So Trump called him an idiot, and told him to quit? Well, he is, and he should. But why does he still have his job? For someone who became famous in part for publicly firing people, Trump sure seems to have a hard time actually doing it.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Speaking of idiots, Joe Biden is saying that people who support due process under the law are just like Nazis. Right.
Boeing and Lockmart seem to be getting their money’s worth for their campaign donations to him. But while he’s clearly a tool, he’s never been the sharpest one in the shed. As Eric notes, the irony is that, prior to SpaceX, it was ULA had an actual monopoly on Air Force launches.
…to (racist) Ta-Nehisi Coates:
“The problem with the police,” you write, “is not that they are fascists pigs, but that our country is ruled by majoritarian pigs. And so to challenge the police is to challenge the American people who send them into the ghettos armed with the same self-generated fears that compelled people who think they are white to flee the cities and into the Dream.” There, you’ve said it. You’ve indicted the majority of the American people on serious charges—and many of them (not all) in their guilt and shame will grant you a moral pass. Some will feign outrage, but most, like aristocrats who reversed roles with the plebeians at the European Dionysian bacchanals, will assume a mask of contrition, look to some hoped-for redemptive moment in the higher registers of their innocent conscience, and move on. Your accusations have made for interesting dinner talk among the cognoscenti and literati in liberal bourgeois enclaves, where some believe moral masochism and symbolic self-flagellation are signs of virtue.
You touch on your flirtation with some special black racial essentialism in your book, and it is both affecting and sympathetic: “My working theory then held all black people as kings in exile, a nation of original men severed from our original names and our majestic Nubian culture. Surely this was the message I took from gazing out in the [Howard] Yard. Had any people, anywhere, ever been as sprawling and beautiful as us?” Unfortunately, there is nothing special about the black body. There is nothing special about any racially distinct physical body per se. Black skin does not convey nobility. Neither does white skin, or yellow skin. Your body is not special until it conjoins itself to a mind and adapts nature to its needs and desires and rational aspirations, its self-actualization and manifested agency. Any human body that fails to achieve a self-cultivated moral character and inscrutable human will is merely an ecological social ballast: ignoble, exploitable, a heap of unintelligible flesh on this earth.
This abnegation of personal responsibility assumes its logical end in your failure to grant black people responsibility for their own lives in the phenomenon of black-on-black crime. You tell your son: “Black-on-black crime is jargon, violence to language . . . . To yell black-on-black crime is to shoot a man and then shame him for bleeding.” Why? You give no reasons. In truth, black-on-black crime is a pathology that has to be reckoned with. Your own experiences with the police and with violence tell a more complicated story than you’d like. You write about your friend Prince Jones. He was shot and killed by a police officer who claimed that your late friend had tried to run him over with his Jeep. This police officer was black. You write of a schoolyard boy who first apprised you of your place in the world by revealing a gun at his waist. In brandishing his weapon, you write, “he let it be known how easily I could be selected.” You write eerily of his haunting presence in your life—the boy in whose small eyes you saw “a surging rage that could, in an instant, erase my body.” He, too, was black. Throughout your letter to your son, black people are mostly treated as mindless automatons who can’t seem to help themselves—and you apply this idea of helplessness to violence. You quote your own father who justified beating you by announcing, “Either I can beat him, or the police.” That’s all there is to it?
In your world, black-on-black crime is causally reducible to the machinations of the orchestrators of a system apparently designed to rule the neurons and synapses of the black brain. Have you told your son that he is twice as likely to be murdered by another black man than by a white police officer? Perhaps not, because it would not make any difference. The gang members and black individuals who kill others, including blacks, are certified moral icons who deserve dispensation because, in your reasoning, they are powerless before the street crime of history that brought the ghettos into existence.
As they do with the Arabs, the Left deprives everyone, other than white people, of moral agency.
She lied about Benghazi, and (unsurprisingly) she lied about the unmasking. More thoughts from Ann Althouse:
[I]t sure looks like members of an incoming Republican administration were spied on by a Democratic political operative who happened to find a meeting suspicious.
You don’t say.
It will now have a seven-meter fairing.
This is another nail in the coffin of SLS.
He’s released a spectacular mix tape of bloopers.
This is just crying out for a subtitled narrative, a la the Corporal Story.
[Update a few minutes later]
Here it is:
This is how you learn to fly rockets. NASA could never do this.
We’re now into our second full day without power. Fortunately, we’re flying back to CA tomorrow. Things are slowly getting back to normal in Palm Beach County, but there is still a curfew from dusk to dawn (it just ended for last night). Our ice has essentially melted, and we’re down to the last of our pre-storm food, but Publix are open, and hopefully they’ll start to re supply. We have several fallen limbs to cut up, but Home Depot is out of chain saws, and doesn’t know when they’ll be getting more (the storm moving up north is likely disrupting supply chains).
