Prices are skyrocketing partly due to ethanol mandates. If I were the Koch brothers, I’d buy a Superbowl ad to make that point.
[Update a couple minutes later]
One of the commenters points out that we need to get rid of the sugar tariffs, too. Good point.
A lot of the gun owner information published by the Journal News was wrong, and they should have known it was wrong.
Looks to me like the basis for a nice class action lawsuit to wipe the hoplophobic fascists out and shut them down permanently. Or let the paper reopen under more enlightened management.
My story on last week’s press conference is up now at PJMedia.
How our kids are being indoctrinated against the Constitution:
In a child’s imagination, a thumb and forefinger make a handy play gun. Some adults, however, see a fully cocked finger and their imaginations run wild. Maybe they imagine today’s finger-pointer coming back one day as a homicidal maniac and pointing a real gun at them. Maybe they see a future NRA member — another threat to their dream of a gun-free world. It’s obvious they don’t see a cop protecting them from robbers, or a soldier from our country’s enemies.
Punishing kids for finger guns has nothing to do with school safety; they know the difference between a finger and a gun as well as adults do. It has everything to do with “moral disarmament.”
What’s more, the idea of using schools as conditioning grounds is not new. Thomas Sowell discusses it at length in his 2009 book “Intellectuals and Society.” After the horrors of World War I, intellectuals of the time determined that “war” and “weapons,” not other nations, were the real enemies. They promoted both military disarmament and “disarming of the mind.”
And didn’t that work out well.
More and more, sending kids to public school seems to constitute child abuse.
It’s not new to readers here, but my own cost estimate has been republished at IO9.
Paul Ryan is reportedly expecting it.
I know what I’d do if I were overseeing NASA’s budget, but it’s not what they’ll do.
That’s how long ago was the beginning of the end for the Shuttle, not even five years after it first flew. Eleven years ago, I recalled the event:
I was sitting in a meeting at the Rockwell Space Transportation Systems Division in Downey, California. It was a status review meeting for a contract on which I was working, called the Space Transportation Architecture Study. It was a joint NASA/USAF contract, and its ostensible purpose was to determine what kind of new launch systems should replace or complement the Space Shuttle. Its real purpose was to try to get the Air Force and NASA Marshall to learn how to play together nicely and stop squabbling over turf and vehicle designs (it failed).
It was a large meeting, with many people in attendance from El Segundo and Colorado Springs (Air Force) and Houston, Huntsville and the Cape (NASA) as well as many Rockwell attendees.
As I sat there, waiting for the meeting to begin, one of my colleagues came running into the room, his face white as a freshly-bleached bedsheet. He leaned over and told me and others, in an insistent sotto voce, “I just saw the Challenger blow up.”
We stared at him in momentary disbelief.
“I’m serious. I just came from the mission control center. It just exploded about a minute after launch.”
One could actually see the news travel across the large meeting room as expressions of early-morning torpor transformed into incredulity and shock. More than most people, even with no more information than the above, we understood the implications. While there was speculation in the media all morning that the crew might be saved, we knew instantly that they were lost. We knew also that we had lost a quarter of the Shuttle fleet, with a replacement cost of a couple billion dollars and several years, and that there would be no flights for a long time, until we understood what had happened.
The ironic purpose of our meeting became at once more significant and utterly meaningless. Most of the NASA people immediately made arrangements to fly back to Houston, Huntsville and the Cape, and we held the session without them, in a perfunctory manner.
This was one of those events, like the more recent one in September, that is indelibly etched into memory–where you were, what you were doing, what you were feeling. I’m curious about any inputs from others, either in comments here or email.
Oh, and I should note that it’s an easy date to remember for me–it was (and remains still) the anniversary of my date of birth…
So today, I start another trip around the sun, and space policy remains a mess.
And it’s not just today. The Apollo 1 fire happened the day before my twelfth birthday. And Columbia was lost four days after my forty eighth. I have no trouble remembering any of these anniversaries.
…by an idiot “gender studies” professor. A male one.
These departments need to be the first to go when the academic bubble pops.
…as he starts his second term.
He’s always looked that way to me. Mendacious, too.