Very brief descriptions, with appropriate links, of current or recent news items.
Worlds without end: Astronomers have taken an image of an exoplanet only a few times the mass of Jupiter.
Be sure to watch the video: Americans signing a petition supporting the idea of putting old people to “sleep to keep costs down.”
New York’s “greenest” skyscraper turns out to be its biggest energy hog.
Maybe the building’s problem is that it has Al Gore as one of its tenants.
Seriously, the article illustrates well “the law of unintended consequences.” You pass a law or regulation intended to do x, and discover that people instead manipulate the law or regulation to get y instead.
A few questions that a real journalist would ask Obama, if given the chance.
That none of these questions were asked by two New York Times journalists during an extremely long interview with Obama should truly embarrass them. Sadly, they are probably proud that they did not ask them.
Russia has announced that they will resume Proton rocket launches in September.
Though they have pinpointed the specific cause of the most recent launch failure, they have not yet announced any remedial actions. Note also the expected number of launches for the rest of the year, 4 to 5, is down from earlier expectations.
Meanwhile, in Kazakhstan, an official in that country’s space program has been arrested for taking bribes.
An update on the effort to bring Kepler back to life.
Japan today successfully launched its fourth unmanned cargo freighter to ISS.
The rendezvous and berthing is scheduled for August 9. Besides supplies, the HTV-4 carries more equipment for NASA’s robotic refueling demonstration project on ISS.
The competition cools down: Armadillo Aerospace closes down.
It is important to recognize that developing a new private industry is not easy, and that many more companies will fail than succeed. That reality, however, does not prove that freedom and private enterprise are bad ideas, merely that they carry great risks.
“You’ve frustrated this committee. You’ve promised to do things and you’re not.”
Guess who? He was also accused of “slow-rolling” the investigation. Video at the link.
In related news the House investigation has now issued a subpoena for the requested documents.
Two graphs that show the depressing trends of the work force for the past twenty years.
Both reveal that, since the crash in 2008-2009, there has been absolutely no uptick, despite the desperate repeated claims of the Obama administration. The American work force, and the economy that work force represents, has shrunk, and shows no signs of recovery.
There is a solution, but no one really wants to risk trying it in our Soviet-style society.
The law is only for the little people: The White House has agreed to exempt Congressional staff from the high costs of Obamacare.
A very good analysis of this arbitrary decision, which is completely counter to the specific wording of the healthcare law, can be found here.
New evidence strongly suggests that the IRS’s harassment of conservative groups is continuing, despite the on-going Congressional investigations.
The IRS’ infamous Cincinnati office, which handles applications from groups applying for tax-exempt nonprofit status, badgered pro-life groups for information on their protesting activities as recently as late June 2013, well after IRS investigations began on the floor of the House of Representatives and elsewhere. “We’ve had three more groups come to us that have had problems with the IRS — some very recent, some current or still pending. One of them just got their determination letter,” Peter Breen, senior counsel at the Thomas More Society, which represents pro-life groups targeted by the IRS, told The Daily Caller. “It’s continuing, and it needs to be addressed.”
Thank you Obamacare! Of the almost 1 million jobs created in 2013, 77% are part-time.
Politicians can live in a ivory tower, devising fantasy plans to remake society, but employers who wish their businesses to survive have no choice but to live in the real world. Obamacare makes hiring full time employees too expensive, so to get the help they need the employers of America are converting their staffs to part-timers.
The long term problem with this is that it will be impossible for businesses to really innovate and compete under these conditions. Moreover, the employees themselves will be poorer, either earning less or working more, while actually getting less healthcare insurance coverage.
And for this we can thank Obama and the Democratic Party. Praised be their names!
The competition heats up: SpaceX has confirmed that it plans to begin vertical take-off and landing tests of a full scale Falcon 9 first stage.
The tests would be in New Mexico’s spaceport, and are essentially a scaled up version of the Grasshopper tests the company has been doing in Texas. It appears they are going to do these ground-up tests in conjunction with attempts on each future Falcon 9 launch to land the first stage.
Curiosity’s first year on Mars, in video in two minutes.
“You don’t jeopardize yourself, you jeopardize your family as well.”
The threat came from supervisors at the CIA to their employees, should any of them tell anyone in the media about what the CIA was doing during the Benghazi attack last year.
A careful analysis of IRS behavior shows that the tax agency very clearly favored liberal groups while specifically targeting conservatives for harassment.
Go to the link and take a look. A picture is worth a thousand words. And in this case it is several pictures.
The state of SLS construction.
The article is mostly focused on the engineering challenges of building a new rocket out of old pieces of the space shuttle. Kind of reminds me of Frankenstein. Nonetheless, I do get the impression for the first time that this heavy lift rocket will be built, and will fly at least once.
