Joel Kotkin and Victor Davis Hanson have both written about the California oligarchy, but this piece points out their cruel but self-righteous youth:
“There are literally shanty towns underneath most highway overpasses in the city,” says Martínez. “But that techie kid who goes and gets his $5 single-origin, cruelty-free pour-over in some trendy coffee shop? He doesn’t give a s***. He just wants to get some liquidity around his shares and steps over the homeless guy en route to his yoga class.”
And, of course, as Ed Driscoll points out, and will come as no surprise to readers here, the dirty little secret is that they’re self-righteous Democrats.
Oh, and speaking of insanity on human spaceflight policy, I’d like to fisk this nonsense, but it’s long, and I just don’t have the gumption for it right now. I doubt if many have even read the stupid thing.
Donald Robertson has an op-ed at Space News that reflects many of the themes of my monograph (which, by the way, I have updated with feedback from the past couple days).
The policy significance of this issue is clear: if we are headed to a mid-20th century solar minimum, or a Grand Solar Minimum for the next two centuries, this will offset greenhouse warming to some extent. The extent of the offset depends on whether climate sensitivity to CO2 is on the larger or smaller end of the range of estimates, and the magnitude of the solar impact. But the sign of the solar offset is becoming increasingly clear: towards cooling.
One of the reasons I’ve been skeptical about claims that carbon will be catastrophic is the willful insistence on ignoring the sun, and I can’t think of any reason to do it than because we don’t understand it, and therefore it can’t be included in the hysterical modeling, and it can’t fit the narrative. I continue to believe that what we don’t understand about climate is much greater than what we do.
[Update a few minutes later]
Is the dam bursting? Climate researchers who have previously denigrated solar activity as being insignificant are now warning of a new mini ice age.
I really have trouble taking any of this seriously.
Thoughts from Eric Berger, which I missed last week due to the funeral and the conference.
From my monograph:
NASA gave up on reusability a decade ago, when Mike Griffin selected Constellation, with its expendable launch systems, capsule, insertion stages and landers. It could in fact be argued that Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) gave up on it after it was given responsibility for it in the 1990s, which it turned into the failed X-33 program, which failure the center then used as an excuse to illogically claim that reusability didn’t work.
One tech I didn't recommend that NASA develop for Mars: Low-cost access to space. Private sector is already taking care of that.