Apparently, Larry Summers did call the Winklevoss twins @n@l orifices, and is unapologetic about it.
Category Archives: Political Commentary
The Post-Shuttle Era
There’s a pretty good article on the history and the future over at Wired. This isn’t right, though:
It took the crash of Challenger in 1986, after which all surviving space shuttles were grounded for three years, to convince the military that it could not rely on the huge, complex craft for all its orbital missions. That was the beginning of the end of the Pentagon’s love affair with the shuttle, and in its autumn years, it did very little military work that we know of.
The Pentagon never had a love affair with the Shuttle to end — it always felt like it had been forced to use it, and (fortunately) fought to keep Titan, Delta and Atlas alive, despite the national policy that all was going to be launched on the Shuttle. This paid off after Challenger (though the other vehicles had failures as well — 1986 was probably the worst year for the space program since the early days).
They Have Met The Enemy
…and it is white middle-class Americans. Pay no attention to the Jihadis — nothing to see there.
Our Debt Explosion
…is an entitlement explosion. Complete with some scary graphs.
Also, more on why the Gang of Six is disastrous.
[Update a while later]
Is Commercial Crew In Trouble?
Jeff Foust has the latest on NASA’s potential moves to screw up the contracting arrangements.
When Ignorance Is The Best Excuse
I don’t actually believe that Eric Holder didn’t know about “Fast and Furious,” but if he didn’t, that’s just one more reason for him to step down. I think that if there wasn’t so much stonewalling going on, we’d know, one way or the other, and that’s yet another reason for him to step down. Or be impeached.
The Administration’s War On Business
The head of Home Depot calls them out on it:
IBD: If you could sit down with Obama and talk to him about job creation, what would you say?
Marcus: I’m not sure Obama would understand anything that I’d say, because he’s never really worked a day outside the political or legal area. He doesn’t know how to make a payroll, he doesn’t understand the problems businesses face. I would try to explain that the plight of the businessman is very reactive to Washington. As Washington piles on regulations and mandates, the impact is tremendous. I don’t think he’s a bad guy. I just think he has no knowledge of this.
He’s being too generous. There’s little evidence that he’s a good guy.
The Homers In The Media
…why is it a foregone conclusion that CCB can’t pass the Senate? By uncritically reporting that claim, journalists are in effect giving senators a pass on the balanced budget issue specifically and more generally of whether their previous declarations are worth anything at all.
And is it too much to ask our esteemed lions of the Fourth Estate toiling in the White House Press Corps to at least ask the president why he opposes a constitutional amendment requiring a balanced budget and a supermajority in both chambers of Congress to raise taxes?
No doubt he has a logical case to support vetoing such a measure, but why not just ask him to state it for the record? Don’t our readers deserve to know at least that much?
This is an illustration of why so many journalists covering the White House, Congress and national politics so frequently end up functioning like “Homers.” No, I’m not referring to the ancient author, but rather the derisive term for sports reporters who never write anything critical of the home professional teams.
Whether they intend to or not, too many journalists are little more than Homers for the Big Government team. And then they wonder why their credibility is in tatters.
They may also be Homers as in “Simpson.” D’oh!
The Shuttle’s Ignominious Conclusion
Thoughts from Ed Driscoll, over at PJM. As he notes, Lileks has some reflections as well:
NASA is keen to tell you there’s a still a future for sending Americans into space, but there’s a general cultural anomie that seems content to watch movies about people in space, but indifferent to any plans to put them there. This makes me grind my teeth down to the roots, but I suppose that’s a standard reaction when the rest of your fellow citizenry doesn’t share the precise and exact parameters of your interests and concerns. That’s the problem when you grow up with magazines telling you where we’re going after the moon, with grade-school notebooks that had pictures of the space stations to come, when the push to Mars was regarded as an inevitable next step.
Just got hung up on the “why?” part, it seems. Also the “how” and the “how much” and other details. I can see the reason for taking our time – develop new engines, perfect technology, gather the money and the will. It’s not like anything’s going anywhere. But it’s not like we’re going anywhere if we’re not going anywhere, either – when nations, cultures stop exploring, it’s a bad sign. You’re ceding the future. If you have a long view that regards nation-states as quaint relics of a time in human history when maps had lines – really, you can’t see them from space! We’re all one, you know – then it doesn’t matter whether China or the US puts a flag on Mars. It’s possible a Chinese Mars expedition would commemorate the first boot on red soil with a statement that spoke for everyone on the planet, not a particular culture or nation. It’s possible. But history would remember that they chose to go, and we chose not to.
No signs that anyone is serious about choosing to go to Mars, other than Elon Musk. For the record, I think that it’s important that we carry Anglospheric and western values into the cosmos, and I’m pretty confident we will. I am equally confident that we won’t do it if we persist in thinking (like the Chinese) that it will be done with a Twenty-Year Plan.
I’m wondering what the thirty-somethings are thinking today. They don’t really remember a time when there wasn’t a Space Shuttle, either under development, or flying. And for most of them, Apollo is just a history that their parents lived through and told them about (as the Depression and WW II are for me). But I suspect that they, and the generation behind, will get pretty used to the idea of a real American space industry taking people into orbit, sans a government mission-control room with lots of desks. I hope that, for them, space will finally become a place instead of a program.
[Update later morning]
More lunacy and inability to read for comprehension or discern human emotions, from Mark Whittington, who fantasizes that I am “dancing on the Shuttle’s grave.”
The Thermodynamic Theory Of Weight Loss
“This study shows that conventional wisdom — to eat everything in moderation, eat fewer calories and avoid fatty foods — isn’t the best approach,” Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, a cardiologist and epidemiologist at the Harvard School of Public Health and lead author of the study, said in an interview. “What you eat makes quite a difference. Just counting calories won’t matter much unless you look at the kinds of calories you’re eating.”
Dr. Frank B. Hu, a nutrition expert at the Harvard School of Public Health and a co-author of the new analysis, said: “In the past, too much emphasis has been put on single factors in the diet. But looking for a magic bullet hasn’t solved the problem of obesity.”
Also untrue, Dr. Mozaffarian said, is the food industry’s claim that there’s no such thing as a bad food.
“There are good foods and bad foods, and the advice should be to eat the good foods more and the bad foods less,” he said. “The notion that it’s O.K. to eat everything in moderation is just an excuse to eat whatever you want.”
I didn’t intend to, and I certainly never counted a single calorie, but I’ve lost about fifteen pounds over the last few months by almost completely cutting out grains and root vegetables (going mainly paleolithic), in the interest of trying to reduce my blood pressure.
Modern nutritionists (and the FDA) have primitive, unscientific beliefs (like the idiotic war on fat and saturated fat “You are what you eat”). They’re like the doctors that still prescribe leeches for ailments. And unfortunately, too many in the medical profession think they know what they’re talking about.