Clark notes that tomorrow will be a time of remembrance in Mojave.
And one year later, they still don’t seem to know for sure what happened. And we haven’t heard what’s going on with SpaceShipTwo propulsion development, though it won’t fly before late next year (at least two years behind the original schedule, with some of that slippage no doubt due to last year’s incident).
Heh:
…thank Gore that the ice is melting just as we need the oil. It’s like divine Providence at work.
This from someone who worked on his 1988 presidential campaign.
Lileks reviews Obama’s empty speechifying in Berlin. It’s not a pretty sight:
He also called for an end to nuclear weapons. (This was also Reagan’s dream, but he had a different way of going about it.) Of course, this isn’t going to happen, but it sounds nice. Who wouldn’t want a world in which everyone decommissions the nukes, and Iran says “wait, what? We thought these were cool. Well, then, we’ll give them up. Geez, next thing you’ll tell us, Izod shirts with popped collars are out.” We will never poke the Genie back in the bottle, and Obama knows this. But the words loft well on the breath of the assembled. The problem, however, is that he didn’t just set forth ideas humanity would be wise to make manifest – he made them moral imperatives that must be done now, because the THIS IS THE MOMENT, and NOW IS THE MOMENT THAT THIS IS, and the moment to come in a few moments is also the moment, but it’s a few moments past the previous moment, which was also now. THIS IS THE MOMENT to do something about Darfur. Fine. What? THIS IS THE MOMENT to do something about Burmese dissidents. Fine. What?
Nothing will be done about either; they are, unfortunately, matters inconsequential to the general order of things. This is not to say that they are not obscene, or horrific, or more evidence of human perfidy both general and specific, but just as the world summed the strength to turn away from Rwanda and Cambodia, it will manage to struggle with the daunting task of doing nothing about Darfur or Burma. The drone of a jet engine outside your window, bearing you to another international conference, does an admirable job of masking the sound of a machete striking bone down below.
As always, read the whole thing.
[Update a while later]
I have to also say that the unexplained image of the Magritte painting in response to the Obama campaign claim that the campaign speech was not a campaign speech was brilliant. One of the things that’s great about Lileks is that he respects his readers’ intelligence.
…with women.
Somehow, it reminds me of this classic Martin Mull (and Steve Martin) sea shanty.
It’s a busy job, but someone has to do it.
The “rocks have rights” crowd are worried again about vandalizing space:
Edward O Wilson has suggested that biophilia, our appreciation of Earth’s biosphere, is a by-product of evolving in this environment. If he’s right, we might find we don’t care about other worlds in the same way. This raises the alarming prospect of rapacious lunar mining altering the view from Earth.
Maybe our biophilia will kick in here: after all, our view of the Moon is one of Earth’s natural vistas. Surely we can agree that we don’t want that changed? It is an awesome thing to look up and remember that human footprints once marked the Moon’s surface. It’s quite another to imagine the moon looking like an abandoned quarry.
No, we can’t agree. Note that this was in the context of a discussion on “eco issues” on the moon.
Here’s the “eco issue” on the moon (and in the rest of the universe, as far as we know right now). There is no “eco” there. There is also no “bio” for our “biophilia” to kick in about. Ecology and biology are about life, something that exists only on earth. It’s one thing to want to preserve an ecosystem, but when one simply wants to preserve the entire universe in its current “pristine” state, there’s something unsettling and misanthropic going on.
Why is it all right for a meteroid to slam into the lunar surface and leave a crater (which has happened billions of times throughout history, and continues today) which is how the moon got to look the way it is, but a pit for mining is verboten? Would he object to seeing the lights of a lunar city up there? Does he have any idea how far away it is and how much mining one would have to do to see it from earth, even with a telescope?
What is this worship of entropy? What is this loathing of humanity? What is this apparent loathing of life itself?
Jim Lindgren on compulsory volunteerism. This is the kind of thing that we’re in for in an Obama administration. It’s the new New Deal. As some commenters note, I wonder if we get to wear arm bands.
[Mid-morning update]
Princess Obama?
Or does he just not know what committees he’s on? And not on?
And which is worse? Not to mention his inability to keep his story straight about Jerusalem.
Get the man a teleprompter, quick!
So far. Ron Bailey wraps up the end-of-the-world conference. I hadn’t previously heard the Yeltsin nuclear football story. It makes one wonder how many other close calls we’ve had.
I’ve been having trouble with MT getting it to publish a post. I want to see if this will force it.