A few months ago I did a phone interview with Sarah Scoles. She finally wrote the piece based in part on it, over at The Atlantic. (Note, Apollo 1 astros died of asphyxiation, not from the fire itself, Columbia happened 17 years after Challenger, not 36, and it was the co-pilot who died on the VG test flight. I’ll blame her editor, since she clearly gets the last two right later in the piece. I assume they’ll fix it at least on line.)
Category Archives: Popular Culture
Bump Stocks
They’re not worth banning, but no one really cares about them that much:
Bump stocks, says Mr. Valone, “are an amusement, because they don’t under normal circumstances turn an AR-15 or another rifle into a killing machine, because you can’t hit anything with it. Only when you are presented 400 yards away with a field of uninterrupted humanity would something like that even be effective.”
Hard cases make for bad law.
Must Pack Heat
A lot of idiots claim that the NRA wants everyone to be armed. They’ve never advocated that, as far as I know, but there is a case to be made for it.
[Update a while later]
It’s not new, but Glenn Reynolds co-wrote a paper on this a while ago.
The New Accord
Wow, looks like they might be worth buying again. I’d like that 2-liter turbo with a six-speed stick.
Bob Zimmerman
He’s newly published an old SF book.
“The Lieutenant Wouldn’t Like It”
Sarah Hoyt writes about growing up a child of Heinlein.
The British Reliability Run
Man, this story brings back youthful memories of MGs, Austin Healeys, Triumphs, Jags and Sunbeams.
The Authoritarian Fascist Regime
Writing The Future
Over at The Weekly Standard, I remember Jerry Pournelle:
…he had an outsized influence on U.S. space and defense policy. In the late 1970s and early ’80s, he and others would gather at Niven’s home in Tarzana, California, to hammer out policy recommendations. These meetings evolved into something more formal, the Citizens’ Advisory Council on National Space Policy, which Pournelle chaired. In addition to several science fiction authors, the group included Buzz Aldrin and a handful of other astronauts, retired military officers like Army General Danny Graham, and several figures from the aerospace industry. (I was too junior to be invited, but my then-boss at the Aerospace Corporation participated.) Congressman Newt Gingrich was involved, too. The group recommended to Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger the commencement of a missile-defense program, a proposal that helped inspire President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative in 1983. To the extent that the prospect of American missile-defense technology hastened the end of the Cold War—by making it plain to Soviet leaders that mutually assured destruction would no longer be mutual—Pournelle can be said to have played a small but not insignificant part in nudging the world toward freedom.
RTWT, despite the fact that I wrote it.
Trump And The NFL
The politicization of everything. When the personal becomes political, when you can’t watch sportsball without politics being interjected, you are well down the road of totalitarianism. I have a crazy idea: I don’t have to choose sides. The protesting players are terrible, and Trump is terrible.
One other point: I see a lot of nonsense on Twitter and in other places that they are just “standing up for their First Amendment rights.” I find this kind of ignorance infuriating. As I tweeted repeatedly over the weekend, this has absolutely nothing to do with the First Amendment, or the Constitution at all. The First Amendment says that “Congress shall make no law.” Congress has made no law. The fact that Trump was Trump doesn’t change that, even though a president who understands the role of the president wouldn’t have stuck his oar in.
They have a right to protest, but they don’t have a right to make millions throwing and catching footballs. The NFL has a right to fine them, and owners have a right to can them. Freedom of expression doesn’t mean freedom from consequences for it. I’ve personally paid a heavy financial price for expressing my opinions publicly, in that I’ve essentially been blackballed by the main cost-plus space industry. I accept that as the price I have to pay for protesting the continuous waste of taxpayer funds and the continuing crippling of our space capabilities. I have no sympathy for second-rate washed-up spoiled children like Colin Kaepernick and his ilk. But I’m sure that I’ll be called a racist for that.
[Noon update]
They have a right to protest. Owners have a right to fine or fire. Trump has a right to be a derriere fedora, and he exercises it w/gusto. https://t.co/J7v2neY361
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) September 25, 2017
[Update a few minutes later]
In Trump versus the NFL, we’re all losers:
Everything about the political dynamic suggests that we could be heading toward an escalation where the NFL protests now become more broadly about Trump. And, as I said up top, there’s no obvious off-ramp here. If you’re a player kneeling because the justice system is screwed up, when do you stop kneeling? Because it’s going to be screwed up for a long time. And if you’re kneeling because Trump is president, that’s got a ways to go, too.
In a perfect world, a presidential response would be something like:
The players can do what they like. We should all want the justice system to work as well as possible. We should understand that it will never be perfect, but will not wave away its failings as inconsequential. We’re all God’s children and I invite you to consider that standing during our national anthem is a symbol of how we remain united in pursuit of ever-greater liberty.
But Trump doesn’t do presidential, at least not often, and never off the cuff.
[Tuesday-morning update]
Red Team, Blue Team? Start your own team:
I’m not on the Blue Team. I’m not on the Red Team. I’m on my team.
Occasionally, I’ll exploit the Reds or Blues to advance my aims in, well, making America great again. But I refuse to surrender my individuality to be an extra in someone else’s movie. As the decades of DC failure have shown us time and again, none of these politicians consider themselves to be on my team. I’m just returning the favor.
Republican leaders will like me if I vote for them. Celebrities will like me if I buy tickets. But neither views me as an equal, just a pawn from which they extract money and power. Those days are long gone.
I look at it this way, in sports and in life: When I see the two teams battling on a football field, I’m not going to passively cheer them from the stands. Instead, I’ll head over to the basketball court to see if I can start my own game. And, to be honest, once the hoops scene gets too crowded, I’ll walk down to the baseball field and try starting a game there.
Politicians are just temp employees we hire to do our bidding. If they suck, we fire them. They aren’t gods we bow to or team owners issuing orders. We’re Americans, dammit.
Celebrities are court jesters we pay to amuse us. When they get too mouthy, we kick them out of the dining hall. That’s the beauty of capitalism.
So, if any of our so-called elites want me to join their team, no thanks. I simply have better things to do.
So do I. Yes, I blew up in comments last night. And I’ll happily do it again any time someone demands that I have to blindly support an anal orifice, whether it’s the one in the White House, or the rich BLM knee takers on the football fields.