Category Archives: History

Business, Economics, History, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Democrats’ New False Campaign Narrative

23 Comments

I have some thoughts on Bill Clinton’s nonsense, over at PJMedia.

A commenter over there makes a good point. If you look at the curve of the current “recovery, it does appear that it started to rebound symmetrically, but something happened to cause it to stall out. His theory is that it was the passage of ObamaCare. I think that’s a good guess.

[Update a few minutes later]

Related thoughts from Jen Rubin:

If you had been dropped from outer space into the Democratic National Convention, you would have thought that we enjoyed full employment, reduced poverty and stared down Iran, leaving us with deeply important issues like paying for birth control for grown women. You would have thought that a large majority of Americans weren’t sympathetic to Israel and weren’t religious. You’d have thought that the federal government had money to burn and no looming debt crisis. You would never have thought that Obama had signed a “historic” health-care bill. And you’d have thought that the political heavyweight in the Obama household was Michelle. (Well, you might have been right about the last one.)

But knowing that the America of 2012 is so very different than the convention portrait, it’s worth asking how the Democrats’ convention became so divorced from reality.

As she says, it’s been a long time coming.

History, Space, Space History

Missile History

28 Comments

Here’s what I have for my space safety paper:

ICBMs were never designed to be highly reliable, because to do so would have dramatically increased their costs (many hundreds of them were built), and it wasn’t necessary for their mission. They were designed to be launched in massive numbers, and if a few out of a hundred didn’t make it through, that was all right, because they were often redundant in their targeting (that is, more than one missile would be aimed at a key target). Some estimates at the time of the reliability of the Titan II was only 80% or so (that is, one in five would not deliver its payload to the designated target), based on the fact that eight of its initial thirty-three test launches were failures. The early manned spaceflights were performed on modified versions of them (specifically, the Redstone and Atlas for Mercury and Titan II for Gemini). But what was good enough for a weapon as part of a fusillade of dozens or hundreds wasn’t perceived to be for a single flight carrying a human, particularly with recent memories of nationally televised ignominious failures of rockets on the launch pad. Thus was born the pernicious (and now obsolete) concept of “man rating,” which confuses the space industry and obfuscates policy down to this very day.

Is there anything inaccurate in that?

History, Popular Culture, Space, Space History

End Of An Icon

17 Comments

Neil Armstrong has died.

That’s a shame — he was only 82, which isn’t that old these days. No word of the cause of death. I’d heard that he’d been doing well since his recent heart surgery, so either there were later complications, or he just happened to succumb to something else.

The irony, of course, as it notes in the bio, is that he never wanted to be an icon, and generally shunned the publicity. In any event, ad astra, and resquiescat in pace.

[Update a few minutes later]

Well, my Facebook wall is all Neil, all the time.