The Space Studies Institute is offering it free on Kindle this week, to celebrate the Apollo anniversary. If you haven’t read it, it’s a classic. Actually, it is even if you have read it.
[Update a few minutes later]
Sort of related: Our discussion of Evoloterra last night on The Space Show is now archived.
What it means, and what it doesn’t.
Yes, that’s all it means. I am not going to support Donald Trump. The notion that non-support of Trump is support of Hillary is nonsense.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Will Trump win in a blowout? It could happen. I’ve never said he can’t win the election, just that he’ll be a terrible president. Hillary will be worse.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Hillary’s people “freaked out” by the polls. They’ve been and continue to be in denial about what a truly awful candidate she is. They don’t care about lies and corruption, but Americans do.
[Update a while later]
“‘Crooked’ means crippled for Hillary Clinton“:
Democrats…have been operating on the assumption that most Americans shared Clinton’s belief that talk of her misconduct was just more slander from the “vast right-wing conspiracy.” Her inability to get ahead of Trump by a comfortable margin even though he spent the weeks after clinching his nomination going off on racist tangents is remarkable. The problem for her isn’t so much that he has risen—he is still stuck at the same low number that he’s had in national polls for months—as it is that she has declined or failed to gain ground.
Looking ahead, it’s hard to predict how a race between two deeply unpopular candidates will turn out. Trump’s undisciplined character and his alienation of elements of the Republican coalition and inability to appeal to non-white and young voters may ultimately cancel out Clinton’s weaknesses. But the one thing we know for sure is that the Democrats will nominate a crippled candidate. No amount of spending or spin can sell Hillary Clinton to the American people as either honest or competent.
Yup.
[Update a while later]
“Hillary managed her emails like [other] criminals I’ve known.”
Meanwhile, here’s a deep dive into her email mess from Ars Technica. One thing not mentioned; how did the classified info get from the SCIF to her server?
I’ve long said that air conditioning was the beginning of the downfall of the Republic, because it made DC habitable, and attractive to all manner of power-hungry grifters.
Well, Glenn Reynolds agrees, and has some suggestions to allow our betters in the federal government to set a good example for the rest of the benighted:
…it’s hard to expect Americans to accept changes to their own lifestyles when the very people who are telling them that it’s a crisis aren’t acting like it’s a crisis. So I have a few suggestions to help bring home the importance of reduced carbon footprints at home and abroad:
- Extend Smith’s bill to cover the entire federal government. We have Skype now, and Facetime. There’s no reason to fly to meetings. I’d let the President keep Air Force One for official travel, but subject to a requirement that absolutely no campaign activity or fundraisers take place on any trips in which the president travels officially.
- Obama makes a great point about setting the thermostat at 72 degrees. We should ban air conditioning in federal buildings. We won two world wars without air conditioning our federal employees. Nothing in their performance over the last 50 or 60 years suggests that A/C has improved things. Besides, The Washington Post informs us that A/C is sexist, and that Europeans think it’s stupid.
- In fact, we should probably ban air conditioning in the entire District of Columbia, to ensure that members of Congress, etc. won’t congregate in lobbyists’ air-conditioned offices.
- Speaking of which, members of Congress shouldn’t be allowed to fly home on the weekends. Not only does this produce halfhearted attention to their jobs — the so-called “Tuesday to Thursday Club” — but, again, it produces too much of a carbon footprint. Even if they pay for the travel out of campaign funds, instead of their own budgets, they need to set an example for the rest of us — and for those skeptical foreigners that Obama mentioned.
Exactly.
He finally faces the Galactic Code of Military Justice.
An amusing people-on-the-street interview by Mary Roach. I knew four out of five.
I should do something like this to try to promote my book.
…would be a terrible place to live.
I agree with the piece, though I don’t like the phrase “credentialed scientist.”
[Saturday-morning update]
I’ve discovered the Missing Link.
Ladies, there may be good reasons to do a Brazilian clear-cutting (won’t anyone think of habitat-destruction of the lice?) but “hygiene” isn’t one of them.
[Friday-morning update]
Thoughts from a (female) gynocologist.
Donald Robertson has an op-ed at Space News that reflects many of the themes of my monograph (which, by the way, I have updated with feedback from the past couple days).
Boston Dynamics’ robotic dogs are getting better. Nice to see that no one kicked them this time.
Ben Domonech responds to Jonathan Rouch’s lunatic dispatch from inside the cocooned Beltway:
Square Rauch’s frame with the Benjy Sarlin report this week on the people who elected Trump, which is also quoted below. You can’t, because the latter offers actual data to show why people supported Trump, and I’ll give you a hint: it’s not because they’re angry about the lack of earmarks. It’s not that people believe their leadership class is corrupt – it’s that they know they’re stupid. It’s not that people are angry because a parking garage didn’t get built, it’s that they’re angry because the FBI can’t keep track of a terrorist’s wife.
Sarlin’s piece illustrates, in clear data-driven reporting, the real basis for the breakdown of our Cold War era political reality: an utter collapse in the belief that our elites, elected or otherwise, have the capacity to represent. They no longer believe our elites will ever look out for the interests of an anxious people. The “he can’t be bought” frame for Trump’s rise is best understood as code for “he’ll look out for me, not [pick your group]”.
This is not about ideology. If people trusted elites and institutions they defend to look out for them, in a non-ideological sense, the breakdown of our systems would have been mitigated or confined. The fact that it is so sweeping is due to a generation of elites who didn’t do their jobs well, or pretended things weren’t their job for too long.
We have breakdown, chaos, and upheaval in our politics today not because the people are “insane”, as Rauch writes, but because they are sane. They know the leadership class which held power for the past generation has not looked out for them.
We should never refer to them as “elites” without the scare quotes: There is nothing “elite” about them, in terms of intelligence, probity or even basic competence. Sadly, Trump would be no better, but he is what their arrogant fecklessness has delivered.