Year: 2015

Senate RINOS whine about the House’s refusal to give Obama what he wants

9:08 am

Well ain’t that a shame: Republicans senators McCain, Graham, Flake, and Kirk are fuming over the House’s refusal to settle the Homeland Security budget issues and give Obama what he wants.

GOP senators say it’s time to move on to other issues, such as the budget, trade legislation, and regulatory and tax reform. They must defend 24 seats in the 2016 election and worry that voters could soon start to question their ability to govern unless they can move forward with a more substantive agenda. The fight over President Obama’s executive actions on immigration brought that agenda to a standstill in February, as the threat of a homeland security shutdown thwarted other priorities.

“I just think we ought to move on to other things. I’m not sure how it helps for the American people to have the perception that Republicans in the Senate and Republicans in the House are at odds with each other,” said Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.). “We have a lot of initiatives I think we could show the American people we can work together on,” he added.

This idiot thinks that achievement is passing a budget, no matter how stupid or illegal. McCain also thinks that the public wants Obama’s agenda fulfilled. Meanwhile, elections tell us a completely different story. I hope the conservatives in the House continue to make these guys squirm.

What infuriates me the most is that McCain and Flake are my senators. McCain I’ve known as a back-stabbing RINO for more than a decade, but Flake had been a decent congressman who had been instrumental in squelching a lot of pork from the budget. Once elected as a senator, however, I have discovered him to be as bad as McCain.

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Fly-by close-up of Comet 67P/C-G

8:56 am


close-up of Comet 67P/C-G

More cool images! Rosetta’s navigation camera has taken another very amazing close-up of Comet 67P/C-G, snapped during the February 14 fly-by.

The cropped section above focuses on the transition between two regions, the generally smooth area called Imhotep on the right and the more mountainous and rugged area called Khepry on the left. Go to the link for the full image, which also includes an interesting description of the engineering problems of doing these close fly-bys.

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Methane does exist in the Martian atmosphere

6:32 pm

The uncertainty of science: Curiosity has confirmed the presence, and fluctuation, of methane in the local Martian atmosphere.

SAM [Sample Analysis at Mars, one of Curiosity’s instruments] has been detecting basal levels of methane concentration of around 0,7 ppbv, and has confirmed an event of episodic increase of up to ten times this value during a period of sixty soles (Martian days), i.e., of about 7 ppvb. The new data are based on observations during almost one Martian year (almost two Earth years), included in the initial prediction for the duration of the mission (nominal mission), during which Curiosity has surveyed about 8 kms in the basin of the Gale crater.

Since methane has a short life expectancy, something must be doing something to generate it.

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The Honey Trees – Moon River

6:01 pm

An evening pause:

Moon river, wider than a mile
I’m crossing you in style some day
Oh, dream maker, you heart breaker
Wherever you’re going, I’m going your way

Two drifters, off to see the world
There’s such a lot of world to see
We’re after the same rainbow’s end, waiting, round the bend
My Huckleberry Friend, Moon River, and me

Hat tip Edward Thelen.

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Homeland funding bill fails

5:49 pm

Good! A large number of conservative Republicans combined with most House Democrats to defeat a cobbled-together three week funding bill for Homeland Security.

As of midnight tonight many Homeland employees will either be furloughed, or have to work without pay (if their job is deemed essential).

The Republican leadership continues to brainwash itself into thinking a government shutdown will hurt them at the ballot box, when all the evidence from recent elections says exactly the opposite. After the 2013 shutdown the press screamed “Republicans did it!” as if it was a bad thing but the voters rewarded the Republicans one of its biggest landslides in almost a century in 2014. If anything, shutting the government down appeared to help the Republicans win elections. The public wants the government brought under control. Moreover, every shutdown helps prove how useless and unneeded that government is, the exact position conservatives have been touting for decades.

Let Homeland Security shut down. We didn’t need it for more than 225 years, and we don’t need it now.

Update: Congress has hurriedly passed a seven-day funding bill for Homeland Security.

The AP story linked above does the usual media hatchet job of spinning the story to make it all sound like the Republicans caused all the problems. As far as I am concerned, the failure here is the fact that not enough Republicans stood firm. A majority did, but we are still stuck with that handful of fake Republicans, such as Hatch, McCain, Flake, and Graham, that screw conservatives every time.

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A cold Pacific causing the lack of warming?

9:08 am

The uncertainty of science: Global warming scientists have concocted another explanation among dozens for the refusal of the climate to warm since 1998: a cold Pacific!

