…is empty.
It always was — it just took this long for people to figure it out.
Category Archives: Media Criticism
The New York Post Headline
Elizabeth Scalia is disappointed, and offers some better alternatives.
Desperation
Who are you going to believe, Attackwatch, or your lying eyes?
[Update a while later]
Here’s the commercial for it. Hilarious.
[Update]
More from the Hawk:
“I actually sympathize with #AttackWatch. They remind me of the time I got my head wedged in a bowling ball return chute.”
[Update mid morning]
The Hill has a story on it.
[Afternoon update]
Well, that didn’t take long. Go get your Attack Watch tee shirt.
Paul Krugman
The “War On Terror”
…is all about God:
…over hard history, we have learned that there are some struggles in which the evil of the fight itself supersedes the good of any potential victory. Faith is not knowledge; we should approach the super-natural with humility in our beliefs and forbearance towards the beliefs of others. And anyway, many cherished doctrines, no matter how deep or meaningful, don’t have much immediate effect on our lives. I believe that God is three persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit — but if it turns out He’s five guys named Moe, I’m not going to change my weekend plans.
So we hate the idea of fighting a holy war. But we have no choice. No matter what moral knots some self-loathing westerners tie the facts into, the truth remains, the other bastards started it and now it’s on. Doesn’t matter how tolerant you think you are. Doesn’t matter how many “Coexist” bumper stickers you own. If a man with a gun kicks your door down and starts telling you how to pray, there are only two possible outcomes: victory or surrender.
Yes. It’s been obvious to me that we’re in a holy war for ten years now (and I suspected it for over thirty, since the Iranian revolution). This is also how the war on Israel has to be viewed to make any sense. And I say that as an agnostic, with no God in the fight (so to speak). But unlike the left, which sees Baptists as the worst people on earth, and as a child of the Enlightenment, I know who my enemy is.
“US Control Of Cis-Lunar Space”
Say what?
Decades ago, when I was an AIAA Congressional Science Fellow, a group of AIAA industry representatives met with my then-boss, Sen. Adlai Stevenson, III, and asked what real influence I had exercised while doing staff work in Congress. Sen. Stevenson smiled and replied, “This is Washington. Not even the President has any influence.” It was meant as a joke, but the experiences of three presidents who proposed human space initiatives prove that it was no joke. George H. W. Bush’s Space Exploration Initiative was killed by NASA coming up with an unaffordable plan. George W. Bush’s Vision for Space Exploration was hijacked by ideologues who wanted to create US control of cislunar space with a permanent lunar base.
Emphasis mine. That’s sure not what happened on my planet. On my planet, the VSE always contained a lunar base, but Mike Griffin and Scott Horowitz came up with an awful plan to implement it that never had a chance of succeeding in any affordable way. Not sure what planet Lou posted that from.
The SpaceX Engine “Anomaly”
Space News has the story. Some have said that this proves that Fragola was right, but that’s nonsense. He tried to create a rumor that the stage blew up. SpaceX had never denied that there was an engine problem, and they apparently provided the information quickly to everyone that needed to know (i.e., NASA and the FAA). They aren’t under any obligation to air all their laundry publicly.
The Reckoning
No, not much has changed in the past decade in that regard, contrary to what some of us had hoped.
[Update a while later]
Saved by the militia. And yet the Left wants to disarm it. Some draw all the wrong lessons from 911.
911 And Science Fiction
Are the books not being written, or not being published?
The Dark Day
…that brought out the worst in Britain. Note that the know-nothing anti-Americanism continues in comments there.
I was in San Juan, Puerto Rico, getting ready to head to the airport to fly back to California, when I saw the second plane hit on television, and knew instantly that we were at war, and probably against Islamism. I didn’t bother to go to the airport, because I was pretty sure that all flights would be grounded shortly, and I turned out to be right.
When Patricia got home from work, she said that many of the Puerto Ricans she worked with were shocked, but that many of them were actually happy that it had happened, and thought that we had it coming. Their resentment of the country that had provided them with a higher standard of living than any of their neighbors for decades quickly came to the fore. As Mark Twain said, a dog will not bite the hand that feeds him — this is the principle difference between a man and a dog.