“Delete this email.”
Cover-up: New evidence shows that the top official in charge of the Obamacare website at least once ordered her subordinates to delete her email, a direct violation of the law.
Year: 2014
The life story of a meteorite
A close analysis of a meteorite that landed on the roof of a California home have allowed scientists to traces its history from inception to Earth impact.
IRS tech claims Lerner’s hard drive wasn’t damaged.
Cover-up: An IRS computer technician has contradicted the sworn testimony of IRS officials, stating that Lois Lerner’s hard drive was not damaged prior to its destruction.
Aaron Signor, an IRS technician that looked at Lerner’s hard drive in June 2011, said in IRS court filings that he saw no damage to the drive before sending it off to another IRS technician, leading some in the media to suggest that the lost emails scandal is basically over. But Signor’s statement, issued in response to the Judicial Watch lawsuit, does not jibe with sworn congressional testimony.
This testimony is one of the reasons Judge Emmet Sullivan has ordered an independent inquiry into the IRS’s lost emails.
Visiting the memorial to a forgotten astronaut
Link here.
Cygnus leaves ISS
After a month docked to ISS the latest Cygnus cargo freighter has unberthed in preparation for a Sunday deorbit.
Six common sounds of the past that we no longer hear
Link here. I agree with the first commenter that another sound no longer heard and not included in the list is the sound of a dial-up modem getting online. There is also the sound of rotating the radio dial past many stations.
Judge orders independent investigation into lost IRS emails
Dissatisfied with the response from the IRS, the judge in a court suit has launched an independent inquiry into the loss of emails at the IRS.
Step by step, this cover-up is going to come apart.
Only some in the Muslim world condemn ISIS
The Islamic world’s reaction to the ISIS persecution of non-Muslims is decidedly mixed.
This sentence from the link sums the situation up nicely:
At the same time that Islamic religious leaders are mostly silent on the genocide, Islamic political leaders have spoken out.
It appears that Islamic political leaders have generally been forthright in condemning ISIS’s actions, something that we should take heart from. Islam’s religious leaders however have taken a more partisan stand, worrying that ISIS’s actions might harm Islam and thus condemning it for that reason. That Christians and other non-Muslims might be murdered however does not seem to be a concern for these Islamic religious leaders.
The Cat Came Back
An evening pause: Hat tip to Phil Berardelli.
“A real Nobel Laureate takes pity on a fake Nobel Laureate.”
Mark Steyn takes a look a one of Michael Mann’s many false claims and tears it to shreds, while also making Paul Krugman look somewhat foolish at the same time.
Michael Mann, a bad scientist who created the discredited hockey stick graph that supposedly proved global warming, is suing Steyn and others for daring to criticize him. In the process Steyn and others are finding ample material for making a great deal of fun of Mann while also finding more examples of his dishonesty and fraudulent behavior.
Maliki steps down in Iraq
Good news: Iraqi prime minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki has agreed to step down as per the legal demands of the country’s government.
Maliki was a poor and weak ruler who even tried to engineer a coup when the government decided to legally remove him. He has found that the army wants to support the rule of law (something we might have taught them) and would not back him in his coup attempt. He is now gone, and maybe the new leadership in Iraq, chosen legally, can unify the country in its battle against the Islamic fascists that are attacking them from Syria.
Did Stardust capture stardust?
Scientists now believe that the spacecraft Stardust captured seven particles from interstellar space during its seven year journey.
Inside the canister, a tennis racket-like sample collector tray captured the particles in silica aerogel as the spacecraft flew within 149 miles (about 240 kilometers) of a comet in January 2004. An opposite side of the tray holds interstellar dust particles captured by the spacecraft during its seven-year, three-billion-mile journey.
Scientists caution that additional tests must be done before they can say definitively that these are pieces of debris from interstellar space. But if they are, the particles could help explain the origin and evolution of interstellar dust. The particles are much more diverse in terms of chemical composition and structure than scientists expected. The smaller particles differ greatly from the larger ones and appear to have varying histories. Many of the larger particles have been described as having a fluffy structure, similar to a snowflake. [emphasis mine]
It appears that for these seven particles, the scientists conclude they are likely interstellar particles because of the speed in which they were traveling when captured as well as their make-up. Both suggest an origin outside the solar system.
However, we should be cautious about this. The data still remains tenuous and preliminary. More work obviously needs to be done to pin this down definitively. More information here.
