Remembering D-Day. In a few years, there will be no one with living memories of that war.
Category Archives: Social Commentary
It’s The Thirties Again
Time to blame the Jews. You know the old saying that beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes right to the bone? Whoever came up with that had Helen Thomas in mind. The doddering moron should have been put to pasture years ago.
[Update a while later]
A story of two Rachels:
Rachel Thaler was a British subject. Yet not a single British journalist has ever mentioned her, profiled her, interviewed her parents or other British relatives, or published her diary in a Fleet Street newspaper – except for a single solitary mention by the great (Jewish) comedienne Maureen Lipman noting that nobody ever mentioned her, or the other victims of Palestinian terrorism.
Ah, but Israel is an “apartheid state”, and the Palestinians are the Europeans’ unending adopt-a-Third-World-pet project. I write in the new National Review (on sale now-ish) that, if old-school judenhass was a by-product of more or less traditional racism and conventional nationalism, the new judenhass advances under the cover of “anti-racism” and “multiculturalism”. The oldest hatred didn’t get that way without the ability to adapt.
What’s really frightening is how many useful Jewish idiots they have.
[Update a few minutes later]
So, should the Jews apologize to Turkey, or go back to Germany and Poland?
[Early afternoon update]
The most ancient virus to infect the soul:
Flare-ups of the virus have been common across Europe throughout the last 2 millennia, but an overwhelming series of eruptions in Europe from England through the lands controlled by the USSR, required a global intervention before the conflagration was deemed to be put out. This, of course was an illusion, since like the root burns engendered by forest fires, it only smoldered underground in the human and social hosts for decades before erupting once again in the vast Petri dish of the Middle East.
With the advent of the “Palestinian cause” becoming chic in Western, European, and Liberal circles — driven at first by Socialist Progressive romanticism in the late 1960s and early 1970s — being infected by virus has once more become acceptable to exhibit socially in certain ways. Indeed, in many circles and societies, having the virus has lately become a highly prized fashion accessory to popular academic, media, and state ideologies. It is now actually a badge of pride in many Western circles to appear at various events wearing gold-plated buboes inset with multi-faceted Kaposi’s sarcoma that contain the virus at their core. Many now believe this intellectual adornment to actually be beautiful.
In a recent mutation, the virus has shown that it can leap the blood/brain barrier and actually infect Jews — if they feel safe within their “advanced” society. The current term for this mutation is “Juicebox Mafia” in which self-styled “intellectuals” of Jewish lineage actually feel it is “intelligent” to call for a world in which it is easier for Arabs and other Islamic groups to kill Jews wholesale. This sort of strange host to the virus is replacing the previous host termed “the self-hating Jew.” The reason for the rise of the Juicebox Mafia is unclear, but it may well have to do with desires for celebrity and paychecks that exceed the desire to live.
Or maybe “intellectuals” aren’t very smart.
The Flint Reporting Project
Gordon Young is trying to fund some reporting of one of our premiere post-industrial cities (and my home town). It’s sad to see how far it’s fallen from my childhood days.
News You Can Really Use
How to reboot your sleep cycle and get the rest you deserve. Or at least, need.
News You Can Use
How to tell if your cat is plotting to kill you. I’ve never trusted either of them, actually.
Seriously, don’t fool yourself. The only thing that keeps your cat from killing you is that you’re way too big. If you were mouse sized, you wouldn’t last a minute, no matter how affectionate they are to the normal-sized you.
It’s Always The Last Place You Look
An eighth grader has found Jesus in his thumbprint. The eighth grader’s thumbprint, that is. The other interpretation would be too recursive.
Going Paleo
Here’s an article on a retro diet.
My problem with this isn’t the diet per se (though I do like me them carbs) as the need for exercise. I read somewhere recently that there were huge health benefits to walking five miles a day. I can believe it, but who has the time? The only way I can imagine doing that is if I raised my desk and worked from a treadmill instead of a chair.
