Free speech in modern America: A cop stops a student from handing out copies of the Constitution, on Constitution Day. Video here.
The video is so egregious that I have embedded it below the fold. Watch the college bureaucrat tell the student he has to schedule his speech, and that the next date is weeks away.
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Australia’s new government does the right thing, instantly shutting down its agenda-driven global warming bureaucracy. More details here.
The House vote to fund the government but not Obamacare will force vulnerable Senate Democrats to either endorse the unpopular law again or shut it down.
Exactly. Force these Democrats to once again endorse this turkey of a law, just as it is about to go into effect. Even if the Republicans eventually back down, they will have successfully put these senators on record, only a year before the next election.
The media guide for identifying firearms.
I think they actually use this guide at mainstream outlets like CNN.
The impending end of China’s first space station.
The competition heats up: Arianespace has signed a contract to build 18 more Ariane 5 rockets.
This order takes the number of Ariane 5 launchers in production for Arianespace to 38, and guarantees the continued provision of launch services for the European operator’s customers at the Guiana Space Centre through to the end of the decade.
Without doubt Arianespace is now in a solid position through the end of the decade. What will happen to them, however, when Falcon 9 and other cheaper rockets begin to fly regularly will be the real story. They have not yet found a way to cut their costs.
Voyager 1 has enough nuclear fuel to keep doing science through to 2025, and then it will be dead, adrift. On its current trajectory, the probe should eventually end up within 1.5 light years of a star in Camelopardalis, a northern constellation that looks like a cross between a giraffe and a camel. No one knows if there are any planets around that star, nor if aliens will be in residence by the time the probe arrives. “But if they are there, maybe they will capture Voyager 1,” says mission scientist Tom Krimigis of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.
In addition to the above silliness, the article gives a good summary of the real data that Voyager 1 is sending back about interstellar space.
Cygnus is operating well in orbit, with berthing to ISS scheduled for September 22.
More information here, including details about Orbital Sciences’ effort to replace the refurbished Soviet-era engines it uses on Antares in order for the rocket to have a long term viability.
Republicans in the House move to fund the government, excluding Obamacare.
If the government shuts down because of this budget proposal it will be because the Democrats refused to sign it. It will be because the Democrats would rather keep Obamacare then keep the government operating.
Nine mass shootings that didn’t happen because someone was there to stop it, with a gun.
The one consistent fact about all the recent mass shootings that did happen is that they occurred in government-imposed gun free zones.
Working for the Democratic Party: IRS officials specifically targeted conservatives for harassment because they thought that was what President Obama wanted, according to an interim House report.
In the report, the investigators do not find evidence that IRS employees received orders from politicians to target the tea party, and agency officials deny overt bias or political motives. But the report says the IRS was at least taking cues from political leaders and designed special policies to review tea party applications, including dispatching some of them to Washington to be vetted by headquarters. “As prominent politicians publicly urged the IRS to take action on tax-exempt groups engaged in legal campaign intervention activities, the IRS treated tea party applications differently,” the staff report concludes. “Applications filed by tea party groups were identified and grouped due to media attention surrounding the existence of the tea party in general.”
It was about this time that both Obama and Democrats in Congress were demanding the IRS go after conservative organizations.
The competition heats up: Antares has successfully put Cygnus into orbit.
The next test is getting Cygnus berthed at ISS.
Working for the Democratic Party: New documents show that more than 80% of the organizations targeted by the IRS in 2011 for harassment were conservative.
A handful of liberal organizations were definitely targeted for close inspection, but it appears to me that these were merely picked to give the IRS some cover while it mainly focused at harassing as many conservatives organizations as possible.
Another look at the leaked IPCC draft report. Key quote:
To those of us who have been following the climate debate for decades, the next few years will be electrifying. There is a high probability we will witness the crackup of one of the most influential scientific paradigms of the 20th century, and the implications for policy and global politics could be staggering.
The article also takes a close look at the contradiction between the data and the IPCC models and says this:
[W]hat is commonly called the “mainstream” view of climate science is contained in the spread of results from computer models. What is commonly dismissed as the “skeptical” or “denier” view coincides with the real-world observations. Now you know how to interpret those terms when you hear them.
For those of you who wish to hear me talk at length about climate and space issues, I will be on the air tonight for about two hours on the Space Show with David Livingston.
And if that’s not enough, you can listen to me again for two hours tomorrow night, September 18, from 10 to 12 am (Pacific) on Coast to Coast with George Noory.
Should be fun, as always.
For those on the East Coast, a viewing guide for tomorrow’s launch of Antares/Cygnus from Wallops Island.
Guess who. And guess about what.
Another story on the leaked IPCC report, and how that new report will admit the climate has not warmed as predicted.
After two months of travel, Curiosity on Mars is now taking a short break to study the rocks under its wheels.
The competition heats up: An unmanned spacecraft designed to get rid of space junk is set to launch in 2018, and use a new European built reusable launch system.
Both components of this story are significant. First, a company has gotten the necessary financing to build the spacecraft, proving that there is profit to be made in the removal of space junk. Second, the launch system is simple and reusable, and will lower the cost of getting small payloads into orbit significantly. And it appears it is being built.
