tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9430835.post4618860905330044059..comments2024-03-27T18:24:19.683-07:00Comments on Steve Sailer: iSteve: HuffPost: "10 Awesome Latino Inventions"Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger150125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9430835.post-28159490613507934212013-05-28T12:47:22.116-07:002013-05-28T12:47:22.116-07:00Good post. The list of inventions here seems to s...Good post. The list of inventions here seems to span all genres. Thanks for posting.Telebrandshttps://www.telebrandswholesale.com/noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9430835.post-62271079004243719852013-05-25T12:48:52.396-07:002013-05-25T12:48:52.396-07:00"ben tillman said...
I didn't quote ..."ben tillman said...<br /><br /> I didn't quote a novel, you lunatic. "<br /><br />Bullshit, asshole. The link you provided cited a novel.<br /><br />Suppresing the Truth? You really are an unbalanced loon, aren't you.Mr. Anonnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9430835.post-27030433023606976332013-05-24T20:49:45.145-07:002013-05-24T20:49:45.145-07:00I don't have time to revisit every established...<i>I don't have time to revisit every established historical fact to satisfy the vanity of people who are unhappy with the history of their own ethnic group to the extent they feel the need to purloin that of other groups.</i><br /><br />That's a lie. You have time to defend things you know nothing about. You must also have time to investigate things you know nothing about. <br /><br />Your arguments are profoundly stupid and disingenuous. You are intentionally suppressing the truth. ben tillmannoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9430835.post-22789452064035567512013-05-24T20:43:24.385-07:002013-05-24T20:43:24.385-07:00"There are countless sources backing up the f...<br /><i>"There are countless sources backing up the fact that Columbus is of Jewish descent."<br /><br />Which is why you quoted.......a novel.</i><br /><br />I didn't quote a novel, you lunatic. ben tillmannoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9430835.post-81173177023873530632013-05-23T21:31:15.720-07:002013-05-23T21:31:15.720-07:00"ben tillman said...
"What the hell doe..."ben tillman said...<br /><br />"What the hell does Spain have to do with this? I never said he was from Spain."<br /><br />You said "converso". That implies spanish descent, does it not.? Nobody ever claimed spanish descent for Columbus until some jews tried to hijack his biography for thier own revisionist, supremicist fantasy.<br /><br />"There are countless sources backing up the fact that Columbus is of Jewish descent."<br /><br />Which is why you quoted.......a novel.<br /><br />"But you don't care. You're a bigot. Your mind is made up. And you'll go through life wrong about this and undoubtedly many other things."<br /><br />I don't have time to revisit every established historical fact to satisfy the vanity of people who are unhappy with the history of their own ethnic group to the extent they feel the need to purloin that of other groups.<br /><br />Your claims are no more credible or interesting than those ridiculous charlatans who claim that blacks invented the mop.Mr. Anonnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9430835.post-25094529217982200162013-05-23T11:37:25.994-07:002013-05-23T11:37:25.994-07:00No, it isn't a ludicrous response. He could ha...<i>No, it isn't a ludicrous response. He could have been a Turk I suppose. Or a Chinaman. The historical account we have of him is of him being a Christian Italian from Genoa, not a converso from Spain.<br /></i><br /><br />What the hell does Spain have to do with this? I never said he was from Spain.<br /><br />And what does an account of him being a Christian have to do with anything? Converts to Christianity are Christians. <br /><br />There are countless sources backing up the fact that Columbus is of Jewish descent. <br /><br /><i>A subsequent poster addresses your contention that "his own writings" make him out to be jewish. </i><br /><br />No, you ignoramus, the other commenter addressed an entirely different argument. But you don't care. You're a bigot. Your mind is made up. And you'll go through life wrong about this and undoubtedly many other things.ben tillmannoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9430835.post-76886119721145703612013-05-23T11:20:08.779-07:002013-05-23T11:20:08.779-07:00I dunno, sometimes things are what they seem.
But...<i>I dunno, sometimes things are what they seem.</i><br /><br />But Columbus doesn't "seem" to be anything. He's dead. And all the evidence points to Jewish ancestry.ben tillmannoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9430835.post-51025089915872514162013-05-23T08:27:45.480-07:002013-05-23T08:27:45.480-07:00"ben tillman said...
