…has converted to Islam.
Of course he has.
And no, I don’t really know what kind of conclusions to draw from this, about either him or Islam.
The Socialist Paradise
…of Venezuela:
Apologists for Chavez mentor Fidel Castro blame Cuba’s sixty years of economic problems on the US embargo. If it weren’t for Uncle Sam, they say, Castro would have built a socialist paradise by now.
Venezuela is the test for this talking point. Not only is there no US embargo in Venezuela, but the country also has huge oil reserves. And what does it have? Food and medicine and foreign currency shortages.
There are very real theoretical reasons, based on fundamental human nature, why socialism doesn’t work, and empirically fails everywhere it’s tried. But it’s also human nature to wish it would work, so those ignorant or in denial of those reasons continue to try it. Or to try to defeat human nature by creating the New Soviet Man, at the point of a gun.
The Logical Response To A Financial Crisis
Why it almost never happens.
It’s really a non-iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma, which rarely ends well for either prisoner.
The Myth Of Property
Matt Yglesias doesn’t think that property exists, unless it’s his.
This reminds of me the Occumoron who made the crucial (to him, not to anyone sane) distinction between private property and “personal” property.
Inspiration Apollo
Amy Shira Teitel writes that Apollo 8 was not done for the purpose of inspiration, though that was a huge side effect.
Here’s what I wrote in the book:
…despite all of the precautions, NASA did demonstrate its willingness to risk the lives of its astronauts, when in a daring mission, it won the space race in December of 1968 with the Apollo 8 mission around the moon. What was daring about it?
The previous April, there had been a partial disaster during an early test of the new Saturn V rocket, whose express purpose was to send astronauts to the moon. It suffered from the same “pogo” problems that had earlier afflicted the Titan, almost shaking the vehicle apart during ascent, with some structural failure in the first stage. Two of the second-stage’s five engines failed, and the single third-stage engine failed to reignite in orbit. Von Braun’s team went to work to sort out the problems, and a few months later, after some ground tests, declared it ready to fly again. NASA was under some pressure because there were rumors that the Soviets were going to send some cosmonauts to circumnavigate the moon with the Zond spacecraft by the end of the year (they had already sent some animals on such a trip).
While it wouldn’t have been a loss of the space race, the goal of which was to land on the moon, and not just fly around it, being beaten to that next first would have been another blow to the national psyche after Sputnik and Gagarin, and the first space walk. The lunar module wasn’t ready yet, and not expected to be until the spring of 1969, so NASA decided to scrap their plan of doing an earth-orbit rehearsal, and instead decided to go for the moon on the very next flight of the Saturn V, and without another unmanned test flight despite the problems on the previous flight. They were willing to throw the dice, and the astronauts (Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders) were willing to risk their lives, because it was important. The whole purpose of the program was to demonstrate that our system was superior to the Soviets, and to be afraid to fly would have rendered it pointless. It is hard to imagine today’s NASA taking such a risk with its astronauts’ lives, because nothing NASA is doing today is perceived as being sufficiently important.
[Cross posted at Safe Is Not An Option]
The Fermi Paradox
Eleven of the weirdest solutions to it.
Actually, I continue to prefer this one.
NASA’s Technical Report Server
Has Frank Wolf shut it down?
As the emailer who sent me the link notes, “I understand the need for an ITAR review, however, what we have so far is a blanket ban, with no prescription in place for when and how this issue will be resolved. In the meantime NASA’s vast archive of technical information, so vital to the commercial and private sector has vanished in a single day.”
So where in the days of sequester is NASA going to find the funds to review the data and get it back on line? Just more ITAR madness that has cost the US space industry billions over the past decade and a half.
[Thursday morning update]
More over at NASA Watch.
[Bumped]
Slaying The Dragons Of Mars
Stewart Money has an interesting essay on progress in understanding the risks of a Mars flight:
This most recent experience brings to mind another observation Zubrin made in The Case for Mars, once it was foreseen that the oceans could be crossed, people of the era did not wait for the advent of iron plated steamships, they raised sail and headed out into the unknown with what they had available ”iron men in wooden ships.”
Why should we do any less?
Why indeed?
[Cross-posted at Safe Is Not An Option]
Substituting Beer For Water
Can you do it and survive? Asking the important questions.
If You Don’t Support The “Assault Weapons” Ban
…you hate children and want them to die.
Plus, Ted Cruz gets a scolding, not an answer:
Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California wants us to know that she is “not a sixth-grader.”
Anyone who saw the recent exchange before the Senate Judiciary Committee between Feinstein and Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas over guns and the Constitution might speculate that the reason she said this is because she couldn’t pass the entrance exam.
As for Cruz, a friend of mine for a decade, it turns out that the most important of the “Senate rules” is unwritten: Thou shalt not embarrass a fellow senator – even one in the opposing party – by making him or her look unprepared, uneducated or uninformed.
That’s not always an easy thing to avoid. The rulebook doesn’t say what to do when a Senate colleague who wants to ban certain guns dodges a tough question and then goes on the attack – thus embarrassing herself.
Nevertheless, Cruz, 42, is headed to the principal’s office. His infraction was asking the right question. What Cruz wanted to know was this: Why do liberals cherish the First and Fourth Amendments, but trash the one in between – the Second Amendment?
That’s a brainteaser. Why does the left play favorites with different parts of the Bill of Rights?
Experience teaches that the better the question, the less likely you are to get a straight answer.
That’s what happened here. Feinstein went on the offense. Abandoning reason for emotion, she scolded Cruz for daring to “lecture” her. After all, she said, she had seen the bodies of people killed by gunfire.
The illogic of these people defies description. They run on pure, grade-A unadulterated emotion.