A look at some Israeli West Bank settlements

As my regular readers know, I periodically take trips to Israel to visit family. When I return, I then post my impressions and what I have learned, thereby providing an eye-witness perspective to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Previous essays from earlier visits are as follows, with the first five from my 2013 visit and the last from my visit in 2014:

Map of the West Bank settlements that I have visited

Having just returned from another visit, I have some new impressions. Above all, I think it worthwhile to note that in all these visits, I have routinely stayed with relatives who live in West Bank settlements. In fact, I have now visited or stayed in five different settlements. The map on the right shows the locations of these settlements, marked with an X. If you click on the image you can see a higher resolution version.

Unfortunately, I do not remember the name of the settlement from my 2003 visit, though I know it was west of Hebron. It might have been Carmel, but I am not sure. I do know I have indicated its location with reasonable accuracy.

Regardless, there are a number of things we can learn from my visits. The largest settlements, Alon Shvut, Kiryat Sefer, and Beitar, are all close to the 1949 Armistice border. They are also all relatively close to Jerusalem and thus act for many as suburbs of that larger city. As I wrote in 2013,
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Clemson administrator proposes that candidates be prescreened for ideology

Fascist: An administrator at Clemson University has proposed the student government consider prescreening candidates for the proper multicultural ideology prior to elections to prevent the wrong candidates from reaching office.

“So when it comes to this whole idea of intercultural competence, what would it look like to have a standard for if you’re going to be elected as an officer, or hold a seat within CUSG [Clemson University Student Government], that you have to demonstrate that you have a certain level of intercultural competence, before you’re allowed to take that office, or that seat,” Richardson stated, according to CUSG Senate’s public livestream.

The administrator, Altheia Richardson, Director of Clemson’s Gantt Multicultural Center, suggested that the student government could either prescreen the candidates, or demand that they be properly educated after winning, though she added that “I will say, once you’re in, it’s harder to hold people accountable for those things if it hasn’t been set as a standard before.”

In other words, this fascist doesn’t like the opinions of some people who have been freely and fairly elected to student government office, and wants to establish a system whereby she can prevent such people from ever obtaining office. How nice.

Cassini makes last fly-by of Titan

Cassini on April 21 made its last fly-by of Titan as the spacecraft is prepared for its final 22 orbits of Saturn.

The flyby also put Cassini on course for its dramatic last act, known as the Grand Finale. As the spacecraft passed over Titan, the moon’s gravity bent its path, reshaping the robotic probe’s orbit slightly so that instead of passing just outside Saturn’s main rings, Cassini will begin a series of 22 dives between the rings and the planet on April 26. The mission will conclude with a science-rich plunge into Saturn’s atmosphere on Sept. 15. “With this flyby we’re committed to the Grand Finale,” said Earl Maize, Cassini project manager at JPL. “The spacecraft is now on a ballistic path, so that even if we were to forgo future small course adjustments using thrusters, we would still enter Saturn’s atmosphere on Sept. 15 no matter what.”

The flyby zipped past Titan only a little more than 600 miles above its surface.

Former Obama official confirms climate data manipulation by bureaucrats

A former Obama official has confirmed that during the Obama administrations bureaucrats in the federal government routinely misused or tampered with climate data in order to promote the theory that humans are causing global warming.

Former Energy Department Undersecretary Steven Koonin told The Wall Street Journal Monday that bureaucrats within former President Barack Obama’s administration spun scientific data to manipulate public opinion. “What you saw coming out of the press releases about climate data, climate analysis, was, I’d say, misleading, sometimes just wrong,” Koonin said, referring to elements within the Obama administration he said were responsible for manipulating climate data.

He pointed to a National Climate Assessment in 2014 showing hurricane activity has increased from 1980 as an illustration of how federal agencies fudged climate data. Koonin said the NCA’s assessment was technically incorrect. “What they forgot to tell you, and you don’t know until you read all the way into the fine print is that it actually decreased in the decades before that,” he said. The U.N. published reports in 2014 essentially mirroring Koonin’s argument.

This story does not prove that human-caused global warming is not happening. What it does tell us, as have many other stories previously, is that we can no longer trust the data issued by federal government sources, and that a major housecleaning is necessary in order to make that trust possible again.

