Author: Robert Zimmerman

Photos of SpaceX’s floating landing barge

9:41 am

The landing barge on which the first stage of the Falcon 9 attempted to land has returned to port.

Photos of the barge show signs of blast and burn damage to cargo containers and possible wreckage from the rocket covered by tarps on the platform’s deck. The rest of the vessel appeared undamaged.

These photos do not show as much wreckage as I would have expected, though my expectations here aren’t based on much knowledge. I would have thought that the first stage remains would have been more substantial.

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Cruz and Rubio to chair important space and science subcommittees

3:40 pm

We are about to find out how conservative and pro-private enterprise senators Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Marco Rubio (R-Florida) really are. Both have been assigned as chairmen of important subcommittees managing NASA and NOAA.

Cruz will chair the subcommittee on Space, Science, and Competitiveness, which handles NASA, while Rubio will chair the subcommittee that handles NOAA.

For Cruz especially this position will challenge him to prove his tea party credentials. If he is in favor of private space as much as he claims, we will see him work to trim SLS, a pork project with no hope of achieving anything in space, and favor the commercial space effort, even though SLS brings much more pork into his state.

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“The freedom to write history without intimidation was no longer something that I took for granted.”

10:26 am

bombhead

The religion of peace strikes again! A scholar on Roman history and his family were threatened with death threats when he wrote a book, followed by a television documentary, about the fall of Rome in the Middle East and how his research raised questions about the life of Mohammed.

Just a few minutes into the broadcast, my Twitter stream was going up in smoke. By the time the show ended, the death threats were coming in thick and fast—and not just against me but against my family as well. Channel 4 was also deluged with protests. A private screening scheduled for assorted movers and shakers had to be canceled after the police warned that they couldn’t guarantee the security of those attending the event. Because many of the invitees had been journalists, this naturally gave the controversy a new lease of life.

Two weeks later, I was still fielding death threats from Muslims convinced that the only plausible explanation for my having made the film was that I was in the pay of Mossad or the CIA or both. The most chilling moment of all came when Press TV, a propaganda arm of the Iranian government, aired a documentary leveling pretty much that accusation. It was the one time that I seriously imagined I might end up as the new Salman Rushdie.

As I said, hate and violence appears to be a feature of Islam, not a bug.

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The madness of IRS Obamacare paperwork

10:09 am

Finding out what’s in it: Tax preparers discover that Obamacare adds so much paperwork to their work it isn’t worth it to do it.

About two-thirds of the way through the morning I questioned the whole process. I stated that if someone walked into to my office who was receiving the [Obamacare subsidy] that I would not accept them as a client. The cost of preparing the paperwork to get them properly qualified to receive the benefit would exceed anything I could reasonably charge them. The instructor, a fine fellow from Iowa, stated he unfortunately had to agree with me. So now tax preparers will have to decide whether to accept clients based on our health care system — just like doctors.

There’s lot more. Read the whole thing.

But you voted for Obama and the Democrats because they care. Aren’t you proud?!

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Jihadists kill thousands

9:50 am

bombhead

The religion of peace marches on! Thousands dead in another Boko Haram massacre in Nigeria.

District head Baba Abba Hassan said most victims are children, women and elderly people who could not run fast enough when insurgents drove into Baga, firing rocket-propelled grenades and assault rifles on town residents. “The human carnage perpetrated by Boko Haram terrorists in Baga was enormous,” Muhammad Abba Gava, a spokesman for poorly armed civilians in a defence group that fights Boko Haram, told the Associated Press. He said the civilian fighters gave up on trying to count all the bodies. “No one could attend to the corpses and even the seriously injured ones who may have died by now,” Gava said.

The key word above is “another”. Killings like this are not a bug in Islam, they are a feature.

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“Dear France, wrap their bodies in the carcasses of pigs.”

3:38 pm

Erick Erickson asks the good question: If the terrorists are not real Muslims, why is it that our intellectual elites object to burying their bodies with the pigs of carcasses?

To do this would be to exacerbate the situation and cause further strife and outrage among muslims. And we could not have that, could we? So either they are the muslims the media has claimed they were not or . . .

I ask: why should any Muslim object? If these murderers do not represent Islam or are not real Muslims, why would any real Muslim want to protect them in any way?

Unless the real Muslims sympathize with these murderers and what they stood for, deep down.

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Islamophobia is a myth created by the bigotry of the elites

10:02 am

Link here.

