Comparing and contrasting NASA and private industry. I prefer the term “space transports” to RLVs, though.
Category Archives: Political Commentary
Social Justice In Gaming
“Oops, I joined a cult.”
The Mann Defamation Suit
There Is No #JourneyToMars
The NASA Advisory Council is pretty remarkable to listen to today, particularly Bill Ballhaus. They’re essentially telling NASA it doesn’t have the technology or a plan. Which has always been the case. As I tweeted, the NAC needs to speak truth to Congress about SLS.
The 25th Amendment
I was thinking exactly the same thing yesterday, listening to Obama’s delusional ramblings:
Without the use of the teleprompter, his speech can be described only as “halting.” It was impossible to count the number of times he seized up, able to deaden the silence with only a drawn-out “uh,” “um” or “ahhh.”
The White House dutifully scrubbed all the halts and stutters from the official transcript, and it was impossible to count them in real time. But a sample of his incoherent word salad found him stuttering about every 15 words, which comes to more than 330 “uh-um-ahhs” in a single appearance.
This is not the same soaring speaker who inspired so many in 2008. This is a broken-down man who has lost the only gift he ever had.
Unfortunately, there is no more 2/3rd of the Congress to act on this than there is for impeachment in the Senate.
I’d also note that I don’t think he ever had a gift for extemporaneous speaking. He was always Candidate, and then President Teleprompter.
[Update a while later]
A Democrat says that Obama’s fecklessness could drag us into a nuclear war.
The Christian Terrorism Problem
No, America doesn’t have one.
Sure are a lot of Christophobes out there.
Political Correctness
Jonathan Chait has decided he’s been mugged enough by the campus fascists:
The upsurge of political correctness is not just greasy-kid stuff, and it’s not just a bunch of weird, unfortunate events that somehow keep happening over and over. It’s the expression of a political culture with consistent norms, and philosophical premises that happen to be incompatible with liberalism. The reason every Marxist government in the history of the world turned massively repressive is not because they all had the misfortune of being hijacked by murderous thugs. It’s that the ideology itself prioritizes class justice over individual rights and makes no allowance for legitimate disagreement. (For those inclined to defend p.c. on the grounds that racism and sexism are important, bear in mind that the forms of repression Marxist government set out to eradicate were hardly imaginary.)
American political correctness has obviously never perpetrated the brutality of a communist government, but it has also never acquired the powers that come with full control of the machinery of the state. The continuous stream of small-scale outrages it generates is a testament to an illiberalism that runs deep down to its core (a character I tried to explain in my January essay).
Of course, given his own history, he’s not the best standard bearer for the message.
Back To The Future
Like me, Eric Berger noticed the irony of last week’s successful spaceflight and NASA’s announcement of regressing to expendable SSMEs.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Gerald Black noticed, too. I disagree that NASA should be funding any new rockets, though, reusable or otherwise. Leave that to private industry.
Richard Posner
This has implications that go far beyond the judiciary. The only reason for not tarring and feathering any government official for effrontery when they tell us what to do is that their power to do so is somehow legitimate. But that legitimacy comes from the exercise of constitutional power. If the Constitution doesn’t mean anything, well, then, maybe it’s time to go long on pitchforks. Because without the Constitution the angry mob is just as legitimate as the perfumed princes of the state.
Here is Josh Blackman’s take down of Posner.
Climate Hysteria
..is creating a climate of intolerance.
That’s not an accident.