Category: Essays And Commentaries

Long essays or op-ed length commentaries on the issues of the day or on topics of special interest.

The first real Republican president in a half century

3:50 pm

Which president is different than all the others?
Which president is different than all the others?

When George Bush Jr. was elected president in 2000, he also won majorities in both the House and the Senate in Congress. At the time I remember quite naively saying that he now was in a position to force through some real change, because any radical leftist proposal needed three different signatures, and the Republicans in all three branches just weren’t going to give it.

Hah! What a fool I was. During Bush Jr’s eight year rein the federal government grew in leaps and bounds, even more than under Bill Clinton, with every leftist desire fulfilled, though generally quietly in order to avoid outraging the American public that wanted change.

Nor was Bush Jr. the exception to the rule. No, every Republican president since Dwight Eisenhower has been nothing more than a Democrat in disguise, and that includes Donald Trump during his first term as president.

Only now do we see a real conservative president in power. You need only look at the official portraits of all these presidents to the right to understand this. Just compare Donald Trump’s official picture in 2017 with this picture in 2025. In 2017 he was a happy leader who innocently thought the administrative state he was in charge of would do as he said.

In 2025 he is innocent no longer. Instead, he is a hardened warrior ready to do battle. And that is exactly what we have seen, a Republican president unlike any since before World War II.

For once, the voters got a choice on election day. For once, the Republican who said he wanted to change things really meant it.
» Read more

29 comments

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Rhode Island) now demands “forced mandatory vaccinations”

3:02 pm

During confirmation hearings this week on Trump’s nominee to take over the Department of Health and Human Services Robert Kennedy, Jr., Democrat Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island once again demonstrated his fascist and petty dictator nature, demanding that Kennedy support “forced mandatory vaccinations” of Americans or else he will vote against Kennedy’s nomination.

Whitehouse also demanded that Kennedy promise to never again say “that vaccines are not medically safe when they in fact are.”

In other words Kennedy is to put aside his own research and knowledge, that has found some vaccines efficacy and safety are questionable, and join the government swamp to lie to Americans while forcing Americans to take drugs they might not want.

Sounds insane? If you don’t believe me then watch:
» Read more

21 comments

Samples from the asteroid Bennu reshape entirely our understanding of the solar system’s early make-up

11:11 am

Nightingale landing site on Bennu
The sample site on Bennu, with OSIRIS-REx
superimposed for scale. Click for full image.

First, I hope my readers will notice that — unlike NASA and the entire press — I make no mention in my headline above of the discovery of a “mix of life’s ingredients” or “the key building blocks of life” from the samples brought back by the probe OSIRIS-REx from the asteroid Bennu.

This is the game NASA does all the time, to hint at the discovery of life when this is not the real discovery. NASA does it because it knows that if you hint at such a discovery, the press will go crazy and give you lots of press.

The real news from the two papers published this week, available here and here, however, is more fundamental. Before the samples from Bennu and Ryugu (brought back by the Japanese probe Hayabusa-2) had arrived, our understanding of the make-up and chemistry of the early solar system was very incomplete and badly biased. The only asteroid samples we had of carbonaceous chondrite asteroids, the most primitive and fragile carbon-rich asteroids in the solar system, had came from meteorites that had survived the journey through the Earth’s atmosphere. Thus, the only material that survived was robust enough to do so. The more fragile molecules however were always destroyed and thus missing from meteorites, even though it was very clear from spectroscopy of these asteroids in the solar system that such molecules did exist, and likely formed the majority of these asteroids’ make-up.

Thus, though carbonaceous chondrite asteroids represent the early solar system, our understanding of them was warped and very incomplete. The whole point of both missions to Bennu and Ryugu was to fill in this data, to get a more complete census of the real make-up of the early solar system.

The two papers published this week have given us that. That’s their real discovery.
» Read more

3 comments

Pushback: The left discovers it doesn’t have the right to break the law

2:00 pm

The Bill of Rights, still in force
The Bill of Rights, still in force

In the past few months, since Trump won re-election in November, the string of legal and political victories by the thousands of individuals blacklisted by the left and the Democratic Party in the past decade has been so overwhelming that for me to report each story as it happened would have required me to change the focus of this website entirely, something I did not wish to do.

