Wernher Von Braun

He would have been a hundred years old today. Also, it’s the 29th anniversary of the announcement of the Strategic Defense Initiative. “Wouldn’t it be better to save lives than to avenge them?”

[Update a couple minutes later]

Related to last item: Japan prepares missile defense in anticipation of North Korean launch.

[Update a few minutes later]

Back to von Braun: a blog post from Roger Launius.

Diminished Climate Alarmism

Lessons from l’affaire Heartland:

The Heartland affair has shown not merely that some climate alarmists (namely Gleick) will stoop to outright deception, and most of his peers will close ranks to defend him in a sort of Green Wall of Silence. Perhaps more disturbing, it reveals that these people really have no idea how their opponents on the climate issue actually view the world. So when they dismiss skeptics as having no legitimate arguments, it should make outsiders take pause.

Without being a trained climate scientist, I can read the various blogs and try to parse the academic papers, but ultimately I have to rely a lot on the good faith and judgment of the scientists themselves. The Heartland affair has reassured my earlier conviction that the case for climate alarmism is far weaker than the alarmists have been telling us.

His emphasis. I think it applies to how the Left views its skeptics in general.

ObamaCare

approaches its day of reckoning. As do its authors, in November.

Rarely has one law so exemplified the worst of the Leviathan state — grotesque cost, questionable constitutionality and arbitrary bureaucratic coerciveness. Little wonder the president barely mentioned it in his latest State of the Union address. He wants to be reelected. He’d rather talk about other things.

And no celebration of its two-year anniversary. I guess it wasn’t as much of a BFD as Joe Biden said it was. Or perhaps it is, but not in the way he thought.

[Update a few minutes later]

Happy second birthday, ObamaCare! “Now let’s destroy it, root and branch.”

[Update a while later]

Five things
the Democrats (politically) got wrong on ObamaCare. Did they get anything right?

[Mid-morning update]

Heh: “Democrats so misjudged everything about Obamacare, you would think they never read the bill or something.”

[Late morning update]

WSJ: Liberty and ObamaCare.

Straight People

Are they born that way?

I know I was. And if someone “self identifies” as straight, but shows signs of arousal by the same sex, they’re not straight, they’re bi. I don’t understand why the concept of a spectrum, a distribution from pure homosexual through bisexual to pure heterosexual, skewed toward the latter, is such a hard concept for people to get their heads around.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!