 2032, when "We'll have fusion in 2052." will be the rallying cry.
You're forgetting the key word in your own statement: 'practical'.
I still remember Mel Gottlieb (successfully) talking me out of studying plasma physics in the mid-Seventies - the closing part of his argument being 'get into some field that makes lots of money, so that if we get the technology workable in 40 years there'll be someone in a position to build it, with the money to build it.' Unfortunately, I studied some economics after then, and learned about opportunity cost...
Problem is, 'practical' fusion isn't just a technical thing like satisfying the Lawson criterion, or achieving stable sustained reaction, or even successful breeding in the blanket. It's about being cost-effective, compared to the alternatives, for generating electrical power, and/or supporting the thorium cycle... surely portability isn't a practical thing, even given a functional Riggatron, in these terror-prone times?
And until the revenue per, let's say, billable KWh over the plant lifetime comes up to... well, the cost to build the plant, commission it, run it with reasonable uptime, and then decommission it and deal with all the nasty little leftovers... you'll be waiting for your practical fusion power. Whether the theoretical physics, or the experimental demonstration of net energy production from the apparatus, is done. My informed guess is that it'll be twenty years out indefinitely...
Nuts all right -- the reason the bases went into Cuba in the first place was because Khruschev et al. thought Kennedy was young and naive enough... and from his track record in foreign policy up to that point, I'd say they had more than a little justification... to accept the fait accompli when they chose to divulge it. There is utterly no connection between this and the moon program; it's possible with some tortured logic to claim the moon program was intended to help 'close the missile gap' or some similar handwaving, but that's another discussion.
Plenty of discussion over the years on exactly who 'won points' when the Jupiter Cs came out as the quid pro quo. Face-saving? Elimination of worthless technology? ISTR Kennedy being furious when he heard the Jupiters were still emplaced -- he'd ordered them removed some time before, and apparently no one on his own side took him seriously, either... ;-}
Why does there have to be justification for Kennedy's call for the moon program being anything else than what he said it was? Contemporaries knew perfectly well that better rocket tech would make better weapons. They also knew perfectly well that the future of practical ICBMs did not involve LOX; it would either be solids or hypergolics. I guess there are still lots of people who... how can I say this delicately... aren't exactly rocket scientists when they post on this thread... ;-}
Early scientific minds were willing to chance being charged as religious heretics in order to study and eventually publish information about the solar system and basic physics models.
Yeah, that's why Leonardo spoke in code.
Ahhh.... no. Not at all.
We'll overlook that he wrote in 'code', not spoke. Exactly where do you find da Vinci being hereticized by the Church? Where do you find him being actively impaired by the powers-that-were?
Principal reason for his writing in 'code' as I understand it (from a seminar with Pam Long) was to keep competitors *in the private sector* from stealing his ideas and discoveries... without proper compensation. He shares with the Wright Brothers an important attitude... one not ungermane to the present discussion... which was a recognition that the most significant use of many of the technologies being developed was... war.
And I was born long before Apollo 7, and unless this is an alternate reality it did not 'blow up'. Apollo 13... yes, sorta. Apollo 1... didn't blow up, it caught fire, and it was on the ground at the time. For an unalloyed rocket disaster, you need to look past anything von Braun developed to STS-51L, perhaps more particularly at why it was launched with the OAT where it was... not really a technical 'failure' at all, in the sense of something not well understood by the developing teams...
Ok so it doesn't suck, but it really isn't that useful a place to go on its own. There's nothing there. I could see a base there as being useful for launching further deeper space missions, but then we first need to solve some other issues. Really right now the space research we should be focusing on seems to be launch costs. It costs WAY too much to put shit in space. Like $10,000/pound. We need to bring that cost down, then maybe we can look at putting more things (like a moon base) out in space.
Once we get more efficient launch methods, then maybe we talk about a moon base.
Yeah, just like we were doing so well with instantiated launch methods (either measured on our own or against Korolev) before the moon-shot development underwrote the Saturn HLV platform?
The issue isn't design of better platforms for heavy launch -- it's the development of them, with a mission that brings the marginal instantiated cost of overall launch down to something reasonable. I believe that anyone posting on here needs to have read 'The Case for Going to the Moon' (to say nothing of later commentary) before starting to make statements, no matter how sensible they are when taken by themselves. The justification for going to space is a synergy of details, just as the ostensible benefits from space development constitute synergistic benefits.
I think you may've overshot a point here. Yes, he could just order it shut down, but that doesn't mean he wouldn't amass very powerful entities. If Congress or the Senate or another committee hates the President, they're petty enough to vote against all of his initiatives regardless of merit. .
According to my professor of public administration in the mid-'80s, that is precisely what happened to Jimmy Carter as President. But for slightly different reasons -- he went in saying he'd clean house and fix the problems with entrenched line and staff bureaucracies. Many of the potential 'reformees' took the not-nonsensical view that 'we were here when you got here, and we'll be here after you're gone' -- and sabotaged his policies in as many ways as they could (which was plenty!)
Not to say that Carter's administration wouldn't have self-destructed for other reasons -- there were certainly plenty of other reasons. But the specific point was significant to me then, and still is.
Now, are there enough 'powers' solely connected with shutting down Gitmo to have this happen? Powers that already weren't opposed to Obama in some way, suddenly deciding on the strength of *that one decision* to see him destroyed or discredited? Or that the shutdown were the 'straw breaking the camel's back'? Frankly, I don't think so. (And it might be instructive to consider just what 'countervailing actions' might be taken, at what levels, to deflate any concern about the shutdown...)
BTW, I presume you meant 'enemies', not 'entities', but correct me if otherwise.