Category: Essays And Commentaries

Long essays or op-ed length commentaries on the issues of the day or on topics of special interest.

Part 3: Fixing our bloated federal government and the administrative state is going to take decades

12:43 pm

The lion now is roaring, quite loudly
The lion now is roaring, quite loudly.
Photo by Travis Jervey.

In part 1 of this series I described how it appears the American public today is no longer asleep and is instead very aggressively participating in the political and cultural debate in ways it has not in many decades, noting how this shift suggests we are experiencing a much more fundamental societal change than a mere shift in voting demographics.

In part 2 of this series I described how this fundamental shift has begun to express itself within the courts and politics in ways unheard of only five years ago. This expression illustrates the bottom-up nature of America, whereby the citizen is sovereign and our so-called leaders can only resist what those citizens want for only so long. And when those citizens become energized, as they now are, that resistance will evaporate with amazing speed.

In part 3 today I am going to take a more pessimistic view, based not on recent events but on the longer view I take naturally as a historian. I do this all the time in my histories. In Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, in describing the political background behind that mission, I could not help noting how that mission changed America and its social goals significantly, for both good and ill. In Leaving Earth, I opened the book like so:

Societies change. Though humans have difficulty perceiving this fact during their lifetimes, the tide of change inexorably rolls forward, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse.

I then documented in detail the space efforts by both Russia and the United States in the decades after the Apollo landing and the politics behind those programs, with both providing a great window into how both societies changed in the second half of the 20th century. As I concluded, “They were like ships passing in the night.”

Similarly, the major cultural and political shift away from big government and the regulatory state that I think we are now experiencing in the United States is not going to change our country overnight. These things take time. People who firmly believe it is a good idea to “gender affirm” confused little kids by cutting off their breasts or castrating them are not going to change their minds easily. People who believe in big government — especially those who benefit from it — are not going to meekly allow that big government and those benefits to vanish without a fight.

The left’s long march through the institutions
» Read more

2 comments

Freedom wins again: SpaceX completes the 6th orbital test flight of Starship/Superheavy

3:50 pm

Starship/Superheavy at T+6 seconds

SpaceX today successfully completed the sixth orbital test flight of its Starship/Superheavy heavy lift rocket, only forty days after its previous test flight, the shortest turn-around so far, mainly because the FAA imposed no red tape to hold SpaceX back.

Before describing details of the flight, it is essential to note that this giant rocket, bigger than the Saturn-5 that sent Apollo astronauts to the Moon and intended to be completely reusable and being designed to be able to relaunch in mere hours, has been conceived, designed, built, and tested entirely by a private company and free American citizens, funded almost entirely by private investment capital hoping to make a profit from the rocket. The government and NASA has played almost no part, except possibly using its regulatory power improperly to slow development down by a year or two.

Even more important its development has cost a tiny amount compared to similar government programs, and has been accomplished in less than a third of the time.

Thus this rocket is a perfect example of freedom in action. Get the government out of the way and allow humans the freedom to follow their dreams, and they will do astonishing things.

As for the flight, Superheavy worked perfectly in getting Starship off the launchpad and on its way into orbit. However, engineers canceled a second tower catch attempt and instead diverted Superheavy to complete a soft splashdown just off the coast in the Gulf of Mexico. The booster touched down on the water quite softly, and then fell over into the water. Expect SpaceX to quickly do salvage operations to recover it.

Starship reached its orbit as planned, carrying for the first time a payload, a single plastic banana suspended by cords in the center of the Pez deployment payload bay where SpaceX hopes to soon begin deploying Starlink satellites. Though somewhat silly, the banana is being used by SpaceX and the FAA to certify future payload operations.

About 38 minutes into the flight engineers did the first re-light of one Raptor-2 engine while in orbit, the burn lasting about three-four seconds. This burn demonstrated that Starship is capable of doing a de-orbit burn so that in a future flight it can be launched into a full orbit and use the engines to bring it back to a precise location on Earth, including possibly a return to the launch tower for its own chopstick catch.

Starship splashing down vertically
Starship splashing down vertically

During re-entry the flight plan called for pushing Starship beyond its technical margins in order to learn exactly what those limits were. Even so, it appeared that — unlike the previous flights — there was very little evidence of damage to the flaps from the heat of re-entry. One flap appeared to have damage at one pointed end, and even that burn-through appeared far less than the previous flights.

During final descent and moving slower than the speed of sound they pointed the ship nose down in order to stress the flaps the most. Even so, the ship performed as planned, and splashed down softly and vertically in the Indian Ocean.

Though the flight plan for this Starship flight as well as the previous flights was purposely designed to bring it back to Earth before it completes an orbit, this was still essentially a successful orbital launch, and thus I am including it in my launch totals. The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

118 SpaceX
53 China
13 Russia
12 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise now leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 136 to 79, while SpaceX by itself leads the entire world, including American companies, 118 to 97.

21 comments

Part 2: The waking sleeping giant lurks not just in public places

11:05 am

The lion now is roaring, quite loudly
The lion now is roaring, quite loudly.
Photo by Travis Jervey.

In the first part yesterday of this three part essay, I described how Americans are no longer the disinterested public that we have seen for more than a half century. No longer is the left the only group with passion. Ordinary Americans are now paying attention, and appear aggressively unwilling to allow leftist bad policy and slanderous blacklisting go unchallenged. The public might not be partisan Republicans or conservatives, but it is nonetheless finally aware and outraged by the leftist agenda that has dominated government policy for the past decade, including policies that encouraged the mutilation and castration of children, allowed the queer agenda in schools, promoted anti-Semitism and bigotry throughout the workforce, and fueled an out-of-control federal government that only serves itself even as it squashes the freedoms of ordinary people.

In today’s second part, I wish to dig deeper, because the public’s willing outrage has already caused unexpected major attitude changes in places where such changes have been impossible for decades.

Let us begin with a somewhat complex court decision that I reported on last week. In this court decision, a two-judge panel went beyond the specifics of the lawsuit before it to rule instead on the basic legal authority of the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), concluding that its decades-long requirement that all government agencies obey its environmental recommendations in writing regulations was illegal, that CEQ simply did not have the statutory authority to do this.

As I said, the case itself is very complex. It is not even clear this ruling will stand up, since in the end the CEQ’s recommendations essentially reflect those of the President, whose authority to determine how the agencies under him create regulations based on Congressional law is legal and quite final.

The point however is not whether this decision will stand up. The point is that the judges were quite willing to rule on the legal authority of a government entity, and rule against its authority, essentially invalidating its power.
» Read more

9 comments

Part 1: The sleeping giant of the American public has finally awakened

1:20 pm

Rick, stating the truth in Casablanca
Have Americans finally awakened?

In my long life there have been a number of times post-election when pundits nationwide have claimed that the results signaled a major cultural transition. This claim was made in 1980 when Ronald Reagan was elected president. It was made again in 1994 when voters gave the Republicans their first majority in the House of Representatives in about four decades. A similar claim was made in 2016, when Trump was elected for the first time.

In every single one of these cases the claim was false. There was no major cultural transition. Republicans might have won control, but the American public and its political class still largely leaned leftward. There was almost no change politically. Despite for example Bill Clinton’s announcement that “The era of big government is over” after the 1994 election, the federal government continued to grow in size and power, and to do so with ever increasing speed.

Even more significant, in every single case, the American people went back to sleep after the election. They considered the election their statement of what must be done, and assumed naively that the new elected officials would obey that statement. No matter how much conservatives attempted to make the public aware that the government remained out of control and was further beginning to institute leftist policies far outside what anyone in America wanted, those attempts fell on deaf ears.

The American people were essentially not interested. The only political movement that moved with any passion was that of the left, and it took advantage of this passion to successfully to get its policies imposed.

It seems however that the 2024 election signals a real cultural transition, far deeper and more significant than the mere shift of voting patterns to the right that most pundits are noting by all demographic groups.

No, what is happening is a shift in passion. The American public has awakened in a way I have never seen. I give you this news report as a clear sign, as the events it describes occurred last week, after the November election, when Americans in the past would gone back into slumber and stop paying attention. Watch and be amazed, not just by the outrage by hundreds of ordinary citizens, but by the fact that this outrage was reported correctly and sympathetically by a television news report.
» Read more

21 comments

Freedom: What Trump’s election will mean for America’s space policy

2:24 pm

The resounding landslide victory by Donald Trump and the Republicans yesterday is going have enormous consequences across the entire federal government. As a space historian and journalist who has been following, studying, and reporting on space policy for decades, this essay will be my attempt to elucidate what that landslide will mean for NASA, its Artemis program, and the entire American aerospace industry.

The cost of SLS
The absurd cost of each SLS launch

The Artemis Program

Since 2011 I have said over and over that the government-designed and owned SLS, Orion, and later proposed Lunar Gateway space station were all badly conceived. They all cost too much and don’t do the job. Fitting them together to create a long term presence in space is difficult at best and mostly impractical. Their cost and cumbersome design has meant the program to get back to the Moon, as first proposed by George Bush Jr. in 2004, is now more than a decade behind schedule and many billions over budget. Worse, under the present program as currently contrived that manned lunar landing will likely be delayed five more years, at a minimum.

For example, at present SLS is underpowered. It can’t get astronauts to and from the Moon, as the Saturn-5 rocket did in the 1960s. For the first manned lunar landing mission, Artemis-4, SLS will simply launch four astronauts in Orion to lunar orbit, where Orion will rendezvous and dock with the lunar lander version of Starship. That Starship in turn will require refueling in Earth orbit, using a proposed fuel depot that has been filled by multiple earlier Starship launches.

Once Starship is docked to Orion the crew will transfer to Starship to get up and down from the Moon, and then return to Earth in Orion.

You think that’s complicated? » Read more

36 comments

Expect fewer and less violent protests should Trump win

11:46 am

Nazi brown shirts destroying Jewish businesses on Kristallnacht
No more American Kristallnachts

Based on recent events, I am willing to predict that we shall see much less violence than expected in the days after the election should Donald Trump win. And if those protests occur, they will mostly be concentrated in Democratic Party strongholds where the protesters feel reasonably confident they can get away with it.

I base this optimistic prediction on the trends we have been seeing. As I first noted in April 2024, the strength of these leftist protests has clearly lost steam in the last four years. While in 2020 the protests and looting and violence occurred almost everywhere, destroying many inner cities, in the last year those protests have mostly been confined to college campuses, and have resulted in relatively little damage in comparison.

The reasons have been two fold. First, the authorities, while still generally treating these protesters too gently, have still responded more aggressively. Violent protesters are now arrested. Some face prison terms. Faced with real consequences, this violent leftist protest movement can no longer get the same numbers to turn out.

