Very brief descriptions, with appropriate links, of current or recent news items.
More polticially correct madness: The Red Cross in the United Kingdom has told all its offices to remove all Christmas decorations in order to avoid offending Muslims. Key quote:
“We have been instructed that we can’t say anything about Christmas and we certainly can’t have a Christmas tree. . . . We are not supposed to show any sign of Christianity at all.”
This story should give everyone the willies: One of the developers of the OpenBSD operating system (an open source OS comparable but different than Linux) has admitted that ten years ago, in exchange for cash, he and others helped the FBI place “surveillance-friendly holes” in the operating system.
I wonder what part of this sentence the FBI does not know how to read: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”
Virgin Galactic has confirmed the story from Space News that it is part of the crew/cargo proposal that Orbital Sciences submitted to NASA this week.
Two Danish citizens are on trial for criticizing Islam. Worse, “under Danish jurisprudence it is immaterial whether a statement is true or untrue. All that is needed for a conviction is that somebody feels offended.”
Feel the love! The Chicago Tea Party’s Christmas party was shut down by a bomb scare. So no one has any doubt about the goals of the arsonists, the written message that accompanied the incendiary devices was “F*CK THE TEA PARTY”.
Don’t slam the door on your way out! Check out this list of senators and the number of earmarks they placed in $1.27 trillion omnibus spending bill put together by the lame-duck Congress.
Freedom of speech alert: The FCC commissioner has made it clear in a recent appearance on the BBC that he strongly supports having the FCC regulate in some manner the news coverage of radios and television. You can see the video here. Key quote from the article above:
In practice, Copps’s recommendations — however well intended — necessarily entail expanding the power of bureaucrats to monitor media content, power which can then be used for objectionable and politicized goals.
After a string of failures going back to 2004, the Indian space agency is set to try to launch its most powerful rocket again, this time with its heaviest cargo.
This might be the best news I’ve heard in years! The government may shut down on Saturday due to the stalemate in Congress over the $1.27 trillion pork-filled spending bill.
Dead alien life arrives on Earth! Not really but still exciting anyway: Scientists have found the remains of space-born amino acids — essential to life — in the meteorite that crashed in the Sudan in 2008. Key quote:
“This meteorite formed when two asteroids collided,” said Daniel Glavin of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. “The shock of the collision heated it to more than 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit [1,093 degrees Celsius], hot enough that all complex organic molecules like amino acids should have been destroyed, but we found them anyway.”
The discovery is further evidence that the basic elements of life can form in even the most hostile of environments.
NASA’s inspecter general has found fraud, waste, and abuse in NASA’s small business research program. Nor is this new news:
Problems with NASA’s SBIR program have been repeatedly criticized in recent years by the agency’s inspector general. Of some 46 investigations related to the SBIR program over the past decade, 17 percent resulted in criminal convictions, civil judgments, or administrative action, the inspector general told a Senate Commerce Committee hearing last year.
