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.
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.
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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.
Stephen Green has some thoughts on how to save it.
I’ve never been enough of a Star Wars fan to care whether it lives or dies. I would note, though, that $40M went a lot farther four decades ago than it would today.
The Space Studies Institute has resurrected a old television discussion of the prospects for space colonies.
It’s interesting to note that when this occurred, we didn’t know how much hydrogen was available on the moon and in the rest of the solar system.
I’ll be on this afternoon, at 2 PM PDT, to talk about space settlement, the OST, and probably ranting about the latest safety insanity from NASA.
No, Tor.com, GenCon isn’t racist: A fisking (from Larry Correia).
Click. You know you want to.
A visit to a s3x-robot factory, and the furniture of Catherine the Great. Latter definitely NSFW.
What’s the best new car you can get with one?
I wish I had the budget for some of these. One of my favorite features is that they’re much less likely to be stolen, since so many people don’t know how to drive them these days.
Was Truman the proto-Trump?
Trump is only shocking to people unfamiliar with presidential history.
Victor Davis Hanson on the appeal of the West:
America remains the exceptional Western nation, whose influence and stature transcend the size of its economy and population, and its vast land mass of rich natural resources. Its cocktail of property rights, unfettered oil and gas development, muscular national defense, gun rights, religiosity, free-market economics, limited government, philanthropy, and great private universities is, again, unlike anything in the West.
Likewise, its excesses that arise from the marriage of free-market affluence and constitutionally protected unfettered expression, in the eyes of the world, appear often as license and indulgence. Certainly, the First and Second Amendments, the National Football League, rap music, the U.S. Marine Corps, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, the Ivy League, or 24/7 cable news could not originate elsewhere.
The result is that America exists both as the world’s refuge and its beacon, the sole place where individuals can find a safe harbor. Only in America can the individual remain free and able to live his life under the assumption that the major decisions of his life are his own and not predicated on state approval. Only in the United States does the rags to riches story still exist, given that neither regulation, the deep state, nor an entrenched aristocracy can fully suppress entrepreneurs or aspiring capitalists.
A key goal of my Outer Space Treaty project is to extend this to the solar system. Speaking of which, Michael Listner has an analysis of the latest U.S. legislation along these lines.