More leftwing tolerance: Union fires stage hand for wearing Bush hat and shirt.
New technology might allow airline passengers to keep their shoes on.
Obeying the orders of local Islamic groups, a London, Ontario, convention center has refused to allow a lecture by Mark Stein. Key quote:
“The reason offered by the London Convention Centre [in a Tuesday morning phone call] was that they had received pressure from local Islamic groups, and they didn’t want to alienate their Muslim clients. It’s interesting to note that the LCC is owned by the City of London, and is therefore a government operation,” wrote Strictly Right’s Andrew Lawton at the website.
Things are not going well for those Dutch officials who want to squelch free speech: The judges in Geert Wilders’ free speech case have been removed, and the trial has to start from scratch.
The Juan Williams firing, in his own words. Key quote:
This is an outrageous violation of journalistic standards and ethics by management that has no use for a diversity of opinion, ideas or a diversity of staff (I was the only black male on the air). This is evidence of one-party rule and one sided thinking at NPR that leads to enforced ideology, speech and writing. It leads to people, especially journalists, being sent to the gulag for raising the wrong questions and displaying independence of thought.
Daniel Schorr, my fellow NPR commentator who died earlier this year, used to talk about the initial shock of finding himself on President Nixon’s enemies list. I can only imagine Dan’s revulsion to realize that today NPR treats a journalist who has worked for them for ten years with less regard, less respect for the value of independence of thought and embrace of real debate across political lines, than Nixon ever displayed.
As I said yesterday, defund them.
Let’s all sit in a dark room and contemplate our navel! Atmospheric scientists claim that space tourism will cause . . . global warming!
The laws covering the exploration of space are not helping.
This Aviation Week article outlines in detail the upcoming test flight program for Virgin Galactic’s WhiteKnightTwo/SpaceShipTwo following the first free flight of SS2. Key quote:
[SS2’s first] flight marks the start of the third of a seven-phase test program that is expected to culminate with the start of space tourism and science flights in 2012.
This bill is going to dog the Democrats who voted for it for years: A new study says the cost of the healthcare bill’s subsidies will far exceed Congressional Budget Office estimates.
What does this tell us? A moderator for a congressional debate in Illinois was offended when asked to say pledge of allegiance.
More archeology news: A Bulgarian archeologist has discovered a rock stove, dating from the third or fourth century AD, cut into the rock wall of fortress.
A Bronze Age burial site has been uncovered at the planned location of supermarket and gas station in Scotland.
Defund them! NPR’s firing of Juan Williams yesterday is another demonstration that this leftwing news organization has no tolerance for free speech. One of the first things the new Congress should do is end all funding to this corrupt propaganda machine.
Sorry I have been late in posting about this story. I would like to say more, but I have an article for Sky & Telescope that must be finished by tomorrow.
If Congress does end up appropriating money for that last extra shuttle mission, NASA managers are considering delaying it as long as possible, until the fall of 2011. Key quote:
[Shuttle Program Manager John] Shannon said if the shuttle is retired prematurely, the ISS will not be properly supplied.
In other words, Congress and the President should never have retired the shuttle in the first place, at least not until a replacement was ready to go.
Next week will mark the tenth anniversary of what is now the continuous human presence in space, since the first crew occupied ISS on November 2, 2000.
New results from the LCROSS impact on the Moon’s south pole: It’s cold and wet at the Moon’s south pole.
Update: Other elements detected in the impact plume included silver and mercury.
Steny Hoyer must really be worried: a attendee at the Hoyer-Lollar debate last week saw Hoyer “knuckle-punch” Lollar in the back, something that Lollar also attests to. This took place shortly after Hoyer was reported to have threatened Lollar by saying to him “I’m coming after you.”
It appears that while he was president, Bill Clinton misplaced the pocket electronic component, called a biscuit, that holds the codes used to activate America’s nuclear forces. And he didn’t tell anyone for months! As Ed Morrissey notes,
“Did they look under the sofa cushions? That’s where my remote usually winds up.”
Talk about stupid: New Zealand might lose $700 million in movie production business due to a boycott by an Australian-based actors union. Fun quote:
Fifteen hundred workers, including directors, technicians and crew who [oppose the actors union], met at . . . Miramar Studios at 5pm for an emergency meeting this evening. By 7pm, they were storming the Actors Equity meeting in the city.
The Moon stinks of gunpowder.
Not all space business news today is bad: Orbital Sciences, one of the companies building cargo ferrying services for ISS, posted good third quarter results today.
The Canadian company that makes the shuttle robot arm and other space robotics might be for sale. The company has vaguely denied this report, however.
As expected, the satellite company TerreStar has filed for bankruptcy.
Expensive and therefore not as competitive for market share as it could be, Arianespace is now facing a second year of losses and further competition from a variety of other rocket companies.
Using a deep field image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers at the European Southern Observatory have identified one galaxy in that image as the most distant ever seen, with a record-setting redshift of 8.6 and thus an rough distance of about 13 billion light years, only about 600 million years after the Big Bang.
Whoops! Last sentence corrected, thanks to my readers.
A variety of federal government agencies are moving aggressively to shut down human access to all American caves, including those on private property. Key quote:
In Wisconsin, where white nose syndrome has not yet appeared, wildlife managers want to get a jump on the disease by declaring G. destructans [the fungus associated with the syndrome] an invasive species, and declaring four species of bats threatened. Those designations would give wildlife agencies access to new sources of funds. They would also “give police power to the agencies to go onto private land to prevent damage to these newly named threatened species,” said [Peter] Youngbaer, [white nose syndrome liaison for the National Speleological Society]. “We fear that private landowners will be fearful of allowing even inadvertent access to caves, and thus move to seal caves shut. They’ll be causing more damage to the bats that they’re ostensibly trying to protect.” [emphasis mine]
As a caver, I not only have a strong personal interest in this story, I know a lot about bats and caves from personal experience. As a science writer who has also written about white nose syndrome for Science, I am also very familiar with the present state of the science. Based on this background, I find the actions of these government officials unconscionable. As one commenter to this article very correctly noted:
“There is currently *no* evidence that humans have spread this disease, but mountains of evidence for bat-to-bat transmission. The possibility does exist that humans *could* spread it, but even at its worst a human vector would be quite statistically insignificant in comparison to the bat-to-bat transmission.
In other words, closing all caves to human access can accomplish no good, and a great deal of harm. Yet, this is exactly what these government officials and environmental bureaucrats wish to do.
Back in March 2008, soon after white nose syndrome was discovered, I wrote the following:
I am beginning to believe strongly that the situation has worrisome political overtones linked to the unstated desire of some people to limit access to caves. . . . Some people are distorting the situation for their own purposes, either consciously or unconsciously. . . . Some of those people might have an agenda (closing caves to cavers) that is entirely irrelevant to the issue of white nose.
The article above only serves to confirm my opinions from 2008. The government officials who are demanding the indiscriminate closure of caves and the unfettered control over caves on private property are not really interested in protecting or saving the bats. In fact, their actions might actually do great harm to the bats, as the closures, the regulatory restrictions, and the threat to private property will antagonize both cavers and landowners, thus guaranteeing their unwillingness to cooperate with scientists.
So what do these government officials want? As far as I can tell, what they really want is power. And they are using white nose syndrome as a hammer to gain it.
Sadly, I fear that they are going to succeed. Today’s environmental laws are rigged to their advantage. The press is generally on their side. And the opposition to this power grab is diffuse and weak.
Once again, we see the death of freedom. And it dies, not by a single devastating blow, but by the death of a thousand cuts.
Benoit Mandelbrot, the mathematician who discovered fractals, has died at 85.
