It’s “the usual mix of half truths, exaggerations, omissions and outright lies.”
In other words, what we’ve come to expect from government climate reports.
[Tuesday-morning update]
Oops, Naomi Oreske caught with biased numbers on “Exxon knew.”
Gee, it’s almost as thought they have a political agenda.
Lee Billings has an interview with him. This is Scott’s (whom I’ve know well for 35 years) standard response when asked about SLS:
Heavy-lift rockets are strategic national assets, like aircraft carriers. There are some people who have talked about buying heavy-lift as a service as opposed to owning and operating, in which case the government would, of course, have to continue to own the intellectual properties so it wasn’t hostage to any one contractor. One could imagine this but, in general, building a heavy-lift rocket is no more “commercial” than building an aircraft carrier with private contractors would be.
He never explains how a rocket that almost never flies, and costs billions per flight, if and when it does, is a “strategic national asset.” It seems more like a liability to me, in the modern age of commercial spaceflight.
[Update Tuesday morning]
More thoughts from Eric Berger.
[Late-morning update]
NASA’s safety Kobayashi Maru.
This is insanity.
[Update mid-afternoon]
Bob Zimmerman righteously rants. I really find it hard to believe that this thing will ever fly with crew.
Things are heating up there, and I don’t think it’s being covered much, particularly given all the coverage of the Texas shooting. First, the Huthis fired a Scud missile at Saudi Arabia from Yemen, which the Saudis shot down, and are blaming on their puppetmasters in Iran, declaring that it may be an act of war.
Meanwhile, the Lebanese Prime Minister has resigned. In Riyadh. Because he fears for his life and that Iran is now effectively in control there. And there’s a huge shakeup going on in the House of Saud. The ancient rivalry between the Arabs and the Persians may be reaching a boiling point.
All this as Israel has been engaging in the biggest war games in almost two decades.
But nothing to worry about. No more peaceful, stable region in the world, historically, than the Middle East.
[Update a few minutes later]
And the deputy governor of Asir province was killed in a helicopter crash. Could be a coincidence, but there’s a lot going on over there.
Steve Hayward writes that the Trump administration is arguably more conservative than Ronald Reagan’s. But to be fair, Reagan never had control of the House.
Watching football while replacing all the plumbing under the kitchen sink. Trap is clogged, and while we were renting it a decade ago, some idiot glued in two-inch ABS down there that’s impossible to get apart without cutting it off. It will give me a chance to get the disposal off to replace the old web in its throat, and put in separate traps for each sink, plus make it much easier to work on in the future.
[Monday-morning update]
Well, that turned into an adventure. Ended up replacing everything under the sink, including disposal, and still not sure I solved the drain problem, and won’t know until I go get an extension for the dishwasher drain hose.
[Monday-morning update]
Got all the plumbing put together, and determined that the drain problem was indeed downstream. Just paid a plumber $160 to snake it, and now it’s running clear. All in all, job cost about $450, but that included a powerful quiet new disposal. Hate to think what a plumber would have charged to do everything I did.
There’s still no evidence of any crime, but there is for Hillary’s campaign.
Cathy Young writes that sex is a lot more complicated than the gender feminists want to pretend.
Marcia Smith has a good write up of the nomination hearing for Bridenstine, which has very little to do with aeronautics or space. I would also note, as always, that SPLC is not a judge of hate groups; it’s itself a hate group that should not be relied on for anything. And Senator Bill “Ballast” Nelson is an idiot, if he thinks that Jim Beggs would have prevented the Challenger from launching.
[Friday-morning update]
Bob Zimmerman isn’t impressed.
But they are changing us. I’ve written before about what I’ve called the Bollardization of the Western World: the open, public areas of free cities are being fenced in by bollards, as, for example, German downtowns were after the Berlin Christmas attack, and London Bridge and Westminster Bridge were after two recent outbreaks of vehicular jihad. This is a huge windfall for bollard manufacturers – Big Bollard – and doubtless it’s a huge boost for the economy, if your town’s nimble enough to approve the new bollard plant on the edge of town, or if your broker is savvy enough to divest your tech stocks and go big on the bollard sector. As I write, Geraldo is on Fox demanding to know why this bike path wasn’t blocked off with concrete barriers.
Why? Why does every public place have to get uglified up just because Geraldo doesn’t want to address the insanity of western immigration policies that day by day advance the interests of an ideology explicitly hostile to our civilization? Instead Geraldo wants to tighten up vehicle rental. Why? Why should you have to lose an extra 15 minutes at an already sclerotic check-in counter because Hertz and Avis and UHaul have to run your name through the No-Rent list? Why should open, free societies become closed, monitored, ugly, cramped and cowering?
And Bollardization doesn’t even solve the problem, does it? Last week I was tootling through Williston, Vermont, which has just reconfigured its highway system to run green-painted bike paths down the center of the streets. And the thought occurred to me that, once you’ve bollarded off every sidewalk, what’s to stop jihadists mowing down cyclists? After all, if the eco-crowd are installing them in the middle of the roadway, they’re kind of hard to bollard off. And then a second thought occurred: As inviting a target as bike paths are in enviro-poseur communities, they’re even more inviting in genuine bicycling cultures such as the Netherlands or Scandinavia.
And now eight people are dead and dozens more injured – at the hands of a guy who came here in 2010 because he won a Green Card in the so-called “diversity lottery”. Why was that stupid program not suspended on September 12th 2001?
So Uber and truck-rental places are expected to do background checks on people to whom we give “diversity visas.” Wonderful.
Eric Berger has the story on how, in attacking SpaceX, they’re ripping off the taxpayer and actively damaging national security.
[Update a while later]
Meanwhile, the target launch date for Falcon Heavy is now late December.
This would be a nice Christmas present to space enthusiasts and the nation at large. https://t.co/C9MtND81vD
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) November 1, 2017