An evening pause: You might say this a variation on a Rube Goldberg device, except that instead of gravity running the show it is a mouse.
Hat tip Phill Oltmann.
Readers: I am always looking for tips for my evening pauses. If you see a video you think might fit, make a comment here mentioning that you have something, but don’t post the link. I will email you to get it from you.
Contempt for the law: The IRS and the Obama administration today directly defied the ruling of a federal judge, who — faced with their stonewalling — had ordered them to release 1800 Lois Lerner emails to the court each Monday.
It appears to me that the IRS and the Obama administration are doing whatever they can to obstruct this investigation and to prevent these emails from ever being seen by the public. This also strongly suggests that there are some real bombshells in those emails, including evidence that there was a blatent effort by the White House, the IRS, and Democratic members of Congress to use the IRS to harass and destroy their political opponents.
I am waiting for this judge to finally show some real backbone and declare several Obama and IRS officials in direct contempt of the court and then have them arrested and imprisoned. Until he does, the Obama administration is going to continue to thumb its nose at him, and the law.
Working for the Democratic Party: New Justice Department documents released today show that in 2010 the Obama administration and the IRS were conspiring to criminally prosecute opponents of the Obama administration.
Judicial Watch today released new Department of Justice (DOJ) and Internal Revenue Service (IRS) documents that include an official “DOJ Recap” report detailing an October 2010 meeting between Lois Lerner, DOJ officials and the FBI to plan for the possible criminal prosecution of targeted nonprofit organizations for alleged illegal political activity.
The newly obtained records also reveal that the Obama DOJ wanted IRS employees who were going to testify to Congress to turn over documents to the DOJ before giving them to Congress. Records also detail how the Obama IRS gave the FBI 21 computer disks, containing 1.25 million pages of confidential IRS returns from 113,000 nonprofit social 501(c)(4) welfare groups – or nearly every 501(c)(4) in the United States – as part of its prosecution effort. According to a letter from then-House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA) to IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, “This revelation likely means that the IRS – including possibly Lois Lerner – violated federal tax law by transmitting this information to the Justice Department.”
This bears repeating: It is illegal for the IRS to give the confidential tax returns of citizens to anyone, including the Justice Department. Worse, having done so the IRS has given the very partisan Obama administration a giant treasure-trove of data it can use to smear and destroy its opponents.
A conservative considers getting a masters degree in sociology, and discovers the hatred of the right that permeates the academic community.
Read it. The story makes it quite clear what I have known since the 1990s when I got my masters at New York University: The left is aggressively blackballing conservatives from any jobs or degrees in academia.
Surprise, surprise! A new study has found that in many cases electric cars actually do more damage to the environment that gasoline-run vehicles.
The study has a lot of uncertainties, and is based largely on statistical analysis, which I always find suspect. In addition:
The study’s biggest caveat, acknowledged by the researchers, is that they don’t consider a full “lifecycle” analysis of emissions—so things like making the car, drilling for oil, or transporting coal aren’t included in the environmental costs. Some previous work has found that EVs are cleaner than gas cars when you consider the totality of impacts; others have found that’s only true if the power grids that charge EVs are also clean.
Notice how they also don’t mention any of the environmental costs for making the batteries and components of an electric car. I wonder why.
Nonetheless, this study illustrates again why we should never rely on the opinions of politicians in these matters. They know less than nothing, and always base their policy on raw, simplistic emotions rather than complex knowledge. Better to let freedom, and the market decide. It always looks for the most efficient way of doing things, which in the end is always going to be better for the environment.
The journal Nature has put together a nice graphic [pdf] summarizing New Horizons’ mission and its fly-by of Pluto next week. The key section shows that it is going to take a long time to get all the data back:
A major university consortium that manages many ground- and space-based telescopes has proposed that a new giant optical space telescope be built to replace Hubble.
A report published today by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy in Washington, D.C., lays out the rationale for another orbiting observatory. It will have a mirror as big as 12 meters across, to both look for habitable planets around other stars and peer deep into the early aeons of the universe.
