Category Archives: Social Commentary
My Book Interview
It’s available on Youtube now.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Here’s one of the brilliant comments over there:
he just sounds like a typical neo con who would prefer to send cheap chinese labor into space rather than waste money on returning white men to their families.
same type who wants more young americans to die for israel.
This is a sign of a broken brain.
BTW, fun fact. That picture of the book? It’s virtual, created by PJTV. It doesn’t yet exist in physical form, but it should next week, and it should look exactly like that.
It’s Not New York City That’s Broken
It’s its new mayor that is.
This is one of the many flaws of human nature that concerned the Founders: the inability to either know history, or learn from it. There’s a young generation that has no idea how bad things were in the days of Dinkins, or what Giuliani (and despite all his nannying, Bloomberg) did for them. Well, as Mencken said, they’re going to get what they want, good and hard.
Sexually Predatory Cetaceans
Sometimes they can love you to death.
There’s an underwater hotel down in Florida for divers, with windows. They had to put curtains on them, because guests were complaining about the dolphins watching them engaged in amorous activity.
[Update a few minutes later]
You should read all. It’s quite an interesting article on Delphinadae behavior in human history.
Selling Kidneys
Why aren’t we allowed to? It’s a misguided policy that kills many people every year.
Hazardous Asteroids
…may be more common than we thought:
The scientific orthodoxy said that a Chelyabinsk-size event ought to happen every 140 years or so, but Brown saw several such events in the historical record.
Famously, a large object exploded over the Tunguska region of Siberia in 1908. But there have been less-heralded impacts, including one on Aug. 3, 1963, when an asteroid created a powerful airburst off the coast of South Africa.
“Any one of these taken separately I think you can dismiss as a one-off. But now when we look at it as a whole, over a hundred years, we see these large impactors more frequently than we would expect,” said Brown, whose paper appeared in Nature.
But our response, and actions to become a space-faring civilization, remains pathetic.
A Message To Millennials
Kurt Schlichter expresses his gratitude:
I have been told that being hard on you Millennials will turn you against conservatism, that I should offer you a positive, hopeful message that avoids the touchy problem of your manifest stupidity.
No. There’s no sugar-coating it – your votes for Democrats have ensured that you are the first generation in American history that will fail to exceed what their parents attained. Embracing liberalism was a stupid thing to do, done for the stupidest of reasons, and I will now let you subsidize my affluent lifestyle without a shred of guilt.
I’m a 48 year old trial lawyer living on the coast in California – I should have “Hope and Change” tattooed on my glutes. I’d have an excuse to be lib-curious, but you Millennials? Why do you support an ideology that pillages you to pay-off Democrat constituencies? Your time in the indoctrination factories of academia trained you in a form of “critical thinking” that is neither. Somehow, you came to embrace the bizarre notion that conservatives are psychotic Jesus freaks who want to Footloosisze America into a land of mandatory Sunday school and no dancing.
But liberals, in contrast, are nice. Obama is cool. You chose petty fascism with a smile. Not a lot of thought went into it. Facts, evidence – these were mere distractions from the feelings-based validation that came from rejecting us wicked conservatives.
What did you get? The chance to be forced to buy health insurance you don’t want at inflated rates so my rates can be lower. You get to pay more out of your monthly barista take – liberalism ensured that the tanked job market foreclosed a real career – so that I get to pay less out of my lawyer checks. Thanks, suckers.
RTWT.
[Update a few minutes later]
Hey, remember back in 2008, when Barack was going to make government cool again?
Idiots.
How Safe Should A Frontier Be?
I have a piece up on that subject over at Reason. It’s a reprise of some of the arguments I make in the book, which I now expect to be available next week (my printer screwed up). I’d hoped to have them available for SpaceUp LA this weekend, but that’s not going to happen.
NFL “Bullying”
Call me crazy, but I think that it’s possible to have a good football team without some team members calling others racist names on their home phone.
Fall Colors
The weather’s been warm, or what passes for warmth in our state of ever-diminishing expectations. Fifty, fifty-two; cloudless sky; mellow sun. Most of the trees are now participating, although a few just go from green to dull green, like adults invited to a costume party who prefer to put on an old pair of glasses and consider that sufficient. Sunday winds separated the hardy from the weak, stripping some trees with the frenzy of starved piranhas.
Pictures, too.