May18
Brian Doherty at ReasonTV interviews Doug Jones of XCOR.
Brian Doherty at ReasonTV interviews Doug Jones of XCOR.
…is falling apart.
My thoughts on the IRS crimes, over at PJMedia.
The current state of play. This is disturbing:
Bolden has acknowledged in congressional testimony, most recently in an April 25 hearing of the Senate Appropriations commerce, justice, science subcommittee, that without a fully funded Commercial Crew Program, the agency may have to pick only one aspiring provider to fund.
That could happen as soon as next summer, when NASA plans to award the next round of Commercial Crew funding.
They make it sound like he’s issuing a threat when that’s exactly what Congress wants them to do. If I were Bolden (or rather, if I were administrator — obviously if I were Bolden I’d do what Bolden would do), I’d be figuring out a way to avoid the down select with a smaller budget. But if I were administrator, a lot of things would be done differently.
“OK, so maybe those gun nuts weren’t as crazy as I thought they were.”
Out: Gun control.
In. Government control.
[Update a while later]
Joe Scarborough is having second thoughts, too: “Gee, maybe background checks aren’t such a red-hot idea after all.”
I hope that this is the week that the American people finally wake up, after having stared into the abyss.
OK, so if I’m understanding Carney and Obama and all the president’s men correctly, the only part of the federal government over which Obama has any insight or control is Seal Team Six?
Is it a problem for suborbital spaceflight? The article says “space tourism,” but there will be a lot more applications than that.
The problem is that, like most “climate science,” we don’t really know. But if it is an issue, I suspect that it’s a worse one for Virgin than for XCOR, at least based on pictures of the plumes of both, and the solution to it would be LOX/hydrogen.
This is our Newtown, except it actually does justify real reform. We have to seize the opportunity.
It’s not as simple as reported:
Put another way, this study says that liberals are a coalition of rich wimpy men and strong poor men. Bu contrast, conservatives are a coalition of rich strong men and poor weak men.
The study found that women are different from men: a woman’s upper body strength did not affect her politics.
Partisans would like to think that it is the smart people who support their side. In reality, though, that doesn’t work: both sides have their share of both smart people and dumb people.
Yes, the notion that smart people are naturally “progressive” is just one of their many conceits.
…of the Mainstream Media:
The big question now is how many of the liberal media will return to form as this process unfolds itself with more whistleblowers emerging, and with documents subpoenaed and witnesses put under oath over the coming months. To be sure some already have reverted to their default position of excuse-making support, floating rationalizations to minimize the damage: Obama is too remote and disconnected (even, it may even be intimated as a fallback concession, a bit lazy what with all that golf and partying) to have actively instigated these shocks.
This would be the face-saving option for both Obama and the journalists who wish to remain invested in his cause, albeit at lower intensity now that they have conceded incompetence and perhaps sloth. He has disappointed them a little, but any overestimation they may have engaged in was out of the best of motives.
But others will take a different tack. Having devoted five plus years to the narrative of Obama the good, they will be ready to follow a new story line now, because it has the ultimate virtue in the news business: it is new. If the special committees which will investigate the scandals do their job, there will many veins to mine in uncovering and telling the stories of wrongdoing. In the 1970s, nobody made a good career move defending the Nixon administration’s use of the IRS against its opponents, after all.
It will be fascinating to see how they respond.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Some in the media have apologized to the Tea Partiers for not taking their concerns seriously:
“One of the guys said, ‘I’m sitting here looking at what you sent me last year and I’m embarrassed that I didn’t cover,’ and I said ‘I understand, this is so surreal, we didn’t know what we were dealing with,’” Zawistowski said.
Well, he should be embarrassed. They all should be. And an apology is the very least they could do after all of the lies and calumny that have been raining down on people who just wanted to see a return to Constitutional government. If they want to apologize, the best way to do it would be to start doing their damned jobs and stop carrying water for these incompetent thugs.
And they should follow the advice of Bob Woodward (and apologize to him, too):
I would not dismiss Benghazi. It’s a very serious issue. As people keep saying, four people were killed. You look at the hydraulic pressure that was in the system to not tell the truth, and, you know, we use this term and the government uses this term, talking points. Talking points, as we know, are like legal briefs. They’re an argument on one side. What we need to get rid of talking point and they need to put out statements or papers that are truth documents.
Don’t expect that from this gang. The media needs to learn that when it comes to Obama and the Democrats, they should not trust, and and they have verify everything.
…are getting worse than we thought:
The author hypothesizes the reasons for this are that attempts in the latest generation of models to reproduce observed changes in Arctic sea ice are causing “significant and widening discrepancy between the modeled and observed warming rates outside of the Arctic,” i.e. they have improved Arctic simulation at the expense of poorly simulating the rest of the globe.
It continues to amaze me that so many supposedly smart people take this junk science seriously. You know what this stuff looks more and more like to me? Epicycles.
Looks to me like the president dodged a question at his presser today, while pretending that he was answering it. Which only raises more questions, of course.
For those wondering from my post the other week, he has contacted me.
…has lost a reaction wheel.
This is bad news for exo-planet hunting.
Having a deep-space capability would allow the repair of systems like this.
He’s not only the best gun salesman in history, but he’s apparently selling conservatism, too:
If these scandals are indeed affecting the ideological landscape, this is bad news for liberals. It’s not just that the opposite ideology is getting some help from government bunglers, but the media is exacerbating the problem. Liberals believe that there is a role for government to play in mediating market failures, and there are plenty of stories of areas where the safety net is thinning as a result of sequestration—from cancer treatments to Head Start to Meals-on-Wheels—where government should step in. But those stories get lost in the scandal coverage of an administration, making it look like conservatives fundamentally understand something that liberals do not.
You don’t say.
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A Heartbreaking Short Film About Loss
by Rand Simberg on May 18, 2013 at 1:23 pm…set in an asteroid mine.