Congress has pulled all funding for the Eisenhower memorial, the design of which is strongly opposed by the Eisenhower family.
Memo to NBC: “What the hell is wrong with you?”
The first manually flown docking by Chinese astronauts is now scheduled for June 24.
The competition heats up: A new company has announced plans to use the Gemini capsule design from the 1960s to provide crew and cargo capability to orbit.
“Since this is an existing and proven design we could begin construction six to eight weeks after funding and complete a flying prototype ten to thirteen months later,” said WestWind President Bill Jolly.
Mars Odyssey is out of safe mode and should be back in full operation by next week.
An evening pause: “He don’t know me very well, do he?”
More guns, less crime: According to FBI statistics released last week, violent crime has declined for the fifth year in a row, the 18th time it has declined in the last 20 years.
Facts are hard things. You can claim that more guns will cause more violent crime, but the facts remain what they are: Wherever there are gun control laws, crime is higher. Wherever people are allowed to own guns, crime goes down.
The Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI), created by Obamacare, announced its first round of grants today, part of a funding program of fifty “pilot projects” totaling $30 million.
It didn’t take much research for me to conclude that, while some of this work might be useful, most of it sounds like bureaucratic claptrap. For example, consider the description Nature gives for these three grants:
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NBC has been caught again, for the third time this year, of selectively editing news footage to create a false scenario.
In all three cases the false scenario aided Democratic leftwing politics.
I mention this story only to emphasis how completely unreliable NBC is as a source of news information. Sadly, none of the other media networks are much better.
Leftwing civility: Adults heckle and shout down kindergarten students singing “God Bless the USA” at a graduation ceremony in Brooklyn.
A Virginia dog that died two years ago received a voter registration form in the mail last week, asking it to register to vote.
The organization that sent out the form is called “the non-profit Voter Participation Center,” which is working to get “groups like young people, minorities, and unmarried women” to vote. Which suggests strongly that this center is a leftwing political activist group working to win future elections for Democrats, by any means necessary. A close look at their website confirms this, as they have many ties to liberal organizations and think tanks. More here.
This is further evidence that when Democrats scream about “the suppress the vote” efforts of Republicans, they are really worried about is the possibility that voter fraud will be eliminated, preventing them garnering fake votes.
Your tax dollars at work: Spending money on silliness at the NSF and NIH.
Coburn’s report identified a number of projects that will make most Americans—scientists and nonscientists alike—shake their heads. They include studies of: how to ride a bike; when dogs became man’s best friend; whether political views are genetically predetermined; whether parents choose trendy baby names; and when the best time is to buy a ticket to a sold-out sporting event. And it noted that “only politicians appear to benefit from other NSF studies, such as research on what motivates individuals to make political donations, how politicians can benefit from Internet town halls…and how politicians use the Internet.”
Read the whole thing, as it gives a scientist’s perspective of this waste, which is sometimes not as obvious as the examples above.