On the cat front, it seems to be a lymphoma, but an aggressive one. The bad news is that the tumors aren’t shrinking with the steroid treatment, but the good news is that they aren’t growing, either, and she seems to be stable and happy. We don’t get in until after the hospital closes tomorrow, but should be able to pick her up on Thursday and bring her home, for however long she ends up living.
[Thursday-morning update]
We got in about five last eveing, had dinner and went to bed. Feeling much better now, and it’s nice to be back in CA, despite the idiocy of the voters here. Had the first good night’s sleep in days, to cool temperatures and the sound of our new garden fountain outside our window. Going in this morning to bring Rerun home, and try to get things back, as much as possible around here, to normal.
If Jose hits DC and NY, I blame them, for voting for Hillary. And for being anti-science on gender and race.
Rest in peace (I have no idea how to copy/paste on these damned finger painting devices, but Instapundit has a text from his son, Alex)). He was an amazing person with an amazing life. I last saw him when I dropped by Chaos Manor a couple years ago to give him a copy of my book, which he reviewed very nicely.
I’ll have more to say when I’ve survived the hurricane and gotten back to a real computer.
[Sunday-morning update, as the winds rise outside our Boynton Beach apartment]
Sarah Hoyt remembers someone she considered a friend and colleague.
When I stopped by to see him a couple years ago, we talked about what was happening with SpaceX and NASA in general, and reminisced about our long-time mutual friend Bill Haynes, whom he hadn’t been aware had been killed in an auto accident on Palos Verdes on his way to church a couple years earlier (both Buzz and I had delivered a eulogy, but I think that Jerry was too sick at the time). It was a tough conversation because his hearing was shot, both from the brain cancer that he’d survived, but long-term from being an artillery handler in Korea. When Roberta let me into the library, I had to figure out how to get his attention without startling him, because the bell wasn’t doing so. I was unsuccessful, but he had no problem once he realized the unexpected intruder was me.
Heading back to LA, probably Tuesday, maybe Wednesday, Irma and American Airlines willing. I hope I’ll be able to attend the service and see a lot of old (sadly, in both senses of the word) friends.
[Late-evening update on Sunday]
J. Neil Schumann has some remembrances, too. I suspect we’ll see a lot of this over the next few days.
[Monday-morning update]
Glenn Reynolds writes that, as a kid in the gloomy 70s, Jerry gave him (and many others) hope for a better future.
We’re in Boynton Beach, getting ready to board up our house in Lake Worth. Posting will be sparse because my only computer is my phone and Patricia’s iPod.
[Wednesday-evening update]
Here’s the sitrep. We’re staying on the third floor of a new apartment building a block from the Intracoastal (not on the island). It’s solid concrete, built to current Palm Beach County codes, with the only glass patio doors rated to 150 mph. We’re boarding up a house a few miles inland that probably couldn’t take a direct hit of a 4 or 5, but that seems unlikely. We came down here to prep it to sell, and Patricia’s son is living in it. We could bug out in theory (American is offering no-fee flight changes), but we don’t want to leave him in the lurch. Worst case for us is if it does come right up the middle of the peninsula, which would put us on the dirty side of the storm (our apartment windows are south facing), but I think we’ll be OK even in that event. We are well above any potential surge, as is our car (in fact, it’s a floor above us). Our current concern is finding gas before it hits. A lot of lines, and we’re a little below half. We’d really like to top off.
[Thursday-night update]
I went out and spent 45 minutes in line getting gas this morning. We’re storing water in bottles, and making ice and putting it in gallon zip locks in the freezer. We’ll move into fridge as necessary if we lose power. Fortunately, unlike most here, we only need hold out until we can get flights out next week when airports reopen after the storm.
[Friday-night update]
Bad news for Cuba and southwest Florida, good news for us. The storm has taken a turn to the south and west, scrubbing the upper west coast of the island, and heading for landfall perhaps near Naples, perhaps with reduced strength from the Cuba encounter. But it won’t have reduced it enough to spare Naples and Fort Myers a huge storm surge.
What it means for us is that, while we’ll still probably see hurricane-force winds, they will be much lower than previously anticipated, and nothing we can’t handle. The only bad news is that the northeast side of the storm, where we’ll now be, will have a lot of tornadic activity. No problem for us in the apartment building, but it puts the house at risk.
[Sunday-afternoon update]
Almost 5 PM EDT, and the winds are continuing to increase. We just lost power, most likely for the duration, until crew can start repairing after the storm. We’ll start to move accumulated ice from the freezer to the fridge.