This is only a surprise to people who haven’t read Frank White’s book.
But I’m always amused by people who think that there will be no demand, or insufficient demand, for space experiences.
This is only a surprise to people who haven’t read Frank White’s book.
But I’m always amused by people who think that there will be no demand, or insufficient demand, for space experiences.
I think it’s a mistake to call the fourth one “immortality.” A better phrase is “indefinite lifespan.” Unless our understanding of the universe is wrong, we’ll all die eventually, when it gets cold. And medical breakthroughs won’t save us from having an ACME anvil dropped on us.
Absent backups, that is. Which is philosophically unsatisfying, from the standpoint of identity.
But we need to start thinking about policy in terms of scenarios three and four, and ObamaCare is a disaster on that front (as is social security, lifetime tenure for academics and judges and popes, etc.). Plus, if people are going to continue to be born, and not die, we will eventually need other places to live than this planet.
On the eve of the official release of the latest report, Steve McIntyre has some thoughts.
This is indeed disturbing:
German ministries insist that it is important not to detract from the effectiveness of climate change warnings by discussing the past 15 years’ lack of global warming. Doing so, they say, would result in a loss of the support necessary for pursuing rigorous climate policies.
Yes, we can’t let empirical reality get in the way of our policy agenda.
[Update a while later]
Desperate times in climate alarmism:
Confronted with all this truly disastrous news on the eve of their upcoming global warming summit, IPCC politicians, bureaucrats and eco-activists are trying to figure out how to cover up the bad news. Germany wants all references to the absence of warming deleted from the IPCC report. Whereas 20 years of mild warming were enough to demand immediate drastic action to avoid a climate cataclysm, now the Germans say 17 years of no warming is “too short” and thus “misleading.”
Hungary doesn’t want the IPCC to give “deniers” more ammunition. Belgium wants the “world’s most authoritative climate body” to manipulate the data and graphs, by using a different starting year that cleverly creates a more noticeable upward temperature trend. The Obama Administration wants the IPCC to explain away the absence of warming, by saying the mysteriously missing atmospheric heat was somehow absorbed by the upper 1.2 miles of oceans waters, which have not actually warmed, according to ARGO project data, or perhaps somehow in the really deep ocean, where we have no data.
In other words, if the models and evidence disagree, the evidence must be wrong. The IPCC is infallible.
Need I remind? This is not science.
The definitive interview.
The relentless increase:
Lubos Motl has done the arithmetic in this post Ocean heat content: relentless but negligible. This is a good post, check it out. The punchline of his calculations: the heating in the layer 0-2000 m translates to 0.065 C +/- 20%. His calculations are essentially confirmed from this ARGO page where they confirm that since the 1960s, the warming of that layer was 0.06 °C.
So, can anyone figure out why 0.06C is a big deal for the climate? Or how all that heat that is apparently well mixed in the ocean could somehow get into the atmosphere and influence weather/temperatures/rainfall on the land? Or is sequestering heat in the ocean a fortuitous ‘solution’ to the global (surface) warming problem?
It’s “relentless” in the same (and harmless) sense that a glacial advance is.
They’re almost human.
I think it’s going to be more important that they act human than that they look it, until they figure out a way to bridge the uncanny valley.
What “California comeback”?
Some interesting questions.
I don’t think they’ll deign to answer any of them.
It’s the IT, stupid.
As noted over there, this whole mess started with Roosevelt’s wage controls during the war. But did they fix that? No, they triple down on the socialist stupidity.
Are they winning the future?
The wacko bird caucus overlaps pretty well with the Tea Party. Besides Cruz and Paul, it includes such characters as Sens. Mike Lee (R-UT) and Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Reps. Justin Amash (R-MI) and Thomas Massie (R-KY). Despite meaningful differences among them, they all support cutting federal spending and taxes, and reducing regulations on business and other economic activities. Unlike many members of the GOP, they are critical of the national surveillance state and, at least in the cases of Paul and Amash, are principled non-interventionists who are quick to question the Pentagon budget.
