Media Criticism, Political Commentary

A Magnificent Achievement

14 Comments

Thoughts from Victor Davis Hanson, on just how big Barack Obama has blown it:

What is strange about all this is how the clueless behavior only intensifies. We expect each day another crazy outburst from another fringe appointee, another “battle” to push through something the public does not want — all overseen by the “healer” of “no more red state/blue state” fame.

In short, in just 18 months, Obama has ended talk of permanent Democratic majorities and may well do to the Democratic party what Carter did in 1980 and Clinton in 1994, all while taking a once-obsequious press down with him. With idols like Obama, Mort Zuckerman, Chris Matthews, and Evan Thomas hardly need enemies.

I never had much hope for him, but I do have to admit that it’s quite impressive, and he’s done the Republic a great favor by putting a blast furnace under the kettle so that the frog noticed in time.

Humor, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Satire

Two Randy Vicars

1 Comment

Iowahawk has the sordid tale:

It happened that in Washingtown-on-Beltway there once ministered to the shire folk two vicars of remarkable and resolute piety. Polite history shall record their names and peerages as the Reverend John St. Edwards, Lord Plaintiff of Durham, and the Reverend Albert des Gores II, Earl Carbonet of Greenhouse. It shall likewise note well that each man, in his fashion, was a virtuoso upon his respective pulpit. What it shan’t record, however, is each man’s slavish indenture to the base desires of the flesh. As every schoolboy knows, as well he does his Latin infinitives, few are those men whose breeches are immune to the Devil’s disturbances. In the case of our two ill-fortuned subjects, Lucifer himself seemed to take particular delight in presenting ribald temptations and the debasing consequences that follow. Herein lies their tale.

Well, it actually lies at the other end of the link.

Political Commentary, Space

Saving Private CRuSR

10 Comments

Apparently, among the many other idiotic things that the Senate authorization draft does is to kill the CRuSR program, the NASA initiative to encourage more suborbital science, which will be helpful in growing the industry. There is an effort afoot to fix this.

[Update a while later]

Jeff Foust has more.

[Update a few minutes later]

John Gedmark of the Commercial Space Federation is sending out an alert:

URGENT: Commercial Space in Jeopardy — Call Your Senator TODAY

A new authorization bill for NASA includes major cuts to commercial spaceflight, but Senator Warner has offered an amendment to restore those cuts and move commercial space forward.

The NASA Authorization Bill being proposed cuts the proposed Commercial Crew Program by $2.1 billion (up to 66%), seriously affecting commercial space efforts by such companies as SpaceX, United Launch Alliance, Sierra Nevada Corporation, Boeing, and Orbital Sciences. Senator Warner’s amendment will restore full funding to the program, but he needs YOUR help to get support from other Senators!

The Warner Amendment will be voted on Thursday morning. Now is the time to call your Senator to say, “Please support the Warner Amendment for commercial spaceflight that will create over 10,000 jobs, and reduce our dependence on Russia!” This is your chance to make a difference in the course of space history! (The phone numbers for each Senator on the committee are below, so please check to see if you or your parents are a residents of one of those states!)

Majority
Rockefeller (D-West Virginia)-Chair – 202-224-6472
Inouye (D-Hawaii) – 202-224-3934
Kerry (D-Massachusetts) – 202-224-2742
Dorgan (D-North Dakota) – 202-224-2551
Boxer (D-California) – 202-224-3553
Nelson (D-Florida) – 202-224-5274
Cantwell (D-Washington State) – 202-224-3441
Lautenberg (D-New Jersey) – 202-224-3224
Pryor (D-Arkansas) – 202-224-2353
McCaskill (D-Missouri) – 202-224-6154
Klobuchar (D-Minnesota) – 202-224-3244
Udall (D-New Mexico) – 202-224-6621
Warner (D-Virginia) – 202-224-2023
Begich (D-Alaska) – 202-224-3004

Minority
Hutchison (R-Texas)-Ranking Member – 202-224-5922
Snowe (R-Maine) – 202-224-5344
Ensign (R-Nevada) – 202-224-6244
DeMint (R-South Carolina) – 202-224-6121
Thune (R-South Dakota) – 202-224-2321
Wicker (R-Mississippi) – 202-224-6253
LeMieux (R-Florida) – 202-224-3041
Isakson (R-Georgia) – 202-224-3643
Vitter (R-Louisiana) – 202-224-4623
Brownback (R-Kansas) – 202-224-6521
Johanns (R-Nebraska) – 202-224-4224

If one of these is your Senator, let them know.

Technology and Society

Ten Technologies

44 Comments

…that should be obsolete, but aren’t.

I’ve previously discussed the landline fallacy. If you don’t understand why people like landlines, you probably haven’t used them much, and are clueless as to what good phone service is like.

With regard to the turntables, the digital-converting ones I’ve seen a) have a vinyl lathe for a cartridge and b) overcompress the music when they convert. Fortunately, there are still a few surviving manufacturers of quality cartridges, and my audio equipment still has audio inputs. And they’ll take away my Conrad Johnson tube preamp when they pry it from my cold dead stereo cabinet.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

The Big Green Lie

26 Comments

Exposed:

Greens who feared and climate skeptics who hoped that the rash of investigations following Climategate and Glaciergate and all the other problems would reveal some gaping obvious flaws in the science of climate change were watching the wrong thing. The Big Green Lie (or Delusion, to be charitable) isn’t so much that climate change is happening and that it is very likely caused or at least exacerbated by human activity. The Big Lie is that the green movement is a source of coherent or responsible counsel about what to do.

The greens claim to be diagnosticians and therapists: that they can both name the disease and heal it. They are wrong. The attitudes and political vision of a group of NGO pressure groups may work when it comes to harassing Japanese whale ships in the Antarctic; this vision and these people come up short when set against the challenge of moderating the impact of human industrial activity on the earth’s climate system.

They come up short in many areas.

Administrative

Yes, I Know, Thanks

12 Comments

A lot of people have been emailing me about problems loading the site. It’s getting hung up on a call to the server b.scorecardresearch.com, which I think is part of Google Analytics’ way of tracking my traffic. If anyone has any suggestions about what to do about this (up to and including disabling GA), I’m all ears.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!