If you’re not attending the event in LA tonight, you can watch live on Reason TV.
Scott Carpenter
I’m seeing on my Twitter timeline that he has died. If so, John Glenn is the only Mercury 7 astronaut left.
Marginal Success In Delaying Aging
Even that is better than cancer or heart-disease research.
But that’s still not where the funding priority is.
[Update a few minutes later]
A simple pill to cure Alzheimers?
Faster please. Though it looks like it would only prevent further damage, not necessarily reverse it. But even that would be a huge breakthrough.
Pigford
A roundup.
Andrew Breitbart is owed an apology. Instead, his widow is being sued, with pro malo help.
[Update a while later]
Here’s a good discussion of the racist’s frivolous lawsuit.
[Update a while later]
Tea Partiers, it’s time to stand up for Andrew Breitbart:
Federalist 58
Yes, Madison anticipated government shutdowns. It was designed that way. What he didn’t anticipate, or at least hoped against, was political parties. He thought that the branches would value their prerogatives more. I’ve heard some ignorami in the past talk about “checks and balances” and “balance of power” as referring to parties. No.
The Wall Of Silence At The IRS
Can it be broken with a lawsuit?
NOM doesn’t know who committed this crime. But it has discovered that some IRS officials who’d have access to the returns — like a senior manager for tax-exempt organizations — were photographed at an HRC Christmas party just a few months before the returns showed up on HRC’s Web site.
Rep. Dave Camp (R-Mich.) head of the House Ways and Means Committee has been quietly conducting an investigation of the illegal disclosure of NOM’s private donor information, with a final report due early next year. And Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) just announced the House Government Oversight Committee will investigate as well.
But there’s no guarantee either probe will get to the bottom of the affair, and NOM — and the American people — deserve answers.
“The fact the IRS is stonewalling so hard suggest the wrongdoing goes high up,” says Eastman. “All we want to know is who committed this crime and see justice done for all federal taxpayers. For the IRS to use disclosure to shield people it wants to shield, instead of protecting taxpayers, is an outrageous and unbelievably dangerous thing; the government can use the IRS to punish any speech it doesn’t like.”
Some things go deeper than right or left; the use of the IRS to punish political enemies ought to be one of them.
As I said, it’s almost like they have a will to power. If this were happening under a Republican president, all of the alphabetic news organizations would be asking every night what it takes to get a president impeached.
[Update a few minutes later]
How federal workers became Barack Obama’s private army:
Seventy-four years later, the civil-service system has been exposed as a failure – at least in this administration. Instead of an independent workforce of professionals who implement federal regulation in an even-handed and competent manner, we have returned to the era of partisan retribution and politically-motivated malevolence.
Time to reform it again.
An Extinct Tree
…is resurrected. Though, if there were viable seeds, can the species really be said to be (or have been) extinct?
Healthcare.Gov
What went wrong?
I imagine there was a dialogue last Monday afternoon that went something like this:
FRONT-END DEVELOPER: Why does the username have to have a number in it?
BACK-END DEVELOPER: It’s in the government username regulations. Didn’t you read them?
FRONT-END DEVELOPER: No, we don’t do accounts, we just hand the input to you.
BACK-END DEVELOPER: And we told you your front-end the input was no good! See the ErrEngineDown in the URL?
FRONT-END DEVELOPER: Fine, fine. Sigh. Nice to finally talk to you, by the way.
BACK-END DEVELOPER: Yeah, you too. Are you in D.C.?
FRONT-END DEVELOPER: San Francisco.
BACK-END DEVELOPER: Know any good jobs in D.C.? I hate this place and they’re furloughing me as soon as we fix this mess.
Each group got its piece “working” in isolation and prayed that when they hooked them together, things would be okay. When they didn’t, it was too late. It is entirely possible that back-end developer CGI is primarily at fault here, but no one will care because they just see that the whole thing doesn’t work. As you learn early on in software development, there is no partial credit in programming. A site that half-works is worse than one that doesn’t work at all, which is why the bad error handling is so egregious. You always handle errors.
The country’s in the very best of hands.
[Update a few minutes later]
The roll out was nothing short of disastrous:
The left likes to flatter itself as thinking in terms of reason, facts, expertise, openness to doubt, and scorn of dogma and magical thinking.
Is this anywhere close to true?
When experts told the Obama Administration it was a fact the website was not ready, did they take seriously this advisement?
Nope! They simply said there was no cause for alarm; the strange gods of the left would just sort everything out.
Oddly enough, they didn’t.
It’s almost like they’re not quite as brilliant and rational as they’re always telling us they are.
And then there’s this. That’s right, Sheila Jackson Lee, who thinks that the Apollo astronauts went to Mars, thinks that the solution to the government shutdown is martial law. Meanwhile, the good lefties over at The Atlantic are more measured. They just want to have the Speaker of the House arrested.
It’s almost like they have a will to power, or something. And of course, as always with the left, when they accuse the “right” of this sort of thing, it’s projection.
[Update a few minutes later]
OK, so just what are CGI Federal’s ties to the administration? You’d be a fool to think there are none.
ObamaCare’s Broken Promises
…pile up:
To recap, then: Before, during, and after passage, Americans were promised that Obamacare was going to lower premiums for “everyone” (the goal of merely maintaining premiums being too modest); it was not going to interfere with anybody’s health care or health insurance if they already had it; and it was not going change anybody’s patient-doctor relationship. The message was unmistakable: All the government wanted to do was extend health insurance to people who didn’t have it. This wouldn’t affect you. No need to worry. Period. Move along.
In addition to the totally partisan nature of this thing, one of the other many things that distinguishes it from previous entitlements is the many grandiose lies that were told about it to sell it, going back to the president’s first campaign.
The Soul-Mate Myth
Dr. Helen has some thoughts.
I’m pretty sure that XKCD has pointed out the mathematical improbability of having a single “soul mate.” As Glenn says, they’re made, not found.