There’s only about seven hours to go, and we’re still two thousand dollars shy of the goal. That’s about the same amount of money that NASA spends on SLS in three seconds. Between now and when the window closes, they will have wasted about one and a half million bucks.
I’d say, at this point, given the current trickle, that either we’re not going to get there, or it will come in close to the end, as people are perhaps holding back to see if it will make it without them.
[Update a couple hours before it closes]
OK, doing pretty well. We just need a little over $600 now before 5:30 Pacific. SLS spends that much every second. Thanks for all the new donors, and the upgrades.
[Update about 3:40 PM PDT]
We did it! Over $12,400, and still an hour and a half to go, for those who still want to support the stretch goal of a video, and get the reward. Thanks to everyone who made it happen. Suck it, Shelby.
My thoughts on today’s anniversary, over at PJMedia. I haven’t been posting much because I’ve been attending a mini-conference on the subject, which was fascinating. I learned a lot of history from a lot of learned people. Sadly, it’s a history that we have not been teaching our youth. It doesn’t fit the narrative.
Alumni of the UC system should immediately cease wasting their charitable dollars on such an anti-intellectual, fascist institution. And any intelligent young person should avoid it like the plague. The system has clearly been captured by individuals with micro-brains possessing micro-tolerance and micro-confidence.
It’s fascinating to sit back and watch the academy destroy itself. Unfortunately, it’s also tragic, and destroying millions of young peoples’ lives, with taxpayer dollars.
Finally, in 2014, Israel discovered that its primary ally had for months been secretly negotiating with its deadliest enemy. The talks resulted in an interim agreement that the great majority of Israelis considered a “bad deal” with an irrational, genocidal regime. Mr. Obama, though, insisted that Iran was a rational and potentially “very successful regional power.”
The daylight between Israel and the U.S. could not have been more blinding. And for Israelis who repeatedly heard the president pledge that he “had their backs” and “was not bluffing” about the military option, only to watch him tell an Israeli interviewer that “a military solution cannot fix” the Iranian nuclear threat, the astonishment could not have been greater.
I’d sure like to see the video of the Khalidi birthday party.
I’m sure she’d like to expand its boundaries to encompass the entire nation.
[Update a few minutes later]
Hillary Clinton, America’s most boring public speaker? Well, that’s probably an overstatement, but she’s certainly the most prominent one.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Yesterday is over. Compare and contrast.
[Update a while later]
There is only the fight:
So now we have the spectacle of a woman of not only no accomplishment but negative accomplishment (Benghazi, Libya, Russia), who by rights probably ought to be jail, running what to the Leftist media is a credible campaign for the presidency. In a sense, she is the anti-Barack Obama, a candidate about whom we knew (and still know) almost next to nothing when he suddenly appeared in the Oval Office. By contrast, we already know far too much about Hillary Rodham Clinton, and perhaps that is the problem. After a while, it all blurs: Whitewater, Travelgate, the missing FBI files, Vince Foster, Charlie Trie, Huma Abedin and the Muslim Brotherhood, the Clinton Foundation, the missing State Department emails, etc., etc. And not only does it blur, but it creates in the public’s mind a perverse sense of her innocence — after all, if there was something there, wouldn’t she have been arrested and brought low by now? Instead, she keeps soaring, a lead balloon defying the laws of the United States and of gravity.
In short, the more she gets away with the more she can get away with. How do you deal with someone like this?
…She’s interested in “campaign finance reform” because (like McCain) it was her ox that was gored by the Citizens United decision. She’s “fighting” for “national security” because it was on her watch that the world went to hell in a handcart. She “fighting” for the economy, even though it was under the Obama presidency that the country has spent seven years in misery and penury, with only the crony capitalists like the Clintons living high on the hog. And she’s “fighting” for families because it is her political party whose policies have been at the heart of the destruction of the American nuclear family. Besides, her own family — which has been looting treasuries around the globe in the name of its “charity” — is doing just fine, thanks.