New footage of the Falcon 9 soft spashdown
SpaceX has released new additional footage showing the controlled descent and soft spash down of the first stage of its Falcon 9 rocket during its July launch. I’ve posted it below.
As they note on their webpage, “Towards the end of the video, the camera operator attempted to zoom in and unfortunately lost sight of the stage and was unable to capture the tip over into the water.” Nonetheless, the controlled nature of the stage’s descent says that they succeeded, and need only try to do this over land to prove they can recover their first stage.
IRS lets contractors rummage through taxpayer data
Does this make you feel secure? An inspector general report found that the IRS allowed contractors access to personal taxpayer information without doing the required background checks required by IRS policy.
Contractors who have access to sensitive information, which also includes employee and law enforcement data, must undergo a background check if they’re with the IRS for more than six months.
But the inspector general’s audit found five contracts where contractors had not had any background checks out of the 28 total contracts reviewed. In one of those cases, a contractor working on printing and mailing tax forms was given a disk containing 1.4 million taxpayer names, Social Security numbers and other personal information. A separate contract, for couriers, had given a daily route to an ex-convict who served more than 20 years for arson, the report added. In another 12 cases, IRS staffers had started background checks for contractors, but contractors were allowed to start working before those investigations had concluded.
On the radio
I will be making a two hour appearance tonight on Coast to Coast with George Noory, from 10 to 12 pm (Pacific) to discuss both climate science (if such a thing exists any longer) as well as the U.S./Russian relationship in connection with ISS. As always, it should be fun.
This post will remain at the top of the page for the remainder of today.
“It was the grossest incompetence.”
The IRS takes more than two years to issue a refund check because of its own stupidity.
This paragraph best sums up the entire idiocy:
Dinesen [representing the citizen] immediately contacted the collection division. He was told they had no record of the return. The identity theft unit was handling it, and the collection division’s computers weren’t capable of interfacing with the identity theft unit’s computers. “I asked if he could just call the identity theft unit to confirm the return had been filed. He said he couldn’t. His explanation for why not boiled down to, ‘We don’t do that,’” Dinesen said.
The agent agreed to suspend collection actions against Boka Gonzalez while Dinesen tried to resolve the case. “He also asked me to give him a call if I got any information from the identity theft unit. It seemed ridiculous to me that one part of the IRS would ask an outside person to keep him informed of what another part of the IRS was doing, but that was the level of dysfunction we were dealing with,” Dinesen said.
Read the whole story. It is horrifying. And remember, this is a case where the IRS was simply incompetent. Imagine the harm they could do if they wanted to do harm, or were ordered to do so by our political leaders. Thank God such things never happen!
The occupation of Cyprus underscores the hypocrisy of any anti-Israel outrage over Gaza
The link is here.
Hanson leaves out one extra detail: Turkey still occupies north Cyprus, with Israel left Gaza entirely to the Palestinians a decade ago.
“You had one job.”
I normally consider stories that beat up on a President for his time off to be partisan hack jobs, but the situation now is becoming absolutely ridiculous.
There there’s this satire, which imagines the kind of story we all know would have been written if Romney had won the election and had been doing exactly what Obama is doing today.
The IRS stonewalls a judge
Working for the Democratic Party: Required by a judge to explain in detail in 30 days the destruction of its emails, the IRS has instead provided nothing more than shallow platitudes.
The author of the article above is very confident that, based on his past history, the judge will come down very hard on the IRS for its stonewalling. I pray that he is right.
Michael Mann’s court suit under attack
Good news: Groups from across the political spectrum are expressing their opposition to Michael Mann’s court suit against his critics.
On Monday, The Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press — along with 26 other groups including The Washington Post, Bloomberg and Fox News — filed an “amici curiae,” or “friend of the court,” brief with the D.C. Court of Appeals. An amici curiae is a brief submitted to a court to raise additional points of view to sway a court’s decision.
“While Mann essentially claims that he can silence critics because he is ‘right,’ the judicial system should not be the arbiter of either scientific truth or correct public policy,” the brief states, adding that “a participant in the ‘rough-and-tumble’ of public debate should not be able to use a lawsuit like this to silence his critics, regardless of whether one agrees with Mann or defendants.”
Just as Mark Steyn and Rand Simberg said it, I will say it also: Michael Mann is a fraud. He has no idea what it means to be a scientist, and should have been fired by his university after his climategate emails were uncovered. Instead, his university’s investigation was a whitewash and as much a fraud as Mann is.