Another huge oil discovery in Brazil.
What’s amazing is not so much that Congress won’t allow us to pump oil, which we badly need to do. They won’t even allow us to look for it, especially if it’s in a “pristine” (aka barren coastal plain, frozen in the winter and a mosquito-infested bog in the summer) region, at least according to Senator McCain.
What are they afraid we might find?
For that kind of money, I’d expect Cat 8, at least.
An audiophile and his money are soon parted.
[Update a few minutes later]
As noted, the Amazon customer reviews are hilarious.
[Update in the evening]
Stephen Dawson (from Down Under) has a defense (albeit pretty flimsy. as he admits) of Denon.
I have to admit my disappointment as well. I’d always respected Denon up until this. As someone in comments said, one hopes that the marketing person responsible will have a few of these cables run through them from one end to the other. Or be keelhauled with them.
I just got the sad news from Pat Kelley:
Len took his final journey this morning, passing peacefully. His family is going to have his ashes interred at Arlington cemetery, but I have no schedule. For those who wish to express condolences, you can reach his life partner, Anne Greenglass via email, [email me for the address if you want to do so–rs].
I tried to address this notice to all the people on my list, but I’m sure there are others I may have missed, so please forward this to anyone else you feel would want to know. I do intend to continue trying to get backing for Len’s last design (Space Van 2010) as a tribute.
Len was a truly unique man, and a rare breed these days. Always the gentleman, honest to a fault, and always ready to give credit where it was due (and sometimes even allowing the unworthy to take credit for his work, for the sake of an important effort). He is unreplaceable, and will be sorely missed.
Ad astra, cum laetitia, Len.
[Previous post here]
I just got the sad news from Pat Kelley:
Len took his final journey this morning, passing peacefully. His family is going to have his ashes interred at Arlington cemetery, but I have no schedule. For those who wish to express condolences, you can reach his life partner, Anne Greenglass via email, [email me for the address if you want to do so–rs].
I tried to address this notice to all the people on my list, but I’m sure there are others I may have missed, so please forward this to anyone else you feel would want to know. I do intend to continue trying to get backing for Len’s last design (Space Van 2010) as a tribute.
Len was a truly unique man, and a rare breed these days. Always the gentleman, honest to a fault, and always ready to give credit where it was due (and sometimes even allowing the unworthy to take credit for his work, for the sake of an important effort). He is unreplaceable, and will be sorely missed.
Ad astra, cum laetitia, Len.
[Previous post here]
James Kirchick writes that the Democrats are trying to lie their party to victory, and the country to defeat in Iraq:
In 2004, the Senate Intelligence Committee unanimously approved a report acknowledging that it “did not find any evidence that administration officials attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their judgments.” The following year, the bipartisan Robb-Silberman report similarly found “no indication that the intelligence community distorted the evidence regarding Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.”
Contrast those conclusions with the Senate Intelligence Committee report issued June 5, the production of which excluded Republican staffers and which only two GOP senators endorsed. In a news release announcing the report, committee Chairman John D. Rockefeller IV got in this familiar shot: “Sadly, the Bush administration led the nation into war under false pretenses.”
Yet Rockefeller’s highly partisan report does not substantiate its most explosive claims. Rockefeller, for instance, charges that “top administration officials made repeated statements that falsely linked Iraq and Al Qaeda as a single threat and insinuated that Iraq played a role in 9/11.” Yet what did his report actually find? That Iraq-Al Qaeda links were “substantiated by intelligence information.” The same goes for claims about Hussein’s possession of biological and chemical weapons, as well as his alleged operation of a nuclear weapons program.
Four years on from the first Senate Intelligence Committee report, war critics, old and newfangled, still don’t get that a lie is an act of deliberate, not unwitting, deception. If Democrats wish to contend they were “misled” into war, they should vent their spleen at the CIA.
Yes. Bill Clinton’s CIA, since George Bush foolishly left George Tenant in charge of it, even after 911, and never even seriously attempted to clean house, other than the failed attempt by Porter Goss. The president got bad intelligence. But the Democrats are being mendacious in their selective memory and rewriting of history.
I loved this:
A journalist who accompanied Romney on his 1965 foray to Vietnam remarked that if the governor had indeed been brainwashed, it was not because of American propaganda but because he had “brought so light a load to the laundromat.” Given the similarity between Romney’s explanation and the protestations of Democrats 40 years later, one wonders why the news media aren’t saying the same thing today.
I assume that the last phrase is simply a rhetorical flourish. There’s no reason to wonder at all.
