Yep. As you see here in this graphic posted by Weather Bell meteorologist Joe Bastardi, in response to Obamalot’s verbal whacking of Gov. Perry for daring to criticizing AGW while dry brush here burns up homes and lives.
I can forgive Obamalot this once. He certainly doesn’t know that drought is our normal condition, Bastardi’s nice graphic here notwithstanding. On the other hand it’s nice to see we’ve been getting so much rain. Heh.
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Posted in Blogosphere, Obamalot, Science/Engineering, Texana, Weather/Climate
Tagged AGW, Joe Bastardi, Obamalot, Rick Perry
Or only the first to crash? Jacob Friedrich Brodbeck may have made the first flight in a heavier-than-air craft, on Sept. 20, 1865–almost forty years before the Wright brothers–in a field in the Hill Country about three miles east of Luckenbach.
Tethered gas balloons had been used for military recon in the Civil War, but Brodbeck’s spring-wound engine was something new, supposedly (accounts vary) propelling him for 100 feet, just twelve feet above the ground, until the spring unwound and, oops, the crash ensued. Or not, depending who you believe.
The photo (owned by the Daughters of the Republic of Texas Library at the Alamo) suggests Brodbeck’s bird might have been a biplane, of a sort.
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Posted in Library, Science/Engineering, Texana
Tagged heavier-than-air plane, Jacob Friedrich Brodbeck, spring-wound engine
Hot new research (they really use tax money for this poop?) on sixty (count ’em) toddlers at the University of Virginia has been misinterpreted by the Los Angeles Times and Bloomberg News:
“The Los Angeles Times and Bloomberg have taken this to mean that a zany show like SpongeBob essentially makes kids dumb…but that’s not what the study concludes at all.”
The Los Angeles Times misunderstanding a science story? Quelle surprise!
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Posted in Science/Engineering, Scribbles
Tagged SpongeBob SquarePants
Osama is gone, but he’s certainly not forgotten. He’s remembered every day in New York City (if he couldn’t make it there, he couldn’t make it anywhere) in the seven-story hole in the ground where the World Trade Center used to be.
Presided over, presumably, by the National Association of Grief Counselors, as James Lileks put it in Mark Steyn’s unsettling new book After America: Get Ready for Armageddon:
“9/11 was something America’s enemies did to us. The hole in the ground a decade later is something we did to ourselves…a gaping, multi-story, multi-billion-dollar pit, profound and eloquent in its nullity.”
With its waterfall and stone recitation of the names of the dead, the pit has become a site of presidential pilgrimage each anniversary of the destruction. Not to mention the Islamic mosque soon to rise nearby. As such it’s a tribute to Osama Bin Laden and the jihadists of al-Queda.
It’s also a monument, as Steyn puts it, to our growing can’t-do spirit, the attitude that has US headed right where Osama predicted: the dust bin of history. Hard to argue with that.
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Posted in Library, Science/Engineering, The War
Tagged "After America: Get Ready for Armageddon", Mark Steyn, Osama Bin Laden, World Trade Center
Rick may have wound up flying turboprop C-130s, but, like all Air Force student pilots, he first flew the T-38 Talon, a twin-engine, supersonic jet trainer. Looks pretty good, eh?
Just one more reason why the Dumbocrats, populated as they are by old draft-dodgers and modern military shirkers, are doing everything they can to smear Rick as too stupid, too religious, too whatever, to take over from Obamalot.
Even the Republican elite prefers Romney. Stupid, stupid.
Speaking of smears, the champagne socialists of the Guardian have dipped into the high-crime southeast Austin suburb of Dove Springs to reveal “the dark underbelly” of Perry’s alleged Texas economic miracle.
Largely illegal Hispanic (dark, get it?) Dove Springs’s poverty isn’t unusual in the USA (or anywhere else, for that matter), but an enduring problem neither socialists or capitalists have been able to solve, and raising taxes for more welfare (the Dumbocrat solution that bankrupted California) isn’t likely to.
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Posted in Obamalot, Science/Engineering, Texana, Troops
Tagged Dove Springs, Rick Perry, T-38 Talon
Speaking of Rick Perry, the Left, as usual, is hammering him over his alleged disbelief in evolution. His religious belief actually is their unspoken agenda.
“Unemployment is 9.1%, the economy is in the tank and you’re worried about a candidate’s position on how old the planet is?”
It’s the usual Democrat ploy. With Palin, it’s abortion. With Perry it’s evolution. Gotta keep the feckless Obamalot in the White House somehow.
Via Instapundit.
UPDATE: It gets worse. Smearing Bachmann as a racist. Pathetic.
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Posted in Blogosphere, Obamalot, Science/Engineering, Scribbles, Texana
I’ve read a lot of Robert Sawyer’s scifi, and enjoyed most of it, but this conclusion to a trilogy (and, indeed, the first two books, Watch and Wake), takes the prize.
It’s a bit preachy, as others have said, but the AI’s achievements, particularly the takedown of a dictatorship, justifies most of it. Sawyer’s usual liberal politics and Canadian ethnocentrism also are pretty well balanced this time out. And no Texan could complain very convincingly about his Texan main character, or the amusing way he handles her sometimes skeptical encounter with Canadian culture.
The ending also surprised me, which is always delightful in a novel, not so much for the content as for the unexpectedness of its leap. We can only hope that the tale’s singularity, and particularly Sawyer’s AI, is a reliable forecast of our future, in addition to being enjoyable entertainment.
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Posted in Library, Science/Engineering, Space, Texana
Tagged hard science fiction, Robert Sawyer, WWW Wonder
THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER 