Category: History

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T-Minus Eight Years And Counting

Spaceship One. Credit: Scaled Composites

It’s been eight long years since SpaceShipOne became the first privately-built spacecraft to actually fly into space, thus earning the title of…spacecraft.

OK, so that’s redundant. My kids have been making me watch too much Austin Powers (allow myself to introduce…myself).

Not being content with making history just once, Rutan and Co. went on to make two more flights with ballast equivalent to two passengers, thus earning the $10 million Ansari X-Prize.

Naturally I was geeked out over the whole thing when it happened. It also gave me the impetus to start writing Perigee, which had already been flitting about inside my cranial region for some time. I figured now that someone had actually done it, and another really rich guy was bankrolling a whole new airline on the concept, that my own wild ideas wouldn’t feel so…science-fictioney.

Yeah, that’s a word. Trust me, I’m a writer. Continue reading “T-Minus Eight Years And Counting”

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Happy Memorial Day

Soldier, rest! Thy warfare o’er,
Sleep the sleep that knows not breaking,
Dream of battled fields no more.
Days of danger, nights of waking.

-Sir Walter Scott

“It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather, we should thank God that such men lived.”

-Gen. George S. Patton

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(We Don’t Need No) Civil War

I wish this post was about a crappy and long-forgotten Guns & Roses tune.

Sadly, it’s not.

Nope, this is a post about the relentless jackassery of the European Union. Seems that their Ministry of Silly Walks (whatever, it doesn’t really matter – they’re all equally ineffective) has determined that to avoid harming the feelings of anyone who might’ve signed up for the Jackboot side of WWII, the Museum of European History will henceforth only present said history from 1946 onward. The armed unpleasantness that occurred immediately before the current era of sweetness and light will henceforth be referred to as the European Civil War.

Let that sink in a minute. Continue reading “(We Don’t Need No) Civil War”

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Serf’s Up

Some thought-provoking…thoughts, on our current state of affairs from National Review. Think you’re a free citizen of a government that exists for the will of the people?

Think again, silly person. Come see the violence inherent in the system! Help, help! I’m being repressed!

UPDATE: Think I’m exaggerating? Here’s a story about a private dinner in Nevada that was broken up by party-crashers from the health department. Yes, it was a very big party. So what? It was a private “farm-to-fork” dinner…i.e., organic. Makes you wonder how many partygoers may be reconsidering their ballot choices.

Hat tip: Samizdata.net

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The Mask Finally Slips

…and the Left reveals their true intentions. Separately, any one of these stories would be just more dismaying evidence of the sorry state of our politics. But taken together, they paint a truly frightening picture:

Climate Changers Game Plan Revealed. Surprise: world domination! Worth considering when you read the ClimateGate 2.0 emails.

Obama’s True Convictions Revealed. Surprise: Marxism! Okay, so it’s not a surprise for anyone who’s actually been paying attention.

Occupy Wall Street’s Goal Revealed. Surprise: crush Capitalism!

Fast & Furious Objective Revealed. Surprise: gun control!

Democrats Abandon the Middle Class in favor of either extreme of the income-distribution curve: those who rely on government handouts and the very wealthy who supposedly pay for it all. In reality, all of us who actually work for a living are paying for it all. And our kids. And their kids…

And lest I forget, former SEIU thug-in-chief Andy Stern advocates for a Chinese Communist economic model in the Wall Street Journal, of all places. Before you dismiss that as having any relevance, don’t forget that the former head Purple People Beater has been the single most frequent visitor to the Obama White House.

At this point, it’d make perfect sense for Dr. Evil to surface off of Washington in his hidden submarine lair to demand one trillion dollars. And we would laugh collectively as Geithner and Bernanke happily roll up with a dump truck’s load of freshly-minted bills, as Dr. Evil certainly wouldn’t appreciate what a screw job they’d just given him.

After decades of hiding their true intentions, the radicals who’ve taken over the Democratic Party have finally dropped any pretense of hiding what they’re really all about. It’s a sign that they see this as the end game, all or nothing.

