Cathy Young writes that sex is a lot more complicated than the gender feminists want to pretend.
Yesterday’s Idiotic Hearing On The Hill
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.
Jihad
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.
Idiot Conservatives
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
Libre Office And PDF
So, I’m trying to convert a Libre Office Writer document to PDF. When I do so, it loses the right justification. Microsoft Word does a better job of it, but when I save the document in Libre Office as a *.docx, and reopen in Word, it loses the page templates. Anyone have any ideas?
[Update a few minutes later]
OK, I played around with the export settings, to preserve document structure, and it’s better now.
[Update a few more minutes later]
OK, I found the problem. It exports it just fine. The problem arises when I try to edit the PDF with Libre Office. It undoes the justification when it pulls it into Draw, and then it re-exports it that way.
[Update]
Here is my real problem. I wouldn’t have to edit it if I could make it do what I want in the first place. I’m trying to start the first page of the document in a certain style, and it refuses to do it. I can only start that style on the second page, with a blank first page. If I had a good PDF editor, I could just remove the first blank page after the conversion, but apparently I have to lay out money for that. It may ultimately be my only solution if I can’t get Libre Office to do what I want, though.
[Update late morning]
Someone on Twitter helped me figure out how to do it. I’ve finally got the document looking the way I want.
Mike Griffin
The guy who ignored the advice of the Aldridge Commission and industry to utilize commercial providers for the Vision for Space Exploration, instead issuing no-bid cost-plus contracts for Constellation, that were overrunning and slipping more than a year per year when it was canceled, seems like an odd choice to be put in charge of reforming procurement at the Pentagon.
Getting Off The Rock
Sarah Hoyt has an interview with Jeff Greason (part 1, part 2 will be tomorrow).
[Tuesday-morning update]
The Mueller Indictments
Some thoughts from Dan McLaughlin:
The overall picture here looks similar to what we saw with the Trump jr. story: people in the Trump campaign were desperate for dirt on Hillary, they were willing to work with anyone to get it, and Russian interests used this desperation to play them for suckers. Papadopoulos was frequently promised things, and promising things in turn to the campaign, that never got delivered. This is a running theme of Trump’s amateur-hour foreign policy campaign team (in contrast, one would note, to the professionals now running his foreign policy shop).
Where things get dicier for Trump is that the investigation and the Papadopoulos plea both focus on how this can all be tied back to Trump and his senior campaign staff. Papadopoulos pled guilty to lying about when he went to work for Trump relative to when he started talking to the professor; he tried to convince the FBI that he already knew about the professor’s dirt on Hillary before he joined the campaign. And on March 31, 2016, well before Trump had even locked up the Republican nomination, Papadopoulos told Trump and a roomful of Trump’s foreign policy advisers “in sum and substance, that he had connections that could help arrange a meeting between then-candidate Trump and President Putin.” The meeting, like many such things, never happened, but he kept the campaign (including an unnamed “senior policy advisor for the Campaign”) apprised that he was trying to arrange one, and the plea is mostly silent on what he was told by the campaign in return. Then, in late April – still well before the June meeting at Trump Tower – the professor began dangling “dirt” on Hillary: “They [the Russians] have dirt on her”; “the Russians had emails of Clinton”; “they have thousands of emails.”
Let us pause here to note that this is precisely the situation that many of us warned was a grave risk to national security with Hillary’s insecure email server, and which Hillary and her camp loudly denied to be a possibility while basically admitting it when they started complaining during the campaign (let alone after) about Trump publicly seeking leaks of her emails. This entire story is the perfect storm of an aggressive and devious foreign regime, a Republican nominee of low character surrounded by inept and naively cynical amateur advisers, and a Democratic nominee who was heedlessly reckless with national security out of partisan paranoia. Secretary Clinton exposed herself to what amounted to easy Russian blackmail, and everything else that happened followed from that.
Yup. Worst political class in history, and worst candidates in history.
[Update a few minutes later]
Andy McCarthy: Not much there, and a boon for Trump.
But the media will continue to have their hair on fire over it.
[Tuesday-morning update]
Popehat lawsplains the Manafort/Gates indictments, and the Papadopoulos guilty plea.
Computer Problems
Did a kernel upgrade in Fedora yesterday. Rebooted today. Wouldn’t boot, had errors. Rather than simple reboot, I decided to shut the whole machine down, then turn it on again. Now it’s dead.
Guess I’ll try swapping the power supply first. If that doesn’t work, sounds like a motherboard or CPU problem.
[Update a few minutes later]
Aaaaaaand, I can’t find any spare supplies. Have to run over to Fry’s to buy one, that probably isn’t the problem…
[Update after returning from Fry’s]
Welp, before I opened the new PS, I tried firing it up again. It booted without complaint. I guess I scared it with the new PS. #HappyHalloween
Seriously, though, it’s probably still a symptom of an incipient problem, probably from overheating.
NASA’s Risk Aversion
Remember when they were insisting on new-car-smell Dragons for CRS missions? Well, they’ve now approved flight-proven boosters. As I’ve long said, there will come a day when customers will demand a discount to fly on an unproven vehicle.
[Update a while later]
With today’s launch, SpaceX will double its record for annual launches.
[Update half an hour before launch]
You can follow launch and landing at the webcast.