Instead, I have collected a short list of these victories, hardly complete, and am now posting them here in one essay. This will not only put these victories on the record, it will show unequivocally how many leftists since 2020 somehow came to believe they were not required to follow the law in imposing their leftist agenda on others. The belief however was a delusion. It has just taken a few years to make the rule of law regain its primacy.

Read now and celebrate. Note also that Trump’s election win was completely irrelevant to most of these stories. While his return to the presidency clearly accelerated the trend, the trend had been established long before his election. And that trend has only just begun.
» Read more

21 comments

Blue Origin successfully launches New Glenn

12:35 am

New Glenn 18 seconds after liftoff
New Glenn 18 seconds after liftoff

Better late than never! After almost a decade of development and five years behind schedule, Blue Origin tonight successfully launched its massive New Glenn orbital rocket, placing its second stage into orbit carrying a demo version of the company’s Blue Ring orbital tug.

It appears the first stage had a problem during what Blue Origin calls its “booster reentry burn”, which appears somewhat equivalent to SpaceX’s entry burn. Unfortunately no camera views were made available. From that point no further telemetry came down from the first stage, suggesting something had gone wrong enough to require initiation of the flight termination system so the stage would not crash on the landing barge.

The second stage will operate in orbit for six hours, testing Blue Ring.

For Blue Origin this success, though late, is a grand achievement. The company has a full launch manifest, with a 27-launch contract with Amazon for its Kuiper internet constellation. It also has a deal with the Space Force to get the rocket certified for military launches, once it completes two successful launches. Once certified the Space Force very much wants to use it, a lot.

America now has three major rocket companies, SpaceX, ULA, and Blue Origin. It also has Rocket Lab, which has a smaller rocket but intends to introduce its own larger version in 2025.

The 2025 launch race:

8 SpaceX
2 China
1 Blue Origin

Nor is the launch action over. Tomorrow SpaceX will attempt the seventh orbital test launch of its Starship/Superheavy rocket, the one-hour launch window opening at 4 pm Central.

9 comments

The old media logjam has broken: Even the left is now getting its news from new media

1:18 pm

Sara Foster sees the light
Sara Foster sees the light

In my essay yesterday describing how the wildfires in the Los Angeles area appear to finally be making conservatives out of a lot of partisan knee-jerk Democrats, I used a quote that I think is important because it illustrates a major cultural change in a way that is not obvious at first. It also demonstrates a new political reality that the Democratic Party has not yet grasped.

The quote was from a tweet on X by actress Sara Foster. This is what she wrote:

We pay the highest taxes in California. Our fire hydrants were empty. Our vegetation was overgrown, brush not cleared. Our reservoirs were emptied by our governor because tribal leaders wanted to save fish. Our fire department budget was cut by our mayor. But thank god drug addicts are getting their drug kits. @MayorOfLA @GavinNewsom RESIGN. Your far left policies have ruined our state. And also our party.

Note the facts this clearly partisan Democrat cites.
» Read more

19 comments

The new conservatives who have been mugged by a wildfire

2:57 pm

Gavin Newsom, surveying his domain
Gavin Newsom, surveying the hellhole his
policies created. Looks proud, doesn’t he?

The news today is about how numerous Hollywood celebrities who have lost their homes in the wildfires that have been destroying huge swatches of the Los Angeles metropolitan area are one-by-one expressing loud public outrage at the mismanagement and failures of the Democrats running California’s state and city governments.

The list is long and detailed at the link. This comment is quite typical:

Actress Sara Foster also took to X to lament how Los Angeles residents pay exorbitant taxes but the state was still completely unprepared to take on such massive wildfires. “Our fire hydrants were empty. Our vegetation was overgrown, brush not cleared. Our reservoirs were emptied by our governor because tribal leaders wanted to save fish. Our fire department budget was cut by our mayor. But thank god drug addicts are getting their drug kits,” she wrote.

