Fascists: Animal rights activists want to blacklist the metal band Metallica from a music festival because one of its members is a hunter.
Why Japan (and Germany) really lost World War II.
The article also illustrates with facts why Russia would have lost to the U.S. as well if we had fought them then, before they got the bomb.
Read it. The facts are quite astonishing. Moreover, I have read a number of histories of World War II from the perspective of the Japanese and the Germans, and in both cases their experience matches the facts laid out by this article: The depth of the U.S. manufacturing capability — created by freedom and property rights and small government — was beyond anything the Axis powers could match. As the war continued it overwhelmed them.
The biggest non-event in this past Tuesday’s election: Mississippi’s new voter ID law went into effect and there were no problems.
As Sid Salter from the Clarion Ledger put it, the voter ID law was a “non-event” and “voters expressed little, if any, inconvenience at the polls due to the new law.” So how is the new law being covered by the media? Instead of reporting that the voter ID law is “sailing through,” the mainstream media has instead elected to remain silent.
The media did not report this non-story because it didn’t serve the partisan fear-mongering of the Democratic Party, which has been claiming since 2000 that voter id laws are designed to suppress the black vote — as if black voters are too stupid to have ID. The truth is that these laws only suppress one thing: voter fraud, something that it appears the Democratic Party depends on all too often to win elections.
Transparency! Dozens of Veterans Administration whistle-blowers have been punished by their management for reporting management problems.
The retaliations included suspensions, demotions, and reassignments.
The VA scandal continues to reveal the kind of future we face with Obamacare.
Oklahoma today joined Indiana and South Carolina in pulling out of the Common Core education standards that have been imposed by the federal government.
All told, seventeen states are pushing back against the federal standards, with four states, Alaska, Nebraska, Texas, and Virginia, refusing to participate at all.
A new analysis of Apollo lunar rocks provides strong new evidence for the theory that the Moon was formed when the Earth was hit by a Mars’ sized planet.
The abstract from this just released science paper summarizes the scientific problem.
Earth formed in a series of giant impacts, and the last one made the Moon. This idea, an edifice of post-Apollo science, can explain the Moon’s globally melted silicate composition, its lack of water and iron, and its anomalously large mass and angular momentum. But the theory is seriously called to question by increasingly detailed geochemical analysis of lunar rocks. Lunar samples should be easily distinguishable from Earth, because the Moon derives mostly from the impacting planet, in standard models of the theory. But lunar rocks are the same as Earth in O, Ti, Cr, W, K, and other species, to measurement precision. Some regard this as a repudiation of the theory; others say it wants a reformation. Ideas put forward to salvage or revise it are evaluated, alongside their relationships to past models and their implications for planet formation and Earth.
The new analysis has found that lunar rocks do differ from Earth in certain ways. Not surprisingly, however, the results have uncertainties.
Some additional details about Airbus’s spaceplane, its recent successful drop tests, and the company’s future plans.
The design has similar to XCOR’s Lynx. It would take off and land from a runway and do a suborbital flight without the need of a mother ship.
Mojave Spaceport temporarily evacuated due to a small scrap metal fire.
The official statement can be read here. As noted by Doug Messier,
There’s a question of why scrap material (or any other flammable material) was anywhere near a tank full of nitrous oxide. In consulting with one expert who uses nitrous oxide, I was told that a blast could have possibly damaged everything within 1,000 feet. That’s basically two complete football fields with end zones plus another 93 yards. There are a lot of irreplaceable people and technologies within 1,000 feet of where that fire took place.
Then again, a fire can occur almost anywhere, and it is often impossible to keep it away from flammable materials.
Believe it or not, it appears that organic or “green” kitty litter is the cause of the leak that has shut down a nuclear waste facility in New Mexico.
Pushback: Disgusted with getting petty citations from their Florida city for the look of their home, a Bradenton couple has had it painted with a giant American flag.
Americans the Obama Administration has left behind.
It sickens me that the Obama administration has been justifying ransoming terrorist leaders for a probable deserter by reciting the creed that America never leaves a man behind. The Obama administration frequently leaves men (and even children) to suffer and die, with minimal apparent effort on their behalf. A partial list:
Why the crickets on the Hawaiian islands stopped singing twenty years ago.
Believe it or not, they actually evolved.
The rupture of a drum at a nuclear waste site in New Mexico has shut down a neutrino experiment.
This article, from Nature, focuses on the harm done to the science experiment, which is considerable and very unfortunate. However, scroll to the end of the article to learn a little about the drum rupture, which has serious implications for the storage of nuclear waste anywhere.
India will do a planned midcourse engine burn of its Mangalyaan Mars orbiter on June 11.
So far, all is well with the spacecraft, which is scheduled to arrive at Mars in September.
