…and how to fight it.
That war goes all the way back to slavery.
Category Archives: Social Commentary
Michael Totten
He wants to go to Vietnam. If you like his work, you might consider donating to his new Kickstarter.
The American Physical Society
Just as the AAAS seems to be going all ass hat, the APS is rethinking its position on the “consensus.” Mann’s, Romm’s et al heads must have exploded when they saw that Curry, Lindzen and Christie are half of the working committee.
Reusable Falcons
Jeff Foust mined Gwynne Shotwell’s Space Show interview for some interesting nuggets. Here’s what I found interesting:
Despite concerns about US access to the ISS given current tensions with Russia and NASA’s current reliance on Soyuz, Shotwell said she didn’t think it was feasible to greatly accelerate the development of a crewed Dragon. “We proposed a pretty forward-leaning program” for commercial crew, she said. “I don’t want to say that we couldn’t speed things up: we probably could, but it would have to be in lockstep with NASA.” She added that SpaceX current believes it can have a crewed Dragon ready “a little bit faster” than current NASA plans for flights in late 2016 or early 2017. [Emphasis added]
I’m pretty sure that if NASA went to her and Elon and said, “we want to fly this year, and we’re willing to do it without the abort system,” they’d be able to do it.
Hillary Clinton
The advice to her is laughable, though:
Nothing in Hillary Clinton’s past suggests she’s ever been that dissatisfied with the way Washington and/or the country works. For pete’s sake, while secretary of state, she had Huma Abedin under a “special contract” that allowed her to be a consultant for private clients while keeping her $135,000-per-year State Department job.
The status quo has been very, very, very good for the Clintons. They have a net worth estimated at $55 million; Hillary Clinton’s speaking fee begins at $200,000, with Wall Street banks and private-equity firms most frequently picking up the tab: Goldman Sachs, KKR, the Caryle Group. Far from an impassioned reformer, eager to overhaul a system of crony capitalism and back-scratching, Hillary Clinton is our political and economic status quo in human form.
Expecting Hillary Clinton to be a transformative reformer of Washington is like expecting Donald Trump to become a Bolshevik, Kim Jong Un to renounce power and become a monk, or the New York Yankees to push for the end of free agency in baseball. Powerful people rarely if ever decide to completely overhaul the system that made them powerful.
Beyond that, the notion that she can somehow transmogrify herself into someone “warm,” and “human” is ludicrous.
The “Selling Space” Debate
Jeff Foust has six takeaways.
British Accents
…of yore.
I’ve always wondered how anyone can think they know what an accent from before Edison would have sounded like. How do we know that Romans would have spoken the Latin of the modern Church?
[Update a few minutes later]
That second video on the how Shakespeare would have been performed in the day is quite interesting.
Aircraft Cockpits
Can they be too secure?
They can be, and are.
Our lessons from 911 and approaches to aircraft security have been wrong headed for over 12.5 years. @PopMech
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) March 20, 2014
Domesticated Cats
We’ve been doing it for thousands of years. The theory that it happened with the advent of agriculture because they were hanging out in the granaries to catch rodents makes sense to me.
Saturated Fat
Even the New York Times is reporting on how we’ve been sold a dietary bill of goods for decades.
Now, if they could stop with the nonsense about counting calories, BMI, and eating whole grains.