Space Solar Power
John Walker reviews John Mankins’ new book.
Ignorant Appeals To Authority
Where to begin? It doesn’t matter if Steyn has “no scientific credentials;” he’s perfectly capable of both spotting fraud when he sees it, and calling out a fraudulent huckster if he deems it necessary. And while it’s true that science, idealized, is “a matter of fact, not a matter of opinion,” this has no bearing on whether or not Michael Mann committed fraud. We’re not debating whether or not science is a fact-based enterprise; we’re debating whether or not Mann is a fraudulent scientist. Defining science simply has nothing to do with the debate at hand; it’s a definitional reductio combined with an argumentative non sequitur.
But that doesn’t really matter with these people. If they get backed into a difficult corner, they just repeat, by rote, the textbook definition of science; for some reason, this is supposed to absolve their pet favorite scientists of any wrongdoing, even if the scientists’ professional credibility is seriously in question. It just doesn’t make any sense to use such a rhetorical device in such a way, and it makes people look like idiots when they use it: “Hey, that scientist is correct; after all, science is fact-based.”
As I said, this is mostly a left-liberal phenomenon; progressives just love the empty-headed campaign to endlessly repeat “science” until their adversaries give up.
It is quite annoying, at the very least.
Regenerative Life Support
This is the kind of research that NASA should be doing, and would be if we were serious about space settlement. Instead, we waste billions on unneeded giant rockets. At least China is taking it more seriously.
Owning A Gun
I don’t know if it’s an act of patriotism, but I think that trying to prevent people from owning guns is the exact opposite of that.
[Late-morning update]
What does it mean to be patriotic? A nice collection of thoughts from various people.
Hobby Lobby Hysteria
Not all of the left melted down and lost its mind over the case.
Just most of it.
Though I’ve had an account for years, I’ve never really “done” it. I spend very little time there, except when I get an email notification that someone mentioned me there. I never manually post, but these blog posts do get automatically added there.
The BearCam At Brooks Falls
…has gone live. Salmon are being caught.
Colonizing Venus
The surprisingly strong case for it.
One of the many disappointments of the NRC report on human spaceflight is the almost total neglect of this topic. That’s at least partially because if was rooted in a neo-Apollo mindset, which must have boots on the ground, though it’s not clear what they’ll be doing.
Birth Control
If it’s not your boss’s business, why do you expect him to pay for it?
…the Hobby Lobby decision opens the door for closely held companies to deny coverage of all forms of birth control if they can plausibly argue that doing so would violate their conscience. The decision doesn’t apply to large, publicly held corporations, but even if it did, it is unlikely that many companies would go down that path. And even if they did, birth control would not be “banned” – employees simply would have to pay for it themselves. The notion that denying a subsidy for a product is equivalent to banning that product is one of the odder tenets of contemporary liberalism.
The cognitive dissonance required to be a leftist must be quite painful.