Angara finally flies.
They really need access to a lower-latitude launch site than Plesetsk, though, to maximize its utility.
All posts by Rand Simberg
Two Tyrannies In One Day
The US caves:
Obama announced on Wednesday that Washington and the Castro regime would resume diplomatic relations after a 53-year estrangement. This platinum-medal prize for totalitarian legend Fidel Castro, 88, and his brother Raul, a sprightly man of 83, came at a cost to them of . . . nothing!
Normalization might have made sense in exchange for the Castros’ liberating all political prisoners from their dungeons. (In 2008, Obama promised that normal relations only would happen after the Castros’ political jails were emptied.) A strict timetable for free elections might have merited Obama’s move. So might have Cuba’s adoption of freedoms of movement, speech, press, property, and religion — for starters. The Castros still offer their people none of the above. Fidel and Raul get to eat their dictatorial cake and have it, too, with diplomatic-relations frosting on top. Free of charge.
Obama’s Christmas present to these aging autocracts lacks the geopolitical genius and strategic benefits of President Nixon’s February 1972 overture to China. Instead, it’s just one young strongman handing the ultimate bucket-list item to two ancient strongmen. The only strings attached to Obama’s gift are the ribbons around the wrapping paper.
America’s surrender to North Korea and its hackers is even more bothersome.
Not sure it’s more bothersome, but it is depressing.
Exodus
Raise your hand if you want to see Moses portrayed as an insurgent lunatic terrorist with a bad conscience, the pharaoh who sought the murder of all first-born Hebrew slaves as a nice and reasonable fellow, and God as a foul-tempered 11-year-old boy with an English accent.
All right, I see a few hands raised, though maybe they belong to people who are still demonstrating about Ferguson. So let me ask you this: How many of you want to see how Hollywood has taken the story of the Hebrew departure from ancient Egypt — by far the most dramatic tale in the world’s most enduring book — and turned it into a joyless, dull, turgid bore?
I don’t know when I’ve seen a movie as self-destructively misconceived as Exodus: Gods and Kings, the director Ridley Scott’s $200-million retelling of the Moses story that has as much chance of making $200 million at the American box office as Ted Cruz has of winning the District of Columbia in the November 2016 election.
No one has explained to me why it was necessary to redo The Ten Commandments. I guess maybe it brings it to a new audience, with better effects, but why so totally screw with the Biblical story line?
This doesn’t inspire confidence for Scott’s upcoming treatment of The Martian.
[Update a few minutes later]
Also, this:
The problem with genre deconstruction in a biblical film is that Blue State audiences won’t touch religious-oriented films with a barge pole, and Red State audiences know when they’re being gaslighted, and those who see the film during its opening weekend quickly tell their friends to avoid yet another boilerplate Hollywood attack on religion. While some initial leftwing critics screamed that Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ was arguably torture porn and/or anti-Semitic, Red State audiences quickly discovered through word of mouth that Mel was perhaps the last filmmaker in Hollywood who took the notion of God and Jesus seriously. (As Hans Fiene of the Federalist quipped last week, if Hollywood wants to get its biblical blockbuster groove back, just “Pretend Mel Gibson is Roman Polanski.”
Heh.
[Update a while later]
It occurs to me that people opposed to this kind of thing don’t have to threaten to bomb theaters. It’s self detonating.
The House Benghazi Report
Outgoing committee chairman Mike Rogers blew up (skip to the ten-minute mark) the media/left narrative that his committee report exonerated the administration yesterday. “Only did intelligence issues, not State Department, not White House.” We won’t have the full story until Gowdy has completed the job.
Orion And SLS
Thoughts on the fiscal challenges, from the Director of the GAO.
If you plan a planetary science mission on assumption that you'll use SLS, you're making a very risky bet.
— Rand Simberg (@Simberg_Space) December 22, 2014
The Left
…is vastly more racist than “the right”:
Since I was publicly identified with the right, roughly from when I started blogging in 2003 (although it was actually several years earlier in private), I have personally witnessed not a single incident of racism from anyone who could be considered a right winger and heard only one racial slur — and that was from a Frenchman. In the seven years I was CEO of PJ Media, I came to know or meet literally dozens of people who identified with the Tea Party. I did not hear one word of anything close to racism from any of them even once. Not one, ever. This despite their being accused of racism constantly.
…we live in [a] culture where there is considerably more black racism than white racism. Someone like Al Sharpton, clearly the equivalent of David Duke, is far more powerful than Duke ever was. No one pays attention to the execrable Duke, as they shouldn’t. But they shouldn’t pay attention to Sharpton either.
But he’s only a part of the problem. There’s also the mayor of the city of New York, Bill de Blasio, the prototype of the leftwing fellow-traveler racist who assumes someone is more moral or better because he or she is “of color.” Of course this is condescending — and therefore racist — to the people he thinks are so pure. No one is. The whole theory of “white skin privilege” is racist and totalitarian to the core: actually it was invented by totalitarians. And while I’m ranting here, all racial identity organizations like the Congressional Black Caucus are inherently racist and dangerous, just as the White Citizens’ Council was and would be.
That’s been obvious to me for decades. All their accusations of racism are just one more aspect of their psychological projection. And so overplayed has the race card become, by race baiters like Sharpton (and Holder, and Obama), that I now take being called a racist by them as a badge of pride.
[Update a while later]
This seems related:
Now and then, I think back to why I rejected the Left, many years ago — when I was in college. One of the reasons was, they always kept the racial pot boiling. They would never let the pot cool off. It seemed to me they did not want racial harmony. They preferred strife, regarding it as more “authentic” or something. Harmony was for Toms.
Yup.
Feminist Fiascos Of 2014
The top ten.
She probably could have come up with more, but I guess “ten” is the magic number for stories like this.
Virgin Galactic’s New Web Site
A lot of the previous hype seems to have gone down the memory hole. As Doug writes, it’s a shame that it took the destruction of a vehicle and death of a pilot to finally get them to tone it down.
“Phony” IRS Scandal Update
The agency has release a whopping 1% of the requested documents.
Religion Of Peace Update
I know it’s become a sad joke, but when I heard last night about the execution of the two cops in New York, I thought “When will we find out that the perp was a Muslim”? With the last name “Brinsley,” I figured that we’d finally found a random murderous criminal act that wasn’t Jihad related — it was just from rage whipped up by the hateful race baiters like Sharpton (and de Blasio).
Well, it turns out that my relief came too soon:
In my previous posts on assassin Ismaaiyl Brinsley, who murdered two New York Police Department officers on Saturday, I noted that he had posted on Facebook a page of the Quran with a notorious verse calling on Muslims to “strike terror into the [hearts of] the enemies of Allah,” and another post about a fight he recently engaged in with an Atlanta panhandler when he discovered the panhandler was a “Muslim too.”
But an Instagram message posted by Brinsley during Ramadan five months ago may indicate that he visited one of America’s most terror-tied mosques.
Sigh.