Did you know that every country is “our strongest and closest ally”?
I don’t have enough palms to do my face or this justice.
More Space Socialism From Republicans
I have some thoughts on Bob Zimmerman’s thoughts over at Open Market.
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.
“Clunky, Anachronistic”
Judy Miller on the death of The Death of a Salesman. I had to read it in a literature course in college (Arthur Miller was a Michigan grad). I agree, it hasn’t held up well.
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.
In Praise Of Chaos
Thoughts on creative destruction, from George Will, with a generous nod to Virginia Postrel.
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.
America’s Real Fiscal Gap
Over $200 trillion dollars? Sadly, give our current policies, I can believe it.
The Colliers Series
Started sixty years ago, introducing the American public to the coming age of space. It later led to a series of Disney short animations, shown on Sunday nights.