Whether Donald Trump is the president capable of doing that housecleaning remains an open question. Some of his actions suggest he is. Some suggest he is not. Overall, he appears a transitional figure who will begin that housecleaning in a relatively superficial way, but lay the groundwork for someone in the future who will push it through with much more success.

Refueling tests begin on Chinese test space station

China has begun the refueling tests between its first unmanned freighter, Tianzhou-1, docked to its test space station, Tiangong-2.

Refuelling tests began at 07:26 Beijing time on Sunday (23:26 UTC Saturday), monitored from the Beijing Aerospace Control Centre (BACC). The refuelling process involves 29 steps and will take five days to complete.

To allow refuelling to take place, the propellant tube and coupling components needed to be perfectly matched after docking, with a margin error of less than 1 millimetre, according to Tianzhou-1 deputy chief designer Chen Qizhong.

The mission involving the Tianzhou and Tiangong spacecraft was designed to prove on-orbit resupply and refuelling technologies and techniques necessary for safe, long-term operation of the Chinese Space Station, which will be permanently crewed by at least three astronauts.

“After refuelling is completed, the residual propellant needs to be drained off. In order to identify security issues during the draining process, it needs to go through a number of tests and verification,” Bai Mingsheng, chief designer of Tianzhou-1, told CCTV+

The article also provides a great deal of information on the station and the freighter.

19 federal agencies eliminated in proposed Trump budget

This article provides a clear and detailed list of the nineteen federal agencies that the Trump administration proposes to eliminate in the budget blueprint it issued last month.

The total budget for all these agencies is only $3 billion, so the cuts are only a mere drop in the bucket in the federal deficit. Still, it is a start, though I have doubts the Republicans in Congress will have the spine to follow through on these cuts, especially with the elimination of National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. All three have essentially become propaganda operatives for the left and the Democratic Party, so there is good reason for Republicans to cut their funding. The problem is that the left will squeal like pigs if these cuts go through, and the ability of the Republican leadership to withstand that squealing has generally been nil.

Nonetheless, it is definitely worthwhile to read this list of agencies that are on the chopping block. Almost all of them have accomplished little with their funds, other than pay the salaries of the bureaucrats who run them. In the private sector they would be gone in a nanosecond.

Vector suborbital rocket test scrubbed

A suborbital test flight of Vector’s orbital rocket was scrubbed on April 6 when a sensor aborted the launch.

The next test flight is scheduled for May 3, after a test April 6 at the company’s test site near the Mohave Desert was scrubbed when a sensor caused an automatic abort, Cantrell said.

Engineers quickly determined the rocket was functional but the company decided not to launch after high winds kicked up. But the rocket is fine, he said, adding that failures are part of the testing process. “We blew a lot of stuff up, trust me,” he said.

The article is more focused on describing in detail the company’s overall status, its fund-raising effort, its future plans, its present operation. This tidbit about the test launch was buried in it. That the flight didn’t fly is not a bad mark on the company, at this point. However, they are under pressure to fly as soon as possible in order to demonstrate success, and delays work against them.

Donors and students fleeing Drexel University, home of genocidal professor

Drexel University, faced now with loss of donations and students because the university took no action against a professor that called for the white genocide, the murder of police officers, and the squelching of the free speech rights of a conservative speaker, has finally opened “a special committee of inquiry” into the professor’s conduct.

It seems the public has decided that enough is enough.

“Numerous prospective students whom the university has admitted have written to the university stating that they will not attend,” [Drexel Provost Brian] Blake wrote, adding that “at least two potential significant donors to the university have withheld previously promised donations.” Indeed, Blake asserted that “the nearly unmanageable volume of venomous calls” that the administration received in the wake of the professor’s latest tweets even forced the school to “consider turning off its phones” for several days.

It appears from the story that Drexel, which initially poo-pooed Professor George Ciccariello-Maher’s comments, is now going to take a hard line. Whether they fire him or merely slap him on the wrist remains as yet unknown.

Normally, I oppose the firing or punishment of anyone for the things they say. At the same time, we are all personally responsible for what we say, and if you say things that are downright evil, you have to accept the consequences of those statements. Calling for genocide against whites and the murder of police officers to me fits very well the definition of evil. Ciccariello-Maher might have the freedom to say these things, but his university has no obligation to support him for doing so.

