Do debating tactics get any more confused, sleazy and odious than this?

A slave owner in the antebellum South thought that blacks were not human beings, and he resented like hell an abolitionist telling him that he had to treat a black like a human being, and it was his principled view that that wasn’t the case. And you had to fight a civil war and basically use the state to enforce the notion that all men are created equal, and that blacks were as fully human beings as whites were. So there are times that that libertarian model just doesn’t work very well.

So, Fukuyama claims that libertarianism, a belief in the sovereignty of the individual, would have defended slavery? Francis, get a clue. Slavery was a failure of statism–in which laws were passed that made it legal for one man to enslave another. This was as far from libertarianism as it’s possible to get.

Comments like this make it hard to take anything he says about ethics or morality, on the subject of cloning, or anything else, seriously.

I’m not normally really big on labor actions, but I hope that the airline pilots strike over this stupidity. My only consolation is that it would probably be even worse if Gore were president.

Until DNS catches up over the next few days, the URL for Instapundit is here.

I’ve long complained that NASA’s efforts to reduce costs were misdirected, because their focus was on technology (which is a problem, but not a major one) rather than new markets and financing (which is the problem). We’ve long known that many people would go into space if they could afford it–polls have always shown it–but NASA has steadfastly ignored this, instead always perverting every launch study they do into a replacement for the Shuttle–oversized, and underflown (the most recent example being X-33, though the SLI program shows signs of the same debilitating tendency).

They have spent (and in most cases, wasted) billions of dollars on this, when a tiny fraction of a percent of the funds that they’ve spent on these technology efforts could have funded some serious market polling that vehicle developers and investors could literally take to the bank.

Finally, after many years, a mere trickle of the NASA new-vehicle funding (this time out of the Space Launch Initiative) has gone toward this end, which will have value far beyond the billions previously spent on technology and system studies.

A NASA contractor, Futron, has directed Zogby International to do a poll, using funding from their market-analysis contract with NASA. Unlike previous polls, which queried the general public, this one focused on people with the actual means to go.

The unsurprising (to me) result is that rich folks are like any other–half of them want to go, and are willing to pay what it costs. Mark Shuttleworth isn’t a weirdo–he’s typical. Of course, the way in which the rich folks aren’t like you and me is that they can afford to.

To me, this is one of the most exciting things that’s happened in space in a long time (partly because I’ve been advocating it for many years). It will go a long way toward making investors take this market more seriously, the previous lack of which has been holding us back. The frustrating thing, of course, is that it could have been done any time over the past couple decades, had we had more visionary people running the agency.

I’ve long complained that NASA’s efforts to reduce costs were misdirected, because their focus was on technology (which is a problem, but not a major one) rather than new markets and financing (which is the problem). We’ve long known that many people would go into space if they could afford it–polls have always shown it–but NASA has steadfastly ignored this, instead always perverting every launch study they do into a replacement for the Shuttle–oversized, and underflown (the most recent example being X-33, though the SLI program shows signs of the same debilitating tendency).

They have spent (and in most cases, wasted) billions of dollars on this, when a tiny fraction of a percent of the funds that they’ve spent on these technology efforts could have funded some serious market polling that vehicle developers and investors could literally take to the bank.

Finally, after many years, a mere trickle of the NASA new-vehicle funding (this time out of the Space Launch Initiative) has gone toward this end, which will have value far beyond the billions previously spent on technology and system studies.

A NASA contractor, Futron, has directed Zogby International to do a poll, using funding from their market-analysis contract with NASA. Unlike previous polls, which queried the general public, this one focused on people with the actual means to go.

The unsurprising (to me) result is that rich folks are like any other–half of them want to go, and are willing to pay what it costs. Mark Shuttleworth isn’t a weirdo–he’s typical. Of course, the way in which the rich folks aren’t like you and me is that they can afford to.

To me, this is one of the most exciting things that’s happened in space in a long time (partly because I’ve been advocating it for many years). It will go a long way toward making investors take this market more seriously, the previous lack of which has been holding us back. The frustrating thing, of course, is that it could have been done any time over the past couple decades, had we had more visionary people running the agency.

I’ve long complained that NASA’s efforts to reduce costs were misdirected, because their focus was on technology (which is a problem, but not a major one) rather than new markets and financing (which is the problem). We’ve long known that many people would go into space if they could afford it–polls have always shown it–but NASA has steadfastly ignored this, instead always perverting every launch study they do into a replacement for the Shuttle–oversized, and underflown (the most recent example being X-33, though the SLI program shows signs of the same debilitating tendency).

They have spent (and in most cases, wasted) billions of dollars on this, when a tiny fraction of a percent of the funds that they’ve spent on these technology efforts could have funded some serious market polling that vehicle developers and investors could literally take to the bank.

Finally, after many years, a mere trickle of the NASA new-vehicle funding (this time out of the Space Launch Initiative) has gone toward this end, which will have value far beyond the billions previously spent on technology and system studies.

A NASA contractor, Futron, has directed Zogby International to do a poll, using funding from their market-analysis contract with NASA. Unlike previous polls, which queried the general public, this one focused on people with the actual means to go.

The unsurprising (to me) result is that rich folks are like any other–half of them want to go, and are willing to pay what it costs. Mark Shuttleworth isn’t a weirdo–he’s typical. Of course, the way in which the rich folks aren’t like you and me is that they can afford to.

To me, this is one of the most exciting things that’s happened in space in a long time (partly because I’ve been advocating it for many years). It will go a long way toward making investors take this market more seriously, the previous lack of which has been holding us back. The frustrating thing, of course, is that it could have been done any time over the past couple decades, had we had more visionary people running the agency.

In a comment about my post on the Chinese space program, Mark Whittington writes:

The Chinese missed a big opportunity to became a world wide imperial power. They not only shut down Zheng’s operation, but forbid all deepwater sailing, even those privately financed and run. It was a blunder of enormous consequence and I don’t think that the current Chinese leadership will repeat it.

My point was not that they didn’t miss an opportunity–they did. My point was the reason for that missed opportunity.

They didn’t then, (and don’t really now) understand the dynamism and strength of capitalism. Zheng He’s missions were not for wealth creation, or even acquisition–they were for national prestige. If that’s the reason that the modern dynasts go to the Moon, they will ultimately stumble as well (as we did, at least temporarily, over three decades ago).

Hey, Glenn’s got a new look at his site.

Suggestion–make the font in the posts a little bigger–it’s a little tough on us presbyopes.

Hey, Glenn’s got a new look at his site.

Suggestion–make the font in the posts a little bigger–it’s a little tough on us presbyopes.

Hey, Glenn’s got a new look at his site.

Suggestion–make the font in the posts a little bigger–it’s a little tough on us presbyopes.