…into Seattle. It does make a lot of sense to get gamers involved.
Privilege, Education And The Miracle Of The Socks
Thoughts from Sarah Hoyt on the privilege of the naive left.
Iranian Nuclear Facility Explosion
Here’s your feel-good story of the day.
That sounds like a big explosion. I wonder if it was a tactical nuke?
“I’m Not On The Ballot”
I wonder if it occasionally occurs to David Axelrod that the incompetent ideological community organizer he helped foist on the country is also a political idiot?
A Lunar Flyby In 2018?
Space Adventures has announced that it’s found the needed second passenger, but Ed Wright points out that there may be some political problems.
Another “Phony” Scandal
May be about to explode?
The wheels of justice, as they say, grind slowly. As with other Obama administration scandals, Barack’s effort is to run out the clock. It may be that by the time we learn the full extent of the Obama administration’s lawlessness, the administration will be over. But the remaining options are not good: either Austan Goolsbee, a senior adviser to Obama, made up a smear of Koch Industries out of whole cloth, or else Obama’s IRS allowed the White House illegal access to confidential taxpayer data for political purposes. That’s a crime for which at least two people should go to jail.
Not if the media has anything to say about it. They’ll just ignore it.
What Happened To My Suborbital Ride?
I have some thoughts and links on the 10th anniversary celebration, over at Ricochet:
Basically, the late Jim Benson of SpaceDev (now part of the Sierra Nevada corporation, which finally seems to have given up on its own plans to use a hybrid motor for its Dream Chaser vehicle) sold Burt Rutan a bill of goods with the hybrid, with claims of simplicity and safety. In fact, as many of us told him at the time, he’d have been a lot better off purchasing a liquid engine from XCOR, but they didn’t have a sufficient track record at the time for him to think they could meet the deadline to win the prize. Then, once they’d (sort of) succeeded in flying something into space, they continued on with what they thought they knew. They’ve been in a sunk-cost trap ever since, unable to get themselves out of the hybrid-propulsion rut.
As I’ve long noted, the delays in the arrival of commercial spaceflight have been a combination of people who knew what to do not having money, and the people how had money not understanding the problem, and being too arrogant to listen to the veterans. Only now is the crucial combination of money and know how finally coming together.
As I note there, I stopped by XCOR in the morning before the event. Looks like they’re making good progress in bringing the spacecraft together.
Mann Versus Me
For those of you who have been following the progress of the case, the appellate court will hear oral arguments on November 25th (a few weeks from now). That will be over two years since the lawsuit was filed, in utter defiance of the District of Columbia’s anti-SLAPP law, whose purpose was exactly to prevent this kind of delay in dismissal of vexatious free-speech torts.
[Cross posted at Ricochet]
The Collapse Of The Obama Presidency
Don’t let this crisis go to waste:
Are the young struck by the dashed hopes of Obamacare? Give them a copy of Friedrich Hayek’s The Fatal Conceit. They can’t believe the Secret Service farce? Introduce them to James Q. Wilson on bureaucracy. They’re befuddled by the exploitation of an unfortunate incident in Ferguson? Have them read Edward C. Banfield’s The Unheavenly City (especially the chapter he titled “Rioting Mainly for Fun and Profit”). Liberalism’s domestic policies aren’t working quite the way they were supposed to? Acquaint them with Irving Kristol: “I have observed over the years that the unanticipated consequences of social action are always more important, and usually less agreeable, than the intended consequences.”
Similarly, we should be running ads telling them that “We told you so.”
James Lileks
YouTube had detected that I was using a 30-year old performance now owned by Sony, and thus I was VIOLATING EVERYTHING HELD SACRED or words to that effect. One had to marvel at a system that could detect such things, especially since the impression one gets from reading YouTube comments is that the service is aimed at a unique species of chimp that is making the transition from flinging its feces as a means of expressing disagreement to typing words which occasionally add up to an actual sentence.
It’s possible someone would have watched the video, and thought: Interesting piece, this Mahler thing. Even though I have heard but two minutes I believe I have grasped the totality of the work, and will refrain from seeking out the entire movement. Surely more could only add up to less. And thus Sony would be deprived of 23 cents in royalty.
Well, I didn’t own the copyright, and while I could claim Fair Use under the guise of using Mahler’s early use of his own Judaic heritage to score slo-mo goose-stepping spark plugs as means of examining the composer’s nominal acceptance of Christianity to ward off the anti-semitism of fin de siecle Vienna, ahhh, to hell with it.
And yes, before you ask, I am indeed behind on my Lileks.