I answer six questions about it over at Popular Mechanics.
[Update a few minutes later]
Well, FEMA can relax — it won’t fall on us.
[Evening update, at least on the west coast]
Yes, I know that Skylab came in in 1979. I hope it will be fixed tomorrow.
…to know that FEMA is prepared for the coming space-junk disaster.
Why, that’s just crazy talk.
I have some thoughts on status-quo bias and human spaceflight over at Open Market.
I think that this is what one calls “a smoking gun”:
In secretly recorded conversations between two individuals deeply entwined in the ATF’s controversial “Fast and Furious” operation, the murder of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry is described as “collateral damage.”
The recordings were obtained exclusively by CBS News. The man who made them – Arizona gun dealer Andre Howard – ran the Lone Wolf Trading Company and was speaking with Hope MacAllister, the ATF operation’s case agent.
Two of the guns Howard sold while cooperating with the ATF that were later found at Terry’s murder.
“It happened. It’s terrible,” Howard said. “That’s life ok we move on.”
We move on, and try to cover it up, so we can keep doing it.
Imagine if this were a Republican White House.
Bringing them down to size. That’s a presentation that even Barack Obama might understand.
…is not a jobs plan.
Traditional estimates of Civil War deaths have been too low:
Hacker says the war’s dead numbered about 750,000, an estimate that’s 20 percent higher than the commonly cited figure of 620,000. His findings will be published in December in the journal Civil War History.
“The traditional estimate has become iconic,” Hacker says. “It’s been quoted for the last hundred years or more. If you go with that total for a minute — 620,000 — the number of men dying in the Civil War is more than in all other American wars from the American Revolution through the Korean War combined. And consider that the American population in 1860 was about 31 million people, about one-tenth the size it is today. If the war were fought today, the number of deaths would total 6.2 million.”
Difficult to imagine.
You know, that guy who put his face behind Obama’s hand to make the president look like a doof.