Islamophobia is a code word for mainstream European elites’ fear of their own populations, of their native hordes, whom they imagine to be unenlightened, prejudiced, easily led by the tabloid media, and given to outbursts of spite and violence. The thing that keeps the Islamophobia panic alive is not actual violence against Muslims but the right-on politicos’ ill-founded yet deeply held view of ordinary Europeans, especially those of a working-class variety, as racist and stupid. This is the terrible irony of the Islamophobia panic: The fearers of anti-Muslim violence claim to be challenging prejudice but actually they reveal their own prejudices, their distrust of and disdain for those who come from the other side of the tracks, read different newspapers, hold different beliefs, live different lives. They accuse stupid white communities of viewing Muslims as an indistinguishable mob who threaten the fabric of European society, which is exactly what they think of stupid white communities.

I would only suggest that this elite bigotry is not limited to European elites, but applies as well to the leftwing elites throughout the entire first world, including the Unites States. They hate conservatives and the general population that is not part of their upper class intellectual community, and express it repeatedly by their expectation of Islamic bigotry that never happens.

Meanwhile, a landmark synagogue in Paris was forced closed on the Sabbath this weekend, for the first time since World War II, because of Islamic antisemitism.

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Dragon reaches orbit

3:00 am

Another successful Falcon 9 launch for SpaceX this morning, placing a Dragon capsule in the correct orbit for rendezvous and berthing with ISS.

We still await word on the attempt to land the first stage of the rocket on a barge in the Atlantic. From the link above: “SpaceX founder Elon Musk has tweeted an update: ‘Rocket made it to drone spaceport ship, but landed hard. Close, but no cigar this time. Bodes well for the future tho.'” More details here.

Based on what they have released, SpaceX has achieved something pretty incredible for its first attempt, actually hitting the floating ship at landing. That the landing itself was not soft or gently is literally only a detail. They will have the opportunity on future launches to get it right.

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Senate Republicans call for gas tax hike

5:57 pm

Lying slime: A number of Senate Republicans have joined with Democrats to call for an increase in the gas tax.

Though the last time the gas tax was increased was during Bill Clinton’s presidency, the only reason the highway fund is short of money is that they don’t spend it wisely, wasting a lot on stupid projects. (Sounds a lot like almost everything the federal government does, doesn’t it?) Rather than increase the tax, Congress should take a close look at how the money is being spent, and clamp down.

I should note that House Republicans have already said that they will oppose this increase. Whether they stay that course however remains to be seen.

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California newspaper vandalized for defying pro-immigration groups

9:17 am

Fascists: A California newspaper has been vandalized because of its insistence on describing illegal immigrants as “illegal immigrants”.

The Santa Barbara News-Press’s front entrance was sprayed with the message “The border is illegal, not the people who cross it” in red paint, sometime either Wednesday night or early Thursday, according to the newspaper’s director of operations, Donald Katich. The attack came amid wider objections to a News-Press headline that used the word “illegals” alongside a story on California granting driver’s licenses to people in the country illegally.

So will someone explain to me how these pro-immigration vandals are any different from the Islamic terrorists who murdered the cartoonists at the French magazine Charlie Hebdo?

In truth, they are only different in their scale of violence. The pro-immigration vandals have not yet risen to the level of the Islamic terrorists, but give them time, give them time. Anyone who thinks violence and destruction is acceptable to prove their point will eventually decide that murder is acceptable as well.

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Airbus-Safran demand total control of Arianespace

9:00 am

The heat of competition: The European joint-venture between Airbus and Safran is now demanding that be given total control of Arianespace and the development of the new Ariane 6 rocket.

From Airbus’ perspective, the production of rockets in Europe should be done the same way commercial Airbus aircraft are built. “The launcher business in Europe in the beginning of 2014 was one in which the vehicles were designed by government agencies, commercialized by a company called Arianespace, produced by an ensemble of companies, and then launched by Arianespace. This is not an optimal situation,” [Airbus strategy director Marwan] Lahoud said.

“The optimal solution is to industrialize the process, with one prime contractor that designs, builds, sells and operates the launchers, with a supply chain — much as we do with Airbus today.”

Essentially, this would be a shift in ownership of the rocket, moving from the government to the private company. We have seen the same process in the U.S., with the new commercial space products no longer controlled or designed by NASA. The result has been lower cost, faster development, and greater profits.

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Travel posters for alien worlds

8:46 am

NASA has produced retro-style travel posters for three alien exoplanets which you can download and print.

The posters are quite cool, which is not surprising, considering that, in the past four decades, the best interplanetary travel that NASA has been able to achieve has been its graphic power-point and pr images. Unfortunately, for NASA actually going there has not been so easy.

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New York Times explains why it won’t publish Charlie Hebdo cartoons

8:36 am

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Cowards: “[L]et’s not forget the Muslim family in Brooklyn who read us and is offended by any depiction of what he sees as his prophet.”

Note that the Times has had no reluctance to show images that are as equally offensive to its Christian and Jewish readers. I wonder why the Muslims get this special treatment?

