Year: 2014

Third launch for China in a week

9:17 am

The competition heats up: China today launched its third spacecraft in a week with the launch Monday of a military satellite.

Monday’s mission was the third Chinese space launch in a week, coming after the Oct. 20 liftoff of the Chinese military’s Yaogan 22 reconnaissance satellite and the Oct. 23 launch of a demonstrator probe on a looping flight around the moon and back to Earth to verify technologies for use on a planned mission to retrieve and return lunar samples. Overall, the launch of Shijian 11-08 marked the ninth Chinese space launch of 2014.

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Largest sunspot in a quarter century spews flares

8:31 pm

The largest sunspot seen in about a quarter century produced another powerful X-class flare today, the sixth in less than a week.

This was the sixth X-class solar flare from NOAA 2192, a record for the number of X-class flares generated by a single group so far this solar cycle. It was also the fourth X-class flare since last Friday, continuing a period of intense flaring activity. This sunspot group has grown again a bit, and maintains its magnetic complexity. A degradation of the HF radio-communication was observed over South-America, the Caribbean, and West-Africa.

The last sentence is referring to some radio communications blackouts that have occurred in these areas because of the flares. For more information about the sunspot itself, go here.

And in case you hadn’t noticed, as predicted by many doomsday fear-mongers in the science community, our technological civilization was destroyed by these flares and we are now all dead.

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Vulnerable Senate Democrats are all Obama rubber-stamps

4:03 pm

A vote for Obama: Every single one of the most vulnerable Democrats running for the Senate voted with Obama more than 96 percent of the time.

As senior writer Shawn Zeller writes in this week’s CQ Weekly cover story, Democrats … have been distancing themselves from Obama on the campaign trail not in votes on the Senate floor — whether it be Mark Udall of Colorado, Mark Pryor of Arkansas or Mary L. Landrieu of Louisiana: “Udall disagreed just once, on a Pennsylvania state judge’s nomination to a federal district court. Pryor parted with Obama three times, and Landrieu four, but only one of those votes was on a policy matter. In July, Landrieu voted against Obama’s request for $2.7 billion to deal with the surge of Latin American children entering the U.S. illegally.” Indeed, all of the most vulnerable Democrats voted with President Obama at least 96 percent of the time on the 120 votes on which Obama has urged a “yes” or “no” vote.

There are many take-aways you could get from this story, but I want to emphasis one: These Democratic candidates are all liars and consider the voters stupid. By claiming in their campaigns and debates that they are independent of Obama they are telling us that they think you are too stupid to see through their lies and will vote for them anyway.

Bottom line: a vote for a Democrat this election is a vote for the policies that Barack Obama has foisted on this country the past six years. Is that what we really want?

Note: Sorry for the lack of posts today, but up until now I have honestly not seen anything in the news that I consider worth posting.

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Obamacare causes AIDS drug prices to skyrocket

9:56 pm

Finding out what’s in it: Because Obamacare has forced AIDS patients off their old health plans, their cost for drugs has skyrocketed.

I wonder how many of these patients, most of whom are gay and thus mostly liberal and supporters of the Democratic Party, will continue to vote Democratic. I wonder if they will finally begin to connect the dots, and realize that their loyalty to the Democratic Party might literally be killing them.

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Kid makes interception and scores and is punished

10:14 am

Sick world: An 8-year-old boy took an interception in for a touchdown in a kid’s football game and his team is fined and his coach is suspended.

CBS 46 reports the Lawrenceville Black Knights were winning against their opponents, 32-0, in the fourth quarter. Burrell then intercepted a pass and went through with the touchdown, failing to comply with the league’s mercy rule. That six-point score caused the Georgia-based team to surpass the 33-point rule, which earned the coach a week-long suspension and the team a $500 fine.

Burrell’s mothers, Brooke Burdett, told CBS 46 that she and her son were “beyond excited” at first, before learning of the fine. “He had no idea” Burdett said. “This is his first year. This was his first touchdown. He is an 8-year-old boy making a pick-six.”

Heaven forbid we have an 8-year-old boy achieve something cool, get thrilled about it, and think he can do great things in the future. Noooooooo, we have to squelch that sense of worth and achievement so that the failures in life won’t have hurt feelings.

These idiotic parents and the people who run this league obviously don’t remember what it is like to play kids’ sports. Boys aren’t crushed by these kinds of defeats. Instead, most boys use the experience to figure out how they can win the next time. By denying them this lesson in life you act to cripple them.

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The IRS steals property and cash

6:27 pm

Theft by government: The IRS admits to seizing hundreds of thousands of dollars of private assets, without any proof of illegal activity, merely because there is a law that lets them do it.

Using a law designed to catch drug traffickers, racketeers and terrorists by tracking their cash, the government has gone after run-of-the-mill business owners and wage earners without so much as an allegation that they have committed serious crimes. The government can take the money without ever filing a criminal complaint, and the owners are left to prove they are innocent. Many give up and settle the case for a portion of their money. “They’re going after people who are really not criminals,” said David Smith, a former federal prosecutor who is now a forfeiture expert and lawyer in Virginia. “They’re middle-class citizens who have never had any trouble with the law.”

The article describes several specific cases, all of which are beyond egregious and are in fact entirely unconstitutional. The Bill of Rights is very clear about this: The federal government cannot take private property without just compensation.

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ISS data lowers radiation risk for humans in space

7:28 pm

Good news: Data collected on ISS for the past decade now suggests that the human body does a better job of shielding its internal organs from space radiation than previously believed.

For an astronaut working inside the space station, the overestimate was about 15 percent — a fairly close correlation given that the station’s exterior shell provides much of the protection needed.

But for astronauts working outside the station, the radiation absorption measured was substantially less than what had been registered by the personal dosimeters worn by astronauts. “Measurements of a personal dosimeter dramatically overstate the exposure of an astronaut, in the worst case by a factor of three,” according to a summary of the results by a Euro-Russian team. “[I]n an outside exposure the self-shielding of the human body is very effective. … [T]he effective dose equivalent is less than 30 percent higher than in an inside exposure.”

In other words, humans could fly 30 percent longer in space with the present shielding and suffer far less exposure than expected. Though this data is for operations in low Earth orbit, it still provides a strong counter to the bad news recently released about the high amounts of dangerous radiation expected in interplanetary space due to the Sun’s recent low sunspot activity. Even if radiation levels are higher, the human body is more resilient than expected. Interplanetary space travel is still possible.

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