If Jose hits DC and NY, I blame them, for voting for Hillary. And for being anti-science on gender and race.
Category Archives: Political Commentary
Jerry Pournelle
Rest in peace (I have no idea how to copy/paste on these damned finger painting devices, but Instapundit has a text from his son, Alex)). He was an amazing person with an amazing life. I last saw him when I dropped by Chaos Manor a couple years ago to give him a copy of my book, which he reviewed very nicely.
I’ll have more to say when I’ve survived the hurricane and gotten back to a real computer.
[Sunday-morning update, as the winds rise outside our Boynton Beach apartment]
Sarah Hoyt remembers someone she considered a friend and colleague.
When I stopped by to see him a couple years ago, we talked about what was happening with SpaceX and NASA in general, and reminisced about our long-time mutual friend Bill Haynes, whom he hadn’t been aware had been killed in an auto accident on Palos Verdes on his way to church a couple years earlier (both Buzz and I had delivered a eulogy, but I think that Jerry was too sick at the time). It was a tough conversation because his hearing was shot, both from the brain cancer that he’d survived, but long-term from being an artillery handler in Korea. When Roberta let me into the library, I had to figure out how to get his attention without startling him, because the bell wasn’t doing so. I was unsuccessful, but he had no problem once he realized the unexpected intruder was me.
Heading back to LA, probably Tuesday, maybe Wednesday, Irma and American Airlines willing. I hope I’ll be able to attend the service and see a lot of old (sadly, in both senses of the word) friends.
[Late-evening update on Sunday]
J. Neil Schumann has some remembrances, too. I suspect we’ll see a lot of this over the next few days.
[Monday-morning update]
Glenn Reynolds writes that, as a kid in the gloomy 70s, Jerry gave him (and many others) hope for a better future.
A Beating In Berkeley
A good account from Matt Labash.
The Insanity Of Global Warming Hysteria
A simple proof:
as a person familiar with both mathematics and computer science, this variation is not odd, in fact it’s completely understandable. After all a computer model is based on the best possible guesses from the available data and hurricanes are “complex natural phenomena that involve multiple interacting processes” so there is nothing at all odd about there being a 850 mile variation as to where it will it. As we get closer to Sunday and we have true data to input the variation in the models will correspondingly decrease.
Now apply this to climate change models telling us we face disaster in 100 years.
You aren’t dealing with a single “complex natural phenomena that involve multiple interacting processes” you are dealing with EVERY complex natural phenomena that involve multiple interacting processes that exists on the earth. Every single additional item you add increases the variation of the data models. Furthermore you are also dealing with variations in the sun, variations in the orbits of the earth, its moon and more.
And that’s just the variations in natural phenomena, imagine the variation in industrial output on the entire planet for a period of 50 or 100 years.
Think of the computer modeling and tracking of that single hurricane and apply this thinking to the climate of the earth as a whole. How accurate that model is going to be over 100 years, 50 years, 25 years or even ten years?
Would you be willing to bet even your short term economic future on it, would anyone in their right mind do so?
Not me.
Falcon Heavy
Leonard David has a story on its prospects for initial success, with quotes from Yours Truly.
To expand on the point, while he didn’t include it, I told Leonard in email:
The other issue is not launch reliability, but schedule reliability. SpaceX has aborted launches of the Falcon 9 when one or more of the engines was indicating performance issues on ignition. Three times as many engines means a lot higher probability of having an issue with one of them. For example, while I don’t know what the ignition reliability of a Merlin D is, suppose it’s 99% (that is, there’s a one in a hundred chance of failure to perform up to spec on ignition). For nine engines, that means the probability of a Falcon 9 aborting on the pad due to an engine issue would be one minus 0.99 to the ninth power, or about 8% per flight, or about once every dozen flights (which doesn’t seem that far off from their record). I don’t know what their flight rules will be for the Heavy, but if they have the same rule that they can’t take off with an underperforming engine, the reliability for twenty-seven engines will be one minus 0.99 to the 27th power, or 24%. That is, if they’re only 0.99 reliable per engine, and require all engines operating properly to take off, they have about a one in four chance of aborting a Falcon Heavy every single flight. That says to me that either they think Merlin reliability is greater than that (which it could well be) or that they’ll relax the rules to allow engine out from liftoff, or perhaps both.
Regardless, here’s hoping for a successful flight in less than three months.
The Clinton Fix Was In
We already knew that, but this is just confirmation that Comey was never conducting a serious investigation.
“Price Gouging”
Hearing the usual idiocy on how the government is going to crack down on it. What I wrote after Katrina still applies after Harvey. Three cheers for “price gougers.”
[Late-afternoon update]
After Harvey, “price gougers” have the moral high ground. Yes.
The FBI
Obama is still running it.
I hadn’t realized how deep the rot was. This is not how the Republic is supposed to work. And this wouldn’t be happening if Jeff Sessions was alive.
Keeping Their Story Straight
They don’t seem to be able to do it on global warming, at Glacier National Park. (We visited there in the early nineties, then went on to Banff, Jasper and Yoho).
White Nationalists Versus SJWs
They’re not fighting over ideological differences, they’re fighting because they have so much in common. Much like the Nazis and the Communists.
I’m always amused when the most race-obsessed people in the world accuse normal people of being racists.
[Sunday-morning update]
The thread seems to have drifted into discussion of Joe Arpaio. He was a sadistic scumbag, but the people of Maricopa County re-elected him multiple times. There are many Joe Arpaios and terrible county jails in this country. The only reason Arpaio was prosecuted by the Obama Department of (In)Justice was because he refused to knuckle under to their insistence that Arizona not enforce federal immigration laws.
[Wednesday-afternoon update]
Don’t call these people (or anyone, really) “anti-fascist”:
We may not take today’s anarcho-communists as seriously as we did back when they had the power, the weapons, and the infrastructure to murder tens of millions of people. But their goals are no different. As they put it, they don’t want a “U.S.A. at all.” The country they want to occupy the center of North America has no First Amendment, no freedom of expression, and people with opposing views (of any views, not just Nazis) are beaten, imprisoned or murdered for intellectual dissent. They may run the gamut from anarchism to revolutionary socialism in their views, but they have far more in common with fascists than they do with the people they seek to attract with the sweet-sounding “anti-fascist” label.
Davies notes that the propaganda value of “anti-fascism” in the West reached its apex when Francisco Franco won the Spanish Civil War, with help from the fascist governments of Italy and Germany. It then fell out of favor when Stalin aligned with Hitler in hopes of devouring half of eastern Europe. Before the Germans turned against them, the Soviets seized half of Poland, annexed the Baltic States, and invaded Finland in the 1939-1940 Winter War, casting its democratic government at the time as a fascist enemy (of course).
So always with these little would-be tyrants. When you use the label “antifa” or “anti-fascist,” you are helping and enabling a resurgence of terrorist liars in the exact same tradition, who are indistinguishable from neo-Nazis except in the specific motivations for and targets of their authoritarian impulses and irrational violence.
Yup.
[Bumped]
[Update a couple minutes later]
Yes, “antifa” is the moral equivalent of neo-Nazis.
Yes, as noted above, going back to Stalin.