The Space Frontier Foundation showed this video at the conference last week.
Meanwhile, NASA continues to attempt to defend the indefensible. I’ll probably fisk this later.
Category Archives: Business
The Silicon Valley Of Space
Maybe, but I think that Pacific Northwest and the Front Range may give them a run for their money. The sad thing is that it’s probably not LA. Other than SpaceX, not a lot of it here.
Obama’s Economy Pivot
It’s over just as it begins.
Hey, he made some speeches. What more do you want?
Hail Hillary!
Get ready for the disgusting biopics:
What did surprise me was that the series will cover none of her life before the Monica Lewinsky scandal, which took place five years into her husband’s second term as president and when Hillary was already 51 years old. It’s as if her first half-century will be airbrushed away, along with the many scandals that dogged her in those decades.
Oh, John, didn’t you hear? That’s old news.
And Hillary Clinton is no Diane Lane.
As Glenn says, maybe we should take a page from the Left’s playbook, and do a sponsor boycott.
[Update a while later]
Suggestions for the mini-series title.
The “Phony” Scandals
The scandals are actually very real. It’s the recovery that’s phony.
Post Graduate Degrees In Education
North Carolina is no longer going to automatically reward teachers for getting them.
This is great news, given how worthless both they, and education degrees in general, are. It’s bad news for schools of education, though. Which is good news for the rest of us, particularly school kids.
Climate Sensitivity
The IPCC is having trouble reconciling its past warm-mongering hysteria and hyperbole with actual science.
CAGW Skepticism
“My personal path“:
…being English I knew all about the vagaries of the weather, but the warnings about CAGW always seemed to be made in the most certain terms. Was it really possible to predict the climate so assuredly? The global climate must be an extremely complex system, and very chaotic. I had recently heard about financial institutions that were spending vast sums of money and picking the very best maths and programming graduates, but still were unable to predict the movements of financial markets with any confidence. Predicting changes to the climate must be at least as difficult, surely? I bet myself climate scientists weren’t being recruited with the sort of signing-on bonuses dangled by Wall Street. I also thought back to the ice age scare, which was not presented as an absolute certainty. Why the unequivocal certainty now that we would only see warming, and to dangerous levels? It all started to sound implausible.
The whole thing also seemed uncertain on the simple grounds of common sense. Could mankind really force such a fundamental change in our environment, and so quickly? I understood that ice ages could come and go with extreme rapidity, and that following the scare of my childhood, no one seriously claimed to be able to predict them. So in terms of previous natural variability, CAGW was demonstrably minor in scale. It seemed obvious that if natural variability suddenly switched to a period of cooling, there would be no CAGW no matter what the effect of mankind on the atmosphere. Even more fundamentally, how could anyone really be certain that the warming then taking place wasn’t just natural variability anyway? The reports I read assured me it wasn’t, but rarely in enough detail to allow me to decide whether I agreed with the data or not.
The other thing that really got me thinking was seeing the sort of people that would appear on television, proselyting about the coming tragedy that it would imminently become too late to prevent. Whether from charities, pressure groups or the UN, I knew I had heard their strident and political use of language, and their determination to be part of the Great Crusade to Save the World before. These were the CND campaigners, class war agitators and useful fools for communism in a new guise. I suddenly realised that after the end of the Cold War, rather than slinking off in embarrassed fashion to do something useful, they had latched onto a new cause. The suggested remedies I heard them espouse were always socialist in approach, requiring the installation of supra-national bodies, always taking a top-down approach and furiously spending other peoples’ money. They were clearly eager participants in an endless bureaucratic jamboree.
And remain so.
Obama’s Speech
…is a confession of impotence:
If you listened closely, the speech seemed like a confession that the president knows he can’t do much. The deep problems afflicting America — social and economic breakdown in inner cities and rural areas; rising economic insecurity; widening gulfs between ideologies, regions, and socioeconomic classes — are simply far beyond the president’s reach.
They’re particularly beyond this president’s reach, given the economic insanity of his fundamental ideology.
And then, there’s the completely unjustified arrogance and contempt for us and our intelligence:
Obama’s speech was a dreadful, cliché-ridden piece of writing. Here’s our favorite bit: “Rather than reduce our deficits with a scalpel–by cutting programs we don’t need, fixing ones we do, and making government more efficient–this same group has insisted on leaving in place a meat cleaver called the sequester that has cost jobs, harmed growth, hurt our military, and gutted investments in American education and scientific and medical research that we need to make this country a magnet for good jobs.”
Because as Ben Franklin sagely observed, you can’t make a magnet with cloven meat.
But wait. It’s worse than that. He’s criticizing “this same group” for leaving in place a meat cleaver. What happens when you leave a cleaver in place? Nothing!
“With an endless parade of distractions, political posturing and phony scandals, Washington has taken its eye off the ball,” the president harrumphed. There’s an image for you. Where exactly is the ball relative to the parade route?
Also, which scandals exactly are “phony”? The biggest scandal is the one that raises serious questions about the legitimacy of Obama’s re-election. Here is what President Asterisk himself had to say on the subject way back on May 13: “If you’ve got the IRS operating in anything less than a neutral and non-partisan way, then that is outrageous, it is contrary to our traditions. And people have to be held accountable, and it’s got to be fixed. . . . I’ve got no patience with it. I will not tolerate it.”
We’re sure his outrage over the phony scandal was genuine.
Yes. As genuine as most things he says. Though, as noted, he is occasionally honest:
On the other hand, Obama’s certitude about his own superiority, his utter contempt for his political adversaries, even for those whose priorities differ from his–now that’s genuine. It is the central feature of his political character, and the proximate cause of–pardon the cliché–Washington’s current “dysfunction.”
Indeed.
One Week Left In July
…and SpaceShipTwo still hasn’t had a second powered flight.
Just sayin.’