A South Dakota tea party conservative who ran and lost in the Republican primary for Senate is now threatened with 24 years in prison for mistakenly signing six petition sheets in error.
The details are worth reading. It looks to me that the only reason she has been indicted is because she is a threat to the powers-that-be, and they want her out of the way.
The religion of peace marches on! Thousands dead in another Boko Haram massacre in Nigeria.
District head Baba Abba Hassan said most victims are children, women and elderly people who could not run fast enough when insurgents drove into Baga, firing rocket-propelled grenades and assault rifles on town residents. “The human carnage perpetrated by Boko Haram terrorists in Baga was enormous,” Muhammad Abba Gava, a spokesman for poorly armed civilians in a defence group that fights Boko Haram, told the Associated Press. He said the civilian fighters gave up on trying to count all the bodies. “No one could attend to the corpses and even the seriously injured ones who may have died by now,” Gava said.
The key word above is “another”. Killings like this are not a bug in Islam, they are a feature.
Link here.
He says there were only “10% off”. I suspect that number is off the top of his head, but it does represent how close they came. They hit the barge, and the rocket was attempting to get into position for touchdown when fuel ran out. That is an amazing success for a first attempt of something that no one has ever tried before.
Link here, with photos and diagrams illustrating its gigantic size.
And it will only be the world’s biggest ship for another few weeks. A bigger ship is about to be launched.
Erick Erickson asks the good question: If the terrorists are not real Muslims, why is it that our intellectual elites object to burying their bodies with the pigs of carcasses?
To do this would be to exacerbate the situation and cause further strife and outrage among muslims. And we could not have that, could we? So either they are the muslims the media has claimed they were not or . . .
I ask: why should any Muslim object? If these murderers do not represent Islam or are not real Muslims, why would any real Muslim want to protect them in any way?
Unless the real Muslims sympathize with these murderers and what they stood for, deep down.
Link here.
Islamophobia is a code word for mainstream European elites’ fear of their own populations, of their native hordes, whom they imagine to be unenlightened, prejudiced, easily led by the tabloid media, and given to outbursts of spite and violence. The thing that keeps the Islamophobia panic alive is not actual violence against Muslims but the right-on politicos’ ill-founded yet deeply held view of ordinary Europeans, especially those of a working-class variety, as racist and stupid. This is the terrible irony of the Islamophobia panic: The fearers of anti-Muslim violence claim to be challenging prejudice but actually they reveal their own prejudices, their distrust of and disdain for those who come from the other side of the tracks, read different newspapers, hold different beliefs, live different lives. They accuse stupid white communities of viewing Muslims as an indistinguishable mob who threaten the fabric of European society, which is exactly what they think of stupid white communities.
I would only suggest that this elite bigotry is not limited to European elites, but applies as well to the leftwing elites throughout the entire first world, including the Unites States. They hate conservatives and the general population that is not part of their upper class intellectual community, and express it repeatedly by their expectation of Islamic bigotry that never happens.
Meanwhile, a landmark synagogue in Paris was forced closed on the Sabbath this weekend, for the first time since World War II, because of Islamic antisemitism.
The Mars rover Opportunity has climbed to its highest Martian altitude yet, a point on the rim of Endeavour Crater 440 feet above the crater floor below.
This despite the rover’s continuing memory problems.
Another successful Falcon 9 launch for SpaceX this morning, placing a Dragon capsule in the correct orbit for rendezvous and berthing with ISS.
We still await word on the attempt to land the first stage of the rocket on a barge in the Atlantic. From the link above: “SpaceX founder Elon Musk has tweeted an update: ‘Rocket made it to drone spaceport ship, but landed hard. Close, but no cigar this time. Bodes well for the future tho.'” More details here.
Based on what they have released, SpaceX has achieved something pretty incredible for its first attempt, actually hitting the floating ship at landing. That the landing itself was not soft or gently is literally only a detail. They will have the opportunity on future launches to get it right.
An evening pause: He doesn’t draw art in caves, he carves the cave itself.
Hat tip Tom Biggar.
Lying slime: A number of Senate Republicans have joined with Democrats to call for an increase in the gas tax.
Though the last time the gas tax was increased was during Bill Clinton’s presidency, the only reason the highway fund is short of money is that they don’t spend it wisely, wasting a lot on stupid projects. (Sounds a lot like almost everything the federal government does, doesn’t it?) Rather than increase the tax, Congress should take a close look at how the money is being spent, and clamp down.
