Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Technology and Society

Huma

August 13, 2015 Rand Simberg 102 Comments

As someone noted on Twitter this morning, somewhere is an underpaid IT guy who’s not going to be willing to do time for Hillary. It’s really starting to look like the White House is getting ready to throw Hillary under the bus. Does that mean Biden? Hard to see who else they’d throw their support to. He’d be the natural one to be an Obama third term.

[Update a few minutes later]

A majority (and not just “likely voters”) want there to be a criminal probe. Because they’re not as stupid as the Democrats need them to be.

And it looks like she’s not going to get Ron Fournier back:

Where do I start? How about with the Clinton campaign’s ridiculous suggestion that coughing up the server and email were voluntary acts. We know that’s bunk—because Clinton herself said she wouldn’t surrender the people’s records without a fight.

As Safire noted in the 90s, she is a congenital liar. Of course, Democrats normally like that; so is Bill, but he’s a lot better at it.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Democrats are in near-panic mode. This is hilarious:

Trippi said another Democrat might well get into the race, but that beating Clinton was a very different proposition.

“I don’t think Joe Biden has given up on his desire to run for president and I’m sure there are others out there who want to get into this race. I just don’t see a path yet for how you get to the nomination,” he said.

…That leaves many Democrats in a painful place: Believing that, in the end, Clinton will be the nominee but worrying that her vulnerabilities could negate the many advantages — from demographics to the electoral college map — that they believe the party nominee should enjoy.

The progressive strategist wondered “how much longer this drip, drip, drip” of controversy surrounding the emails would continue.

“There’s a hesitance that emerges in terms of her trustworthiness,” the source said. “At some point, people will start to ask whether this hurts her electability in the general election.”

You don’t say.

[Update a few minutes later]

OK, this is hilarious, too:

But concerned Democrats keep coming back to the same question: Why did the Clinton campaign not simply hand over the private server when the controversy first erupted in March?

“It’s bizarre,” said the Democratic strategist. “Let me give you some simple strategic communications advice: Put everything out first, on your terms. If you wait, or you are forced to do it, you always lose and look bad. … That is exactly what is happening here, and I find it inexplicable.”

I know this sounds crazy, but try applying Occam’s Razor. She didn’t turn it over for the same reason she set it up in the first place, in order to protect and cover up a lot of sleazy/criminal/duplicitous activity.

[Friday-morning update]

Why Hillary’s server matters:

To illustrate why this matters so much, perhaps you will forgive me an analogy? Imagine that you are writing a manuscript by hand, and that your initial draft contains all the crossings out, substitutions, and spelling errors that initial drafts tend to include. Next, imagine that having completed that draft to your satisfaction, you make a perfect copy — minus all the changes and mistakes, of course — and then, lest anyone be privy to your imperfections, you burn the original. In such a case, handing over the finished draft would naturally be entirely useless to anyone who wanted to find out what changes you had made. Indeed, it would be of use only to those who believed that you were a perfect writer. That, effectively, is what Hillary Clinton has done here. As I noted yesterday, she may still come a cropper. But if so, it will be because she didn’t get rid of the incriminating materials when she had the chance.

As I noted in comments, one can plead the Fifth without an implication that one has done anything wrong. One cannot destroy evidence without that implication. The fact that she took this much trouble to make sure that even FBI forensics couldn’t get access to it will be viewed in court as having criminal intent.

[Late-morning update]

From a Democrat: The Party’s ticking Hillary time bomb:

For the past five months, those of us old enough to have lived through the 1990s have been enduring a deeply unpleasant bout of déjà vu-inspired dread. First the news breaks, inspiring the unavoidable thought, “How could [insert member of the Clinton family here] possibly have failed to realize that this would be a problem?” Then the barrage of counter-attacks from the Clinton machine against the story, poking holes, impugning motives, kicking up just enough dust to convince fair-minded observers that maybe, just maybe, there’s less to the story than it originally seemed. And finally, because journalists make mistakes and actually care about being able to stand behind the truth of what they publish, even those who ran the original story begin to backtrack, express uncertainties, and air self-doubts.

