All posts by Rand Simberg

Political Commentary, Weird

An Omen?

1 Comment

As Halperin writes, you can’t make this kind of thing up:

Hillary Clinton enthusiastically picked a filly named Eight Belles to win the Kentucky Derby and compared herself to the horse. Eight Belles finished second. The winner was the favorite, Big Brown.

Eight Belles collapsed immediately after crossing the finish line, and was euthanized shortly thereafter.

Like Mark, I too have no other comment.

Oh, and while we’re on the subject, does Hillary! live in a permanent state of denial and fantasy? Mickey makes a good case.

[Mid-morning update]

Speaking of denial, Jim Geraghty explains (once again, for those who continue to miss the point, or obfuscate it with straw men) that the issue with Wright is not the concern that Obama secretly shares his views (though that is certainly a possibility). It’s the judgment, stupid:

In Wright, Obama saw what he wanted to see. He wanted a wise, shrewd, kind, funny, educated man who could show him the ways of the world (and Chicago politics), one who perhaps went a little too far every now and then, but who was overall a good person.

Instead, we see that Wright is a toxic figure, arguing that blacks and whites have different brain structures, that the American government created the AIDS virus for genocidal purposes, that U.S. policy can accurately be called terrorism, that the U.S. Marines can be compared to the Roman soldiers who tortured Jesus, who calls Italians “garlic-noses,” who calls the Secretary of State “Condoskeezia” and “Con-damn-nesia”, etc.

Here’s where the example of Wright is truly disturbing when contemplating an Obama presidency. If Barack Obama looked at Jeremiah Wright and saw only what he wanted to see… how sure can we be that he wouldn’t look at say, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and see only what he wanted to see?

Also, as a bonus, some psychoanalysis based on Obama’s book. So now both Hillary! and Obama are put on the couch in this post.

Administrative

House Painting

That’s why no posting this weekend. We tore out some shrubbery, and it was a good opportunity to paint the house, which we had never done since we bought it, four years ago. New landscaping, too, so drive-up value should be improved considerably.

Political Commentary

He’s Got His Number

4 Comments

I think that Victor Davis Hanson has diagnosed the situation spot on, and it’s good news for Republicans, because it means that a) Obama is almost a lock on the nomination and b) there’s no way he can win the general election. Particularly since Hillary! will do everything she can to prevent it, as long as her fingerprints aren’t on it.

…privately they acknowledge:

–that their candidate made a devil’s bargain with a racist to create an authentic black persona in order to jump start a political career in Chicago;

–that their candidate was so inured to de rigueur anti-American speech from his church days, black-liberationist friends, assorted reverends, and former radicals like Ayers, that he never really thought things that Wright said were all that big a deal — hence his deer-in-the-headlights approach to the initial scandal and serial hedging. After all, in Obama’s adopted world, his church really isn’t “particularly controversial;”

–that their Obama messiah is hardly a new politician, but instead a very gifted and charismatic actor, who, in skillful fashion, can talk about utopian politics but then backstep, hedge, and get away with more than anyone since Bill Clinton in his prime in 1992 (one of the reasons that those two dislike each other so is that they are so much alike) — and that is not such a bad thing after all.

Yes, I can easily imagine letting such talk pass, while not necessarily agreeing with it, accepting it as well within reasonable discourse. I remember doing it a lot in college.

But I grew up.

Political Commentary

He’s Got His Number

I think that Victor Davis Hanson has diagnosed the situation spot on, and it’s good news for Republicans, because it means that a) Obama is almost a lock on the nomination and b) there’s no way he can win the general election. Particularly since Hillary! will do everything she can to prevent it, as long as her fingerprints aren’t on it.

…privately they acknowledge:

–that their candidate made a devil’s bargain with a racist to create an authentic black persona in order to jump start a political career in Chicago;

–that their candidate was so inured to de rigueur anti-American speech from his church days, black-liberationist friends, assorted reverends, and former radicals like Ayers, that he never really thought things that Wright said were all that big a deal — hence his deer-in-the-headlights approach to the initial scandal and serial hedging. After all, in Obama’s adopted world, his church really isn’t “particularly controversial;”

–that their Obama messiah is hardly a new politician, but instead a very gifted and charismatic actor, who, in skillful fashion, can talk about utopian politics but then backstep, hedge, and get away with more than anyone since Bill Clinton in his prime in 1992 (one of the reasons that those two dislike each other so is that they are so much alike) — and that is not such a bad thing after all.

