The U.S’s oil reserves now larger than Saudi Arabia’s.
Huh. Like Glenn, I’m also old enough to remember when the Obama the Wise told us we couldn’t drill our way out of the energy situation. Reminder: Every resource is a renewable resource with sufficiently cheap energy.
It might be possible to live thirty years longer. I wonder to what degree treating diabetes with metformin will also extend life? I also think that people confuse cause and effect between aging and many of the “diseases of aging.”
I think there’s potential for much more than that. I don’t buy the notion that the body can’t be repaired indefinitely. It violates no laws of physics.
[Afternoon update]
The mystery of the Missing Link has been solved once again!
Joel Kotkin and Victor Davis Hanson have both written about the California oligarchy, but this piece points out their cruel but self-righteous youth:
“There are literally shanty towns underneath most highway overpasses in the city,” says Martínez. “But that techie kid who goes and gets his $5 single-origin, cruelty-free pour-over in some trendy coffee shop? He doesn’t give a s***. He just wants to get some liquidity around his shares and steps over the homeless guy en route to his yoga class.”
And, of course, as Ed Driscoll points out, and will come as no surprise to readers here, the dirty little secret is that they’re self-righteous Democrats.
How they ruined my barbecue (he means grilling).
Reading comments on Donald Robertson’s excellent disquisition on SLS in Space News, I don’t think anyone so encapsulates the insanity as Gary Church.
I should note that I found this link via the space-policy section of Reddit, which I’ve added to the blog roll.
Oh, and speaking of insanity on human spaceflight policy, I’d like to fisk this nonsense, but it’s long, and I just don’t have the gumption for it right now. I doubt if many have even read the stupid thing.
On the hundredth anniversary, thoughts on the Somme, from Charles JohnsonCooke.
On display in one cabinet are a couple of pristine machine guns — one a British “Vickers,” the other its German equivalent. My stomach turns inside out at the sight of them. These are the water-cooled monstrosities that were instrumental in producing the great stasis and all of its horrors. Capable of pushing out 500 rounds per minute (eight per second), it convinced both sides that defense was the safest course.
The machine gun, the British journalist Philip Gibbs observed, afforded its bearers the capacity to construct “not a line but a fortress position.” “No chance,” he noted, “for cavalry!” And yet, though the world’s generals knew from experience in Manchuria, from Thrace, and from the killing fields of the American Civil War just how obsolete established military tactics had been rendered by technological change, for much of the First World War the cavalry was given plenty of chances. Mounted or not, advancing forces at the Somme hewed largely to the techniques of old — failing tragically to overcome the conviction that charging with sufficient gusto would, eventually, lead to a glorious breakthrough. It was thus that the poet Rupert Brooke’s romantic conceptions of some “corner of a foreign field that is forever England” gave way to unlovely reality, and those optimistic volunteers who had followed the Ruritanian glory of all that his sonnets promised were met instead with the full might of the Industrial Revolution. There were few fair fights in the Great War — little chivalry or skill or heroism. There was just boredom, and then attrition. Just factory-style death. Just Siegfried Sassoon’s embittered “continuous roar,” and the apocalyptic collision of impregnable defense with naïve attack. In the days of muskets and cannon, one could reasonably expect to push forward to glory. Now, the lions were fed into the meat grinder with everybody else. When soldiers were brave enough to leave their hiding places, the novelist Sebastian Faulks recorded in Birdsong, “the air turned to lead.”
As I noted on Twitter, I hadn’t realized that the battle started exactly fifty-three years after Gettysburg (this weekend is the 153rd anniversary). As Charles notes, the Civil War, particularly the latter stage, with battles like Cold Harbor, provided hints of the horrors to come.
[Afternoon update]
…would be a terrible place to live.
I agree with the piece, though I don’t like the phrase “credentialed scientist.”
[Saturday-morning update]
I’ve discovered the Missing Link.
A spot-on rant.
It is highly highly overrated.
I probably won’t be able to make it, but this looks like an interesting symposium later this month.
Louise Riofrio has a new Kickstarter project to highlight her cosmological theory.