Berkeley mayor belongs to group that organized riots against Milo Yiannopoulos

Fascist: It now appears that the mayor of Berkeley, Jesse Arreguin, belongs to the group that organized the riots that shut down the lecture of Milo Yiannopoulos.

Berkley Mayor Jesse Arreguin was revealed to be a member of the anti-fascist group, By Any Means Necessary (BAMN), on Facebook. BAMN orchestrated the violence that shut down a scheduled lecture at UC Berkeley featuring Milo Yiannopoulos in early 2017. Arreguin is allegedly also friends with BAMN leader, Yvette Felarca, on Facebook.

They were also involved in the violent clashes earlier this month.

This might explain why the Berkeley police did so little during the first riots as well as during the violence that occurred on April 15 between pro-Trump and leftist demonstrators. In fact, there is even some evidence, not conclusive, that suggests the Berkeley police were helping the leftist demonstrators.

Meanwhile, Yiannopoulos has announced that he is planning a week long free speech event in Berkeley later this year. Good for him.

Airbus-Safran gets go-ahead to build first Ariane 6 test rocket

Capitalism in space: The European Space Agency (ESA) has given Airbus-Safran the go-ahead to build the first Ariane 6 rocket, which will be used for ground tests.

It is really important to recognize how this article illustrates the major things that have occurred in how Europe is builds its rockets. Note first that Arianespace is not mentioned at all, even though government bureaucracy has been in charge of ESA’s commercial business for decades. It is not in control any longer and is thus irrelevant. Note also that the design was created solely by Airbus-Safran, and that the only thing ESA did was approve it. The agency did not micromanage it, or revise it, or insist on changes, as would have been the case less than three years ago. Instead, it appears they essentially rubber-stamped it, leaving this work entirely to the private company, which in the end will operate and sell the rocket entirely for profit, while also providing ESA its needed launch vehicle.

At first glance, it appears that the ESA has adopted here the recommendations that I made in my policy paper, Capitalism in space:. In truth, they made these policy changes well before my paper was even written, which helps illustrates forcefully their universal correctness. If you want things built well and efficiently, you give people ownership of their work, you let them create it, and you get out of the way.

Or to use that forgotten word, you let freedom work its magic.

China’s first unmanned freighter successfully docks with test station

Tianzhou-1, China’s first unmanned space freighter, today successfully docked with that nation’s test station module, Tiangong-2.

Tianzhou-1, China’s first cargo spacecraft, which was launched Thursday evening from Wenchang Space Launch Center in south China’s Hainan Province, began to approach Tiangong-2 automatically at 10:02 a.m. Saturday and made contact with the space lab at 12:16 p.m.

The Tianzhou-1 cargo ship and Tiangong-2 space lab will have another two dockings. The second docking will be conducted from a different direction, which aims to test the ability of the cargo ship to dock with a future space station from different directions. In the third docking, Tianzhou-1 will use fast-docking technology. It normally takes about two days to dock, while fast docking will take only six hours.

This testing program by China is very well thought out. They are performing a whole range of docking tests, and they are doing it with an unmanned prototype station that well simulates the full scale station they eventually plan to build.

The Israeli finalist in the Google Lunar X-Prize is out of the running

The Israeli team for the Google Lunar X-Prize, one of the five finalists, can no longer win the race because its SpaceX launch will not take place before the end of the year.

SpaceIL, formed by veterans of the Israeli tech sector, will not be able to launch by the year-end deadline set by the race’s organizers, according to Spaceflight Industries, the space transport company hired to carry the team’s spacecraft on a Falcon 9 rocket launch it purchased from SpaceX.

A Spaceflight executive tells Quartz that SpaceIL’s rocket is still in the launch queue but will be unable to launch before 2018, effectively scotching SpaceIL’s chance at the contest barring a last-minute extension to the deadline.

The article does a nice job of summarizing the situation for all five finalists, all of which appear to have problems that could prevent them from flying before the deadline at the end of 2018. It also notes that an extension could also be granted, as has happened twice before.

France settles union dispute in French Guiana

The union strike that has stopped all Arianespace launches from French Guiana for the past month has been settled.

The article provides no details on the settlement itself. Instead, it outlines the company’s intention to complete all the scheduled launches they had planned for 2017.

