Thomas James, on scamming corporate executives with touchy-feely seminars.
The Top Five
Computing technologies that are hot for ’07.
Eighteen To One
That’s the ratio of potty words on “left,” as compared to “right” blogs. Based on my own reading of both kinds, it doesn’t shock me. I wonder if it says something about relative emotional maturity?
Doing Well By Doing Good
Gore’s hypocrisy is apparently even greater than we thought. Bill Hobbes explains.
And I agree with him (and Glenn Reynolds) that there are lots of non-GW reasons to reduce our use of fossil fuels. When the enviros get serious about this, and stop looking for excuses to abandon technologies, and run our lives through watermelon social-control schemes, there will be lots of solutions, including nuclear ones.
[Late-afternoon update]
Some interesting thoughts on Al Gore’s motives:
If he believed what he was saying on its own merits, then he would be behaving differently. Since his behavior and his rhetoric do not match, we learn something about him: that there is likely some other motivation for his policy preferences.
Those policy preferences – limit carbon, mandate the use of certain technologies, restrict land use, etc. – all seem to entail increasing governmental control over the economy. Mr. Gore
Way Off Base
Whenever I read anything like this rewriting of history, it makes it hard to take anything else that person says seriously. It tells me that that person is living in some kind of Clinton-spun dreamworld:
As to Bill Clinton not being the focus of right wing hatred, I disagree strongly. For years, I would see bumper stickers around town that said, “Don’t Blame Me, I Voted for Bush.” The right wing-funded litigation was going after Bill, not Hillary. Ken Starr persecuted [literally] Bill, not Hillary. And, the Republican Congress impeached and tried the President — not the First Lady — for no other reason than he was unfaithful to his wife, and in the face of a 65% approval rating. No, they were after Bill, because they just couldn’t bear to have been beaten by a Democrat. Especially a Democrat that they had targeted, on which they had attempted political homicide, and who just wouldn’t go away when a lesser man would have quit. Clinton’s perserverence [sic], and the continuing efforts by the Right to downplay his two Administrations, simply reinforce my theory that the Republicans will do anything — anything — to win.
Emphasis mine. Not only were there several other reasons, but that wasn’t even one of them. I know that you’ll be shocked to learn that none of the articles of impeachment mentioned his wife, or his fidelity to her. He was impeached for things that are federal crimes. Worse ones, in fact, than the one for which Scooter Libby is currently having a jury deliberate, because they included not just lying under oath, but witness intimidation and bribery, and subornation of perjury from others. And Libby hadn’t taken an oath in front of the American people to see that the law of the land was properly executed.
And he can’t even keep his false story straight, because in the very next sentence, he says that he was impeached because he’d won an election (funny, how they’ve never done that with any other Democrat president).
And this guy’s supposed to be a lawyer?
This is the kind of fantastic denial about the nature of the Clintons among Democrats that I wrote about the other day.
Demonstrating Their Priorities
It’s OK to have Representative “Frozen Cash” Jefferson on the Home Security Committee–just don’t put him in charge of anything serious, like taxes:
Pelosi removed Jefferson from the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee in response to Justice Department allegations that the Louisiana Democrat had accepted $100,000 in bribes and stored $90,000 of them in his freezer. The speaker then gave Jefferson a seat on the Homeland Security, and Democrats agreed to the change in a closed-door caucus in February.
“The idea that Homeland Security is less important than the tax-writing committee is ludicrous,” Blunt said Wednesday.
She Must Be Crazy
A German teenager has been locked in a psychiatric ward because she was being home schooled. And the court in Strasburg has no problem with the Hitler-era law under which this was done.
Ah, the enlightened Europeans. I wonder if this is one of the “foreign court decisions” that some Supreme Court justices think should guide their own?
Pet Peeve Alert
The Chair Force Engineer (aka “Mr. X”) likes the TeamVision approach to the VSE. I haven’t read it myself, so I don’t know if they claim that the Shuttle is “man rated” as Mr. X does (though he also uses quotes, so perhaps he’s not really making the claim). It is not, and never has been. “Man rating” is whatever NASA decides that it means, and it’s usually just an excuse to not use a vehicle that they don’t want (for other reasons) to use.
Empty Symbolism
Lileks, on Gorebal Warming:
The demands of the faith are specific and exacting. You must believe that climate change is largely the fault of man
Rolling Back To The VAB
Looks like they lose their March launch window. There was hail damage to the tiles, but it’s described as “cosmetic.” The big problem is the tank.