Rod Stewart – When You Wish Upon a Star
An evening pause: Hat tip Edward Thelen.
Year: 2017
Ann Coulter has cancelled her speech at UC-Berkeley
The fascists win: Ann Coulter has cancelled her speech at UC-Berkeley, scheduled for April 27.
She cites as her reason for cancelling as the fact that the two groups that had sponsored her lecture had both cancelled that sponsorship out of fear of violence and the refusal of the university and the local government to provide protection. Their lawsuits against the university however will go on.
Regardless, this is now what urban California has become, a fascist state where expressing conservative views leaves you vulnerable to violence, with the local authorities working with the violent brown-shirted thugs to help them squelch freedom.
April 25, 2017 Zimmerman Space Show podcast
My two hour appearance with David Livingston on the Space Show last night is now available and can be downloaded as a podcast here.
Bigoted professor to accept students in course based on race
Bigot: A professor at Pomona College in California has announced that she will give preferential treatment to “students of color” in deciding who can attend her class on geology.
“I encourage students who PERM this course to indicate how their background, experience, and/or interests could contribute to diversifying perspectives in the course,” she states in the flyer. “In resolving PERMs I will strive to identify students for whom the small-section setting has the potential to be of particular benefit,” she adds, stressing that “I am especially interested in seeing PERM requests from students of color, first generation or low-income students, international, and students early in their college career (first two years); such students are especially encouraged to apply” [emphasis in original].
Increasingly in the modern leftist-controlled academic community, it is becoming popular to treat whites in the manner that bigots treated blacks before the civil rights movement, oppressively and with contempt.
I must add that not only is this professor’s policy bigoted, it is almost certainly illegal. I wonder if Pomona College will take action against it. I suspect not, because after all, this is California, a place that considers the oppression and the squelching of free thought to be a good thing.
European push for more space regulations under international law
In the European space community and governmental circles, there appears to be a new push to revise the Outer Space Treaty, focused specifically on increasing the treaty’s regulatory power in the area of large satellite constellations and space junk.
This week [the city of] Darmstadt hosts a closed-door, governmental meeting of the Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee (IADC). Whether it was planned or not, the IADC is set to discuss a much-needed renewal of international space law, which is, experts admit, rather vague. But how far they will go is anyone’s guess.
…There is a palpable sense that the space community needs enforceable international laws and regulations, rather than – or merely to bolster – its current inter-agency agreements. They’ve served us so far, but few countries have actually signed up to them. That leaves a lot of wriggle-room, especially as space becomes increasingly commercialized.
Most of our space activities are governed by the Outer Space Treaty of 1967. It’s a short document that primarily seeks to ensure space operations are “peaceful” and for the good of all humanity. It is complemented by other agreements, including a set of documents on mitigating space debris. “We have a good, coherent set of justified rules and we don’t intend to alter them drastically,” said Christophe Bonnal of the French Space Agency, CNES, and the International Academy of Astronautics (IAA) in closing remarks last week. “But we will improve them at the IADC meeting to include mega-constellations.”
It appears to me that this is a push-back against Luxembourg’s recent announcement that it is going to request a renegotiation of the Outer Space Treaty to allow for property rights in space. What this article is advocating instead is that the treaty increase its control and regulatory power over private satellite constellations, which at present are not covered by the treaty.
Liberated Mosul districts reconnect with satellite television
This story from SpaceWatch Middle East outlines the effort by the Islamic State to block access to information in Mosul, and how the recent liberation by Iraqi forces has allowed citizens to regain access to satellite television and the internet.
This website by the way is an interesting one. It is based in Switzerland, and appears focused on covering the business of space from a European/Middle East perspective.
Cassini about to make first dive into Saturn’s rings
Cassini will make its first dive through a gap in Saturn’s ring today, and this link provides details.
Because that gap is a region no spacecraft has ever explored, Cassini will use its dish-shaped high-gain antenna (13 feet or 4 meters across) as a protective shield while passing through the ring plane. No particles larger than smoke particles are expected, but the precautionary measure is being taken on the first dive. The Cassini team will use data collected by one of the spacecraft’s science instruments (the Radio and Plasma Wave Subsystem, or RPWS) to ascertain the size and density of ring particles in the gap in advance of future dives. As a result of its antenna-forward orientation, the spacecraft will be out of contact with Earth during the dive.
The first images are not expected until mid-day tomorrow.
Latch blamed for Webb vibration test issue
A latch that hadn’t closed properly has been identified as the cause of the anomaly that halted vibration testing of the James Webb Space Telescope in December.
At the committee meeting, Smith said the problem was tracked down to a latch designed to hold in place one of the wings of JWST’s primary mirror, which consists of 18 hexagonal segments. Those wings are folded into place to fit within the payload fairing of the Ariane 5 that will launch JWST, then deployed into place once in space. The latch, he said, consists of two plates with serrated teeth a few millimeters in size. “The thought is that the teeth, when they closed it, they didn’t quite seat,” he said. “So during the vibe [test], the teeth clapped together on the order of a millimeter or two, and that was what made the noise.”
Engineers were able to replicate the noise by placing the plates slightly out of alignment in the lab and subjecting them to similar vibrations, giving them confidence that was the cause of the anomaly.
I love how the Webb program manager also says that Webb is “on budget and on schedule.” That claim could only be true if you make believe that the budget was always $9 billion and the launch date was always supposed to be 2018 instead of the original $1 billion and 2011 launch date.
Salt N Pepa – Whattaman
An evening pause: Something different, and quite good.
Hat tip Jim Mallamace.
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:
- Staying in the West Bank
- Hitchhiking and supermarkets in the occupied territory
- The HOAs of Israel
- Bigotry in Israel
- Building a real Peace Forest in Israel
- What the Middle East conflict looks like from inside Israel
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.
Crystal Gayle & Muppets – River Road
An evening pause: As I have said before, it is very important to be silly once in awhile.
Hat tip Edward Thelen.