…is a gun-grabbing moron:
“What’s the efficacy of banning these magazine clips? I will tell you, these are ammunition, they’re bullets, so the people who have those now, they’re going to shoot them” says Rep DeGette. According to her, “the number of these high capacity magazines is going to decrease dramatically over time because the bullets will be shot and there won’t be any more available.”
These people shouldn’t be allowed to vote, let alone be elected to office.
It’s not a new theme, but it is a new source: Joe Klein:
Yes, the President has faced a terrible economic crisis—and he has done well to limit the damage. He has also succeeded in avoiding disasters overseas. But, as a Democrat—as someone who believes in activist government—he has a vested interest in seeing that federal programs actually work efficiently. I don’t see much evidence that this is anywhere near the top of his priorities.
He only just figured that out? A little slow on the uptake, I guess.
Kill it to save human spaceflight:
Simply put, the SLS program should be canceled now to free up approximately $10 billion programmed for this decade. This money could then be redirected to continue the planned flight tests of the Orion spacecraft with the much lower-cost Falcon Heavy booster while making a robust investment in a first-generation space station in the vicinity of the Moon. An investment in such a cislunar station would provide—by the early 2020s—a multifunctional platform to act as a fuel depot, a workstation for robotic operations on the Moon and a habitat to protect against the more intense radiation environment outside of the Earth’s magnetic field. This station could even be used as a habitat during longer-duration human missions to an asteroid and eventually to Mars.
Expect to see a lot more editorials like this as time goes on, new systems appear, and budgets get tighter.
Some thoughts on the war on Monsanto:
Monsanto is just too perfect an issue for a certain class of urbane lefty already inclined to food snobbery and to activism. It harmonizes with his inherent mistrust of corporations, confirms him in the superiority of his lifestyle choices, and accords with the deep strain of Rousseauian anti-modernism that runs through him. Never mind that a world without GMOs would be a hungrier world, a world in which the poor would have to pay something closer to the prices he happily bears for the peace of mind that comes from the politically correct consumption of roughage. As for the rest, well, let them eat cake. Locally sourced, sustainably produced, certified organic cake.
I did note on someone’s FB page the other day that the GMO hysteria is the modern version of “Let them eat cake.” I don’t want to hear one more word about the “Republican” “war on science.” These nutjobs probably think that Norman Borlaug committed crimes against humanity.
And when it’s all over, they aren’t really educated — they’re just credentialed.
America is poaching European business investment:
American government got out of the way of innovative drilling companies and allowed the shale boom to take off. Europe took the opposite tack, choosing to stick to its green policies and snub shale. As a result, natural gas prices in the US are a quarter of what they are in Europe. And as industry departs, unemployment in the Euro zone is hitting a record high. That’s yet another failure that can be laid at the feet of Europe’s greens.
Just imagine how much better we’d be doing if we had a reasonable (i.e., zero) corporate income tax.
Why Obama is losing.
Shorter answer: he’s a political incompetent, with no discernible skills at anything other than winning elections. Ultimately, that may be the only thing that saves us from his destructive agenda.
The New York Times discovers that he was as terrible a person as many (most?) of his acolytes.
I just got an email that NASA personnel are being evacuated from a brush fire south of the VAB on Merritt Island.
“Tel-4 road runs north/south for two miles then turns west for two miles until it hits the river. So if the fire jumps that E-W stretch of highway it is off KSC property and into civilian land. There’s a pretty respectable north wind today, so it’s a bit dicey until they get that back-burn done.
The second image is looking due south. So the VAB is to my back (to the north) about 6 miles. In that image, the land to the left is KSC property, the land on the right (about where the truck is down the road) is privately held.”
Is it possible? Even if it’s very unlikely, it’s such a high payoff that it’s worth devoting some resources to. In the mean time, I’m much more focused on making it affordable to just get into orbit.