At a time when a record high 60 percent of all Americans agree the federal government has “too much power,” the wacko birds are flying pretty high, especially when they attack their own party for its utter malfeasance during the Bush years. There’s every reason to believe that the future belongs to the wacko birds and their general, transpartisan message that government is too big and too powerful. The trend throughout the 21st century, reports Gallup, is increasing skepticism toward Washington, D.C. The trend is particularly pronounced among all-important independent voters, who make up a plurality of the electorate. In 2003, 45 percent of them thought the government was too powerful. Now it’s 65 percent. They will vote for candidates—and a party—pushing limiting government.
Let’s hope.
Also, related: opposition to the Tea Party is at a record low:
Considering the multi-year war on the Tea Party by Democrats, many Republicans, and the media, it is astounding that the Tea Party continues to stay more or less even in its support over the past two years. A 2% drop is hardly meaningful, and could just be variations within the margin of error in the poll, which was +/- 3%.
Also consider that half the electorate has no opinion one way or the other. So put it another way, almost 3/4 of the American electorate is not opposed to the Tea Party!
Think about it another way, if you were at a dinner table with four other people who represented the American electorate, one of the people at the table would be a Tea Party supporter. And two others would have no opinion.
This doesn’t bode well for the Democrats next fall. Which means it bodes very well for the Republic.
[Update a while later]
Will the Republicans be rejuvenated by the wacko birds?
Here we are, more than 20 years after the complete collapse of Marxism-Leninism and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and we’re still having the same argument.
So how to end this — as end this we must if the survival of the United States of America as founded is to be secured? Remember that “fundamental transformation” is ostensibly meant to contribute toward a “more perfect Union,” but it of course does nothing of the sort. Under Progressivism — a combination ideological movement and criminal enrichment racket — the country is less united, less happy, less free. And, like any movement composed of True Believers, Progressivism brooks no opposition, ascribes no good motives to its opponents, and will impose its way in a heartbeat when given half the chance. The Democrats’ fierce, desperate contortions to sneak Obamacare through the Congress should stand as a monument to how the system can be abused and manipulated by a group of unscrupulous politicians — and care needs to be taken that such a travesty can never happen again.This doesn’t mean, as the Left would have you believe, that the choice is between Orwell’s Big Brother and Oliver Twist’s workhouse. I can’t name a single Republican senator who opposes some kind of healthcare “reform” (a misnomer, since the law has to do with insurance, not healthcare). But the reforms on the Right mostly concern the liberated operation of free markets across the country, not a top-down, imposed, statist solution that only aggrandizes more power and wealth in Washington while doing little or nothing about medical care. Only a child, a moron, or a Democrat could believe that you could take a system as complex as medical care/insurance, impose a collectivist solution to a non-existent problem upon it, and expect the markets to function as before, only this time cheaper.
A quick example. In in the old Soviet Union taxis were cheap and closely regulated by the central government. Result: almost no taxis on the streets of Moscow, anywhere. Instead, civilians freelanced as taxi drivers, and the way you got one was either by holding up a pack of Marlboros (the effective currency in the U.S.S.R.) or one or two fingers to signal how many packs you were willing to pay for a ride. Rarely did you have to wait more than a couple of minutes before a car stopped for you.
The revolution that Cruz and his Senate cohort are leading can win — but only if the GOP jettisons its current leadership (who do not believe in it, anyway) and adopts the tactics and techniques of the Left to put it across. (Gee, someone should write a book about that.) But this means learning how to seize and control the Narrative, to make the personal political, to turn the culture in the direction of the spin. How a political party cannot sell Freedom and Liberty and Leave Me Alone to a formerly free people is beyond me, but if anyone can’t do it, that would be Mitch McConnell, Orrin Hatch and John McCain. The sooner they all go the better, and clear the way for Cruz & Co. before they, too, become corrupted by the Beltway system, and while they still have plenty of fight left in them.
I sure won’t miss them.