Second, the protests and violence has declined because of the utter failure of these protests to work. If anything, the looting and destruction has convinced vast numbers of Americans to oppose the left and to now vote with even greater energy against the politicians who support it.

Thought trends have been obvious for months, recently we have had even more evidence that the protests and violence will be less should Trump win. And that evidence is striking.
» Read more

19 comments

Farewell to America

12:57 pm

The Liberty Bell
“Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all
the inhabitants thereof.” Photo credit: William Zhang

Despite my headline, this essay is not intended to be entirely pessimistic. Instead it is my effort to accept a reality that I think few people, including myself, have generally been able to process: The country we shall see after tomorrow’s election will not be the America as founded in 1776 and continued to prosper for the next quarter millennium.

The country can certainly be made great again. Elon Musk’s SpaceX proves it, time after time. The talent and creativity of free Americans is truly endless, and if Donald Trump wins it is very likely that energy will be unleashed again, in ways that no one can predict.

The country can certainly become free again. There is no law that prevents the elimination of bureaucracy and regulation, no matter how immortal government agencies appear to be. The fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 proves this. Though Russia has sadly retreated back to its top-down government-ruling ways, the country did wipe out almost all its bureaucracy in 1991, resulting in an exuberant restart that even today is nowhere near as oppressive as Soviet rule.

Should Donald Trump win, we should have every expectation that he will do the largest house-cleaning of the federal government ever. The benefits will be immeasurable, and magnificent.

What however will not change, even if Donald Trump wins resoundingly tomorrow, is the modern culture and political ethics that now exist. That modern culture is fundamentally different than the America that existed during the country’ s first 200 years, and it guarantees that America can never be the country it once was.
» Read more

23 comments

Has there been a wave of fraudulent election ballots swamping PA? Let’s find out!

2:08 pm

What does the newly discovered election fraud in PA tell us?
What does the newly discovered election
fraud in PA tell us?

In the past week there have been a bunch of stories in the conservative press from three different counties in Pennsylvania, suggesting that each county has been swamped with thousands of fraudulent ballots, produced in bulk and then delivered in large numbers so as to make it difficult to trace or investigate them.

I decided to take a closer look, because this story could either be telling us how corrupt the upcoming election will be, or it might actually be telling us that it is going to be much more reliable than we have anticipated.

The three counties involved are Lancaster, York, and Monroe. All told, less than six thousand voter registration applications, all submitted apparently in bulk by a Arizona-based company called Field+Media Corps, were under review, the number from each county being 2,500, 3,087, and 30 respectively. Note that these do not appear to be actual ballots, but registration forms that would once approved would allow the individual to vote, either by mail or in person.

Of these applications, the reviews have already produced results. For example, York County has found that of the 3,087 submitted, 47% were verified and approved, 29% needed more information, and 24% were declined and are under further review. In Monroe County the investigation has apparently only flagged these 30 forms, with one coming from a deceased person and others flagged for different reasons that in the end might be legitimate.

In Lancaster County officials have not yet issued a report. Initially it announced:
» Read more

14 comments

A return to Phantom and the reminiscences of an Apollo astronaut

3:04 pm

Charles Duke, Apollo 16 astronaut
Charles Duke, Apollo 16 astronaut

Yesterday I had to pleasure of getting my second tour of the Phantom Space facilities, located here in Tucson. Jim Cantrell, the founder of the Tucson-based rocket/satellite company Phantom Space, had last week graciously invited me to attend the event he was holding there, where astronaut Charles Duke, from the April 1972 Apollo 16 lunar landing, would be giving a talk to the company’s employees, investors, and customers. Duke had become an advisor for the company, and this would be his first visit to its operations.

First, the talk by Charles Duke, describing his life and Apollo 16 walk on the Moon, was as usual awe-inspiring, mostly because Duke spoke like every astronaut I’ve ever met so matter-of-factly about what he had done. During the second of three excusions on the surface with his commander John Young, they drove their rover up the slope of nearby Stone Mountain, climbing to an elevation of 500 feet, the highest any human has so far been on the lunar surface. From there he could look back and see for miles, including the entire valley where the lunar module was nestled as well as the mountains and craters that surrounded it.

When I asked him if he had had any sense of his remoteness from humanity, his response was a good-natured laugh. “We felt at home there!” They had done so much study of the terrain beforehand, including simulations, that from the moment they approached to land it all looked very familiar. This is where they were supposed to be!

Following Duke’s presentation we all were given a tour of the facility. My first visit there had been in 2022. At the time Cantrell’s effort was to aggressively succeed from his earlier failure at the rocket startup Vector, focusing this new company on building its Daytona rocket. After the tour I concluded as follows:
» Read more

2 comments

As if on cue, the Democrats now go after Musk for daring to campaign for Trump

12:56 pm

Elon Musk under attack
The target is now Elon Musk

When Elon Musk revealed in May 2022 that he had decided to switch his political allegiance from the Democratic to the Republican Party, he immediately predicted quite correctly the following: “Watch their dirty tricks campaign against me unfold.”

As I noted in detail a year ago, the federal campaign against Musk and his companies since then has been extensive and disgusting, with investigations opened by the Department of Justice, the Federal Trade Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Communications Commission, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Transportation Department.

Nor has this harassment eased in the past year. If anything it has accelerated, with the red tape by the FAA slowing down operations at SpaceX to the point of absurdity.

