Quote du jour

Liberalism is a philosophy of consolation for western civilization as it commits suicide.

- Jerry Pournelle

Quote du jour

The Constitution says the President must take care to see that the laws are faithfully enforced. Mr. Trump didn’t want to deport the “Dreamers”, particularly those who have integrated into the society, but the law gives him no leeway, and the Presidential Order Obama signed giving them amnesty is unconstitutional. He solved that dilemma by giving it back to Congress who created it. We’ll now see what happens.

I can solve part of the problem. Any volunteer of any age who serves 7 years overseas in Army or Marines gets a Green Card and an application to apply for Citizenship along with his honorable discharge. The Citizenship application and test need not be very difficult and I would expect all who applied to pass it. The swearing should be public and conducted by an officer of rank Colonel or above.

As to girls, we can think of something similar or suitable; they need not join the combat arms. Surgical Assistant comes instantly to mind.

Their parents are a more difficult problem, and it will take ingenuity to find a path that does not offend the legal immigrants who obeyed the law.

-Jerry Pournelle's last blog entry R.I.P.

Quote du jour

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.

-Jerry Pournelle

Quote du jour

My own conclusion is that the AGW hypothesis is at best not proven, and the likelihood is that it has a lot of factors wrong – and that there are remedies. The important matter is to be wealthy enough to implement those remedies.

-Jerry Pournelle

Sic Transit Gloria Americanus?

I wasn't planning on writing about this today, but the fading glory of our space program moves me to write. In 1977, Jerry Pournelle wrote about the "2007 expedition to Ceres". The old Buck Rogers TV show spoke of the "last of NASA's deep space probes in 1987". The last?? when was the first???

Robert Heinlein spoke of the expectation that many of us had growing up of the inevitability of space travel. In 1949, he wrote in the preface to "The Man Who Sold the Moon":

" (the stories)...are of the "What-would-happen-if" sort, in which the "if", the basic postulate of each story, is some possible change in human environment latent in our present day technology or culture. Sometimes the possibility is quite remote; sometimes the postulated possibility is almost a certainty, as in the stories concerned with interplanetary flight."

Did you get that? In 1949, R.A. Heinlein considered interplanetary flight "almost a certainty".

How did we get from the first Model A Ford to the first walk on the moon in forty two years and from the first walk on the moon to the last flight of the shuttle program in exactly the same time?

And perhaps, more importantly, how do we get back?

Cross posted at LCR, Lady Cincinnatus , Say Anything.