Trump And Obama

I’m thinking about writing a long piece about how similar they are in many ways. I’ve started a list:

Reverse midas touch
Die-hard cultish base
Big in pop culture
Inarticulate foot-in-mouth off prompter
Indifference/hostility to Constitution
Charismatic to Selective audience (related to cult above)
Reckless disregard for the truth
Travel expenses
Dunning-Kruger
Despised by members of his own party

Any others?

[Wednesday-afternoon update]

Here’s another one: They both waged war on the media, though different media (Obama’s main target was Fox News).

The Risk Of Spaceflight

A few months ago I did a phone interview with Sarah Scoles. She finally wrote the piece based in part on it, over at The Atlantic. (Note, Apollo 1 astros died of asphyxiation, not from the fire itself, Columbia happened 17 years after Challenger, not 36, and it was the co-pilot who died on the VG test flight. I’ll blame her editor, since she clearly gets the last two right later in the piece. I assume they’ll fix it at least on line.)

Bump Stocks

They’re not worth banning, but no one really cares about them that much:

Bump stocks, says Mr. Valone, “are an amusement, because they don’t under normal circumstances turn an AR-15 or another rifle into a killing machine, because you can’t hit anything with it. Only when you are presented 400 yards away with a field of uninterrupted humanity would something like that even be effective.”

Hard cases make for bad law.

Space Regulation

Glenn Reynolds has put together a short video.

A couple points: The FAA has only been regulating space since the mid-90s; prior to that it was done by a separate office that reported directly to the Secretary of Transportation. I recommended in my book that the office be taken out of the FAA and restored to its original place in DoT. Others (including NASA administrator nominee Jim Bridenstine, who told me in February that he read the book) have recommended this as well, as has the commercial industry, but they’re (unsurprisingly) getting pushback from the FAA. Over a year ago, I had an op-ed in The New Atlantis in which I said that the FAA should keep its head on the clouds, and hands off space.

If Elon really does build BFR, and wants to use it for point to point, it’s going to raise some very interesting regulatory issues. Under the current law, because it’s suborbital, it will be regulated by the Office of Commercial Space Transportation, not the aviation portion of the FAA. There will be no certification of the vehicles; they will operate under a standard launch license, and the spaceflight participants (aka “passengers”) will fly in an informed-consent regime, without the same expections of safety they’d have with an airliner. We’ll see how long some in Congress will find that acceptable.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!