The fear and unending two-minute hate against Sarah Palin (and Republican women in general) is a wonder to behold.
Monthly Archives: June 2009
Not Quite Gone
A couple weeks ago, I noted that World War II is passing out of living memory. But there are still some who remember remaining, some bitter, some sad, and Carol Gould talks to a few of them.
First Day
Clark Lindsey has been live blogging the Augustine Commission hearings in DC. Just keep scrolling. Little editorializing other than a “sigh…” when John Shannon disses reusability.
[Thursday morning update]
Alan Boyle has a summary and link round up of yesterday’s festivities.
[Update a few minutes later]
A couple days ago, I noted my hope that the Augustine Commission wouldn’t just look at alternative launch architectures, but rather take a big-picture, systems approach, and look at exploration architectures overall (which I assume that Jeff Greason was trying to do with his depot question to the DIRECT team). That means reexamining all of the assumptions, including what the lunar lander would look like. Jon Goff has some thoughts today.
[Late morning update]
A day-after summary from Jeff Foust.
Insanity
They can rebuild guard rails on dry lakes in Oklahoma, but they’re cutting money for missile defense.
A Response To Derbyshire
He gets a letter from an astronaut in response to his anti-manned-space piece. Of course, it should be noted that it was anti-NASA manned space, not anti-manned space in general.
He remains unrepentant:
I would give everything I have, ten times over, to have been where Greg has been and see what he has seen. I don’t see any reason why U.S. taxpayers should fund my enthusiasm, though.
Neither do I.
He is obviously not opposed to human space flight. I think that he might think differently had the taxpayers’ money done more (and a lot more) to allow him to go. And, to forestall the usual trolls, that doesn’t mean paying for his trip. It just means doing the kinds of things that made aviation successful.
[Wednesday afternoon update]
Mark Whittington imagines that I am “misreading” Derb’s attitude:
He is obviously not opposed to human space flight. I think that he might think differently had the taxpayers’ money done more (and a lot more) to allow him to go.
Actually Derbyshire makes it clear that he is opposed to all government funded pace exploration, such as Apollo.
So sayeth the Derb today (though not in response to Mark’s own misreading — I’m quite confident that he never reads Mark’s scribblings):
…even if I grant your argument, the role of government remains to be decided. Stuck as I am with the rooted conviction that government does everything badly and in a spirit of financial irresponsibility, I’d keep government involvement to a mimimum, with just perhaps a modest subsidy here or there to encourage entrepreneurs. Shuttle missions at half a billion dollars per, though? No thanks. Not unless I’m on board!
I’m a little more principled than Derb — I’d object to billion-dollar shuttle flights (just as I object to billion-and-a half-dollar Ares I flights) as a national policy even if I were on board.
I’m sure that Mark will continue to misread it, though. It’s what he does.
[Bumped]
Don’t Hold Your Breath, Guys
EADS Astrium is still “fully committed” to building a suborbital tourist vehicle. All they’re waiting for is someone to hand them a billion dollars. Hey, it’s only a millibarack.
These people crack me up.
Do You Hear That Little Sound?
It’s the sound of me playing the tiniest violin in the universe:
…as much as I hate the idea of the leader of the free world being short on sleep, it’s hard to work up a lot of sympathy for a guy who can’t sleep with his own decisions, and is still trying to figure out ways to drive the deficit even higher … no matter how often he says his universal health plan is going to cut costs. In fact, the news that he can’t sleep and can’t stop is more than a little disturbing.
And you know that the last way that he’ll try to do anything about the deficit is to cut spending. Unless it’s military spending, of course.
Welcome Back, Carter
Will Collier says it’s looking like 1979 all over again:
The fantasy that “moderates” within the mullah regime can be coaxed into a “grand bargain” has taken in better men than Barack Obama, but Obama doesn’t even have the excuse of not being aware of that prior history. The level of self-loathing an American has to possess to believe that the Khomeinists are a brutal, terror-supporting regime entirely because the US hasn’t been nice enough to them is pretty staggering.
Khoemeini and his heirs were and are brutal fanatics. Period, dot. They have subjugated and terrorized their own people and done their level best to kill ours for thirty years because that’s what they are and that’s what they do. The devil didn’t make them do it. There’s nothing you or I or Jimmy Carter or George W. Bush or Barack Obama ever could have said that would have changed them. The idea that we’d burn some kind of bridge with Ahmadinejad and the ayatollahs behind him is laughable–those guys are never going to be anything other than hostile to us, and Obama ought to be realistic enough to understand as much.
Unfortunately, Obama spent far too much time marinating in Leftoid academia, and invested too much of his political persona in the self-aggrandizing mantra, “Everybody hates us because of Bush” to be able to comprehend the significance of what’s going on in Iran right now. It’s not about us…
…I’ve meet a lot of Eastern Europeans who have pictures of Ronald Reagan on their mantles. They never forgot the way he stood up for them, in public, against the commissars. Iran’s population is going to run off the mullahs one of these years, hopefully this year. When that happens, what do you want them to remember, that we were supporting them, or worrying about what their oppressors would think about it?
I hope that they remember that a lot of us did support them, even if the dictator coddler in the White House doesn’t.
[Update mid morning]
The ongoing saga of the “liberal” reactionaries:
I’m confused. Back when I identified as a liberal, democracy promotion was very much what we stood for. We would have done anything to get rid of the likes of Pinochet and Somoza. When Pinochet was up against it in Chile, every liberal I knew was jumping for joy, cheering on Salvador Allende. Why not the Iranian demonstrators against Ahmadinejad and the mullahs who, in many ways, are worse even than Pinochet? The Chilean dictator didn’t oppress women and gays to anywhere near the extent of the Islamists. He also wasn’t building a nuclear weapon and denying the Holocaust. Is everything standing on its head? What’s going on here? Left is right. Right is left. Liberal is… reactionary?
You’d almost think he has no real interest in either freedom or democracy.
Swag For The Troops
Couldn’t Happen Too Soon
The robocall auto warranty scammers have been busted. I don’t even know what the scam is, because I never answer when they call, but I hear the message. They tell me that they recently sent me a letter about my auto warranty, and I know it’s a lie, because I don’t currently own a car.