REALLY? NOT THE PRINTING PRESS OR, YOU KNOW, WRITING? History’s greatest invention: the refrigerator.
Archive for 2015
December 8, 2015
BUT IT HAS MORE CENSORSHIP: Hillary’s ISIS strategy is just as lame as the president’s.
THAT THIS IS A MIRACLE AND A WONDER SAYS NOTHING GOOD ABOUT OUR POLITY: Republican wins black-majority legislative seat in Georgia.
MIRACLES AND WONDERS: For once, Mayor de Blasio snubs the teachers union.
December 7, 2015
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Harvard Law Students Issue 7-Page List Of Demands In Wake Of Racial Unrest.
A PRESIDENT HAS TO PRIORITIZE: These Before and After Photos of Obama Show Why He Rushed Through His Oval Office Speech…
“Just 30 minutes after addressing the nation regarding the ‘very real’ threat of terrorism, the President was all smiles at the Kennedy Center Honors,” navy blue business suit off, black tie and tux on, and in full late night talk show master of ceremonies mode, emphasizing both his sense of priorities, and that he can’t wait to get out of office and begin his role as the ultimate MSNBC host.
But until that moment comes, The. Man. Cannot. Rest. Forward!
This might sound like science fiction, but it isn’t: Just before Thanksgiving the U.S. government made it legal for Americans to mine an asteroid—provided they can catch one. Several companies, believe it or not, are preparing to give this a go, pursuing already-identified asteroids that contain precious metals, such as platinum, worth trillions of dollars.
Although the prospects for commercial spaceflight have been skyrocketing, the law governing it had not been updated in more than a decade. That is what makes the bipartisan U.S. Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act, which President Obama signed Nov. 25, so important. The act is a full-scale overhaul that streamlines regulatory processes, promotes safety, and will allow commercial spaceflight companies to reach new milestones.
One provision of the law, however, has gotten most of the headlines. It says, quite simply, that if an American company retrieves minerals, metals or resources from an asteroid or other location in space, it owns them as far as the U.S. is concerned. That single sentence, which applies to all nonliving matter in the cosmos, appears to be the most sweeping legislative recognition of property rights in human history.
With this new law Congress has taken a Lockean approach. In his “Second Treatise of Government,” John Locke argued that God gave the world to humanity in common, but that each person owns himself and his labor. Therefore, when he puts labor into an object through work, he can develop a property right in the object. Similarly, the U.S. recognizes that the cosmos belongs to everyone. But under the new law resources can be retrieved from their location in space and subsequently developed. It is the work of doing this that creates the property right. . . .
With a strong, clear statement that the U.S. will recognize property rights in space, Congress has given a boost to a growing industry. Planetary Resources, a company that I advise, has already launched the first in a series of technology demonstration satellites and plans to send its first prospecting probe to an asteroid by the end of the decade. Private investors can now back it and other ventures, secure that they will own whatever metals and minerals they can extract and bring home.
Property rights spur hard work and innovation—in Locke’s day, in ours and in the age of commercial spaceflight to come.
Yes.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: U.C. Irvine Professor Tells Students NRA Is To Blame For San Bernardino Shooting.
SEVEN YEARS OF OBAMA’LL DO THAT: Michael Barone: Democrats’ Problem: Americans Have Little Faith In Government.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Fall 2016 Law School Applicants Up 0.6%. A turnaround, or a dead-cat bounce? We’ll see.
IT’S COME TO THIS: Is anyone praising Obama’s Oval Office speech?
NIGHTTIME HEAVY METAL: Mark Rippetoe conducted his Bullets & Bourbon workout sessions on the helipad at Rough Creek Lodge. In order to accommodate the number of guests who wished to attend his workouts, a session was added for Friday night at 5:30 PM. The engineers at Rough Creek improvised the illumination via a generator and lights on poles, which made for some cool photographs as well, such as this one, shooting into one of the lights:
Glenn Reynolds prepares for an Insta-lift; in the right-hand side of the frame, Mark talks shop with one of our guests:
Click to pump both photos up to full size.
AT AMAZON, Sports Gifts For Kids.
BULLETS & BOURBON: So we had a great time. I spoke on the Second Amendment, we did a tactical shooting course, an archery course, threw tomahawks, trained with Mark Rippetoe, and generally had a great time. (We missed Stephen Green’s model-rocketry launches, but not his mixology demonstration.) Rough Creek Lodge is an awesome place, and we barely scratched the surface of what they offer. But my favorite part was hanging out with all the attendees, most of whom were InstaPundit or PJ readers and all of whom were cool, interesting people. Looks like it may happen again next year, so stay tuned.
BEN SASSE responds to Obama from San Bernardino.
OUT: DISTRACTED DRIVING. In: Distracted Walking.
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And shop the Amazon Emergency Prep Store. Plus, Emergency & Long-Term Storage Food Deals. When bad things happen, it’s good to have food.
Plus, Generators and Portable Power for Storm Season. Winter is coming.
The Democratic party’s dramatic slide into naked authoritarianism — voting in the Senate to repeal the First Amendment, trying to lock up governors for vetoing legislation, and seeking to jail political opponents for holding unpopular views on global warming, etc. — has been both worrisome and dramatic. The Democrats even have a new position on the ancient civil-rights issue of due process, and that position is: “F— you.”
Yeah, pretty much.
WHAT COULD GO WRONG? Trump: It’s time for a “total and complete shutdown” of Muslims entering the U.S.; Update: Not my policy, says Cruz; Update: American citizens too.
