Some advice from The Oatmeal.
Urban Renewal
Is it time to demolish HUD? Long past time, I’d say.
Conduct Unbecoming
I have some thoughts on the Secret Service imbroglio, and presidential vetting, over at PJMedia.
Spacefaring
Is space more like seafaring or aviation? It started out like the latter, but the former is a better model once we actually get serious about it.
[Update a while later]
Meteor craters, dinosaurs and spacefaring.
Actually, while I do think it’s a federal responsibility to keep an eye out for impactors, it’s not clear that it’s NASA’s job. It’s one of the things we need a Space Guard for.
A Sharp Rise In Retractions
And they wonder why conservatives and other sensible people don’t have faith in scientific institutions. As Glenn notes, all the government funding leads to corruption, and not just in the climate-change industrial complex.
Who’d’ve Thunk It?
The Titanic was real? I never fail to be amazed at some peoples’ willingness to profess their ignorance in public.
Derb And Discourse
A long, but thoughtful post on the “racism” of John Derbyshire.
I continue to wonder if they cancer treatments have impaired his judgment.
Charles Stross On Amazon’s Business Model
In which he ignorantly bashes libertarians:
I’m not going to lecture you about Jeff Bezos either, although I do want to note that he came out of a hedge fund and he’s ostensibly a libertarian; these aspects of his background make me uneasy, because in my experience they tend to be found in conjunction with a social-darwinist ideology that has no time for social justice, compassion, or charity. (When you hear a libertarian talking about “disruption” and “innovation” what they usually mean is “opportunities to make a quick buck, however damaging the long-term side effects may be”. Watch for the self-serving cant and the shout-outs to abstractions framed in terms of market ideology.)
Emphasis mine. Jonah Goldberg, hit this guy with a cluebat.
More Space Access Thoughts
Jon Goff is encouraged at progress among the suborbitals.
The United Nations Today
The absurd and inconsequential nature of the General Assembly is reflected in the bodies and commissions that depend on it. Groups like the Commission on Human Rights are international laughingstocks and rightly so. At best they are irrelevant; at worse they actively undermine the causes they were, theoretically, established to advance.
…The Security Council represents a 1945 compromise between power realities and political correctness. That is, the UK, the US and the USSR were great powers in 1945. China and France weren’t, but it was convenient to pretend otherwise. Today, a majority of permanent Security Council members aren’t great powers, and there are significant powers (like India and Japan) who aren’t permanent members.
A majority of the Security Council’s permanent members are European states and ex-great powers to boot. This is farcical, and the Security Council’s growing weakness is the natural and inevitable result.
Like the UN, the Outer Space Treaty is outdated as well. In my talk at Space Access on Saturday, I pointed out the real problem with Article VI — its assumption that space activities, and particularly human space activities, would be performed by governments, for governments. Its nanny approach and demands that a government be responsible for anything its citizens do off planet is utterly impractical in a modern era of private spaceflight.