Update: This story outlines the basic agreement.

It authorises an emergency relief plan of up to 2.1 billion euros, which includes funds for security, education, healthcare and business aid.

France had already approved 1.1 billion in aid for French Guiana at the beginning of April. The additional funds were offered to meet demands made by the collective and local representatives, who rejected the government’s initial offer.

France will prioritise the implementation of the spending plan, said Bareigts, who described the agreement as a “decisive day for the future of Guiana”.

Essentially, this is a payoff to the unions and group in French Guiana that organized the strike. I am sure a lot of the money will go for good purposes, but I am even more sure that a majority of it will simply end up in the pockets of the strike organizers, doing little to help the people of French Guiana themselves.

Trump signs commercial weather satellite bill

Capitalism in space: President Trump today signed the new law that strongly encourages NOAA to begin using privately acquired weather data.

Among the bill’s provisions is language formally authorizing the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to purchase weather data from commercial satellite systems. The bill authorizes NOAA to spend $6 million a year in fiscal years 2017 through 2020 for a pilot program of data purchases to evaluate the effectiveness of commercial data to support weather forecasting.

NOAA has already started such a pilot program using $3 million appropriated to the agency in fiscal year 2016. In September 2016, NOAA awarded contracts to GeoOptics and Spire, with a combined value of a little more than $1 million, for GPS radio occultation data.

These are only baby steps. At this time NOAA’s bureaucracy views commercial space the same way that NASA did back in 2004: it is a threat and also incapable of doing the job. Since NOAA today, like NASA in 2004, has been unable to do the job very well itself, its ability to argue against private space is limited. Expect the pressure to build for NOAA to hand over more and more of its weather-gathering work to private companies.

Mars rover update: April 21, 2017

Curiosity

Curiosity's position, Sol 1664 (April 10, 2017)

For the overall context of Curiosity’s travels, see Pinpointing Curiosity’s location in Gale Crater.

Since my previous February 14, 2017 update, Curiosity has worked its way through the dunes and has emerged, as planned at the head of what looks like a dry wash flowing down from Mount Sharp. At the time I had predicted that the science team would then have the rover make a beeline to Mount Sharp, following the smoothest route. That prediction is almost certainly wrong. Instead, the scientists are probably going to have the rover zig-zag its way south into the dry wash so that they can study the geology there. This is what they have been doing, as shown on the traverse map to the right, which shows Curiosity’s location through Sol 1664 (April 10). Ideally I expect them to want to check out the flow areas of the central parts of the wash as well as the contact point on either side where the color of the terrain changes from dark to light. This appears to be what they doing now, two weeks later, based on this update posted yesterday.

The 23 m drive on Sol 1673 put Curiosity alongside Murray bedrock blocks that appeared to be capped with a different material, with a darker color and smoother texture relative to the Murray

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How Russia’s next ISS module got contaminated

Russia’s next module for ISS, MLM or Nauka, has been delayed years because of the discovery of sawdust sized metal particles throughout the module’s propulsion system. This article describes how this happened, showing the incredibly incompetence and bad quality control that caused it.

At the time, workers at Khrunichev were cutting pipelines and removing other components of the module’s propulsion system, in order to reconfigure it from its original role as a backup to the Zarya FGB module into the MLM. For example, a set of six tanks, which would be used for refueling of the ISS during the FGB mission, were removed from the exterior of the spacecraft in order to make room for scientific instruments and for the attachment of the European Robotic Arm, ERA.

The official conclusion of the probe said that the contamination had stemmed from the “lack of methodological and technological support for the operations of cutting pipeline connections in the pneumatic and hydraulic system, PGS, which was needed to guarantee the meeting of requirements for ensuring the sterility of the internal cavities in the pipelines and system hardware.” It is essentially bureaucratic speak for letting metallic dust formed during sawing off the lines pour into the interior of the remaining components.

According to one legend circulating at GKNPTs Khrunichev, the workers who were sawing off pipelines from the module thought they were dismantling the entire spacecraft for scrap. That story would sound completely unbelievable if not for other almost as incredible incidents of carelessness, poor quality control and incompetence within the industry in recent years, such as the installing navigation sensors on a Proton rocket in the upside down position or loading a Block DM-03 space tug on another Proton with too much propellant.