Now, as the campaign season moves to its climax on election day and the polls increasingly show a major shift in the direction of a Trump win, barring any illegal vote tampering, we should not be surprised that the Democrats are now demanding that Elon Musk shut up, and are doing so by issuing new false accusations against him.

Leading the way was a Wall Street Journal report [behind a pay wall], picked up by all the usual suspects in the propaganda press, based solely on anonymous sources, that accused Musk of having private and secret phone conversations with Vladimir Putin, head of Russia. From this typical propaganda piece at NPR:
» Read more

24 comments

But will loyal Democrats actually abandon their beloved party? History says no

2:57 pm

The Democratic Party: Given decades of blind loyalty by its supporters
The Democratic Party: Decades of blind loyalty
by its supporters

This week the publication Issues and Insights had a poll taken of registered Democrats to garner some idea of their overall opinion of the Democratic Party’s sudden back-room deal to dump Joe Biden as presidential candidate and replace him with Kamala Harris. The poll asked whether those polled agreed or disagreed with these three statements:

  • The process the Democratic Party used to select its nominee for President did not yield the strongest candidate.
  • The process the Democratic Party used to select Kamala Harris as its nominee was undemocratic.
  • I lost significant faith in the Democratic Party because it did not disclose Biden’s health issues during the primary process.

For Democratic Party politicians, the results should be disheartening at best. A significant majority of the 1,240 registered Democrats polled agreed with all three statements, with 58% agreeing strongly or somewhat with the first statement, 52% agreeing strongly or somewhat with the second statement, and 54% agreeing strongly or somewhat with the third statement. As noted by Scott Pinsker of PJMedia in analyzing the results:
» Read more

16 comments

Have Americans finally awakened? Early voting suggests yes

2:02 pm

Rick, stating the truth in Casablanca
Have ordinary Americans finally awakened to the
anti-American plans of the Democratic Party?

For the past few weeks early voting data from a variety of states has begun to suggest a major shift in what have been the traditional voting patterns for decades. In the past, Democrats routinely dominating early mail-in voting, while Republicans instead went to the polls on election day.

This election season is seeing an almost Earth-shattering change.

Nor are these three states outliers. A look at a nationwide map of early voting shows that Republicans also lead in Georgia and Arizona. Though the overall numbers nationwide show a Democrat-Republican split of 46% to 36%, the number of early votes from Republicans this election is far higher than in the past.

Though caution must be exercised, and we must recognize that these numbers do not guarantee a win for Donald Trump, what the data suggests however is an amazing newfound voting enthusiasm among Republicans. » Read more

20 comments

Sinwar’s elimination is merely one small win in Israel’s new quest for total victory

1:39 pm

Hamas vs Israel
The obvious reasons why killing the leaders
of Hamas and Hezbollah is a good thing.
Courtesy of Doug Ross.

The confirmation today that Israel had finally killed Hamas leader Yahha Sinwar, considered the main architect behind the October 7, 2023 murder, rape, and torture of more than a thousand Israeli men, women, children, and babies near Gaza is good news, but it only is one small victory in what is now clearly Israel’s decision to go for nothing less than total victory against the terrorists who have been hounding and killiing its citizens wantonly for decades.

You see, since the 1973 Yom Kippur war, all of Israel’s responses against terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah have been limited and targeted, and ended quickly with fake ceasefires that allowed those terrorist groups to not only regroup, but actually expand their capabilities.

The most blatent and best example of this what happened in connection with Israel’s 2006 month-long invasion of Lebanon, launched in an attempt to defeat Hezbollah. The invasion bogged down, and as a result Israel and Hezbollah ended up agreeing to UN resolution 1701, which had Israel evaculate southern Lebanon and the UN take on the task of keeping the peace. The agreement also created a demilitarized zone in southern Lebanon, where Hezbollah was forbidden.

That agreement was an utter failure. Neither the UN nor Lebanon had the ability or even the desire to limit Hezbollah, and so before long it had made that demilitarized zone a launchpad for rocket attacks into Israel. In Israel’s most recent campaign to clear out that zone, it has also discovered tunnels and large weapons caches clearly designed for Hezbollah’s own planned October 7th-type invasion.

After October 7th, what I labeled Israel’s Pearl Harbor, Israel was clearly no longer going to accept this failed piecemeal and limited negotiating approach, administered by dishonest third parties like the UN and even the United States. Instead, it decided to go by an old American concept of “unconditional surrender,” first made plain by Grant during the Civil War and then underlined by Eisenhower and Roosevelt in their insistence on “total victory” in World War II.

In other words, Israel would only accept a ceasefire or peace treaty if it involved the surrender and capture of the leadership of Hamas and Hezbollah. If they refused to do this, then Israel resolved to kill them.

It has now demonstrated its ability to do so, with gratifying success.

Israel’s military actions since October 7th however also illustrate a major change in strategy and tactics. » Read more

14 comments

The evidence strongly suggests FAA top management is working to sabotage SpaceX

2:44 pm

FAA administrator Mike Whitaker today said this to SpaceX:
FAA administrator Mike Whitaker to SpaceX:
“Nice company you have there. Shame if something
happened to it.”

After SpaceX’s incredibly successful fifth test flight of Starship/Superheavy on October 13, 2024, I began to wonder about the complex bureaucratic history leading up to that flight. I was most puzzled by the repeated claims by FAA officials that it would issue no launch license before late November, yet ended up approving a license in mid-October in direct conflict with these claims. In that context I was also puzzled by the FAA’s own written approval of that launch, which in toto seemed to be a complete vindication of all of SpaceX’s actions while indirectly appearing to be a condemnation of the agency’s own upper management.

