Very brief descriptions, with appropriate links, of current or recent news items.
Not good: The number of available job openings in April showed the biggest drop in nearly 4 years.
Cover up: President Obama today invoked executive privilege in order to withhold documents demanded by a House committee investigating the “Fast and Furious” gun scandal.
In related news, the union that represents Border Patrol agents called today for the resignation of Attorney General Eric Holder.
The North Carolina high school teacher who thought it is a crime to criticize the president and threatened students for doing so will keep her job.
It is now proven that ignorance is a qualification for teaching in North Carolina’s public schools.
The competition heats up: SpaceShipTwo was in the air on Friday, as WhiteKnightTwo did a 1.5 hour test flight with the ship attached to its belly.
This was the second flight of WhiteKnightTwo in three days, and is in line with Virgin Galactic’s test flight schedule announced in May. If the test flights go well, expect that first rocket-powered flight of SpaceShipTwo later this year.
The competition heats up: Excalibur Almaz has announced its plans for a privately funded trip to the Moon.
News you can use: How to make potato chips that look like translucent shards of glass.
Congress has pulled all funding for the Eisenhower memorial, the design of which is strongly opposed by the Eisenhower family.
Memo to NBC: “What the hell is wrong with you?”
The first manually flown docking by Chinese astronauts is now scheduled for June 24.
The competition heats up: A new company has announced plans to use the Gemini capsule design from the 1960s to provide crew and cargo capability to orbit.
“Since this is an existing and proven design we could begin construction six to eight weeks after funding and complete a flying prototype ten to thirteen months later,” said WestWind President Bill Jolly.
Mars Odyssey is out of safe mode and should be back in full operation by next week.
More guns, less crime: According to FBI statistics released last week, violent crime has declined for the fifth year in a row, the 18th time it has declined in the last 20 years.
Facts are hard things. You can claim that more guns will cause more violent crime, but the facts remain what they are: Wherever there are gun control laws, crime is higher. Wherever people are allowed to own guns, crime goes down.
NBC has been caught again, for the third time this year, of selectively editing news footage to create a false scenario.
In all three cases the false scenario aided Democratic leftwing politics.
I mention this story only to emphasis how completely unreliable NBC is as a source of news information. Sadly, none of the other media networks are much better.
Leftwing civility: Adults heckle and shout down kindergarten students singing “God Bless the USA” at a graduation ceremony in Brooklyn.
A Virginia dog that died two years ago received a voter registration form in the mail last week, asking it to register to vote.
The organization that sent out the form is called “the non-profit Voter Participation Center,” which is working to get “groups like young people, minorities, and unmarried women” to vote. Which suggests strongly that this center is a leftwing political activist group working to win future elections for Democrats, by any means necessary. A close look at their website confirms this, as they have many ties to liberal organizations and think tanks. More here.
This is further evidence that when Democrats scream about “the suppress the vote” efforts of Republicans, they are really worried about is the possibility that voter fraud will be eliminated, preventing them garnering fake votes.
Your tax dollars at work: Spending money on silliness at the NSF and NIH.
Coburn’s report identified a number of projects that will make most Americans—scientists and nonscientists alike—shake their heads. They include studies of: how to ride a bike; when dogs became man’s best friend; whether political views are genetically predetermined; whether parents choose trendy baby names; and when the best time is to buy a ticket to a sold-out sporting event. And it noted that “only politicians appear to benefit from other NSF studies, such as research on what motivates individuals to make political donations, how politicians can benefit from Internet town halls…and how politicians use the Internet.”
Read the whole thing, as it gives a scientist’s perspective of this waste, which is sometimes not as obvious as the examples above.
Want to invest in a spacesuit company? Now you can! (Hat tip Clark Lindsey.)
Global warming: Second thoughts by an environmentalist.
For many years, I was an active supporter of the IPCC and its CO2 theory. Recent experience with the UN’s climate panel, however, forced me to reassess my position. In February 2010, I was invited as a reviewer for the IPCC report on renewable energy. I realised that the drafting of the report was done in anything but a scientific manner. The report was littered with errors and a member of Greenpeace edited the final version. These developments shocked me. I thought, if such things can happen in this report, then they might happen in other IPCC reports too.
He then very clearly outlines what we do and do not know about the Earth’s climate, and pinpoints the important uncertainties that presently exist.
A Wyoming think tank is suing the Federal Election Commission in behalf of three Wyoming residents who were denied the right to run a political ad hostile to Barack Obama.
What was that language again? I think the words are “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
The FAA and NASA have worked out their differences concerning their regulation of private commercial space.
Essentially, NASA has finally conceded with this agreement that it has no control over a private space launch that is not flying to a NASA facility. That the FAA continues to have as much regulatory control is bad enough, but getting NASA out of the loop will at least ease the bureaucratic burden for private companies.
Leftwing civility: A school bus used by a church to drive anti-abortion protesters to a local abortion clinic was firebombed Friday night.
The terrorist training that Gaza gives to kindergarten children. With pictures.
I ask again: Why do we give these people millions?
How nice of them: The TSA has tentatively approved a plan to allow private companies to screen passengers in Orlando.
It’s all crap. In a free society there is no such agency as the TSA, and according to the Constitution, no one is screened by anyone without due cause.
The answer is 43: An IBM supercomputer today became the fastest in the world.
The competition heats up: China’s Shenzhou-9 capsule successfully docked with Tiengong-1 today and the crew has entered the space module.
The X-37b that has been in orbit for the past 15 months successfully returned to Earth in a runway landing today.
Video of the landing below the fold.
» Read more
China has successfully put into orbit its first three person crew, including its first female astronaut, on its first manned space docking mission.
Despite the continuing lack of an agreement, Kazakhstan today gave Russia permission to resume launches from the Baikonur spaceport.
Their new as yet unfinished spaceport in Vostochny must appear increasingly important to the Russians.
