Author: Robert Zimmerman

A House hearings yesterday, the partisan tactics of the director of the National Park Service was clearly illustrated by comparing what this government official did during the Occupy Wall Street protests versus his actions during the government shutdown.

10:27 am

Working for the Democratic Party: A House hearings yesterday, the partisan tactics of the director of the National Park Service were clearly illustrated by comparing what this government official did during the Occupy Wall Street protests versus his actions during the government shutdown. Watch:

The man should be fired. But he won’t be. Obama’s outrage over such activities is pure theater. He actually likes what Jarvis did, as it wholly supports the agenda of the Democratic Party.

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Obamacare might well be imploding.

8:44 am

Obamacare might well be imploding.

In other words, the elites in Washington might have signed a corrupt budget deal, but meanwhile the cause of the shutdown, Obamacare, continues to show itself to be an abject failure, justifying the efforts of the more honest Republicans to try to stop it.

The Democrats endorsed this law again during the budget standoff. Had they be willing to even consider minor changes the shutdown could have been averted. Instead, they stood firm as a party, supporting this unworkable law, as it stands.

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The next test flight of a version of SpaceX’s Grasshopper could occur in New Mexico in December.

8:29 am

The next test flight of a version of SpaceX’s Grasshopper could occur in New Mexico in December.

The story says this test will be with Grasshopper, but I think that is a mistake. Unless SpaceX is using this name for all its vertical landing test vehicles, the company had said the test vehicle to fly in New Mexico would be a full scale Falcon 9 first stage, with nine Merlin engines, not one as has Grasshopper.

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Cygnus will be de-orbited one day early, on October 23.

8:24 am

Cygnus will be de-orbited one day early, on October 23.

At the same time, preparations move forward for the second Cygnus flight in December, which will be the first operational flight. This quote is interesting:

Neither Orbital nor the Virginia Commercial Space Flight Authority got locked out of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport as a result of the shutdown, meaning that preparations for the tentative December launch continued while more than 95 percent of NASA’s roughly 18,000 civil servants were on furlough.

Suggests again how unessential a good percentage of NASA’s employees really are. They might be great engineers, but they are apparently wasting their talents at NASA doing unnecessary make-work.

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The Senate budget deal that the House will vote on today includes some really nice pork.

4:48 pm

The Senate budget deal that the House will vote on today includes some really nice pork.

The bill includes extra funds to fix flooded roads in Colorado, a $3 million appropriation for a civil liberties oversight board and a one-time payment to the widow of Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.), who died over the summer. It also includes a more than $2 billion increase in funding for construction on the lower Ohio River in Illinois and Kentucky. Current law authorizes $775 million in spending for related projects, and the bill increases it to $2.918 billion.

The last appears to be a kickback to Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) to get him to buy into this crap.

The bill also has this crap:

The legislation broadly re-opens the government through Jan. 15, and extends the ability of the government to borrow money through Feb. 7. It does so by allowing President Obama to waive the debt ceiling, a move that can be overridden by a resolution of disapproval by Congress that Obama could still veto. [emphasis mine]

In other words, Congress is now ceding this budgetary responsibility and power to the President, who will then rule by decree.

Update: The bill passed both houses of Congress and has now been signed by the President. Note that the only opposition came from Republicans, but even here the opposition was a minority. The Democrats strongly endorsed this bill, and for good reason. It gives them (and the Republicans who supported it) lots of pork and greater power for Obama. Americans meanwhile are screwed. The day of reckoning still looms.

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Chase Bank has told its business customers that there is now a limit on the amount that can be withdrawn from an account, while also banning all international wire transfers.

11:56 am

WTF? Chase Bank has told its business customers that they are placing a limit on the amount that can be withdrawn from an account, while also banning all international wire transfers.

If I had a Chase account, I would close it today, immediately, before these restrictions go into place.

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“Let’s don’t confuse nobody with the facts.”

9:03 am

A Democratic Congresswoman speaks her mind: “Let’s don’t confuse nobody with the facts.”

But don’t worry: I guarantee she will be re-elected forever. She is a black representative, in a black district. What matter that she appears to be as stupid as a brick, she’s black!

When your only criteria for voting for someone is their race, then you are the bigot. And sadly, this description appears to apply to too many blacks voters today.

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“I wanted the Affordable Health Care Act. The problem is, is it’s not affordable,”

9:24 pm

An Obama supporter finds out what’s in it: “I wanted the Affordable Health Care Act. The problem is, is it’s not affordable.”