""That's ..."ben tillman said...<br /><br />""That's pretty impressive for Columbus to have been a converso, given that he was an Italian from Genoa.""<br /><br />How is that supposed to be relevant? Why couldn't conversos move from Spain to Genoa? Why couldn't a Jew convert in Genoa? That's a ludicrous response."<br /><br />No, it isn't a ludicrous response. He could have been a Turk I suppose. Or a Chinaman. The historical account we have of him is of him being a Christian Italian from Genoa, not a converso from Spain.<br /><br />"Anyway, it appears that he was descended from conversos, not that he personally converted."<br /><br />Based on what? The novel you cited. A Novel? Here's a clue: a novel is a piece of fiction.<br /><br />"There are countless sources that back up the fact that Columbus was of Jewish descent, including his own writings."<br /><br />A subsequent poster addresses your contention that "his own writings" make him out to be jewish. Sounds like your case is exeedingly weak.<br /><br />"As for your sneering reference to "historicsl revisionism",...."<br /><br />My reference was sneering because your contention is ridiculous. Cherry-picked sources written by highly interested advocates is not evidence, especially in the face of a long and established historical tradition.<br /><br />Here is a book that claims that all the monuments of the ancient world were built by a sophisticated, globe-girding, Atlantean civilization:<br /><br />http://www.grahamhancock.com/library/fotg.php<br /><br />I guess it must be true, because it's in a book. How could I possibly conclude otherwise?Mr. Anonnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9430835.post-69384379316187159862013-05-22T22:27:14.185-07:002013-05-22T22:27:14.185-07:00About what happened to Portuguese innovation... I ...About what happened to Portuguese innovation... I wouldn't be so sure the Portuguese are punching below their weight... if you count Brazil as Portuguese, which I'd argue that you probably should.<br /><br />If you've flow commuter airlines, or lately any airlines, chances are you've flown on an airliner made by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embraer" rel="nofollow">Embraer</a>. There are very few countries in the world, only a handful, that make commercially successful airliners. The Chinese and Israelis don't. Embraer has been one of the few growing aircraft manufacturers in the world.<br /><br />There was a time when the US was easily the world's breadbasket superpower. US farmers could feed the whole world if needed. The government paid farmers not to plant. But lately US ag has had to go head-to-head with Brazilian ag. Why? Homegrown Brazilian ag research has opened up a huge chunk of southeastern Brazil to farming. This land was previously cerrado, unfarmable savanna:<br /><br /><a href="http://www.economist.com/node/16886442" rel="nofollow">"The miracle of the cerrado"</a>, The Economist, Aug 26th 2010.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306919212001169" rel="nofollow">"Assessing Brazil’s Cerrado agricultural miracle"</a>, ScienceDirect, Volume 38, February 2013, Pages 146–155.<br /><br /><br />A primary player in this was a low-key government ag research institution, Embrapa: <a href="http://farmfutures.com/blogs-embrapa-the-engine-behind-brazils-miracle-2264" rel="nofollow">"Embrapa: The Engine Behind Brazil's Miracle"</a>, Farm Futures, May 03, 2011.<br /><br />But these Brazilians are not who are are talking about when we talk about US immigration from Mexico.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9430835.post-51119025793568888032013-05-22T21:49:35.680-07:002013-05-22T21:49:35.680-07:00Hi, about this "Columbus was a Secret Jew in ...Hi, about this "Columbus was a Secret Jew in a Jewish Conspiracy" idea (I don't think it would have made any real difference to history if he was, many European powers were going places with or without him), it seems this is one of those "the Chinese circumnavigated the world first", "Oxford wrote Shakespear", or "Vikings planted Runes in Chicago" things. Based on a recent book by a Georgetown Linguistics professor, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Christopher-Columbus-DNA-his-writings/dp/1934461717/ref=la_B001JOX7N8_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1369283352&sr=1-3" rel="nofollow">"Christopher Columbus: The DNA of his writings"</a>, Estelle Irizarry.