What caused the change at the FAA? Why was it claiming no approval until late November when it was clear by early October that SpaceX was preparing for a mid-October launch? And why claim late November when the FAA’s own bureaucracy has now made it clear in approving the launch that a mid-October date was always possible, and nothing SpaceX did prevented that.

I admit my biases: My immediate speculation is always to assume bad behavior by government officials. But was that speculation correct? Could it also be that SpaceX had not done its due diligence properly, causing the delays, as claimed by the FAA?

While doing my first review of the FAA’s written reevaluation [pdf] that approved the October 13th launch, I realized that a much closer review of the history and timeline of events might clarify these questions.

So, below is that timeline, as best as I can put together from the public record. The lesser known acronyms stand for the following:

TCEQ: Texas Commission on Environmental Quality
NMFS: National Marine Fisheries Service (part of NOAA)
FWS: Fish & Wildlife Service (part of the Department of Interior)

My inserted comments periodically tell the story and provide some context.
» Read more

17 comments

SpaceX Starship/Superheavy test flight achieves 100% of its goals

6:53 am

Superheavy after its flight safely captured at Boca Chica
Superheavy after its flight, safely captured at Boca Chica

In SpaceX’s fifth orbital test flight of its Starship/Superheavy rocket, the company astonishingly achieved 100% of its goals, with Superheavy successfully returning to the launch tower and caught by the tower chopsticks on the very first attempt, and Starship successfully completing a soft splashdown in the Indian Ocean, hitting its target landing spot for the first time.

The full video of the live stream is embedded below.

The capture of Superheavy, as shown in the screen capture to the right, was especially incredible. The first attempts to vertically soft land the first stage of the Falcon 9 back in the mid-2010s were not unprecedented, the concept of which had previously been demonstrated by numerous tests on Earth as well as the Apollo landings. The tower chopstick capture of Superheavy was an entirely new concept and had never even been tested previously, anywhere, by anyone. To hit the mark and succeed on the first attempt is mind-boggling. The reaction of the SpaceX employees illustrated this, as they were overwhelmed by their own success.

As for Starship, like the fourth test flight there was some burn through damage seen on at least one of the control flaps, but much less this time. Moreover, the spacecraft was under full control during its entire flight, followed its planned flight plan, and landed on its target in the Indian Ocean.

With that success, I predict SpaceX will do a full orbit of Starship on the next test flight, #6, and attempt to land Starship vertically on land, possibly at Boca Chica or elsewhere. To do this will of course require government approvals, something that will likely slow things down again while accomplishing nothing, because in the end the bureaucrats will have to say yes anyway.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

97 SpaceX
45 China
11 Russia
11 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise still leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 114 to 68, while SpaceX by itself now leads the entire world, including American companies, 97 to 85.
» Read more

46 comments

Study proves that more than a decade after passage the promises of Obamacare were all a pack of lies

1:30 pm

Figure 1 from the study, and possibly its most damning datapoint
Figure 1 from the study, and possibly its most
damning datapoint. ACA stands for Affordable
Care Act, Obamacare’s official name.

A new study comparing the promises made about Obamacare by President Barack Obama and the Democrats in 2010 with the real world results more than a decade later shows that either those promises were a pack of lies, or were pushed by politicians so ignorant of the basic facts of economy that we would have been better off having the legislation written and approved by blind voles.

“Obamacare has failed in every particular – it failed to make health care more affordable; it failed to improve the health of Americans; it piled on an enormous amount of additional debt on taxpayers; it has principally enriched massive insurance company conglomerates, and it now serves as a major impediment to real heath care reforms that would empower patients and doctors,” Phil Kerpen, American Commitment and Unleash Prosperity president and one of the study’s co-authors, told the DCNF. “As we show in this paper, every single promise that was made to pass this law turned out to be false.”

You can read the actual study here. From its executive summary:
» Read more

8 comments

The bad consequences to the bad COVID policies in 2020 continue to pile up

2:27 pm

Lysenko with Stalin
Trofim Lysenko (on the left), preaching to Stalin as he destroyed
Soviet plant research by persecuting anyone who disagreed with him,
thus causing famines that killed millions. He is now the role model for
today’s entire government health community.

Three stories this week illustrate once again that not only did none of the governmental actions imposed by our “betters” during the COVID panic in 2020 work, they are now resulting in long term harm across large populations.

First there was a study of 1.7 million children that found a marked increase in serious heart problems in children who got the jab.

Their research confirmed a large body of evidence showing links between the COVID-19 shots and myocarditis and pericarditis, particularly in adolescents. The research also confirmed that even in 2021, when the vaccine was first authorized for children and teens, that age group did not face a high risk for COVID-19-related serious outcomes, including death or the need for emergency care, hospitalization or critical care.

You can read the paper here [pdf]. Fortunately, the study also found no deaths in either group from these heart conditions, and that new heart ailments among the jabbed children were rare. Nonetheless, the study found solid evidence that the jab caused some harm while doing little to prevent COVID. As noted in the first link:
» Read more

10 comments

FAA and the Biden administration proves it is out to destroy SpaceX

9:47 am

The FAA to SpaceX
The FAA to SpaceX “Nice company you got here.
Sure would be a shame if something happened to it.”

