Thoughts from Bill Whittle. I’d note, though, that Siebold was actually unaware that Alsbury had unlocked the feathers. That information came from the cockpit camera, I think.
[Update a while later]
Commercial space setbacks, and why we need to move forward.
Someone should write a book about that.
It was blatherskite:
As an act of rare semantic derring-do, this was a towering achievement. As a political speech, I don’t think it was very effective. It puts one in mind of the debate in “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” which ends when one side manages to prove that black is white — and gets themselves killed at the next pedestrian crosswalk.
To be honest, it’s not clear to me that the president was trying to be persuasive. He seemed, rather, to be triple-dog-daring Republicans to jump off the bridge with him, and if history is any guide, they will probably oblige. But there’s a real risk that Democrats will come to regret having the president jump first.
Reportedly some of them already are. He may have created a wedge issue for his own party.
Why you don’t want to let “intellectuals” anywhere near power:
Unfortunately, contemporary Washington is calibrated to defer to experts who defer to politicians, providing an intellectual Praetorian Guard for the constant growth of a leviathan. As Denver University professor David Ciepley noted, “Starting in the First World War, and much more so during the New Deal and World War II, American social scientists became part of the autonomous state themselves, helping staff the mushrooming government agencies.” The closer that intellectuals get to politicians, the more weaselly they usually become.
Playing off Mr. Gruber’s derision of average Americans, one wag suggested a new acronym — L.I.E. — for Low Information Experts. Mr. Gruber and many other professors have gotten rich by pretending that government is far more competent than it actually is. Economist Robert Skidelsky, writing about the history of modern socialism, observed that “the collectivist belief system existed independently of the facts of modern life.” The same is true of the academic cadre who profit by vindicating endless government interventions that breed chaos and dependency.
I’d like to think that people will take a lesson from this (particularly with regard to climate models), but history doesn’t make me hopeful.
They still have no idea what they’re going to do after thye run out of SSMEs.
As I noted on Twitter:
If a Martian looked at this program, it'd say, "Well, sure don't have anything to worry about from these lunatics.: http://t.co/JcChYaQSgG
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) November 21, 2014
[Afternoon update]
Contra Dan Dumbacher's crazytown Huffpo editorial, SLS is not a "highway" to the solar system. It's a dead-end railroad siding.
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) November 21, 2014
Google engineers have given up on it:
At the start of RE
Anyone who understands basic math and physics knows that the notion it could replace fossil fuels was always insane.
Alan Boyle has an inside look at how VG employees are responding to the loss of Alsbury and the space ship. Note that the official schedule now is “ground testing” in the first half of next year. That’s a lot more realistic than past predictions, I think.
It was the administration that hacked Sharyl Atkisson’s computer:
How’s that grab you, champions of the fourth estate? The White House teamed up with the Attorney General to take out a troublesome reporter and gin up some dirty coverage for congressional investigators. A patently bogus claim of executive privilege was used to keep politically-damaging documents under wraps until the President was safely beyond the reach of irate voters. You’d have been totally cool with Richard Nixon doing something like this, right?
Sure, if he’d been a Democrat.
In the comics.
Who knew eating meat causes diabetes?
Here’s the final report from the CAA, for those who have time and interest. There seems to be quite a bit of enthusiasm. Of course, the Brits have been out of the space game, in terms of launch, for decades.
In his attempt to troll the hard right, Obama has actually handed them a wonderful gift by killing comprehensive immigration reform dead. Legislative amnesty is finished, it’s done, it’s pining for the fjords. Conservative Republicans get to finally advance border and enforcement reforms without even dealing with those here illegally! It’s just what the Bob Goodlattes of the world have wanted to do all along: ditch the clunky amnesty tradeoffs and deal with citizenship issues last, only after securing the border. It’s the Republican establishment, consultant and donor classes, and the Chamber who are closest to the blast radius on this, turning anyone viewed as pro-amnesty toxic overnight. They will be viewed by the GOP base as supportive of the president’s overreach despite all denials (“I was in favor of what he did but not how he did it” is always a weak position), which will make for some very awkward defenses in the 2016 stakes.
Yup.