<br /><br />The author claims analysis of Columbus's writing reveals him to be a crypto-Jew, using characters, such as the slash symbol, presumed to only be used by crypto-Jews from some parts of Spain. Here's a hostile take on the thesis, from <a href="http://medievalnews.blogspot.com/2009/10/scholar-casts-doubt-on-claims-that.html" rel="nofollow">http://medievalnews.blogspot.com/2009/10/scholar-casts-doubt-on-claims-that.html</a><br /><br /><i>"One of the key pieces of evidence was the explorer's use of a slash symbol - similar to the ones used in Internet addresses - that Columbus employed to indicate pauses in sentences.<br /><br />...<br /><br />Dr. Diana Gilliland Wright confirms that the slash symbol was used in other places outside of western Spain. Wright, who is an expert in Italian history in the late Middle Ages, says, "the virgule is a very common marker for pauses in sentences" among Venetian documents from the later half of the fifteenth century.<br /><br />...<br /><br />Dr. Wright also casts doubt on Irizarry's belief that Columbus' spelling inconsistencies can also be a clue to his origins. "Spelling in the 15th century was extremely fluid," she says, "and it is normal to find in official Venetian documents and records three different spellings of the same name, even when it was the name of a person known to the writer of the document. I cannot see that variation in spelling can be used to demonstrate anything but that the writers didn't have my spelling teacher.""</i><br /><br />I dunno, sometimes things are what they seem. It's also all too easy to look at a few writings from way back when and then connect the dots in any fashion that fits.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9430835.post-33864300820188673802013-05-22T10:28:20.509-07:002013-05-22T10:28:20.509-07:00That's pretty impressive for Columbus to have ...<i>That's pretty impressive for Columbus to have been a converso, given that he was an Italian from Genoa. </i><br /><br />How is that supposed to be relevant? Why couldn't conversos move from Spain to Genoa? Why couldn't a Jew convert in Genoa? That's a ludicrous response.<br /><br />Anyway, it appears that he was descended from conversos, not that he personally converted. <br /><br />There are countless sources that back up the fact that Columbus was of Jewish descent, including his own writings.<br /><br />As for your sneering reference to "historicsl revisionism", there are obvious reasons why someone would conceal his Jewish background in 15th-century Spain, and there are similarly obvious reasons why that background might be omitted from contemporaneous accounts.ben tillmannoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9430835.post-2555348373584943732013-05-22T06:35:11.580-07:002013-05-22T06:35:11.580-07:00"Many scholars would assert that that the 18t..."Many scholars would assert that that the 18th century saw the full flowering of the novel (e.g., Harold Bloom is fond of citing CLARISSA as the greatest novel)"<br /><br />Bloom is as fatuous blowhard. I truly pity a man who expends the vast majority of his mortal hours studying a topic, yet at the end of his life still fails to comprehend ahead. <br /><br />I would call Dreams of a Red Mansion, The Romance of the Three Kingdoms and The Scholars proper novels.<br /><br />"<br />Sure, but Cervantes was not operating in a vacuum..."<br /><br />Agreed - he was parodying prose romances. <br /><br />"Certainly a fine list of authors, but were their contributions as seminal as the work of Defoe, Fielding, Richardson, Sterne, etc?"<br /><br />No - but that's why I said they were definitive exponents of the genre, as opposed to seminal pioneers. <br /><br /><br /><br />Peter Wongnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9430835.post-27571504011610865382013-05-21T20:25:10.461-07:002013-05-21T20:25:10.461-07:00"That's pretty impressive for Columbus to...<i>"That's pretty impressive for Columbus to have been a converso, given that he was an Italian from Genoa."</i><br /><br />Back in the Cold War it was odd how the Soviets were always discovering that Ivan Somebodysky had flown an airplane before the Wright brothers, etc.. There's no end to it, it seems...Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9430835.post-23578291667258471142013-05-21T20:15:59.614-07:002013-05-21T20:15:59.614-07:00"ben tillman said...
