History, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, War Commentary

The Leftist Freak Out Over Trump’s Speech

29 Comments

Why yes, yes they do hate Western civilization:

So, for Jamelle Bouie, a Westerner asserting the value of Western civilization is barely-veiled racism? If that’s true, then the term “racism” is meaningless. In fact, it’s worse than meaningless: it’s dangerous. If you tell people that to love and to want to defend the culture of the West is a racist act, then they will cease to care about your judgment on the matter, because you are requiring them to hate themselves as an act of virtue. In that regard, Jamelle Bouie’s sentiment here is a much greater gift to the racist alt-right than anything Donald Trump said in Warsaw.

I mean, really, how ignorant and provincial do you have to be, Messrs. Beinart and Bouie, to hear Trump’s speech and think of it as a #MAGA version of a Nuremberg Rally Address? Is the degree of self-hatred of the West required to be a virtuous, woke person such that you cannot tell the difference between Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus and the Horst Wessel Song? Do they really think Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation (all of which is available on YouTube, starting here) is a plummy version of Triumph of the Will? If standing against this kind of liberal insanity means I have to stand with Donald Trump, well, okay, I’ll stand with Donald Trump. I won’t like it, but at least Donald Trump doesn’t hate his own civilization.

It’s why they find common cause with Islamists. Also (as usual), want more Trump? Because this is how you get more Trump.

[Mid-afternoon update]

Jonah Goldberg: In defense of western civilization.

[Saturday-morning update]

Trump defends the West, and the Left cries foul. They’re really showing their colors. So to speak.

[Update a few minutes later]

Some of the critics of Trump’s speech in Poland reject the idea of the greatness of Western Civilization. You don’t say.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

Pence’s Speech At KSC

10 Comments

Bob Zimmerman listened to it, so you don’t have to. It was pretty uninspiring, at least to anyone who knows what’s going on.

[Update a few minutes later]

Keith Cowing has a word cloud of the speech.

[Update a few more minutes later]

And more from Loren Grush:

it was a speech with very little substance. There were many anecdotes about the US’s past achievements in space, Pence argued that recent administrations had failed to “match the spirit of the American people” when it came to creating space policy. Multiple times he insisted that Trump would open “a new era of American space leadership.” But the most recent presidential budget request calls for cutting NASA’s funding, as well as canceling some of the agency’s offices and programs. Space is expensive. How does Pence plan to match our ambitions with our missions if there isn’t a detailed money plan?

So, six months into the Trump administration, NASA doesn’t have any space policy priorities or definitive leadership. NASA administrators are often instrumental in steering the direction of the space agency, and without one, the agency will lack a strategy for how to move forward. This is now the longest amount of time NASA has been without a new permanent administrator; the record was previously held by President Richard Nixon, who took 164 days after his inauguration to fill the position, according to the Planetary Society. NASA’s current acting administrator Robert Lightfoot, who took over temporarily when Trump was inaugurated, has now served longer than that. And there’s no indication when a new administrator will be named.

“Depending on the details, this backwards speech could signal a backwards space policy, meaning rolling back the progress that’s being made instead of building on the commercial space policies that Reagan started and Obama continued,” says Larson.

I have no particular expectations about civil space from Trump. But I’m happy that at least milspace seems to be undergoing reform.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary

Trump’s Tweets

27 Comments

Kurt Schlichter says to stop caring about them:

I didn’t vote for Donald Trump to be a role model or a moral paragon. I voted for him to not be Hillary Clinton, and to incrementally move towards actual conservatism. Like everyone else who voted for him, I knew he wasn’t a doctrinaire conservative. But he believed in some conservative things, and that was better than someone who believed in no conservative things, and who wanted to stamp her sensible shoe into our faces forever.

Was he my first choice? No. Was he my second? No. But was there any other choice when it came down to him or Felonia von Pantsuit?

No. Which is something a lot of the cogs in the machine that is Conservative, Inc., still don’t choose to acknowledge.

That’s pretty much my take, too.

Administrative, Business, Technology and Society, Weird

Libre Office Problem

16 Comments

I’ve been working on a document for a client, and it’s laid out in book format. Each chapter has its own page style (to maintain chapter title in headers) and there are several other styles as well. I’ve been printing it double sided, two pages per side. Today, when I tried to print it, instead of US Letter (which is what I set up all of the styles to be in) it insists on printing in a #8 Monarch Envelope format, which totally screws things up. But there’s no way to change it; the format is greyed out. The default for the printer is US Letter, the page styles are US Letter, but for some reason Office has decided that it’s only going to allow me to print it as an envelope, in this file, and this file only. I can’t find anything in either the Help for the software or by Googling anyone else who has had a problem like this. Is there a Libre Office doctor in the house?

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!