The latest one is up. Warning: the twenty-dollar DIY tread-desk is a scam. You have to have a treadmill first.
The Democrats’ Demagoguery
I’m less amazed that they do this (it’s who they are, it’s what they do) than that the media lets them get away with it.
It’s hard to say which is worse: that so many prominent Democrats believe they aren’t responsible for any of Washington’s gridlock—or that they’d say these things anyway. Not all that long ago, a presidential spokesman using this language would be talking about murderers who hijacked airplanes or drove explosive-laden trucks into the barracks of U.S. Marines—not political opponents with differing notions about federal spending.
With suicide bombs going off daily around the world and funerals for the Washington Navy Yard victims still taking place, one might expect a modicum of rhetorical restraint from inside the White House. No such luck. For five years now, such metaphors have been the cudgel of choice for administration officials, along with their fellow Democrats on Capitol Hill and journalistic fellow travelers.
It all starts with President Obama, who routinely accuses Republicans trying to thwart his spending plans by putting “party ahead of country.” Last January, when talking—as Dan Pfeiffer was this week—about GOP insistence on trading spending cuts for agreeing to raise the nation’s debt limit—the president said he wouldn’t negotiate with those holding “a gun at the head of the American people.”
Joe Biden asserts Republicans are holding the country “hostage” with their spending stance, and in a 2011 meeting with congressional Democrats the vice president agreed with the suggestion that Tea Party groups were “terrorists.”
Among Democrats on Capitol Hill, it starts at the top, too.
On This Week this morning, they were shameless about saying that the lying president of Iran was “more reasonable” than Republicans. But I guess that’s who they are and what they do, too. At least Jake Tapper called them on it.
Eight Minutes To Launch
Things are looking good for a Falcon-9R launch from Vandenberg. I’ll be watching for it from the balcony in Redondo Beach.
[Update a while later]
Looks like everything went perfectly. Just waiting to hear if they had a successful relight and splashdown of the first stage. We didn’t see it from our place, though. Not sure if the house next door was blocking, or what. Next time we’ll go to the beach.
Diagnosing the IPCC
It’s suffering from permanent paradigm paralysis, and it’s time to put it down:
Paradigm paralysis is the inability or refusal to see beyond the current models of thinking. The vast amount of scientific and political capital invested in the IPCC has become self-reinforcing, so it is not clear how move past this paralysis as long as the IPCC remains in existence. The wickedness of the climate change problem makes if difficult to identify points of irrefutable failure in either the science or the policies, although the IPCC’s insistence that the pause is irrelevant and temporary could provide just such a refutation if the pause continues. In any event, there is a growing realization of that neither the science or policy efforts are making much progress, and particularly in view of the failure climate models to predict the stagnation in warming, and that perhaps it is time to step back and see if we can do a better job of understanding and predicting climate variability and change and reducing societal and ecosystem vulnerabilities.
Read the whole thing.
NSA Spying
…is making us less safe.
And making the government too powerful. Lord Acton had it right.
[Sunday morning update]
Link is fixed now. Sorry!
The Republicans And ObamaCare
…and the logic of the Alamo.
Engineering Less-Than 101
This is dramatically oversimplified. It only works for mechanical engineering.
The ObamaCare Video Contest
Give Remy the prize.
Blackberry
How the mighty have fallen. It’s game over.
I never used one myself.
Bill Gates’s Nuclear Ambitions
I’m not a huge Bill Gates fan, but he certainly gets this important issue. Cheap energy is the key to reducing poverty. As long as government policies aren’t insane, of course. And we need it for space as well. The lack of progress in space nuclear reactors for the past half century is appalling.