Tag: government

Tesla stock crashes due to possible loss of tax credit

10:13 am

The stock of Elon Musk’s Tesla electric car company crashed this week, dropping 7% on Wednesday, with the revelation that the Republican tax plan proposes eliminating the $7,500 tax credit for buying an electric car.

Its share price fell more than seven per cent to about $296 apiece from Wednesday’s $321. The draft law emerged as the Elon-Musk-led automaker announced its worst-ever quarter, recording a $671m loss and admitting it had not met its production target for its new Model 3 car, producing just 220 of them against its 1,500 target.

Economists believe that the tax credit is a key driver for electric car sales, and cite the example of when the state of Georgia cut its $5,000 tax credit and saw sales of electric cars slump from 1,400 a month to just 100 a month in response.

What this story highlights is that electric cars are simply not economical at this time, and that the government is distorting the market by pushing them. Without government aid, practically no one would buy them.

It would be far better for everyone to let the market decide. Not only would this save us tax dollars, it would allow the industry to focus its innovative efforts on upgrades that are cost effective and profitable, rather than on pie-in-the-sky fantasies that actually do no good at all.

Hat tip Wayne DeVette for pointing me to this story.

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Builders of Ghana’s first satellite push for government help

9:36 am

The new colonial movement: The student engineers who built Ghana’s first satellite, GhanaSat-1 and launched in July, are pushing their government to establish the legal framework for future space activities in that country.

Student engineers behind the successful launch of Ghana’s first satellite into orbit have appealed to the government to set up a multi-stakeholder committee to come up with an act, the Ghana outer space act, a key requirement that would enable the country to ratify and sign the United Nations Outer Space Treaty.

They said if the country signed and ratified the treaty, it would give investors the signal and confidence that the country was ready for them to come and establish space science facilities.

The description in the article of what these students want suggests they do not quite understand the ramifications of all the UN space treaties, because it appears they also want Ghana to become signatories to them all. This would be a big mistake. While every country that launches satellites is a signatory to the Outer Space Treaty, very few have signed the Moon Treaty, as its language puts far more serious restrictions on property rights.

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China says Long March 5 will resume launches in 2018

9:12 am

The new colonial movement: Though the details are vague, a Chinese official said earlier this week that they now expect to resume launches of their Long March 5 rocket in 2018.

The article says that the July launch failure of the second Long March 5 was due to “a manufacturing defect affecting one of two YF-77 engines powering the first stage. If officially confirmed, this would mean no major effects such as redesign are required, meaning a relatively swift return to flight.”

The long delay since July however suggests to me that the defect was more serious, and has either required that redesign or a complete recall of all YF-77 engines.

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Local tribe signs deal for Australian spaceport

9:05 am

Capitalism in space: An aboriginal tribe tribe in Australia has signed a lease with a new space company proposing to build a spaceport on their land where smallsat rockets can launch.

The Northern Land Council has granted a 275-hectare lease in northeast Arnhem Land to the Gumatj clan for use as a commercial rocket launching facility. That’ll pave the way for Gumatj Aboriginal Corporation to sublease the site to Equatorial Launch Australia, a firm whose $236 million space base proposal is being considered by federal and NT infrastructure funds.

The 12-year lease has an option for a 28-year extension, and is expected to be finalised later this month.

This is the first I have ever heard of Equatorial Launch Australia. Their website provides little information. Further web searches revealed little as well. My impression is that it is focused on creating a spaceport for the use of new Australian smallsat rocket companies. Whether it plans to launch its own rocket is unclear.

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Saudi minister calls for “toppling” Hezbollah

9:24 am

Intriguing: The Saudi state minister for Gulf affairs has called for the “topplng” of Hezbollah, condemning that organization as “a party of Satan.”

He also said that “The coming developments will definitely be astonishing.”

While there have always been strong differences and hostility among the many Arab nations and movements in the Middle East, rarely have these differences been expressed so publicly and forcefully. Read the whole article. The things this powerful official says could not be said if he did not have the support of his government. I wonder if this indicates some major shifts are about to occur in the Arab world.

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Human errors and lax management caused Navy collisions

9:10 am

A new Navy report blasts bad management, lax standards, poor training, and numerous human errors for the ship collisions that occurred last summer.

