The forgotten opposition. Most people don’t realize how close it came to not happening, which is why they foolishly insist on trying to do it again. Not also the implicit but false assumption that Apollo (and human spaceflight in general) was about science. It wasn’t then, and it isn’t now.
Behold The Power Of Mitt Romney
He singlehandedly prevented the media from properly covering Barack Obama’s pooch screwing.
Just amazing. With that kind of influence over the press, he should be a shoe in for election.
The First Amendment
It seems to have created a huge speed bump when Obama threw it under the bus.
Not that this is anything new, of course.
[Saturday morning update]
Kirsten Powers: “Mr. President, stop blaming the victim.”
Less than two months for our opportunity to make this constitution contempting, lawless administration history.
Space And The Election
Andrew Moseman (my editor at Popular Mechanics) interviews Jonathan Card of the Space Frontier Foundation.
The ACLU
President Strawman
I’m listening to Paul Ryan take it to him at the Heritage Foundation. I’d like to see him debate Obama instead of Biden. The Biden debate will probably have to be called for a mercy rule.
[Update early afternoon]
Katrina Trinko has some of the transcript:
Say things like this, and our opponents will quickly accuse you of being, quote, “anti-government.” President Obama frames the debate this way because, here again, it’s the only kind of debate he can win – against straw-man arguments.
No politician is more skilled at striking heroic poses against imaginary adversaries. Nobody is better at rebuking nonexistent opinions. Barack Obama does this all the time, and in this campaign we are calling him on it.
The President is given to lectures on all that we owe to government, as if anyone who opposes his reckless expansion of federal power is guilty of ingratitude and rank individualism.
More at the link.
[Bumped]
The Arab Street And The Mainstream Media
They are both shameful and shameless.
When My Dog Lucky Disappeared
…so did I.
I haven’t mentioned it, but last Saturday we put Jessica down. She was eighteen, and still loving, but she had become incontinent (not in the sense that she had lost control, but in that she didn’t care where she went, and the litter box was generally last on the list). She was down to half her peak body weight from an original nine pounds, just skin and bones, and very finicky about food, demanding not food per se, but to be fed.
She was always a very social cat (even when we rescued her at the age of one and a half, she seemed more dog than cat in her need for attention), and remained so, but she was tired, and didn’t seem to enjoy anything in life other than eating, and lying on us. At the end, she had to stay outside lest she destroy the house, and when I took her to the vet to diagnose a diarrhea problem, we both concluded that despite her continued affection, she was suffering from dementia. Patricia and I made an appointment for Saturday, and saw her through to the end, which came very quickly and painlessly, at least for her. There was very little fight left in her. We brought her home and buried her in the yard where she used to play when she was young.
While we’re relieved that we can finally clean floors (and perhaps replace some of the wood flooring where she’d made permanent urine stains through a rug that we hadn’t seen), there’s a hole in our lives as well, after over sixteen years. Rerun (the young cat we adopted three years ago) doesn’t know what happened to the older cat she used to try to play with, but she’s been more subdued than usual. At some point, I hope we’ll get her companionship her own age.
[Update a while later]
Thanks for the condolences in comments. It’s interesting to note that what we did was very common when we were growing up (and not unusual at all to our great grandparents), but a lot of people think it’s weird today, I think. Some friends of mine live in a farmhouse west of Ann Arbor across the road from a church in which some of their relatives are buried in the yard.
When we first got a quote for the procedure from the vet, it included cremation, with an option to keep the ashes. That’s in fact what I did when Stella died, but I didn’t really have a choice, because I was half a continent away when it happened. Apparently keeping the body of the animal is an unusual request. When we asked, the vet said that we weren’t supposed to bury it ourselves, but she would give it to us as long as we didn’t tell her what we were going to do — for all she knew we were taking it to a pet cemetery for interment. It actually saved us a little money, and made us feel like we were taking care of her ourselves.
And apparently dealing with pet remains is a pretty good business. We just used a cardboard box. I’m pretty sure she doesn’t care. The vet did make a little clay cast of her paw print, that the young women in the office paint (one of them was a little apologetic about it — “It’s nothing fancy, sort of like a kid’s art project”). I’ll pick it up tomorrow. Maybe I’ll embed it in a cement slab.
[Update late afternoon]
One more point, per comments. I am never offended by someone offering their prayers for me, though I’ve been god blind all my life (and expect to go to my grave that way, which is one, but not the only reason that I’m into life extension).
I can’t imagine how they would hurt me (well, OK, I can, but only in a ludicrous, Pascal’s-Wager-denying thought experiment), and I assume that they at a minimum benefit the person praying. I always appreciate everyone’s good will, and good thoughts, in whatever form.
Libya Is Not Just A Tragedy
It’s just part of the larger war:
What are the Libyan government’s options? It can try to appease the opposition by more Islam. But that won’t work really. It can try to appease the opposition by distancing itself from the United States, but given its weakness that won’t work. And it can try to repress the rebels, but since it cannot depend on its own military forces — which are riddled with jihadists — that won’t work either.
That is the real lesson in Libya. For once, Obama took sides against the revolutionary Islamists. We are seeing in Egypt and the Gaza Strip that appeasement doesn’t work; we are seeing in Libya that engaging in conflict has its high costs, too. Obama claims to have “liberated” Libya, but to many Libyans he has enslaved it to infidels.
So what next? American military aid to the Libyan government and U.S. military advisors? An endless war against the jihadists? And what if the government in Libya, which is pretty fragile and cannot fully depend on its own military, starts to fall? In Somalia, the local al-Qaeda branch didn’t win only because Ethiopia and other African nations sent in thousands of troops. In Bahrain — a complicated situation in which there is a mistreated Shia population whose opposition has both moderates and radicals — the government was only saved by Saudi troops and against the will of the White House.
Treating what has happened in Libya as an isolated tragedy misses the point. Viewing it as generalized proof of Obama’s terrible policy doesn’t get us to the solution. There is a battle going on in the Middle East that will continue for decades. Obama has largely helped the enemy side. In Libya, while he gave some help to the Islamists, his basic policy supported the moderates for once. Now the price must be paid or one more country will fall to revolutionary Islamist rule and U.S. influence and credibility will decline even further.
This is a war, not a misunderstanding. It is a battle of ideologies and a struggle for control of state power, not hurt feelings over some obscure video.
And it’s a war that the administration pretends doesn’t exist, and (like all foreign wars) certainly doesn’t want to win.
Read all, it also has a well-justified criticism of our anti-Israel foreign service.
[Update a while later]
Mark Steyn: An act of war, not a movie protest.
On A Lighter Note
And because it’s a Friday, which means cat videos, here’s what cats really are saying when they play patty cake.
Instant Internet classic.