Very little in this essay is new to people who have been following the arguments in space policy circles for years, but it’s useful to pull it all together into one place, and bring it up to date. I and many others have long advocated that we need to resurrect NACA (which was absorbed into NASA half a century ago) and start developing technology that can support private industry, as we did for aviation. With the new private space passenger vehicles now starting to be developed, the time is ripe for it, and Jeff Foust and Charles Miller have made a very powerful case. This should be must reading for both presidential campaigns.
[Update mid morning]
This piece I wrote a few years ago on the centennial of flight seems pertinent.
[Mid-afternoon update]
Jon Goff has an interesting post on a reusable two-stage vehicle concept.
There are no doubt many people empathetic for Luke Russert today, losing his father, with whom he apparently had a very close bond (and a father who had a very close bond to his own father), two days before Father’s day, and fresh out of college.
But I feel particularly so, having been in a similar situation, many years ago.
There were a lot of similarities, but three big differences.
First, while Luke had just finished college, I was in the middle of finals of my second-to-last semester. It was May, in Michigan, only a month before Father’s Day. Fortunately, all of my professors were understanding, and allowed me to make up, including delaying the publication of the final report of a class space systems engineering project to which I had to contribute, being a major contributor. I recall sitting on the porch in Ann Arbor, on one of those perfect early summer days in June, after we laid my father to rest, in which the temperature, humidity and sunlight were exactly as intended, writing in longhand (which I hated) the orbital mechanics aspects of the concept to be handed to the Aerospace Engineering Department secretary for inclusion. I also remember Professor Don Greenwood, who literally wrote the book on dynamics, giving me some extra time to study for the oral exam that was part of his graduate course, and passing me, no doubt from pity.
Unlike Luke, I graduated from college without my father having been able to see it happen, something which he no doubt often doubted (as did I, often) would ever happen.
Second, and trivially, my father was not a world-famous newsman, though he was as well-respected in his much smaller community of Flint, Michigan. He had been the producer for many years of the A.C. Spark Plug (now Delphi, and no longer part of GM) spring and fall concerts at the IMA Auditorium, in which he had lined up major stars of the era, including Edie Adams, Peter Palmer, Anita Bryant, and many others, with the contributions of the GM divisions vocal chorus clubs and its many talented employees. I recall going out to Luigi’s for the best pizza anywhere with them, a restaurant which still has many pictures of those stars on its walls.
I recall from my own eulogy that I gave at the Unitarian service, that he was an inverse Will Rogers–that he never met a man who didn’t like him. I also remember stealing a line from Barney Miller–that whenever someone would tell me what a great guy my dad was, I’d say, “Yeah, he’s a block off the young chip.”
But another big difference, perhaps the biggest, is that while, as Luke did, I lost my father to a heart attack (at an even younger age than Tim Russert–fifty five), it didn’t happen suddenly. It took him over a month to die. It was his second (the first being over a decade earlier, when in his mid forties). The fact that I had to go back and forth between Flint and Ann Arbor to see him for three weeks contributed to my lackluster late-semester academic performance. It really wiped out the last of the semester, but it gave me the chance, unlike Luke, to say goodbye.
Fortunately for Luke, he perhaps didn’t have as great a need, though the pain must have cut through him like a knife, being an ocean away when he heard the news, and knowing that there would be no last words. But Luke by all reports had a great relationship with his dad, and perhaps, let us hope, that no last words were necessary.
Almost three decades later, I feel as though I squandered my opportunity, being young and stupid. I felt that he didn’t understand me, and what I was about or trying to do. I know now, as I approach the age of his dying (though I hope to live many years longer), that we were in many ways much more alike than in the superficial ways that, as I thought then, we were different. There are many things that I would say to my father given another chance, even only knowing what I knew then, but not having the wisdom to do so. We had had our differences, and even lying in the hospital, his lungs filling with fluid, slowly drowning him from the congestive heart failure, I couldn’t tell him that I loved him, but I think that he knew I did. I can only console myself now with that hope. I would hope that had he lived, he would have been proud of what I have done with my life though, in honesty, I’m not always that proud myself. There are many mistakes that I’ve made, but almost always in good, if naive intent.
The hardest part of that month was that I was the one who had to tell his widowed mother, a woman who had come to this country early in the century, and lost many of those she left behind in Europe to the Holocaust, that he, her only child, who had survived many missions in the waist of a B-25 over Italy, and was the only member of the crew to get out of the last mission without being killed or captured, had died. I still remember her audible grief. “He was my Einstein,” she cried, she wailed. I held her, and cried with her. She went back to her condo in Miami Beach, and died herself less than three years later, no doubt from heartbreak.
