Very brief descriptions, with appropriate links, of current or recent news items.
A businessman fights a federal regulatory effort that destroyed his business. The government responds by trying to destroy him.
Read the article. It will send chills down your spine. The business was legal, did no harm, and was very successful. The government shut it down, killed it. Now they are going after the creator because he had tried to stop them.
The next IPCC report: “The timing couldn’t be worse.”
The author describes how the new report, due out in just a couple of months, is probably already obsolete because of a slew of new papers documenting the long 10 to 15 year pause in global warming that was not predicted by any of the climate models used by the IPCC.
This quote I think sums things up nicely, however:
Due to a ‘combination of errors’, the models have overestimated warming by 100% over the past 20 years and by 400% over the past 15 years.
Seven colossal architectural blunders.
The last is the best, but not for the reasons you’d expect.
The Russian way: In an effort to deal with their quality control problems the Russians plan to consolidate their space industries into a single company controlled by the government.
This is not a good sign for the future competitiveness of the Russian aerospace industry. Consolidation will only reduce competition and innovation, while placing the government in control will only increase bureaucracy.
More extreme weather, eh? There were no Atlantic hurricanes in August this year, for the first time in eleven years.
As I’ve noted repeatedly, there is no evidence yet of an increase of extreme weather events as predicted by global warming advocates. In fact, some recent data suggests a decline, though I personally wouldn’t take that seriously either.
So, when Al Gore or Barack Obama or Dianne Feinstein starts running around like Chicken Little, claiming the sky is about to fall, remember these facts.
Working for the Democratic Party: The IRS harassment of conservatives continues.
An IRS letter sent to [a tea party] group last week and obtained by The Washington Times contains a laundry list of requests related to virtually all the group’s activities, including its involvement in the 2012 election cycle and its get-out-the-vote efforts, fundraising activities, all radio and TV advertising, and other information. The IRS also is asking for detailed financial records, including “the amounts and percentages of your total expenses that were for fundraising activities in the tax year 2011, 2012 and 2013.” [emphasis mine]
Key quote: “We got away with discriminating against you and we’re not stopping.”
Finding out what’s in it: Five large population groups are losing their healthcare insurance because of Obamacare.
The five groups are spouses, part-time workers, retirees, individuals, and unions. I wonder how many of these — especially the unions — will continue to blindly support Democrats, even after this disaster.
The launch date for India’s GSLV rocket has been pushed off until December in order to thoroughly investigate what caused the fuel leak during the scrubbed launch last week.
Curiosity makes a three frame movie of Phobos eclipsing the Sun.
“Democrats are just goddamned liars.”
He is referring to professional Democrats, not your typical Democrat voter. To continue:
The fact that one of their more politically useful falsehoods nowadays is telling black people that their problems are caused by white racism should not require us to treat that lie any more seriously than we do any other Democrat lie.
When Democrats say we need “a conversation on race,” what they really mean is they want to have a monologue, a tedious lecture about all the evils perpetrated against black people by those evil racist Republicans. Your part of the “conversation” is, shut up.
The competition heats up? An Iranian news release today says that researchers at a local university have “designed and built” a manned spacecraft.
Sounds very dubious to me. I suspect what really happened is that these Iranian university researchers did some work outlining their proposed design, and this has now been translated into a “built” spacecraft.
Hubble sees a cosmic caterpillar.
I am always astonished at the weird loveliness of these astronomical objects. They are big, tenuous, faint, and almost impossible to see. And yet, when we tease them out of the darkness they blind us with beauty.
If you like your insurance you won’t keep your insurance: Aetna pulls out of New York because of Obamacare.
That’s the fifth state that Aetna has fled in its effort to survive the Democratic Party’s effort to reform our healthcare system.
In comparison to the ruined economies of the Arab Spring — tourism shattered, exports nonexistent, and billions of dollars in infrastructure lost through unending violence — Israel is an atoll of prosperity and stability. Factor in its recent huge gas and oil finds in the eastern Mediterranean, and it may soon become another Kuwait or Qatar, but with a real economy beyond its booming petroleum exports.
Israel had nothing to do with either the Arab Spring or its failure. The irony is that surviving embarrassed Arab regimes now share the same concerns of the Israelis.
Read it all. It gives you a different but (I think) more accurate perspective on the chaos in the Middle East.
More details are released about the launch abort of Japan’s new Epsilon rocket earlier this week.
Using the combined power of 200,000 home computers astronomers have discovered 24 new pulsars in the Milky Way.
For the first time since arriving on Mars engineers have allowed Curiosity to drive itself.
The 1-ton Curiosity rover used autonomous navigation for the first time on Tuesday (Aug. 27), driving itself onto a patch of ground that its handlers had not vetted in advance. The robot will likely employ this “autonav” capability more and more as it continues the long trek toward the base of Mars’ huge Mount Sharp, NASA officials said.
In autonav mode, Curiosity analyzes photos it takes during a drive to map out a safe route forward. The car-size rover used this ability on Tuesday to find its way across a small depression whose fine-scale features were hidden from Curiosity’s previous location.
The competition heats up: China’s first unmanned lunar lander is now scheduled for launch before the end of the year.
This mission is the second stage in their long term plans for unmanned lunar exploration. It began with an orbiter which mapped the surface in high detail, followed now by a lander, which will then be followed by a sample return mission.
Astronomers have identified a star almost identical to the Sun, except that it is 4 billion years older.
They have dated this old age by the amount of lithium detected in the star.
An upside down world: A disabled security guard was fired for asking a Muslim woman to remove her veil.
The dispute occurred in May when Krause asked a Muslim woman to remove her face scarf thinking he was enforcing the mall’s no-mask policy. Instead of just reprimanding him after informing him that the woman’s veil was a vestige of her religion, Krause was fired after the woman filed a lawsuit of her own.
Without doubt there are real security concerns when someone arrives wearing a full face mask. Muslims might claim this is part of their religion, but it has been used too often by Islamic terrorists to do terrible harm. Moreover, there is real dispute within the religion whether such veils are required.
Finally, from a western perspective requiring women to be masked seems oppressive, even if they choose to do it.