The long list of errors by the crews, some as simple as failing to sound the standard warning blasts when it appeared they would approach other ships too closely, suggest that no one in the Navy’s upper ranks is following the Navy’s own operational guidelines. They are improvising wildly, while doing nothing to prepare their crews to act properly.

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Factional bickering dominates nomination hearing for NASA administrator

8:43 am

Quite boring. Factional bickering yesterday between Democrats and Republicans dominated the nomination hearing of Congressman Jim Bridenstine (R-Oklahoma) for NASA administrator.

Today’s contentious nomination hearing for Rep. Jim Bridenstine (R-OK) to be NASA Administrator was split along partisan lines. Democratic Senators questioned his credentials and viewpoints about climate change, sexual harassment and other issues that could affect how he runs the agency and its personnel. Republicans defended him and chafed at the tenor of the hearing. The committee could vote as early as next week on whether to send the nomination to the full Senate.

I did not watch the hearing because I knew this would be what I’d see and I didn’t want to be bored for two hours. It ain’t news anymore to find Democrats opposing anything proposed by the Republicans. Furthermore, it doesn’t matter. Bridenstine will almost certainly be approved along partisan lines in the Senate, and nothing I have read about him suggests he is going to do anything significant or radical. He has made it clear, both in recent interviews and articles as well as his testimony yesterday as reported by numerous articles that he does not wish to rock the boat. He supports all of NASA’s current programs, commercial space, SLS/Orion, climate research, everything. I do not expect him to make any radical changes in the direction NASA is going.

In fact, the people who will change NASA are not even in the government. I expect the actions of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos to have far greater impact in the coming years, with politicians and bureaucrats in NASA forced to follow them, as they have been forced to follow Musk during the past half decade.

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Another Vostochny manager on trial for embezzlement

8:19 am

The Russians are prosecuting another manager at Vostochny for stealing more than $10 million.

[O]ut of 765 million rubles ($13 million) allocated under the contract with Federal State Unitary Enterprise Spetsstroytekhnologii, Tolstikov had only 100 million rubles ($1.7 million) left. The rest, according to him, he spent for construction trailers for workers.

It is amazing anything has been built at Vostochny. This case is in addition to the more than half dozen other embezzlement cases totaling almost $200 million, a very significant amount of money in Russia as well as a significant portion of the spaceport’s entire construction budget.

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Scientists receiving EPA grants will no longer serve on EPA advisory panels

6:13 pm

EPA head Scott Pruitt today announced that any scientist receiving EPA grants will no longer be allowed to serve on three EPA science advisory panels.

In the past three years, members of the Science Advisory Board, the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee, and the Board of Scientific Counselors received about $77 million in direct EPA grants while serving, according to agency calculations. “Strengthening independence from EPA; increasing state, tribal, and local government participation; and adding geographic diversity and fresh perspectives will improve the integrity of EPA’s scientific advisory committees,” Pruitt told reporters, government officials, and policy analysts in attendance.

The issue is a conflict of interest. These same scientists could not fairly advise EPA since they depended on that agency for major funding. The result was that these panels would often recommend the EPA to fund research that these scientists favored and were known to focus on, thus giving them an advantage in obtaining grants. Not surprisingly, this research often pushed the theory of global-warming and anti-industry regulation. This old-boy network for funneling funds to the right people, regardless of its legitimacy, is now hopefully cut off.

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North Korea’s new plan to develop and launch satellites

12:16 am

North Korea announced yesterday a new program to accelerate the development of home-built space satellites and orbital rockets.

North Korean newspaper Rodong Sinmun published a commentary laying out the country’s plans to send more satellites into space over the next five years. The program “can contribute to improving the economy and people’s lives,” the article reads. “It is a global trend to seek economic development through space programs,” the October 31 piece said. “According to our five-year plan for space development, we will launch more working satellites, such as geostationary ones.” Geostationary satellites orbit the Earth about 38,500 kilometers (22,000 miles) over a fixed position over the equator and revolve from west to east like the Earth.

It is hard to know how realistic this program is, and how much of it is actually a cover for North Korea’s ICBM development efforts.

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Trump Justice Department settles lawsuits over Obama IRS harassment

9:49 am

The Trump administration has come to a settlement with the lawsuits filed by tea party groups over their harassment by the IRS during the Obama administration.