That's the technolo..."ben tillman said...<br /><br />That's the technology part of it. As for the rest, Columbus came from a family of conversos; he was of Jewish descent."<br /><br />That's pretty impressive for Columbus to have been a converso, given that he was an Italian from Genoa. It's funny that jews never mentioned these things in the past. All of a sudden, every other great person from the age of discovery was jewish. I bet they were all homosexual too. And Black. And, as Woody Allen once quipped: "Shakespeare: Was he actually three women?"<br /><br />From the introduction of your source: "In his well-researched novel,......"<br /><br />It all smacks of convenient historical revisionism to me. Ever consider the possibility that your source just made this stuff up? And it's not as if jews have to coopt persons of great accomplishment, as there were plenty of jews who were very accomplished indeed.Mr. Anonnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9430835.post-80260151863080341932013-05-21T19:34:41.479-07:002013-05-21T19:34:41.479-07:00Peter Wong:"The Jin Ping Mei isn't really...Peter Wong:"The Jin Ping Mei isn't really that highly regarded in Chinese literary circles." <br /><br />I wasn't basing my argument on its aesthetic standing with Chinese critics;I was basing my argument on its novel-like qualities.<br /><br />Peter Wong:"Dreams of a Red Mansion and The Three Kingdoms are considered the apogee of the genre from that era."<br /><br />Impressive pieces of narrative art, but I cannot classify the DREAM OF THE RED CHAMBER and the ROMANCE OF THE THREE KINGDOMS as true novels. They are definitely novel-like, though...And one must always bear in mind the the hazy borders of the genre. Some critics, I'm sure, would gladly call argue for their status as true novels.<br /><br /> <br /><br />Peter Wong:"I stand by my comments about the novel - it's an extremely difficult literary genre, and in the modern era is used as a vessel for purple prose."<br /><br />Again, though, is the genre to blame for these shortcomings, or is it a manner of the temper of the times?<br /><br />syonAnonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9430835.post-83592381846150331292013-05-21T19:17:27.271-07:002013-05-21T19:17:27.271-07:00Peter Wong:"Your dates are off - I would say ...Peter Wong:"Your dates are off - I would say the key period of development for the novel started and ended later than the years you cite."<br /><br />Well, as with so much where the novel is concerned, dates are quite debatable. I started at 1500 because that shows the line of development that precedes Cervantes (for example,things like LA VIDA DE lAZARILLO DE TORMES). <br /><br />Peter Wong:"Cervantes doesn't start writing until the early 17th century, for example."<br /><br />Sure, but Cervantes was not operating in a vacuum...<br /><br /><br />Peter Wong:" Novels written in the 1700's in English and French - stuff by Rousseau and Sterne - still haven't achieved a full state of maturity."<br /><br />Highly debatable.Many scholars would assert that that the 18th century saw the full flowering of the novel (e.g., Harold Bloom is fond of citing CLARISSA as the greatest novel)<br /><br /> <br /><br />Peter Wong:"I would say the 1800's are the definitive period in the development of the novel as we today define it - you have Dickens, Tolstoy, Balzac, Flaubert etc."<br /><br />Certainly a fine list of authors, but were their contributions as seminal as the work of Defoe, Fielding, Richardson, Sterne, etc?<br /><br />syonAnonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9430835.post-54134873266539800802013-05-21T09:26:19.703-07:002013-05-21T09:26:19.703-07:00Mark Plus:
The Portuguese showed some cognitive s...Mark Plus:<br /><br /><i>The Portuguese showed some cognitive strengths in the 15th and 16th Centuries. They innovated in navigation, ship engineering and map-making (all mathematically oriented endeavors), and their sailors pioneered long-distance ocean voyages. They don't have much of a reputation for cognitive efficiency now, however. What happened to them?</i><br /><br />Ben Tillman: <br /><br /><i>The people who did most of those things were Jewish. The exploration of the new world was largely a Jewish project that used Jewish technology.</i><br /><br />Anonymous:<br /><br /><i>Elaborate</i>.<br /><br />Mr. Anon:<br /><br /><i>To elaborate, he's making it up.</i><br />----<br /><br />That's an uncharitable and frankly ignorant reply. <br /><br />http://reformjudaismmag.org/Articles/index.cfm?id=1428<br /><br /><i>Portugal’s quest to become the world’s most advanced naval power did not begin with John II. About eighty years before Columbus set sail for America, the third son of John I, who would become known as Henry the Navigator, established a navigational research center and seamanship school at Sagres, a remote cape at Europe’s most southwestern point. As governor of the Order of Christ (formerly Knights Templar), Prince Henry trained his knights to become navigators whose mission was to expand the kingdom and to spread the Christian faith. <b>For the project’s scientific and technical advances, Prince Henry relied on the kingdom’s top mathematicians, astronomers, cartographers, and inventors of navigational instruments, most of whom were Jews.</b> Year after year, Prince Henry documented and analyzed the information collected by his explorers as they braved the uncharted waters of the Atlantic Ocean on secret fact-finding missions, setting the stage for Portugal’s rise as a global power. </i><br /><br />The Jews were later expelled from Portugal:<br /><br /><i>Manuel’s decision to end more than eleven centuries of Jewish life in Portugal proved to be a monumental blunder. By outlawing the practice of Judaism and cleansing his realm of Jews, the king essentially exported one of his greatest assets to his competitors. Soon the Dutch and British acquired enough knowledge of navigation and trade to eclipse Portugal as the dominant power in Africa, Asia, and the Americas.</i><br /><br />That's the technology part of it. As for the rest, Columbus came from a family of conversos; he was of Jewish descent. <br /><br />His voyage was not financed by the crown; it was financed by two Jewish Conversos and another prominent Jew: Louis de Santangel, Gabriel Sanchez, and Don Isaac Abrabanel.