“Democrats should be embarrassed to appear with Bill Clinton.”
I think they proved pretty conclusively fifteen years ago that they’re shameless.
The Venus-Mars Mission
Keith Cowing points out the political chicanery and fiscal absurdity of a 2021 attempt with SLS/Orion.
Also, note the technical issue. Orion was designed to come back from the moon, not from Mars. It can barely manage escape velocity on earth entry. Note page 17 of the Plymouth Rock paper:
Reentry velocities are 11.05 to 11.25 km/s for asteroid missions, vs 11.0 km/s for lunar return
TPS enhancement may be required depending on the ultimate capability of Orion lunar TPS
They’ll be coming in a lot hotter than that for Mars. And what will they use for habitat? There’s no way Orion itself is large enough for a mission of that duration.
Note: I do think that the mission is physically and fiscally possible, in that time frame. Just not with SLS/Orion.
[Update a while later]
If Congress was serious about a Venus/Mars flyby in 2021, it would divert all funding from SLS/Orion to hardware actually needed to do it.
— Rand Simberg (@Simberg_Space) February 26, 2014
A Climate Skeptic
The thought experiment that made him one:
I think any physical scientist should be extremely skeptical that a long-term stable system is dominated by positive feedback. Systems dominated by positive feedback — and we are talking about incredibly high implied feedback percentages to get to these catastrophic forecasts — don’t tend to be very stable, but it is Michael Mann himself who has argued over and over with his hockey stick chart that past temperatures have only varied in very narrow ranges for thousands of years. Not the behavior one would expect of a system dominated by strong positive feedbacks.
To me, this thought experiment demonstrated that it was more likely that net climate feedbacks were zero or even negative (if only half of past warming was due to man, and half due to nature, it would imply a sensitivity around 0.7C). In either case, the resultant warming would be far from catastrophic. To believe the IPCC forecasts, one would have to believe there were either really long time delays, or natural and manmade cooling factors off-setting the warming. These have all been debated and I won’t go into them today, but I didn’t find the higher forecasts of 5-10C to be at all credible.
I don’t, either.
Phony Scandal Update
Two thirds of American voters want a Congressional investigation into Benghazi.
The election was stolen through administration and media lies, and corruption on several fronts.
The Bloodshed In Venezuela
Here are seven people to blame for it. Note that Barack Obama is one of them.
But she left off Jimmy Carter, who is going to visit, as though they haven’t suffered enough.
[Update a few minutes later]
Venezuelan violence, the farce of Cuba, and Marco Rubio’s best speech. He does seem to be about the best extemporaneous speaker out there.
The Mann Apology
More from Charles W. Cooke.
Miles O’Brien
…has just had an unfortunate life-altering experience, but he’s got a great attitude. As I noted on Twitter, we’ve come a long way with prosthetics, and they’re only going to get better (I suspect a lot of the progress has been driven by the wars over the past decade).
The Fossil Record
…doesn’t have a daily box score.
This is something that creationists don’t understand.
What Is Life?
This is an interesting interview, but Beck seems to be confusing “life” and “consciousness.” The appropriate answer to his question is something that self replicates using local resources, but that has nothing to do with AI, or uploading.
American Spring
It’s time for a little revolution here:
We need some government, obviously, but at this point in American history, in order to save our nation, we need to get the state as much as possible out of our lives, to cut its functions with a meat cleaver to release our better impulses, to have the renewal of Spring. Deep down even some modern liberals realize this. (Bill Clinton famously said the era of big government is over before running the other way as if in fear of his own honesty.)
In this coming crucial year, those of us who feel the overweening state is the problem must reach out our hands to our fellow citizens as never before. My sense is that many of them are ready to hear our message. (The fiasco of Obamacare has been a gift in that regard.) And if we don’t reach out our hands, there will be no American Spring. Things will only get worse. (The horrific attempt of the FCC to monitor newsrooms is a harbinger of totalitarian things to come.)
I am one of those eternal optimists who think we are on the brink of this American Spring. Another, whether he knows it or not, is ironically Joe Trippi, once the campaign manager for Howard Dean, a statist of the first order. (See Trippi’s interview with Reason magazine in which he foresees a libertarian-oriented president in the near future.) Possible allies can be found in more quarters than we know.
As Glenn Reynolds notes, it may already be starting to happen:
This is more “Irish Democracy,” passive resistance to government overreach. The Hartford (Conn.) Courant is demanding that the state use background-check records to prosecute those who haven’t registered, but the state doesn’t have the resources and it’s doubtful juries would convict ordinary, law-abiding people for failure to file some paperwork.
We need a lot more civil disobedience.