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Like the UN, the Outer Space Treaty is outdated as well.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.
Obama’s Gaffes
…are his own. It’s hilarious that the Telegraph thinks that this kind of error is “uncharacteristic.” They must have missed “liberating Auschwitz” and “all 57 states,” and the notion that “Texas has been a pretty Republican state for historic reasons.”
As a commenter notes, the leftist media will never let go of the fantasy that George W. Bush was an intellectual pygmy and that Obama is brilliant.
[Update a couple minutes later]
More smart diplomacy: Obama’s gaffe could start a war. You’d like to ask “what was he thinking?” but I think the answer is the usual — he wasn’t.
Doubling Lifespan
…with fullerene?
Joe The Plumber
May be going to Congress: “In retrospect, his question, Obama’s answer — and in particular the vicious and law-breaking politico-media smear campaign launched against him in response — perfectly prefigured the Obama Presidency.”
And based on the Ann Romney attacks last week, it seems likely to continue until November.
Space Access
I was remiss in not posting much from the conference, but Clark Lindsey has some thoughts in the aftermath, with a lot of links. My impression? It wasn’t as exciting as last year, when Gwynne Shotwell came and not only gave a speech but answered questions. I think that both SpaceX and XCOR weren’t there in force this year (the latter for the first time, though ably represented by Mark Street) because they’re busy building hardware that will reduce the cost of access to space.
“Peace-Loving” Nations
Some thoughts.
Graves, I’ve noticed, are very peaceful places.
The Capricious Dr. Hansen
Balancing The Scale For Prosecutors
Some thoughts on overcharging defendants. The Zimmerman case looks a lot like that to me. I like the idea of banning prosecutors from running for political office for five years after their last prosecution. It would have kept a lot of lousy politicians out of office (a former governor of New York comes to mind) and reduce grandstanding.
“Social Darwinism”
The continuing fantasies (well, OK, lies) of the “progressives.”