Meanwhile, representatives of the religion of peace have now taken hostages, both in a factory near Charles De Gaulle Airport as well as in a kosher grocery store in Paris.

Update: It appears both hostage situations have ended.

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9 of the 10 worst countries for Christian persecution are Islamic

11:12 pm

The religion of peace: A new assessment of Christian persecution worldwide has found that of the top ten most religiously oppressive nations nine are Islamic.

North Korea tops the list, but the rest are all countries where the majority of the population is Muslim. The report also found that “Islamic extremism is the main source of persecution in 40 of the 50 countries on the 2015 World Watch List.”

I wonder what these facts tell us? Anyone care to venture a guess? Maybe we should condemn Israel for this oppression? Yeah, that makes sense!

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Ancient fossils on Mars?

8:41 am

A close look at features on the Martian surface seen by Curiosity suggests to one scientist the presence of ancient fossils of carpet-like microbiology.

On Earth, carpet-like colonies of microbes trap and rearrange sediments in shallow bodies of water such as lakes and costal areas, forming distinctive features that fossilize over time. These structures, known as microbially-induced sedimentary structures (or MISS), are found in shallow water settings all over the world and in ancient rocks spanning Earth’s history.

Nora Noffke, a geobiologist at Old Dominion University in Virginia, has spent the past 20 years studying these microbial structures. Last year, she reported the discovery of MISS that are 3.48 billion years old in the Western Australia’s Dresser Formation, making them potentially the oldest signs of life on Earth.

In a paper published online last month in the journal Astrobiology (the print version comes out this week), Noffke details the striking morphological similarities between Martian sedimentary structures in the Gillespie Lake outcrop (which is at most 3.7 billion years old) and microbial structures on Earth.

Noffke is very careful in her analysis. She doesn’t claim any proofs, only that her expert eye sees the same things on both planets. Most intriguing.

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The sunspot cycle update for December

3:49 pm

The monthly update by NOAA of the solar cycle, showing the sunspot activity for the Sun in December, was released this past weekend. As I do every month, I am posting it here, below the fold, with annotations to give it context.

Even though sunspot activity in December increased, the slow ramp down to solar minimum continues to track the 2009 prediction of the solar scientist community. The overall intensity of the solar maximum prior to 2014 was considerable less than this prediction, but the numbers throughout 2014 matched that prediction remarkably well.
» Read more

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Do not submit!

12:34 pm

Mohammed Bomb cartoon

The cartoon on the right prompted the first Islamic riots. More recent ones in the French magazine Charlie Hebdo apparently prompted today’s violent murders.

The goal of these Islamic acts of violence: To stop people from criticizing Islam.

My goal in publishing this cartoon: To defy these thugs and to encourage people to criticize Islam. In the past two decades we have seen nothing but violence, terrorism, death, and destruction from this Arabic religion, fed by hatred and bigotry of Jews and Christians. It is time to say so, bluntly.

If Muslims wish this criticism to stop, they need to do something about it themselves, as the President of Egypt has, instead of demanding others to shut up.

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Islam murders 12 people at magazine

9:12 am

The religion of peace strikes again: Twelve people were murdered today by Islamic terrorists at a French satirical magazine.

The magazine, Charlie Hebdo, had published many cartoons making fun of religion. Fortunately, they were able to avoid the hoards of Jewish and Christian terrorists that tried to kill them.

In addition, a car bomb has exploded in front of a synagogue in the suburbs of Paris. Update: An accident unrelated to terrorism.

The Obama administration has been quick to act, condemning the attacks while once again insisting that Islam is “a peaceful religion.” That is a quote, today, by Obama’s own press secretary.

Make sure you read James Delingpole’s prediction of what will happen next as our leaders will do anything to avoid facing reality so they can continue to live in a fantasy world where Islam is our friend and it is the evil racism of the west that caused this tragedy.

In defiance of Islam’s effort to impose its will on us all, here is a link to some of the cartoons Charlie Hebdo previously published making fun of Islam. Click on it. Spread it around. Let’s have everyone see it!

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Comet impact theory replaced by common house fires

8:56 am

The uncertainty of science: Fused droplets found in many places across the globe and theorized to have come from a comet major impact that caused a major climate change around 13,000 years ago have now been found to have instead come from common house fires.

Since the 1970s when the Walter Alvarez found evidence of an asteroid impact in the Yucatan that could have caused the dinosaur extinction 65 million years ago, planetary scientists have seen asteroid or comet impacts everywhere. After all, impacts are cool disasters that play well to television producers and funding agencies.

Read this story however. It describes some very solid scientific work that wipes out one one of those cool theories, replacing it with something quite mundane.

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