Claire Berlinski (who lives in the Parisian district of Le Marais), spent some time with them.
A Lunar Colony
Bob Zubrin {?!) and Homer Hickam say we have the technology; let’s do it.
Update a while later]
Dennis Wingo: The elephant and the moon. (Not new, but first time I’d seen it.)
The Deep Biosphere
Biologists have discovered a whole new world below the surface of the planet.
Geminids
It should be a good year for watching the meteor shower, if you can handle the temperatures.
The Climate Wars
The first shots are being fired in western Europe:
Who pays for environmental virtue?
The gilets jaune revolt begs the issue: who pays to save the planet? The Paris accords absolved the very countries driving emission increases — China and India — from mandating emissions cuts until 2030, leaving the burden largely on the backs of the West’s own middle and working classes.
Yet many of these people need fossil fuels to get to work or operate their businesses. Tourists may gape at the high-speed trains and the Paris Metro, but the vast majority get to work in cars. More than 80 percent of the Paris metropolitan area population lives in the suburbs and exurbs, in an area nearly the size of Connecticut and Rhode Island combined.
Like the revolutionaries of 1789, people are enraged by the hypocrisy of their betters. In pre-revolutionary times, French aristocrats and top clerics preached Christian charity while indulging in gluttony, sexual adventurism and lavish spending. Today they see the well-off and well-connected buying their modern version of indulgences through carbon credits and other virtue-signaling devices. Meanwhile, as many as 30 percent of Germans and as many as half of Greeks are spending 10 percent or more of their income on energy, the definition of “energy poverty.” This is occurring while these policies prove sadly ineffective in reducing emissions while the much disdained US leads the large countries in cuts.
It’s not about saving the planet; it’s about the “elites” (who are elite in name only, not in talent or competence or intelligence) signaling their virtue to their peers, while defecating on the commoners and telling them it’s cotton candy.
[Update a while later]
It’s hard to believe that it’s been almost exactly nine years since I wrote this piece about the Precautionary Principle. And nothing has changed.
The Facebook App
Yet another reason I’ve never installed it on my phone.
Vacation
We decided to drive up to Santa Ynez for a weekend holiday wine tour. We left last night in hopes of getting up here in time for the Delta IV launch out of Vandenberg, but it was scrubbed for a technical issue. The good news is that it’s rescheduled for an earlier launch tonight (1006), and we’ll still be up here. The weather is clear, and it should be good viewing of a night launch if it goes. It’s the first time in many months that we’ve traveled just for pleasure, with no business. Back to the grind on Monday.
[Update after the launch scrub]
Well, that was disappointing. We had a great spot on Ocean Avenue to view, a clear sky, and it aborted seven seconds before liftoff. No word on cause yet.
Seventy-Seven Years
I just noticed the date; it is one that, in Roosevelt’s words, “will live in infamy.” Seventy-seven years ago we abruptly entered the second world war when the Japanese attacked our fleet at Pearl Harbor. The passing of George H. W. Bush a week ago is a reminder that that event, along with the war itself, is passing from living memory.
Brokaw called them “The Greatest Generation.” I don’t know about that, but mine has not covered itself in glory. However I remain simultaneously hopeful for and fearful of the future. We do, for now, live in the best of times in human history.
But if you’re pessimistic, I guess you can take the Trump approach. After all, as Marx* once said, “What has posterity ever done for me?”
* Not that Marx. This one.
Still Off The Air
I flew up to DC on Tuesday after checking out the house in Florida, and was at the Galloway Symposium all day yesterday, with two back-to-back receptions afterward, and didn’t get back to my room until midnight. It was a very useful day, but it was marred by texts from my realtor that someone had attempted to break into the patio door and damage it, and she has open houses scheduled this weekend. So this morning first thing I had to find a handyman to go check out the situation.
Today is getting caught up in emails this morning, then a meeting at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce where I’ll have meetings with some officials from the Dept of Commerce, then a late-afternoon flight back to California. So no blogging today (either).
Bari And Eve
When political adversaries become friends.
The demonization of people with whom you disagree in good faith is one of the more depressing aspects of modern life. I follow a lot of science writers on Twitter (many of them women), but I avoid discussion of politics with them, based on their political tweets. It’s one of the reasons I have separate accounts for space/sci/tech and my general commentary.