Category Archives: Political Commentary
Sandy Hook
Sorry, but in a free society, some tragedies just can’t be prevented.
Another Legal Blow Against ObamaCare?
SCOTUS is going to take up the religious freedom issue.
I suspect they’ll come down on the side of Hobby Lobby. The real question is whether or not they’ll say it’s severable, or if Roberts decides to fix his previous screwup.
ObamaCaliforniaCare
As is noted there, Krugman told us Enron was working fine, too.
23 And Me
I think that the FDA is a much greater danger to public health than DNA testing. It needs to be reined in.
Inspiration Mars
…and its uninspirational end:
…as this latest episode demonstrates, unaffordable programs like the SLS are not a highway to the solar system. They are a roadblock.
Another mission destroyed by the big-rocket myth.
Star Wars
Thoughts on when the franchise died.
Frankly, I was never that big a fan. I thought it was highly overrated by a younger generation.
Ten Questions For Al Gore
Earlier this year in an interview with the Globe and Mail you described Canada’s development of the oil sands as the equivalent of treating the atmosphere like an “open sewer.” What do you have to say about the findings of Canadian climate scientist and lead UN IPCC author Andrew Weaver, and his colleague Neal Swart, published in the journal Nature, that even if Canada developed all the commercially viable oil in the oilsands, global temperatures would rise by an insignificant 0.03 degrees?
It’s frightening how close this pompous hypocritical math-challenged fool came to being president.
Obama’s Legacy Of Betrayal
He builds on it with the Iranian deal. This is shameful.
Politicians And Technology
Why they don’t know how to deal with technical messes:
All appearances to the contrary, the managers involved in this debacle aren’t dumb. But they come from a background — law and politics — where arguments often take the place of reality, and plausibility can be as good as, or better than, truth.
What engineers know that lawyers and politicians often don’t is that in the world of things, as opposed to people, there’s no escaping the sharp teeth of reality. But in law, and especially politics, inconvenient facts are merely inconvenient, something to be rationalized away.
When our country has accomplished great things in the past, there has usually been a great engineer running the program: Hyman Rickover with the nuclear submarine program, or Wernher von Braun with the Apollo space program, for example. Rickover and von Braun were famously stern taskmasters, but they did not substitute wishes for reality.
Which may be why they were able to launch submarines, and rockets that astounded the world. While today, we can’t even launch a website.
Of course, they ignore economic reality as well.