Year: 2016

Hawaii turns down requests to remove TMT hearings officer

9:10 am

The state of Hawaii has decided to not replace the hearings officer in charge of the new permitting process for the Thirty Meter Telescope, despite a request by TMT to remove her.

There are different reasons for wanting to replace her. Telescope opponents raise conflict-of-interest concerns over her paid family membership to the Imiloa Astronomy Center. The university takes issue with her mediating another matter involving the Manoa campus. The nonprofit telescope company says replacing her with an alternate would avoid further delay.

“With due respect and consideration to the parties’ various interests and reasons for asking the board to replace Judge Amano, the board cannot and will not sidestep its own administrative responsibility to exercise judgment and common sense regarding whether the selection process up until now has objectively appeared to be fair,” the order said. “Common sense must prevail.”

The situation is a strange one. Despite the fact that the judge would likely rule fairly, TMT wanted her removed because they expect their opponents to eventually dispute any favorable decision she makes because of her link to the astronomy center. By refusing to remove her, the state is actually taking the side of the telescope’s opponents, since their main tactic is delay.

I hope TMT’s builders are making serious plans for finding an alternative site. I do not expect them to ever get permission to build in Hawaii.

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Astronauts enter privately built BEAM module

8:59 am

Led by American Jeff Williams, two astronauts opened the hatch and entered Bigelow’s BEAM inflatable module on ISS today.

Williams officially opened the hatch at 08:47 UTC. Along with Russian cosmonaut Oleg Skripochka, Williams entered BEAM for the first time to collect an air sample and begin downloading data from sensors on the dynamics of BEAM’s expansion. The astronaut reported that the interior of BEAM looks “pristine”. However, he added the temperature was on the cool side – with Houston adding they recorded 44F as the temperature at bulkhead – but no condensation was visible. He then took air samples, as is the procedure for entering a new module.

They will install interior sensors over the next two days, and then shut the hatch. The module will then remain closed for most of its planned two year stay on ISS to test its operation in space.

The article also includes some nice details about the possible uses of Bigelow’s much larger B330 modules, two of which are under construction right now.

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Trump the liberal revealed again

9:23 am

Donald Trump has made his first political endorsement, and in doing so decided to throw his support to the moderate Republican in a tight North Carolina Republican primary race.

Donald Trump has inserted himself into one of the most contentious House primaries in the country this weekend, endorsing GOP Rep. Renee Ellmers in her member-versus-member race in North Carolina. Trump makes a personal appeal to voters to back Ellmers in a robocall released Saturday. She was “the first congresswoman to endorse me and she really was terrific and boy, is she a fighter,” Trump says in the call. It is the first time this election that Trump has picked sides in a congressional race. ….

Ellmers faces fellow GOP Rep. George Holding and two-time Senate candidate Greg Brannon in a June 7 Republican primary for a new district. Court-ordered redistricting drew Ellmers and Holding into the same territory outside Raleigh earlier this year, guaranteeing that at least one incumbent will lose in Tuesday’s primary.

Powerful conservative groups like Americans for Prosperity and the Club for Growth have been working against Ellmers for weeks, running critical television and digital ads and sending canvassers door-to-door. Ellmers has also lost favor with anti-abortions groups that once backed her.

Ellmers first won her seat running as a tea party conservative. When she got in office however she became very much a moderate RINO, working with Democrats and the moderate Republican leadership to stymie conservative budget efforts. That Trump supports her once again illustrates his political position, and is a reason not to back her. To protect us from Trump’s liberal Democratic leanings we need as many conservatives in Congress as possible.

Let me add that Trump’s support here of a moderate Republican is actually provides a reason to support him in the presidential election. Though he is a liberal Democrat at heart, he is an old-fashioned liberal Democrat, not a modern leftwing ideological radical communist/socialist we now find dominating the Democratic Party. His endorsement of Ellmers here illustrates this.

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Why I won’t use Windows

9:05 am

A remote wildlife project in central Africa has been significantly hampered by the unwanted Windows 10 forced upgrades.

The Chinko Project manages roughly 17,600 square kilometres (6,795 square miles) of rainforest and savannah in the east of the CAR, near the border with South Sudan. Money is tight, and so is internet bandwidth. So the staff was more than a little displeased when one of the donated laptops the team uses began upgrading to Windows 10 automatically, pulling in gigabytes of data over a radio link.

