I’d say that when you’ve engaged in conjugal relations with the pooch to the depth that Detroit has, you can’t afford either impressionists or public-employee unions.
Category Archives: Social Commentary
Libertarians
Five myths about them.
It’s Not Selma Any More
No, Trayvon Martin was no Emmett Till.
But some people just can’t let go of their race-baiting. I for one (well, OK, for at least two) hereby officially refuse to engage in any more one-sided “conversations” about race.
[Link to the second page of the Barone piece at IBD seems to be broken — I’ve emailed him about it.]
[Update a while later]
The cheapening of civil-rights history. They should be ashamed, but they’re shameless.
Obama’s Creeping Authoritarianism
Thoughts from Dan Henninger:
The political left, historically inclined by ideological belief to public policy that is imposed rather than legislated, will support Mr. Obama’s expansion of authority. The rest of us should not.
The U.S. has a system of checks and balances. Mr. Obama is rebalancing the system toward a national-leader model that is alien to the American tradition.
Gee, someone should write a book
Press-Release Science
Some extensive thoughts, from Charlie Martin.
Sorry, but disagreeing with the media is not a “war on science.”
Detroit
Here, where cattle could graze in vast swaths of this depopulated city, democracy ratified a double delusion: Magic would rescue the city (consult the Bible, the bit about the multiplication of the loaves and fishes), or Washington would deem Detroit, as it recently did some banks and two of the three Detroit-based automobile companies, “too big to fail.” But Detroit failed long ago. And not even Washington, whose recklessness is almost limitless, is oblivious to the minefield of moral hazard it would stride into if it rescued this city and, then inevitably, others that are buckling beneath the weight of their cumulative follies. It is axiomatic: When there is no penalty for failure, failures proliferate. This bedraggled city’s decay poses no theological conundrum of the sort that troubled Darwin, but it does pose worrisome questions about the viability of democracy in jurisdictions where big government and its unionized employees collaborate in pillaging taxpayers. Self-government has failed in what once was America’s fourth-largest city and now is smaller than Charlotte, N.C.
This is why the Founders gave us a republic, not a democracy.
Hipster Buddhism
A lesson on the nature of souls.
How Obama Won Re-Election
By breaking the law?
The Obama campaign doesn’t seem to have been deterred by the possibility that it was violating federal law. I can think of at least four reasons why that might be. Three of them are scandals.
Hey, it’s not like President Asterisk (or his sycophants) has ever given a damn about the law.
Nostalgia
Exploration Is Highly Overrated
Ben Wright McGee has a long essay on old space versus new, which I think misses the point, because he seems to think that space is about exploration, and then gets bogged down in the pointless argument of whether or not suborbital flight constitutes such:
In almost back-to-back recent events, what to me is an example of the true nature of the conflict between the many colliding conceptions of astronauts, space explorers, and space exploration was brought into sharp relief:
On the one hand, a NASA historian who I greatly respect alleged to me that private suborbital spaceflight and even new, commercial orbital space modules and transportation systems (which have recently received NASA funding to enhance the U.S. space infrastructure and give scientists more platforms and opportunities to conduct research), were patently unworthy of NASA dollars.
Existing Russian and U.S. systems should be relied upon, and the already pinched NASA budget, he implied, should be saved and consolidated for the more worthy endeavor of exploring truly uncharted planetary territory.
To me, this is all beside the point. There is an implicit assumption that the purpose of human spaceflight is to explore space, but that has never, ever been the case. In the sixties, its purpose was to beat the Soviets in a peaceful contest in the Cold War, and since then it’s been largely a jobs program — “exploration” was just the excuse, despite the fact that we haven’t left LEO. To me, exploration is a means, not an end. The goal of human spaceflight should be to develop the resources of and settle space, and if we’re not doing that (which we currently are not, at least NASA isn’t), then we should quit wasting money on it. But we remain stuck in this “exploration” mindset because we’ve never had a real national debate on why we’re spending this money, instead talking with hidden assumption that we all assume are shared by others, even though they clearly are not.