Is it really true that a man offering a woman a seat on public transportation is creepy?
Then call me a neanderthal creep.
We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ God
Heather McDonald has been steadfastly arguing over at NRO that political conservativism doesn’t need to have a God, and that in arguing the success of Judeo-Christianity, many religious conservatives may be confusing cause and effect (I think there’s a powerful Anglosphere angle here…). While I’m not a conservative, I agree with everything in this post.
We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ God
Heather McDonald has been steadfastly arguing over at NRO that political conservativism doesn’t need to have a God, and that in arguing the success of Judeo-Christianity, many religious conservatives may be confusing cause and effect (I think there’s a powerful Anglosphere angle here…). While I’m not a conservative, I agree with everything in this post.
We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ God
Heather McDonald has been steadfastly arguing over at NRO that political conservativism doesn’t need to have a God, and that in arguing the success of Judeo-Christianity, many religious conservatives may be confusing cause and effect (I think there’s a powerful Anglosphere angle here…). While I’m not a conservative, I agree with everything in this post.
On The Edge Of Our Seats
COTS finalists are supposed to be announced in a couple hours.
Clark Lindsey has an overview of the program, and links (including one to the webcast of the announcement, which will occur at 4 PM Eastern).
[Update shortly after begin of announcement]
Just said that two have been selected. So we know they’re not going to be spreading money thin.
Well, that didn’t take long. SpaceX and RpK.
That means two (partially) reusable vehicle companies.
[Update a minutes later]
Well, I see via comments that I didn’t have to liveblog it. An army of reporters!
Heading South?
Has the oil fever finally peaked?
…the recent record-high prices have fueled a boom in exploration. And as that boom begins to yield more oil, the industry will gain a greater ability to ramp up production in one place in order to make up for any shortfall elsewhere.
This should reduce the impact of a supply disruption in, say, Iran or Nigeria, and ease what experts refer to as the security premium that’s currently build into oil prices.
“That [premium] is in the neighborhood of $25 dollars a barrel,” said James Williams, an energy economist at the consultancy WTRG Economics. “That number would go away, or most of it would go away, if we had more spare production capacity.”
And that’s not even considering shale and the tar sands, which are now coming on line, and will remain that way, as long as prices don’t drop back into the twenties.
Genocide, Not Ecocide
Environmentalists (most notably, recently, Jared Diamond) are fond of using Easter Island as a cautionary tale of what happens when resources are depleted in a non-renewable manner. Well, it’s looking a lot like this example is a fairy tale:
By the time the second round of radiocarbon results arrived in the fall of 2005, a complete picture of Rapa Nui’s prehistory was falling into place. The first settlers arrived from other Polynesian islands around 1200 A.D. Their numbers grew quickly, perhaps at about three percent annually, which would be similar to the rapid growth shown to have taken place elsewhere in the Pacific. On Pitcairn Island, for example, the population increased by about 3.4 percent per year following the appearance of the Bounty mutineers in 1790. For Rapa Nui, three percent annual growth would mean that a colonizing population of 50 would have grown to more than a thousand in about a century. The rat population would have exploded even more quickly, and the combination of humans cutting down trees and rats eating the seeds would have led to rapid deforestation. Thus, in my view, there was no extended period during which the human population lived in some sort of idyllic balance with the fragile environment.
It also appears that the islanders began building moai and ahu soon after reaching the island. The human population probably reached a maximum of about 3,000, perhaps a bit higher, around 1350 A.D. and remained fairly stable until the arrival of Europeans. The environmental limitations of Rapa Nui would have kept the population from growing much larger. By the time Roggeveen arrived in 1722, most of the island’s trees were gone, but deforestation did not trigger societal collapse, as Diamond and others have argued.
I’m sure that the argument now will be that they were about to collapse any year now, but the evil white men killed them before they had a chance to.
Having It Both Ways?
Andy McCarthy points out the cognitive dissonance of the ACLU and New York Times:
…which is it? Is the TSP leak a big nothing that changed no one’s behavior, or a bombshell that changed everyone’s behavior? Evidently, it depends on which scenario the Left believes will damage the Bush administration more on any given day.
Need A Knock-Out Blow
Here’s an interesting article on the history of Israeli military conflicts, and why they lost (or at least didn’t win, making another inevitable soon) this one.
I’m too busy to post much on this right now, but this leads to a much bigger theme. One of the damaging things that the UN has done over the decades is to short-circuit many conflicts, causing them to actually go on unabated for years, albeit at a lower level with flareups, because its emphasis and urgency is always on band-aid ceasefires and halting fighting, rather than achieving true peace or justice.
The Crisis In Photojournalism
On Monday I wrote at TCS Daily about it. Today, David Perlmutter has further thoughts, over at Editor and Publisher.
Perhaps it would be more reassuring if the enemy at the gates was a familiar one