The thing that I find most irritating about the criticism (as well as in the health-care debate) is the declaration of life expectancy as a useful parameter. I don’t know what the life expectancy of paleolithic people was, but I’ll bet that diet was not a big factor in determining it. It’s important to understand that average life expectancy isn’t the age at which most people die. If it really was thirty, it was likely due to a) high infant mortality and b) a very violent lifestyle, in which the men were likely to be killed either hunting or fighting other humans, at a fairly young age. I suspect that if you manage to become an “elder” (i.e., someone in your thirties) you’d live a long time.
“It’s Tough To Draw Where The Line Is”
Have researchers created the first artificial life? If not, it certainly seems like a tall milestone marker on the way to that.
[Update a few minutes later]
More at the Beeb.
The Day Has Arrived
Time for solidarity in defense of enlightenment values.
Brendan O’Neill says, though, that we’re missing the real point — that the real cultural enemy isn’t extremist Islam, but the multiculturalists within. But Nick Gillespie explains why it’s important nonetheless. And Mark Steyn has more thoughts.
[Update a few minutes later]
People will see what they want to see.
[Update a while later]
Who decides what is provocative?
How Much Does Safety Cost?
And how much should it cost? Over at my Pajamas Media piece this weekend, frequent TTM commenter “bbbeard” comments:
SpaceX has a launch record of 3 complete failures and two successes. What is disturbing about the SpaceX failures is that they hinged on relatively major oversights. Take the Demo2 flight, for example. SpaceX’s post-flight analysis showed that incorrect propellant utilization parameters were uploaded into the engine computer, a textbook case of sloppy configuration control. There was a recontact during staging, which initiated a slosh event — that was not mitigated because the LOX tank had no baffles. These are the kind of rookie mistakes that get you labeled as a “hobbyist”. It will take more than two successful flights to show that Elon Musk’s company has outgrown its hobbyist mentality and is ready to tackle human spaceflight.
Safety is the elephant in the foyer that you have not addressed. STS has suffered two launch failures in 132 missions (counting Columbia’s foam strike as a launch failure) — and what no one in NewSpace seems able to admit is that that loss rate is unacceptable. You can deny all you want that NASA is up to the job of designing a vehicle significantly safer than STS, but it is a fact that Ares is being designed to tough and unprecedented requirements for loss of crew rates — and Atlas and Delta never were. You claim Atlas has an “unbroken string of many dozens of successful flights” but by my count only 20 of the 21 flights of Atlas V have been successful — and that is an unacceptable loss rate. Only 2 out 3 Delta IV-Heavy flights have been successful — and that is an unacceptable loss rate.
Unlike SpaceX, the engineers at Boeing and Lockheed are the best in the business. But they were never directed to make Atlas and Delta reliable enough for human spaceflight. Using those platforms as human launch vehicles would be a step backward from STS safety levels, which are already unacceptably high.
What your argument boils down to is that you, Rand Simberg, think that the extra reliability that Ares aspires to is not worth the price tag. You may be right, you may be wrong. But why won’t you explain that that is your argument, instead of simplistically blaming NASA for poor cost control?
Man, there’s a lot to unpack there. I don’t know if I have time to deal with it right now, but let me at least lay out the issues. One is what an “acceptable” level of safety is (particularly relative to the reliability required to deliver a satellite worth a billion dollars). Another is how it is achieved. A third is how much it should cost to do so. A fourth is how much someone who had pretty much the same experience as other “professionals” in developing rockets for the first time can be said to be a “hobbyist.” (I would note as an aside that I don’t intrinsically accept “hobbyist” and “amateur” as pejoratives vis a vis “professionals” — many amateurs and hobbyists can be better than professionals — they just don’t choose to do it for a living. Space historian Henry Spencer comes to mind. I don’t think that there is anyone on the planet who is more familiar with both space history and space technology than Henry, but it’s not his day job.)
Anyway, I’m trying to figure out how to earn a living myself, so have at it in comments for now. I may weigh in later.