I’m thinking about writing a long piece about how similar they are in many ways. I’ve started a list:
Reverse midas touch
Die-hard cultish base
Big in pop culture
Inarticulate foot-in-mouth off prompter
Indifference/hostility to Constitution
Charismatic to Selective audience (related to cult above)
Reckless disregard for the truth
Travel expenses
Dunning-Kruger
Despised by members of his own party
Any others?
[Wednesday-afternoon update]
Here’s another one: They both waged war on the media, though different media (Obama’s main target was Fox News).
Sam Dinkin runs the numbers. Looks about right to me. People really don’t appreciate how little of the cost of a launch is propellant, and once we fix that, how much we can reduce it.
A few months ago I did a phone interview with Sarah Scoles. She finally wrote the piece based in part on it, over at The Atlantic. (Note, Apollo 1 astros died of asphyxiation, not from the fire itself, Columbia happened 17 years after Challenger, not 36, and it was the co-pilot who died on the VG test flight. I’ll blame her editor, since she clearly gets the last two right later in the piece. I assume they’ll fix it at least on line.)
Bump stocks, says Mr. Valone, “are an amusement, because they don’t under normal circumstances turn an AR-15 or another rifle into a killing machine, because you can’t hit anything with it. Only when you are presented 400 yards away with a field of uninterrupted humanity would something like that even be effective.”
They had their first “meeting” today (scare quotes because it was basically a scripted dog and pony show). Bob Zimmerman has some thoughts. Mine: The tension between the old cost-plus dinosaurs and commercial space within the administration was on full display, but everyone recognizes that we’ve shifted back to the moon. “Civil” space remains focused on pork, “commercial” space is focused appropriately on cost reduction. Nothing new on the milspace side to anyone who’s been following it, but I’m sure it was news to several of the council members.