Four problems with it.
Only four?
And the other problem is that a lot of Republicans (like Rob Portman) go for this nuttiness.
The Continuing IRS Debacle
Four Pinocchios
Jim Crow Is Dead
Of course, once the racist Jim Crow Democrats were replaced by Republicans in the south, it was no longer necessary.
[Update a while later]
Hysterical race derangement from the Left.
[Update late morning]
The Left’s false narrative:
In our real nation, the VRA was always of dubious constitutionality. The Supreme Court expressly recognized that in originally upholding it, just as Congress recognized it in originally limiting its duration to five years. It was a distortion of the constitutional principles of federalism and equal sovereignty among the states — absent which there would have been no union. The distortion was tolerated because of the gravity of the evil it addressed, just as surgery must traumatize the body in order to cure it. But the VRA was a remedy, not a new order of things. It was supposed to vanish once the disease — the denial of a core privilege of citizenship through systematic, pervasive racial discrimination — was cured.
The disease was long ago eradicated. That does not mean racism is over. There are vestiges of racism in our society. Because we are dealing with human nature, some of them are to be expected. But many are a direct result of the Left’s race-obsessed narrative, dominant on the campus and in the media for over a generation. It tirelessly promotes — it needs — the destructive canard that racial animus is the cause of every effect, and thus that systematic reverse discrimination, far from a temporary remedy, must be a lasting framework and a thriving industry.
Racism would otherwise die its natural death. It is a violation of the self-evident truth that we are all created equal. That government and our society failed, for a very long time, to keep faith with this truth is incontestable. But the truth is self-evident because it does not come from any government or society. It is part of our nature, a gift from our Creator, and an immutable tenet of our Judeo-Christian heritage. If we hold to what makes us Americans, all racism — including the purportedly benign kind — will be seen as immoral. For now, racism of the sort that drove the VRA to passage in 1965 is aberrational.
But the Left can’t admit it, because it takes away one of the foundations of their justification to rule us.
HoustonDallas Space Hacker Workshop
The one up in Silicon Valley was apparently a success, and Citizens in Space is doing another one:
There is still time to sign up the Space Hacker Workshop takes place July 20-21 at the Frontiers of Flight Museum at Love Field. The workshop is sponsored by Citizens in Space, a project of the United States Rocket Academy, and SpaceGAMBIT, an international collaboration of citizen scientists operating through makerspaces, hackerspaces, and community groups.
At the two-day workshop, citizen scientists and hardware hackers will learn how to do “space on the cheap”. Participants at the workshop will learn how they can build and fly experiments in space, and even fly in space as citizen astronauts, through the Citizens in Space program.
Citizens in Space has purchased 10 flights on the XCOR Lynx spacecraft, now under construction at the Mojave Air and Space Port, which will be made available to the citizen-science community.
“We’re looking for 100 citizen-science experiments and 10 citizen astronauts to fly as payload operators,” Citizens in Space project manager Edward Wright said. “The Space Hacker Workshop will provide participants with information and skills needed to take advantage of our free flight opportunities.
“This is an opportunity for citizen scientists to develop and test new technologies in space, to collect microorganisms from the extreme upper atmosphere, to experiment with new processes for creating new materials; and do many more cool things.”
Andrew Nelson of XCOR Aerospace will be on hand to discuss the Lynx spacecraft. Experts from NASA and industry will discuss the research professional scientists have done in the past, prospects for new research on low-cost suborbital spacecraft such as Lynx, and opportunities for citizen scientists to build on the shoulders of NASA giants.
Three citizen-astronaut candidates will also be on hand, to discuss the Citizens in Space astronaut selection and training process.
Admission for the event is $129 at the door. Tickets are limited and the event may sell out. Online registration is available at spacehackerdfw.eventbrite.com.
The last one was oversubscribed, I think.
Obama’ Idiotic Energy Speech
He’ll only approve the pipeline if it won’t add to “carbon pollution.”
It’s a stupid question. Of course it won’t “add to carbon pollution.” Only in a fanciful, unicorn-fart world in which the oil that will be flowing through the pipeline will be left in the ground if it isn’t built is this an issue. We know that the Canadians are already cutting deals to sell the oil to China. In that case, moving it there in ships will generate even more carbon than moving it through a pipeline (not to mention increasing the chances of oil spills on the Pacific coast). So if you’re really worried about carbon, and you’re smart, you should be urging the construction of the pipeline. But we know that for opponents of the pipeline (possibly including the president) at least one, and possibly both of those conditions don’t apply.
The Space Show
I’m going to be on at 7 PM PDT tonight to talk about space safety.
Joe Bastardi
How dare he dispute that noted scientific journal, Rolling Stone?
What To Do About Global Warming/Cooling
I see a problem with this approach, I think, unless I’m missing something:
1. Are global temperatures warming?
2. Do the negative consequences of the change outweigh the positive consequences?
3. Can we do anything that will reverse the change?
4. Do the positive consequences of the action outweigh the negative consequences of doing nothing?Notice, the steps have nothing at all whatsoever to do with whether or not global warming is anthropogenic. The climate’s “naturalness” is actually irrelevant. If a 10 kilometer-wide asteroid were hurling toward earth at 100,000 km per hour, it would be a completely natural event. However, just because the meteor wasn’t anthropogenic doesn’t mean that we wouldn’t take actions to deflect it.
Notice also, that we could change question 1 from “warming” to “cooling” and the four-step approach still works. And quite frankly, cooling is probably a more historically problematic situation.
If the answer to any one of the above four questions is “No,” then we should do absolutely nothing about a changing climate. If the answer to all of the questions are “Yes,” then, and only then, should we take any actions.
The first problem is in step 3. It doesn’t seem to account for cost. Suppose there is something that we can do (at least in theory) to reverse the change, but it would result in the loss of (say) a quadrillion dollars in global economic growth over the next century. And that points out the problem with Step 4. Rather than comparing the positive aspects of the action to the negative consequences of doing nothing, we need to compare the positive consequences of the action to their cost. For example, Wikipedia (FWIW) says that the gross world product is about seventy trillion dollars. If we were to get a growth rate of 4 percent over a century, that would mean that in 2113, the GWP would be (1.04)**(100), or about fifty times that amount, or about 3.5 quadrillion dollars. If by arbitrarily making energy more expensive with carbon taxes or caps, we were to reduce that growth rate by a mere half a percent (which is probably a conservative estimate — many of the proposals would do much more economic damage), that would reduce the factor of growth after a hundred years to about thirty, instead of fifty. That is, the world would be 20 times seventy, or 1.4 quadrillion dollars poorer over that period of time. You can buy a lot of mitigation against climate issues with that kind of money.
This is the kind of rational analysis that Bjørn Lomberg has been doing
Public Education
An industry of mediocrity. Mostly thanks to the teacher’s unions.
It’s been over thirty years since that report on the subject, that said if a foreign power had imposed such a system on us, it would be rightly considered an act of war. But we continue to do it to ourselves, and nothing has changed. If anything, it’s gotten worse.