Senator Richard Shelby’s poison pill in the Senate NASA budget bill that will double the cost of manned commercial space.
Essentially Shelby wants to require the commercial companies to follow the older paperwork requirements used by NASA in the past. Presently, the contract arrangements NASA has used for these new companies have been efficient and relatively paperwork free, allowing them to build their cargo freighters (Dragon and Cygnus) and their manned spacecraft (Dragon V2, CST-100, and Dream Chaser) for relatively little.
The older contract rules are what NASA has used for Constellation and SLS as well as all past attempts to replace the shuttle. In every case, the costs were so high the replacement was never finished. In the case of SLS, the costs will be so high it will never accomplish anything.
Why has Shelby (R-Alabama) inserted this language? He wants pork, and SLS is the way to get it. Rather than cut the cost of SLS to make it more competitive (and which will reduce the pork in his state) Shelby instead wants to make the new commercial companies more costly, thus making SLS appear more competitive. It will still cost too much and will not accomplish anything, but this way he will be able to better argue for it in congressional negotiations.
Shelby illustrates clearly that the desire to waste the taxpayers’ money is not confined to the spendthrifts in the Democratic Party. Republicans can do it to!
Want to own your own Apollo capsule from the 1960s?
Apparently nobody wants to buy a spaceship, at least not for $200,000. St. Louis-based auction company Regency-Superior reported no bids on Wednesday for former Lt. Gov. Lonnie Hammargren’s 1960s Apollo Command Module Block 1 mock-up, which was a fixture in the retired neurosurgeon’s eclectic collection since he acquired it in the mid-1970s.
The capsule remains available still at the minimum price if you go to the auction house’s website.
Weather has once again delayed the test flight of a new Mars-landing parachute system on a saucer shaped launch vehicle.
The next launch opportunity is Saturday, June 7.
The competition heats up: SpaceX plans to boost production of its rockets to 2 per month by year’s end.
They need to do this to prove they can launch their backlog of contracts of commercial satellites. And I will say this once again, I see nothing in their history to suggest that they won’t succeed.
The investigation into the failure of the Russian Proton rocket on May 16 says it will make its report by June 8.
The story says that the results will not be “sensational” but that they will also be accompanied by further delays in future Proton launches.
The competition heats up: Aerojet Rocketdyne says it can replace the Russian rocket engines used by American rockets for $20 to $25 million per engine.
Including legacy systems and various risk-reduction projects, Aerojet Rocketdyne has spent roughly $300 million working on technologies that will feed into the AR-1, Seymour said during a June 3 roundtable with Aviation Week editors. The effort to build a new, 500,000-lb. thrust liquid oxygen/kerosene propulsion system would take about four years from contract award and cost roughly $800 million to $1 billion. Such an engine is eyed for United Launch Alliance’s (ULA) Atlas V rocket as well as Orbital’s Antares and, possibly, Space Exploration Technology’s Falcon 9 v1.1.
This is roughly the same price cited for the cost of standing up U.S. co-production of the RD-180 engine, which is manufactured by NPO Energomash of Russia and sold to ULA for the Atlas V through a joint venture with Pratt & Whitney.
Unfortunately, this announcement is part of a lobbying effort to get Congress to fund the new engine rather than a commitment by Aerojet to build it themselves. Thus, I fully expect them to go over budget and for the engine to cost significantly more once in production, facts that will make it less competitive in the future.
The x-ray instrument on the orbiting Swift gamma-ray telescope has shut down.
The problem has not affected Swift’s optical and ultraviolet instruments. Engineers are working on the problem, though it is unclear now whether they fix it.
“Homofascism should be crushed.”
Klavan starts out by bluntly saying that he thinks the government should stay out of the marriage issue, and that if gays want to marry it ain’t any of his business. All power to them. Then he continues.
Having said all this, I think Homofascism — this current movement to regulate and restrict opinions and outlooks toward homosexuality — indeed, toward anything — should be crushed. Lawsuits against photographers who won’t shoot gay weddings. Television show cancellations because the hosts oppose gay marriage. Attempts to silence anti-gay preaching or force churches to recognize gay marriages. Crushed, all of it. Crushed by the united voice of the people, crushed in courts of law, in legislatures, in businesses and in conversation. When someone is sued, attacked, shamed, boycotted or fired for opposing gay marriage or just opposing gayness in general, straight and gay people alike should protest. No one should lose his television show, no one should be dragged before a judge, no one should have his business threatened. Don’t tell me about a company’s right to fire its employees. It has the right, but it isn’t right. It’s unAmerican and it’s despicable.
Very well said.
Finding out what’s in it: Almost three million Americans who signed up for Medicaid under Obamacare have not yet had their applications processed.
