I tried to get through this seemingly Malthusian rant from the dawn of the space age, but it’s a tough slog.
I would note that, like Sagan years later, he extrapolates existing launch technology to come up with an absurdly costly estimate for space settlement.
Welcome to the Paradise of the Real:
The Nation yesterday published a hilariously illiterate essay by Raúl Carrillo, who is a graduate student at Columbia, a Harvard graduate, and an organizer of something called the Modern Money Network, “an interdisciplinary educational initiative for understanding money, finance, law, and the economy.” All three of those institutions should be embarrassed. Mr. Carrillo is the sort of man who thinks that 40 pieces of candy can be divided and recombined in such a way as to arrive at a number greater than 40. His essay, “Your Government Owes You a Job,” argues that the federal government should create a guaranteed-job program, “becoming our employer of last resort.” Mr. Carrillo’s middle-school-quality prose must be read to be appreciated — “Would jobs for all skyrocket wages and prices, spurring inflation? Such unfounded belief holds the jobless hostage to hysteria” — but his thinking is positively elementary. It does, however, almost perfectly sum up the symbolism-over-literal-substance progressive worldview: “You need dollars to eat,” he writes, “and unless you steal the dollars, you generally have to earn them.”
But you do not need dollars to eat. You need food to eat. Experiment: Spend six months locked in room with nothing other than a very large pile of dollars; measure subsequent weight loss.
Mr. Carrillo’s intellectual failure is catastrophic, but it is basic to the progressive approach. Mr. Carrillo argues that a guaranteed-job program would “pay for itself,” mitigate deficits, empower women, strengthen communities, liberate us from Walmart and McDonald’s — I half expected him to claim that it would turn a sandwich into a banquet. But the question he never quite gets his head around is: Jobs doing what? Americans in guaranteed government jobs “needn’t construct trains or solar panels,” he writes. Instead, they could be employed in “non-capital intensive” sectors such as “child-care, eldercare, and” — focus in here, kids — “community gardening.” Experiment: Offer for sale at a price of $250 a voucher entitling its bearer to one year’s worth of meals at McDonald’s, one year’s worth of groceries at Walmart, or one year’s worth of produce from your local community garden; compare sales figures.
Read the whole thing.
Time to eliminate them from the American legal system.
“Hate crimes” are, in essence, thought crimes. Which is why the Left loves them.
My thoughts on the latest discovery from the Kepler data, over at PJMedia.
On a day that over a dozen sherpas were lost in an avalanche, thoughts from Keith Cowing on the parallels between Everest expeditions and space exploration. I discuss this in the book.
George Will is quite confident that we are going to rebel against it.
Speaking of which, good news from Nevada. The BLM seems to have backed down, at least temporarily. We’ll see where it goes.
I have some thoughts over at PJMedia.
It does seem kind of inevitable. It will be a gradual transition.
Some thoughts. I may see if there’s some interest at USA Today to run something in response.
[Update a while later]
You know, in rereading, and thinking about it, that lead is quite fascinating in it’s apparent implications:
Keith Baugues is not a scientist, but that didn’t stop him on a recent wintry day from expressing skepticism about global warming — something that is broadly accepted in the scientific community.
Let’s leave aside for a moment the issue of whether or not Baugues actually is a scientist. Should we infer from this that only scientists are allowed to express skepticism about global warming? Or that “true” scientists aren’t skeptics, and therefore no one can be? Or what?
by a researcher who says that planets that can accommodate LAWKI aren’t as common as some are saying.