Why aren’t we thanking it for the economic recovery?
Because it doesn’t fit the narrative. But as Jefferson said, it’s a good demonstration that that government that governs least, governs best. If only we could roll back a lot of this crap.
It’s worth noting that things started to go to hell after the Democrats took over Congress in 2006, and didn’t really start to recover until the Republicans took the House back in 2010.
A concept for doing it on the cheap.
One problem I see in the near term is that NASA plans to use Dragons as lifeboats, so I’m not sure when one would become available on orbit.
[Update a while later]
Actually, I think that a cargo Dragon meets the requirements for this much better than a crew Dragon. It’s an on-orbit mission only, so there’s no need for couches, which just take up room. It can’t be used for a lifeboat, because it has no docking adaptor (at least currently), so NASA wouldn’t miss it. Even a Dragon V2 would need an ECLSS upgrade, so might as well just put it in the cargo version. It would have a lot less value to NASA than a V2, so it would be easier to get it from them. All they’d be giving up is the cargo return (which they could even get when the mission was over, months later, if they wanted).
…get militant. Well, they’re going to have to, sadly:
This won’t be the last of such surges in militancy. The 21st century was supposed to be a post-religious, post-modernist era of peaceful secularism. That now looks less and less like the world we are living in.
And you know whose fault this isn’t? America’s.
Gun-controller wannabe legal (and moral) idiot.
[Afternoon update]
What is it about “progressives” and guns?
I don’t know if I mentioned this foolish piece by Charles Seife last week (what would we do without “journalism” professors?). At the time, I merely tweeted that I didn’t understand why I was supposed to care whether or not Virgin Galactic and SpaceX were about “exploration.”
Jeff Foust commented that Slate editors must have taken the week off (which I think gives them too much credit during the non-holidays). Anyway he has taken it apart.
It’s difficult to imagine a student of Professor Seife’s turning in a class assignment with such factual errors and getting a passing grade.
Zing.
And speaking of “space exploration,” I’ve decided that this is the year I make all-out war on the phrase. It has held us back for decades in thinking about space in a sensible way.
Hope it’s a good one for all. There seems to be a consensus that 2014 sucked (though I thought the first Tuesday in November went pretty well). In any event, let’s hope 2015 improves on it.
[Update a few minutes later]
Why 2015 may be the best year in history.
A short story, in tweets.
I’m not a gamer, but here‘s what Pop Mechanics thinks were the top ten of the year, at least in terms of innovation.
How to end it [behind a paywall, though usually you can read by Googling the headline):
The GOP almost always bears the blame for a shutdown, because the smaller-government message of Republicans is easily portrayed as aiming to deprive the public of government services. President Clinton faced off against House Speaker Newt Gingrich in 1995, and Mr. Clinton won. President Obama dueled with the Republican House in 2013 and Mr. Obama won.
The advantages to the political party that favors higher spending—i.e., the Democrats—reflect the existing legal regime. But the next Congress can change the law (the most relevant one being the Antideficiency Act) so that the public suffers less inconvenience when the political parties cannot agree on spending levels. In case of a government shutdown, the government would continue to spend on discretionary programs at a level close to the amount authorized by the previous year’s budget. A reasonable default target might be 95%.
Such a law could be a political game-changer. The public would be less likely to suffer serious inconvenience with spending at this default target, and a 5% solution would strengthen the leverage of the party favoring less spending, i.e., the GOP. A 5% cut would in any event be closer to what Republicans ultimately want. They could hold out for a deal preferable to the default, since there would be very low costs imposed on the public in the interim.
Yes, if the Republicans were smart, they’d deprive the statists of this weapon. Unfortunately, there are lots of things the Republicans would do if they were smart, that they don’t. Which is why I’m not a Republican.
The problem isn’t racism (it rarely is, or at least it is much more rarely than it’s proclaimed to be). It’s tribalism. And the Left seems to cocoon itself much more.