Just as a reminder, while yesterday’s Apollo anniversary was of course much more significant, at least over the long haul, it was also the tenth anniversary of an event that started a very troubling chapter in our politics–the untimely death of Clinton White House counsel Vince Foster.
Joe Farah has a rundown on why, whatever the truth (and it may never be known due to the flawed nature of the investigation), we should remain very skeptical of the official story.
The anti-globo morons have come up with some brilliant and practical ideas to deal with the G8’s choice of Sea Island for the next summit.
A posting by the group Food Not Bombs in Berkeley, Calif., said it may build a “a floating food warehouse and communal kitchen to serve delicious vegan meals to participants arriving at the island by kayak.”
Or perhaps protesters could take up a collection to buy one of Sea Island’s 500 “cottages,” which range in price from $1.3 million to $18 million.
“If ten-thousand people chipped in half a grand each, we could collectively own it, and then throw a REALLY BIG HOUSEWARMING PARTY,” wrote a messager using the name “mj,” who included a link to real estate listings on Sea Island’s Web site. “It’d have to be illegal to keep us off the island.”
But here’s my favorite:
One messager using the name “wispy” suggested trying to breach the island with flotilla of boats flying pirate flags and blaring composer Richard Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries.”
I love the smell of salt-sprayed vegans in the morning.
Looks like the space wedding is off.
I guess that innovative-uses-of-space stuff runs hot and cold in Russia.
Via Geek Press, the ultimate grand list of overused SF cliches. This should be a mouse click away from any aspiring SF writer, if you don’t want to add to the burgeoning pile of turgid and laughable dreck out there, and further decrease the percentage of non-crud in Sturgeon’s Law.
I particularly enjoyed the cliched settings and characterizations:
Cities of future are depicted as though sanitation workers have been on strike from now until then.
Planets with the same exact climate planet-wide (planets without atmosphere excepted).
Alternative Earths where society is just like some society of the past, with some technodoodads added.
Bad guys who miss everything they shoot at.
Beginning warriors who hit everything they shoot at.
All genetically superior humans have an innate drive to rule, conquer, or kill everyone else.
And silly science:
A hole the size of a barn is made in the hull of a space ship; decompression of the ship’s atmosphere takes a half minute or so.
A hole the size of a dime is made in the hull of a space ship; decompression of the ship’s atmosphere takes a half minute or so.
A large nuclear explosion can be obtained by putting several smaller de-vices together.
The same energy beam which causes rocks, buildings and robots to violently explode produces only a puff of smoke and a bit of burnt flesh and clothing when used on a living being.
These are by no means the best–they are merely representative–go read the whole thing.
More and more conservatives are starting to notice.
In the first three years of the Bush administration, government spending has climbed – in real, inflation-adjusted terms – by a staggering 15.6 percent. That far outstrips the budget growth in Clinton’s first three years, when real spending climbed just 3.5 percent. Under the first President Bush, the comparable figure was 8.3 percent; under Ronald Reagan, 6.8 percent, and under Jimmy Carter, 13.3 percent. No, that’s not a mistake: Bush is a bigger spender than Carter was.
To be sure, Bush’s budgets have had to account for Sept. 11 and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But even when defense spending is excluded, discretionary spending has soared by nearly 21 percent in Bush’s first three years. In Clinton’s first triennium, nondefense discretionary spending declined slightly. If their budgets were all you had to go by, you might peg Bush for the Democrat and Clinton for the Republican.
On this Apollo anniversary, go check out The Speculist. There’s not much information about the proprieter, but the focus seems to be on space and the future.
Bill Simon and I will be on David Livingston’s “The Space Show” this evening (4 PM PDT) to discuss the thirty-fourth anniversary of the first Moon landing, and the ceremony that we developed to commemorate it. It’s only broadcast in the Seattle area, but you can stream it here.
Five hundred million years ago, the moon summoned life out of its first home, the sea, and led it onto the empty land. For as it drew the tides across the barren continents of primeval earth, their daily rhythm exposed to sun and air the creatures of the shallows. Most perished ? but some adapted to the new and hostile environment. The conquest of the land had begun.
We shall never know when this happened, on the shores of what vanished sea. There were no eyes or cameras present to record so obscure, so inconspicuous an event. Now, the moon calls again ? and this time life responds with a roar that shakes earth and sky.
When the Saturn V soars spaceward on nearly four thousand tons of thrust, it signifies more than a triumph of technology. It opens the next chapter of evolution.
No wonder that the drama of a launch engages our emotions so deeply. The rising rocket appeals to instincts older than reason; the gulf it bridges is not only that between world and world ? but the deeper chasm between heart and brain.
