“If Orion could provide a redundant capability as a fallback for the commercial crew partners, why is it necessary to carry two partners to ensure competition in the constrained budget environment?” Smith asked NASA Administrator Charles Bolden in an Oct. 7 letter co-signed by Rep. Steven Palazzo (R-Miss.), chairman of the House Science space subcommittee.
So as a bonus, the chairman of the space subcommittee is an idiot, too.
The country’s in the very best of hands.
Some thoughts on the potential (and often actual) tyranny of prosecutorial discretion:
“If the prosecutor is obliged to choose his cases, it follows he can choose his defendants. This method results in “the most dangerous power of the prosecutor: that he will pick people he thinks he should get, rather than pick cases that need to be prosecuted.” Prosecutors could easily fall prey to the temptation of ‘picking the man, and then searching the law books …to pin some offense on him.’ In short, prosecutors’ discretion to charge — or not to charge — individuals with crimes is a tremendous power, amplified by the large number of laws on the books.
As Glenn often says, we need to take away sovereign immunity from these people.
[Update a few minutes later]
Speaking of the injustice of law enforcement, some thoughts on civil forfeiture, in which someone can be deprived of their property without a trial.
Great. Now not only is it refusing to restore tabs after it crashes (even though that’s what my preferences tell it to do), but this morning it came to with total amnesia of every page I’ve ever visited.
[Update Monday morning]
OK, I’ve installed Pale Moon 24.6.0, which seems to be the most recent version for which there’s a Linux tarball. It seems to run quickly so far, but I haven’t done much with it, or opened many tabs.
“The best way to get it built is to make it irrelevant.”
This would be a smart thing for Canada to do though, as the article notes, there will be more nutty opposition from some Canadians.
Just to the south of Jefferson, the new state of North California (shown as purple on the map) would be much larger, with a population of almost four million, comparable to Oregon or Oklahoma.
There is no other state that would really be comparable to North California, in terms of geography and climate. Unlike any of the other new states, it would have very little desert. It would have some of the best wine country in the world, in Napa and Sonoma counties. It would have the coastal beauty of Marin as well, just north of the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco and the rest of the new state of Silicon Valley to its immediate south. Like Silicon Valley, it will have ocean access via the Golden Gate, from San Pablo and other northern bays, so it would have the option of building its own new ports.
As it is now, western North California would be a bedroom community for the industry of Silicon Valley to the south. With towns like Vallejo, Sausalito, Benicia, Santa Rosa and others along the northern reaches of the San Francisco Bay system and Sacramento Delta, access between the two states would continue to be via ferries and toll bridges to San Francisco and Oakland, and Concord in Contra Costa County. One point of contention in a breakup will be which state gets both responsibility for, and revenue from, which bridges.
The eastern part of the new state would be much more rural, with the northern Sierra Nevada, Lake Tahoe, and Gold Country in the western foothills of the mountains, and its own wine region centered in Amador County. The foothills and mountains will offer recreational opportunities for fishing, hunting, hiking, and horseback, with skiing in the winter in south Tahoe. Gold Country, with its historical towns and sites, will continue to be a tourist draw. While not as high as the Sierras further south, there will be some snow pack in the northern mountains to feed the northern part of the delta, and provide water for the new state.
As with the current California, Sacramento would be a good candidate for state capital. The current Sacramento State would likely become the flagship of North California’s higher educational system, the University of North California. The campus of the University of California in Davis would probably have its focus broadened and strengthened from its current one of agricultural research, perhaps becoming North California State.
It will inherit a number of prisons, in Sacramento, Folsom, Vacaville, Mule Creek in Ione, and of course the infamous San Quentin, just over the Silicon Valley state line from San Francisco. As with Jefferson, it is possible that these will provide excess capacity for its own criminal needs (particularly if it, like Jefferson, were to legalize drugs), given that the majority of prisoners are likely generated by the big cities of Silicon Valley, and West and South California. So there may be opportunities for revenue from those states to continue to house their prisoners. Again, the new state may offer an opportunity for reform with an end to the guards’ unions.
With its current voters, North California will have a twelve-point voting edge for Democrats, 43% to a little over 31% for Republicans and almost 3% for the American Independent Party. But as with Jefferson, about twenty percent of those registered are unpartied, so the right Republican candidate and policies could potentially win the votes of the state for governor, senators and electors. A more libertarian Republican might do well there.
Next up, the city-state of Silicon Valley.
Steve Hayes has a long piece (necessarily, because it’s such a target rich environment) on how it is chock full of fail.
[Update a couple minutes later]
This isn’t from the essay, but rather from Jonah Goldberg’s latest “newsletter” (so no link), but it seems apt:
Islamic State took Fallujah and Mosul months ago and he kept calling it the “jayvee team.” As recently as August, he was telling Tom Friedman that it was ridiculous to arm the Syrian rebels. In September, he was wistfully complaining that the Islamic State made a mistake in beheading those Americans because it aroused U.S. public opinion for war. In other words, doing nothing about the Islamic State was Obama’s foreign policy until the domestic political situation made his foreign policy untenable. Chess Masters think many moves ahead, novices respond to whatever their opponent’s latest move is. Total amateurs just move pieces based on shouts from the crowd watching the game. Obama’s like a kid looking for approval every time he touches a piece.
It’s sad because it’s true.
No, there is no correlation between spending and the quality of education.
Some interesting sociological results. I find the word “friend” for Facebook acquaintances annoying.
I’ve got three of the six states up @Ricochet, but they’re behind the paywall, so I’m going to republish here. First up is Jefferson.
The statistical meltdown:
The sensitivity of the climate to increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide is a central question in the debate on the appropriate policy response to increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Climate sensitivity and estimates of its uncertainty are key inputs into the economic models that drive cost-benefit analyses and estimates of the social cost of carbon.
Continuing to rely on climate-model warming projections based on high, model-derived values of climate sensitivity skews the cost-benefit analyses and estimates of the social cost of carbon. This can bias policy decisions. The implications of the lower values of climate sensitivity in our paper, as well as similar other recent studies, is that human-caused warming near the end of the 21st century should be less than the 2-degrees-Celsius “danger” level for all but the IPCC’s most extreme emission scenario.
That’s the wrong answer. It doesn’t justify ending capitalism.