Richard Branson’s balloon rival
The competition heats up: They might fly as high, but the balloon company that is aiming to capture some of the space tourism market is a strong rival to Virgin Galactic and XCOR.
Year: 2014
Planxty – The Blacksmith
An evening pause: From their 2004 reunion.
The deep ocean is not where global warming has gone
The uncertainty of science: A new NASA study finds that the deep oceans have not warmed since 2005, striking dead one of the favorite theories of global warming advocates to explain the 18 year stall in global warming.
In the 21st century, greenhouse gases have continued to accumulate in the atmosphere, just as they did in the 20th century, but global average surface air temperatures have stopped rising in tandem with the gases. The temperature of the top half of the world’s oceans — above the 1.24-mile mark — is still climbing, but not fast enough to account for the stalled air temperatures.
Many processes on land, air and sea have been invoked to explain what is happening to the “missing” heat. One of the most prominent ideas is that the bottom half of the ocean is taking up the slack, but supporting evidence is slim. This latest study is the first to test the idea using satellite observations, as well as direct temperature measurements of the upper ocean. Scientists have been taking the temperature of the top half of the ocean directly since 2005, using a network of 3,000 floating temperature probes called the Argo array.
“The deep parts of the ocean are harder to measure,” said JPL’s William Llovel, lead author of the study published Sunday in the journal Nature Climate Change. “The combination of satellite and direct temperature data gives us a glimpse of how much sea level rise is due to deep warming. The answer is — not much.”
The bottom line: no one really knows what is going on, climate scientists still do not have a good handle on how the climate works, the science is not “settled”, and anyone who says it is is a liar.
SpaceX wins safety design award
I post this story about SpaceX winning an award for its safety-in-design work mostly to illustrate again that, except for one lone commenter on my webpage, most of the aerospace industry recognizes the generally good work that SpaceX has been doing. Not only do their recognize it, they have found themselves struggling to meet the competitive challenge that SpaceX now represents, an effort that has been all to the good for everyone in the space industry.
Privately built module heading to ISS next year
The competition heats up: An inflatable module, built by the private company Bigelow for NASA, will be launched next year to ISS inside a SpaceX Dragon capsule.
Read that sentence again to savor the reality of two private companies both building and launching this addition to ISS.
Reality bites liberal Texas judge
The Texas judge who visited the infected apartment of America’s first ebola victim without protection has now had a complaint filed against him for endangering his own 9-year-old daughter.
The concerned citizen reached out to Breitbart Texas in a phone interview and provided information about his complaint to [Child Protective Services]. He told Brietbart Texas he wanted to remain anonymous because he is a business owner and is concerned about retaliation. He said he felt Jenkins’ conduct was inappropriate and unnecessarily exposed his child to potential danger. “I am doing this because I am concerned about the child,” the complainant said, “and I am concerned for the children in her school who might become exposed if the virus were to spread.”
Read the article at the link. The risks to the judge’s family and their acquaintances are real. Moreover, there is evidence that the judge has spent considerable time in contact with infected locations and individuals, without protection.
But he cares! That absolves him of any guilt should his actions causes others to die!
India gets Canadian launch contract
The competition heats up: Because of the Russian situation in the Ukraine, Canada has rejected a launch contract with Russia and signed India to do the launch instead.
No word on the rocket Canda will use, but I suspect it will be India’s smaller rocket, tested and more dependable. Their geosynchronous rocket, GSLV, is still in the testing stage.
The stall in global warming is now more than half the satellite record
The uncertainty of science: There has now been no global warming for 18 years, a time period that is more than half the entire satellite temperature record.
The Great Pause is the longest continuous period without any warming in the global instrumental temperature record since the satellites first watched in 1979. It has endured for a little over half the satellite temperature record. Yet the Pause coincides with a continuing, rapid increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration. …
The length of the Great Pause in global warming, significant though it now is, is of less importance than the ever-growing discrepancy between the temperature trends predicted by models and the far less exciting real-world temperature change that has been observed.
If you click on the link you will see quotes from one global warming scientist who, rather than honestly deal with the conflict between theory and data, instead uses name-calling as an argument. He unfortunately is the rule, not the exception.
Some reasons to panic, part 2
Left wing fantasies meet the real world: Apropos my previous post about the refusal of the modern intellectual liberal elite to face reality, on Thursday a liberal Democrat Texas judge and two assistants entered the Ebola-infected apartment of America’s first Ebola patient without any protection.
Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins shocked the local press corps Thursday night when he and two female workers entered the apartment where America’s first Ebola patient was staying. He entered without any visible protection from possible exposure to the deadly virus. Judge Jenkins entered the apartment to speak with the occupants who are now being held inside their home under a protection order requiring their compliance. He and two unknown women entered and were not visibly wearing gloves or any kind of mask or other form of protection from the virus.
This idiot and his assistants are now wandering around Dallas, shaking hands at political rallies and possibly spreading the disease far and wide. But it is all okay because he cares for these poor infected blacks and wants to help them. And if you die because of his actions it will only be because you are a raaaaaacist!
Some reasons to panic
And those reasons have less to do with actual problems and more to do with the incompetence of our culture’s intellectual leadership.
Over the last few years the divergence between what the government promises and what it delivers, between what it says is happening or will happen and what actually is happening and does happen, between what it determines to be important and what the public wishes to be important—this gap has become abysmal, unavoidable, inescapable. We hear of “lone-wolf” terrorism, of “workplace violence,” that if you like your plan you can keep your plan. We are told that Benghazi was a spontaneous demonstration, that al Qaeda is on the run, that the border is secure as it has ever been, that Assad must go, that I didn’t draw a red line, the world drew a red line, that the IRS targeting of Tea Party groups involved not a smidgen of corruption, that the Islamic State is not Islamic. We see the government spend billions on websites that do not function, and the VA consign patients to death by waiting list and then cover it up. We are assured that Putin won’t invade; that the Islamic State is the jayvee team of terrorism; that Bowe Bergdahl served with honor and distinction; that there is a ceasefire between Ukraine and Russia.
While the public remains pro-Israel, our government negotiates with Israel’s enemies. While the public wants to reduce immigration, the preeminent legislative objective of both parties is a bill that would increase it. While the public is uninterested in global warming, while costly regulations could not pass a filibuster-proof Democratic Senate, while the scientific consensus behind the green agenda is, at the very least, fraying, the president says that climate change is the greatest threat to the United States. While Americans tell pollsters their economic situation has not improved, and that things are headed in the wrong direction—while even Democratic economists acknowledge the despondent state of the middle class—the president travels to Chicago to celebrate his economic recovery.
These disjunctions and confusions, these missteps, scandals, and miscalculations, have hurt Obama’s approval numbers. They endanger the Democratic Senate majority, contribute to the widespread sense of disorder and decay, shatter trust in government and in public institutions. They have put into stark relief a political class dominated by liberal partisans, captured by ideas and interests removed from those of ordinary Americans. The stories of ineptitude or malfeasance that appear in the daily newspaper are more than examples of high ideals executed poorly. They are examples of the pursuit of ideas—of equality and diversity and progress and centralization and environmentalism and globalization—to absurd and self-destructive limits. [emphasis mine]
Read the whole essay, as I couldn’t have said it better. The incompetence of our intellectual partisan liberal elite, more consumed with pie-in-the-sky leftwing agendas than the real world around them, has become downright frightening. The sooner the general public rejects them, wholly and completely, illustrated by a landslide election, the sooner our society can get back to the business of dealing with the increasingly deadly problems of the real world.
Naturally 7 – Ready or Not
An evening pause: Recorded live.
Hat tip to Frank.
The day fascism rushed through the door in Wisconsin
And I call it fascism because that is what it is, the misuse of government force by members of one political party, the Democrats, to harass and destroy the lives of citizens who happen to disagree with them about policy.
“Houses were surrounded and lit up,” O’Keefe said. “Children and spouses were home in multiple cases, and made to suffer through two-and-a-half-hour raiding parties going through all paper files and seizing computers and phones. Children in multiple cases were told they could not inform their schools why they were late.”
After investigators stormed into their homes and rooted through their possessions, the conservative targets and their families suffered the additional insult of the gag order, O’Keefe said. “So a traumatic event is imposed on entire families, and they are told to suck it up, don’t talk to your friends, relatives, ministers, colleagues,” O’Keefe said. “Don’t explain the deputies’ cars, the boxes they took from your house. Don’t allow your children to tell the truth.”
Once again, the only reason these SWAT team searches were done was because the citizens under attack happened to oppose the politics of the propsecutor who ordered them. And if he could have arrested these citizens without trial, I firmly believe he would have.