And it’s not just bandwidth bills they have to worry about. “If a forced upgrade happened and crashed our PCs while in the middle of coordinating rangers under fire from armed militarized poachers, blood could literally be on Microsoft’s hands,” said one member of the team. “I just came here recently to act as their pilot but have IT skills as well. The guy who set these PCs up didn’t know how to prevent it, or set a metered connection. I am completely livid.”

As I’ve noted before, I have been using Linux for ten years. Though there have been some areas of annoyance (no software is perfect), I have not found myself limited in what I need to do, in any important matter. If you’ve got a spare older computer that you’re not using right now, install Linux on it and play with it. You will soon find that it does everything a Windows machine does, without the crap.

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Luxembourg to invest $200 million in space mining

6:46 am

The competition heats up: The government of Luxembourg has budgeted $200 million to invest in private proposals to mine asteroids for profit.

This government commitment is different than other government space projects in that they are not creating a “space program”, they are literally acting as a venture capitalist, putting their money into private efforts in exchange for profit.

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No sunspots for the first time in two years

10:13 pm

For the first time since July 17, 2014, and only the second time since 2011 at the beginning of the solar maximum, the Sun was blank today, with no sunspots visible on its surface.

I expect the next monthly update of the solar cycle will arrive early next week, and though I expect it will show a slight increase during the past month, it will also show that the ramp down to solar minimum is continuing unabated.

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Another Obamacare co-op fails

10:34 am

Finding out what’s in it: Ohio’s Obamacare co-op announced this week that it is shutting down, making it the 13 of 23 co-ops to fail.

The company recorded an underwriting loss of $80 million in 2015 despite the $129 million in taxpayer-backed loans granted to the co-op by the federal government. InHealth Mutual was also placed under “enhanced oversight,” one of three tools the Department of Health and Human Services has to monitor co-ops in financial distress. When a co-op is placed under enhanced oversight, it means the company is consistently underperforming and allows the department to give detailed and more frequent reviews of the loan recipient’s operations and financial status. According to Columbus Business First, medical claims were coming in at a rate of $3 million per week and the company would have had to raise premiums by 60 percent in 2017 to keep up. If InHealth Mutual were to stay in business through the end of 2016, projections show that the company would have posted losses of $20 million.

Ohio’s failed co-op is added to the list of 12 co-ops that have already failed in Arizona, Michigan, Utah, Kentucky, New York, Nevada, Louisiana, Oregon, Colorado, Tennessee, South Carolina, and a co-op that served both Iowa and Nebraska. [emphasis mine]

Gee, it sure would have been helpful if, before Obamacare was shoved down our throats by Obama and the Democratic Party, there had been someone to point out that this Obamacare co-op model could not work financially and was bound to fail. Oh wait! Wasn’t that exactly what every conservative pundit and politician was saying back in 2010?

Obviously, this all means we must vote Democratic again, as they are the only ones who really know what must be done!

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Liberal editor calls for riots against Trump

10:12 am

Fascist: An editor at the liberal news website Vox is calling for more riots and violence against Donald Trump and his supporters.

Vox’s “deputy first person editor” Emmet Rensin took to Twitter last night to declare that, since Trump is a racist and a fascist (in Rensin’s opinion, at least), then all forms of violence short of murder have become completely legitimate.

I hope the trend is becoming obvious to everyone: Despite their claims, it is the left and the Democratic Party who support more violence against people who are merely exercising their first amendment rights to free speech.

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FEC Democrats vote to punish Republican for a political joke

10:02 am

Fascists: Two Democrats on the Federal Election Commission have voted to punish a Republican presidential candidate for cracking a joke.

Over mocking objections from their own staff, two top Democrats on the politically divided Federal Election Commission voted to investigate one-time Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee for joking that he hoped supporters would shower him with million dollar contributions.

In the latest display of FEC Democratic efforts to regulate speech and target Republicans, Commissioners Ann Ravel and Ellen Weintraub backed a complaint against Huckabee, who made the joke during his May 2015 presidential candidacy announcement.

The vote failed, because all three Republicans and one Democrat on the commission voted to dismiss the complaint. However, the vote does tell us that two-thirds of the Democrats on this government panel — designed to regulate federal elections — believe it is proper to regulate the actual words of candidates.

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