No, Democrats, your election losses don’t indicate a broken system; they indicate a broken and morally bankrupt political party.
Category Archives: Social Commentary
Corporate Recruiters
They’re paying far too much attention to prestigious degrees.
Yes. There’s no reason to think that will give them better employees. And all this does is continue to inflate the disastrous higher-ed bubble.
[Update a few minutes later]
This seems related: Students complain that a professor’s op-ed makes them feel bad.
Stop Trivializing Naziism
Thoughts from David Harsanyi:
It’s difficult to take this spurious reasoning seriously, but simply because you think you detect some trace parallels between what Nazis engaged in and contemporary politics doesn’t make them comparable in any important way. The Nazis adopted a bunch of socialist policies, but that doesn’t mean Bernie Sanders is a would-be Himmler.
Admittedly, there is huge space in-between zero tolerance and lawlessness at the border. But none of the positions that have been taken in American political discourse so far portends the Fourth Reich. Switzerland and Japan, to name just two liberal democracies, have far stricter immigration laws than the United States, and neither is on the cusp of fascism. Simply because the arbitrary number of allowable immigrants you’ve come up with differs from that of your political opponent doesn’t make that person a budding sociopath.
I've never seen a week in which the Holocaust, Nazis, Dred Scott and Korematsu were so trivialized.
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) June 26, 2018
Buzz
Emilee Speck got the court documents. As someone who’s known them all for years, this is very sad.
[Afternoon update]
Here’s a statement from Christina:
Personal Statement by Christina Korp @Buzzs_xtina regarding article about @TheRealBuzz lawsuit in the @WSJ pic.twitter.com/okyW8aztvY
— NASA Watch (@NASAWatch) June 25, 2018
[Wednesday-morning update]
Here’s the latest, from Chris Davenport.
[Bumped]
[Late-morning update]
Marina Koren has more at The Atlantic.
The Risk Of Spaceflight
A new paper assessing spaceflight mortality. Not sure how useful it is, given the admitted paucity of data.
[Update a few minutes later]
When a Mars simulation goes wrong. Yes, we have a lot to learn before we go to other planets, and even then, people will die, often in terrible ways. Part of the answer is that we have to be more ambitious about how many we send. Six simply isn’t enough.
Left-Coast Lawlessness
Sounds like San Francisco, Seattle and Portland are becoming like third-world hell holes. I’m supposed to go up to the city in July for the ISS conference. Doesn’t seem like a great location choice.
Trump And Conservatives
John Hawkins has five weird things about being a conservative who doesn’t love Trump.
I’m not a conservative, but I agree with all.
Narrator: Both charities were profoundly corrupt. Both candidates were profoundly corrupt. https://t.co/bsZHUwmQre
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) June 14, 2018
The Climate Wars
The (rare) voices of reason:
10. Can we put the polarization genie back in the bottle, on climate or anything else? I really don’t know. But I do wonder how those advocating further radicalization of climate advocacy imagine any of this ends.
11. Making ever more radical demands might be a fine strategy were there someone to negotiate with. But by the reckoning of most prominent climate hawks, there isn’t.
12. Nor does it appear that a more inclusive climate coalition is likely to bring larger congressional majorities. Any Democrat-only climate strategy has to be predicated on not only winning but holding purple/red districts over multiple elections.
13. These are precisely the districts that radicalized climate rhetoric alienates culturally and the green policy agenda punishes economically. Since the failure of cap and trade in 2010, climate activists have taken rhetoric to 11, and what it got them was Trump.
And it will continue to.
Remembering Bobby Kennedy
I remember waking up on a school day to hear that he’d been shot out in California. That was a rough couple months, between it and the earlier MLK assassination. Fifty years on, a useful reminder that much of the history has been rewritten, and that both he and JFK were highly overrated. Teddy was scum, but apparently some Americans have need for royalty.
More thoughts from Ed Driscoll.
Anthony Bourdain
I’ve never paid much attention to him, but he seems to have been quite a character. Here’s a foreword he wrote to a book in defense of a guileless restaurant reviewer in flyover country.
[Update a while later]
It’s always been such an alien concept to me.
[Update a few minutes later]
After a suicide, think of the survivors. and Ben Shapiro asks “How do we stop suicides?”
When I was a kid, one of my classmates’ father shot himself, and she discovered the body. I wondered just how terrible that would be.