Read the whole story. It is most revealing of the overall systematic problems within Russia’s aerospace industry.

The “March for Science”: a Democratic Party operation

No matter what the leaders of this weekend’s planned “March for Science” might claim about the neutrality of their event, this article in the journal Science today reveals its very decidedly partisan, leftist, and anti-Trump nature. Democrats are planned as major speakers at many venues, while no Republicans are participating anywhere.

“I’d be surprised if any Republicans participate,” says Representative Jerry McNerney (D–CA), one of only two House of Representatives members with a science Ph.D., who will be speaking at the San Francisco, California, march. “They may feel that they are on the receiving end of the protest.”

McNerney was also amazingly honest about the march’s partisanship in another quote: “McNerney thinks organizers of the march have been disingenuous by asserting their neutrality. ‘It’s a political rally, and they should acknowledge that.'”

Meanwhile, the journal Nature today published an article interviewing scientists about their view of the march. As expected, most supported the event for partisan and anti-Trump reasons. One person however was honest about this partisanship, and worried how such partisanship will hurt science.

I am not going to the March for Science, because some people in America view science as leftist. Maybe it’s because [former US vice-president] Al Gore launched ‘An Inconvenient Truth’. I’ve seen articles from right-wing outlets that are framing the march as focusing on gender equality and identity politics. I think it could easily politicize science because, even though the march’s mission statement isn’t anti-Trump, the marchers seem anti-Trump.

The bottom line is that the leaders of this march are organizing it not only to lobby for funds, but to advance the Democratic Party agenda and to protest Trump. And because the majority of today’s scientists are Democrats, if only because they would face blackballing in the modern leftist academic community if they were anything else, they are going along, some eagerly and some with reservations. Either way, Sunday’s “March for Science” is going to end up looking like a march against Trump and the Republican Party.

Be prepared as well for many mainstream reports on the March to frame it otherwise. They will be lying.

China launches first unmanned freighter in test flight

China today successfully launched its first unmanned cargo freighter, Tianzhou-1.

After entering orbit, according to CCTV-Plus interviews with Chinese space officials, Tianzhou-1 is slated to conduct a first docking with Tiangong-2 in a few days. The two spacecraft will then have a two-month in-orbit flight to test the liquid-propellant refueling as well as the cargo spaceship’s control of the combined vehicles, CMSA officials said.

The two spacecraft will also fly separately for three months, during which time the cargo spaceship will complete its own space science experiments. Then the two will have the third docking to test the automatic fast-docking technology, a test to complete the docking within 6 hours.

This was also the second launch of their most powerful rocket, Long March 7, and the second launch from their new spaceport at Wenchang.

Berkeley backs down to Coulter, partly

Fascists: The University of California-Berkeley today backed down on its demand that Ann Coulter’s speech there, scheduled for April 27, be canceled.

Instead, they offered May 2 as a new date, which it appears does not satisfy either Coulter or the college group that invited her.

But on Thursday, the university said it had found a venue where it could hold the speech on May 2, instead of the original April 27 date. However, a leader of the college Republican group that originally invited Coulter said the university was placing strict conditions on the event, and he said his group intended to reject the new terms.

Before the reversal was announced, Coulter had vowed to go ahead with an appearance anyway.

The article outlines some of the absurd conditions the university is trying to impose.

Coulter said the university insisted that her speech take place in the middle of the day, that only students could attend and that the exact venue wouldn’t be announced until the last minute. She said that she agreed with the conditions but that apparently wasn’t good enough. “They just up and announced that I was prohibited from speaking anyway,” Coulter said, noting that her speech topic was to be immigration, the subject of one of her books. “I feel like the Constitution is important and that taxpayer-supported universities should not be using public funds to violate American citizens’ constitutional rights.”

I repeat: Coulter should just come on April 27. It is not her job to cater her free speech to the university’s needs. It is their responsibility to protect her right to speak. If they can’t, then maybe their government funding should simply go away.

Scientists release geological map of potential landing site for 2020 rover

Researchers have released a detailed geological map of Northeast Syrtis Major, one of the prime candidate landing sites for NASA’s next Mars rover, scheduled for launch in 2020.

Within Northeast Syrtis are the mineral signatures of four distinct types of watery and potentially habitable past environments. Those minerals had been detected by prior research, but the new map shows in detail how they are distributed within the region’s larger geological context. That helps constrain the mechanisms that may have formed them, and shows when they formed relative to each other.

