I missed this earlier in the week, but Mike Snead has a long essay on passenger safety over at The Space Review. It’s a useful history, that touches on many of the themes of my book, but I believe that it’s technologically premature to apply the principles to human spaceflight. Spaceflight participants (not passengers) must be aware of the risks of the varied methods of building spaceships, and accept them accordingly. No one should, at this point in history, get aboard one with the same expection of getting safely off that one does with an airliner, particularly because different people have different risk tolerances and goals. There will come a time when trips to space will be considered common carrier, on certified vehicles, but we are years from that time.
Category Archives: History
John McCain
John McCain served his country well in Vietnam. My condolences to his family and friends. I wish that he had never been in politics.
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) August 26, 2018
[Update a while later]
Thoughts from Jim Treacher about a “humorous” take on McCain’s death.
Flipping Witnesses
Ken White: Yes, it does corrupt justice, but not (just, or even) because they’re “rats.”
Yes. Trump is wrong about why flipping is bad, but he's not wrong about flipping is bad. Prosecutors have far too much power, with too little accountability. It's a travesty of the justice system. https://t.co/2p0anto9d5
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) August 24, 2018
Rigging The Game
Sore-loser Democrats want to change the rules.
None of this was unanticipated by the Founders. They considered popular vote for the presidency and Senate a bug, not a feature.
#ProTip To “Democratic Socialists”
Want power to the people? Then you want capitalism.
Socialism
Well, it certainly resulted in the brutal premature deaths of many tens of millions of people in the last century. But maybe they weren’t doing it quite right. We’ll just have to keep trying until they get it right. For the children.
The Cohen Plea
OK, so Mark Levin thinks this is legal BS, and I’m inclined to agree with him.
So, if this “crime” is not a crime, why is he copping a plea? Why would his legal team agree to it (assuming they’re competent, not necessarily a good assumption when it comes to Lanny Davis).
My guess is that they have him on a lot more serious stuff, so he was advised to accept this plea down in return for testimony against the president. The prosecutors knew they could never get an actual conviction for this “crime” with a jury, but now that he’s plead, they’ll claim, “See, he wouldn’t have copped a plea if he wasn’t guilty of this ‘crime,’ and the president did it, too!”
Thus providing additional impeachment fodder should the country be nuts enough to put Democrats back in power.
But funny thing, I recall a mid-term election in which the opposing party not only talked about impeachment, but actually did it, and took a beating at the polls. If I were Republicans, I’d be running non-stop campaign ads of loony, low-IQ Maxine screaming “Impeach, impeach, impeach!”
[Afternoon update]
Thoughts on this and Manafort from Andrew McCarthy and Mollie Hemingway, via Instapundit.
[Update a while later]
From an email list:
Lanny Davis, long time Clinton lawyer and fixer, approaches Michael Cohen. He says, “You hate Trump, me and my clients hate Trump, let’s work together. You are facing 30+ years and happen to be one of the least sympathetic defendants of all the people in Trump’s orbit. I’ll work with the prosecutors, who would much rather get something on Trump than on you, to get you only 3-5 years. All you have to do is plead guilty to something that is a little shaky, but implicates Trump. Do you think you could possibly find it within your moral wheelhouse to agree to such a deal?”
Sounds about right to me.
[Update a few minutes later]
Steve Bannon: “November is a referendum on impeachment.”
The Pre-Trump World
Was it normal, or abnormal?
One off the polling practices I find annoying is the “right track, wrong track” question, because it can be very misleading in its implications. It doesn’t provide any information as to what the respondent thinks what “track” we should be on. I have never in my adult life felt that the country was on the “right track,” and if polled I would always say it was wrong. And of course, if I said that whenn Republicans were in power, Democrats would infer that it meant that I wanted them to win, which would be stupid, because what I wanted continually was a more libertarian, constitutional government.
Anyway, I have to confess that, despite my dislike of Trump, I do feel, for the first time, that with all the regulatory rollback, and constitutionalist judicial appointees, we’re at least, finally, on the right track. But we still have along way to go down the rails. My fear is that if the Democrats get back in power, we’ll be off the rails entirely.
The First Amendment
…and the lesson of Robespierre:
Once we stop treating the Internet as just a medium like newsprint and start treating Internet hosting companies as publishers, we make them vulnerable to oppressors and we can be sure that some of them will not have what we see as the “public good” in mind.
This is the lesson of Robespierre: once you establish that something may be done for you, you establish that it can be done to you.
Similarly, as Barry Goldwater and others have said, a government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take it all away.
The Fate Of The ISS
Matt Fitzgibbons says it’s like the ancient Roman roads. I’m not sure the analogy works very well, but I do think that it would be wasteful to deorbit it. When he says it’s “only” three or four billion a year, I don’t think he appreciates how much more we’ll be able to do for much less in the near future, But I also think in the next decade we’ll have the ability to move it higher, and preserve it as a museum.