I’ve been pretty disappointed with it for decades, but it seems much worse than I thought. Apparently, a new organization is needed to protect civil liberties (including the Second Amendment, though the NRA has been doing the heavy lifting there, anyway).
Category Archives: Political Commentary
Was Janeane Garafolo Right?
Little Miss Attila thinks so (sorta):
Janeane Garofalo is absolutely right: the tea parties are racism straight up. Because if it had been racism on the rocks, PJM would have gotten someone else to do interviews that day, instead of asking Zo to do two jobs. And if it had been racism-and-water, the organizers of the event wouldn’t have imposed upon Alfonzo by asking him to the podium. If it were racism-and-soda, they wouldn’t have recruited Zo to work for PJTV at all, but would have allowed him to continue commenting on events from his living room in the SoCal desert.
But don’t you see, this just proves Janeane’s point, because as all the bien pensant know, Zo (who I had the pleasure to briefly meet at Bill Whittle’s birthday party a couple weeks ago) is obviously a Tom.
Glad I’m not bien pensant.
I’m All For It
Randy Barnett proposes a federalism amendment to the Constitution. We shouldn’t need one, but the courts have so misinterpreted the Commerce Clause that apparently we need to be very explicit. And repealing the sixteenth amendment would be a great idea as well.
Is It Or Isn’t It?
Rob Coppinger says that the Aerospace study on EELVs/Ares comparison hasn’t been completed. If so, we still don’t know what the actual cost comparisons are.
The Down Side Of Supply Chain Management
The supply chain is simply empty, all the way up to the people who mine the raw materials. It’s going to take time to replace all the links in that chain, and it’s not because of the war in Iraq/Afghanistan, The Joos, FEMA, the CIA, a secret agreement to implement gun control through ammo availability, or any other silly theory you may have heard. This is a textbook example of what happens when an inelastic supply chain, composed with scarce “just in time” inventories, meets insatiable demand. It’s not sexy or intriguing, but that’s the way it is.
You know what’s scarier? Your food comes to you the same way. Imagine what would happen if…
And we were thinking about going shooting this weekend.
[Via Mark Danziger]
[Update mid morning]
Here’s a fact sheet on the ammo shortage.
Solar System Day
Regular readers know that I hate the earth and the environment.
Well, not really, but I’d imagine that some of the more deluded among them believe that. And I am opposed to many so-called environmentalists. But it’s not an anti-environment position so much as an anti-anti-humanity and anti-anti-free market position.
So I do have trouble getting into Earth Day. I find the notion far too blinkered and unimaginative.
Yes, earth is special and, as we learned over forty years ago (shortly before the first Earth Day), looks like a very precious and fragile jewel against the black background of an unimaginably vast, sterile and hostile universe.
But it’s just one planet of uncountably many, and we don’t just live on a planet, we live in a solar system, a galaxy, a universe. In fact, while there’s an implicit recognition of this in the worship of the sun by the renewable energy types, they’re insufficiently open minded about the use of the rest of the system as a source of resources whose harvesting would be much gentler on the planet than mining them here, if it could be done cost effectively.
I’d like to see Earth Day used as a platform to focus a lot more attention on the environmental benefits that space technology has brought us over the past half century, from data gathering on deforestation and pollution, communications that allow less business travel and more telecommuting, to space-based navigation that saves fuel and lives. I’d also like to see consideration of the even greater future potential for saving the planet via space.
I actually do share the goal of the anti-humans of wanting to reduce the environmental burden of humanity on the planet, and I don’t even necessarily object to the goal of reducing the terrestrial population, as long as we can dramatically increase the extraterrestrial human population, because I’m one of those people who think that human minds are the ultimate resource, and that you can’t have too many of them. But the way to achieve that goal is to open up space, not to simply reduce the human population on earth, by whatever means necessary (and many of these folks think that end will justify any means).
Back in the seventies, many of the L-5ers were hippies who recognized the peaceful potential of space colonization to gently depopulate the earth and make it into a giant natural park, with the vast bulk of humanity living and producing off planet the wealth, via industrial-intensive processes, that would make such a thing affordable. I wasn’t a hippy, but I thought then, and still think, that a wonderful ultimate goal.
But the means to achieve it are not more constraints and taxes on current energy use, or population. It is to deploy technologies that can actually achieve the goal — nuclear, molecular manufacturing, fusion (if we can do it), and low-cost space access, which might eventually make space solar power and extraction of other extraterrestrial resources for use on earth economically feasible.
Golda Meir once said that there would be peace in the Middle East when the Arabs started to love their children more than they hated the Jews. Similarly, the planet will be saved when many of the watermelons who claim to care for it start to love it more than they hate humans, freedom, individualism and technology.
[Thursday morning update]
Last week the Environmental Protection Agency did bravely move forward by finding that things like smokestacks and breathing — or anything related to greenhouse gases — endanger the public health and welfare. And since the EPA can now regulate CO2, it can have a say in nearly everything we do with little regard for silly distractions like economic tradeoffs…
…What’s worse than the EPA grabbing power over CO2? Well, leading Luddite and Congressman Henry Waxman is worse. His proposal sets carbon reduction goals of 20 percent by 2020, 42 percent by 2030 and 83 percent by 2050, and, with cap-and-trade, effectively nationalizes energy production.
This incremental destruction of prosperity is probably going to have to be modified as soon as citizens get a taste of reality. But how could any reasonable or responsible legislator suggest an 83 percent cut in emissions without any practical or wide-scale alternative to replace it, or any plan to pay for it all?
Well, that assumes that Henry Waxman is reasonable or responsible, when the available evidence indicates otherwise.
[Bumped]
The Milwaukee Way
Thoughts from Glenn Reynolds on civil rights.
Takes One To Know One
I missed this one. Apparently the Fidel pot said that the kettle was black:
…At the press conference, as well as in the final meetings of the Summit, Obama looked conceited. Such attitude by the US President was consistent with the abject positions adopted by some Latin American leaders. …When the US President said, in answering to Jake, that thousands of years had elapsed since 2004 until the present, he was superficial. Should we wait for so many years before his blockade is lifted? He did not invent it, but he embraced it just as much as the previous ten US presidents did.
…Leaders just pass through; peoples prevail. There would be no need to wait for thousands of years to pass by; only eight years will be enough so that a new US President — who will no doubt be less intelligent, promising and admired in the world than Barack Obama- riding on a better armored car, or on a more modern helicopter, or on a more sophisticated plane, occupies that inglorious position.”
Of course, it’s been half a century since Cuba has had a real new leader. This is one of the down sides to life extension.
I Hope He’s Right
Thoughts on Kathleen Sebelius:
The mere presence of Sebelius at the top of HHS will be enough to push millions of pro-life Americans into adamant opposition to the whole health-care reform enterprise. The president and his team may think it won’t matter — that they can pass their bill anyway. But passing a massive and expensive health-care bill was going to be complicated enough without a fight with social conservatives. The president didn’t need to alienate a sizeable portion of the electorate with a controversial selection for HHS — but he did. He has made his choice, and I think he will come to regret it.
I really think that the president imagines that his political views are mainstream. That’s what happens when you live in a leftist cocoon your entire life. It’s a problem that many journalists have as well.
[Update Thursday evening]
Well, that expains it. I was wondering why I was getting so many moonbat comments on this post. Apparently, it was linked by Firedog Lake.
The Pirate’s Conventions
Most people who complain that we don’t adhere rigorously enough to the Geneva Conventions are almost completely ignorant of them, thinking that they are about nothing except how to treat prisoners of war. Apparently, the Somali pirate’s lawyer is similarly ignorant.