Benghazi

The difference it makes:

Maybe there’s an explanation in the internal processes of the State Department. And, it should be said, high officials often make decisions that with hindsight seem obvious mistakes. But she has given us just an exclamation, not an explanation.

And, as the Interim Report goes on to explain, the accounts given by the Obama administration at the time were misleading — deliberately so.

It notes that State immediately reported the attack to the White House Situation Room and two hours later noted an al Qaeda affiliate’s claim of responsibility. There was no mention of a spontaneous protest of an anti-Muslim video.

Yet President Obama, Clinton and press secretary Jay Carney spoke repeatedly for days later of a video and a protest. Clinton assured one victim’s family member that the video-maker was being prosecuted.

Because they had to maintain the false narrative for the election.

The Border Fence

Rubio has already caved:

If you want to write a bill that won’t result in a fence being built, you will give discretion to the DHS as to “where” it should be built, in what form–and, implicitly, where it shouldn’t be built. You will require only a ”plan.”

If you want to write a bill that won’t result in a fence being built but that might con conservatives into thinking it will be, you will throw in lots of meaningless references to possible ”double layer fencing” even though DHS might not decide to build even a foot of that kind of fencing (and none is mandated).

That’s what Rubio and his gang have written. Does Krauthammer–who despairs of getting any actual “enforcement first” bill through Congress, given Dem opposition–think Rubio is now going to pull a 180 and decide to really mandate an actual fence, and that Schumer and the Democrats will go along?

This won’t help Rubio get the nomination in 2016, if he decides to run.

SpaceShipTwo’s First Powered Flight?

A lot of rumors that it will be happening today. Jeff Foust has the story, with some broader context:

While Virgin may make a flight test of a crewed suborbital vehicle as soon as Monday, another company isn’t far behind. Just down the flightline from Virgin and Scaled at the Mojave airport, XCOR Aerospace is continuing work on its Lynx suborbital spaceplane, with plans to begin an incremental series of tests later this year.
“The concept design is done. I know what the approach is, I can put the numbers together,” Greason said of XCOR’s orbital vehicle plans.

“We’re not done yet,” said Jeff Greason, CEO of XCOR, said of Lynx in a presentation at the Space Access ’13 conference in Phoenix earlier this month. “It’s not because of any particular roadblock, but it’s just the usual 90-90 rule of project management: the first 90 percent takes the first 90 percent of the time, and the last 10 percent takes the other 90 percent of the time.”

While development of SpaceShipTwo’s hybrid rocket motor is widely believed to have been the major cause of that vehicle’s delays, Greason said propulsion is not an issue for Lynx. “Propulsion-wise, we’re in great shape,” he said, saying that the four engines, powered by liquid oxygen and kerosene, are now integrated into the fuselage of the Lynx Mark I prototype.

Instead, Greason said, XCOR has been working on a variety of other issues with the Lynx, including tweaks to the vehicle’s aerodynamics, avionics, and landing gear, as well as the production of the vehicle’s wings and a second fuselage. Flight tests are slated to begin in the second half of this year.

It just occurs to me that while the biggest difference is that XCOR was funding-constrained while (as far as I know) Virgin Galactic was not, both have also been delayed for symmetrical problems. XCOR is a propulsion company trying to build an airplane, while Scaled was an aircraft company trying to develop a rocket engine. So it’s natural that both companies have their core competency well in hand, but are being held up by the problem that’s not so much in their wheelhouse.

[Update a while later]

The implication, of course, is that if they’d teamed up, there might have been a suborbital vehicle flying years ago. That they didn’t certainly wasn’t XCOR’s fault.

[Update a few minutes later]

Apparently it was a successful test, and they went supersonic.

This may be the first prediction that Sir Richard has ever made that met schedule.

[Afternoon update]

Clark Lindsey has a roundup of links, including the congratulatory press release from XCOR.

Newtown Versus Watertown

What is the difference?

The contrast between the political exploitation of Newtown and the way in which the same media outlets have gone out of their way to avoid drawing the obvious conclusions about Boston could not be greater. In one case, the media helped orchestrate a national discussion in which hyper-emotional rhetoric about the fallen drove a political agenda. In the other, they are seeking to ensure that no conclusions — even those that are self-evident — be drawn under any circumstances.

We’re living in politically correct, and culturally suicidal times.

The Nerdprom Love Fest

Thoughts from Ann Althouse:

I really do find the shots of the audience quite sickening. Do they not realize how they look? It’s an anti-advertisement for the services they’d like to sell us. They seem utterly unprepared to confront power. I’m thinking: This is something that should be done in private, like masturbation. Then I realize: This is the public show. Imagine what they do in private.

I’m going to try not to. Apparently they have absolutely no self-awareness of how they look to those of us not so smitten.

Global Warming Theory

…is the new Lysenkoism:

All the climate alarmist organizations simply rubber stamp the irregular Assessment Reports of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). None of them do any original science on the theory of anthropogenic catastrophic global warming. But the United Nations is a proven, corrupt, power grabbing institution. The science of their Assessment Reports has been thoroughly rebutted by the hundreds of pages of science in Climate Change Reconsidered, and Climate Change Reconsidered: 2011 Interim Report, both written by dozens of scientists with the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change, and published by the Heartland Institute, the international headquarters of the skeptics of the theory of anthropogenic catastrophic global warming.

Again, check it out for yourself. You don’t have to read every one of the well over a thousand pages of careful science in both volumes to see at least that there is a real scientific debate.

The editors of the once respected journals of Science and Nature have abandoned science for Lysenkoism on this issue as well. They have become as political as the editorial pages of the New York Times. They claim their published papers are peer reviewed, but those reviews are conducted on the friends and family plan when it comes to the subject of anthropogenic catastrophic global warming. There can be no peer review at all when authors refuse to release their data and computer codes for public inspection and attempted reconstruction of reported results by other scientists. They have been forced to backtrack on recent publications relying on novel, dubious, statistical methodologies not in accordance with established methodologies of complex statistical analysis.

Formerly respected scientific bodies in the U.S. and other western countries have been commandeered by political activist Lysenkoists seizing leadership positions. They then proceed with politically correct pronouncements on the issue of anthropogenic catastrophic global warming heedless of the views of the membership of actual scientists. Most of what you see and hear from alarmists regarding global warming can be most accurately described as play acting on the meme of settled science. The above noted publications demonstrate beyond the point where reasonable people can differ that no actual scientist can claim that the science of anthropogenic catastrophic global warming has been settled or that there is a settled “consensus” that rules out reasonable dissent.

My emphasis.

Climate “science” doesn’t seem to have very many actual scientists involved with it.

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