The government apologized Thursday for illegally targeting tea party groups for intrusive scrutiny and agreed to settlements with hundreds of organizations snared in the targeting, bringing to a close one of the more embarrassing episodes of the Obama administration.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions said the IRS owed the groups an apology after years of poor treatment and even longer refusal to concede bad behavior. He placed blame on “the last administration,” saying the targeting that went on under President Obama “was wrong and should never have occurred.”

One of the settlement agreements, filed in federal court in Washington, D.C., officially admits that the IRS singled out groups because of their political beliefs, in defiance of the law. The other settlement, in a class-action lawsuit in Ohio, includes a “generous” payout to more than 400 groups snared, according to a lawyer involved.

The amount of the settlement was not released.

Meanwhile, John Koskinen remains head of the IRS, despite a long documented record of stone-walling and obstruction of justice. If the Trump administration is really sincere about fixing this proglem so that it won’t happen again, why has Trump not fired him?

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More hints that the first SLS launch will be delayed again

9:17 am

Government in action! The head of the Marshall Space Flight Center yesterday once again hinted that the first unmanned launch of SLS/Orion, presently scheduled for late in 2019, could be delayed again.

In September, the agency said in a statement that it would announce a new target date for EM-1 in October, citing the need to account for a range of issues, including progress on the European-built Orion service module and shutdowns at NASA centers from hurricanes in August and September.

However, an update in October is increasingly unlikely. “Within a few weeks, I think [NASA Acting Administrator Robert Lightfoot] intends to codify whatever that date is going to be,” Todd May, director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, said in remarks at the American Astronautical Society’s Wernher von Braun Memorial Symposium here Oct. 25.

Bill Hill, deputy associate administrator for exploration systems development at NASA, offered a similar assessment. “Probably in the next month, maybe sooner,” he said in an interview.

These hints have been standard operating procedure for announcing SLS’s endless delays for the past decade. First they make hints that a delay might happen, but reassure everyone that it is very unlikely. Then they follow this up later with announcements about how they need more time to accomplish all their goals. By the third announcement they outline a possible new schedule, including some delay but insist that it isn’t likely. Finally, they release the new dates, often as an aside during some other announcement in order to minimize the news.

It should be noted that the new dates have almost never been realistic. NASA has usually known that the new dates are interim, and that further delays will likely require more of this same dance to make them public.

So, here is my prediction: They are preparing us for the fact that the first unmanned flight will likely slip into 2020, which means the first manned flight slips for certain into 2023, as I have been predicting for the past three years.

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Saudi Arabia to invest $1 billion in Virgin Galactic and Virgin Orbit

9:05 am

Capitalism in space: Saudi Arabia and Virgin have signed a non-binding agreement for Saudi Arabia to invest $1 billion in Virgin Galactic and Virgin Orbit.

I’m not sure what to make of this press release. The agreement is clearly called “non-binding,” which means Saudi Arabia is not obliged to provide any funds. At the same time, the deal appears to shift power and control of the two Virgin companies to the Arab country, which if successful (a big “if”) would also quickly give Saudi Arabia both a manned and smallsat launching capability.

Why they chose Virgin appears at first baffling, considering that company’s repeated inability to achieve any of its promises. It could be, however, that Richard Branson’s funds are drying up, and that he needed this deal to keep both companies afloat. Saudi Arabia thus saw an opportunity and grabbed it.

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FBI informant cleared to testify on Clinton Uranium Russian deal

10:17 pm

The Trump Justice Department has cleared the FBI informant with direct knowledge of the Clinton-Russian uranium bribery scandal.

The informant worked undercover to investigate bribery and intrigue in the Russian nuclear industry during the Obama administration and was, until Wednesday, bound by a gag order from speaking about what he knew. According to sources at the Department of Justice, the informant is now cleared to testify about a wide range of issues including, specifically, the Clinton Foundation. The informant worked undercover to investigate bribery and intrigue in the Russian nuclear industry during the Obama administration and was, until Wednesday, bound by a gag order from speaking about what he knew.

