Category Archives: Social Commentary

Plasma Jet Electric Thrusters

An interesting Kickstarter project.

Via (former co-blogger) Andrew Case, who writes:

It will be interesting to see if crowd funding of space projects is viable. I know that there’s a guy who successfully funded a project to study a lunar space elevator, but as far as I know this is the first that is focused on something practical that has a real chance of flying in the short term.

I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on the subject.

I think it’s very viable, and a useful model for the future. It will be even better when we can start crowd funding actual businesses via the JOBS Act, and not just technology development.

[Late evening update]

Yeah, I know, I know. I was gone all day, and Trent provided it in comments, but here’s the link.

[Update a few minutes later]

Ignore my response to Paul Breed in comments. Doug Messier is now reporting that the engine exploded. If so, that puts a different complexion on things, but it still proves out their engine-out capability for the first stage, including shrapnel shield. The question is, as Paul notes, what are the differences between first and second-stage Merlins, if any, that can give us confidence in the second-stage reliability? Also, what would have happened to the Dragon had it happened on second stage? Just a loss of thrust, or an explosion of the entire stage (that is, would the explosion have taken out the tanks above as well, or does it have a similar shrapnel shield)?

In terms of commercial crew, the former wouldn’t necessarily require an abort system, and the latter probably wouldn’t be helped by one, unless there was sufficient warning to activate it. So it will be interesting to know from telemetry how soon they knew the engine was going south.

The President’s Character

exposed:

Barack Obama is a narcissist and a sociopath, with the skills of persuasion that children abandoned by their parents learn as a survival mechanism. In the adoring light of the liberal media, Obama reflected power and self-confidence — so long as he was in control, and stood in front of the teleprompter. The real Barack Obama is the one who cowered in the Oval Office protected by his Praetorian guard, who declined to hold cabinet meetings or meet with Republican leaders: McBama surrounded by the weird sisters, Valerie Jarrett, Susan Rice and Michelle. Obama’s greatest strength always has been his greatest weakness, potentially a catastrophic one: he manipulates so effectively because he has a compulsion to be in control. When he knows that he is not in control, Obama is paralyzed. Absent last night were the easy rhetorical flourishes and rock star pose of 2008.

As I wrote earlier, that’s the Obama I’ve always seen, but I think that the contrast with Romney opened up a lot of eyes anew.

Quoting Obama

…is racist:

It’s funny how quickly liberals and the media (PTR) can do a heel-turn:

OUT: “You selectively edited that!”
IN: “You put back in all the parts we selectively edited out!”

You know, I followed the ’08 presidential race pretty damn closely, and this is the first I’m hearing about that speech. I’m willing to bet that all the people insisting it isn’t news hadn’t heard of it either, or hadn’t seen the whole thing. But they’ve decided you don’t need to know about it. Romney’s dog 30 years ago is important, but Obama’s racebaiting speech 5 years ago isn’t.

These people are despicable.

Oh, and it wasn’t an isolated incident. This is the real Obama, not the one that so many were fooled by four years ago.

[Update a couple minutes later]

I like this comment at Treacher’s post: “The way the media protects Obama reminds me of the way the boy Damian was protected in the Omen movies.”

Barack Obama

Segregationist:

Now I’m not trying to say that Obama is a segregationist like Orville Faubus or even a cheap race hustler like Sharpton. He is something different and obviously more complex and subtle, but in the final analysis he relies on the same reactionary racial estrangement as the other two.

Indeed, our president is the reverse of what he appears to be, pretending to bring the races together when he profits by driving them apart. In that sense, he is similar to Yasser Arafat, talking one way to the West and another to his Palestinian brothers.

Yes, we all know that almost all politicians engage in such targeted speechmaking, but the lengths to which they go while doing it, the extremity of the differences in what they are saying between audiences, take the measure of the man or woman.

In Barack Obama’s case, it’s pretty extreme. In the Hampton University speech, Obama sounds like a character out of Ralph Ellison’s classic Invisible Man, pandering and preaching divisive nonsense about Hurricane Katrina, which he surely knew wasn’t true.

Or did he? Actually, he seemed to be making a “separate but equal” argument regarding the treatment of Katrina victims and those of other disasters, itself reminiscent of the days of segregation. But I don’t think he was really doing that either, at least not consciously. Again like one of Ellison’s characters, he was convincing himself of his general righteousness while revving up the crowd telling them lies they clearly wanted to hear.

As usual, all this racism talk from the Left is just projection.

[Update a few minutes later]

More racism from the Left:

Yes, that’s how the Associated Press had described the Pennsylvania law: a “tough new law.” So hard to show ID, you know — especially if you’re black, as Democrats have said for years, though no one seems to take offense, which is mind-boggling.

I’d love to ask a white liberal politician someday: “Why do you think you’re more capable of showing ID than a black person?” I mean, does even the Klan say that white people are more capable of showing ID than blacks?

Ass George Bush said, it’s the soft bigotry of low expectations.