I caught Simonyi’s liftoff this morning.
If someone had told me back in the eighties that in 2009, I’d be watching a Soyuz launch from Kazakhstan on the local news, carrying an American millionaire to a (mostly) NASA space station, I’d have thought they were nuts.
He managed to talk down the dollar. It’s like he doesn’t even care about it, or US sovereignty in general.
Can someone remind me again why this tax cheat (who is now in charge of the IRS) is “indispensable”?
[Thursday morning update]
More thoughts from Jim Lindgren.
[Bumped]
[Update a few minutes later]
“I wish the Admin could bring back the days when Joe Biden had sole possession of the gaffe-o-matic.”
A commenter makes the point of what is so worrisome about this:
I’ve been following the currency issue for years, and repeatedly over the past 10-15 years, the Saudis, Iranians, Russians and others have been pushing for an alternative reserve currency. The prime reason is mistrust of the United States fiscal policy.Now the Chinese, our largest creditor, have joined the chorus. Frankly, the only thing saving the dollar right now is that no one trusts any of the other major currencies.
It really doesn’t matter what Yglesias says or does, the global markets are speaking. Obama and Geithner are now “welcoming’ such a discussion. Basically we are looking at the downfall of the dollar similar to that of the Pound Sterling back in the 1970’s. The sun is setting on American economic leadership unless the grown ups act responsibly. To me, this is economic treason.
And the treason is not in going along with a second reserve currency per se, but in making it seem necessary to much of the rest of the world due to insanely reckless fiscal policies that are debauching the dollar.
[Update late evening]
Welcome, Instapundit readers. I’m glad that Glenn linked this post, but it’s not the one that I sent him (which means that he looked over the rest of the site and picked it out). Anyway, you might want to do the same.
I love the Gilbert and Sullivan parody in comments.
Kaus’ BS meter explodes.
Lileks has some thoughts on clueless anti-Christian bigots in entertainment. And the fact that they’d never bravely slander Muslims in the same manner.
Also, a question about movie stars past. I left a heretical comment that Marilyn Monroe was highly overrated. And I think that Hedy Lamar was hot for her brains (she invented frequency hopping).
I agree, I liked this Obama comment:
Q: Yours is a rather historic presidency. And I’m just wondering whether in any of the policy debates that you’ve had within the White House, the issue of race has come up, or whether it has in the way you feel you’ve been perceived by other leaders or by the American people. Or has the last 64 days been a relatively colorblind time?
OBAMA: I think that the last 64 days has been dominated by me trying to figure out how we’re going to fix the economy. And that’s — affects black, brown and white. And, you know, obviously at the inauguration I think that there was justifiable pride on the part of the country that we had taken a step to move us beyond some of the searing legacies of racial discrimination in this country. But that lasted about a day — (laughter) — and, you know, right now the American people are judging me exactly the way I should be judged, and that is are we taking the steps to improve liquidity in the financial markets, create jobs, get businesses to reopen, keep America safe. And that’s what I’ve been spending my time thinking about.
Too bad so many of his underlings and fellow Democrats don’t agree.
One of my consulting clients is very Windows centric, and I thought it was going to be a problem when my Windows desktop died a few weeks ago. Though, actually, I could never access either their Sharepoint or Exchange servers even when it was up, because there was some software on it that was incompatible with Juniper, so the only way I could get in was with my Vista laptop. Well, just for the hell of it, I tried to access both sites today using Firefox in Fedora, and it seems to be fully functional, so it gets along better with my client’s server than my Windows 2000 machine did.
This is interesting on two levels: first, that the security system didn’t complain, and second, that Linux Firefox seems to play well with Microsoft sites. It’s come a long way, baby.
There’s a very interesting (and long) profile over at New York Times magazine:
Dyson is well aware that “most consider me wrong about global warming.” That educated Americans tend to agree with the conclusion about global warming reached earlier this month at the International Scientific Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen (“inaction is inexcusable”) only increases Dyson’s resistance. Dyson may be an Obama-loving, Bush-loathing liberal who has spent his life opposing American wars and fighting for the protection of natural resources, but he brooks no ideology and has a withering aversion to scientific consensus. The Nobel physics laureate Steven Weinberg admires Dyson’s physics — he says he thinks the Nobel committee fleeced him by not awarding his work on quantum electrodynamics with the prize — but Weinberg parts ways with his sensibility: “I have the sense that when consensus is forming like ice hardening on a lake, Dyson will do his best to chip at the ice.”
Dyson says he doesn’t want his legacy to be defined by climate change, but his dissension from the orthodoxy of global warming is significant because of his stature and his devotion to the integrity of science. Dyson has said he believes that the truths of science are so profoundly concealed that the only thing we can really be sure of is that much of what we expect to happen won’t come to pass. In “Infinite in All Directions,” he writes that nature’s laws “make the universe as interesting as possible.” This also happens to be a fine description of Dyson’s own relationship to science. In the words of Avishai Margalit, a philosopher at the Institute for Advanced Study, “He’s a consistent reminder of another possibility.” When Dyson joins the public conversation about climate change by expressing concern about the “enormous gaps in our knowledge, the sparseness of our observations and the superficiality of our theories,” these reservations come from a place of experience. Whatever else he is, Dyson is the good scientist; he asks the hard questions. He could also be a lonely prophet. Or, as he acknowledges, he could be dead wrong.
But he’s got a pretty good track record.
If one of these five Congresspeople are yours, you can do the nation a favor by encouraging them to not go along with this deficit madness.
Could SCOTUS be prepared to overturn McCain-Feingold, six years late?
I hope so. Supporting it was one of Sandra Day O’Connor’s more boneheaded decisions, and I hope that replacing her with Alito makes the difference.
I’ve always thought that George Bush’s signing the thing was an impeachable offense, since he took an oath to uphold the Constitution, but freely admitted that he was signing a bill that he viewed as unconstitutional. He was supposed to do his job, not kick it upstairs to the court and hope they’d do theirs.