Year: 2022

Teachers fired and blacklisted for opposing the queer agenda in childcare and elementary schools

1:01 pm

As I did yesterday, today’s blacklisting column will cover a number of individual stories, this time focusing on the blacklisting of teachers who oppose indoctrinating very young children to the queer agenda. I am reporting more than one story in order to make sure these stories do not fall by the wayside. The harm done to the individuals does not go away, even if the news cycle considers their story stale.

Bright Horizons commitment to Critical Race Theory and the queer agenda, for toddlers
Screen capture from Bright Horizons’ own webpage.
Very clearly, Bright Horizons is determined to teach
Critical Race Theory and the queer agenda to toddlers.

First we have California teacher Nelli Parisenkova, who was fired from her job with the nationwide childcare company Bright Horizons because she for religious reasons refused to read books promoting the queer agenda to 1 to 5-year-old toddlers.

What makes this story especially egregious is the vindictive manner in which Parisenkova was treated. From the lawsuit [pdf]:

The childcare room at Bright Horizons where Ms. Parisenkova works has children’s books on the shelf that promote and celebrate same-sex relationships and marriage. When Ms. Parisenkova first started working for Bright Horizons, her supervisor at the time provided her with an informal accommodation that she would not be required to read books to the children promoting same-sex marriage. However, on or around April 7, 2022, Katy Callas, the director of the location where Ms. Parisenkova worked, discovered Ms. Parisenkova’s religious beliefs in this regard. Ms. Callas, who is lesbian, apparently took personal offense at Ms. Parisenkova’s religious beliefs.
» Read more

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Ukraine officials in direct negotiations with Musk about Starlink

10:22 am

According to the Ukraine’s defense minister, they are now conducting direct negotiations with Elon Musk concerning the cost of using SpaceX’s Starlink constellation as part of its war against Russia.

In an interview, Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov said “I know that we will not have a problem” keeping the service active, citing the “personal communication” between Ukraine’s Minister of Digital Transformation Mykhailo Fedorov and Musk.

Fedorov “is responsible for the digitalization and he has a direct connection with Elon Musk. They have a personal communication, and Mykhailo was really positive” about the situation in their last discussion of the issue, Reznikov said.

I suspect that at some point, the Ukraine will start paying SpaceX some money out of the $20 million per month Musk says it costs. And it will likely draw the cash for those payments from the approximately $50 billion the U.S. has sent it in aid.

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Astronomers discover an exoplanet with the density of a marshmallow

10:18 am

Using ground-based telescopes to gather more data about an exoplanet discovered by the orbiting TESS telescope, astronomers have found that it has the density of a marshmallow.

The planet orbits a red dwarf star, the most common star in the universe, and is the “fluffiest” yet seen around this type of star.

Red dwarf stars are the smallest and dimmest members of so-called main-sequence stars — stars that convert hydrogen into helium in their cores at a steady rate. Though “cool” compared to stars like our Sun, red dwarf stars can be extremely active and erupt with powerful flares capable of stripping a planet of its atmosphere, making this star system a seemingly inhospitable location to form such a gossamer planet.

Astronomers remain puzzled how such a large fluffy planet could have formed around such a dim small star.

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Rate of micrometeorite impacts on Webb holding as expected

10:10 am

According to this Space.com article, the rate and size of micrometeorite impacts on the main mirror of the Webb Space Telescope has held steady at the rate and size expected, since the first surprisingly large micrometeorite impact in May that slightly dinged one mirror segment.

At this point, JWST has experienced a total of 33 micrometeoroid events, according to Smith’s slides. But the most damaging one came before JWST began science observations; in late May, a particularly large micrometeoroid struck the observatory’s mirror, leaving its mark on one golden hexagon. The team estimates that a strike of that size should occur about once a year, Smith said.

“So we got that at month five,” he said. “We haven’t seen another one yet, so it’s still consistent with the statistics that we expected.”

Smith noted that, at the current impact rate, Webb will still be meeting its five-year performance requirement 10 years into the mission. Scientists estimate that the observatory has enough fuel to operate for 20 years.

Meanwhile, one of Webb’s infrared cameras is not doing spectroscopy as engineers analyze the high levels of friction in a “grating wheel.” At this point it appears they still do not understand the cause of the friction, and thus have not come up with a plan for mitigating it.

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Chandrayaan-3 now scheduled for summer 2023

10:01 am

India’s second attempt to put a rover on the surface of the Moon, Chandrayaan-3, has now been tentatively scheduled for launch in the summer of 2023.

The launch had originally been scheduled for launch in the fall of 2020, but was delayed when India shut down due to the Wuhan panic. Official at ISRO, India’s space agency, had hoped to launch by the summer of 2022, but that proved impossible. They have now delayed the mission a full year.

In fact, all earlier reports had indicated the rover was almost ready. This new delay of a full year suggests that some new issues might have been identified.

The news article at the link also notes that ISRO is now planning two unmanned orbital missions plus four launch abort tests before launching its first manned mission, dubbed Gaganyaan, not two abort tests as previously planned. They are still targeting ’24 for the manned mission.

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InSight status: Barely hanging on

9:50 am

InSight's power status as of October 19, 2022

The science team for the InSight lander on Mars today posted an update on the power the spacecraft’s dust covered solar panels are producing. I have added that data to my on-going graph of these power levels, to the right. From the update:

On October 19, 2022, InSight was generating an average between 275 and 285 watt-hours of energy per Martian day, or sol. The tau, or level of dust cover in the atmosphere, was estimated at 1.5 (typical tau levels outside of dust season range from 0.6-0.7).