— Sir Arthur C. Clarke (L’Envoi)
[Update at 3:05 PM PDT]
There’s more at Winds of Change, including Jews in space…
As Mickey Kaus suggested (sorry, his permalinks seem broken–scroll down to July 10), some “progressives” are trying to recruit Arianna Huffington for the now-almost-certain upcoming race to replace Gray Davis as governor of California. Combined with an entry by Ahhnulld, that will indeed put an entirely new “accent” on the gubernatorial debate.
Golden State donkeys have put themselves into a real bind. Now that the election is inevitable, they’re betting that they can scare the voters into keeping the corrupt robot in office with the threat of an Evil Right-Wing Republican (TM) for governor, by not fielding a candidate. Terry McAuliffe (he who predicted a victory for Janet Reno over Jeb Bush last fall), is running around declaring that no Democrat will be on the ballot.
This is a losing strategy for at least four reasons.
First, I think that they misjudge the depth of animus of California voters to the governor, and just how unlikeable they find him. They may be willing to replace him with John Birch himself, were he still alive.
Second, a fall election, with no other issues on the ballot, is much more likely to bring out those who are passionate on the issue. There’s a lot of passion against Davis. There’s almost none for him. In addition, despite their nasty rhetoric about this being a “right-wing coup,” there are many Democrats that want to remove him as well, and they’ll be marching to the polls.
In my opinion, the combination of these two factors makes his removal almost as inevitable as the election itself now appears to be. The only real issue at this point is who will replace him–keeping him is a lost cause. If the Democrats remain in denial about this, they’re going to lose the governor’s mansion.
The third reason is that if/when the Dems come to their senses and decide they do have to field a candidate, the Republicans will have a field day running McAuliffe’s quote, demonstrating what duplicitous power-hungry whores the Democrats have shown themselves to be.
Example TV commercial: Cue ominous-sounding music running behind a film noire photo of McAuliffe that makes him look like he just took a break from heaving brimstone, his own bellicose words, now shown to be a sham, emblazoned over his mug.
A voiceover from the Twilight Zone says:
“First, the Democrats say they won’t run a candidate. Now, they say they will.”
“What changed? What else will they say, and not mean?”
“What other promises will they break, just to preserve their corrupt hold on power that has led the Golden State so far down the wrong road?”
The fourth reason that this is a lousy strategy is that the advantage will go to the party with the fewest candidates on the ballot, to minimize vote splitting among your own partisans. Right now we know there’s at least one Republican candidate–Issa. I find it hard to believe that once the race becomes reality, Riordan and Schwarzenegger won’t jump in. If Simon takes another shot, that makes four (and that doesn’t even count Arianna, who may still be a registered Republican, as far as I know). So that’s four ways for the Republican vote to split. If the Dems can field a single credible candidate, he or she would almost certainly win, even with a high Republican turnout.
Remember, also, as I said, a number of Democrats are going to the polls, not to save Davis, but to replace him. The party leadership does them a disservice by not offering them a Democrat alternative.
Of course, that’s the rub. It will be difficult for them to unite behind a single candidate, because (as is the case with the Republicans) there’s no primary process in which that can occur. In addition to wanting to maintain a united front against the recall, they also know that once one candidate jumps in, it will be katie bar the door, and a number of others will as well, thinking that they can do better than that clown…
At that point, it becomes a race to the bottom, and there’s no way to tell who can win. I suggested to Mickey at the LA Press Club a few weeks ago that we should set up a reality show–“Who Wants To Be Governor Of California?”
You couldn’t recruit nationwide, because of the five-year residency rule, but given that one out of ten Americans already lives in California, and those people tend, proportionately, to be a little more…interesting…than folks from other parts, there would be no shortage of talent for the game.
You could lock them up on Catalina (or one of the less inhabited channel islands, so they don’t scare off the tourists) with the legislature, and see who survives best on lizards and buffalo, and prickly pear cactus over the next couple of months. It would be a good bonding process for the upcoming tax’n’budget food fights.
The winner would likely have more name recognition than anyone else on the ballot (including Feinstein and Panetta, if they decide to get in), with the possible exception of the Terminator, bringing it down to a two-man (or two-person) race.
And in either case, it will be an improvement over the incumbent.
I just heard some Democrat use that irritating phrase, for the umptillionth time. Whenever I hear it, the physicist in me wonders how a tax cut can be “massive.” It seems to me to be primarily a rhetorical trick. In fact, I suspect that most Dems think that any tax cut, of whatever size, is “massive,” regardless of the units…
And while I’m on the subject of irrational political rhetoric, I’m still bothered by Al Gore’s idiotic and repetitious use of the phrase “blow a hole in the deficit” in the 1996 campaign. How do you blow a hole in a hole?