The lowest and the oldest layer exposed at Northeast Syrtis has the kind of clay minerals formed when rocks interact with water that has a fairly neutral pH. Next in the sequence are rocks containing kaolinite, a mineral formed by water percolating through soil. The next layer up contains spots where the mineral olivine has been altered to carbonate—an aqueous reaction that, on Earth, is known to provide chemical energy for bacterial colonies. The upper layers contain sulfate minerals, another sign of a watery, potentially life-sustaining environment.

Understanding the relative timing of these environments is critical, Mustard says. They occurred around the transition between the Noachian and Hesperian epochs—a time of profound environmental change on Mars.

This press release is very much an effort by these scientists to influence the final landing site choice. They like this site, and they want to convince other scientists that are part of the project to agree with them.

First results from Breakthrough Listen’s search for alien radio signals

Breakthrough Listen has released its first results from its search for extraterrestrial radio signals using the Greenbank Observatory in West Virginia.

Breakthrough Listen – the initiative to find signs of intelligent life in the universe – has released its 11 events ranked highest for significance as well as summary data analysis results. It is considered unlikely that any of these signals originate from artificial extraterrestrial sources, but the search continues. Further, Listen has submitted for publication (available April 20) in a leading astrophysics journal the analysis of 692 stars, comprising all spectral types, observed during its first year of observations with the Green Bank Telescope.

The press release tries to make a big deal about this data, but essentially what it boils down to is that so far they have found nothing that could indicate artificial radio signals coming from any of these stars.

Private company builds high resolution space radar facility in Texas

Capitalism in space: A private company, Leo Labs, has built a high resolution space radar facility in Midland, Texas, aimed at providing satellite companies precise location information of their orbiting satellites as well as the space junk that might threaten them.

It is not clear from the article or the company’s webpage whether they are funded by the federal government or by private capital investment. Up until now this data has been routinely gathered by the U.S. military, though obtaining it has I think been somewhat difficult due to security concerns. It seems this company is trying to compete with the government in offering a better data stream that is also easier to obtain.

Posted over Poland during my return flight from Israel.

UC-Berkeley tries to silence Coulter speech

Fascist Berkeley: Fearing violence and unwilling to protect the free speech rights of conservatives, UC-Berkeley has refused to allow Ann Coulter to give a speech at the campus on April 27.

The problem is that the university, a public institution, does not have the right to ban her from speaking, and Coulter knows it.

Miss Coulter took to Twitter to denounce the public university with her usual verve and said she would speak in Berkeley next week no matter what. “I acceded to Berkeley’s every silly demand (never made of lib speakers). Called their bluff & they canceled anyway,” she posted, adding that “no school accepting public funds can ban free speech.”

“If I were going to Berkeley to get an abortion, this would be a national scandal,” she tweeted.

Miss Coulter said she was “instructing Berkeley student group to spare no expense in renting my speaking venue — part of my legal damages,” the last phrase likely a reference to damages she expects from a possible lawsuit against the University of California. In an interview with the Hollywood Reporter, she elaborated that “they can’t stop me. I’m an American. I have constitutional rights.” [emphasis mine]

I hope she goes, and I hope a lot of conservatives show up prepared to defend her right to speak, with whatever means possible. We know from last week’s violence during pro-Trump demonstrations that the Berkeley authorities, on campus or off, will do nothing to protect her.

Israeli student cubesat launched from Atlas 5

When the Cygnus capsule was placed in orbit yesterday, it also released a number of nanosats, one of which was a cubesat built by Israeli high school students.

More than 80 pupils in grades 9-12 at schools in Herzliya, Ofakim, Yeruham, Ofra, and the Bedouin town of Hura helped to construct Duchifat-2, which weighs just 1.8 kilograms (four pounds), and is just 20 centimeters (eight inches) tall and 10 centimeters wide. Due to its small size, the satellite has no motors and instead uses the earth’s magnetic field to keep itself correctly aligned in space.

Cubesats have generally been built and launched as college projects to help teach students the engineering behind satellites. This however was the only nanosat released by the Atlas 5 that involved high school students.

Note also that the project did not simply involve Jewish students.

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