Virginia Postrel has a good post on the real-life consequences of allowing the verbal currency to be debased (e.g., the hijacking of the word “liberal” by the left).

Bush’s rhetoric continues to have two major problems, neither of which is likely to disappear. The first, and most obvious, is that he says the enemy is terrorism rather than Islamicism using terrorism as a weapon (including against Muslims). The second, less obvious, is that he says we are fighting to defend democracy, when in fact we are fighting to defend liberalism (or liberal democracy). Iran is a democracy, in the normal sense of holding real elections, but it is not liberal.

The fundamental conflict is over whether the systems of limited, non-theocratic, individual-rights-bsed governments that developed over centuries in the West are good or bad. Outside of the academy and other intellectual circles, however, American political discourse has literaly lost the words to describe what the “civilized world” has in common. We think “liberal” means Hillary Clinton, when it also means George Bush.

Now that Easterbrook has a blog, I hereby challenge him to a debate on space policy. We can start with this post as well as this one, in which I went after his post-Columbia commentary in February.

I hope he’s up to the challenge, but fair warning–don’t bring a soda rocket to a hypergolic fight…

[Update on Tuesday afternoon]

OK, it’s been pointed out in comments that soda rockets are hypergolic. So how about…don’t bring a hypergolic to a pyraforic fight?

Now that Easterbrook has a blog, I hereby challenge him to a debate on space policy. We can start with this post as well as this one, in which I went after his post-Columbia commentary in February.

I hope he’s up to the challenge, but fair warning–don’t bring a soda rocket to a hypergolic fight…

[Update on Tuesday afternoon]

OK, it’s been pointed out in comments that soda rockets are hypergolic. So how about…don’t bring a hypergolic to a pyraforic fight?

Now that Easterbrook has a blog, I hereby challenge him to a debate on space policy. We can start with this post as well as this one, in which I went after his post-Columbia commentary in February.

I hope he’s up to the challenge, but fair warning–don’t bring a soda rocket to a hypergolic fight…

[Update on Tuesday afternoon]

OK, it’s been pointed out in comments that soda rockets are hypergolic. So how about…don’t bring a hypergolic to a pyraforic fight?

Laughing Wolf has a couple good posts–one a general tutorial on writing a business plan, and another on specific issues associated with space business plans.

On the latter, though, I think he spent a little too much time at NASA. I don’t understand what he means about space tourism being a “limited” market. From my perspective, it’s the only one that’s not limited, at least in the sense that there are millions of existing payloads, and millions more are continually being manfactured by (as the old joke goes) unskilled labor. In my opinion, he has far far too much faith in space manufacturing, particularly given its dismal payoff so far, relative to the hype for the last thirty years.

I believe that there may be money to be made from this field, but it’s not going to be a major driver for reducing launch costs, because the lucrative applications (if there are any) will be those for which great value can be extracted from small amounts of mass (just as currently the most money made in space consists of delivering a few thousand pounds into orbit which then returns millions of dollars of revenue in the form of (rest) massless photons). Only tourism requires the huge amount of up and down mass that will force up launch activity, and force down costs.

Dan Weintraub’s review of a recent Bustamante speech is withering:

With just a few words tucked in the middle of his speech, Bustamante demonstrated that despite the image, despite the build-up, despite the resume, his knowledge of state government and its problems is woefully thin.

Sounding no more informed than a cranky letter writer to the local paper, Bustamante badly mischaracterized the roots of California?s budget crisis, falsely claiming that the electricity purchases the state made on behalf of the utilities in 2001 erased the budget surplus and forced the state to cut vital programs. While that’s a widely held perception among the general public, it is completely untrue, and any second-year staffer in the Legislature could tell you so.

Dan Weintraub’s review of a recent Bustamante speech is withering:

With just a few words tucked in the middle of his speech, Bustamante demonstrated that despite the image, despite the build-up, despite the resume, his knowledge of state government and its problems is woefully thin.

Sounding no more informed than a cranky letter writer to the local paper, Bustamante badly mischaracterized the roots of California?s budget crisis, falsely claiming that the electricity purchases the state made on behalf of the utilities in 2001 erased the budget surplus and forced the state to cut vital programs. While that’s a widely held perception among the general public, it is completely untrue, and any second-year staffer in the Legislature could tell you so.

Dan Weintraub’s review of a recent Bustamante speech is withering:

With just a few words tucked in the middle of his speech, Bustamante demonstrated that despite the image, despite the build-up, despite the resume, his knowledge of state government and its problems is woefully thin.

Sounding no more informed than a cranky letter writer to the local paper, Bustamante badly mischaracterized the roots of California?s budget crisis, falsely claiming that the electricity purchases the state made on behalf of the utilities in 2001 erased the budget surplus and forced the state to cut vital programs. While that’s a widely held perception among the general public, it is completely untrue, and any second-year staffer in the Legislature could tell you so.

I suspect that this will be just as effective (and offputting, with some folks), as spelling out “PEACE” was.

Gumby just gave Arnold a great chance to show what a scumbag the governor is. He shouldn’t demand an apology–he should make a speech like Roosevelt did in his September ’44 address to the Teamsters:

These Republican leaders have not been content with attacks on me, or my wife, or on my sons. No, not content with that, they now include my little dog, Fala. Well, of course, I don’t resent attacks, and my family doesn’t resent attacks, but Fala does resent them. You know, Fala is Scotch, and being a Scottie, as soon as he learned that the Republican fiction writers in Congress and out had concocted a story that I had left him behind on the Aleutian Islands and had sent a destroyer back to find him–at a cost to the taxpayers of two or three, or eight or twenty million dollars–his Scotch soul was furious. He has not been the same dog since. I am accustomed to hearing malicious falsehoods about myself–such as that old, worm-eaten chestnut that I have represented myself as indispensable. But I think I have a right to resent, to object to libelous statements about my dog.

Here, I’ll do it for him:

Guffernor Davis is apparently not content to attack my ideas, or my plans to straighten out the mess in which he has left the formerly great state of Califfournia. I expected him to attack me as a Republican, and to make fun of my mooffy caareer, and my past asss a body builder, but making an issue of the pronunciation of our state, he isss no longer attacking me, but all uff the hardverking immigrants both here, and in thisss wonderful country. I don’t mind so much, but he isss now denigrating not just me, but all of those for whom English is not a native language, but one that we’ve embraced nonetheless bekawss vee know that it isss the vay to get ahead and to make our state and nation even greaaater.

He cannot defend his record, so instead he attacks my and othersss pronunciation asss he continues to raise millionsss from the special interests who have driven our state into a ditch.

It is a tactic of distraction. But I neither ask for, nor expect an apology. It isss in perfect keeping with the past campaign techniques and lies that allowed him to win reelection, despite his obvious and repeated failure as a governor.