Jonah Goldberg finds this video a little creepy.
Why couldn’t they have made these pledges a year ago? Or eight? Why did they have to wait until the Messiah showed up?
I have to agree with Jay Nordlinger, too:
I don’t know about you, but I am particularly unkeen on arm gestures associated with party enthusiasm and loyalty…
Can you imagine the uproar in the press if this were happening with a Republican president?
Late afternoon update]
Iowahawk attempts a transcript.
Fabius Maximus notes that we now have more people employed in government than in manufacturing.
While I’m certainly not thrilled with the growth of government employment, which is a problem in and of itself, I can’t get very wound up about a decline in manufacturing employment, per se. All that says to me is that we’re becoming more productive in manufacturing, which I thought was supposed to be a good thing. As someone who has been employed in manufacturing on occasion, I’m glad that I don’t do it any more.
At the turn of the twentieth century, a large percentage of the population was employed in agriculture. I don’t know what the number is now, but I’d guess it’s on the order of a percent (and in fact the Great Plains states have been steadily depopulating). Despite this, we have no impending food shortage. And many who might have wasted their lives as a horny-handed son or daughter of toil and soil now have opportunities for both better paying and personally satisfying employment.
Should we weep for the loss of that bygone day when many more of us were privileged to follow the south end of a mule for a living? I would hope that most would say no, and I don’t see it as a tragedy if fewer people have to be drones on assembly lines, either. The problem isn’t that fewer people are working in factories, per se, but that we don’t have good jobs for those who have been displaced, particularly if they remain uneducated.
Bill Ayers was turned back at the Canadian border. Boo hoo. I thought this was amusing:
The border guards reviewed some stuff and said I wasn’t going to be allowed into Canada. To me it seems quite bureaucratic and not at all interesting … If it were me I would have let me in. I couldn’t possibly be a threat to Canada.”
Yes, I’m sure that you would have let you in. Just as you let yourself build bombs, or radicalize schoolchildren. You may not have noticed, as some of the rest of us have, that you’re not all that discriminating about the sorts of things that you would let yourself do.
Is he a threat to Canada? Who knows? Who cares? He was a domestic terrorist who got off on a technicality. I’m not going to weep if he’s inconvenienced, either personally or academically. He’s led too charmed a life up to now.
Chief invader Waxulon reveals all.
Clark Lindsey follows up on the previous discussion (with the typical ahistorical nonsense in the comments section about Nixon “scrapping” Apollo):
I think that if, say, Pete Worden had been chosen as NASA chief in 2005, his study would have set boundary conditions much closer that for the HLR than to Griffin’s and come up with a HLR type of architecture. Conditions on Constellation required that it avoid in-space operations at all costs, avoid multiple launches at all costs, and avoid development of any new technologies at all costs. Not surprisingly, all of that ends up costing a whole lot.
As someone once said, when failure is not an option, success gets pretty damned expensive.
Via Virginia Postrel — Sidney Wolfe has been put on the committee overseeing drug safety. This is a calamity. Many unseen murders, and needless suffering, will ensue. As she notes:
He’s got the “consumer” slot. Well, I’m a big-time pharmaceutical consumer, and this man does not speak for me.
Fortunately, I’m not (yet) much of a pharmaceutical consumer, but he doesn’t speak for me, either.
For those who have been waiting in anticipation, reader suggestions.
I’ve noticed a new type of comment spam showing up. It’s a link to a post, that’s aggregated with other links to other posts, which may or may not be related, in a blog that consists of nothing else but links.
Here’s an example. This seems to be a blog that is set up for free as part of a larger blog site (in this case, “localferret.com”), with no restrictions. So, two questions. What is the purpose of such a blog? And is there any harm in allowing it to provide links to my site (probably picked up by a bot that simply watches my feed — I get a lot of Russian spam this way), even though they seem pointless? It does, after all, increase my Google and Technorati (and probably other) rankings. All of them are captured for moderation, but I can’t decide whether to approve them or declare them spam.
Any ideas?
From Jeff Jacoby:
4. You argued that “a massive campaign must be launched . . . to de-develop the United States” in order to conserve energy; you also recommended the “de-development” of modern industrialized nations in order to facilitate growth in underdeveloped countries. Yet elsewhere you observed: “Affordable energy in ample quantities is the lifeblood of the industrial societies and a prerequisite for the economic development of the others.” Which is it?
5. In Scientific American, you recently wrote: “The ongoing disruption of the Earth’s climate by man-made greenhouse gases is already well beyond dangerous and is careening toward completely unmanageable.” Given your record with forecasting calamity, shouldn’t policymakers view your alarm with a degree of skepticism?
6. In 2006, according to the London Times, you suggested that global sea levels could rise 13 feet by the end of this century. But the latest assessment from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is that sea levels are likely to have risen only 13 inches by 2100. Can you explain the discrepancy?
This seems like a terrible pick to me, and now we’re going to see a “war on science” from the Democrats.
[Update a few minutes later]
Here’s one more, suggested in comments: Have you read Ted Kaczynski’s manifesto? If so, with which parts did you agree, and with which did you disagree? (A lot of people had fun after its publication, putting parts of it up alongside excerpts of Al Gore’s book, and defying people to guess which were which.)
I have a piece up at PJM today on the revival of the old cult of child sacrifice in the Middle East.