<br /><br />Columbus's navigator, interpreter, and doctor were all Jews and at least two more of his crew were conversos who had converted the day before departure. One of the ostensible purposes of the voyage was to find a new home for expelled Jews.<br /><br />http://reformjudaismmag.org/Articles/index.cfm?id=1428<br /><br /><i>Shortly before Columbus set sail on August 3, 1492, John II of Portugal furnished the admiral with an indispensable nautical almanac authored by his royal astronomer, Rabbi Abraham Zacuto. The almanac’s astronomical tables provided a critical corrective to the imprecision of the astrolabe, the instrument navigators depended on to calculate a ship’s location according to the position of the sun. John II’s Jewish physician, Joseph Vecinho, who had served on the Portuguese commission that ruled Columbus’s plan “an illusion” (because he knew that one could not reach India by sailing west), translated the almanac from Hebrew into Spanish and, at John II’s behest, gave it to Columbus. <br /></i><br /><br />Etc. I'm not going to spend any more time on this in an old thread.ben tillmannoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9430835.post-23115424686936970672013-05-21T08:15:55.189-07:002013-05-21T08:15:55.189-07:00"Plus, we just do not see the kind of artisti..."Plus, we just do not see the kind of artistic takeoff that occurred in the West from 1500 to 1800, when the novel emerged in its canonical form."<br /><br />Your dates are off - I would say the key period of development for the novel started and ended later than the years you cite. <br /><br />Cervantes doesn't start writing until the early 17th century, for example. Novels written in the 1700's in English and French - stuff by Rousseau and Sterne - still haven't achieved a full state of maturity. <br /><br />I would say the 1800's are the definitive period in the development of the novel as we today define it - you have Dickens, Tolstoy, Balzac, Flaubert etc. Peter Wongnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9430835.post-84513547112426773922013-05-21T08:10:21.700-07:002013-05-21T08:10:21.700-07:00"Certainly, an argument can be made for the n..."Certainly, an argument can be made for the novel-like qualities of Chinese prose fictions like JIN PING MEI,but there is an element of strain in the process."<br /><br />The Jin Ping Mei isn't really that highly regarded in Chinese literary circles. <br /><br />Dreams of a Red Mansion and The Three Kingdoms are considered the apogee of the genre from that era.<br /><br />I also think The Scholars , written during the Qing Dynasty, is pretty amazing for its time. <br /><br />I stand by my comments about the novel - it's an extremely difficult literary genre, and in the modern era is used as a vessel for purple prose. Peter Wongnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9430835.post-31810835175822207742013-05-21T07:09:45.235-07:002013-05-21T07:09:45.235-07:00It's always hard to tell where an industry wou...It's always hard to tell where an industry would be without government involvement, and of course we can't go back and try it the other way.<br /><br />The Internet, for instance, was built on technology that was primarily done and funded by the military. On the other hand, government control of it kept private-sector competition at bay for a while. When people first started creating private Internet service providers (ISPs) in the early- to mid-1990s, technically you couldn't connect to the Internet backbone if you were using it for commercial purposes. Some connected anyway and lied; others thought we would have to build a completely separate commercial backbone. If you were an investor at the time, what do you do -- invest in a new backbone that might become obsolete if the regulators changed their minds? Invest in an ISP that might get closed down because it was allowing commercial traffic on the non-commercial net?<br /><br />Things didn't take off until Congress opened the whole thing up so that people could safely make money on it. Then, after decades of slow but steady progress in government-funded labs, the technology exploded from all the private development.<br /><br />So I'd guess that space travel would be the same way: we wouldn't have gotten to the moon in 1969 without lots of government funding. But we might be on Mars by now on the strength of private funding and innovation if government hadn't maintained a monopoly over space for so long.Cail Corishevhttp://cailcorishev.wordpress.comnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9430835.post-68254028980528963572013-05-21T05:40:16.038-07:002013-05-21T05:40:16.038-07:00SpaceX HAS reached the ISS; it happened a year ago...SpaceX HAS reached the ISS; it happened a year ago Sunday. They, like NASA, have been cautious and haven't yet sent a manned mission.<br /><br />SpaceX is the name player right now, but the Scaled Composites/Virgin Galactic team, as well as Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos' space company, are in the hunt.<br /><br />Notice something about these companies: Bezos, Musk, Branson. I see rich guys wanting their orbital resorts and data/tax havens far beyond the reach of the earthbound taxman, right out of William Gibson's Neuromancer.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9430835.post-56970774808497758412013-05-21T04:15:28.213-07:002013-05-21T04:15:28.213-07:00" Modern scholars generally agree that “race”..." Modern scholars generally agree that “race” is a social construct and is not biologically determined, therefore it can’t determine intelligence."<br /><br />Dogs are a sociological construct too.<br /><br />There's no biological difference between a wolf and a chihuahua.<br /><br />Mankind didn't create dogs by tinkering with their DNA;changing their environment and selectively breeding for the best traits-that's preposterous- he just said "Poof! You're a dog!". Differences between things happen by magical incantation now.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9430835.post-22456436332265497052013-05-20T20:37:09.516-07:002013-05-20T20:37:09.516-07:00"Jewish supremist? It is just the truth.
