So they could afford to do things more like this.
It’s always a little unnerving to me to see them fly through the ring plane. It makes you realize that as striking they are in appearance, the mass density is very slight, and there’s plenty of open space in there. Not that they couldn’t have had a collision, but they haven’t.
OK, I know, even if they weren’t being forced to waste money, they’d still have trouble getting more funding for more planetary missions.
Those who favor big government are more racist than those who favor small government. In fact, the latter don’t seem to be very racist at all.
No one tell Ron Schiller. Or Janeane Garafalo.
Another powerful argument for public-employee unions. Not.
Allahpundit, on the president’s brackets:
This is a rare case where I think (hope?) that even our resident liberal trolls will admit that a Republican president in the same situation would be utterly destroyed by the media for wasting time on something so inane as NCAA brackets at a moment of global high anxiety. Libyan rebels holed up in Benghazi are preparing to make their last stand, with all that entails; cable news is wall-to-wall with updates on how much worse than Three Mile Island the situation in Japan is and whether Californians should be stockpiling iodide. And meanwhile, this guy’s talking about Pitt’s perimeter game. If you want to equivocate on world events that have captured the public’s imagination, okay (well, not okay), but can we at least deep-six the lighthearted photo ops until we know for sure that a cesium cloud isn’t headed for Tokyo? Says John Podhoretz, “We’re going on four weeks now, or more, that Barack Obama has been reading My Pet Goat.” Except he’s not just reading it. He’s doing ESPN segments about it.
But as I wrote earlier, given his general competence level, I’d prefer he stick to that sort of thing myself. He’s not good at it, either, but at least it won’t do much harm.
This is pretty grim news, if true.
Even still, in the context of the major catastrophe there, it’s small potatoes. It’s going to cost billions to reclaim much of the land just from the seawater inundation (perhaps including dikes, with some advice from the Dutch). This just may mean that there will be a small part of it that will never be reclaimable in the foreseeable future.
On the other hand, they can console themselves with the thought that this probably won’t happen again for a few hundred years.
…on only ten billion a day. Iowahawk runs the numbers.
Brave New Climate seems to be doing a good job.
The latest space policy adventure with the teddy bears. Or dogs. Or whatever they are.
More thoughts, on the butchery in Israel and the ever-increasing European anti-semitism, from Mark Steyn.
Thoughts from Victor Davis Hanson:
I don’t know quite why many of our environmentalists and urban planners wish to emulate such patterns of settlement (OK, I do know), since for us in America it would be a matter of choice, rather than, as in a highly congested Japan, one of necessity. Putting us in apartments and high rises, reliant on buses and trains, and dependent on huge centralized power, water, and sewage grids are recipes not for ecological utopia, but for a level of dependence and vulnerability that could only lead to disaster. Again, I understand that in terms of efficiency of resource utilization, such densities make sense and I grant that culture sparks where people are, but in times of calamity these regimens prove enormously fragile and a fool’s bargain.
Actually, many of them do favor decentralization and “appropriate” technology. But most of them also favor depopulation. And some of those favor it by whatever means are necessary.