Conservatives don’t see liberals as vampires — they’re zombies. The closest thing I’ve seen (or smelled) to a zombie apocalypse happened at Zuccotti Park, the shambolic squatters therein denied the ability to act upon their culinary impulses only by the manifest lack of brains available for eating. We may call liberals “bloodsuckers” and whatnot, and, as Mr. Davis notes, Rush Limbaugh did once go on an Obama-vampire riff, but he has his hematophages all wrong. Rush quotes our own venerable VDH:
Watching the tastes, the behavior, the rhetoric, the appointments, and the policy of this administration suggests to me that it is not really serious in radically altering the existing order, which it counts on despite itself. Its real goal is a sort of parasitism that assumes the survivability of the enfeebled host.
Not vampires, but leeches, ticks, bedbugs, etc. “Vampire” is the word we use for liberals when we’re trying to be nice.
I have to say that while I’m not thrilled at the prospect of a Romney presidency per se, I’m very impressed with the campaign so far. They seem to have been living inside Axelrod’s OODA loop for weeks now. The latest (and it’s hilarious) is that the campaign bus has its own Twitter account.
Rumsfeld called “an idea of enormous consequence” the fact that “anyone who finds a way to make use of such riches by applying their labor or their technology or their risk-taking are required to pay writ royalties of unknown amounts, potentially billions, possibly even tens of billions over an extended period, an ill-defined period of time, to the new International Seabed Authority for distribution to less developed countries.”
Saying that this principle has “no clear limits,” he mused that it could set a precedent for space exploration, too.
He shouldn’t just “muse.” It could be a disastrous precedent, completely undercutting the arguments we make against the Moon Treaty.
This kind of ignorance is why so much reporting is nonsensical — reporters are always surprised when an economic report “unexpectedly” has bad numbers, because they really believe the Keynesian crap.
Historically, the decision was a disaster, from the standpoint of making the effort sustainable, though it’s what won the race. Unfortunately, it was inevitable once it became a race to the moon and back. There was simply no time to develop the LEO infrastructure that von Braun and others wanted to put into place that would have obviated the need for the Saturn V. And it created a myth — that we can’t explore without such a vehicle — that haunts us to this day.
I went over to SpaceX this morning to hear them speak, with the first Dragon to go into space (it was a repeat of their show in McGregor, Texas yesterday with the Dragon that flew the recent mission). There are a bunch of pictures at SpaceflightNow. I don’t think I’m in any of them. I was standing in the press area, just below the vantage point of most of the shots.
You might see some bulges on the side of the Dragon to the right rear. I asked Elon if those were the pods and thrusters for the abort/landing motors. He said they were, but that the design was still in flux. I also asked him if there were cosine losses, and he said yes, that they are unavoidable, since you can’t thrust straight down from the side of a cone.