Anyone who is denounced so loudly by Koch Industries, the Scaife Foundation, and so many others probably has a story worth telling.

Are you saying that we should use guns to settle the "debate" on global warming?

Are you saying that advocates for action against CO2 pollution should present themselves as gun-friendly?

I don't get it.

And of course being a jerk is a capital offense?

There are plenty of accounts of police officers shooting innocent, law-abiding civilians in their homes (usually when a warrant was served at the wrong address or when an informant gave maliciously bad information). Who was the jerk in that case?

Cops are not judge, jury, and executioner.

I'm getting kind of concerned. While I agree strenuously that intentionally messing with the climate is likely to end as badly as unintentionally messing with the climate, the scary part is that the cost estimates for doing so aren't really that high.

It is at least plausible that a Buffet, Zuckerberg, Allen, or Musk might just go ahead and start seeding the upper atmosphere with sulphur dioxide. The cost estimates are low enough (and I suspect that you could do it for a lot less) to make it plausible for non-state actors to do exactly that -- without asking anyone's permission. I kind of doubt anyone would be able to stop them, either. And once they had managed to get away with it for a decade or so, my understanding is that we'd almost have to keep seeding the stratosphere or we'd have a very rapid, very scary climate shift in a very few years.

For that matter, I could see the Russians or the Saudis quietly pursuing a geoengineering program just so they can keep selling oil. It isn't that much of a stretch to imagine a consortium of hedge-fund billionaires with large holdings of Florida real estate doing exactly the same thing.

The heck of it is, if someone quietly did a sneaky climate hack, people would forget about the whole global warming thing in a very short time. Politicians, either ones who had pressed for action or who had pushed for doing nothing at all, would not pay very much attention to the issue if it appeared to be going away. And scientists who claim that someone is messing with the climate would be just as easily ignored as they are now.

I think the challenge should be something like, "reduce manned launch costs by 95% and increase launch reliability by 500%". That doesn't sound glamorous, that won't excite people, but that is exactly what it will take to make a manned Mars mission, asteroid mining, and all of the other great ideas a reality.

Honestly, at this point I could argue with a straight face that we ought to emphasize unmanned missions with high scientific returns and take the enormous pile of money spent on manned space programs for comparatively little scientific return and get the launch costs down and the reliability and safety way up, You'd probably want to bring in outside talent from NASA and you'd definitely want an administrator and a President and enough congresspeople and senators on board that could make the change in direction stick.

I do believe that it would be great for humans to become a true spacefaring species. The fact of the matter is that the present approaches that I see being seriously proposed will not get us there.

.... or the Vikings who colonized Greenland.

I'd like to ask the Mayans, Anastazi, Minoans, and the Harappans, about surviving and thriving regardless of climate.

I'm glad there is someone referenced _Peopleware_. Honestly, it is ironic to me that between that book and _The Mythical Man-Month_ everything you need to know about managing software development from a personnel standpoint was written before most code grunts, indeed most managers, were born. Yet the good advice is universally ignored.

Makes me glad that I am retired, honestly.

I think the Soviet Union was afraid of more than Star Wars. I remember in the late 1980's there was an article (I think in _Foreign Affairs_) hypothesizing that a very small number of conventional cruise missiles, launched from submarines in the Barents, Baltic, and Black seas, could completely disable the command and control network for a nuclear launch as well as the early warning systems used to activate the ABMs around Moscow. All while causing very few casualties. The article was probably quite a ways out there, but I am sure the same ideas occurred to American and NATO planners.

Or a merge sort to Aaron Copland's "Fanfare of the Common Man".

I wonder sometimes.

NASA has sent spaceprobes to every planet in the solar system. And turned those places from lights in the sky into worlds.

NASA has discovered volcanism on Io, Enceladus, Triton and probably Venus.

NASA has discovered thousands of extrasolar planets with the Kepler probe.

The various CMB probes have mapped out the very early history of the universe.

All of this in less than fifty years.

You could argue that NASA has mapped more land area than all of the explorers in history, combined. Until we visit other stars no one will beat that record.

Really, has NASA done that badly?

Yeah, because suspending habeus corpus indefinitely is so constitutional. And reading everyone's email doesn't violate the fourth amendment. I'm also pretty sure that torture violates the fourth and fifth amendments.

Please.

There are lots of examples of this in action. Many states have laws against adultery, cohabitation, and consensual oral sex. Yet when was the last time someone got a felony rap for carpet munching?

On a even less serious note, many states have ridiculous laws which were put on the books back during the Jurassic period of American jurisprudence. So, as an example, in Washington state it is illegal to sell bedding or meat on a Sunday. You will recall the wave of busts against Bed Bath and Beyond, Pottery Barn, and Safeway. Yeah, right...

Back in the 90's Montana didn't have a speed limit on the Interstates. "Reasonable and prudent" speed for the conditions was the rule. I do remember there being a night-time speed limit of 65 or 70, though.

Someone has already implemented a pretty good algorithm for generating congressional districts.

http://rangevoting.org/SplitLR...

While it does ignore geographic features, the algorithm has the virtue of extreme simplicity and does seem to produce quite reasonable results in all but a few cases.