Very brief descriptions, with appropriate links, of current or recent news items.
One more post on today’s IRS House hearing: The IRS Commissioner John Koskinen smirked as he insisted that “no apology is owed” by the agency for its actions.
Watch the video. As I said earlier, the arrogance of the man is disgusting.
Update: Images from the successful cave rescue in Germany.
More revelations from today’s IRS hearings, this time indicating evidence of White House involvement.
The evidence remains circumstantial, but very damning nonetheless. The White House needs to explain exactly what happened in a meeting between the IRS chief counsel and President Obama exactly two days before that chief counsel changed IRS criteria for approving tax exempt status in a manner that increased the harassment of conservatives.
More video from IRS commissioner John Koskinen’s testimony today during House hearings.
Koskinen is so full of crap I think I could fertilize half the farm fields in the state of Iowa with it. This response from Kevin Brady (R-Texas) sums it up quite cogently.
“The IRS denied for two years targeting of Americans based on their political beliefs. That wasn’t the truth. They said it was a few rogue agents in Cincinnati. That wasn’t the truth. You said you were targeting liberal organizations. That wasn’t the truth. Then you assured us you would provide us all the emails in May and that wasn’t the truth. And today, you are telling us out of thousands of IRS computers, the one that lost the emails was a person of interest in an ongoing congressional investigation. And that is not the truth either. This is the most corrupt and deceitful IRS in history.”
Leftwing tolerance: The head of the Clinton library in Arkansas, also a donor to Hillary Clinton’s campaign, has banned researchers from a conservative media outlet because it used that research to publish stories critical of Hillary.
Library dean Carolyn Henderson Allen informed editor-in-chief Matthew Continetti in a June 17 letter that the library had “officially suspended” the Free Beacon‘s research privileges. The Free Beacon published the Hillary Papers, drawn from the archive of the late Clinton confidante Diane Blair, in February. Those papers are also housed in the special collections at the University of Arkansas.
“I am writing you to direct you and the Washington Beacon Press to cease and desist your ongoing violation of the intellectual property rights of the University of Arkansas with regard to your unauthorized publication of audio recordings obtained from the Roy Reed Collection,” wrote Allen.
Not only did the library ban the researchers, it wants to squelch the results of their research so that no one can read it. How open-minded and tolerant of them!
The truth versus the leftwing media.
Read it. First the author describes what really happened. Then he describes how the press has dishonestly tried to spin it. And that spin is quite dishonest, as the facts here are very clear and include rulings by both federal and state courts that make the spin entirely unjustifiable.
“They just got rid of it. … It really looks bad and I’ve got to say it looks like a cover-up to me.”
The quote comes from a House hearing today where lawmakers blasted the head of the IRS for claiming it has lost two years worth of Lois Lerner’s emails.
Update: I think it worthwhile to include video of this exchange between Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin) and IRS Commissioner John Koskinen. The arrogance of Koskinen is, to use Ryan’s world, unbelievable.
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As China’s Yutu lunar rover barely continues to survive, unable to move, its scientists prepare to publish their results.
But other systems and scientific instruments — a panoramic camera, infrared and X-ray spectrometers and a ground-penetrating radar — are operating normally, says Zheng: “The rover can still carry out measurements from the fixed location and send scientific data to the ground station.” …
Yutu’s penetrator radar has detected several layers underneath its path, says Long Xiao, a planetary scientist at China University of Geosciences in Wuhan. Under the surface soil, known as regolith, it found a layer of debris from a crater-forming impact and two layers of lava flows, made of basalt.
Though the rover lost its ability to rove within days of landing on the Moon, the mission is certainly an overall success for China. When they send their next rover to the Moon this first experience will serve them very well.
Recognizing the competition: In a speech in Singapore, the head of Arianespace said that the company urgently needs to overhaul its Ariane 5 rocket in order to meet tough competition from SpaceX and Russia’s Proton rocket.
“We have a newcomer in America with SpaceX. Yes, competition is increasing, but when competition is increasing, we need to be more and more agile,” said Israel. While recognising that Arianespace was the market leader, “we have to ask ourselves one question: what should we do to remain the leader? Europe is very serious about launchers, and Europe will not give up when it comes to launchers.”
For Arianespace this speech is a very good thing, as it demonstrates again that Israel — and the company — are aware of the competitive challenge put forth by SpaceX and are not making believe it doesn’t exist.
A detailed look at tomorrow’s Falcon 9 commercial launch of six Orbcomm satellites.
Launch is set for 6:08 pm (Eastern). If all goes well, SpaceX will also attempt another soft vertical splashdown of the first stage in its continuing effort to make that first stage reusable.
A Russian Dnepr rocket today successfully placed in orbit the largest number of satellites, 37, ever launched on a single rocket.
