The Economist pays a visit.
Category Archives: Business
Space Property Rights
A (relatively) new paper. If the space-settlement bill has hearings and is discussed on the floor, this will become a key issue.
TSA Pre-Check
I’ve been getting randomly assigned it on my boarding passes for years, but I’d never understood why. For instance, I got it on my flight back from IAD this week, but not on my flight out from LAX. So here’s the story, sort of.
Anyway, they say it’s going to end, so if I want to get it, I have to actually sign up and pay the 85 bucks. So I decided to finally do it. I have to go to LAX with my passport and fingers on Monday morning to complete the process.
Lipidophobia
Nina Teicholz, author of The Big Fat Surprise
Is Barack Obama A Socialist, Or A Fascist?
Yes:
One of the reasons why both pro-Obama and anti-Obama observers may be reluctant to see him as fascist is that both tend to accept the prevailing notion that fascism is on the political right, while it is obvious that Obama is on the political left.
Back in the 1920s, however, when fascism was a new political development, it was widely — and correctly — regarded as being on the political left. Jonah Goldberg’s great book “Liberal Fascism” cites overwhelming evidence of the fascists’ consistent pursuit of the goals of the left, and of the left’s embrace of the fascists as one of their own during the 1920s.
Mussolini, the originator of fascism, was lionized by the left, both in Europe and in America, during the 1920s. Even Hitler, who adopted fascist ideas in the 1920s, was seen by some, including W.E.B. Du Bois, as a man of the left.It was in the 1930s, when ugly internal and international actions by Hitler and Mussolini repelled the world, that the left distanced themselves from fascism and its Nazi offshoot — and verbally transferred these totalitarian dictatorships to the right, saddling their opponents with these pariahs.
The real act that broke the Left from Hitler was when he betrayed Stalin.
[Update a while later]
Obama: “No difference between communism and capitalism.” Well, if you ignore the tens millions of citizens murdered by their governments, sure.
[Sunday-morning update]
The Illinois Constitution
…is a suicide pact.
No federal bailouts, at least without a rewriting of the state constitution.
Ivanpah’s Problems
…could end concentrated solar in the US.
And the birds and pilots rejoiced.
Commercial Supersonic
Here’s the latest entry. They seem to have persuaded Virgin into buying ten planes.
They don’t seem to be addressing boom, no mention of transcontinental flight. I have a lot of trouble believing they can do trans-Pacific non-stop. But I’d like to find out more.
Greenfail
So much for the 10kW-hr Tesla Powerwall.
The SEDS Act
Dana has been talking about this for a year, but he’s finally introduced it:
To require the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to investigate and promote the exploration and development of space leading to human settlements beyond Earth, and for other purposes.
Development and settlement demand low cost of access to space, while NASA is forced by Congress to pursue a giant rocket that has exactly the opposite effect. I wish they’d left the E word out, because that’s implicit, and it allows people to maintain the status quo: “Well, the first thing we have to do is exploration, before we can think about development and settlement. And we can’t do exploration without SLS!”
I have a query in to Tony DeTora as to how this differs from the 1989 bill, because I still see no teeth in it regarding what to do if the administrator ignores it and doesn’t submit reports.
[Update a while later]
Related: A new book of essays and stories on the spiritual aspects of space