THINGS I’M THANKFUL FOR

Frank J on things he’s thankful for:

• So far, the Large Hadron Collider hasn’t destroyed the universe.

• Burritos continue to be cheap and plentiful.

• Having completely squandered public support, the worst of the Democrats being in charge is already over.

• The sun continues to be a cheap and free source of heating and light with no signs of stopping.

• Thanks to Twitter, we no longer have to speculate what inane thoughts are going through a given celebrity’s head at this very moment.

• Due to Sarah Palin’s aerial patrols, wolf attacks are down 30%.

Things I’m thankful for

• Even bankrupted under massive debt and with a ninny as president, America is still like a million times better than any other country.

• Frank J's humor.

IT’S FALL AND THE ACORNs ARE DROPPING

ACORN is left “twisting slowly, slowly in the wind.” I have no doubt that the retrieved documents will make interesting reading over the next few months.

[Update] ACORN responds: “It was theft.”

IT'S ALL ABOUT ME

Mark Steyn on The Ego of ‘O’.
























I am "The Won".

WHAT’S NEXT? THE AUGUSTINE REPORT

The space shuttle Atlantis arrived home safely at 9:44 a.m. EST today.
Only 5 shuttle flights remain. What’s next?

Well, the Augustine Report on the future of manned space is in, and it isn’t pretty.

A White House committee is urging President Barack Obama to develop commercial taxi services to fly American astronauts to and from low Earth orbit, a move that would be a major shift in longstanding national space policy.

Under the plan, NASA still would build its Orion spacecraft to fly astronauts beyond Earth orbit -- on missions to orbit the moon and Mars or perhaps land on asteroids. The agency also would move rapidly to develop a human-rated heavy lift rocket to launch large components required for deeper-space missions. That rocket would provide a "fallback option" if U.S. aerospace companies fail to develop space taxi service to low-Earth orbit.

However, the shift in approach essentially would take NASA out of the business of launching its own astronauts -- a job the agency has done since Alan Shepard became the first American to fly in space in 1961.

Commercialization of space is an obvious – and personally welcome – development, but the lack of a “Grand Plan” is disturbing:

Also among the big questions Obama will have to answer: Where should astronauts go next? The panel boiled it down to three options: Stick with current plans to go the moon, go straight to Mars instead, or fly interplanetary voyages to orbit the moon, Mars and perhaps land on an asteroid.

As is the clear lack of financial support:

NASA's budget needs to be ramped up by $3 billion between 2011 and 2014 to carry out any "meaningful" human spaceflight program.

Unfortunately, I don’t view the Obama administration as interested in space exploration or competent to develop a vision if it were interested.

It’s going to be a long three years for the next frontier.

PARTY CRASHERS

"United States Secret Service agents are conducting an internal review to determine how Washington area socialites Tareq and Michaele Salahi managed to sneak in to President Barack Obama's first State Dinner on Tuesday despite high security."

The Secret Service will certainly get a black eye over this one, but my bet is that if the media doesn’t go all defensive (likely) we’ll find out that the Secret Service was overruled on security precautions by someone in the White House.

[Update]: Hmm. Lawyer: White House cleared crashers.

WHO DESERVES CREDIT FOR THE NOBEL PRIZE IN PHYSICS?

Two Bell Labs contemporaries of Nobel Prize winners George Smith and Willard Boyle put some doubt into the accepted history.

An interesting podcast. People tend to think that science and engineering are pretty cut-and-dried. They aren’t.

DEFINING MSNBC

”[I]t’s the Stuff White People Like network.”

I’d only add the single word “Elite” between “Stuff” and “White.”

PALIN DERANGEMENT SYNDROME

It’s in full bloom:

Slate magazine is just one of the countless media outlets convulsing with St. Vitus’ Dance over that demonic succubus Sarah Palin. In its reader forum, The Fray, one supposed Palinophobe took dead aim at the former Alaska governor’s writing chops, excerpting the following sentence from her book:

“The apartment was small, with slanting floors and irregular heat and a buzzer downstairs that didn’t work, so that visitors had to call ahead from a pay phone at the corner gas station, where a black Doberman the size of a wolf paced through the night in vigilant patrol, its jaws clamped around an empty beer bottle.”

Other readers pounced like wolf-sized Dobermans on an intruder. One guffawed, “That sentence by Sarah Palin could be entered into the annual Bulwer-Lytton bad writing contest. It could have a chance at winning a (sic) honorable mention, at any rate.”

But soon, the original contributor confessed: “I probably should have mentioned that the sentence quoted above was not written by Sarah Palin. It’s taken from the first paragraph of ‘Dreams From My Father,’ written by Barack Obama.”

What is the sound of an ego deflating?

Link from Instapundit.

THANKSGETTING

Why did I have the uneasy sense that Thanksgiving is all about him?



Getting thanks instead of giving thanks?

GLORY DAYS

Rebuilding an IBM 1401 computer (slide show). The story is here.

I feel right at home. As an undergraduate student, I was a systems operator (unpaid; it was love) on the University’s first computer.