In the past week the FAA proved unequivocally that it is abusing its regulatory powers for political reasons, imposing much harsher regulatory restrictions on SpaceX while allowing other companies much more free rein.

That reality became most evident first with the FAA response to the serious failure of one of the strap-on solid-fueled boosters during the second test launch of ULA’s Vulcan rocket on October 4, 2024. During that launch something went seriously wrong with that booster 38 seconds after launch, involving an explosion and what appeared to be ejection of that booster’s nozzle. Though the launch succeeded in placing its payload into the correct orbit, it required the rocket’s main engines to compensate aggressively.

Despite this, the FAA decided no investigation by it was necessary.

The Federal Aviation Administration, which licenses commercial space launches in the United States, said in a statement that it assessed the booster anomaly and “determined no investigation is warranted at this time.” The FAA is not responsible for regulating launch vehicle anomalies unless they impact public safety.

This decision is correct, but the contrast with the FAA’s treatment of SpaceX is quite striking. If the FAA applied the absurd standard it has been using against SpaceX, it would claim that this Vulcan launch threatened public safety because the incident occurred 38 seconds after launch and was thus relatively close to Florida, where an out of control rocket could potentially threaten public safety.

Such a threat of course really doesn’t exist, as the FAA correctly concluded, because the rocket has a self-destruct system to prevent it from crashing in habitable areas.

Yet the agency failed to use this logic with SpaceX. Instead the FAA decided anything SpaceX launches that doesn’t work perfectly poses a serious public safety threat, no matter where or how it happens, and thus has repeatedly grounded SpaceX launches. A first stage, flown already 23 times, falls over after soft-landing successfully on its drone ship in the middle of the Atlantic, and somehow this justified the FAA grounding SpaceX due to the threat to public safety. A second stage, after successfully placing two astronauts into orbit, misfires during its de-orbit burn but still lands in the middle of the ocean, far from any habitable regions, and somehow this justified the FAA grounding SpaceX due to the threat to public safety.

And the fact that a Superheavy returning to its launchpad at Boca Chica will cause a sonic boom — as do every Falcon 9 landings at Cape Canaveral or Vandenberg — is now justification for grounding Starship/Superheavy test launches, even though sonic booms pose zero threat to anyone other than startling them with the sudden noise.

The FAA further illustrated its bias against SpaceX when it decided to allow the company to do its launch this morning of Europe’s Hera asteroid mission, but specifically stated that the company’s other launches remain grounded.
» Read more

38 comments

NASA pushes discrimination to favor minorities in its education workshops

11:31 am

NASA: dedicated to segregation!
NASA: dedicated to the new segregation!

“Segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!” A NASA press release today proudly touted what it called a “Culturally Inclusive Planetary Engagement in Colorado,” one of a series of recent science/education workships designed specifically to help “black and Latinx youth and their families.”

Though the events are apparently not segregated, it also appears that white and Asian kids and their parents were not really welcome.

Planetary scientists and engineers from Boulder, as well as scientists from Florida, Maryland, and Alaska participated. ReaCH partnered with the Boys & Girls Clubs of Metro Denver, whose staff participated in the workshop to share their perspectives. Other educators local to the Denver area also participated, along with an educational specialist from NASA@ My Library (another Science Activation program). The workshop culminated in an event at the Shopneck Boys & Girls Club in Brighton, CO; workshop participants facilitated a variety of hands-on planetary activities for approximately 120 children. Workshop participants also shared information about college pathways into science professions with teenagers at the Club.

The location and the local organizations were specifically chosen to aid these specific minorites above anyone else.
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Sunspot update: Sunspot activity crashes in September

3:56 pm

As it is the start of the month, it is time another monthly sunspot update, in which I provide some context and analysis to NOAA’s most recent update of its monthly graph tracking the number of sunspots on the Sun’s Earth-facing hemisphere.

After several months in which the number of sunspots rose considerably each month, in September the sunspot count crashed, dropping precipitously to levels closer to the various predictions of solar scientists, but still far above what they had all expected at this time of the solar maximum.

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The mess that presently exists in science

10:16 am

Lysenko with Stalin
Trofim Lysenko (on the left), preaching to Stalin as he destroyed
Soviet plant research by persecuting anyone who disagreed with him,
and caused famines that killed millions.

Two stories today in the peer-review journal Science illustrate bluntly the dry rot that has seeped into the entire peer-review scientific community, much of it caused by the politics and incompetence that always follows when too much government money is available to hand out.

In the first story, Science simply provided a horrifying overall summary of the misconduct and research fakery committed by Eliezer Masliah, who as head of the the Division of Neuroscience at the National Institute of Aging (NIA) beginning in 2016 was crucial in recommending who would get major grants for doing research into diseases like Alzheimer’s.

Masliah’s own published peer-reviewed research into Alzheimer’s helped guide him in awarding grants. His work had said that proteins found in brain tissue were a major factor in causing the disease, and thus based on his recommendations for the next decade huge amounts of money were devoted to following up that conclusion.

The problem was that Masliah’s work was garbage.
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The real insurrection on Jan 6, 2021 was within the government, against Trump

3:28 pm

Under threat, from within
Under threat, from within

For the past three years the Democratic Party and its shills in the propaganda press have been claiming that Donald Trump as president instigated a violent insurrection on Jan 6, 2021, causing the Capitol to be invaded with significant violence. These claims have resulted in hundreds of people who attended the Capitol hill rally on that day getting long prison terms, often for doing nothing more than “parading” (the actual charge).

