This probably isn’t it, but in the immortal words of Marlon Brando, it has to be “a contendah.” Particularly at the level of the court from which it was excreted. Of course, the real problem is the ADA, which opened the doors to such nonsense.
Filet Of Keillor
Lileks practices his fine art on his fellow Minnesota scribe, once again:
“,,,I want to see my man excited by the prospect of victory and not shrink from it as so many Democrats do. They’ve read too many books about heroic dissenters and it makes them nervous about being in too big a crowd.”
I have no idea what he’s talking about. Seriously. Perhaps in Pasedena there’s some alternate-universe Barnes and Noble where the shelves are stacked high with books praising the administration and shouting the myriad & infinite glories of America the Perfect, but I was at B&L today and there was a table six feet long heaped with books about how we’re screwed and broke and lied to and misled and all the other merry sentiments that abound in the land these days. I don’t think any of the authors are worried about selling too many books, and ending up in too big a crowd. If he’s saying that the Modern Brave Soul automatically questions his principles if they’re accepted by the masses – the loutish, stupid, cat-strangling masses – then he seems to have missed that portion of the internet that practices Heroic Dissent on a daily basis. Or maybe he spends all day reading the Daily Kos and wonders why these people are so timid and gunshy.
Let’s keep going with that crowd idea:
“The huge crowds that Barack draws are stunned by the fact that someone like him, with that interesting name, is – hang on now – a mainstream candidate for President of the United States, and that he is, on close examination, One of Us.”
That’s the line that pinged out at me, and made me file away the column for future fiskery. One of us. Never mind the gabba-gabba-hey connotations, or the “mainstream” line – I’d love to hear a Woebegon ep in which Rev. Wright brings his race-based rhetoric to a small Lutheran church. (“Think twice about who you put your arm around, Senator McCain,” the Scout cautioned in another column, back in the olden times when associations were relevant..) No, by “one of us” Keillor, I suspect, means the “us” of the smart set, the people who read the New Yorker even if one out 52 covers offends, the people who went to college for real instead of floating by with frat-boy grins, the people who protested the war instead of fighting it, the people who grapple, you know, with issues, seriously, and express a certain soulful anguish at the complexity of it all, and file away the details about zoning disputes with neighbors to be worked into a novel six years hence, when the whole incident has ripened into a metaphor.
Lots more where that came from.
On The Radio
Sorry for the short notice, but I’d forgotten myself. I and my partner in crime in our July 20th space ceremony will be on the radio in half an hour, at The Space Show.
Just A Rant
And probably a futile one, and one that I’ve even probably kvetched about before. But when did top posting become the norm for email? Was it Microsoft and AOL’s fault?
And is there anything that can be done at this point? In many extended discussions, I feel like I’m driving on the wrong side of the road in my own country.
Rolling My Eyes
…at Keith’s brief “review” of my exploration piece:
The author of this article makes some odd, borderline misogynist, and mostly unsupportable claims (mixed with some valid points) as he rambles along trying to explain why people do or not explore. “Empirically obvious“? – Where’s the data to support this?
Where the support for the claim that it is “misogynist,” “borderline” or otherwise? Is he claiming that Cristina Hoff Sommers is misogynist?
What is “odd” about my claims?
And as for the data to support my claim, I provided it in the piece. Things for which there is an “innate human urge” are done by most, if not all humans. Most people don’t explore.
[Update a few minutes later]
One of the commenters over there gets it:
I didn’t see anything misogynist in Simberg’s piece – he’s just pointing out a potential cost of browbeating and drugging boys into behaving more like girls in school.
Exactly. If my piece was (mis)interpreted to imply that women cannot or should not be explorers, that’s absurd, and I would hope obviously so.
The Living Constitution
Is Barack Obama too young to be president?
Sure seems that way to me.
The New Area 51
Here’s a nice piece on Mojave at Popular Mechanics.
Good News On The Life Extension Front
From Instapundit.
I think that this stuff is going to sneak up on us, and the political establishment is going to not have any idea how to respond to it. But it will be a disaster for social security in its current form, as well as pension plans, though a boon for those of us who have never counted on it.
An Alternate History
The Problem With Ares
Henry Spencer (whose wisdom is finally becoming available on the web, apparently) explains:
An experienced designer with more freedom to act might have realised that there was just too much optimism in the Ares I concept, that a shuttle SRB was simply too small as a first stage for a rocket carrying the relatively heavy Orion spacecraft. There were several ways to handle the situation, but in my opinion the best was to just forget about Ares I entirely: build Ares V, or something like it, right away and use it for all the launches.
With a big launcher, there would be plenty of margin for weight overruns in development. Using the big launcher for Earth-orbit missions would obviously permit much heavier payloads there. Moreover, the lunar missions would get greater margins too, because they’d be done with two big launches rather than a big one and a little one, so they could weigh almost twice as much.
There is also an important pragmatic issue: the biggest threat to NASA’s return to the Moon is the possibility that Congress will delay or cancel development funding for Ares V. Doing Ares V right away, and using it for the Earth-orbit missions as well as the ones to the Moon, would have ensured that this crucial element of NASA’s plans actually gets built.
Of course, better yet would have been a focus on in-space infrastructure, drawing on ISS assembly experience, to allow us to use existing launchers. That would have also freed up money for earlier development of injection stages and landers, and made lunar missions much more of a fait accompli by now.