According to sources at the Department of Justice, the informant is now cleared to testify about a wide range of issues including, specifically, the Clinton Foundation. In a statement, DOJ spokesman Ian Prior told media outlets: “As of tonight, the Department of Justice has authorized the informant to disclose to the Chairmen and Ranking Members of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, as well as one member of each of their staffs, any information or documents he has concerning alleged corruption or bribery involving transactions in the uranium market, including but not limited to anything related to Vadim Mikerin, Rosatom, Tenex, Uranium One, or the Clinton Foundation.”

The article says the informant will testify Wednesday night before Congress, but also notes that it is unclear as yet how or where that testimony will be given. More details about the scandal here.

If this person reveals as much as the news stories have suggested, it could very well finally shatter the protection the press and the left have given the Clinton since Bill Clinton’s problems as president in the 1990s. What I am sensing is that the Democratic Party might possibly be considering throwing the Clintons to the wolves in an effort to keep the wolves off of it.

Then again, I tend to be a wide-eyed optimist.

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Freon leak on U.S. part of ISS?

6:28 pm

A news report today says that an accident in the U.S. portion of ISS caused a freon leak.

The report also said there was a leak of ammonia, and that he crew is not in danger from either leak.

The report is also very vague and sparse with information, and appears to come from the Russians, since it also says that the leaks suggest “systemic problems in the operation of the station’s U.S. segment.”

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Today in fascist academia

11:26 am

Time for another update on the growing movement on American campuses to squelch freedom of speech. The stories below highlight some of the more egregious examples since my last update.

Note also that I am making a point to identify the university in every headline I link to. If you have children who are about to pick a college, a quick search here at Behind the Black will tell you where a college stands on the first amendment and free speech.

No one should be surprised that three of these stories come out of California, which in recent years has become increasingly hostile to the concept of dissent.

All is not bad news, however. The Board of Regents that runs the University of Wisconsin two weeks ago approved a new policy that would suspend and expel students who disrupt speeches and presentations on campus.

This tidbit from the story reveals once again which political party today believes in free speech, and which political party does not.

The new Wisconsin policy mirrors Republican legislation the state Assembly passed in June, though the Senate has yet to act on the bill. Regents President John Robert Behling told the board before Friday’s vote that adopting the policy ahead of the legislation shows “a responsiveness to what’s going on in the Capitol, which helps build relationships.”

Republican Gov. Scott Walker appointed all but two of the board’s 18 members. State public schools Superintendent Tony Evers and Wisconsin Technical College System Board President Mark Tyler are automatically regents by virtue of their offices.

Evers, a Democrat running against Walker in next year’s gubernatorial election, cast the only dissenting vote. He accused the regents of sacrificing free speech to curry favor with Republican lawmakers.

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Russia to up ISS crew back to three

8:55 am

In order to integrate the new Nauka module, expected to launch in 2019, the Russians plan to increase their crew size on ISS back to three in late 2018.

[L]ong before the Nauka’s arrival, the Russian crew members aboard the ISS will have their hands full with various chores preceding the docking of the 20-ton spacecraft, which will increase the size and mass of the Russian Segment by almost a third. Moreover, once the module is in place, Russian cosmonauts are expected to labor into the 2020 to fully plug all the systems of the new room into their home in orbit. The total time required to integrate Nauka is expected to reach 2,000 work hours, including 11 spacewalks!

The preparations for the addition of the long-awaited module were scheduled to begin less than a year from now on Sept. 8, 2018, with the launch of the three members of Expedition 57 crew aboard the Soyuz MS-10 spacecraft. The launch will mark the first time since October 2016 that a Soyuz will lift more than one Russian cosmonaut.

Nauka is more than a decade behind schedule, which puts it in the same league as SLS and Orion. But then, Nauka, like SLS and Orion, is a government-built project, so no one should be surprised that it has taken so long. The goal isn’t the exploration of space. The goal is to create jobs, even if they don’t accomplish anything for decades.

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NanoRacks successfully deploys its largest commercial smallsat from ISS

9:24 pm

Capitalism in space: NanoRacks today successfully deployed its largest commercial smallsat yet from ISS.

NanoRacks Kaber Deployment Program allows for a larger EXPRESS class of satellites to be deployed from the International Space Station, up to 100 kilograms. NanoRacks deploys these Kaber-class satellites currently through the Japanese Experiment Module Airlock, and will shift deployments to the NanoRacks Airlock Module when the Company’s commercial Airlock becomes operational (planned for 2019).