After that, however, I expect it to die from lack of funds. In fact, its history will probably parallel that of the Soviet Union’s Energia rocket, which flew twice, once to launch their shuttle copycat Buran and once to lift a failed payload whose purpose has never been clearly revealed. Soon thereafter came bankruptcy and the end of the Soviet Union, which couldn’t afford such a monstrosity. SLS will likely see a similar fate.
Does this make you feel safer? Homeland Security has lost track of more than one million foreigners after they have entered the country.
The government does track arrivals, but is years overdue in setting up a system to track departures — a goal set in a 1996 immigration law and reaffirmed in 2004, but which has eluded Republican and Democratic administrations. “DHS has not yet fulfilled the 2004 statutory requirement to implement a biometric exit capability, but has planning efforts under way to report to Congress in time for the fiscal year 2016 budget cycle on the costs and benefits of such a capability at airports and seaports,” GAO investigators wrote.
Homeland Security, like the TSA, is a fraud. Neither is capable of protecting us. Both are very skillful however at abusing innocent American citizens. Both should be eliminated. The country was actually safer — and freer — before they existed.
Does this make you feel safer? A new GAO report has found that TSA misconduct has risen by 26% in the past three years.
More evidence that Obamacare is turning the U.S. workforce into a part-time workforce.
The graphs are damning. The consequence of this shift is that the U.S. will increasingly be unable to compete in the global market. In addition, incomes and prosperity will shrink.
The uncertainty of science: New satellite data covering the period from 2000 to 2011 now shows that the atmosphere traps far less heat than predicted by every global warming climate model.
The models had predicted that the increase in CO2 — which is insufficient on its own to cause a greenhouse effect — would cause feedbacks with water (the atmosphere’s real greenhouse gas) that would increase the amount of atmospheric humidity which would thus trap heat in the atmosphere and raise the global temperature. The new data instead shows the opposite. The atmosphere is not trapping any heat. The greenhouse effect is not occurring as predicted.
Working for the Democratic Party: Emails between IRS official Lois Lerner and an attorney in the Federal Election Commission’s general counsel’s office show them twice colluding to illegally influence the FEC to prosecute conservative groups.
The timing of the correspondence between Lerner and the FEC suggests the FEC attorney sought information from the IRS in order to influence an upcoming vote by the six FEC commissioners. The FEC received a complaint in March 2008 from the Minnesota Democratic Farmer Labor Party alleging that the American Future Fund had violated campaign-finance law by engaging in political advocacy without registering as a political-action committee. The American Future Fund responded to that complaint in June 2008, telling the commission that it had applied for tax exemption in March of that year and was a “501(c)(4) social-welfare organization that was organized to provide Americans with a conservative and free-market viewpoint and mechanism to communicate and advocate on the issues that most interest and concern them.” According to the e-mail correspondence, a month after receiving the American Future Fund’s response, the FEC general counsel’s office — which is prohibited under law from conducting an investigation into an organization before the FEC’s six commissioners have voted to do so — contacted Lerner to investigate the agency’s tax-exempt status. [emphasis mine]
Simply put, the law states that when the FEC receives a complaint, the commission must then decide whether to initiate an investigation. Until it does so, however, it is a crime for the FEC’s general counsel to do any investigation. It is also a crime for the IRS to provide them any confidential tax information. Yet, the FEC’s general counsel did do an investigation on at least two conservative groups prior to a vote and Lois Lerner at the IRS provided them what they wanted, all illegally.
It appears that for justice to be served and for trust to be restored to these bureaucracies a lot of people need to be fired. Unfortunately, I do not expect that to happen. The Democrats clearly want to take advantage of this corrupt bureaucracy to wield power and destroy their enemies, and the Republicans are too wimpy to fight back. The result: The corruption and abuse of power will continue to happen, and it will happen with increasing aggressiveness against conservatives.
The competition heats up: SpaceX has signed a contract with MDA to launch all three of Canada’s next generation Radarsat satellites.
MDA’s willingness to go with SpaceX prior to the September 5 launch of its Cassiope satellite on the Falcon 9 illustrates again the confidence they have in SpaceX. At the same time, this contract is for launches expected to occur around 2018, which is a long way away. Much can happen till then, including the possibility that SpaceX will go bust.
In other words, right now it is the successful launch of Falcon 9 that is of significance, not these new contracts. Only if those launches succeed will these contracts then become really significant.
The uncertainty of science: Many in the astronomy community do not agree with the recent conclusions of one astronomer that Comet ISON is likely to be a dud.
The arguments from both sides are quite interesting. Stay tuned. We will find out in only a few more months.
Working for the Democratic Party: New evidence now suggests that the IRS harassed conservative organizations routinely, whether or not they already had tax exempt status.
According to the observations of one Italian astronomer, it appears that Comet ISON will not be the “Comet of the Century,” as hoped.
This fits with other recent reports, all of which suggested that the comet is not brightening as it should.
