David McElroy

Cleaning out the notebook again…

Is private industry ready to head into space to save humanity? It’s very possible. Less than a week after I wrote that I’m happy to see the space shuttle program go away, a group of impressive investors has announced a company called Planetary Resources, which plans to mine asteroids and finally bring real commerce to space.

This is the sort of venture that NASA would never have attempted. Although the comparison isn’t perfect, I’d say it’s reminiscent of the European trading companies that were set up to colonize and trade in the New World. It’s the brainchild of Peter Diamandis, the guy who created the X Prize Foundation.  The star-studded list of investors includes both of Google’s founders, an early Google investor, a key early Microsoft employee and Ross Perot Jr. Their previous success doesn’t guarantee anything, but I wouldn’t bet against them.

The best things about the venture are that taxpayers aren’t footing the bill and that anyone else can choose to compete on a level playing field if he wants to. It’s great to see people step up to blast off into space with a motivation to make money.

The truth about George Zimmerman is a lot more complicated and nuanced than some people wanted us to see. Many people have already convicted him of murder and are convinced that it was nothing but a racially motivated killing. Reuter’s has a long and detailed story that paints a far more interesting picture of how we got to this point.

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How did so many people ever fall for the fiction that “self government” means being governed by the majority of one’s neighbors? Being governed by some powerful elite is bad, but being governed by the “non-powerful masses” is just another brand of poison. Self-governance means just that — governing yourself.

Of all the national myths in this country, perhaps none is as nonsensical as the notion that there is a collective “genius of the American people” insofar as governance goes. It’s a myth that’s discussed in almost religious tones — and it leaves otherwise intelligent people acting in foolish ways to try to bring about things that aren’t possible.

I started thinking about this Wednesday because of a Cato Institute policy forum I listened to called “Citizens v. the Ruling Elite.” (You can watch the video of the forum at the end of this article. Or click here to subscribe to Cato’s audio podcasts via iTunes. Many of them are excellent.) The theme of the discussion was finding ways to elect people to Congress who would “represent the people” instead of elites.

One of the speakers was a co-founder of one of the Tea Party groups. Another speaker was with an organization working to get more people to run in party primaries to challenge incumbents. (On the pragmatic side, the group working for more primary challenges is just plain wrong to believe that this is a good way to defeat incumbents, but that’s a different story entirely.) The overall theme for all the presentations is that the people in office now represent “the elites,” but that if the right candidates would just run, “the people” would suddenly be represented and everything would change.

Since these people believe this, I wonder what other fairy tales they believe.

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We’ve all seen something like this in an airport or somewhere else in public. An excited child sees a grandmother and impulsively runs over to hug her. It’s sweet and loving and it makes most of us happy.

For the thuggish bureaucrats of the TSA in Wichita, Kansas, though, it was enough to make a soon-to-be-crying 4-year-old girl into a “suspect,” according to a mother who told her daughter’s story in a poignant and scary Facebook post.

Michelle Brademeyer was traveling with her two children — ages 4 and 6 — from Montana to Kansas for a wedding. Brademeyer’s mother (the children’s grandmother) was on the trip. The kids don’t get to see their grandmother that often, because she lives in California. This was their first time to travel together.

As the family was waiting to leave Wichita on the way back home, they went through security. Brademeyer and the children went through the scanners without problem, but something on the older woman was triggering the scanner, so she was told to sit to the side to wait for a pat-down search.

As the grandmother sat alone, Brademeyer’s 4-year-old daughter saw her sitting and ran over to give her a hug. (That’s her in the blue dress above.) It wasn’t more than a few seconds, but a TSA agent started screaming at the child. Agents wouldn’t allow the girl’s mother to come get her, because they said she must go through a pat-down now, too. They implied that the grandmother might have passed a gun to the now-crying 4-year-old.

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