Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Technology and Society

Susan Rice

7 Comments

Why she wrote an email to herself.

I continue to await Horowitz’s report. I suspect it will be a bombshell.

[Update a few minutes later]

The Trump and Clinton scandals are claiming a lot of bodies, at the Justice Department. I suspect that there will be some going down at Foggy Bottom, too.

[Update a few more minutes later]

Rice’s memo implies that Comey seriously misled the Senate about his meeting with Obama. In Comey’s rant about “liars and weasels,” he displays a serious lack of self awareness.

[Update a while later]

Carter Page, useful idiot.

I can’t recall in my life such a huge disparity between the media narrative and reality.

[Update after noon]

Last link was wrong, fixed now.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

The NASA Budget

40 Comments

Eric Berger has looked at it, and (unsurprisingly) the Trump administration seems to be in no hurry to get back to the moon. The NASA budget is going to become increasingly irrelevant in the next few years.

[Update a while later]

Dick Eagleson wonders not only if SLS’s days are numbered, but just how low the number is?

SLS, as currently envisioned, is a farce. Its development has been glacial and insanely expensive. It plows absolutely no significant new technological ground. It will be slow and insanely expensive to build. It is entirely expendable. Its associated spacecraft, Orion, is, at best, a Moon-craft, lacking heat shielding sufficient to withstand an Earth return from any significantly more distant point and, in any case, having life support capability for only 12 person-weeks of continuous occupancy.

But other than that, it’s great.

Last week’s launch was a major temblor, I think.

[Update early afternoon]

Here‘s Christian Davenport’s story (I saw him at the launch last week).

[Tuesday-morning update]

Katherine Mangu-Ward: It’s not a crazy idea to privatize the ISS.

Business, Economics, General Science, History, Mathematics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Technology and Society

Sea-Level-Rise Acceleration

28 Comments

Judith Curry’s latest thoughts (this is part of a series, to be continued).

The more times goes on, the less concerned I get about climate change (not that it may not change for the worse — that’s always a possibility — but in the sense that we really understand and can predict it). For example, consider the Iceland event of 1783. If that happened today, it would be much larger than anything we’ve been doing with CO2, and it’s entirely unpredictable.

As always, our best bet is to get as wealthy as possible so we’ll have the resources to deal with whatever the future holds. Instead the climate alarmists advocate polices that make energy needlessly more expensive (and hence everything more expensive, inhibiting economic growth).

[Update late afternoon]

Judith’s weekly climate roundup, which is usually interesting.

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