Yes, I can easily imagine letting such talk pass, while not necessarily agreeing with it, accepting it as well within reasonable discourse. I remember doing it a lot in college.

But I grew up.

Political Commentary

He’s Got His Number

I think that Victor Davis Hanson has diagnosed the situation spot on, and it’s good news for Republicans, because it means that a) Obama is almost a lock on the nomination and b) there’s no way he can win the general election. Particularly since Hillary! will do everything she can to prevent it, as long as her fingerprints aren’t on it.

…privately they acknowledge:

–that their candidate made a devil’s bargain with a racist to create an authentic black persona in order to jump start a political career in Chicago;

–that their candidate was so inured to de rigueur anti-American speech from his church days, black-liberationist friends, assorted reverends, and former radicals like Ayers, that he never really thought things that Wright said were all that big a deal — hence his deer-in-the-headlights approach to the initial scandal and serial hedging. After all, in Obama’s adopted world, his church really isn’t “particularly controversial;”

–that their Obama messiah is hardly a new politician, but instead a very gifted and charismatic actor, who, in skillful fashion, can talk about utopian politics but then backstep, hedge, and get away with more than anyone since Bill Clinton in his prime in 1992 (one of the reasons that those two dislike each other so is that they are so much alike) — and that is not such a bad thing after all.

Yes, I can easily imagine letting such talk pass, while not necessarily agreeing with it, accepting it as well within reasonable discourse. I remember doing it a lot in college.

But I grew up.

Technology and Society

A New Strap-On Design

15 Comments

No, not that kind of strap on. Get your minds out of the sewer.

A strap-on helicopter:

Tiny rockets at the tips of the helicopter’s rotor blades take the place of a tail rotor, a component which couldn’t be safely attached to a human body. According to the company, the Libelula would be the lightest helicopter in the world, so light that it could be strapped to a person’s body with a carbon fiber corset.

“The best [part] of this technology is that [these] kinds of helicopters don’t need a tail rotor because they don’t have any torque, so with a simple vane they can turn – being the simplest form of an helicopter and the easiest and safer to fly,” the company says on its Web site.

So, first question is: how do they prevent the pilot/passenger from rotating with the blades (there’s bound to be non-zero friction in the bearing)? Seems like you’d get kinda dizzy, and it would be hard to steer.

There would also seem to be safety issues for bystanders–that thing could easily decapitate someone.

General Science, Philosophy, Political Commentary, Science And Society

Show Me The Science

8 Comments

Jim Manzi reviews Expelled. He’s not impressed.

And John Derbyshire is appropriately dismayed by Jews like David Klinghoffer and Ben Stein latching on to this anti-science schtick:

One of the best reasons to be a philosemite in our time is sheer gratitude at the disproportionate contribution Jews have made to the advance of Western civilization, and to our understanding of the world, this past two hundred years. The U.S.A. dominated the 20th century in culture and technology, to the great benefit of all mankind, in part because of the work done in math and science by the great tranche of pre-WW2 immigrant Jews from Europe.

Now you have joined up with people who want to trash the scientific enterprise and heap insults on one of the greatest names in intellectual history. For reasons unfathomable to me, you and Ben Stein want to sneer and scoff at our understandings, hard-won over centuries of arduous intellectual effort. Don’t the two of you know, don’t Jews of all people know, where this anti-intellectual agitation, this pandering to a superstitious mob, will lead at last? If you truly don’t, I refer you to the fate of Hypatia, which you can read about in my last book (Chapter 3), or in Gibbon (Chapter XLVII). Your new pals at the Discovery Institute no doubt think Hypatia got what she deserved.

Civilization is a thin veneer, David. Reason and science are bulwarks against the dark.

The mistake that these people make is to equate science with atheism. It is true that, as science advances, and more scientific explanations are put forth, much of the need for God, at least insofar as an explanation for natural phenomena, is removed. But then, that’s the nature of natural phenomena–if they require the supernatural, they are by definition not natural.

But it doesn’t follow that a belief in science in general, or evolution in particular, requires atheism. Many (including Manzi in the link above) have pointed out numerous examples, going back to Aquinas, of the compatibility of rationality and reason, and theism. Stein and Klinghoffer would return us to the dark ages, even if they don’t realize it.