Very brief descriptions, with appropriate links, of current or recent news items.
NASA’s last effort to re-establish contact with the Mars rover “Spirit.”
The pigs rule! Congress to NASA: follow the authorization act.
In other words, Congress wants NASA to spend money (Pork!) on a rocket it can’t complete for the cash provided.
Seven topics Americans can’t have an adult conversation about.
More craziness: McGill University has decided to protect the student who issued jihadist death threats against conservatives and Jews.
Some examples of the student’s threats: “I want to shoot everyone in this room,” followed by “I should have brought an M16.”
Here is McGill’s interpretation: “We have come to the conclusion that the messages don’t constitute a threat to the community.”
How the IRS harasses and oppresses.
The disassembly and decommissioning of the space shuttle Discovery has started.
The Defense and Transportation departments have slammed the FCC over its approval of a new broadband service that they think will interfere with GPS.
Japan’s unmanned freighter undocked from ISS today.
The X-37B space plane has been spotted again by amateurs.
More leftwing civility: Wisconsin Republican legislators continue to face threats.
“Protesters have congregated at the homes of Republican legislators, surrounded their cars and jeered at them as they walk to work, Mr. Jefferson said,” the Journal reported.
It appears the operator of a dam in Australia ‘invented’ record rainfall data in order to justify the gigantic release of water that caused the flooding there in January.
A tiny church in England has discovered that its church bible is actually an original 1611 King James bible, “one of perhaps 200 surviving 400-year-old original editions.”
The brightest supernovae yet found.
Supernova 2008am is 3.7 billion light-years away. At its peak luminosity, it was over 100 billion times brighter than the Sun. It emitted enough energy in one second to satisfy the power needs of the United States for one million times longer than the universe has existed.
From Watts Up With That: New sea level data shows that there has been “no acceleration of global sea level over the past 100 years,” despite the increase in temperatures. Key quote from the paper:
It is essential that investigations continue to address why this worldwide-temperature increase has not produced acceleration of global sea level over the past 100 years, and indeed why global sea level has possibly decelerated for at least the last 80 years.
Senate Democrats and the White House offer $20B more in cuts.
This is further evidence that the political winds favor trimming the government. However, to find out how serious the Democrats are we’d need to find out some details about their specific proposed cuts.
More on the space war over NASA from Jeff Foust of The Space Review. Also read this Aviation Week article.
Overall, it is still a mess, with much of the money allocated to NASA a complete waste that will not get us into space.
He has a point: Fred Barnes argues that the Republican incremental approach to cutting the budget makes sense politically. Key quote:
The end zone is far away, however, and impatience won’t get Republicans there. Impatience is not a strategy. It may lead to a government shutdown with unknown results. To enact the sweeping cuts they desire, Republicans must hold the House and capture the Senate and White House in the 2012 election. Then they’ll control Washington. Now they don’t.
More proof of media partisan bias: A Democratic President, and suddenly the press isn’t interested in a military murder scandal in Afghanistan.
Frenzy in Washington grows over nation’s debt.
I like the headline alone, because it suggests the political tide might finally be turning in the direction of actually cutting down the size of federal spending. And the article itself reinforces that sense.
A new statistical study has concluded that big quakes don’t trigger others large quakes far away.
Budget negotiations — and the possibility of a shutdown — are coming to a head.
The pigs continue to squeal: Five anti-hunger organization leaders plan open-ended fasts to protest proposed cuts.
Not bigots: Russia and Israel have agreed on a framework for cooperating in outer space.
Bigots: The University of Johannesburg has ended research with an Israeli School, “a step hailed as a ‘boycott’ by proponents of an international academic campaign to shun Israeli researchers.”
Good news: Japan has reopened its space station control room following the earthquake.
The NASA space war mess.
Congress is now looking to flatline or cut NASA budget (or not enact new ones) while also playing its own game of telling NASA to do things it simply does not have the budget to do. A new slow motion train wreck is in the making.
Get those telescopes out! A asteroid, a quarter-mile in diameter, is going to pass only 200,000 miles from the Earth on November 8, 2011. Key quote:
Although classified as a potentially hazardous object, 2005 YU55 poses no threat of an Earth collision over at least the next 100 years. However, this will be the closest approach to date by an object this large that we know about in advance and an event of this type.
