37 amazing places you must visit before you die.
Great pictures. I am happy to say that I’ve seen most of the places listed that are in the U.S. And I’ve also seen other places in the U.S. quite comparable to international locations shown here.
We’re here to help you! The Veterans administration keeps a database administrated by secret committees that lists vets as “disruptive” and “disgruntled,” which it then uses to restrict their treatment.
Among examples of patients’ behavior referred to the VA’s “Disruptive Behavior Committees” (yes, that’s what they’re called): venting “frustration about VA services and/or wait times, threatening lawsuits or to have people fired, and frequent unwarranted visits to the emergency department or telephone calls to facility staff.”
As Krause explains, the Disruptive Behavior Committees are secret panels “that decide whether or not to flag veterans without providing due process first. The veteran then has his or her right of access to care restricted without prior notice.”
Obviously, the VA demonstrates once again why we must put the entire healthcare industry under government control. If they can do it to vets, why shouldn’t the rest of the government not have the power to do it to us all!
The uncertainty of science: Despite predicting ten years ago that the global temperature would rise significantly, actual temperatures have dropped in the ensuing decade.
But don’t worry, these climate scientists really do know what’s going to happen. Just give them lots of money, silence their critics, and they guarantee they will fake the data to make sure their predictions are right!
Hillary Clinton reveals what it’s like to be poor in America.
Read it. This piece is not only hilarious, it encapsulates the absurdity and childishness of American politics today.
In another victory against government overreach, the Supreme Court today ruled that a buffer zone protecting abortion clincs from protests violates the first amendment.
While the court was unanimous in the outcome, Roberts joined with the four liberal justices to strike down the buffer zone on narrow grounds. In a separate opinion, Justice Antonin Scalia criticized Roberts’ opinion for carrying forward “this court’s practice of giving abortion-rights advocates a pass when it comes to suppressing the free-speech rights of their opponents.”
I am once again gratified that the entire court recognized the unconstitutionality of this buffer zone. However, Scalia is right. That a majority of the court rejected the buffer on narrow grounds is unfortunate.
The law is such an inconvenient thing: In a 9-0 ruling, the Supreme Court has decided that Barack Obama’s fake recess appointments were unconstitutional.
Two and one-half years ago in 2012, Obama tried to slip-in appointments to the National Labor Relations Board without the constitutionally required Senate approval, claiming he had the right to do so because the Senate was in recess. There’s only one problem. The Senate was not in formal recess when Obama made the dictatorial appointments.
Now the Supreme Court of the United States has ruled in a unanimous 9-0 decision that Obama doesn’t get to define when the U.S. Senate is in recess, the Senate does.
I am gratified that all the Democratic appointees to the court ruled against Obama, refusing to allow their partisan tendencies to overrule the plain language of the Constitution. More information about the ruling and its history here.
Engineers have discovered they can replace a toxic material used to manufacture one type of solar cell with simple bath salts.
The chemical used is also used to make tofu. It costs far less to buy, and its benign nature means it also costs far less to use as well. This could significantly lower the cost for making these solar cells, though two companies quoted in the article seemed skeptical.
Astronomers have discovered a trinary of supermassive black holes at the center of a distant collision of multiple galaxies.
Astronomer Roger Deane of the University of Cape Town in South Africa and his colleagues have been watching a particular quasar, known as SDSS J1502+1115, in the constellation Boötes. Other astronomers had found that the object, located 4.3 billion light-years from Earth, possessed two supermassive black holes, each the center of a large galaxy smashing into another. The black holes are at least 24,000 light-years apart.
Deane wanted to confirm their existence, so he used an intercontinental array of radio dishes that yields even sharper views than the Hubble Space Telescope. Lo and behold, one of the black holes turned out to be two. “We were incredibly surprised,” says Deane, whose team reports its findings online today in Nature.
While the discovery of this system is incredibly cool, this article in the journal Science is surprisingly incorrect on some points, while also missing the main story.
» Read more
The competition heats up: Yahoo today published a 5 point comparison between a ride on Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo and Worldview’s Voyager balloon.
The winner, Virgin Galactic, but by a nose. As the story notes, Worldview is the better buy. “You can use the money you save for a nice vacation on Earth — where you can make new friends by telling stores about that time you went to space.”
In preparation for the first test flight of Orion later this year NASA successfully completed a full scale flight test of the capsule’s parachute landing system.
They even included some planned failures into the test to see if the system could recover and compensate, which it did.
The competition heats up: In several different news stories today China touted its future plans in space.
The landing test described in the first story above will also be the first test flight of China’s new heavy lift rocket, Long March 5.
That China is both politically and culturally serious about this effort can be seen by the nationalistic enthusiasm for this space effort that permeates these stories. They also can’t help comparing their plans to U.S. efforts.
» Read more
For those who wish to listen to the podcast of my two hour appearance on the Space Show yesterday, you can get the podcast here. You can also comment on my discussion with David Livingston and his callers at the Space Show blog, or here.
The two major topics we discussed were first, Russia’s future in space in the context of that government’s effort to retake control of its entire aerospace industry, and second, the evidence that there is fraud and data manipulation going on in the climate research units of both NOAA and NASA. I also discussed some recent space science stories, such as Yutu on the Moon, Curiosity on Mars, and Cassini’s recent imagery of the lakes of Titan.
