Lileks has some thoughts on sports stadia (with bonus mystery guests), but the phrase he uses (the title of this post) would apply as well to job creation.
More Liberty Thoughts
…as well as links, over at Clark Lindsey’s place. I agree with his take on the reusability issue. ATK made it clear that they don’t even plan to refurbish the solids. That makes sense, given the infrastructure necessary to do so and insufficient traffic level to justify it, but it doesn’t speak to a low-cost system.
Dreams Of The Girl I Bullied
Hasn’t anyone on the president’s campaign team read his autobiography? I mean, I know the president has, when he read it while moving his lips, but he probably only read it that one time, so he’s probably forgotten most of what’s in it by now.
Science And Politics
The latest from Bill Whittle. Why science should stay out of politics. And, I’d add, vice versa.
Trouble In Timbuktu
Walter Russell Mead laments:
Via Meadia is glad the press doesn’t hate Obama as much as it hated Bush; otherwise the papers would be full every day with stories about the unintended, tragic consequences of the humanitarian intervention gone awry in Libya and about the policy failures and miscalculations that landed us in this mess. There would be eloquent lamentations and beautifully choreographed hand wringings by our professional moralists and the custodians of the collective conscience at our better universities and more prestigious magazines. There would be telling comparisons of the destruction of the tombs in Timbuktu with the looting of the Baghdad museums. There would be impassioned denunciations of the hubris that led the ideological zealots to promote the holy war, and scathing, mocking reminders of the promises they made about how nice things would be if we took their advice.
As it is, we are just doing our best to ignore the rubble and move on, while many of the same people who pushed the Libya intervention try to gin up a new war in Syria. At least if we make a mess in Syria there is a strong national interest case for the intervention, and a small war in Syria might well reduce the risk of much uglier and nastier war with Iran. Via Meadia is still scratching its head wondering what exactly we gained that was worth the humanitarian catastrophes and bloodbaths the Libyan war unleashed.
Only a few months until November.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Speaking of Libya, it has an increasing gun problem. And before anyone accuses me of being a hypocrite in my Second Amendment support, it’s not really a gun problem — it’s a culture problem.
Cornucopians In Space
Some thoughts on Planetary Resources and Peter Diamandis’ abundance thesis over at Zero Hedge. I need to give it some thought, but I think there is a definitional issue here of what constitutes a “resource.” It’s somewhat related to the question of whether gravity existed before Newton invented it, though a little less philosophical. I’m on a couple deadlines right now, but have at it in comments.
The New Holocaust Deniers
Some thoughts from Robert Zubrin on the environmental movement. They’re not just deniers — many of them are enablers and cheerleaders.
Liberty
I’m at the ATK press conference. I’ve been tweeting @Rand_Simberg
[Thursday morning update]
It was hard to get everything accurately while tweeting, but NASASpaceflight has a good technical description of the system. The key thing I didn’t catch until talking to Rominger later at the reception is that it’s not using the Orion tractor abort system.
The Muslim Brotherhood
President Narcissist
Thoughts on Mr. I, Me, Mine:
So what is the problem with a charismatic, narcissistic president? After all, most presidents by definition must be somewhat self-absorbed. Yet the rub is that the world has tuned Obama out. All his prime-time rhetoric from Afghanistan, the cool multicultural accentuation of Pakîstan and the Talîban, the photo-op reminders that it was Obama who ordered the mission that took out bin Laden — all this meant nothing to the Taliban, who will now patiently wait us out, unleash a North Vietnamese–like offensive very soon, and remind us that just because we don’t believe there are still things like victory and defeat in our messy wars, that does not mean there are not.
In other words, I worry that Vladimir Putin, the Iranian theocrats, the North Korean apparat, the Chinese central committee, the Muslim Brotherhood, and all the others who detest the United States have sized up Barack Obama. For 40 months they have acknowledged that his postracial image and his youthful charisma, as David Axelrod and Robert Gibbs rightly insisted, threw them for a loop — for a while. And that “for a while” is now ending, replaced with a new belief abroad that the more Obama talks about himself and his team, and the more emphatic he becomes with his “Make no mistake about it” and “Let me be perfectly clear” vacuities, the more he can at first safely be ignored, and then, quite soon, safely be taken advantage of.
Let’s hope it’s not for more than a few more months.