I would laugh except that I am crying. Moreover, the article is from a San Francisco media outlet, which is as surprised as this Obama supporter at the cost of Obamacare. Too bad these liberals all considered conservatives and tea party people terrorists, murderers, and hate-filled killers of small children and therefore not worth listening to back in 2009. Had they listened, they would have found out about the unworkable nature of this law then, instead of now, and the law would never have been passed.

They should maybe consider this reality and recognize that this is why there are Republicans putting up a fight now to delay or defund the law.

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No budget deal: The Democrats continue to refuse to give in at all, and the bulk of the Republican caucus has shown some spine and refused to cave.

5:42 pm

Well hallelujah and amen! No budget deal: The Democrats continue to refuse to give in at all, and the Republicans have shown some spine and refused to cave.

This deadlock has been a team effort, from both sides. To say it is entirely the fault of one party or the other is to reveal your partisanship.

Nonetheless, legislation requires negotiation, and the only ones refusing to negotiate at all have been the Democrats. In the real world outside of government, such pig-headedness always results in no deal at all.

Right now it looks like 17% of the government will remain shut for quite awhile. And with the debt ceiling kicking in, the federal government will find its hands tied even more. The American people are about to find out that life will go on quite successfully without their big daddy to boss them around.

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Tennessee and North Carolina have agreed to reopen Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

3:23 pm

Tennessee and North Carolina have agreed to reopen Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

Like other states, they will pay the operating costs of the National Park Service, then get reimbursed when the government shutdown ends.

I wish they weren’t paying anything. They could have made sure the parks were open and available to all using state resources, and let the National Park Service throw a temper tantrum when it discovered it couldn’t control the parks.

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A bogus scientific paper, with numerous errors, was accepted for publication by more than 150 peer-reviewed scientific journals.

12:36 pm

A bogus scientific paper, with numerous errors, was accepted for publication by more than 150 peer-reviewed scientific journals.

The scientist purposely wrote a paper that should have been unacceptable for publication in order to see if peer-review would spot the problems. What he found was that more than half the journals to which he submitted didn’t notice or care, and accepted the paper as is.

The journals in this case were open-access, meaning that they are free to readers but charge authors money for publication. Thus, rejecting papers is against their financial interest. Nonetheless, the number of journals willing to be unethical is quite disturbing, and reveals a rottenness lurking in the heart of the science field that no one wants to talk about.

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A new woman’s land speed record was set this week.

8:42 am

A new woman’s land speed record was set this week.

Back in 1965, Lee Breedlove set the women’s land speed record on Utah’s Salt Lake Flats with an average speed of 308.51 mph (496.49 km/h) over four runs. That record stood for 48 years until this month, when Jessi Combs smashed it in her 52,000 hp North American Eagle Supersonic Speed Challenger with a speed of 392.954 mph (632.39 km/h).

I am puzzled why the gender matters in driving these high speed vehicles.

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Scientists have found a fossil of a mosquito with traces of blood in its engorged abdomen.

8:30 am

Scientists have found a fossil of a mosquito with traces of blood in its engorged abdomen.

Although scientists have found fossils of suspected blood-sucking insects, the creatures’ feeding habits have mostly been inferred from their anatomy or the presence of blood-borne parasites in their guts. But Greenwalt’s fossilized mosquito contains molecules that provide strong evidence of blood-feeding among ancient insects back to 46 million years ago. It is a fortunate find. “The abdomen of a blood-engorged mosquito is like a balloon ready to burst. It is very fragile,” says Greenwalt. “The chances that it wouldn’t have disintegrated prior to fossilization were infinitesimally small.”

Some news reports have implied that the scientists had found actual blood 46 million years old. This is not the case. They found “large traces of iron and the organic molecule porphyrin — both constituents of haemoglobin, the oxygen-carrying pigment found in vertebrate blood. These molecules were either rare or absent in the abdomen of a fossilized male mosquito (which does not drink blood) of the same age, found at the same location.” Still, even though this isn’t actual blood, the evidence is good and so the result is quite cool.

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In a negotiated settlement, Arizona police will pay the widow of Jose Guerena, murdered during a SWAT raid, $3.4 million.

1:38 pm

In a negotiated settlement, Arizona police will pay the widow of Jose Guerena, murdered during a SWAT raid, $3.4 million.

The police settled because they knew that if the case had ever reached a jury, they would have lost hands down. I feel for the widow, as she probably had to settle now because she couldn’t wait the years necessary for a full victory in court.

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