Category: Points of Information

Very brief descriptions, with appropriate links, of current or recent news items.

“If guns cause more violence, where’s the exploding crime rate?”

9:29 am

“If guns cause more violence, where’s the exploding crime rate?”

The gun control lobby has been claiming for years that the more guns in private hands, the more gun violence we’ll see; the perennial hyperventilation is given to fears of a kind of Wild West America of lawless anarchy, wherein every gun owner is prepared to shoot from the hip at the first sign of danger.

Well. Last year the Department of Justice released a report revealing that firearm homicides declined nearly 40% between 1993 and 2011, and nonfatal firearm injuries declined nearly 70% within the same time period. Every year since 2002 has seen a rise in the number of NICS background checks performed, yet in 2011 the firearm homicide rate was lower than it was in 2002; in fact, all firearm violence, both fatal and nonfatal, was lower the former year than the latter.

You cannot negotiate the facts. They are what they are.

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The man who was forced by police to undergo multiple invasive surgeries after a traffic stop — and billed for the abuse after nothing illegal was found – has won a $1.6 million legal settlement with New Mexico local authorities.

9:16 am

Pushback: The man who was forced by police to undergo multiple invasive surgeries after a traffic stop — and billed for the abuse after nothing illegal was found –- has won a $1.6 million legal settlement with New Mexico local authorities.

He is also suing the hospital involved. I hope he wins millions more.

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Scaled Composites did an engine test today in Mojave of an alternative engine for SpaceShipTwo.

9:09 am

The competition heats up: Scaled Composites did an engine test today in Mojave of an alternative engine for SpaceShipTwo.

In this case, the company is even competing with itself, in that its first engine design is now in competition with another engine design. Considering the rumors about problems with that first design, I suspect the new design is probably winning.

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An outline of Dream Chaser’s test flight schedule for the next three years, leading to its first crewed flight in 2017.

8:59 am

An outline of Dream Chaser’s test flight schedule for the next three years, leading to its first crewed flight in 2017.

The article makes a big deal about Sierra Nevada’s completion of a NASA paperwork milestone, but to me the aggressive flight schedule is more interesting, including news that the engineering vehicle used in the test flight in October was not damaged in landing so badly it could no longer be used.

The Dream Chaser Engineering Test Article (ETA) has since arrived back in her home port in Colorado, following her eventful exploits in California. Despite a red-faced landing for the baby orbiter, she earned her wings during an automated free flight over the famous Edwards Air Force Base, a flight that was perfectly executed, per the objectives of the Commercial Crew check list. The vehicle will now enjoy a period of outfitting and upgrading, preparing her for one or two more flights – listed as ALT-1 and ALT-2 – beginning later this year. Both will once again be conducted at the Dryden Flight Research Center in California.

The ETA will never taste the coldness of space, with her role not unlike that of Shuttle Enterprise, a pathfinder vehicle used to safely refine the final part of the mission for the vehicles that will follow in her footsteps. The Dream Chaser that will launch into orbit will be called the Orbital Test Vehicle (OTV), which is currently undergoing construction at the Michoud Assembly Facility (MAF). Debuting atop of the United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V, the OFT-1 (Orbital Test Flight -1) is scheduled to take place in late 2016. This flight will be automated, testing the entire Dream Chaser system, prior to the crewed OFT-2 mission in early 2017. [emphasis mine]

I think I will up my bet from yesterday. I am now willing to bet that all of the commercial crew spacecraft chosen by NASA to complete construction will fly their privately built manned spacecraft with crew before NASA flies its first unmanned test flight of Orion/SLS.

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A cheaper Japanese launch vehicle is scheduled to launch next month.

8:46 am

A cheaper Japanese launch vehicle is scheduled to launch next month.

The story is actually not very informative. What is interesting is the spin of the article: Japan’s rockets are getting cheaper! This suggests to me that the pressure brought to bear by SpaceX’s lower prices is being felt quite strongly.

We really don’t know if this Japanese rocket is cheaper to launch. What we do know is that, for the first time in decades, Japan feels compelled to use that sales pitch to sell its rockets. Isn’t competition great?

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“I think it was a sham from the beginning.”

11:22 pm

“I think it was a sham from the beginning.”

And what might that sham be? If your first thought is of the Obama administration’s investigation into the IRS scandal, you’d be right on the money!

The Obama administration closed the investigation without interviewing any of the victims of the harassment by the IRS.

Meanwhile, the administration as well as the Democrats in Congress are working hard to codify that harassment, so that the IRS can continue to work for the Democratic Party through the 2014 election.

