There have been several city-killer-class impacts since 2001. We were just lucky they didn’t hit cities. And Chelyabinsk really dodged a bullet last year. You should support the B612 Foundation. Don’t expect the government to do anything about this.
The History Of Navigation
Hiawatha Bray has what looks to be an interesting new book
Venezuela
It wants to spread the suffering:
As with the old lady and the fly, Venezuela’s government may be running out of encores. It can crack down on black-market activity, but that won’t make the shortages go away. It might redistribute the suffering a bit, but that’s not all it will do. The black market is often a sort of release valve for bad policy; shut it down, and you turn the formerly annoying into the totally intolerable.
There is, as Adam Smith once observed, “a lot of ruin in a nation.” President Nicolas Maduro seems determined to find out exactly how much Venezuela has left.
This is always how socialism ends. They’ve run out of other peoples’ money down there.
Al Franken
A whopping 40% of likely voters in Minnesota think he deserves re-election. That many?
He barely won the first time, and then only by “finding” votes at the last minute, as Democrats always seem to do in tight races.
The FAA Learning Period
There was an interesting discussion at the #SpaceTechExpo on Tuesday afternoon. An indefinite extension is one of the key recommendations in my book.
The Real War On Women
It’s being waged by Islam, not Republicans and conservatives, and to point that out is not “Islamaphobic.”
The Debate On Health Care
No, it’s not over, your not-so-Highness, and we will not cease our dissent.
Oh, and for the record? The debate isn’t over on climate, either. Whenever someone tells me that the debate is over, it’s a pretty good sign that it’s wishful thinking, and that they’re losing it.
SCOTUS On Free Speech
Boo hoo. Senator Schumer says the ruling makes it harder for the IRS to intimidate the Tea Party.
That’s a feature, not a bug, Chuckie.
Recant Your Heresies!
Leftism is a religion, Part 2,354,629:
Eich once made a $1,000 donation to Prop 8, in 2006, shortly before the pro-gay-marriage Senate candidate Barack Obama would be persuaded by the righteousness of the traditional marriage cause, and thus announce his conversion to the proposition that marriage must be as it had been eternally, a union between a man and a woman.
For some reason, the rabid Upper Income White Women (and Feminized White Men) of the tech industry don’t seem to think Barack Obama deserves criticism for that position, but they’re very sure that Eich should either recant or be fired.
As I noted on Twitter the other day, if I were Eich, I wouldn’t let these little fascists mau mau me. I’d tell them that if they really couldn’t tolerate working for such a hateful bigot, they know where the door is.
Those 7M “Sign Ups”
Why yesterday’s champagne-cork popping in the Rose Garden was meaningless propaganda.
[Update a few minutes later]
Want medical insurance? Get in line:
The first thing we thought of when we saw the pictures was the photos we’ve recently seen on Twitter of Venezuelans waiting in bread lines. Waiting in line to purchase necessities is a characteristic not of a prosperous free society but of command economies under repressive regimes. Closer to home, one doubts even the Transportation Security Administration would be so tone-deaf as to advertise long airport lines as an indication it’s doing a great job.
So what in the world could the White House have been thinking? Here’s a guess: They look at the ObamaCare lines and think not of communist subjects queuing up for bread or toilet paper, or Americans for driver’s licenses, but something more like the lines of consumers eager to be the first to get the new iPhone or the latest Harry Potter book. Affluent people often wait in line for things about which they have a particular enthusiasm–or for special experiences, like an amusement park ride, concert or meal at a favorite restaurant.
One obvious difference is that whereas the iPhone and Harry Potter queuers are eager to get the new thing first, the ObamaCare ones are presumably anxious not to miss the deadline (even if it’s not rigorously enforced). ObamaCare lines might have been impressive if they’d begun to form in the last days of September. At the end of open enrollment, the White House boast is akin to the IRS’s citing a “surge” in filing of tax returns two weeks from now as evidence that the income tax system is popular and well designed.
Command economies under repressive regimes seems to be the goal.