“You-know-who saw that Monmouth poll of Iowa this morning and figured he’d better do something dramatic,” Allahpundit* posits. Ben Shapiro adds:
Kiss Our Intelligence Apparatus Goodnight. We need to work with Muslims both foreign and domestic. It’s one thing to label Islamic terrorism and radical Islam a problem. It’s another to label all individual Muslims a problem. That’s what this policy does. It’s factually wrong and ethically incomprehensible. Donald Trump has just transformed into the strawman President Obama abused on Sunday night.
So no, this isn’t a good idea. It’s a rotten idea all the way around: legally, ethically, practically. Trump’s supporters need to realize at some point that knee-jerk extreme reactions to events of the day don’t substitute for good judgment. It’s ugly when it’s President Obama looking to grab guns from American citizens without due process, and it’s ugly from Donald Trump. Given the poll numbers, it’s not clear whether Americans will get wise to that truth.
And as Gay Patriot notes, “Once again, Donald Trump steps on a negative news cycle for Obama.”
* Would Trump let someone who calls himself “Allahpundit” back into the country if he goes overseas? (Just kidding.)
OUR SOURCE WAS THE NEW YORK TIMES:
Shot: WashPost Newbie: GOP Media Bias Claims Usually ‘Unfounded or Greatly Exaggerated.’
—Tim Graham, NewsBusters, today.
Chaser: THE PUBLIC EDITOR; Is The New York Times a Liberal Newspaper? Of course it is.
—Daniel Okrent, then-ombudsman of the New York Times, July 25, 2004.
Hangover:
Thousands of conservatives and even some moderates have complained during my more than three-year term that The Post is too liberal; many have stopped subscribing, including more than 900 in the past four weeks.
It pains me to see lost subscribers and revenue, especially when newspapers are shrinking. Conservative complaints can be wrong: The mainstream media were not to blame for John McCain’s loss; Barack Obama’s more effective campaign and the financial crisis were.
But some of the conservatives’ complaints about a liberal tilt are valid. Journalism naturally draws liberals; we like to change the world. I’ll bet that most Post journalists voted for Obama. I did. There are centrists at The Post as well. But the conservatives I know here feel so outnumbered that they don’t even want to be quoted by name in a memo.
—Deborah Howell, then-ombudswoman of the Washington Post, November 16, 2008.
Coma:
—Newsweek cover for February 16 2009 issue, when the magazine was still owned by — wait for it — the Washington Post.
ILYA SOMIN: The Emerging Cross-Ideological Consensus On Zoning.
In recent years, and especially over the last few months, economists and other public policy experts across the political spectrum have come to realize that zoning rules are a major obstacle to affordable housing and economic opportunity for the poor and lower middle class. By artificially restricting new construction, zoning and other similar land-use restrictions greatly increase the price of housing, and prevents the market from adjusting to increasing demand. This emerging consensus is a good sign, though it may be difficult to translate it into effective policy initiatives.
Libertarians and other free market advocates have criticized zoning on such grounds for decades, at least as far back as the late Bernard Siegan’s classic 1972 book Land Use Without Zoning. Present-day pro-market scholars such as Steve Horwitz and Harvard economist Edward Glaeser have continued in a similar vein. More recently, however, the critique of zoning has been taken up by prominent left of center commentators. One particularly notable example is this widely quoted recent speech by Jason Furman, Chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers. . . .
Furman’s speech includes a good overview of the academic literature on the subject, which finds that in many cities, zoning restrictions artificially inflate the cost of housing by as much as 50 percent. Other prominent left of center commentators who have recently advanced similar critiques of zoning include Paul Krugman, Noah Smith, and Matthew Yglesias. As Krugman puts it, “this is an issue on which you don’t have to be a conservative to believe that we have too much regulation.”
The growing left-wing critique of zoning is particularly significant because the most liberal cities also tend to be ones with the most restrictive zoning laws, and the highest housing costs. In earlier posts on this subject, I have argued that this tendency is probably the result of voters’ ignorance of the effects of zoning, rather than callous indifference to the needs of the poor. Nonetheless, it would be good if more politically influential liberals become aware of the problem, and began advocate measures to curb zoning.
If you give politicians power, they will use that power on behalf of themselves and their supporters rather than the general public, to precisely the extent that they can get away with it. Lefties occasionally grasp individual applications of this principle, but never the general rule. Or, if they do, they cease to be lefties.
CHART OF THE DAY: More Guns, Less Violence Between 1993 and 2013.
EVERYTHING SEEMINGLY IS SPINNING OUT OF CONTROL:
Shot: Ralph Peters on Fox News: Let’s face it, Obama is a “total pussy”; Suspended two weeks.
Chaser: WHOA: Popular Egyptian TV host says Obama should tried and then ‘sat on an impalement rod.’
END THE WAR ON ISIS NOW, Michael Walsh writes:
Until Saudi Arabia is forcefully and directly confronted over its international financing of extremism, events like Paris and San Bernardino will continue and multiply. That’s a fact, however, that the president has yet to face up to; it goes against every fiber of his painfully politically correct world view. That world view, however, is getting Americans killed. The oath of office is clear about what the president’s overriding duty is:
I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.
The United States is not a nation-state in the sense the European countries are; it is not a country of blood relations, but of fealty to a document of western, Enlightenment principles regarding the relationship of citizen and state. By defending the Constitution — something Obama is increasingly loath to do — the president is defending the country. Because the Constitution, not some vague leftist bromide about our “values” or “the arc of history,” is exactly who we are.
Read the whole thing.