You know who else (besides you) doesn’t have a degree in economics? Barack Obama.
What’s amazing is that these media ditzes (both male and female) are clueless about how stupid they make themselves look. Of course, there’s a reason that they both look that way, and are unable to recognize it. But just how stupid are the suits who hire them?
…wiped out the recovery. If he loses next year, that’s called being hoist by one’s own petard, and it will be well deserved.
[Update a few minutes later]
We need more than a war on taxes and spending — it’s time for a war on regulations.
Today’s the forty-second anniversary of the first moon landing. Bill Simon and I discussed the ceremony that we developed to commemorate it over on The Space Show on Monday. Clark Lindsey has some more related links.
POGO has filed a FOIA on NASA’s heavy-lift program.
[Update a few minutes later]
Here’s a story on the SLS by NPR. I found this comment by Bill Nelson interesting:
Congress recently told NASA to build that system by 2016, and to use existing industry contracts as much as possible. Sen. Bill Nelson, a Florida Democrat who flew on space shuttle Columbia, thinks building the big new rocket is what NASA needs to do, no matter where it’s going next.
“Maybe it’s going to be an asteroid, as the president suggested, for 2025,” Nelson says. “It’s possible we may go back to the moon. There may be other destinations. All of these are going to develop as we develop technology. But the first thing we have to have is a big rocket that can get all of these different components and refueling up into Earth orbit.”
So, my question is, Senator, if we’re going to be refueling in earth orbit, why do we need the big rocket? Fuel can go up on small rockets.
“The worst plan so far.”
…signs.
[Update a few minutes later]
Someone had too much time on their hands: the physics of Superman.
It’s not just time, it’s long past time. Of course, Doug Bandow has been preaching this for years, to little avail.
I have a piece up today on the end of the Shuttle (and big-government-space) era. Unfortunately, so does Christian Adams. Every paragraph of it seems to have been posted from an alternate reality. I may fisk it later, if no one else does.
[Mid-morning update]
Clark Lindsey has responded to Adams’ piece in comments over there.
The far future seems to have put Frase in full flaming far mode, declaring his undying allegience to a core ideal: he prefers the inequality that comes from a government hierarchy, over inequality that comes from voluntary trade.
Yes, he prefers a world in which everyone is equal, but some are more equal than others. And as Glenn notes:
I always figure that people who feel this way do so because they think they’re better at sucking up to authority figures than at creating value on their own. And my guess is, they’re right about that.
And the president is a canonical example.
An interesting look behind the scenes:
Go into the kitchen of a Taco Bell today, and you’ll find a strong counterargument to any notion that the U.S. has lost its manufacturing edge. Every Taco Bell, McDonald’s (MCD), Wendy’s (WEN), and Burger King is a little factory, with a manager who oversees three dozen workers, devises schedules and shifts, keeps track of inventory and the supply chain, supervises an assembly line churning out a quality-controlled, high-volume product, and takes in revenue of $1 million to $3 million a year, all with customers who show up at the front end of the factory at all hours of the day to buy the product. Taco Bell Chief Executive Officer Greg Creed, a veteran of the detergents and personal products division of Unilever (UL), puts it this way: “I think at Unilever, we had five factories. Well, at Taco Bell today I’ve got 6,000 factories, many of them running 24 hours a day.”
It’s as if the great advances of human civilization, in everything from animal husbandry to mathematics to architecture to manufacturing to information technology, have all crescendoed with the Crunchwrap Supreme, delivered via the pick-up window.
As Bill Whittle wrote a few years ago, an ancient Egyptian Pharaoh would marvel at a 7-11. We don’t realize what an age of miracles we live in, or how fragile it is.