Rest in peace. I hadn’t seen him in years, but used to occasionally in the eighties at various LA space events. He wasn’t as big an influence on me as a kid as Heinlein and Clarke, but I read all his books. Of course, as he often said himself, he wasn’t a science fiction writer.
[Update late afternoon]
The lights are going out.
You’d have to have a heart of stone to watch this video and not laugh out loud.
I’ve been thinking for quite a while that this might be the case:
the Bradley Effect has resurfaced dramatically in a different manner in the Wisconsin recall vote. The polls — and, yes, the exit polls as well – were showing Scott Walker in a narrow victory. But he won beyond anyone’s prediction.
Apparently, the silent majority of Wisconsin voters didn’t want to admit to nosy pollsters and anyone else that might be listening that they were opposed to runaway unions, runaway spending, or the Democratic administration. They just wanted to cast their votes. And they did.
This Bradley Effect, then, is not like the Bradley Effect of yore. It’s about race to some degree, but I suspect there are much larger components of being fed up with elites of all sorts, interest groups, media groups, union groups, all sorts of groups telling the average citizen what he should and shouldn’t think, openly or covertly threatening to ostracize him or her for not going along with the pervasive liberal status quo. This was a cry of “Ya, basta!”
So if I were a member of the Democratic Party this morning, if I were David Axelrod and his team of so-called wise men, I would be wondering – what if all the polls are wrong? What if this is true across the entire country?
If Axelrod and his team of so-called wise men aren’t making a mess in their underoos this morning, they’re completely out of touch with reality. I think that this also explains the disparity between the president’s approval rating and his “likeability.” People are now willing to say, after over three years of non-stop policy disaster, that they don’t approve of his policies, but they still fear being thought racist if they say they find the egomaniacal condescending incompetent insufferable.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Francis Porretto makes a good point in comments over there — it may not be the Bradley Effect so much as a “thug effect,” in which people are afraid to tell exit pollsters what they really think, given what’s been happening in Wisconsin for a year and a half.
…since the troops hit the beach at Normandy. It wasn’t as bold a military gamble as killing bin Laden (just ask Joe Biden), but still. Let’s hope we have a different president to commemorate the seventieth anniversary.
[Update a while later]
Here’s Reagan’s commemoration twenty-eight years ago, on the fortieth anniversary:
[Update later morning]
Well, it was inevitable, and it didn’t take long — Hitler has found out about it.
It’s hard to believe that was almost thirty years ago. I’ve probably mentioned this before, but I remember almost forty years ago, on the thirtieth anniversary, and my mother remarking that it was hard to believe that it had been thirty years (she had been a WAC in Egypt at the time). She’s been gone over twenty years now.
Here’s a live webcast from Fraser Cain, Phil Plait, et al.
Over at Open Market, I point out a way for Mitt Romney to demonstrate his secular cred, by coming out for cancellation of a program that benefits the home state of his church.
Is California the death knell? Let’s hope so, at least for government-subsidized systems. I do think that an LA-Vegas run could make sense.
The latest from Bill Whittle, with contrasting thoughts on Chris Hayes and Elon Musk.
Thoughts from Lileks on the new Puritans:
Let’s get one thing clear: when the TV talk-show people lavish praise on the idea, it has nothing to do with some abstract notion of the costs of obesity. They just don’t like fat people. Fat people, at best, are a rebuke their own finicky vanity – I look good, why can’t you? – and at the worst, aesthetically unpleasant. If they all went away, the trim pert types woudl miss them after a while, and realize that people no longer came pre-packaged in a style that made them easy to dismiss.
A thin woman with three children by three men who can’t get by is an object of concern. A fat women with two kids who can’t get by is a toad, and probably a smoker.
A culture that redefines food choices as moral issues will demonize the people who don’t share the tastes of the priest class. A culture that elevates eating to some holistic act of ethical self-definition – localvore, low-carbon-impact food, fair trade, artisanal cheese – will find the casual carefree choices of the less-enlightened as an affront to their belief system. Leave it to Americans to invent a Puritan strain of Epicurianism.
I do have to agree that sugar is bad for you. But people have a right to eat things that are bad for them. Until the rest of us are forced to pay for their health care, of course…
How to watch it this afternoon.
You know, if we were a true spacefaring civilization, we’d move the planet to get it in the same orbital plane as earth so we could do this every few months instead of once a century or so.