The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern: every class is unfit to govern.
– John Dalberg-Acton
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I have expected this to come along as it seemed an obvious market step for SpaceX. They have announced their plans to enter the Heavy Lift arena. If you are familiar with the politics in DC right now, this really puts the cat amongst the pigeons. August 8th, 2010 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
 August 7th, 2010 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
Rand Simberg attended the Boeing press conference and has supplied some notes on their CST-100 plans. I am glad to see there will be competition in the LEO cargo and business passenger field. As much as I like Elon and what he has accomplished, there is nothing like real competition to grow the market. August 6th, 2010 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
No libertarian purist is going to love London’s new public bike hire scheme but it is nearer to harmless than many other state schemes. Apparently it looks to be quite popular. The same cannot be said for Melbourne’s scheme, launched two months ago with high hopes and high rhetoric about the benefits of cycling for people’s health and the environment. The reason for these “ranks of unused blue bikes” is that another bunch of health-promoting statists had queered the pitch. Andrew Bolt in the Australian Herald Sun writes:
August 6th, 2010 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
The blogger, David Thompson, who seems to have the knack of unearthing all matter of weird and wonderful stuff for his Friday postings, also has a posting about a far less amusing subject: the cringeing of certain Western, post-modernist types when confronted with a direct, brutal example of violence by the Taliban. This is what I meant in my previous post about the fact while radical Islam poses a threat that should not be underestimated, there is nothing inevitable about that threat succeeding. What is necessary is for the heirs of our great institutions to start growing a pair, so to speak. August 6th, 2010 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
Thoughtful, long article here by Alex Massie at the Spectator on the real and presumed issues surrounding Islam and the UK, and whether some commentators on the subject are seeing phantom menaces:
Definitely worth reading the whole article. I think one point to make straight away is this: if we have more confidence in the resilience of Western civilisation and the virtues of a post-Enlightenment, pro-reason culture, and encourage support for such things in our places of higher learning and in the opinion-forming world, that in itself might encourage more moderate-minded Muslims in the West realise that the long-term trend was not on the side of the Islamists. Showing a confident front to the world is not bravado – it helps us to win. August 5th, 2010 | 71 comments - (Comments are closed)
The American media has used up its credibility on vanity projects. AGW was the primary one over the last few years, but the biggest vanity project of theirs was Obama. He’s been elected, and no one in America really has any illusions, on either side of the aisle, that he was “the media’s candidate.” The problem that they face is that they are now tied to him, and he’s sinking fast. Turns out, despite how many times they claimed it wasn’t true or didn’t matter, that he’s inexperienced, indecisive and lacks any sort of guiding principle. They spent all the credibility they had with the American people over the last 15 years or so, and ramped that spending way up to get Obama elected. They are now broke, incredible, and paying the price. Fox News is the only one that didn’t waste its credibility capital on this (and have learned to horde it viciously after being under credibility attack by the others since its birth) and is now thriving because of it. Even leftists in America are now turning to Fox more than the rest of the media when they need hard news, like in a crisis or attack situation. The media wasted the reputation they built up since WW2 on tawdry baubles like AGW and Obama, and now no one trusts them. That’s the state of the US media. – Samizdata commenter “Phelps”, writing about this. August 5th, 2010 | 40 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Befitting his ideology, Krugman has only one policy to propose, regardless of topic: Transfer more resources from the discipline and dynamism of markets to the inefficiency and cronyism of government. Government-run health care. Government-controlled banks. Government bailouts. High taxes. High spending. Krugman wants it all, just like in Europe (which, in 2008, he called “the comeback continent”). And Krugman has no problems denying economic science and current events to advocate it.” – Fred Douglass, on the NYT columnist and supposed Harvard economist. For what it is worth, I have never taken Krugman all that seriously since he became a hired attack dog for the Dems. A pity, since some of his writings on trade, for example, are excellent. August 4th, 2010 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