The problems are most acute in three states — California, Illinois and North Carolina — where almost 1.5 million Medicaid applicants remain in limbo. Though all three are experiencing high volumes of enrollment, problems vary from California’s balky electronic sign-up system to Illinois’ inability to predict a surge of applications.
The waits are linked in part to the troubled rollout of the federal insurance website healthcare.gov last fall. Alaska, Kansas, Maine and Michigan still are unable to receive applications their residents completed through the federal website. Others such as Georgia received applications submitted last fall in May.
And how is this problem really any different than the problems recently revealed at the VA? In both cases, a large government bureaucracy can’t handle a simple task efficiently and properly. Worse, no one should be surprised. This is what conservatives and tea party activists have been saying since 2009. When you ask the government to handle these kinds of large complex tasks it almost always does a bad job.
The competition heats up: On Monday the Russians announced that they plan to fly two tourists around the Moon by 2017.
This is in conjunction with Space Adventures and the previous tourist flights that have gone to ISS. They say they have two customers willing to pay the $150 million ticket price, but they have also been saying this for years. I am not sure I believe them anymore.
House and Senate budgets for NASA give almost full funding to manned commercial space while boosting SLS.
The bill would provide $1.7 billion for the heavy-lift SLS rocket, some $350 million more than the White House requested for 2015, and $100 million more than the House has proposed. SLS is being built at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), ranking member of the Senate Appropriations commerce, justice, science subcommittee, is an ardent defender of the center.
The bill also provides $805 million for NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, under which the agency is funding work on three competing astronaut transportation systems with the goal of having at least one delivering crews to and from the international space station by the end of 2017. The White House requested $850 million next year for Commercial Crew, its top human spaceflight development priority. The House proposed $785 million, which would represent a high water mark on a program that has never received the full funding sought by the White House.
That the proposed budgets made only tiny cuts to commercial space indicates that the political clout of this program is growing, since in previous budget years Congress had trimmed this program’s budget much more significantly. That Congress continues to also feed gobs of money to SLS, even though it won’t be able to fly more than 1.5 missions because of a lack of a European service module, indicates that these legislators are really only throwing pork at whatever they think will buy them votes, without any concern for the overall federal budget, instead of using their brains to pick and choose the smartest projects to fund.
The uncertainty of science: Solar scientists admit they at this point have no idea what the Sun will do after it completes is present solar maximum.
I’ve only been say this now for six years. I’m glad the scientists have finally come around to admitting it strongly and in public.
The competition heats up: Airbus has begun drop tests of a scale-model version of its own suborbital spaceplane.
The video at the link is very disappointing, as it cuts off almost immediately after the spaceplane is released, showing nothing of what happened and how it landed. Nonetheless, that Airbus is testing such technology means that they are considering competing with other suborbital companies like Virgin Galactic and XCOR.
More details here, but they are scanty as well.
Heh: A transcript of the phone conversation between Barack Obama and Dwight Eisenhower on the eve of the invasion of Normandy.
The 70th anniversary of D-Day is Friday. Remember well a time when Americans stood unflinchingly for freedom.
The solar-powered experimental airplane Solar Impulse 2 made its maiden flight on Monday.
The solar-powered aircraft took off at 5:36 AM CET, when the weather around the aerodrome was at its calmest, with pilot Markus Scherdel at the controls. The aircraft flew for two hours and 17 minutes, reaching an altitude of 1,670 m (5,500 ft) and a ground speed of 55.6 km/h (30 kt). According to Solar Impulse, the in-flight data indicates that the aircraft slated to make the first all-solar global circumnavigation flight performed to expectations.
The goal is to use this plane to fly around the world in 2015. Videos of the take off and landing below the fold. The plane gets off the ground very quickly, does not move very fast, and is balanced precariously on a single set of wheels in the center. If you look closely before takeoff, there are two guys literally holding the wings up at each end to balance it. They have to run with the plane for the first few seconds until it gets enough lift to balance on its own. The landing video shows both bicyclists and men racing to meet up with the wings to hold them up once the plane stops.
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Further details on Google’s proposed 180 satellite constellation for providing internet access worldwide.
The more satellites that can be fit on a single rocket, the cheaper it is to send those satellites into space.
For Google’s plan to fit its budget, the company will have to figure out how to pack more capacity into a smaller package. O3b Networks, the satellite start-up backed by Google, is currently working with 1,500-pound satellites that can provide broadband Internet connectivity. O3b’s first four satellites were launched last June from French Guiana atop a Russian-built Soyuz rocket.
Google reportedly wants satellites that weigh just 250 pounds — and is said to be hiring engineers from Space Systems/Loral, a satellite-building company, to work on the project. If Google could use satellites that small for telecommunications, it would be a “radical advance” in the field, Farrar said.