I should note that House Republicans have already said that they will oppose this increase. Whether they stay that course however remains to be seen.
Link here.
Take a stab at guessing who is lying, and about what.
Fascists: A California newspaper has been vandalized because of its insistence on describing illegal immigrants as “illegal immigrants”.
The Santa Barbara News-Press’s front entrance was sprayed with the message “The border is illegal, not the people who cross it” in red paint, sometime either Wednesday night or early Thursday, according to the newspaper’s director of operations, Donald Katich. The attack came amid wider objections to a News-Press headline that used the word “illegals” alongside a story on California granting driver’s licenses to people in the country illegally.
So will someone explain to me how these pro-immigration vandals are any different from the Islamic terrorists who murdered the cartoonists at the French magazine Charlie Hebdo?
In truth, they are only different in their scale of violence. The pro-immigration vandals have not yet risen to the level of the Islamic terrorists, but give them time, give them time. Anyone who thinks violence and destruction is acceptable to prove their point will eventually decide that murder is acceptable as well.
The heat of competition: The European joint-venture between Airbus and Safran is now demanding that be given total control of Arianespace and the development of the new Ariane 6 rocket.
From Airbus’ perspective, the production of rockets in Europe should be done the same way commercial Airbus aircraft are built. “The launcher business in Europe in the beginning of 2014 was one in which the vehicles were designed by government agencies, commercialized by a company called Arianespace, produced by an ensemble of companies, and then launched by Arianespace. This is not an optimal situation,” [Airbus strategy director Marwan] Lahoud said.
“The optimal solution is to industrialize the process, with one prime contractor that designs, builds, sells and operates the launchers, with a supply chain — much as we do with Airbus today.”
Essentially, this would be a shift in ownership of the rocket, moving from the government to the private company. We have seen the same process in the U.S., with the new commercial space products no longer controlled or designed by NASA. The result has been lower cost, faster development, and greater profits.
NASA has produced retro-style travel posters for three alien exoplanets which you can download and print.
The posters are quite cool, which is not surprising, considering that, in the past four decades, the best interplanetary travel that NASA has been able to achieve has been its graphic power-point and pr images. Unfortunately, for NASA actually going there has not been so easy.
Heh: It is currently warmer in Gale Crater on Mars than in many parts of the United States.
Obviously those SUVs on Mars are causing the warming there. Obviously.
Note that the Times has had no reluctance to show images that are as equally offensive to its Christian and Jewish readers. I wonder why the Muslims get this special treatment?
Meanwhile, representatives of the religion of peace have now taken hostages, both in a factory near Charles De Gaulle Airport as well as in a kosher grocery store in Paris.
Update: It appears both hostage situations have ended.
The Centers for Disease Control today released graphs detailing the on-going ebola epidemic in West Africa.
What is significant about all the graphs at the link is that there is no sign of a let up or an easing of the epidemic. The numbers are still rising, even if the increase has slowed somewhat.
The religion of peace: A new assessment of Christian persecution worldwide has found that of the top ten most religiously oppressive nations nine are Islamic.
North Korea tops the list, but the rest are all countries where the majority of the population is Muslim. The report also found that “Islamic extremism is the main source of persecution in 40 of the 50 countries on the 2015 World Watch List.”
I wonder what these facts tell us? Anyone care to venture a guess? Maybe we should condemn Israel for this oppression? Yeah, that makes sense!
An evening pause: Hat tip Danae.
A close look at features on the Martian surface seen by Curiosity suggests to one scientist the presence of ancient fossils of carpet-like microbiology.
On Earth, carpet-like colonies of microbes trap and rearrange sediments in shallow bodies of water such as lakes and costal areas, forming distinctive features that fossilize over time. These structures, known as microbially-induced sedimentary structures (or MISS), are found in shallow water settings all over the world and in ancient rocks spanning Earth’s history.
Nora Noffke, a geobiologist at Old Dominion University in Virginia, has spent the past 20 years studying these microbial structures. Last year, she reported the discovery of MISS that are 3.48 billion years old in the Western Australia’s Dresser Formation, making them potentially the oldest signs of life on Earth.
In a paper published online last month in the journal Astrobiology (the print version comes out this week), Noffke details the striking morphological similarities between Martian sedimentary structures in the Gillespie Lake outcrop (which is at most 3.7 billion years old) and microbial structures on Earth.
Noffke is very careful in her analysis. She doesn’t claim any proofs, only that her expert eye sees the same things on both planets. Most intriguing.
