Democratic civility: When challenged about his gun control proposals and how they conflict with the second amendment, a Rhode Island state legislator responded “Go f–k yourself.”
Video at the link. Note how gleefully he says it.
Sierra Nevada has subcontracted Lockheed Martin to help build its Dream Chaser spacecraft.
The article is about the beginnings of construction at the Michoud Assembly facility in Louisiana, but to me the significant fact revealed by this article is that Jim Crocker of Lockheed Martin is involved in the effort. Crocker was one of the key engineers who came up with the solutions that helped return focus to the Hubble Space Telescope back in 1993. He is one of the country’s best aerospace engineers, and his participation here is excellent news.
A Russian rocket successfully lifted off today from Kazakhstan with the next crew for ISS.
Unspeakable: The UK’s nationalized hospital system has routinely been using the fetal remains of dead babies for heating fuel.
The bodies of thousands of aborted and miscarried babies were incinerated as clinical waste, with some even used to heat hospitals, an investigation has found. Ten NHS trusts have admitted burning foetal remains alongside other rubbish while two others used the bodies in ‘waste-to-energy’ plants which generate power for heat.
Last night the Department of Health issued an instant ban on the practice which health minister Dr Dan Poulter branded ‘totally unacceptable.’
At least 15,500 foetal remains were incinerated by 27 NHS trusts over the last two years alone, Channel 4’s Dispatches discovered.
When Jonathan Swift wrote A Modest Proposal in 1729, it was harsh satire. Now we find that, with Great Britain’s nationalized healthcare system, it has become reality. Quite horrifying.
The competition heats up: DARPA has chosen Boeing to build a test design of an air-launched satellite launcher.
This engineering research is in parallel with the airborne launcher research of Scaled Composites (on SpaceShipTwo) and Stratolauncher. When you add SpaceX’s effort to make its first stage reusable, you get a real sense where the future of rocket design is heading: rockets in which the first stage is entirely reusable, returning safely to Earth either by a horizontal or vertical landing.
Finding out what’s in it: Four reasons why the cost of heath insurance will go up again next year.
These rate increases in 2015 will be on top of the higher rates people have been forced to pay in 2014 because of the advent of Obamacare. They are also all because of the existence of Obamacare itself.
Aren’t you glad the Democrats and President Obama have been willing to do almost anything to prevent any legal changes to the law?
You know, people who would lobby for, comment on, advocate for, or vote on laws like ObamaCare without any understanding of its real-world impact. Such felonies are then carried out by low-information bureaucratic microbes with the power to destroy lives and businesses with impunity, and a political and talking-head class with the access and sway to codify these common malfeasances. Destruction of private property and liberty – and these two concepts are not divisible – takes place in government cubicles every minute of every day across the country. And why not?
We have a low-information president, who has appointed a low-information cabinet, including the low-information secretary of health and human services who is applying a low-information health care law (one of many such laws) behind the big power of a low-morality Internal Revenue Service. The result of all of this low information in power is a low-liberty nation.
Read it all. The events that instigated this article are profound because they illustrate just how bankrupt the intellectual community of our country presently is.
In related news, global warming advocates are increasingly refusing to debate with global warming skeptics. This article also outlines the increasing effort to blackball anyone who expresses skepticism of human-caused global warming.
Curiosity has reached another area of interesting terrain: rows of layered curvy rocks.
The science team has been hunting for tasty rock outcrops suitable for the first drilling campaign since she departed the dried out lakebed at Yellowknife Bay in July 2013 and began her epic trek across the floor of Gale Crater towards the base of Mount Sharp. With each passing Sol, or Martian day, Mount Sharp looms larger and larger and the historical layers with deposits of hydrated minerals potentially indicative of an alien habitable zone come ever clearer into focus.
The panoramas are quite spectacular as the rover continues its journey toward Mt Sharp.
The competition heats up: On Saturday Arianespace’s Ariane 5 rocket has successfully launched two commercial satellites, its 59th straight successful launch.
The uncertainty of science: New geological research suggests that the hydrogen levels that have been detected on the moon — which are used to predict the presence of water — might be a false positive and not exist at the levels predicted.