Well, thank God for that, however infuriating they may be. So bring it, you Commie pukes. And I mean that in the true sense of the word, as that’s the ideology you’ve aligned yourselves with. It’s nice that you’ve finally admitted to it. 2012 will be one of the most consequential elections in our history, equal to 1860 or 1932. It’s only fitting that we know what our choices are really going to be.

Of course, that assumes the Republicans get their collective act together and present us with an actual choice, and not just a less-scary version of what the Dims have been pushing since the Sixties. Hint: that probably won’t be coming from the Mittster.

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History Repeats Itself

First as tragedy, next as farce.

And that, my friends, is the only thought Karl Marx ever expressed that I would even halfway agree with (assuming I’m correct in attributing that to him).

So what’s got me wound up on such a topic? Current events, as usual.

At the top of the list would be supposedly intelligent people believing we can solve the world’s financial problems by just printing more money. And where, exactly, has that worked whenever it’s been tried? Think Wiemar Germany or Zimbabwe can’t happen here? You can’t ignore the laws of economics any more than you can physics. The effects just take longer to materialize.

Next, an administration which foolishly encourages Israel’s enemies (and by extension, our own).

Just for fun, how about the rise of the “Fifth Reich“? (No one expected the Spanish Inquisition!)

Finally, our pathetic inability to understand or appreciate our own history, which just cements the deal. I’ve never been one to think like a tin-foil-hat survivalist, but the likelihood of a global catastrophe just keeps growing . 1914 or 1938, pick your year, because I fear we’re about to find out what that was like.

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The Shoulders of Apollo

Andrew Chaikin is the author of A Man on the Moon, an eminently readable history of the Apollo program which Tom Hanks used as the basis for his HBO miniseries, From the Earth to the Moon.

The book reads like a novel. It’s hands-down the single best source of information on one of our nation’s greatest achievements, and provides excellent context for more detailed inside-baseball histories written later on by key players like Gene Cernan, Chris Kraft, and Gene Kranz.

They are all men whom I have a tremendous amount of respect for, and held high places among my list of boyhood heroes. But sadly, many of the men who made Apollo successful have also fully imbibed the NASA Kool-Aid, based on their advocacy for the atrocious Senate Space Launch System. SLS threatens to become a fiscal black hole from which no other program money will escape.  I found this ironic for Mr. Kranz, who in his own book, Failure is Not an Option, lamented as to how NASA has devolved into just another butt-covering government bureaucracy.

Which brings me back to Mr. Chaikin, who recently penned an excellent piece on the sorry state of U.S. human spaceflight in Space News. An unquestioned expert on Apollo history, he appears to have benefited from an historian’s sense of objectivity. It probably didn’t hurt that he wasn’t drinking from the water fountains in Houston or Canaveral in the ’60s, since they were apparently flush with the aforementioned Kool-Aid.

An excerpt:

Four decades later the challenge is not just to follow Apollo’s trail into deep space, but to do it affordably and sustainably. That’s not going to happen if NASA continues to be run as a jobs program as much as a space program.

These are the things I think about when I hear people like my manager friend say that commercial companies should be patient and wait for the fruits of NASA’s experience to spin off to the private sector. They apparently don’t see that this spinoff has already happened, that companies like SpaceX have digested the collected wisdom of NASA’s first half-century and are building on it.

But don’t take my word for it. Read the whole thing at Space News.

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Happy Veteran’s Day

To all Americans, but especially the brothers and sisters I served with in the Marine Corps.

As the saying goes: “If you can read this, thank a teacher. If you can read this in English, thank a veteran.”

On a lesser note (pun intended), today’s date is 11/11/11, which also makes it Nigel Tufnel Day.

Crank up your patriotic music to 11!

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Just in Time for Deer Season

What every young man needs: a rifle that fires tactical nuclear warheads.

Hat tip: Field & Stream’s Gun Nuts.

Yet another product from our government’s golden age of ingenuity. Or something. In the meantime, I’m still craving this decidedly less elaborate firearm:

And as the tag line says, I can probably have only one…

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