Category Archives: History
Jeff Greason
I haven’t listened yet (it’s a two-hour interview), but I’m sure it’s interesting:
This has gone live now. Wide ranging; how I got in the field, what worthy goals are for the space enterprise, some of what we need, and of course, advanced propulsion. Gets a little emotional in spots. And 2 hours long ….https://t.co/CyO6dZPone
— Jeff Greason (@JeffGreason) April 16, 2026
Thanks to @tmro https://t.co/iIdePreSGP
Intelligence Versus Wisdom
Interesting thoughts. One of the purposes of the Senate was to be the wise house, to tamp down the impetuosity of the People’s House. We lost a lot of that with the 17th Amendment.
[Update a few minutes later]
Related: “An AI trained on engagement will optimize for engagement. An AI trained on profit will optimize for profit. An AI trained on wisdom would optimize for something else entirely, but we would have to know what wisdom looks like before we could train for it. And we have spent the last century systematically dismantling every institution that once tried to answer that question.”
The “Ceasefire”
…is merely a strategic pause. And the blockade of Iran is part of it.
[Tuesday-morning update]
I’m going to make many of you spitting mad at me for pointing this out, but now that we have started the naval blockade, Iran’s strategic position (which was already hopeless) has become terminal. They are soon going to run out of storage space for their oil. And we haven’t even…
— Ken Gardner (@KenGardner11) April 13, 2026
Disney
An interesting thesis: How it accidentally radicalized generations before they could read.
Convenient BS
The legacy of Al Gore’s religious polemic, twenty years on.
He, I think more than anyone, was responsible for the politicization of science.
Newsom Is Gruesome
An Open Letter To Western Europe
…from Eric Raymond.
Hello, Europeans. The first thing you need to understand about the rant I'm about to utter is that I'm not MAGA, not a Trumpite, but a libertarian who has in the past nevertheless been strongly supportive of US military presence overseas. Because I want the wars that defend this…
— Eric S. Raymond (@esrtweet) April 4, 2026
They have a choice. Our best allies in Europe right now are Poland, Finland, and the Baltics.
The Current Generation And Space
I've written about this extensively over the years (this, depressingly, is from almost a decade ago: https://t.co/4mnbzkPsvN), but the reason we didn't continue on from Apollo was that we did it the wrong way, the most expensive possible way, because of the "end of the decade"… https://t.co/BjXuPmKvgk
— Not-So-OK Boomer (@Rand_Simberg) April 2, 2026
Birthright Citizenship
Trump is right.