I just realized that last week was the fifth anniversary of my blog post that started the whole thing. We’re still waiting for the DC Court of Appeals to respond to our request for an en bank review of the ruling against us last December.
Bob Mueller
Bob Zimmerman thinks that he’s expanding the witch hunt.
Saturated Fat
The tide continues to turn.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Why are doctors so stupid?
Basically, when they do have any time to keep up with the literature, much of it remains bogus.
Game Of Thrones
Libertarian edition.
Evoloterra
Get together with friends and celebrate the 48th anniversary tonight. Bill Simon and I will be on The Space Show at 7 PM Pacific to discuss it.
[Update a while later]
Here’s what I wrote on the 40th anniversary. It still holds up pretty well, I think.
[Update early afternoon]
There’s a new version of the ceremony on line now.
[Late-afternoon update]
Seeing comments out there on the Interwebs that Nixon canceled Apollo. No, it happened in 1967, by Congress. Before he was elected. For those of you unfamiliar with the post-Apollo history under Nixon, John Logsdon’s latest book is a good read. Funded by Bill Anders, it’s probably the definitive history at this point. He’s currently working on the space history of the Reagan administration, which I wrote about at the time of Reagan’s passing.
[Friday-morning update]
The Space Show we did last night has been archived.
Elon And AI
Rob Bailey says that he’s mistakenly using the precautionary principle.
I’ve discussed this logical fallacy in the context of climate change.
Louise Mensch
Charles Cooke isn’t impressed. To say the least:
In a more sensible world, a woman such as Mensch would be running around a train station warning commuters about the spaceships in the lavatory car. In America, 2017, alas, she was first elevated to the head of a News Corp property and is now is at the heart of what has become a popular and widely read conspiracy movement, which not only indulges her endless flights of hallucinatory fancy but repeats and retweets them under the heady imprimatur of “reporting.” Along with Eric Garland, Claude Taylor, Andrew Laufer, and a few other sorry victims of early onset absurdity, Mensch provides hope and titillation to the illiterate and the credulous, more than 250,000 of whom have elected to follow her on Twitter.
In the course of her breakdown she has ensnared some of those you’d imagine she’d ensnare — Joy Reid is a fan, naturally, as are Ted Lieu and Keith Olbermann – but she has also managed to attract some of those you would not. To his intense discredit, Harvard Law’s Laurence Tribe has shared her material on more than one occasion, which should serve as a welcome reminder that brilliance in one’s field in no way guarantees the possession of common sense.
RTWT. Brutal.
Jeff Sessions
I wouldn’t miss him if Trump were to fire him. In addition to Glenn’s reasons, he’ll probably continue to do whatever he can to protect SLS from within the administration.
Light Blogging
We woke up this morning to no Internet. The lights on the modem looked fine, but there was no ethernet connection to either my computer or to the mesh router (which was magenta, indicating no Internet). I talked to Frontier, and they agreed that it sounded like a dead LAN port bank. Unfortunately, they won’t get me a new one until tomorrow or Thursday. I’m typing this from my laptop tethered to my phone, but I don’t want to use a lot of bandwidth, so I can’t really scour the web for material as I usually do. The other issue is that I don’t seem to be able to get a wireless connector going on my Fedora desktop, either an old Linksys PCI card or a new Tp-Link USB device; the system doesn’t seem to recognize either one. So I’m stuck on the laptop if I want any Internet at all.
[Wednesday-afternoon update]
Got the new modem early afternoon, and we’re back on the air.
Satellite Sea Levels
Another tale of the Adjustocene.