Former flight controller (and Shuttle program manager) Wayne Hale has been writing a series of blog posts about his recollections of the events leading up to the disaster. This week, he recalls the harbinger of the previous flight, that should have warned NASA about the problem, but didn’t.
Bob Costas, You Ignorant Slut
It’s not the “gun culture,” it’s the thug culture. And in that regard, as Bryan Preston points out, Bob Costas is part of the problem.
Fermi’s Anniversary
Thoughts on leadership in America, seventy years ago and today.
Occupy Pyongyang
I am completely unshocked to discover that Occupy Wall Street supports North Korea.
[Update a few minutes later]
More thoughts on the stupidity, or insanity, or whatever it is.
Take More Than Five
Hope they have pianos, and not just harps in heaven, for the likes of Dave Brubeck. He was a revolutionary when it came to time signatures, at least in terms of popularizing quirky ones. My sister went to music school with his son, Chris, in Ann Arbor.
Rachel Maddow’s Blind Deference To Government
It’s the typical socialist mindset:
This question continues to be a puzzle until you realize that when Maddow says “America,” she means not individual Americans or society but government. And now her fallacy is clear. Frédéric Bastiat identified it in 1850. In his classic, The Law, Bastiat wrote that the “socialist” confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all. We disapprove of state education. Then the socialists say that we are opposed to any education… We object to a state-enforced equality. Then they say that we are against equality. And so on, and so on. It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain.
I can see Maddow saying that. One need not be a state socialist, however, to commit this fallacy. It’s done all the time all along the political spectrum. But Maddow offers us a particularly good example.
It’s basically a totalitarian mindset.
Last Day For Space Safety
I’m a little over a thousand bucks beyond the goal, but I still hope to do much better, if I’m going to properly publicize it.
The Democrats’ Fiscal Disaster
Make them own it.
George Zimmerman
Who made the decision to legally lynch him?
[Wednesday morning update]
Note that almost all of the discussion in comments is peripheral to the point of this post, which is about how Zimmerman has been falsely demonized by assorted community organizers, media and public officials.
Susan Rice
Yes, apparently race does matter:
For all the president’s condescending talk daring Rice’s critics to come after him instead, we should note that Rice herself apparently welcomes being in the arena. Here is what she undiplomatically remarked about potential critics in an interview for a book earlier this year: “People know not to mess with me. And if they haven’t learned, and they try, then they will learn.” So it is left to her supporters to make the case that Rice had an inspired diplomatic career in the Clinton administration, or that her current tenure at the U.N. has been characterized by adroit diplomacy, which we perhaps saw on display with the U.N. recognition of a Palestinian state.
It also was recently announced that Susan Rice reported a net worth of somewhere between $30 and $40 million – information that appeared in the popular media only after one of the nastiest campaigns in modern memory, whose central theme was that Mitt Romney and his supporters were 1 percenters whose affluence was prima facie proof of some sort of moral or legal failing.
But don’t point that out, because…racist.