The key here is that NanoRacks is making money providing launch services to smallsats in partnership with ISS and others. They act as the go-between between the smallsat companies and the NASA bureaucracy, thus earning money by simplifying NASA’s generally Byzantine approval and launch process for private satellite companies.

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Timeline of Russian uranium deal and Clinton donations

2:48 pm

Link here. The timeline not only puts the quid pro quo nature of the Russian uranium deal in context, it helps clarify the players and the different parts they played. It appears this deal not only involved giving Russia control of 20 percent of American uranium, that control included the corrupt Kazakhstan government.

All told, the Clintons and the Clinton Foundation appears to have received in the range of $55 million for their help in making the deal happen, all from players who benefited financially from the deal.

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WHO fakes data to claim weedkiller causes cancer

8:43 am

Par for the course: IARC, the agency of the World Health Organization (WHO) that focuses on cancer research, has apparently faked data so that it could make the claim — in opposition to every other published paper in the world — that a commonly used weedkiller causes cancer.

This detail about the man in charge might explain what happened:

The chairman of the IARC sub-group tasked with reviewing evidence of glyphosate’s effect on laboratory animals was Charles Jameson, an American toxicologist. In testimony as part of personal-injury lawsuits against Monsanto in the United States, Jameson told lawyers for Monsanto he did not know when, why or by whom the edits had been made.

Monsanto is facing multiple legal claims in the U.S. from plaintiffs who allege glyphosate gave them or their loved ones cancer. Jameson is an expert witness for the plaintiffs. He did not respond to questions for this article. [emphasis mine]

If you want to read the whole ugly story, go to the second link above. This report cites numerous examples where IARC clearly fudged their reports to hide the fact that their conclusions were consistently debunked by other research.

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Iranian scientist sentenced to death

8:13 am

An Iranian judge has sentenced an Iranian scientist to execution in 20 days.

The scientist, who appears to have mostly worked in Sweden, was convicted of spying for Israel. He in turn says he was railroaded because he refused to spy on his colleagues for the Iranian intelligence service.

What baffles me here is that he was arrested when returned to Iran for a short visit. He must have known that going back was going to put him in great risk. Why do it?

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Could North Korea use its missiles to fill orbital space with debris?

7:52 pm

Link here. While most of the discussion about the missile threat from North Korea has focused on the possibility of it detonating a nuclear bomb high enough to cause an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) that would disable most electronic equipment, this article notes that they could much more easily do almost as much harm by simply using their ballistic missiles to fill low-Earth-orbit (LEO) space with space junk, thus disabling much of the world’s military surveillance and reconnaissance satellites.

I am not sure how much of a threat this might be, but I find the article somewhat worrisome because it proposes something that seems quite reasonable and doable, with the technology that North Korea appears to have, right this minute.

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NASA still hasn’t established a baseline cost for SLS’s future missions

5:01 pm

Despite being told to do so in an 2014 GAO report, NASA has still not developed a budget to determine what it would cost to use SLS for any future beyond-Earth-orbit missions.

Worse, NASA says it doesn’t have to do this.

The government report notes that it previously recommended to NASA and Congress that costs of the first (and subsequent) human missions be calculated and disclosed three years ago in 2014. Since then, the report says, a senior official at NASA’s Exploration Systems Development program, which manages the rocket and spacecraft programs, replied that NASA does not intend to establish a baseline cost for Exploration Mission 2 because it does not have to.

This response must have struck investigators with the General Accountability Office—Congress’ auditing service—as a bit in-your-face. Later in the report, the director of acquisition and sourcing management for the accountability office, Cristina Chaplain, notes that, “While later stages of the Mars mission are well in the future, getting to that point in time will require a funding commitment from the Congress and other stakeholders. Much of their willingness to make that commitment is likely to be based on the ability to assess the extent to which NASA has met prior goals within predicted cost and schedule targets.” [emphasis mine]

In other words, NASA expects Congress to give NASA and SLS a blank check, forever. Sadly, based on the behavior of Congress now and in the past two decades, NASA might very well have reasonable expectations here.