And then: Ka-Blam! The story is back and bigger than ever. Oh, that server we wouldn’t give to you? You can have it now, cleaned up all nice and tidy. There certainly weren’t any classified documents on there. Oh, there were? Oops, well, only those two — oh, I mean four — and don’t worry about how that’s just a “limited sample” of 40 emails out of tens of thousands; the inspector general of the Justice Department just got lucky. And hey, we deleted them, so who cares? (Freedom of information is for suckers.) Yes, of course, my “shadow” had access to that server and those classified emails, too. Why is that a problem? What, are you a member of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy?

Tick, tick, boom.

The amount of denial on display here is because they got away with so much in the 90s, the Dems just figure there is no limit to how much corruption, deception and cover up the American public will tolerate.

Science And Society

El Nino

August 13, 2015 Rand Simberg 3 Comments

A “Godzilla El Nino“?

A strong El Niño can shift a subtropical jet stream that normally pours rain over the jungles of southern Mexico and Central America toward California and the southern United States.

But so much rain all at once has proved devastating to California in the past. In early 1998, storms brought widespread flooding and mudslides, causing 17 deaths and more than half a billion dollars in damage in California. Downtown L.A. got nearly a year’s worth of rain in February 1998.

Of course, the problem with that is that most of it just goes into the ocean, no way to catch water that rains downtown. We really need snowpack up in the Sierra, and to fill the reservoirs, but at least amidst all the upcoming damage, it looks like that might happen this winter.

On another note, if the Panama Canal is low on water due to drought, couldn’t they pump it up the locks? But I guess they want fresh water in the upper canals, not salt.

History, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space, Space History, Technology and Society

“Opposing Apollo”

August 12, 2015 Rand Simberg 5 Comments

This should be an interesting FISO telecon this afternoon. I suspect it will just be about the myth that it had a lot of popular support at the time, since Roger has written extensively about that.

History, Media Criticism, Popular Culture, Space, Technology and Society

Supersonic Flight

August 11, 2015 Rand Simberg 40 Comments

Over @NRO, Josh Gelernter is far too credulous of Airbus’s announcement of a supersonic transport:

In April 1976, Congress banned supersonic passenger planes from landing in the United States. The ban was overturned by the courts in 1977, after it was pointed out that the Concorde — which flew at subsonic speeds around the airport — was in fact quieter than conventional jets. Never mind: Like irrational fears about nuclear power or GMOs or vaccines, sonic-boom panic sustained anti-Concorde campaigns, which successfully throttled its business. When the Concorde was announced, airlines around the world placed combined orders for more than a hundred planes. By the time it made its first flight, a quarter of the orders had been withdrawn. By the time the production line was up and running, three-quarters of the remaining orders had been canceled. Only 20 Concordes were actually built; all 20 were bought by the British and French governments, which had paid for the Concorde’s development. They were flown by BOAC and Air France.

When Pan Am launched the first transatlantic passenger flights in 1939, a round-trip ticket cost $675 — which is about $11,000 in today’s money. Clipper flights were even more exotic than Concorde flights; nonetheless, within a few decades, they had driven ocean liners out of business. Because so few Concordes made it into service, service prices never came down, part prices never came down, operation never became routine. In 2003, the Concorde died, and mankind did something it does rarely: It took a step backward.

Concorde’s problem was not laws against supersonic overland flight, but very high operating costs, and limited range, due to the excessive wave drag. The real market for supersonic flight is transpacific, but Concorde could barely make it across the Atlantic. The initial orders were probably based on overoptimistic estimates of costs, and once reality sunk in, the orders dried up.

And to equate a commercial aircraft with Apollo and our later abandonment of lunar capability is a category error, unless he meant that in both cases they were economically unsustainable, in which case, it was best to end them.