Wha...<i>"Jewish supremist? It is just the truth.<br /><br />What is not mentioned is the significant antisemitism that Jewish people faced in many Anglo cultures in the past."</i><br /><br />Ah, but what if it's a pretty fairy tale to inspire the children and you are mistaken? A mistaken fantasy like the notion that antisemitism is "what is not mentioned", when, if you pay attention, you notice is mentioned whenever possible. Do you think it could be that there is a signficant problem, but you've got it backwards?<br /><br />Also, the Anglo culture is not perfect, but you can name a lot of cultures that have been less hospitable to Jews. Not that there's any thanks in it, apparently.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9430835.post-62107129483050722952013-05-20T20:03:33.289-07:002013-05-20T20:03:33.289-07:00You've inadvertently reinforced my point. *We*...<i>You've inadvertently reinforced my point. *We* currently cannot get Americans to the Space Station. We do *not* currently have, built and ready to fly, a way to get the astronauts to the space station.<br /><br />If SpaceX does manage to build a lifter, that'll be great. But we cannot do it at present -- we have no vehicle. Have to thumb a ride with the Russkies</i><br /><br />Compare to:<br /><br /><a href="http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2414140,00.asp" rel="nofollow">SpaceX Aiming for Manned Mission in 2015</a><br /><br /><i><br />SpaceX Aiming for Manned Mission in 2015<br /><br />By Damon Poeter January 10, 2013 10:44am EST 10 Comments<br /><br />SpaceX is aiming to conduct crewed missions to low-Earth orbit as early as 2015, according to a report in the Orlando Sentinel.<br /><br />The Hawthorne, Calif.-based aerospace firm has so far only launched its unmanned Dragon capsule into space to place satellites in orbit and last October, in a first for a private company, to resupply the International Space Station in partnership with NASA.<br /><br />This week, SpaceX project manager and former NASA astronaut Garrett Reisman said manned flights conducted by the company could come more quickly than many industry watchers anticipated. Reisman, speaking at a NASA press event at Florida's Kennedy Space Center, said SpaceX was hoping to send a capsule carrying its own hand-picked astronauts—not the U.S. space agency's—on a three-day demonstration flight in low-Earth orbit, the Sentinel reported.<br /><br />Reisman quipped that SpaceX is "not selling tickets" for the proposed Dragon test flight, so "don't call our toll-free number."<br /><br />...<br /><br />Meanwhile, Boeing, one half of SpaceX competitor the United Launch Alliance (ULA), is planning to conduct its own manned demo flight for NASA in 2016, according to the newspaper. Robert Stevens, the outgoing CEO at Boeing's ULA partner Lockheed Martin, made news late last year when he criticized SpaceX as inexperienced in conducting space missions and misguided in trying to operate on the cheap relative to the ULA.<br /><br />SpaceX co-founder and CEO Elon Musk fired back, saying his company was able to underbid the ULA for contracts like its recently won deal to conduct trial missions for the U.S. Air Force because it used more advanced technology than the two aerospace giants' joint venture.<br /><br />...</i>David Davenportnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9430835.post-11132927153173933172013-05-20T07:03:27.232-07:002013-05-20T07:03:27.232-07:00Mark Plus, the continued strength of the Roman Cat...Mark Plus, the continued strength of the Roman Catholic Church happened to them. Michener wrote about the Church's extreme influence in Portugal back in the Sixties. <br /><br />Portugal still has the lowest college graduation rate in Western Europe. My mother's father, an intelligent and curious man even at the end of his life when I knew him, left the Azores at age 15 and came to America with his uncle when his father forced him to leave school at age 13.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com