Hubble has a mirror 2.4 meters across, so this would be significantly larger. In fact, if built this new space telescope would make it bigger than any ground-based telescope that exists today.
As the article notes, the cost over-runs and delays of the infrared James Webb Space Telescope — which went from a $1 billion budget to $8 billion — will likely make Congress reluctant to fund a new giant project like this. Nonetheless, this report gives us a hint of where the astronomy community wants to head in future decades. For the past two decades they have poo-pooed the construction of a new and larger optical space telescope. It appears from this report that this culture is now changing.
The competition heats up: The United Kingdom’s space agency has issued its proposed future strategy, focusing on a renewed involvement with ISS and the European Space Agency.
Following a public consultation and lengthy discussions across government, the new strategy, published today, concludes that continued involvement in the ISS and other programs via ESA membership is the best way to involve U.K. scientists and industry in human spaceflight. The document says the government will consider bilateral projects with other space agencies but fears always being the junior partner since the United Kingdom has no launchers or space stations. It does not think that the commercial launch industry is sufficiently mature for the United Kingdom to buy services commercially. The report also states: “The Agency will also consider its role in human exploration missions beyond Earth orbit, especially where this complements science and technology goals for robotic exploration.”
I wonder if the newly elected conservative British government agrees with this strategy. It appears to me that it was researched and written prior to the election.
Beginning on June 30 Dawn experienced an as yet unexplained “anomaly” that put it into safe mode for several days.
According to JPL, engineers have uploaded “configuration changes” that solved the problem, and the spacecraft has returned to normal operations, continuing its second mapping orbit of Ceres. From this position they are gathering wide angle images of the entire planet, from which they will construct a detailed global map to be used as a baseline during later more detailed close-up orbits. For example, they released this very nice image today of what is called “Spot 1”, shown on the right. I have cropped it to focus on the spot itself. Looks almost like scattered snow on the surface, doesn’t it?
An evening pause: Hat tip Edward Thelen.
In celebration of Behind the Black’s fifth anniversary, I am considering ending the automated Google ads that presently appear on the site. To I remove these ads, however, I need to replace that income. I am therefore asking that my readers consider contributing to the website, either with a one-time contribution or a regular subscription, as outlined in the tip jar to the right.
So far the response has been gratifying. My heart-felt thanks go out to all who have contributed.
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Engineers have pinpointed the issue — “a hard-to-detect timing flaw in the spacecraft command sequence” — that caused New Horizons to enter safe mode on Saturday.
Since they do not plan to upload any similar commands before the July 14th fly-by, they do not expect a repeat of this problem. Full science operations are expected to resume on July 7.
This week I celebrate the fifth anniversary of this website. My first post here took place on June 27, 2010, but I consider the beginning of Behind the Black to have occurred during that entire first week as I figured out how I wanted to do it.
To commemorate these past five years I am holding a fund-raiser. Please consider contributing.
Finding out what’s in it: Health insurance companies are now requesting (and getting) rate increases from 23 to 54 percent due to the increased costs imposed by Obamacare.
Blue Cross and Blue Shield plans — market leaders in many states — are seeking rate increases that average 23 percent in Illinois, 25 percent in North Carolina, 31 percent in Oklahoma, 36 percent in Tennessee and 54 percent in Minnesota, according to documents posted online by the federal government and state insurance commissioners and interviews with insurance executives.
The Oregon insurance commissioner, Laura N. Cali, has just approved 2016 rate increases for companies that cover more than 220,000 people. Moda Health Plan, which has the largest enrollment in the state, received a 25 percent increase, and the second-largest plan, LifeWise, received a 33 percent increase.
At the same time, many insurance companies are merging or leaving the market because of the law makes profitability impossible.
Obviously, we must all then vote for Democrats so they can use their brilliance (demostrated so clearly with Obamacare) to solve this problem by nationalizing healthcare.
Sadly, the man saying this is the exception rather than the rule. But that he said it gives hope.