Instead, what scientists thought was hydrogen in water molecules might be calcium as part of a mineral called apatite. If so, this would mean that the Moon has a lot less water than hoped. This data might also explain the lack of water seen in the Apollo samples as compared to what is suggested should be there from more recent orbital data. This also might explain the conflicting results from instruments on Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.
The essentials: The APS has appointed three of the world’s most well known climate skeptics to its public affairs panel, almost guaranteeing that the organization will change its position from supporting the consensus to a more skeptical approach. Note also that this is the same organization that had one important scientist and a Nobel prize winner resign in disgust three years ago because of its insistence that the evidence of human-caused global warming was “incontrovertible.”
Partial victory: The Michigan union contract that required a school district to discriminiate against Christians and whites as now been amended so that it won’t discriminate against Christians.
I am not for favoring whites. I am against anything that considers ethnicity or religion as a factor for employment.
Failure to launch? A reporter takes a close look at Virgin Galactic and Spaceport America in New Mexico and comes away very skeptical.
Read it all. The view might be pessimistic, but it is important to keep an open mind. Richard Branson’s effort, as sincere as I think it is, might not succeed.
The contamination that has delayed SpaceX’s next Dragon cargo mission to ISS was caused by oil from a sewing machine.
The machine sewed the cloth blankets that protect payloads in Dragon’s unpressurized trunk section.
Using images from the Spitzer Space Telescope, astronomers have assembled a 360 degree zoomable portrait of the plane of the Milky Way galaxy.
The image is in infrared, which is why it can see parts of the galaxy obscured by dust in visible wavelengths, and you can explore it at your leisure, from home.
Fifty states of Obamacare victims.
The video, embedded below the fold, excerpts news stories from all fifty states about the failures of Obamacare. It is short, but worth watching, as it provides a good fast summary of the innumerable stories that have appeared since the law’s failed roll out in October, showing that the failure is not confined to specific areas but is widespread, covers the entire nation, and involves a wide range of issues.
From the link:
Harry Reid thinks that 50 states of Obamacare cancellations, raised premiums, cut workers’ hours, fines and computer headaches are all lies.
This is how the tea party ends.
The Tea Party’s success is not gauged by primaries alone. It’s gauged by how much the Tea Party’s priorities become the Republican Party’s priorities.
The Tea Party’s impact in primaries is largely about putting fear into establishment candidates, whether they knock them off or not. It took them two cycles, but the traditional Republican establishment took the right lessons from the Bennett and Lugar losses. Orrin Hatch spent 2011-12 voting lockstep with Mike Lee. Primary threats made Mike Enzi part of the organizing group for the defund push. Pat Roberts is doing his best to don the winger apparel. Lindsey Graham is trying like mad to re-establish his conservative credentials. Thad Cochran is the exception that proves the rule: it’s no accident that a traditional Washington appropriator who hasn’t modified his ways is the most vulnerable GOP Senator this cycle. So if establishment Republicans understand that they are vulnerable in primaries, and have to pretend to be Tea Partiers when they’re in cycle, is that a sign that the Tea Party is dead – or a sign that it’s had a significant political impact?
The tea party movement has won because it is now driving the political debate, in both parties. Republicans want to look like tea partiers, and even Democrats are shaping their election campaigns with tea party issues in mind.
China’s Yutu rover is still functioning but cannot move.
Last week Yutu and its companion spacecraft, the Chang’e 3 Moon lander, awoke from a period of dormancy after the frigid, two-week lunar night — the third awakening since landing on 14 December, Chinese scientists said this week at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in The Woodlands, Texas. The probes continue to gather data and send it back to Earth.
But Yutu may never move more than the 100–110 metres it has already travelled from its landing site — in the Mare Imbrium. Mission officials had hoped that Yutu would travel to the rim of a nearby crater and explore it, but a mechanical failure in Yutu’s drive system has stilled the rover since late January.
I wish they would get their story straight. This article suggests that the problem wasn’t in the circuit that controls the storage of equipment during the long lunar night, as reported previously, but in the system that actually moves the rover.
It also appears from the story above that scientists were disappointed by the amount of information released at the Texas conference.
Paleontologists have discovered a dinosaur dubbed “the chicken from hell.”