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Trump administration backs off plans to end or reduce ethanol policy

9:48 am

The swamp wins: Scott Pruitt, EPA head, has retreated from his plans to reduce or end the program that subsidizes and encourages the use of ethanol in automobile gasoline.

After heavy pressure from lawmakers and other stakeholders, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt on Thursday night sided with pro-ethanol lawmakers and said his agency will abandon many controversial changes to the nation’s ethanol mandate — prompting a top biofuels leader to claim that Mr. Pruitt apparently has had an “epiphany” over the past few days.

In a letter to seven key senators, Mr. Pruitt — who had been critical of ethanol during his time as Oklahoma attorney general — shot down several major concerns about looming adjustments to the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), the federal law that requires the blending of ethanol with gasoline.

The letter comes just days after Sen. Charles E. Grassley, Iowa Republican and perhaps the loudest pro-ethanol voice in Congress, threatened to hold up nominees for top-level EPA posts if Mr. Pruitt didn’t acquiesce to their demands on the RFS.

It is going to take many years to drain the swamp, since it presently holds great power and is willing to use it to maintain its corrupt control over taxpayer money.

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Background of Mueller’s lead investigator confirms it is a witch hunt

5:43 pm

Link here. The article provides some detailed information about the background of Robert Mueller’s chief investigator, Andrew Weissmann, that strongly illustrates the likelihood that Mueller’s investigation is the witch hunt.

Time after time, courts have reversed Weissmann’s most touted “victories” for his tactics. This is hardly the stuff of a hero in the law.

Weissmann, as deputy and later director of the Enron Task Force, destroyed the venerable accounting firm of Arthur Andersen LLP and its 85,000 jobs worldwide — only to be reversed several years later by a unanimous Supreme Court.

Next, Weissmann creatively criminalized a business transaction between Merrill Lynch and Enron. Four Merrill executives went to prison for as long as a year. Weissmann’s team made sure they did not even get bail pending their appeals, even though the charges Weissmann concocted, like those against Andersen, were literally unprecedented. Weissmann’s prosecution devastated the lives and families of the Merrill executives, causing enormous defense costs, unimaginable stress and torturous prison time. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the mass of the case.

Weissmann quietly resigned from the Enron Task Force just as the judge in the Enron Broadband prosecution began excoriating Weissmann’s team, and the press began catching on to Weissmann’s modus operandi.

Links are provided to every one of Weissmann’s previous cases above. I clicked on each, and confirmed that not only did he intimidate witnesses, each one of these major prosecutions was thrown out because of aggressive improprieties. Weissmann approach is to find a crime, and prosecute it, whether any real crime occurred or not.

I post once again below the fold the Congressional testimony of “Republican” Robert Mueller when he was head of the FBI and was being questioned about the investigation he was leading into the Obama administration’s use of the IRS to harass its political opponents. It illustrates forcefully how much a tool Mueller was, and is, for the Democratic Party.
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NOAA declares record-setting warming where it has no data

11:20 am

NOAA’s September update on the climate has declared that central and southern Africa experienced “record warmth,” even though NOAA itself admits it has no ground data for this region, and the satellite data shows temperatures normal.

Except for the satellite data, which comes from a different research source, all the graphs at the second link are from NOAA itself. Despite admitting in one graph that they have zero data for most of Africa, they declare in a different graph that most of Africa experienced record-setting warming.

This is not the first time NOAA has done this. I noted similar intellectual dishonesty by NOAA two years ago. In the interim they have followed this pattern repeatedly, claiming new warming records all over the globe in many areas where they have absolutely no surface data and the satellite data remains inconclusive.

There is an intellectual corruption in the climate field, especially within government agencies like NOAA, that is ruining our ability to really learn what is going on with the climate. And until someone in power steps in and either demands a forthright explanation that justifies these actions (something that I think is impossible) or demands that it stop, this corruption is only going to get worse.

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Budget cuts for Roscosmos in 2017

9:41 am

The budget problems in Russia continue, with the government revealing today that the budget for Roscosmos in 2017 was cut by about $1 billion, and that the budget for the next two years will remain essentially flat.

Roscosmos and the Russian press periodically make grand announcements about what they plan to do, but all their plans end up, like NASA’s SLS, being delayed endlessly. This is how government operations operate. The goal really isn’t to build anything for sale, but to create make-work jobs.

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