The single black mom who faced prison because she had a Pennsylvania concealed carry license and happened to drive into New Jersey and innocently told this fact to a cop has now been pardoned of all criminal charges by Governor Chris Christie.
As I wrote earlier, everyone should simply avoid any contact with fascist states like New Jersey, at least until they change their laws about guns.
What does this teach us? A Jewish kindergarten in Brussels was denied insurance this week because the insurance company thought the risk of a terrorist attack — in a city whose population is now 25% Muslim — was too great.
Those evil 4 year olds! Threatening the religion of peace by simply existing! How dare they!
Government marches on! A new GAO report has found that NASA’s effort to upgrade the ground-based portion of its satellite communications system, used by both military satellites and manned spacecraft, is more than 30 percent over budget, with its completion now delayed two years to 2019.
Worse, the GAO found that this problem program was actually one of three that have had budget problems. And that doesn’t include the disastrously overbudget James Webb Space Telescope.
In its latest assessment of NASA’s biggest programs, the U.S. Government Accountability Office identified the Space Network Ground Segment Sustainment (SGSS) as one of three — not counting the notoriously overbudget James Webb Space Telescope — that account for most of the projected cumulative cost growth this year. The others are the Magnetospheric Multiscale Mission, which launched March 12, and the Ice, Cloud, and Land Elevation Satellite-2, or ICESat-2, mission, the congressional watchdog agency said.
The last two projects are part of the climate focus that Obama imposed on NASA.
An evening pause: On this date why not some silliness?
Hat tip Diane Zimmerman
Link here.
Today, we’re all hating on Indiana. Who will be the left’s Emmanuel Goldstein next week?
Evidently, the sole function of the media these days is to subject the public to a steady stream of manufactured events: “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot”; nuclear power kills; Lena Dunham’s rape by a college conservative at Oberlin; the “mattress girl” raped at Columbia University; Jon Stewart is funny; a fraternity gang-rape at the University of Virginia; and a law protecting religious freedom will lead to separate water fountains for gays in Indiana.
The whole country has to keep being dragged through these liberal hate campaigns, but as soon as the precipitating event turns out to be a gigantic hoax, the truth is revealed like a bedtime story being read to a child: The ending is whispered and the narrator tiptoes out of the room.
Read it all. It will help you distinguish between real news and modern leftwing propaganda, based on lies, being promoted by our modern mainstream press.
Meanwhile, that pizzeria whose owner said they wouldn’t cater a same-sex wedding, though they’d be glad to sell pizzas to homosexuals, has been forced to close because of death threats, including one threat on twitter from a high school coach who thought it a good idea to get together and burn the place down. She has since been suspended from her job.
Link here. Chief engineer Marc Rayman loves to write about Dawn, and his posts on the Dawn blog are probably the most information-packed of any spacecraft blog I have ever read. Key quote this time:
Dawn’s extensive photographic coverage of the sunlit terrain in early May will include these bright spots. They will not be in view, however, when Dawn spies the thin crescent of Ceres in its next optical navigation session, scheduled for April 10.
The orientation of the spacecraft and asteroid now are such that there is no point taking pictures, as most of the asteroid is in darkness.
Read it all, however. He gives a masterful overview of what is going to happen in the coming months.
During its most recent close fly-by of Comet 67P/C-G Rosetta had a number of issues that caused the spacecraft to go into safe mode.
During the most recent flyby, a number of issues were reported, starting with the primary star tracker encountering difficulties in locking on to stars on the way in towards closest approach. Attempts were made to regain tracking capabilities, but there was too much background noise due to activity close to the comet nucleus: hundreds of ‘false stars’ [from comet debris] were registered and it took almost 24 hours before tracking was properly re-established.
In the meantime, a spacecraft attitude error had built up, resulting in the high gain antenna off-pointing from the Earth. Indeed, a significant drop in the radio signal received by ground stations on Earth was registered. Following recovery of the star tracker system, the off-pointing was immediately automatically corrected and the operations team subsequently saw a return to a full strength signal from the spacecraft.
