Orson Scott Card, of all people, wrote an excellent WSJ opinion piece here on media bias. His point is about liberal/conservative bias, while I think the problem has less to do with ideology and more to do with competence, but the point remains clear. Certainly in print media (which is the most prestigeous venue) there exists a bias towards the ( Read more... )

There is an excellent article here about the Saudi situation. People in america do't realize how complez politics gets in a monarchy. There are some 5000 saudi princes all of whom are immensely wealthy and desperate to hold on to power. They're all constantly gaming all of the groups they possibly can, forging and breaking alliance, trying ( Read more... )

Bob Dole had an excellent point to make in the WaPost today ( Read more... )

So I just finished the anual rafting trip and it was a blast. We ran the tuolome, which is basically the best river in the country. We've done it before, but at really low water. We were running 1200ish this time, which wasn't great, but way better than the last two years. So while the water could have been better, the weather was perfect. ( Read more... )

Before the fall of the Soviet Union, the "party line" in the west was that it was useless to try to compete with the USSR because the Soviet economy was strong and the Soviet military was formidable, and there was no way it was going to collapse, so we should negotiate and try to come to some sort of accommodation, instead of relying on competition ( Read more... )

Well, history was made today and no one was watching. At 6am, the first ever private citizen blasted off in a home made rocket engine, built at a cost of less than 20 million, and made it into space. This sort of thing took government billions. Demonstrating that getting into space is possible might open up a new era in space flight, and getting ( Read more... )

The statistics behind my previous bitching about the Republicans. They party of limited government totally controls government for the first time in 60 years, and they ramp up discretionary spending and enacted a giant new entitlement progam.

When Bush ran for office in '00, he was essentially running as a reaganite, and his tenure in office, and the congress he's dealt with, have demonstrated how far american conservatism has fallen from its roots ( Read more... )

So Reagan's dead. I have a mixed view on his career. He certainly did a good deal to create the modern US military (especially stealth), to defeat the Soviet Union, and to set up the 90's boom. On the other hand, he lauched the war on drugs, started the expensive and rediculous right wing fascination with a missile defense shield, and largely ( Read more... )

So I was talking to someone about how the space shuttle combined an incredible series of massive mistakes, beauacratic infighting, budget cuts, and outright lies to produce the most expensive mistake in history. Of course, she thought I was talking about the war in Iraq.