Here’s a piece I wrote four years ago, but it holds up pretty well today, I think.
The Other Sad Space Anniversary
Its not just Apollo 1. The Outer Space Treaty was opened for signing on the same day the astronauts died, forty-seven years ago yesterday. It was a major setback, in many ways, to opening up space. And for many, that was the idea.
The Apollo 1 Astronauts
Obama’s Assault On Science
…will he continue it tonight?
Yes. Next question?
In The Second Term
Get ready for a lawless president to double down on the tyranny.
Pete Seeger
I love this line in this NPR puff piece:
Seeger actually was a member of the Communist Party in those early days, though he later said he quit after coming to understand the evils of Josef Stalin.
Yeah. You know when he came to “understand the evils of Josef Stalin”? Not until the nineties. He was in his seventies before he figured out what I knew as a kid in the sixties.
[Update a while later]
Glossing over the dark side:
As an apology Seeger’s words are underwhelming. While “cruel misleader” is by no means a term of endearment, in light of Stalin’s monstrous record, it vastly understates the depth of his depravity and the true horror of Stalinism. There are many more apt nouns and adjectives in the English language to describe the man who gave us the purges of the Great Terror, the Gulag, and the Ukrainian Terror Famine. Lost in the obfuscations of Seeger’s moral equivalencies is the fact that contemporary Christians, White people, and Mongolians are not responsible for the acts, however heinous, of Christians, white people, or Mongolians of the past, because they had nothing to do with them. Whereas Seeger is all too culpable for the crimes of Stalin because he was an open apologist for “old cruel Joe” and other communist thugs at the very time they were slaughtering millions.
Yes.
[Late-morning update]
If only Leni Riefenstahl was a communist like Pete Seeger.
The 100+ Million lives lost under communism during Mr. #seeger's lifetime could not be reached for comment @PeggyBrava @AmPowerBlog @MsEBL
— Peter Ingemi (@DaTechGuyblog) January 28, 2014
Climate Change Versus Free Speech
Benjamin Weingarten weighs in at The Blaze.
Another Book Review
Mark Lardas had a review a couple weeks ago in the Galveston Daily News, but it was behind a paywall. But I just learned that he reposted it at Ricochet. It’s an appropriate time to note it, given that today is the 47th anniversary of the Apollo 1 fire, and tomorrow is the 28th anniversary of the Challenger disaster.
[Update late afternoon]
Here’s another brief (partial) review, in comments at the same web site. It’s the first one to discuss the quality, as opposed to the content of the book.
The Holodeck
One of the arguments against human expansion into outer space is that we will instead retreat into virtual worlds as the technology evolves. I think it’s an interesting technological race.
OPEC
Why and how we should break it now.
It’s been a major thorn in the world’s side for decades, including fueling Islamic terrorism.