Category Archives: Social Commentary

Random Thoughts

“Obama ate a dog” edition. This is like a permanent employment act for people like Jim Treacher and Frank J. And of course, the inevitable Dogs Against Obama web site.

[Late morning update]

Just when did the presidents stop eating dogs? Treacher’s having way too much fun with this.

[Update a few minutes later]

Why Barack Obama identifies with the dog eaters. The rest of us are just bitter, clinging to our provincial American cuisine.

Spacefaring

Is space more like seafaring or aviation? It started out like the latter, but the former is a better model once we actually get serious about it.

[Update a while later]

Meteor craters, dinosaurs and spacefaring.

Actually, while I do think it’s a federal responsibility to keep an eye out for impactors, it’s not clear that it’s NASA’s job. It’s one of the things we need a Space Guard for.

Charles Stross On Amazon’s Business Model

In which he ignorantly bashes libertarians:

I’m not going to lecture you about Jeff Bezos either, although I do want to note that he came out of a hedge fund and he’s ostensibly a libertarian; these aspects of his background make me uneasy, because in my experience they tend to be found in conjunction with a social-darwinist ideology that has no time for social justice, compassion, or charity. (When you hear a libertarian talking about “disruption” and “innovation” what they usually mean is “opportunities to make a quick buck, however damaging the long-term side effects may be”. Watch for the self-serving cant and the shout-outs to abstractions framed in terms of market ideology.)

Emphasis mine. Jonah Goldberg, hit this guy with a cluebat.