I accidentally started a Twitter conversation with Sandy Mazza as a result of this nice piece on markets being enabled by lower-cost launch, including space burial. I noted to her that it made no sense for the California Department of Public Health to be regulating it, and then mentioned that they shouldn’t have anything to do with cryonics, either. In the course of the discussion, I dug up an old piece I wrote for Cryonics Magazine back in 1990 (ctrl-F “Simberg” to find it). Given that things are finally looking promising for reducing cost of access to space in general, and likely the moon as well, I decided I’d resurrect it here. Note that I’ve been talking about the need for markets to drive down launch costs for three decades. Note also that it’s somewhat dated, in terms of its discussion of the NASP and American Rocket.
Category Archives: History
Nazis
Yes, sorry, but they really were socialists, and there is nothing “right wing” about them.
Related: Dinesh D’Souza apparently has a new book
Dinesh D’Souza explodes the Left’s big lie. He expertly exonerates President Trump and his supporters, then uncovers the Democratic Left’s long, cozy relationship with Nazism: how the racist and genocidal acts of early Democrats inspired Adolf Hitler’s campaign of death; how fascist philosophers influenced the great 20th century lions of the American Left; and how today’s anti-free speech, anti-capitalist, anti-religious liberty, pro-violence Democratic Party is a frightening simulacrum of the Nazi Party.
Yup.
Iran
The health-care debacle is devastating on the domestic front, but probably the worst legacy of the Obama presidency will be its nuclear program. And it continues to play games with its ships in the Gulf. At least now we’re ready for it.
Presidential Power
Yes, a president can be indicted. And he can pardon himself.
The only ultimate Constitutional check on a president’s power is impeachment. Something that has been done far too rarely, largely because Congress’s sense of its own prerogatives has become overwhelmed by partisanship.
A Liberal Party
Bob Zubrin thinks we need one. I haven’t read the whole thing, but I generally agree. (Yes, I know it’s a few months old, but I just ran across it, and not much has changed.)
Regular Order
Angelo Codevilla says we need to return to it to restore the Republic.
I agree, but the problem is, he doesn’t say how. Op-eds clearly aren’t going to do the job, in and of themselves. It may require an amendment.
Dunkirk
I’d been thinking about going to see it, but having second thoughts after reading this review.
Evoloterra
Get together with friends and celebrate the 48th anniversary tonight. Bill Simon and I will be on The Space Show at 7 PM Pacific to discuss it.
[Update a while later]
Here’s what I wrote on the 40th anniversary. It still holds up pretty well, I think.
[Update early afternoon]
There’s a new version of the ceremony on line now.
[Late-afternoon update]
Seeing comments out there on the Interwebs that Nixon canceled Apollo. No, it happened in 1967, by Congress. Before he was elected. For those of you unfamiliar with the post-Apollo history under Nixon, John Logsdon’s latest book is a good read. Funded by Bill Anders, it’s probably the definitive history at this point. He’s currently working on the space history of the Reagan administration, which I wrote about at the time of Reagan’s passing.
[Friday-morning update]
The Space Show we did last night has been archived.
Nancy MacLean
Is she the new Michael Bellesiles?
It’s very important to the Left to try to make the case that conservatives are racist, even with fake history, not only to smear them, but to cover up their own long history of racism, which continues even to this day.
[Wednesday-morning update]
Well, this is brutal, but fair:
Once I realized that this was the approach, the larger point became clear: Democracy in Chains is a work of speculative historical fiction. There is considerable research underpinning the speculation, and since MacLean is careful about footnoting only things that actually did happen she cannot be charged with fabricating facts. But most of the book, and all of its substantive conclusions, are idiosyncratic interpretations of the facts that she selects from a much larger record, as is common in the speculative-history genre. There is nothing wrong about speculation, of course, but there is nothing persuasive about it either, in terms of drawing reliable conclusions about history.
The reason that Democracy in Chains is remarkable is that it is such a great story. The evil mastermind of the secretive “Public Choice” movement, James M. Buchanan, was the winner of the 1986 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. MacLean is able to decode the true meaning of his mostly rather bland, academic-ese writings, after which Buchanan achieves the status of a Bond villain. Buchanan sought nothing less than to bring down the America we all love, and replace it with a plutocracy. The account is rendered plausible by MacLean’s excellence as a writer.
The problem with history, of course, is that many narratives about a few cherry-picked events and documents are “plausible.” The task of the historian is to try to distinguish among plausible accounts “through careful sifting of evidence and respectful encounters with opposing points of view.” There is none of that here. Even a casual familiarity with the basic facts of James Buchanan’s life and scholarship, and of the growth and success of the Public Choice movement, reveal far simpler, and more plausible, explanations.