This launch once again illustrates the increasing capabilities of tiny satellites. More and more, it is becoming possible to do a lot more in orbit with a lot less.
Groundbreaking — the literally blasting off of a mountaintop — took place today in Chile at the eventual site of the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT).
Once completed in 2024 this telescope will have a segmented mirror with a total diameter of 39 meters or 128 feet, the largest ever built.
Why the Redskins trademark ruling should terrify you.
This ruling isn’t a slippery slope. It’s a slope we’ve already slid down: bureaucrats in Washington are now empowered to make subjective decrees about what is offensive and what will be tolerated, based on pressure from a small clique of Washington insiders. Anyone who runs afoul of these decrees, anyone branded as regressive and politically incorrect, is declared outside the protection of the federal government.
And what do we call people who like to wield that kind of oppressive power? I call them fascists. They hate it when I do that, but I am actually not name-calling but applying a very accurate description to their behavior.
At hearings in the Senate Ted Cruz (R-Texas) sharply attacked the proposed Democratic proposal to amend and restrict the first amendment of the Bill of Rights.
Cruz even offered to replace the Democratic proposal, which would allow Congress to limit spending on political campaigns, with the first amendment itself. All the Democrats rejected that change, illustrating that they reject the first amendment itself.
Two low-cost, car battery-sized Canadian space telescopes were launched successfully in Russia today.
The important detail here is this quote:
“BRITE-Constellation will exploit and enhance recent Canadian advances in precise attitude control that have opened up for space science the domain of very low cost, miniature spacecraft, allowing a scientific return that otherwise would have had price tags 10 to 100 times higher,” [emphasis mine]
Most nanosats and cubesats have not had the kind of precise attitude control of larger satellites, which is one of their limitations. If the technology is now maturing so that these tiny satellites can be pointed as accurately as bigger payloads, it will mean that unmanned satellites are going to get smaller very quickly. This lowers cost and increases the customer base, creating more business for launch companies.
Rosetta’s comet has unexpectedly gone to sleep.
An image snapped earlier this month by ESA’s Rosetta spacecraft shows its target comet has quietened, demonstrating the unpredictable nature of these enigmatic objects. The picture was captured on 4 June by Rosetta’s scientific camera, and is the most recent full-resolution image from the narrow-angle sensor. It has been used to help fine-tune Rosetta’s navigation towards comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, which was 430 000 km away at the time.
Strikingly, there is no longer any sign of the extended dust cloud that was seen developing around nucleus at the end of April and into May, as shown in our last image release. Indeed, monitoring of the comet has shown a significant drop in its brightness since then.
Rosetta’s approach for the next few months and arrival at the comet in August should be quite exciting.
Update: After an almost two week rescue effort, the injured German caver safely reached the surface Thursday.
The competition heats up: SpaceX today released a new video of the most recent Falcon 9R vertical take-off and landing test flight.
Video below the fold. The flight was to test the deployment and use of fins for controlling the stage during its return to Earth. Watch them unfold and adjust themselves beginning at about 1:15 into the video. In the second half you can see them near the top of the stage.
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The competition heats up: The new Russian rocket Angara is now scheduled for its first test launch on June 27.
According to the article this decision will be finalized tomorrow. The flight itself will be suborbital. The article also provides a wealth of information about the history, development, and configuration of this rocket. Very worthwhile reading.
Senator Bill Nelson (D-Florida) today expressed concern on the Senate floor over the budget language inserted by Richard Shelby (R-Alabama) that many think will cripple the new commercial manned space companies with high costs and extensive paperwork.
Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) took to the Senate floor June 18 and tapped the brakes on a powerful appropriator’s plan to subject NASA’s commercial crew program to strict federal accounting standards the agency waived when it solicited bids for crew transportation in November. Nelson, the chairman of the Senate Commerce science and space subcommittee, said NASA’s commercial crew program to fly astronauts to and from the international space station aboard commercially designed spacecraft needs “the right mix of oversight and innovation” to start ferrying crews by NASA’s target date of late 2017.
The senior senator from Florida was alluding to a directive Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama, the top Republican on the Senate Appropriations Committee, personally fought to include in a report appended to a spending bill now awaiting debate on the Senate floor, and which would if signed into law require NASA to either comply with section 15.403-4 of the Federal Acquisition Regulations, or risk a legal mandate to do so. Nelson said he wanted to work with Shelby “as the bill goes to the conference committee to make sure that we have the right mix of oversight and innovation in how NASA contracts for this competition.”
While Nelson was apparently very careful in how he stated his public criticism of Shelby, he also made it clear that he wants the language changed. As the article noted, this gives opponents of Shelby a powerful ally in the Senate. Expect the Shelby language to be significantly watered down.
