More thoughts from Rich Lowry:
The government can care for the needy; it can field a military and do much else besides. But it can’t dream. It can’t let its imagination run wild and pursue an individual vision with a ruthless determination. It can’t conjure new and profitable industries out of nothing.
Again, contrast NASA with SpaceX.
Don’t try this at home, kids — a chili contest sends two people to the hospital.
[Via Geek Press]
…never dies. It’s unfortunately a basic feature of human nature that requires logic to overcome, and it’s a battle for every generation.
Modern rocket engines are much safer than the historical examples he cites (e.g., XCOR has never had a hard start, let alone an explosion), and it makes no sense that a single accident would end the industry, any more than deaths on Everest stop people from climbing.
Over at Pajamas Media, I have some thoughts this morning on Steve Jobs and people who really change the world.
[Update a few minutes later]
The business of Apple was business, not politics.
[Update a while later]
Did Jobs die from quackery?
[Update a few minutes later]
Here’s the WSJ obit.
[Update a while later]
More thoughts from Lileks.
[Update a while later[
Michael Malone remembers Steve Jobs.
[Update a couple minutes later]
How his philosophy changed technology.
[Late morning update]
The Onion says we’re doomed.
[Update in the afternoon]
Rob Long: The right kind of tyrant.
From David Freddoso:
Those people you left stuck in traffic have a hard time paying their bills and rents and health insurance and mortgages. They worry about things like finding decent schools for their children to attend and making sure they don’t get fired at work, and fixing leaking roofs and chimneys.
You know what they don’t worry about, ever? Smashing patriarchy and capitalism.
So when your organizers go on television and say things like, “It’s revolution, not reform!” and they’re not joking, those words might give some of these narrow-minded people an unpleasant, October 1917 kind of feeling.
Read all.
[Late-morning update]
The pathology of capitalism, new and improved with trutherism.
…is over.
I think this is a good thing. A lot of people hate a la carte pricing, but when you bundle things, there are no signals as to what the real demand for various goods and services are. Also, I don’t like subsidizing other people for stuff that I don’t need.
Some thoughts from Sonia Arrison.
An interesting article on pathological altruism.
It’s particularly dangerous when people like this go into politics.
My one and only post on this subject will just point to the one by John Hinderaker, in case any of my readers care.
[Update early afternoon]
OK, one more — Amanda Knox as femme fatale:
One lady I know offered the view that the femme fatale was a totally self-generated male creation. “The self-destructive acts are not orchestrated by women of some preternatural cunning. Most femme fatales do nothing. All the work is done by the men themselves. Femme fatales are only ordinary women who’ve accidentally found the right combination of buttons to push to make men do what they want. It is the fantasy of men that does the rest.” Her explanation made me uneasy because I had heard the same argument offered, in a political context, to explain the 2008 presidential elections. But in that view, we will never know any more about Amanda Knox than we will ever know about Barack Obama. Maybe neither actually exists as we think they do, except in our imaginations.
Well, the evidence against Obama continues to accumulate.