The jump in tau level is due to a large dust storm that developed in September more than two thousand miles away in the southern hemisphere. Though it is so far away, that storm put a lot more dust in the atmosphere above InSight, and forced engineers to shut down all but its most essential functions.

That storm is apparently continuing, and might even be growing. If so, the future of InSight is dim indeed. Any further drop in the amount of power it generates daily will likely make it unable to operate at all, and the mission will end.

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Frozen lava flows around Martian hills

5:06 pm

Martian lava flowing around hills
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and enhanced to post here, was taken on August 24, 2022 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows the westernmost edge of the Athabasca flood lava plain, thought to be the youngest lava flow on Mars, having covered the area of Great Britain in a matter of weeks 600 million years ago.

This image was a captioned feature yesterday by the MRO science team. As they note:

Although you can’t sail a boat on a sea of lava, hills and craters that stick up higher than the lava flow act like barriers. When a boat is driven through the water, there is a bow wave at the front of the boat, and a wake that trails off behind that indicates which way the boat is moving. In a lava flow, when a hill sticks up, the lava piles up on the upstream side (just like a bow wave) and can leave a wake on the downstream side, so we can tell which way the lava was moving against the stationary hill.

As you can see, every hill has a pile of lava on its northeast slopes, and a wake to its southeast. As the main vent of the Athabasca eruption is to the northeast, about 500 miles away (as shown on the overview map below), the flow direction suggested by the wakes fit the general geography.
» Read more

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October 20, 2022 Quick space links

3:35 pm

Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay, who trolls Twitter so we don’t have to.

 

  • Chinese scientists produce a tectonic map of the Moon

    • Their paper is here. From the abstract:

    The map provides a state-of-the-art illustration of structures and tectonic units of different periods, the distributions of 9 types of linear structures, including 18976 elements (358 inferred deep faults, 1335 shallow faults, 11046 wrinkle ridges, 474 rillles, 816 grabens, 2583 crater-floor fractures, 227 lobate scarps, 1882 impact fractures and 255 impact crater chains), and 5 types of circular structures, including 2501 elements (271 volcanic vents, 47 domes, 46 mascons, 3460 impact craters and 81 impact basins).

 

 

 

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Nurses fired and blacklisted for either being white or Christian

2:31 pm

In today’s blacklist story, I tell two different tales, both of long-time nurses of great experience were not only fired from their jobs because one was white and the other was Christian, but are now apparently blacklisted from getting new work for the same reasons.

I tell two stories today because I am finding I have so many blacklist stories in the queue that many are getting dropped because they are getting stale in terms of the news cycle. Since none of these stories are stale to the individuals being persecuted, I feel a need to tell more than one per day, for a few days, just to catch up.

Laura Morgan, blacklisted
Laura Morgan

First we have Laura Morgan, a nurse with 39 years experience. Morgan was fired by her employer, Baylor Scott & White Health, when she refused to take a new anti-racism course required by her employer that specifically accused her of being a racist, because she was white.

Morgan said her “ordeal” began in September 2021 when her company, Baylor, Scott & White Health, directed annual training for clinicians that this year included a course called “Overcoming Unconscious Bias.”

After reviewing the course, she requested a meeting with the nursing director and the human resources manager. Both blew her off.

“The idea of implicit bias is grounded in the belief that white people treat those who aren’t white worse than those who are. It’s part of the woke assumption that society, including healthcare, suffers from ‘systemic racism,’” she wrote. “Accordingly, my own supposed implicit bias, which is a euphemism for ingrained racism, must be rooted out. Not only that, it must be replaced with preferential treatment for the nonwhite.”

“I fail to see how real racial discrimination is justified by my nonexistent racism,” Morgan added.

Morgan also added in a Wall Street Journal op-ed,
» Read more

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Hubble spots double tail of debris from DART impact of Dimorphus

11:28 am

Dimorphus double tail
Click for original image.

A series of images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope of the ejecta released when DART crashed into the small 525-foot-wide asteroid Dimorphus has found that debris forming a double tail trailing away from the Sun.

The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and enhanced to post here, was taken on October 11, 2022 by Hubble, and shows those two tails as close parallel debris trails.

Repeated observations from Hubble over the last several weeks have allowed scientists to present a more complete picture of how the system’s debris cloud has evolved over time. The observations show that the ejected material, or “ejecta,” has expanded and faded in brightness as time went on after impact, largely as expected. The twin tail is an unexpected development, although similar behavior is commonly seen in comets and active asteroids. The Hubble observations provide the best-quality image of the double-tail to date.

Following impact, Hubble made 18 observations of the system. Imagery indicates the second tail formed between 2-8 October 2022.

Though observations by telescope will continue for the years to follow, the real punchline to this event will be when the European probe Hera rendezvouses with the Didymous-Dimorphus pair in 2026 to perform several years of very close observations.

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NASA approves use of American spacesuits for spacewalks after investigation

10:14 am

NASA this week gave approval to the resumption of spacewalks on ISS, using its American spacesuits, following its investigation into a March incident where one astronaut’s spacesuit became somewhat water-logged.

The agency has now completed a review of the incident, finding that it was not a leak caused by hardware issues. Instead, the water was condensation caused by high levels of astronaut exertion and the cooling setting on Maurer’s extravehicular mobility unit (EMU) spacesuit, NASA officials said.

Though NASA was somewhat vague about the solution, it appears it has simply told astronauts to adjust the cooling setting of their suits to prevent condensation within the suits.

These American suits are very complicated to use, and very expensive. The agency has contracted out for new suits from private companies, but it will be very instructive to see what SpaceX comes up with for the spacewalk suits it is making for the private commercial manned Polaris Dawn mission in the spring of 2023.

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