“There is only the fight.” And she means it. The problem is, the only thing Hillary Clinton thinks worth fighting for is herself.
I think that’s being kind. They’re based on junk science. And they’re deadly:
The confluence of self-interest, institutional inertia, and scientific incompetence has led us to where we are today. The federal government has massively increased spending on nutrition and obesity research over the past few decades, and now spends over $2 billion of taxpayer’s money per year. Unfortunately, the people that control that funding are the same researchers that use these anecdotal methods, train the next generation of researchers, and control the publication of scientific papers. As such, new methods and innovative research is stifled. The same researchers are getting funded to do the same research year after year after year. This inertia and self-interest are exacerbated by the exorbitant amount of grant funding established researchers receive. As with many things in life, follow the money.
Say, isn’t there another field of science with profound public-policy implications that operates under the same incentives and pressures?
Next was the argument over hormones. Again, screaming argument over hormones. I was told by the founding members of the Women’s Studies Department at the State University of New York at Albany that I had been brainwashed by male scientists to believe that hormones even existed, much less had any role in the shaping of our identity and character.
So I was banned from the women’s movement from the start, but I kept going on. I was pro-pornography, pro-prostitution on libertarian grounds. For years, my wing of feminism—which had been silenced and ostracized by the Steinem wing, the establishment wing, partisans of the Democratic party, my party, but nevertheless, I don’t feel that feminism should be subordinated to any party—finally, we rose in the ’90s and the pro-sex wing of feminism won in the ’90s thanks to Madonna having changed the culture.
…If you’re going to be a woman president, she must communicate strength, reserve, and yet compassion. That formula—I’ve been waiting, and waiting, and waiting for it. The only person in America who’s had it as far as I’m concerned was Dianne Feinstein, and she didn’t put herself forward for whatever reason as president.
But Hillary does not have it. Hillary is a mess. And we’re going to award the presidency to a woman who’s enabled the depredations and exploitation of women by that cornpone husband of hers? The way feminists have spoken makes us blind to Hillary’s record of trashing [women]. They were going to try to destroy Monica Lewinsky. It’s a scandal! Anyone who believes in sexual harassment guidelines should have seen that the disparity of power between [Bill] Clinton and Monica Lewinsky was one of the most grotesque ever in the history of sex crime. He’s a sex criminal! We’re going to put that guy back in the White House? Hillary’s ridden on his coattails. This is not a woman who has made her own career. The woman failed the bar exam in Washington! The only reason she went to Arkansas and got a job in the Rose Law Firm was because her husband was a politician.
And then there’s this:
I’m happy that this talk about medical sex changes was not in the air, because I would have become obsessed with that and assumed that that was my entire identity and problem. This is why I’m very concerned about the rush to surgical interventions today.
At any rate, I was attracted to men—I dated men—but I just fell in love with women and always have. Yes, there’s absolutely no doubt: I was on the forefront of gay identification. When I arrived at graduate school at Yale, 1968–1972, I was the only openly gay person, and I didn’t even have a sex life. To me, it was a badge of militance. And I was the only person doing a dissertation on a sexual topic. It’s hard to believe this now.
I’m sorry, but isn’t it blindingly obvious that if you’re attracted to men, and also attracted to women, that you are not gay, but bi? I wonder how she’d respond to this question.
It’s almost the 800th anniversary of the signing, and there will be a ceremony in Runnymede on Monday, with Daniel Hannan. But if you’re in the Los Angeles area you can participate via satellite with him by attending this conference tomorrow and Monday. Looks like an interesting line up of speakers, if you’re interested in things Anglospheric.
Yes, it’s pointless and distracting. We need to be developing capabilities to go wherever we want. But there’s not enough graft in that.
I should note that while my Kickstarter is about clearing the roadblock to Mars, it’s really about clearing the roadblock to everywhere, which is the false perception that we cannot go beyond earth orbit unless NASA builds a giant rocket. It’s all part of ending the old Apollo cargo cult.