All of these claims are of course lies, something that was even patently obvious during the event itself. Trump himself was giving a speech a considerable distance from the Capitol when the first break-ins occurred and when security finally opened many doors to allow the publicly to quietly walk through the building, causing no violence or damage. During Trump’s speech he called for his supporters to demonstrate “peaceably.” Moreover, the only ones killed during the protest were two protesters, killed by Capitol security, one shot and the other beaten to death.

With the release this week of transcripts of interviews conducted by the Pentagon’s inspector general with various key officials in the military, we now know that not only did Trump not instigate the riot, he issued orders that these officials make sure there were sufficient security at the Capitol to prevent any violence or misbehavior.
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SpaceX and Elon Musk blast the FAA’s red tape again

9:54 am

Are Americans finally waking up and emulating their country's founders?

Fight! Fight! Fight! Yesterday both SpaceX and Elon Musk renewed their attack on the FAA’s apparent arbitrary harassment of the company, both by slowing down development of Starship/Superheavy as well as imposing fines and delays on the company for petty issues relating to Falcon 9 launches.

First, Elon Musk sent out a tweet on X, highlighting a successful static fire launchpad engine test of the Starship prototype the company plans to fly on the sixth Starship/Superheavy orbital flight. As he noted with apparent disgust, “Flight 5 is built and ready to fly. Flight 6 will be ready to fly before Flight 5 even gets approved by FAA!”

Second, and with more force, the company released a public letter that it has sent to the leading Republican and Democratic representatives of the House and Senate committees that have direct authority over space activities, outlining its issues with the FAA’s behavior. The letter details at length the irrational and inexplicable slowdown in FAA approvals that caused two launches last summer to occur in a confused manner, with SpaceX clearly given the impression by the FAA that it could go ahead which the FAA now denies. In one case the FAA claims SpaceX removed without its permission a poll of mission control during its countdown procedure. SpaceX in its letter noted bluntly that the regulations do not require that poll, and that the company already requires two other polls during the count.

In another case involving SpaceX’s plan to change to a new mission control center, the company submitted its request in June, and after two months the FAA finally approved the control center’s use for one launch, but had still not approved it for a second. The first launch went off, so SpaceX thus rightly assumed it could use the control center for the second. Yet the FAA is now trying to fine SpaceX for that second launch.

The third case of FAA misconduct appears to be the most egregious. » Read more

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Partisan Democrats hate so much they are willing to commit murder, and worse, now admit it openly

11:52 am

The assassination of Abraham Lincoln
An earlier example of the Democratic Party’s
reasonablity, that time against Abraham Lincoln

They’re coming for you next: The words couldn’t have made it clearer. When asked by a reporter of the Daily Mail what he thought of his father’s actions, the son of attempted Trump assassin Ryan Routh said that his father hates Trump as “every reasonable person does. I don’t like Trump either.”

The problem is that reasonable people don’t hate. Reasonable people think about the differing opinions of others and decide as rationally as possible what they think might be the right answer. And if reasonable people are faced with true evil, they don’t act with hatred. They instead follow the biblical mantra, don’t condemn the sinner, only the sin.

Routh’s son however illustrates the contrasting attitude of the base as well as the leadership of today’s Democratic Party. They don’t simply disagree, they hate. Worse, they think that hatred is “reasonable,” and that everyone “reasonable” agrees with it.

Thus you get two assassination attempts in just over two months against Donald Trump, whose only crime — according to Democrats — is that he is running for president against them, and has said he will change the governmental policies they believe in. “Reasonable Democrats” can’t tolerate such a possibility, so therefore these “reasonable Democrats” appear out of nowhere, over and over again, attempting to kill the source of their hatred.

It is this same mindless hatred that allowed Kamala Harris as well as the Democratic Party operatives running the Trump-Harris debate last week to repeat slanderous lie after slanderous lie. The list below is only a sampling:
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Bad consequences from the medical profession’s panic/lies over COVID continue to build

3:23 pm

The results of COVID policy decisions of our medical community
The results of COVID policy decisions
for our medical community

Several stories in the past week illustrate how the medical community dug itself a deep hole with its dishonest panic and over-reaction to COVID and its response to it.

First the background from 2020: Rather than follow past very successful policies involving new epidemics, whereby only the sick and aged were quarantined while everyone else went about their normal lives, intentionally spreading the new respiratory virus to those with which it was relatively harmless so that the entire population could quickly get herd immunity and thus quickly choke the virus out, our modern medical community, in conjunction with government health officials who had political motives, chose to quarantine everyone, destroying the economy and the livelihoods of millions while actually allowing the disease time to spread to the aged and sick, killing many more than were necessary.

Numerous studies have confirmed the failure of the lockdown and mandate policies during COVID. Sweden for example essentially followed those traditional policies, never locking down or mandating masks or shots. It was blasted for that decision, with many in the health community predicting massive deaths from COVID. Instead, studies have now proven that Sweden had the lowest mortality in Europe from 2020–2022.

That’s the background. The new stories this week illustrate the consequences. First, a recent peer-reviewed study found that trust in doctors has crashed since 2020. The numbers are quite shocking:
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A new study, commissioned by NASA, endorses giving NASA more power and money, even as NASA becomes more irrelevant

2:32 pm

NASA logo
It’s all about power and control.

