“But really, what powerful woman in Washington hasn’t been accused of being a lesbian? Condoleezza Rice, Harriet Miers, Janet Napolitano, Janet Reno—they’ve all at one time or another been the victim of whisper campaigns about their sexuality. And of course there’s Hillary Clinton. Wingnuts have been accusing the Secretary of State of secretly lusting after women for decades now.
Surely, men haven’t entirely been spared such campaigns. The reclusive, lifelong bachelor, retired Justice David Souter has often been the subject of speculation, but he was lucky enough to be nominated before the advent of the Drudge Report. And for years rumors have dogged Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who serves on the Judiciary Committee that will be vetting Kagan.
Gossiping about the sexuality of Washington powerbrokers has become sort of a national pastime. But the stakes—and the vitriol—seem to go up substantially when powerful women crash the beltway frat party. And while Sullivan might think that sexual orientation has become as bland a biographical detail as Jewishness, the unfortunate truth is that, unlike him, most of those suggesting Kagan has something to hide aren’t rooting for her to come out so she can advance the cause of gay rights. They just want to knock a powerful woman down a few notches.”
The Amazing Vegetable Oil Jet
Definitely added this book to my to-read list.At the agency, they refer to some problems as “DARPA-hard.” What does that mean, and what kinds of things are DARPA-hard?
DARPA-hard means something that other government agencies and even private companies shun because it is viewed as being nearly impossible to pull off. DARPA-hard means taking on big risks for the chance of a big payoff. For example, scramjets have been theorized for decades. NASA got one flying for about 10 seconds back in 2004. DARPA-hard means getting a scramjet to stay lit for as long as the fuel supply holds out. Scramjets could turn out to be as transformative as the jet engine itself. Imagine being able to fly anywhere on Earth in four hours.
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Free-enterprise advocates would say we don’t really need something like DARPA. What’s the answer to that?
Free enterprise excels at advancing technology in incremental steps and at bringing that new tech to market. Government works best when it comes to pursuing far-out advances that may not pay off for years, if ever. A company trying to develop scramjets or Ling’s prosthetics would quickly go bust without some other very lucrative sources of funding. ARPANET went online in 1969. We didn’t get the World Wide Web until the mid-1990s. What company can wait that long for a profitable product?
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What’s the strangest research project DARPA is currently working on?
I only got a glimpse of perhaps half of what the agency is up to. But certainly one of the most out-there projects I learned about is a project to program actual, living insects into miniature unmanned aerial vehicles. Researchers are doing this by implanting insect larvae with microprocessors and sensors that become imbedded in the adult insects. The researchers can then remotely control the insects with a view toward operating them as mini-spy cams.
“The total 2009 deficit is $1.587 trillion. If we entirely eliminated discretionary spending—no electricity in the White House, no military, no FBI, no national parks, no nothing—we’d still have a $346 billion deficit.”
“To glean a sense of the dimensions of the organization department’s job, conjure up a parallel body in Washington. The imaginary department would oversee the appointments of US state governors and their deputies; the mayors of big cities; heads of federal regulatory agencies; the chief executives of General Electric, Exxon-Mobil, Walmart and 50-odd of the remaining largest companies; justices on the Supreme Court; the editors of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post; the bosses of the television networks and cable stations; the presidents of Yale and Harvard and other big universities and the heads of think-tanks such as the Brookings Institution and the Heritage Foundation.
All equivalent positions in China are filled by people appointed by the party through the organization department.”
If you have any interest in China or communism, you must read this article. Incredible.
![Paul Krugman:
even if we do run these [$9 trillion of] deficits [over the next 10 years], federal debt as a share of GDP will be substantially less than it was at the end of World War II. It will also be substantially less than, say, debt in several European countries in the mid to late 1990s.
Political Math:
implicit in [Krugman’s] observation is the concept that since we did fine after WWII, we’ll do fine now. But the years after WWII saw drastic reductions in the inflation-adjusted debt driven by drastic reductions in spending. Mr. Krugman points to no similar possibility in the post-Obama world…. Back in 1945, at the height of the spending that saw our national debt rise so dramatically, entitlement spending and interest on the national debt made up a meager 5% of our total budget.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kp3f1tJ8Cn1qz8ujuo1_500.jpg)
Paul Krugman:
even if we do run these [$9 trillion of] deficits [over the next 10 years], federal debt as a share of GDP will be substantially less than it was at the end of World War II. It will also be substantially less than, say, debt in several European countries in the mid to late 1990s.Political Math:
implicit in [Krugman’s] observation is the concept that since we did fine after WWII, we’ll do fine now. But the years after WWII saw drastic reductions in the inflation-adjusted debt driven by drastic reductions in spending. Mr. Krugman points to no similar possibility in the post-Obama world…. Back in 1945, at the height of the spending that saw our national debt rise so dramatically, entitlement spending and interest on the national debt made up a meager 5% of our total budget.