Where’s the heat? Greenhouse gases, particularly carbon dioxide, continue to be pumped into the atmosphere, but sometime around 1998, the rise in Earth’s average temperatures slowed, deviating from the rates predicted by models. Scientists have proposed that what some call “the pause” could be the result of a number of factors, including heat storage in deep ocean waters to unexpectedly high amounts of aerosols in the stratosphere helping deflect solar rays back into space. Now, a new study suggests that natural cycles in the Pacific Ocean are the culprit.

Since the end of last El Niño warming event of 1997 to 1998, the tropical Pacific Ocean has been in a relatively cool phase—strong enough to offset the warming created by greenhouse gas emissions. But, this is just a temporary balm: When the switch flips and the waters turn warm again, the researchers say, Earth will likely continue warming.

“What this study addresses is what’s better described as a false pause, or slowdown,” rather than a hiatus in warming, says climate scientist Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University, University Park. Some climate change deniers have taken encouragement from the pause, saying they show warming predictions are flawed, but Mann, a co-author on the study, notes that “there have been various explanations for why [the slowdown is happening], none of which involve climate models being fundamentally wrong.” [emphasis mine]

Does no one at the journal Science notice the outright stupidity of the first two paragraphs above? In the first it is posited that all the climate heat we haven’t been seeing could be stored in the oceans. In the second it is posited that a cold Pacific Ocean has offset the warming, thus causing the lack of climate warming.

If the oceans are storing the extra heat, how is it possible for the Pacific to be unusually cold?

We should not be surprised by this stupidity, however. The third paragraph shows that Science is depending on Michael Mann for its climate expertise, a global warming activist who was exposed as a fake scientist, a fraud, and a dishonest corrupter of data in the climategate emails. That this journal still goes to him for his opinions tells us quite a lot about the lack of objectivity at Science. Their use of the word “denier” for scientists who raise questions about global warming also tells us that the journal hasn’t the faintest idea how science works. The very heart of the scientific method demands skepticism. To instead equate skeptics with those who deny the genocide committed by the Nazis suggests that much of the so-called science published by Science is not science but propaganda.

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Investigators say 32,000 Lerner IRS emails have been recovered

10:12 pm

Transparency! The Treasury investigators told a House committee on Thursday that they have been able to recover 32,000 emails by IRS official Lois Lerner that IRS officials had sworn were lost forever.

[Timothy Camus, a Treasury deputy inspector general for tax administration,] said it took investigators two weeks to locate the computer tapes that contained Lerner’s emails. He said it took technicians about four months to find Lerner’s emails on the tapes. Several Oversight Committee members questioned how hard the IRS tried to produce the emails, given how quickly independent investigators found them.

In other words, IRS officials lied to Congress when they said these emails were unrecoverable and couldn’t be found.

Unfortunately, the investigators have not yet gone through these emails in detail, and were not yet prepared to reveal what was in them. For that show we will have to wait a bit longer.

Update: During his testimony Camus also said that they are considering a criminal investigation into whether there was a real cover-up.

The IRS’s inspector general confirmed Thursday it is conducting a criminal investigation into how Lois G. Lerner’s emails disappeared, saying it took only two weeks for investigators to find hundreds of tapes the agency’s chief had told Congress were irretrievably destroyed. Investigators have already scoured 744 backup tapes and gleaned 32,774 unique emails, but just two weeks ago they found an additional 424 tapes that could contain even more Lerner emails, Deputy Inspector General Timothy P. Camus told the House Oversight Committee in a rare late-night hearing meant to look into the status of the investigation.

“There is potential criminal activity,” Mr. Camus said.

Camus also said that when his investigation went to the software people to try to get the tapes, they discovered that IRS officials had never talked to them, demonstrating clearly that IRS Commissioner John Koskinen was lying when he said the agency had searched high and low for the tapes and discovered them lost.

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Jet lag is worse on Mars

9:45 am

Research and actual experience has found that adjusting to the slightly longer Martian day is not as easy as you would think.

If you’re on Mars, or at least work by a Mars clock, you have to figure out how to put up with the exhausting challenge of those extra 40 minutes. To be exact, the Martian day is 24 hours, 39 minutes, and 35 seconds long, a length of day that doesn’t coincide with the human body’s natural rhythms. Scientists, Mars rover drivers, and everyone else in the space community call the Martian day a “sol” to differentiate it from an Earth day. While it doesn’t seem like a big difference, that extra time adds up pretty quickly. It’s like heading west by two time zones every three days. Call it “rocket lag.”

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