Engineers lost contact with New Horizons for an hour and twenty-one minutes on Saturday.
Engineers have since begun talking with the probe again, but NASA says it will take up to several days to get New Horizons back to normal. In the meantime, the US$700-million spacecraft is not recording science data. It is just 11 million kilometres from Pluto, and closing in fast.
Communication issues are exacerbated by the fact that it takes four and a half hours to send a signal, traveling at light speed, across the nearly 4.8 billion kilometres to the spacecraft — and four and a half hours back. In that elapsed time, the Earth has rotated so much that mission controllers must switch from one to another of the three deep-space antennas that communicate with spacecraft: in Goldstone, California; Canberra; and Madrid.
An evening pause: In anticipation of July 4 tomorrow. Hat tip to Frank Kelly.
Fascists: Oregon’s labor commissioner has now imposed a $135,000 fine on the owners of a bankrupt bakery business for refusing to participate in a same-sex wedding by baking a cake.
Even worse, the fascist has demanded the owners shut up about the case.
In the ruling, Avakian placed an effective gag order on the Kleins, ordering them to “cease and desist” from speaking publicly about not wanting to bake cakes for same-sex weddings based on their Christian beliefs. “This effectively strips us of all our First Amendment rights,” the Kleins, owners of Sweet Cakes by Melissa, which has since closed, wrote on their Facebook page. “According to the state of Oregon we neither have freedom of religion or freedom of speech.”
What a wonderful way to celebrate July 4th!
A new poll has found that the public’s hostility to the federal government, including the Supreme Court, has grown in recent years and jumped significantly in the past six months.
A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 33% of Likely U.S. Voters now believe that states should have the right to ignore federal court rulings if their elected officials agree with them. That’s up nine points from 24% when we first asked this question in February. Just over half (52%) disagree, down from 58% in the earlier survey. Fifteen percent (15%) are undecided. …
Support for ignoring the federal courts is up among most demographic groups, however. Most voters have long believed that the Supreme Court justices have their own political agenda, and they still tend to feel that that agenda is more liberal than conservative.
That’s just the public’s changing attitude to the Supreme Court. Overall trust in the federal government is down as well:
A plurality (47%) of voters continues to believe the federal government has too much influence over state governments, and 54% think states should have the right to opt out of federal government programs that they don’t agree with. Even more (61%) think states should have the right to opt out of federally mandated programs if the federal government doesn’t help pay for them.
The Declaration of Independence, the foundational document that Americans honor on the Fourth of July, says that governments derive their authority from the consent of the governed, but just 25% believe that to be true of the federal government today. Only 20% now consider the federal government a protector of individual liberty. Sixty percent (60%) see the government as a threat to individual liberty instead.
The more power the federal government grabs, the more the public will resist. Eventually, the federal government, and all of society, will break under this strain. The sooner the public reins in the federal government, by voting for legislators who will do that reining, the better chance we will have of avoiding that collapse.
From what I can see right now, however, I must sadly say that I am not hopeful. Since 2010 the voters have clearly made their position clear: They want the government reined in. Our society’s intellectual class, including the Republican leadership in Congress working with the congressional Democratic minority, doesn’t seem to want to listen to that message unfortunately.
Then again, this update on the growing power of the Freedom Caucus in the House suggests that the voters might finally get their way if the next election puts more conservatives in office.
Instead of using the Air Force’s Vandenberg launch complex in California, NASA and SpaceX have shifted their plans for the final launch abort test of the manned version of Dragon capsule to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
The date for the test has not been finalized, but it appears it will be delayed until after the next Dragon flight to ISS, itself delayed following the Falcon 9 failure on Sunday. The test will also be delayed until after the completion of the unmanned demo flight to ISS of the manned version of Dragon. SpaceX will then refurbish that demo capsule and re-use it for the launch abort test.
Update: I have rewritten the paragraph above, correcting my first version, which had mistakenly said that a refurbished cargo version of Dragon would be used for the launch abort test. My very knowledgeable readers noted the error and set me straight.
