I’ll certainly drink to that.
Parachutes
Why commercial jetliners don’t have them.
I discuss this in the book. Many safety measures proposed for new space vehicles may be similarly pointless. Certainly the Shuttle “rescue pole” was. It was just for PR.
Al Qaeda
Gee, I’m old enough to remember (a year ago) that they were “on the run.”
You mean it was just a lie to get re-elected? Huh.
Gee, maybe that would explain that Benghazi cover up.
Weimar Germany
Sorry, yes, but for those unfamiliar with history, this is what it looks like. It’s also what “progress” looks like. Sadly, for “progressives.”
Happy New Year
And good riddance to 2013. Let’s hope that it won’t have turned out to be an average year — worse than the one before, better than the coming one.
One good thing about it, though. It’s the year that defiance of the State became cool.
[Update a while later, watching a rerun of the Rose Parade]
That was the year that was — Dave Barry summarizes the suckitude of the past twelve months. We laugh so we don’t cry.
Ten New-Year Resolutions
…for Barack Obama.
I fearlessly predict he will adopt, or follow through on, none of them. It’s simply not in his character.
Fraudulent Ballots
New York investigators can get them 97% of the time.
But of course, no one would ever try to get one with illegal intent.
That Shark Off Manhattan Beach
…was almost certainly a dolphin, so the mother wasn’t lying to her kids.
We saw a pod of them cavorting and spouting a couple hundred yards off shore in Hermosa on Christmas Day, a few hundred yards south of where that picture was taken. Probably common or bottlenose, but hard to tell from that blurry shape in the wave.
The New Space Age
Seven ships. I think his odds for Orion are too high.
The Principal Enemy
Some thoughts on Hillary, from a recovering leftist:
Hillary is the one who can consolidate and solidify the “gains” of the Obama era in a way Obama himself never could because she is much more politically savvy — Obama was only savvy about getting elected, not governing — and has the backing of her even more politically savvy husband. Hillary is the one who can fully remake the United States into some version of Western Europe or, yet more frighteningly, China, a permanently stratified state capitalism governed by quasi-totalitarian bureaucrats. (We can call this system Soros Marxism, meaning a ruling clique of increasingly rich corporate czars employing a propagandistic veneer of socialist equality to keep the power and wealth for themselves.)
As Roger Kimball pointed out, the New York Times (the very model of that propagandistic veneer) already knows their bread is buttered with Hillary, not Obama. They demonstrated that Saturday with their revisionist article on Benghazi, bent on taking that scandal (Hillary’s Achilles’ heel) off the table for the coming elections or at least seriously defusing it. Republicans would do well to redouble their efforts to make sure this particular obfuscation does not succeed by doing the proper research and communicating the results to the public — succinctly and repeatedly.
But to do this our group must concentrate on the principal enemy and not upon each other. My inbox is filled with emails on both sides of the inter-right wars (the Tea Partiers and the so-called RINOs) excoriating each other. What unmitigated idiocy — as if Lindsey Graham or Ted Cruz was the principal enemy and not Hillary Clinton. It’s a war between those who favor cutting government by seventy percent versus those who favor cutting it by fifty or sixty, ignoring those who want to expand it by a hundred. Although not nearly as violent, it’s in some weird way reminiscent of the party rectification campaigns practiced by Stalinists back in the 1940s.
Let’s hope they can unite. They have a couple years for a leader to emerge.