I’d like to attend this event. Maybe we’ll be through bathroom-renovation hell by then.
Category Archives: Popular Culture
The Farce Awakens
Bad lip reading of the movie. Some of the dialogue is better, really.
This Presidency’s Worst Enemy
Douthat is right that Trump could use a brain trust. But some of us were told that Pence or Reince Priebus or Paul Ryan would serve that role. Certainly they’ve tried. Moreover, there are countless policy agendas sitting on the shelf for Trump to choose among.
Why so much chaos, then? A common answer you hear from all corners is “the tweeting” — the horrible, horrible tweeting. But when you talk to people with more hands-on experience in, or with, the Trump White House, the better answer is that the tweeting is just a symptom.
Trump brings the same glandular, impulsive style to meetings and interviews as he does to social media. He blurts out ideas or claims that send staff scrambling to see them implemented or defended. His management style is Hobbesian. Rivalries are encouraged. Senior aides panic at the thought of not being part of his movable entourage. He cares more about saving face and “counterpunching” his critics than he does about getting policy victories.
In short, the problem is Trump’s personality. His presidency doesn’t suffer from a failure of ideas, but a failure of character.
Yup. As I said throughout the campaign, Trump is terrible, she’s worse.
Why The Patriarchy Hates The Moon
I think Sam Kriss had a little too much time on his hands.
Sexbots
Can they teach us to be better humans? I’m skeptical, but it’s an interesting development.
The “Mainstream” Media And Guns
Why is it impossible for them to be honest about them?
Because if they were, it would disrupt the narrative.
The Real Expanse
Thoughts on the worthwhile difficulties of settling space.
Wasteful Spending
Trump is going to order a government-wide review of it.
If Trump really wants to review wasteful government spending, at NASA he can start with SLS/Orion: https://t.co/eR8yiprfgO
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) March 13, 2017
[Update a while later]
Congratulations to Altius Space Machines for their NASA SBIR Phase II win for cryo propellant transfer technology development. If we canceled SLS/Orion, we could found several thousand efforts like this.
“Liberals”
It’s the end of the world for them:
The fear and panic on the left are palpable. Network programs that once, long ago, were respected news outlets are now little more than vicious rants declaimed in raised voices. News anchors have become mindless megaphones of victimhood and defeatism, totally absorbed by the idea of stopping Trump because Trump threatens the end of their world.
Why is it that Trump poses such an existential threat to progressivism? How does that threat operate? Why is Trump so much more dangerous than Christie, Rubio, Cruz, and Kasich would have been? It is because unlike those who merely oppose the left, Trump dissolves the opposition by holding it up to ridicule. With his laser-like tweets and incisive wit, with his very presence, Trump brings the preposterousness of the left’s positions into the light.
I hope so. But Stop. Calling. Them. Liberals. They are exactly the opposite, and always have been.
Camille Paglia
She predicted the rise of Trump:
Paglia was not surprised by the election results. “I felt the Trump victory coming for a long time,” she told me. Writing last spring, she’d called Trump “raw, crude and uninformed” but also “smart, intuitive and a quick study”; she praised his “bumptious exuberance and slashing humor” (and took some pleasure in watching him fluster the GOP). Speaking two weeks into his administration, she sounded altogether less troubled by the president than any other self-declared feminist I’d encountered since Inauguration Day: “He is supported by half the country, hello! And also, this ethically indefensible excuse that all Trump voters are racist, sexist, misogynistic, and all that — American democracy cannot proceed like this, with this reviling half the country.”
In fact, she has had to restrain herself from agreeing with the president, at least on certain matters. “I have been on an anti–Meryl Streep campaign for about 30 years,” she said. When Trump called the actress “overrated” in a January tweet, “I wanted to leap into print and take that line but I couldn’t, because Trump said it.”
I found this (by the interviewer) revealing, though:
The past few years have felt like a return to the identity-politics wars of the 1990s, another period in which liberals (especially those inside the academy) began to draw bright lines dictating the boundaries of acceptable discourse. [Emphasis mine]
She keeps using that word “liberal.” I don’t think it means what she thinks it means.