However, issues with false stars were still occurring. Cross comparisons with other navigation mechanisms showed inconsistencies with the star trackers and some on board reconfigurations occurred. While attempting to reconfigure those, the same error occurred again leading this time to an automatic safe mode on Sunday afternoon. Safe modes occur when certain spacecraft parameters fall out of their normal operating ranges and the spacecraft automatically takes measures to preserve its safety. This also includes switching off the science instruments to protect them.
Rosetta is operating nominally now, but these issues are going to get more serious in the coming months, as the comet gets more active. Rosetta’s engineering team is going to have to come up with a method for the spacecraft’s star trackers to distinguish between stars and the debris in the comet’s coma. If they don’t it is likely that they will have to reduce the close fly-bys significantly.
The Russian government has once again increased its supervision of the construction of the Vostochny spaceport, now 120 days behind schedule.
They want to launch the first rocket from the spaceport by December of this year. The story also describes how contractors have been ordered, by Russia’s deputy prime minister himself, to stop leaving delicate new equipment in unprotected environments, as the equipment has been delivered before the buildings they are supposed be stored in have been finished.
Where the equipment will be put is not said. The boss has ordered it, however, so it better happen!
The competition heats up: After delaying the launch to inspect its rockets for a suspected helium leak, SpaceX has now scheduled the next Dragon cargo mission to ISS for no earlier than April 13.
They will once again try to land their first stage during that launch. Also, the SpaceX schedule also lists a commercial launch later in April and the first launch abort test of Dragon in May.
An evening pause: Performed live by Les Paul & the Les Paul Trio at the Iridium Jazz Club in New York City on Paul’s 90th birthday, June 9, 2005.
Hat tip Tom Biggar.
Link here. First Shapiro outlines how these gay advocates have been lying to us repeatedly over the decades:
Gay activists and their leftist allies told us decades ago that same-sex marriage wasn’t on the agenda. All homosexuals wanted was the benefits of marriage, but not the title. That, of course, was a lie.
Next, gay activists and their leftist allies told us that same-sex marriage would not threaten anyone; it was simply a matter of equal rights. “How will it affect anyone else if two men choose to get married?” they said. That, of course, was a lie. The same-sex marriage agenda includes with it the desire to force individual religious Americans to accept same-sex marriage. Hence the current attempt to leverage same-sex marriage into legislation forcing religious business owners to participate in activities, like same-sex weddings, that they consider sinful.
So, what’s next on the agenda?
He then outlines their next three targets: the churches, private religious universities, and private religious schools. Read it all. Based on history it is logical that these are the next targets. This quote from the article however especially stood out to me, based on the recent legal effort to punish Christian businesses who refuse to endorse and participate in gay marriages:
Once non-profit status is revoked for churches on the basis of supposed discrimination against homosexuals, those churches become private institutions engaged in commerce. Which means that they are regulated as common businesses under anti-discrimination law. Which means they can be shut down or fined for failure to perform same-sex weddings. The left says this will never happen. Which means we are a few years away from it happening. [emphasis mine]
Anyone who thinks this fascist oppression — to force Christian and Jewish religious institutions to perform same-sex marriages — is not on the agenda is living in a dream world. This movement has already succeeded in redefining discrimination and bigotry as anyone who even hints that they consider gay behavior wrong. They have moved to McCarthyite tactics to destroy such people. Next comes the institutions that disagree with them.
Once again, my disagreement here is not with the gay lifestyle. It isn’t for me, but I have no problem if someone else wishes to live that way. Just don’t force me or anyone else to endorse your choices. Just as you deserve the right to liberty of conscience, so does everyone else.
For the John Batchelor Show tonight John and I taped this afternoon a two-segment interview with geologist Bill Farrand, who is part of the science team for Opportunity. The image above shows Opportunity’s recent travels as well as its next target. (Click on the image for the full resolution image.) Assuming the rover’s memory problems don’t get worse and Congress decides to reverse the decision of the Obama administration to end all funding for Opportunity, the scientists hope to take the rover east into Marathon Valley, a very distinct break in the rim of Endeavour Crater.
Whether they will continue east into the crater itself Bill could not say. Some scientists have been pushing for that eventual goal, while others would prefer to do more research along the rim.
What is interesting about Marathon Valley is that it takes the rover deep into the crater’s rim. Previously Opportunity has been limited to exploring the rim’s outer edges, since the rim itself is generally too rugged for the rover to traverse.