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The operators of campgrounds in the national forests are suing the Obama administration, saying it had no right to force them to close down during last October’s government shutdown.

1:38 pm

The operators of campgrounds in the national forests are suing the Obama administration, saying it had no right to force them to close down during last October’s government shutdown.

The suit, which was filed in October, claims that the campgrounds and recreation areas should have been allowed to remain open because they don’t rely upon the federal government for funding and that private staff could have safely managed the sites. The group says the Forest Service carried out what it described as politically driven orders from the Obama administration, costing businesses hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost revenue.

There’s also this revealing quote from the article:

Ms Reese said she cannot understand why her members had to close up shop for much of the shutdown but other private operators on forest land — including several resorts — got a reprieve. “The frustrating part is that the campgrounds were closed, just the camp grounds, and not resorts or marinas,” she said.

Gee, isn’t this an example of the Obama administration abusing its power to hurt innocent citizens because it can’t get what it wants? And isn’t it kinda similar to what was done by Chris Christie’s underlings in New Jersey that has the mainstream press going into a wild-eye snit? I wonder, for what reason could the press have so little interest in this similar example of government abuse-of-power?

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In a House hearing today, cybersecurity experts once again warned that the Obamacare website is not secure, and that the Obama administration is doing nothing to fix it.

11:42 am

In a House hearing today, cybersecurity experts once again warned that the Obamacare website is not secure, and that the Obama administration is doing nothing to fix it.

“The site is fundamentally flawed in ways that make it dangerous to people who use it,” Kevin Johnson, one of the experts who reviewed Kennedy’s findings, told Reuters. Johnson said one of the most troubling issues was that a hacker could upload malicious code to the site, then attack other HealthCare.gov users. “You can take control of their computers,” said Johnson, chief executive officer of a firm known as Secure Ideas. [emphasis mine]

But hey, not to worry. If it’s the Spanish language version you won’t understand anything anyway!

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UN climate chief this week declared that communism is the best way to fight global warming.

11:36 am

Honesty! The UN climate chief this week declared that communism is the best way to fight global warming.

United Nations climate chief Christiana Figueres said that democracy is a poor political system for fighting global warming. Communist China, she says, is the best model. China may be the world’s top emitter of carbon dioxide and struggling with major pollution problems of their own, but the country is “doing it right” when it comes to fighting global warming says Figueres. “They actually want to breathe air that they don’t have to look at,” she said. “They’re not doing this because they want to save the planet. They’re doing it because it’s in their national interest.”

Putting aside the minor detail that communist states have routinely had the worst environmental record — “ghastly” as the article above accurately notes — this statement by Figueres is remarkably refreshing in that might be the first time an environmentalist has admitted the movement’s true agenda. They don’t want to save the environment, they want to gain power and then use it to squelch everyone else’s freedom.

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NASA’s first test flight of both the Orion capsule and the heavy-lift SLS rocket in 2017 might be delayed because of design problems with the European-built service module.

9:29 am

I am shocked, shocked! NASA’s first test flight of both the Orion capsule and the heavy-lift SLS rocket in 2017 might be delayed because of design problems with the European-built service module.

Overweight and struggling with design delays, the European-built service module for the Orion crew exploration vehicle may not be ready for a much-anticipated test flight by the end of 2017. The preliminary design review for the Orion spacecraft’s critical engine and power element is now on track for May after a six-month delay to contend with weight issues, according to Thomas Reiter, director of the European Space Agency’s human spaceflight and operations programs.

I am willing to bet that SpaceX will put astronauts in space on Dragonrider before this unmanned SLS flight occurs.

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Astronomers have discovered the first exoplanets orbiting a star almost identical to the Sun.

2:13 pm

Astronomers have discovered the first exoplanet orbiting a star almost identical to the Sun.

Astronomers have used ESO’s HARPS planet hunter in Chile, along with other telescopes around the world, to discover three planets orbiting stars in the cluster Messier 67. Although more than one thousand planets outside the Solar System are now confirmed, only a handful have been found in star clusters. Remarkably one of these new exoplanets is orbiting a star that is a rare solar twin — a star that is almost identical to the Sun in all respects.

This discovery is interesting in that some astronomers have proposed that our Sun itself was born in M67, the open galactic star cluster where these exoplanets were found. My March 2012 cover story for Sky & Telescope was on this very subject.

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The Obama administration now harasses the military chaplain who sued them because of their actions during the government shutdown.

1:36 pm

The Obama administration now harasses the military chaplain who sued them because of their actions during the government shutdown.