I doubt if he reads this blog, but on the off chance that he does, on this Father’s Day, Dad? Thank you for everything. I love you.
Happy Father’s Day.
There are no doubt many people empathetic for Luke Russert today, losing his father, with whom he apparently had a very close bond (and a father who had a very close bond to his own father), two days before Father’s day, and fresh out of college.
But I feel particularly so, having been in a similar situation, many years ago.
There were a lot of similarities, but three big differences.
First, while Luke had just finished college, I was in the middle of finals of my second-to-last semester. It was May, in Michigan, only a month before Father’s Day. Fortunately, all of my professors were understanding, and allowed me to make up, including delaying the publication of the final report of a class space systems engineering project to which I had to contribute, being a major contributor. I recall sitting on the porch in Ann Arbor, on one of those perfect early summer days in June, after we laid my father to rest, in which the temperature, humidity and sunlight were exactly as intended, writing in longhand (which I hated) the orbital mechanics aspects of the concept to be handed to the Aerospace Engineering Department secretary for inclusion. I also remember Professor Don Greenwood, who literally wrote the book on dynamics, giving me some extra time to study for the oral exam that was part of his graduate course, and passing me, no doubt from pity.
Unlike Luke, I graduated from college without my father having been able to see it happen, something which he no doubt often doubted (as did I, often) would ever happen.
Second, and trivially, my father was not a world-famous newsman, though he was as well-respected in his much smaller community of Flint, Michigan. He had been the producer for many years of the A.C. Spark Plug (now Delphi, and no longer part of GM) spring and fall concerts at the IMA Auditorium, in which he had lined up major stars of the era, including Edie Adams, Peter Palmer, Anita Bryant, and many others, with the contributions of the GM divisions vocal chorus clubs and its many talented employees. I recall going out to Luigi’s for the best pizza anywhere with them, a restaurant which still has many pictures of those stars on its walls.
I recall from my own eulogy that I gave at the Unitarian service, that he was an inverse Will Rogers–that he never met a man who didn’t like him. I also remember stealing a line from Barney Miller–that whenever someone would tell me what a great guy my dad was, I’d say, “Yeah, he’s a block off the young chip.”
But another big difference, perhaps the biggest, is that while, as Luke did, I lost my father to a heart attack (at an even younger age than Tim Russert–fifty five), it didn’t happen suddenly. It took him over a month to die. It was his second (the first being over a decade earlier, when in his mid forties). The fact that I had to go back and forth between Flint and Ann Arbor to see him for three weeks contributed to my lackluster late-semester academic performance. It really wiped out the last of the semester, but it gave me the chance, unlike Luke, to say goodbye.
Fortunately for Luke, he perhaps didn’t have as great a need, though the pain must have cut through him like a knife, being an ocean away when he heard the news, and knowing that there would be no last words. But Luke by all reports had a great relationship with his dad, and perhaps, let us hope, that no last words were necessary.
Almost three decades later, I feel as though I squandered my opportunity, being young and stupid. I felt that he didn’t understand me, and what I was about or trying to do. I know now, as I approach the age of his dying (though I hope to live many years longer), that we were in many ways much more alike than in the superficial ways that, as I thought then, we were different. There are many things that I would say to my father given another chance, even only knowing what I knew then, but not having the wisdom to do so. We had had our differences, and even lying in the hospital, his lungs filling with fluid, slowly drowning him from the congestive heart failure, I couldn’t tell him that I loved him, but I think that he knew I did. I can only console myself now with that hope. I would hope that had he lived, he would have been proud of what I have done with my life though, in honesty, I’m not always that proud myself. There are many mistakes that I’ve made, but almost always in good, if naive intent.
The hardest part of that month was that I was the one who had to tell his widowed mother, a woman who had come to this country early in the century, and lost many of those she left behind in Europe to the Holocaust, that he, her only child, who had survived many missions in the waist of a B-25 over Italy, and was the only member of the crew to get out of the last mission without being killed or captured, had died. I still remember her audible grief. “He was my Einstein,” she cried, she wailed. I held her, and cried with her. She went back to her condo in Miami Beach, and died herself less than three years later, no doubt from heartbreak.
I doubt if he reads this blog, but on the off chance that he does, on this Father’s Day, Dad? Thank you for everything. I love you.
Happy Father’s Day.
OK, now Obama seems to like guns. At least as long as he’s the only one allowed to have one.
But you have to admit, it is the Chicago way.