So thank God for Airbus. Finally we — as a species — are back on track. Actually, Airbus isn’t the first aerospace firm to talk about bringing back supersonic passenger flight — but it’s the biggest and the most credible. An Airbus neo-Concorde is downright plausible. The new Airbus design, we’re told, will be able to fly from London to New York in one hour — two and a half hours quicker than the Concorde. Its top speed will be 2,500 mph to Concorde’s 1,350. And, for the hippies, it will have boom-dampeners, so the noise won’t bother western Long Island, and so it will be able to fly overland. Of course, the one, big, nagging problem is that Airbus is an Anglo-French company. Are we going to take that? I’m sure Boeing and Lockheed and Grumman all have e-mail addresses.

Key words: “…we are told…”

A 2500 mph aircraft will need much more exotic materials than the Concorde did to handle the high skin temperature, and its fuel consumption will be horrific, again with limited range. Note that there’s no mention of transpacific, it’s again just a faster way to get from New York to Europe. Its market would be just as, if not more limited than Concorde. I think that this is marketing hype (like Boeing’s Sonic Cruiser a few years ago). And he doesn’t seem to be aware of changes in the industry. “Grumman” is now Northrop Grumman, and it’s a company that has zero legacy of building a commercial transport. “Lockheed” is Lockheed Martin, and it got out of the airliner business in the late seventies, after the commercial failure of the L-1011 Tri-Star. The notion that either of them are going to get in against Boeing with a supersonic transport is a flight of fancy. I am working on a concept that might make supersonic flight practical, but I see nothing about Son of Concorde that would do so.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

Leftists

August 11, 2015 Rand Simberg 19 Comments

Stop calling them “liberals.”
My latest rant on taking back the language, over at PJMedia.

[Update a few minutes later]

An excerpt:

as Bill notes, the party was taken over by the hard left decades ago, and abandoned even any pretense of liberal values, even while continuing to call themselves fraudulently by that phrase, and slandering true liberals everywhere. And the reason that they get away with it is because people like Bill O’Reilly allow them to, using their purloined word to falsely describe them himself.

Long before Orwell or Carroll, the Chinese philosopher Confucius said that, when words had lost their meaning, it was time for a rectification of names, because “…if names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success.”

At least since 2006, when the Democrats took over Congress, it’s fair to say that affairs have not been particularly carried on to success, at least for the American people. It is past time to rectify the names, to take back the language from these lexigraphical thieves. And I modestly propose that we start with the word “liberal.”

Related: The coddling of the American mind:

We have been studying this development for a while now, with rising alarm. (Greg Lukianoff is a constitutional lawyer and the president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, which defends free speech and academic freedom on campus, and has advocated for students and faculty involved in many of the incidents this article describes; Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist who studies the American culture wars. The stories of how we each came to this subject can be read here.) The dangers that these trends pose to scholarship and to the quality of American universities are significant; we could write a whole essay detailing them. But in this essay we focus on a different question: What are the effects of this new protectiveness on the students themselves? Does it benefit the people it is supposed to help? What exactly are students learning when they spend four years or more in a community that polices unintentional slights, places warning labels on works of classic literature, and in many other ways conveys the sense that words can be forms of violence that require strict control by campus authorities, who are expected to act as both protectors and prosecutors?

They’re questions more people at universities need to be asking themselves.

Also related: “Speech nuts“:

Speech nuts, like gun nuts, have amassed plenty of arguments, but they—we—are driven, too, by a shared sensibility that can seem irrational by European standards. And, just as good-faith gun-rights advocates don’t pretend that every gun owner is a third-generation hunter, free-speech advocates need not pretend that every provocative utterance is a valuable contribution to a robust debate, or that it is impossible to make any distinctions between various kinds of speech. In the case of online harassment, that instinctive preference for “free speech” may already be shaping the kinds of discussions we have, possibly by discouraging the participation of women, racial and sexual minorities, and anyone else likely to be singled out for ad-hominem abuse. Some kinds of free speech really can be harmful, and people who want to defend it anyway should be willing to say so.

I’m certainly willing to say so. It’s the price we pay for liberty. But note, this author also falsely identifies these totalitarian speech police as “liberals.”

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Technology and Society