In honor of April Fools Day on Tuesday, fourteen of the greatest hoaxes ever.
The list is decidedly non-political, but the one theme running through almost all these hoaxes is how the press is often the number one victim.
The competition heats up: SpaceX has test fired its Grasshopper replacement test vehicle.
Unlike Grasshopper, which only had one engine, the Falcon 9R (pronounced “niner”) is the equivalent of a Falcon 9 nine engine first stage. They fired it on the launchpad for 5 seconds in preparation for future vehicle take off and landing tests.
According to a new report from the federal government, only 6 percent of the country’s electricity comes from green energy sources.
What strikes me about this figure is that, if I remember right, back in around 2001 or so green energy sources only contributed about 3% of our electrical needs, and Vice President Dick Cheney then made the point that even if we doubled that number it wasn’t going eliminate the need to burn fossil fuels. For that comment Cheney got pilloried by the press and by green activists for being a barbarian who was against saving the planet.
Well, here we are, about a dozen years later, and we have doubled our use of green energy, and Cheney was 100% right, we are still reliant on fossil fuels.
The odious Chuck Schumer and Harry Reid.
And why are they odious? Because they have the nerve to attack a free American citizen for merely disagreeing with them publicly.
“But, senator, can’t we have a disagreement about how charity is funded without calling somebody un-American?” Scarborough countered. He continued to press Schumer to answer his question. “Do you think David Koch is un-American?”
Schumer finally said, “The commercials he runs are not part of the American mainstream. No two people [David Koch and his brother Charles] should have such a huge influence on our politics. That’s not First Amendment … I think the commercials he is running are against the American grain and un-American, yes …. I think what Harry Reid was saying was the actions are un-American. And they are, and they should change.”
I wonder if people quite appreciate how disgusting this all is. Here we have two Democratic senators labeling a private citizen as being “un-American” because that citizen is vocally advocating public policies they disagree with.
Can you imagine the media (and Hollywood) firestorm if Senator Ted Cruz went to the Senate floor and repeatedly accused, say, Jeffrey Katzenberg of being “un-American”–and Mike Lee echoed the charge?
But hey, they’re Democrats, so they must mean well! In fact, they must be so correct that the proper thing to do would be for us to put together a lynch mob and get these un-American Americans. How dare David Koch, or anyone, criticize a Democrat?
The first amendment is such an inconvenient thing: A reporter today was detained by DC police for daring to ask a question of the head of the EPA.
We’re here to help you: The U.S Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights has forced a Michigan school to rip down a brand-new set of bleachers for its boys’ baseball team because the new seating is nicer than the girls’ softball bleachers.
The raised seating deck for the boys’ baseball team, which was paid for with money raised by parents, was put in place because fans who’d come to watch games at Plymouth High School in Canton, Mich., were having a hard time seeing the game through the chain-link fence WJBK-TV reported. The parents installed the new bleachers themselves and even added a new scoreboard to the field, the station reported. [emphasis mine]
So, something that cost the school nothing that the parents of the students themselves wanted isn’t good enough because our wonderful federal government didn’t like it. Tear it down!
Bruce Rauner, the Republican running for governor of Illinois, is proudly running as a RINO.
Essentially, he is copying the campaign approach that was used successfully by RINO Senator Mark Kirk.
I do not say this as a criticism. For a Republican to win in the very Democratic enclave of Illinois, he must move to the left. Moreover, a RINO Republican in office in Illinois will still be a step up from a corrupt Democrat. In fact, getting a lot of Democrats fired in that state might actually force some real reform in that party there.
SpaceShipTwo is outside its hanger today, undergoing cockpit pressure tests.
The article also provides some additional information about the rumored engine issues of the spacecraft, suggesting that the company is working hard to replace its nitrous oxide-rubber engine with a nitrous oxide-nylon engine.
The competition heats up: Orbital Sciences has begun construction of the 81satellites that will make up Iridium’s second generation communications satellite constellation.
Not only is this big business for satellite construction — 81 satellites is a big order — someone will have to launch those satellites. Even if they are launched in groups of five, which was how it was done for the first generation, it will still take more than 16 launches to get them all in orbit. That will be a lot of business for some lucky rocket company.
The Air Force’s X-37B mini-shuttle presently in orbit has now set a new record for the spacecraft’s longest flight.
The X-37B space plane currently in orbit in flying the Orbital Test Vehicle 3 (OTV-3) mission, the third long-duration flight of the unmanned Air Force spaceflight program. The miniature space shuttle launched on Dec. 11, 2012 and is surpassed the record for longest X-37B spaceflight on Wednesday (March 26). Until now, the record for the longest X-37B mission is 469 days, set by the program’s OTV-2 mission that was launched in 2011.
The OTV-3 mission in orbit today now uses the first of the Air Force’s two X-37B space plane vehicles. The same spacecraft was used to fly the first-ever X-37B mission (the 225-day OTV-1 flight in 2010), while a second vehicle flew the longer OTV-2 mission a year later.
After a two day delay because of an aborted engine burn, a Soyuz spacecraft docked last night with ISS, bringing its next crew of three to the station.
The Republican leadership in the House today held a sham vote to get a spending bill passed.
They did it because they couldn’t get enough votes from both Republicans and Democrats for the bill. So, “Republican leadership worked with their Democratic counterparts to orchestrate the ploy.”
It is stuff like this that makes me sick for our country: bi-partisan corruption.