French cricket, to an Englishman, means a game played with a cricket bat and a tennis ball, where you stand vertically, using your bat to hit the ball and protect your legs, which double up as your stumps. When trying to hit the ball you may not move your legs. A hit equals a run. If you miss, and it then misses your legs, you aren’t allowed to change the position of your legs on the ground, so if you miss and it goes behind you, you have to twist around rather than just turn around, which makes it much harder. If you hit, you can then turn around and face where it’s coming from, which is from where it lands, so good fielders can get very close, and then defeat you. A catch is, well, a catch. If it hits your legs you’re out and it’s someone else’s turn. I think. It’s decades since I’ve played this ancient English game. But now comes this:
Amazing. And it’s a Franch government project. Proof if ever you needed it that governments are packs of traitors. August 4th, 2010 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
I would be very interested to learn what our American commenters make of Andrew Breitbart. My impression is that he’s really making misery for the One Party Media in the USA, but occasionally making mistakes. Did he mishandle that video featuring Shirley Sherrod? Or is he being falsely accused of having done so by lilly-livered Conservatives who are too keen on being liked by liberals who will always despise them? My impression is that Breitbart didn’t call Sherrod a racist, but that he did, rightly, call her audience racist. I ask because the latest Breitbart sally seems to contain a (another?) quite serious error. The New York Times has issued what looks to me like a deeply dishonest “retraction”, saying that the racist things said to some Congressman in the street were nothing to do with the Tea Party Movement, when the actual truth, as commenter number one on his piece immediately points out, is that they were nothing to do with anything because they never even happened. And Breitbart seems to me to be letting the New York Times get clean away with this piece of blatant scumbaggery, contenting himself with merely demanding that all the other One Party Media organs issue the same utterly dishonest semi-retraction. If this is Breitbart hitting back twice as hard, my reaction is that he could have landed a far heavier flurry of punches than he just did. Is that a fair criticism, and even if it is, am I just doing that old arm-chair moaner thing of saying that whoever is doing the real business for my team, when I am doing nothing, could be doing even better. Am I demanding the best in a way that is for practical purposes hostile to the good? Whatever the particular truth about just how good a job Breitbart is or is not doing on the One Party Media, I get the distinct impression from over here that something very big is happening to the US media. Some kind of – sorry but the phrase is exactly appropriate – “tipping point” seems to be being reached. The thing is, people on the whole tend not to unleash cumbersome solutions upon circumstances that don’t seem to be a problem. It takes time for people to desert their old familiar ways of acquainting themselves with what’s going on in the world, and there has to be a solid reason to do this, same as there has to be a solid reason to move house or switch from PCs to a Mac, or to stop drinking any alcohol. It takes some particular lie about something that they are personally familiar with, to “tip” them, like when their own genuinely good-guy cousin and his thoroughly nice wife get called (along with a few thousand other people) racists by some loud-mouthed hand-deep-in-the-government-till scam-artist on the television, without any corrective complaint from the grey-haired professorial old guy introducing it, and when they read the same stuff in their newspaper the next morning. At which point they start suspecting that everything else in their formerly trusted newspaper, or on their hitherto perfectly adequate TV channel, could also be deception and scumbaggery. The point being that this switch wasn’t going to happen all in one go, with the overnight arrival of the internet. But I have the feeling that the number of US citizens who are, just about now, arriving at this point in their news and current affairs habits, is becoming something approaching a Moment in US History. Is that right? Or just wishful thinking. To put it another way, Paul Marks is fond of saying in comments here that “most people” still get their news from the regular old media rather than from blogs and such. Is that observation starting to become seriously obsolete? After all, if a quite large percentage of those who still read (exclusively) and trust (implicitly) the regular old media now have family or friends whom they do not consider to be completely mad who don’t and who don’t, that has to change things. Doesn’t it? At the very least, that means that the One Party Media are now experienced by most as putting forward a distinct point of view, rather than just serving up The News. And that’s quite a change. Isn’t it? ADDENDUM: I wrote what is immediately above before reading Dale’s piece immediately below. August 4th, 2010 | 34 comments - (Comments are closed)
I have not yet read ‘American Empire: Before the Fall’ yet myself but have been hearing a great deal about it. I do not myself believe America is going to ‘fall’. Quite the contrary, I believe it is the ruling class in America that is about to go through a very big fall, albeit with some bad short term consequences for the nation before that occurs. The very fact that a self-published book can rise so far in the Amazon rankings is a testament to just how ticked off average Americans are with the power elite. Their day of reckoning is coming. August 4th, 2010 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
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