Thoughts from Laura Seward Forczyk. As she notes, media hype about SLS/Orion getting anyone to Mars is greatly exaggerated, with the connivance of NASA PAO.
Category Archives: Political Commentary
California’s Social Priorities
…are pretty screwed up:
California continues to lead the country, and by some measures even the world, in environmental quality and climate change initiatives. But public policy must evolve to leverage these environmental achievements into corresponding improvements in educational attainment and middle class job creation. With more than 18% of the nation’s poor, and less than 1%3 of global greenhouse gas emissions, California should also embrace the challenge of leading the world in the creation of middle class manufacturing jobs for the rapidly evolving clean and green technology that California’s laws mandate, California’s educational and technology sectors invent, and California’s venture capital investors bring to the global market.
Instead, California’s policies, and regulatory and legal costs and uncertainties, tend to divert thousands of middle class jobs even in emerging green industries (including those not requiring high school diplomas) to other locations, including the Tesla battery manufacturing facility, which moved to Nevada. The loss of projects that help achieve important environmental objectives, create high quality jobs, and comply with California’s strict environmental and public health protection mandates, continues to occur in part because well-funded special interest groups ranging from business competitors to labor unions file “environmental” lawsuits as leverage for achieving narrow political or pecuniary objectives rather than to protect the environment and public health. This study suggests that the state must work much harder to ensure that California’s landmark environmental laws are not misused or pursued in a manner that adversely affects other, equally important policy priorities for California’s large undereducated and underemployed population.
The idiotic carbon law is going to do huge harm to the economy and the middle class, while doing nothing about “climate change.”
[Monday-morning update]
A tale of four droughts. All true, but, as Paul Dietz notes in comments, the biggest problem is that there is no rational water market in the state.
[Bumped]
Hillary’s Bus
The engine of the one under which she’s about to be thrown seems to be warming up.
The Dems are like jackals. When they see a weak member of the herd, they go in for the attack.
BTW, when you see them attack people like Trey Gowdy for a “partisan” attack, it’s almost always projection.
President Clinton
I’m not sure, he’s sort of subtle, but my neighbor Kurt Schlichter doesn’t seem to think that Her Hillaryness is going to be president.
Uranium Enrichment
Putin
“I’ll assume he’s alive until I see the corpse.” One other possibility is that there’s been a putsch, perhaps over the assassination, and he’s under arrest, but they haven’t figured out who’s in charge yet to make an announcement. But usually such things are resolved much more quickly.
The Space Access Society
A few weeks before its annual conference, a space policy update.
Restaurants In Seattle
…going dark as a $15 wage looms.
Morons. I find it particularly amusing that they are so precise in what they think the right number is, with Obama’s imbecilic $10.10. It’s like when Roosevelt arbitrarily raised the price of gold twenty-one cents “because it was three times seven.”
Netanyahu
Why is he doing so poorly? As noted, it’s certainly domestic politics — the Israelis have been living with an existential threat since the nation was founded.
[Early afternoon update]
I wish you guys could read Hebrew.. The butthurt from slanted Israeli journalists tweeting is so strong, it's gorgeous. Aww poor babies.
Hmmmm, not sure why I can’t properly embed that tweet, but here it is. he thinks the debate didn’t go well for the opposition, but we’ll see.
The Centennial Anniversary Of The Great War
Why does America ignore it?
Well, to be fair, as with WW II, America didn’t enter until a couple years after it started. But it’s true that the Left would like to whitewash its own history of our first fascist president (and the current one, who aspires to many of the same things).