Father Ray Leonard, the Catholic Navy Chaplain who sued the Department of Defense and the Navy after he was barred from celebrating Mass at Kings Bay Naval Submarine Base in Georgia during the recent the Government shutdown, is now the target of Government retaliation even though the Department of Justice indicated the day after the lawsuit was filed that he could resume his duties as a Navy Chaplain.

The retaliation involves repeated Government assertions that the employment contract under which Father Leonard was working is no longer “valid”, demands that he must sign a new contract containing several pages of onerous new terms if he wants to be paid and refusals to pay for services he had already performed.

I probably have posted an example of this kind of harassment by the Obama administration against innocent citizens about once per day for the past year. And as I said earlier today, the abuse of power by this Democratic administration makes Chris Christie look like a amateur.

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Jimmy Kimmel savages Obamacare and ignorant young who support it.

10:05 am

Jimmy Kimmel savages Obamacare and ignorant young who support it.

Read and watch it all. Quite entertaining, in a painful sort of way.

The article also notes that while young people should surely be criticized for their blind faith in Obama and the Democrats, the media is as much to blame.

Without question, if America’s media had behaved responsibly in 2009 and 2010, the calls and emails to Congress opposing this legislation would have been so voluminous it never would have passed.

But instead, with the exception of the conservative outlets, America’s media were 100 percent behind this legislation, aiding and abetting the President and his Party to enact something that virtually all late night comics agree is a total joke.

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Why the sequester had to die.

9:43 am

Why the sequester had to die.

It worked.

It did not work perfectly, and it did not balance the budget or put us on course for a balanced budget. But it did play a critical role in nudging the deficit away from “catastrophic existential threat” territory and toward “terrifying money-suck.” It did this in part by forcing Republicans to accept cuts in military spending, which they are not normally much inclined to do. (It goes without saying that the Democrats are categorically hostile to spending reductions.) Because we cannot rely for very long upon the better angels of congressional nature, these statutory limits are always destined to be short-lived, which should be of some concern to us: Experience shows that when Congress agrees to a budget-control deal, the first thing it does is begin looking for opportunities to undermine that deal.

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A House investigation has found that the Obama administration acted to make the sequestration cuts as “painful as possible” for rural schools.

11:27 pm

A House investigation has found that the Obama administration acted to make the sequestration cuts as “painful as possible” for rural schools.

I have made no excuses for Chris Christie and the abuse his underlings heaped out in New Jersey against innocent citizens. It was wrong, and it makes me much less likely to support Christie in future campaigns. At the same time, it is also important to note that this one event pales in comparison to the number of similar abuse-of-power stories I’ve noted coming from the Obama administration. When it comes to improperly using the power of government to hurt innocent citizens, Obama and his underlings make Christie look like an amateur.

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The House is about to vote on a trillion dollar spending bill that no one has really read.

7:41 pm

This sums it up: The House is about to vote on a trillion dollar spending bill that no one has really read.

It might include some specific cuts, but in general this budget plan is a surrender to more spending.

The only real solution to this madness, however, really rests with the voters. The spenders in both parties have to be fired, and the only way to do that is to fire them. Sadly, I see no sign of that happening in the hardcore Democratic states such as New York, California, and Illinois, to name just a few. There, the voters are so partisan that they’d rather die than vote for a Republican. And die they will.

Among Republican voters at least there is pressure from the right to spend less. To make it effective, however, the voters still have to do some firing, as far too many Republicans elected officials are willing to go along to get along.

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A federal court has thrown out the net neutrality rules imposed by Obama’s FCC appointees, stating that the commission had overstepped its authority.

10:22 am

The law is such an inconvenient thing: A federal court has thrown out the net neutrality rules imposed by Obama’s FCC appointees, stating that the commission had overstepped its authority.

Have you noticed how the left always comes up for these meaningless terms — “net neutrality”, “single payer”, etc — any time they want to expand their power over our lives?

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Another innocent patient, having lost his insurance due to Obamacare, is now threatened with death.

9:06 am

Finding out what’s not in it: Another innocent patient, having lost his insurance due to Obamacare, is now threatened with death.

I cannot be more accurate. Read the story. The man is not getting treated because his policy was cancelled because of Obamacare.

Thank you Obama and the Democrats. I am so glad you care.

And there’s this horrible story of a disabled family now out of luck: “We did not put ourselves in this situation,” she told The Daily Caller. “The government put us in this situation.”

And we have only just begun. Stay tuned from more horror stories as Obamacare spreads its wings over the entire healthcare industry this year.

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