The politically active actress, who is the daughter of music mogul David Foster, called on [LA mayor] Bass and Gov. Gavin Newsom to resign, writing, “your far left policies have ruined our state. And also our party.” [emphasis mine]

The highlighted words tell us however that Foster is not yet ready to reject the corrupt, bigoted, and incompetent Democratic Party that she so loves. This has been the pattern now for decades. No matter how bad its policies, the partisan adherents to the Democratic Party have too often consistently resisted opening their minds to other choices.

It immediately occurred to me however that this present outrage is only a foretaste of the real outrage soon to come. » Read more

33 comments

The global launch industry in 2024: A year of amazing highs and depressing lows, with the best yet to come

9:40 am

For the past five years the entire global rocket industry has experienced a revolution that has resulted in a rise in global launch numbers unprecedented since the launch of Sputnik in 1957. 2024 was no different, with the total number of successful launches topping 256, two to four times the average number of launches that had occurred yearly prior to 2020.

This success has almost entirely been driven by the arrival of many private rocket companies competing for government and commercial business — led largely by SpaceX — aided by the decision by governments worldwide to get out of the way and let private enterprise do the job. The result has been spectacular, so much so that it now seem possible in the very near future to see humans finally revisiting the Moon and even getting to Mars and the asteroids.

At the same time, 2024 saw some significant signs that this success is not guaranteed, and could vanish in an instant if care is not taken.

The graph below, my annual count of launches world wide, provides the groundwork for these conclusions.
» Read more

15 comments

Beware the DEI shell game

1:09 pm

Don't trust it to do the right thing
Don’t trust the leftists who run it to do the right thing

In the past few months the conservative has been repeatedly celebrating the retreat of the racist “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (DEI) movement. From corporations to universities DEI departments are being shut down.

Today I report on one of the most recent examples, but I do so as a warning. Just because a university or company announces plans to shut down a DEI department does not mean this racist policy is no longer being taught or used in hiring. In many cases, the shut down is merely a shell game to fool the general public while the policies continue, under the radar.

On December 17, 2024, the University of Iowa announced that was shuttering a number of programs, including its department of Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies, and combining them into a new department dubbed the School of Social and Cultural Analysis. From the university’s press release:

Under the proposed plan, the college would close the departments of American Studies and Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies, as well as the current majors in American Studies and in Social Justice, which have fewer than 60 students combined, and create a new major in Social and Cultural Analysis. The existing programs have limited faculty and overlapping curricula, causing challenges for faculty in sustaining teaching capacity. The new curricula will not only streamline operations but offer clarity and flexibility in students’ educational pathways.

“Right now, these programs are administered by multiple department chairs and multiple directors,” said Roland Racevskis, CLAS associate dean for the arts and humanities. “Under this proposed plan, the school would have a single leadership team dedicated to overseeing the operations of the programs. This new structure would provide better coordination of curriculum across these related programs, easier pathways for degree completion, and support for interdisciplinary research opportunities.”

Existing minors and certificates in associated areas would move into the new school. No changes to graduate programs are currently being proposed. [emphasis mine]

One of the reasons for this action is that the state legislature had recently passed an education appropriations bill [pdf] that specifically banned spending any money on DEI-type programs. From page 8 of the bill:
» Read more

9 comments

Repost: The real meaning of the Apollo 8 Earthrise image

1:56 pm

I wrote this essay in 2018, to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Apollo 8 mission to the Moon. I have reposted previously, but I think it is worth reposting again and again, especially because stories about Apollo 8 still refuse to show the Earthrise image as Bill Anders took it. Even today, the Air and Space Museum did it wrong again, and it seems to me to be a slap in the face of Anders himself, who died this year while flying.
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Earthrise, as seen by a space-farer
Earthrise, as seen by a space-farer

Today is the fiftieth anniversary of the moment when the three astronauts on Apollo 8 witnessed their first Earthrise while in orbit around the Moon, and Bill Anders snapped the picture of that Earthrise that has been been called “the most influential environmental picture ever taken.”

The last few days have seen numerous articles celebrating this iconic image. While all have captured in varying degrees the significance and influence of that picture on human society on Earth, all have failed to depict this image as Bill Anders, the photographer, took it. He did not frame the shot, in his mind, with the horizon on the bottom of the frame, as it has been depicted repeatedly in practically every article about this image, since the day it was published back in 1968.

