This is just appalling. There is nothing conservative about racism. There is also nothing liberal (in the true meaning of that word) about it. But it fuels the Left.
Category Archives: Media Criticism
Frivolous Lawsuits
Yes, as someone on the sharp end of one, I’d like to see some form of “loser pays” here.
Putin In Syria
How he outflanks Obama.
A blind tortoise could outflank Obama.
One of the major goals of the Cold War was to prevent Russia from getting a foothold in the Middle East. Thanks a lot, Barack.
A Stupid Space Piece
It’s stiff competition, but this may, in fact, be the stupidest space piece ever written. As Stephen Green says, the Left jumps the shark, in a rocketship.
SLS And Orion
The Senate Launch System is four years old (if you count from when NASA actually rolled out the design — it’s more like five years when it was first stipulated in the NASA authorization bill). Some thoughts at the time from Jerry Pournelle.
And Stephen Smith has a history of Orion (the capsule, not the nuclear-powered spacecraft, which just slipped another two years, and even NASA is no longer pretending will ever go to Mars):
SpaceX spent 100% of its own money to develop the Falcon 9 booster and the upcoming Falcon Heavy. The cargo Dragon capsule cost $850 million to develop; $400 million was NASA seed money, while $450 million was SpaceX money. It was only four years from SpaceX receiving its first commercial cargo contract in August 2006 to the first test flight in December 2010. The first Dragon delivery was in May 2012. Dragon was designed with the eventual goal of using it for people, so the crewed Dragon V2 would seem likely to avoid much of the design delays that might plague other commercial crew companies.
Orion and SLS have no urgency, because there’s no profit motive. The contractors get paid regardless of their pace or success; it’s required by law. Their lobbyists ensure through generous campaign contributions that Congress will prohibit any competition. Representatives of NASA space centers populate the space authorization and appropriations committees in the House and the Senate; their priority, sometimes stated explicitly, is to protect the taxpayer-funded government jobs in their districts and states.
Maybe, someday, we’ll actually see NASA crew climb into an Orion capsule atop a Space Launch System booster at Pad 39B. But it will be tens of billions of dollars after we see commercial crew companies do it for far cheaper.
Yup. I’d bet it never happens. It certainly shouldn’t.
Carly And The Media
She just monkey wrenched them on the Planned Parenthood video, and they aren’t taking it very well.
[Early-afternoon update]
The first post-debate poll has her tied with Trump. With Carson, that’s a total of 56% that doesn’t want a traditional politician. I’ve long said that someone is going to consolidate the non-Trump vote. She has vaulted to the lead in doing so.
[Update mid afternoon]
Aaaaaaaaaaand, she takes the lead in New Hampshire.
History may record this week as peak Trump.
Obama Gets It Right
It’s not often I can have a post title like that, but I agree with Glenn:
President Obama was perhaps inspired by a recent article in The Atlantic by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, “The Coddling of the American Mind.” Lukianoff and Haidt describe in some detail the way in which college sensitivities have undermined teaching, to the point that some criminal law professors — in law schools — are afraid to teach about rape, and where “trigger warnings” and concerns about “microaggressions” rule the day.
Rather than respond to such complaints with a suggestion that the complainers might be better off under professional psychological care than enrolled in institutions of higher learning, university administrations have tended to go along, even though the complainers represent a rather small fraction of the student body. The result has been a sort of arms-race of oversensitivity, in which each complaint is trumped by one still sillier, until we have reached the situation that Lukianoff, Haidt — and Obama — deplore, in which student mental health may actually suffer, and professors worry that they’ll be pilloried for saying that something “violates the law” because the word “violates” may trigger rape anxieties.
In Monty Python’s Holy Grail, the knights decide to skip a visit to Camelot because “it is a silly place.” With college costs (as President Obama has also noted) skyrocketing even as students seem to be learning less and finding greater difficulty obtaining suitable employment after graduation, higher education administrators should worry that more and more students will draw a similar conclusion. Perhaps President Obama’s warning will get their attention.
This might be the closest he’s ever come to a “Sister Souljah moment.”
Healthcare.gov
The problems she describes with the federal procurement system afflict both Air Force and NASA space projects as well.
Jerry Brownout
California’s disastrously stupid energy policy.
The Debate
Ashe Schow has a roundup of each candidate’s features and failures.
I have to say that I find the (mostly male) criticism of Fiorina’s “sternness” and failure to smile silly. And maybe even sexist. In her deep knowledge of the issues, willingness to do her homework, and articulation, she is the anti-Trump.
[Afternoon update]
More debate observations from Andrew McCarthy.
[Update a while later]
According to the overnights, it was Carly’s night, and The Donald is starting to hemorrhage support from women:
A Fiorina surge would be more dangerous to the rest of the field than a Carson surge because there’s no reason to think she won’t continue to have excellent substantive debates. Carson tends to disappear at these things and his policy proposals seem like afterthoughts vis-a-vis his persona. If you’re backing him, it’s because you believe in the man and what he represents as a healer and a political outsider, not because you’re excited about his immigration proposals or whatever. Fiorina knows the issues, she’s unflappable, and she’s better than the boys are at taking Trump down a peg. Her weakness is her record at HP, but she was prepared for that last night and Republican voters have proved themselves willing to nominate a CEO whose business was responsible for many layoffs. Besides, the guy who’s ahead of her in the polls is a billionaire whose catchphrase is “you’re fired.” He’s the last person who’s going to try to Romney-fy Fiorina in the debates. I don’t think she’ll be the nominee, but that feeling owes more to simple tradition — people who haven’t held office before don’t win presidential primaries — than to any reasoned “here’s why Carly can’t win” argument. Of the three outsiders in the field, she’s easily the one the donor class would be most comfortable with as nominee. If people like Walker and Christie and even Jeb start to fall away, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Fiorina pick up some of their money (although most of it will go to Rubio).
As I’ve repeatedly noted, Trump is the “front runner” only in the sense that he has a plurality in a field of over a dozen candidates splitting a majority. Seven out of ten want a non-Trump. Some non-Trump is going to consolidate that vote.