2000: Al Gore, having served as VP for 8 years, has "gravitas" that George Bush, Governor of Texas, does not have.
2008: Barack Hussein Obama doesn't need to have executive experience to be a good President. Besides, he's in charge of his campaign!
2008: John McCain is old and even though he looks good now, his age means his health is questionable. We have to worry about this! We should elect Obama because he's young!
2016: Hillary Clinton has a whole slew of reported health problems, including an inability to climb stairs, but we have to elect her President because First Woman President and LOOK HALLEY'S COMET!
Whatever is wrong with Hillary's health--and there are some serious questions about it which our media is entirely uninterested in asking--it's obvious that she's less fit to be President now than McCain was in 2008.
File this under "left-wing bias in the press". On which, not to put too fine a point on it, I am tired of commenting.
* * *
Nobody is worried that Hillary is talking about silencing someone critical of her? Does this not concern anyone in the media that Hillary is talking about quashing people who speak against her?
I suppose the media thinks that Hillary would be satisfied with crushing Breitbart out of existence. I also guess they think that's where it would end. But of course this kind of thing doesn't end; feeding it makes it worse. Eventually there wouldn't be a single reporter in the country who would dare say anything about Hillary which was even slightly negative...and they'd all wonder "How did it come to this?"
Well, it came to that because you didn't immediately stand up and blast the airwaves with this story about how Hillary wants to crush freedom of expression, but instead kept it quiet and helped her get elected.
Reading Red Storm Rising reminded me of an unpleasant historical fact: in the Soviet Union, people could not express themselves. The story reminded me that under communism the USSR was a place where people couldn't speak their minds, and saying anything critical of the Party or government was a good way to land yourself in the gulag.
That's what Hillary wants: she wants to be able to punish anyone who says anything negative about her. If you think she'd stop feeling that way after crushing Breitbart, you're delusional.
* * *
Is there any way we could get Milwaukee to keep him? Jesse Jackson is going to give a eulogy for the criminal who got himself shot by police.
Being an ordinarily honest man, I can't really wrap my head around what Jackson could possibly say about the death of the thug in question. Seems to me it'd be a great chance for a black leader to stand up and say, "Look, dickheads, if you break the law and carry illegal guns and all that other shit, you're much more likely to be shot dead by police than if you obey the law and go to school and get a job. The remedy here is not to riot and loot and pillage whenever a criminal gets shot dead, but for all of y'all to stop acting like savages and start being productive citizens."
But that's hard. And anyway, as a prominent Democrat and race huckster, the very last thing Jesse Jackson wants is for urban blacks to become even remotely self-sufficient. The longer blacks remain poor and uneducated and view it as a virtue to do so the longer the Democrat party can count on their votes.
So Jesse Jackson will get up at that funeral and wax eloquent about how it's a tragedy and it's terrible and racism and cops and blah blah blah, all the while not laying blame for the situation squarely at the feet of every last person over the past fifty years who has excused and enabled the criminal tendencies of young black men. Including himself.
* * *
High speed fail, still. The high speed rail line that California is building has, so far, not progressed at all, and the cost of the thing continues to climb.
The most interesting thing is how the cost has now begun to approximate the figure bandied about by opponents of the ballot measure (when it was still optional for California voters, I mean).
In just 3 years, from the original passage of Proposition 1A authorizing about $10 billion in High Speed Rail bonds, the estimated cost for high-speed rail had gone from $40 billion to $98 billion, the amount that independent expert analysis had predicted prior to the bond’s being approved.All this for something which is economically unnecessary. Of course.
* * *
It's there! It's there! Proxima Centauri b is a real planet! If it's got an atmosphere, it's either habitable or could be made so. The temperatures with an atmosphere are livable for humans, and liquid water could exist on much of the surface, which also means there might be life there--assuming, as I said, an atmosphere, which no one knows yet. Only real show-stopper here is that the planet is tidally locked, which means its day is as long as its year. (Which is 11.2 Earth days long.)
The star is close enough to Alpha Centauri that the separation of the binary stars would be visible in the night sky, to the naked eye.
This is an Earth-sized world close enough to us that we could send probes there and get useful information back in a reasonable amount of time. The Starwisp idea promulgated by Robert Forward should be able to do it in about twenty years, which is not too bad for an interstellar mission that doesn't have faster-than-light capability.
We just need to decide to do it.