Instead, Anders saw himself as an spaceman in a capsule orbiting the waist of the Moon. He also saw the Earth as merely another space object, now appearing from behind the waist of that Moon. As a result, he framed the shot with the horizon to the right, with the Earth moving from right to left as it moved out from behind the Moon, as shown on the right.

His perspective was that of a spacefarer, an explorer of the universe that sees the planets around him as objects within that universe in which he floats.

When we here are on Earth frame the image with the horizon on the bottom, we immediately reveal our limited planet-bound perspective. We automatically see ourselves on a planet’s surface, watching another planet rise above the distant horizon line.

This difference in perspective is to me the real meaning of this picture. On one hand we see the perspective of the past. On the other we see the perspective the future, for as long humanity can remain alive.

I prefer the future perspective, which is why I framed this image on the cover of Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8 the way Bill Anders took it. I prefer to align myself with that space-faring future.

And it was that space-faring future that spoke when they read from Genesis that evening. They had made the first human leap to another world, and they wished to describe and capture the majesty of that leap to the world. They succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.

Yet, they were also still mostly Earth-bound in mind, which is why Frank Borman’s concluding words during that Christmas eve telecast were so heartfelt. He was a spaceman in a delicate vehicle talking to his home of Earth, 240,000 miles away. “And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you — all of you on the good Earth.” They longed deeply to return, a wish that at that moment, in that vehicle, was quite reasonable.

Someday that desire to return to Earth will be gone. People will live and work and grow up in space, and see the Earth as Bill Anders saw it in his photograph fifty years ago.

And it is for that time that I long. It will be a future of majesty we can only imagine.

Merry Christmas to all, all of us still pinned down here on “the good Earth.”

7 comments

Post COVID data in the UK: Those who got the jab substantially increased their chances of death

12:43 pm

How health scientists determined policy against COVID
How health officials and governments determined
policy against COVID during the epidemic.

Data assembled by the government of the United Kingdom now proves unequivocally that getting the jab during the COVID panic was a very bad idea. It did less than nothing to prevent you from getting the virus, and in fact significantly increased your chances of dying.

[T]he data show that 30 percent of the UK population remained completely unvaccinated as of July 2022. 34 percent were not double vaccinated, and 50 percent were not triple vaccinated.

However, the vaccinated population accounted for 95 percent of all COVID-19 deaths between January and May 2023.

The unvaccinated population, meanwhile, accounted for just five percent of Covid deaths.

Perhaps the most troubling information revealed in the data is the fact that deaths increased among the groups who received more “vaccine” doses. The vast majority of the deaths are among those vaccinated four times. This quad-vaxxed population accounts for 80 percent of all COVID-19 deaths, and 83 percent of all Covid deaths among the vaccinated.

The numbers for many other time periods following the introduction of the jab are comparable.
» Read more

25 comments

Oh no! The sonic booms of SpaceX are coming!

10:00 am

Superheavy after its flight safely captured at Boca Chica
Superheavy after its flight, safely captured at Boca Chica
on October 13, 2024.

When the current (but soon to step down) administrator of the FAA Mike Whitaker testified before Congress in September 2024 and attempted to explain his agency’s red tape that have significantly slowed development of SpaceX’s Starship/Superheavy rocket, he claimed that the sonic booms produced when Superheavy returned to land at the launchpad posed a “safety issue” that needed a detailed review.

“I think the sonic boom analysis [related to returning Superheavy back to Boca Chica] is a safety related incident.”

The sudden introduction of this issue was somewhat out of the blue. While loud, the sonic boom of a rocket launch is hardly a concern. The space shuttle produced the same for decades when it landed, and that was always considered a fun plus to watching the landing. And even if SpaceX begins launching its rockets once a day from any spaceport, that added noise does nothing to hurt anyone. In fact, it is a local signal of a thriving economy.

Since then it appears the leftist “intellectual elitists” that don’t like it when they don’t run everything — which is one reason they now hate Elon Musk — have run a full court press trying to make these rocket sonic booms a cause celebre that can be used to block SpaceX launches.
» Read more

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