Archive for 2018

RAZIB KHAN: Why SpaceX Matters. “Musk, and Jeff Bezos, envisage us as an inter-planetary (and perhaps extra-planetary) species. This is laudable so as to avoid the risk of mass extinction on a single ‘lifeboat Earth.’ . . . The lesson from prehistory is that modern humans are a crazy species. We journey across the deep blue sea into the unknown. To a great extent, this is irrational for the groups and individuals who engage in this activity. The vast majority of voyagers probably expired. And yet something within us kept pushing some of us until we made it. In a different lingo, one might say that staying home, focusing on safety and comfort, is a local maximum. International space agencies and private firms such as Lockheed Martin were chasing the local maxima. That was safe and defensible. Only someone as crazy as Elon Musk would push SpaceX into an endeavor which was insane and likely to fail. And yet sometimes humans don’t fail, and crazy is actually saner than we could ever imagine.”

TONIGHT’S OPEN THREAD: Make of it what you will.

ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY. LGBT Vigilantes Find New Bigot Nests: Meet the new anti-gay enemy — gays who say gay families are like other families.

IS TRUMP’S TREASON JOKE WORSE THAN OBAMA’S AUDITING YOUR ENEMIES “JOKE?” “I thought it was bad form to joke about auditing your enemies too. But for the most part, no one really cared. Even when Obama’s enemies started getting audited. I still think it is bad form to joke about treason, but Trump has never been one to hold himself to rules his opponents won’t follow.”

PHOTO ESSAY: Chernobyl as you’ve never seen it before.

Infrared photography can be tricky to get just right — I had an old D70 converted to shoot it once upon a time — but the creepiness of the location is a perfect match for the weirdness of the format.

FBI’S PETER STRZOK RAILED ABOUT ‘IDIOT’ TRUMP, ‘IGNORANT HILLBILLIES’ IN VIRGINIA:

Throughout the primary and general elections, Strzok and Page repeatedly demonstrated hostility to then-candidate Trump and Republicans in general. Page called Trump a “loathsome human,” before writing “I can not [sic] believe Donald Trump is likely to be an actual, serious candidate for president.” Strzok called Trump “an idiot” and opined Clinton “should win 100,000,000 – 0.” Strzok and Page also used expletives to describe Trump. Page also expressed disdain for Americans participating in the 2016 March for Life, writing that she “truly hate[s] these people.” Strzok called Virginians who apparently voted against FBI Deputy Director McCabe’s wife for a local Senate seat “ignorant hillbillys [sic].” These statements raise questions about whether personal political bias may have affected the FBI’s investigation.

“Those ‘ignorant hillbillies,’” adds Twitchy, “would be the voters who decided not to send Andrew McCabe’s wife Jill McCabe, a Democrat, to Virginia’s state legislature in 2015.”

As Glenn noted last month, “America — and the West in general — has been ruled by people who, at core, don’t very much like the countries they rule. But they do like ruling them, and will do anything they can to keep doing it.”