…MacLean’s thesis really does read like a plot line that Ian Fleming rejected for a Bond novel: “No, that’s nuts. Let’s go back to the idea where a nuclear missile blows up the moon and changes the orbit of the Earth, causing earthquakes that allow recovery of hidden oil reserves and diamonds. That’s more plausible.” Nevertheless, the narrative thread connecting the documents and discussions that MacLean has selected from the much larger and more equivocal record does indeed have this structure, and that is what we are evaluating.
It’s long, but worth the read, if you want to actually understand Buchanan, public choice and libertarianism.
Clinton’s Emails
Byron York: What campaign wouldn’t have wanted to get them?
It was, as the New York Times’ Mark Landler said in August 2016, the “original sin” of the Clinton email affair — that Clinton herself, and no independent body, unilaterally decided which emails she would hand over to the State Department and which she would delete.
Still, there were people who did not believe that Clinton’s deleted emails, all 30,000-plus of them, were truly gone. What is ever truly gone on the Internet? And what if Clinton were not telling the truth? What if she deleted emails covering more than just personal matters? In that event, recovering the emails would have rocked the 2016 presidential campaign.
So, if there were an enormous trove of information potentially harmful to a presidential candidate just sitting out there — what opposing campaign wouldn’t want to find it?
I certainly still want to see them. And I still want to see a special prosecutor appointed to do (unlike Comey’s) a proper investigation.
The problem for the Trump defenders (and after last week, I hesitate to bring the issue up again), is that the campaign spent months vociferously denying that they were colluding with the Russians to get this kind of information while simultaneously doing everything possible (other than saying they weren’t) to make it look as though they were, including Trump’s own public request of Putin almost a year ago to hack her and find the emails. His defenders now say there was nothing wrong about going to Russia for oppo research. OK, fine. If there was nothing wrong, why have they spent so much energy denying that they did so?
I hate to say what I would do if I were Trump, because, obviously, if I were Trump, I’d do all the stupid things that Trump does. But if I were someone in Trump’s position here’s what I would have done. I’d have given the following speech:
One of the reasons that I won this election is because my opponent was not only a terrible candidate with awful policies, but recognizably corrupt. And not only was, and is, she corrupt, but so was the previous administration that in addition to siccing the IRS on its political enemies while covering up the crime, refused to properly investigate her, and tied the hands of the FBI director in his investigation.
Because she did all she could to destroy all those emails, we have no idea what was in them that she so feared us finding, but the public still deserves to know. If getting them from the Russians was the only way to get them, then that was the price that had to be paid, to begin to restore the integrity of the American government, and I make no apologies for that.
But I’m not Trump.
[Update a few minutes later]
Speaking of Clinton corruption, I’m sure that this is just a coinkidinky: Haiti official who exposed the Clinton Crime Family Foundation’s criminality and was going to expose much more next week “commits suicide.” Sure he did.
Oh, and a reminder from a year ago. Sad how being associated with the Clintons (and/or investigating them) makes so many people so despondent that they have to take their own lives.
[Update a few minutes later]
For those too young to remember, how the press ignored or helped cover up Clinton corruption two decades ago. Democrat operatives with bylines.
The sprawling fundraising scandal ultimately led to 22 guilty pleas on various violations of election laws. Among the Clinton fundraisers and friends who pleaded guilty were John Huang, Charlie Trie, James Riady, and Michael Brown, son of the late Clinton Commerce secretary Ron Brown. But many questions went unanswered, even after the revelations that Clinton had personally authorized offering donors Oval Office meetings and use of the Lincoln bedroom. A total of 120 participants in the fundraising scandal either fled the country, asserted their Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination, or otherwise avoided questioning. The stonewalling worked — and probably encouraged Hillary Clinton in her own cover-up of her private e-mail server and her ties with the Clinton Foundation.
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/449539/chinese-illegally-donated-bill-clinton-reelection-campaign-media-downplayed
The nineties were when I finally lost any vestige of support for Democrats I’d ever had.
[Update a few more minutes later]
Subpoena Fusion GPS:
Isn’t it interesting that a Russian-born American lobbyist with a Soviet counter-intelligence background just happens to have been tied to Fusion GPS?
The depth of corruption in DC is staggering. Trump was elected in part to drain that swamp, but he seems too incompetent to do it.
[Update a couple minutes later:
Which theory is harder to believe?
That Trump, who had never run for office before and who was panned as a clown by the Democrats and the media right up until Election Night last November, orchestrated a grand coup d’état with the assistance of the Russians to “hack” an American election, and that it was so well hidden that the Don Junior meeting is the only real evidence unearthed so far of the whole thing?
…Or that the Obama administration and the Democratic Party used their immense power to attempt to ensnare the Trumps in a damaging narrative that would either discredit him and the Republican Party as traitors in the event of a Clinton victory or cripple his administration in “scandal” should he pull an upset?
This is going to get very messy for the Democrats, I hope.