If I were Chris Carberry, I’d be outraged at this, instead of promoting it. None of those people or companies are going to get anyone to Mars. But they’ll spend billions pretending they will.
Do As I Say, Not As I Do
Hillary told State Department employees not to use personal email.
Rules are for the little people.
Want To Understand Hillary?
Read Saul Alinsky (who was the subject of her college thesis that she tried to keep hidden for so long).
The American Left are the direct ideological descendants of the Puritans.
[Update a few minutes later]
The Clinton campaign repeatedly overcharged poor donors. Doing her bit for wealth inequality.
Coffee Beans
This seems like too much work for me, given that I’ve never had a good cup of coffee (it’s just a matter of to what degree it tastes less awful), but here’s a guide to roasting your own.
Adulting
Advice to young people: Stop taking pride in not having your act together.
And particularly don't take pride in being bad at math. https://t.co/S0FL6sYxo9
— Deplorable-In-Chief (@Rand_Simberg) September 18, 2016
How To Make A Spaceship
I just received a review copy of this new book
Elon’s Ambitions
Eric Berger reports that they go far beyond Mars.
He still seems to be a planetary chauvinist, though.
Hillary’s Birthers
The media’s hair is on fire over Trump’s claim that she started it back in 2008, but he’s right. No, of course she didn’t say it herself. That’s what she has sycophantic surrogates like Sid for.
Female Orgasms
Speaking of evolution, this looks like an interesting paper.
What Makes Socialism So Attractive?
Evolution has wired our brains for it, unfortunately.
The chief problem, he suggested, is that many people are beguiled by “romantic socialism”—that is, they imagine what their personal lives would be like if everyone shared and treated one another like family. We evolved in small bands that were an individual’s only protection from starvation, victimization, and inter-group aggression. People feel vulnerable if their band does not exist. Such sentiments are more or less appropriate when people lived in small groups of hunter-gatherers composed mostly of kin, but they fail spectacularly when navigating a world of strangers cooperating in global markets.
Tooby also argued that markets make intellectuals irrelevant. Consequently, academics have a huge bias against spontaneous order and the basic goal of most social science is to critique the social institutions associated with market-based society.
More darkly, Tooby pointed out that political entrepreneurs know how to appeal to romantic socialist sentiments as a way to establish themselves in power. The evolved psychological propensity toward romantic socialism facilitates political coalitions that oppose free-market societies. Since such coalitions are organized around romantically appealing ideas, any heresy is treated as betrayal. If things are not going well (and they never are in full-blown socialist societies) and since the ideology cannot be wrong, evildoers are undermining progress and must be found and punished (think kulaks and the Gulag). Such coalitions tend to revert to primitive zero-sum thinking: If there is something you don’t get that means that someone took it from you. The result is, according to Tooby, that there really are those who are willing to make poor people worse off in order to make rich people worse off.
In terms of defining socialism, I don’t make a distinction between it and Marxism, which was simply a failed attempt to explain economics and human nature scientifically. Simply put, though it’s more complex, it is the belief that one person can know better than another what that other person “needs,” and should have the power to ensure that those “needs” are met.