Surprise, surprise! A just released report from the National Academies and paid for by NASA has concluded that the agency suffers from insufficient political and financial support, and that the agency’s recent shift to relying on private enterprise should be de-emphasized in order to grow NASA instead.

Two quotes from the report’s executive summary tells us everything we really need to know about its purpose and political goals:

NASA’s shift to milestone-based purchase-of-service contracts for first-of-a-kind, low-technology-readiness-level mission work can, if misused, erode the agency’s in-house capabilities, degrade the agency’s ability to provide creative and experienced insight and oversight of programs, and put the agency and the United States at increased risk of program failure.

In plain English, NASA’s transition to relying on the private sector for the development of rockets, spacecraft, and even planetary missions “erodes” the ability of the agency to grow. That those private companies are actually building and launching things and doing so for far less money, compared to NASA’s half century of relatively little achievement since the 1960s while spending billions, is something the report finds utterly irrelevant. If anything, that success by the private sector should recommend that NASA should shrink, not grow.

The second quote from this NASA-commissioned report underlines its effort to lobby for NASA:
» Read more

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Why would anyone who wants a good college education ever go to Harvard?

1:53 pm

Harvard: where you get can get a shoddy education centered on hate and bigotry
Harvard: where you can spend a lot of money
getting a shoddy education

Two stories last week proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that Harvard is at this moment in time the worst American college in the nation, its faculty and staff clearly having no interest in teaching critical thinking. Instead, they are more focused on suppressing dissenting views while making their prime task indoctrinating students into the Marxist and queer agenda that is divorced from reality but eager to discriminate against whites and Jews.

First the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) and the College Pulse published their fifth annual College Free Speech Rankings, surveying almost 60,000 students across more than 250 universities. Guess which university ranked at the very bottom of the list, for the second year in a row?

Harvard University retained its position as the lowest-ranked institution for free speech for the second consecutive year. Harvard, Columbia University, New York University all received an “Abysmal” rating for their speech climates. The University of Pennsylvania and Barnard College round out the bottom five. These schools not only have low levels of administrative support for free speech. They also have low levels of student comfort in expressing their views on controversial political topics and a strong bias in favor of allowing liberal speakers on campus over conservative ones.

Next, to prove this ranking was well deserved, it appears that Harvard’s administration has refused to cooperate with the local district attorney and the police in investigating the pro-Hamas rioters who attacked Jewish students during the violence that occurred on campus in October 2023, violence committed in support of the rape, torture, and murder of innocent men, women, and children near Gaza that same month.
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Today’s blacklisted American: Democrats demand Elon Musk be censored and arrested simply for disagreeing with them

12:25 pm

Robert Reich
Robert Reich, labor secretary under Bill Clinton

They’re coming for you next: Based on the behavior of loyal Democrats in the past five years, no on should be surprised by this story. Several big name Democratic Party supporters have now called for the complete censorship and imprisonment of Elon Musk for the horrible crime of disagreeing with them and campaigning for their opposition.

First we have Robert Reich, that petty dictator who was once secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton and teaches public policy at — you guessed it — the University of California in Berkeley. In an op-ed for the leftist British newspaper The Guardian, Reich claims Musk is “out of control” and for this crime he must be squelched. First he calls for a global boycott of Tesla and X but then tops this demand with some decidedly tyrannical desires:
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A former Democratic Party majority leader in California sees the light

1:33 pm

The Democratic Party today
The Democratic Party today

If she of all people can do this, why can’t so many other ordinary Democrats? Gloria Romero, former Democratic Party majority leader in the California state senate from 2005 to 2008, announced publicly yesterday that she has dumped her lifelong allegiance to that party, switched her registration to the Republican Party, and furthermore enthusiastically endorsed Donald Trump for president. From her statement:

“Today I say ‘goodbye, adios,’ I’ve had enough. I am now another near-lifelong Democrat who is joining the growing number of people, including key groups like Latinos, who are leaving the Democratic Party. This is not the Democratic Party that I once championed. I do not recognize it anymore, and I cannot continue. I changed my voting registration today as the sun was rising to Republican, which has, under Donald Trump, become the champion of working people, the big tent. And indeed, I will vote for Donald Trump this fall.”

She proceeded to list the many tyrannical actions taken by the Democratic Party recently that led her to this decision, including its backroom deals that blocked any others from running against Joe Biden during the presidential primaries and then dumped him for Kamala Harris. She also cited that party’s support for the queer agenda, for “locking people up for free speech,” for supporting “endless war” everywhere, and for allowing an invasion of illegal immigrants, including violent felons.

Above all she cited the Democratic Party’s failed school policies, from favoring the school unions that do not educate kids but funnel money into the party’s campaign coffers to encouraging anti-Semitism at universities. “The Democratic party thrives off of this failure shamefully … even as our children fall farther and farther behind in reading, writing and the ability to compete internationally.”

None of her criticisms of the Democratic Party are wrong. » Read more

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Sunspot update: The Sun continues to boom!

12:02 pm

It is time for my monthly sunspot update, taking NOAA’s most recent update of its monthly graph tracking the number of sunspots on the Sun’s Earth-facing hemisphere and adding my own analysis as well as some additional details to provide the larger context.

During August the Sun continued to confound the experts, with the number of sunspots not only greater than July’s high count. the August count exceeded the numbers from December 2001 (215.5 vs 213.4), the last time the Sun was this active.

None of the predictions by anyone in the solar science community had predicted this level of activity.
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