Very brief descriptions, with appropriate links, of current or recent news items.
Black gold! Three to four billion barrels of oil — 25 times more than previously predicted — are now thought to lie under certain geological formations in North Dakota and Montana.
Want to tone down the rhetoric? Maybe the left should look at itself: The progressive “climate of hate:” An illustrated primer, 2000-2010.
The shooting in Tucson might cause NASA to drop Congresswoman Giffords’ husband as commander of Endeavour’s last mission this spring.
Russian scientists are about to drill into Lake Vostok, a lake buried for the last 14 million years beneath the almost two and a half mile thick Antarctic icecap.
The next time someone begins ranting about how the money from “big oil” is used to attack the science of global warming, tell them to take a look at this post, which outlines in detail the more than $2 billion that the U.S. government plans to spend on climate change research in 2011 alone (too much of which is unfortunately used by partisans like James Hansen to try to prove the Earth is warming).
What does this tell us about the quality of his journalism degree? A freelance writer and journalism graduate of Columbia University has been caught fabricating material for an article in the Village Voice.
From Watts Up With That: Data from the Argos ocean floats says that the Earth’s climate, as measured by the heat content of the ocean, has been cooling since 2001, not warming as predicted by climate models. You can download the actual science paper, “The Energy Balance of Earth,” here.
It ain’t just NASA that’s having budget problems: The lack of a budget from Congress is going to delay the launch of two civilian NOAA weather satellites by more than a year.
Some squeals from the right: Don’t cut defense.
As much as I think it necessary to aggressively fight the wars we are in, I have no doubt that the budget of the Defense Department could be trimmed by significant amounts, without harming our capabilities in the slightest.
More please, especially in places like Iraq, Iran, and Pakistan! Thousands of Egyptian Muslims show up in Coptic Christian churches to act as “human shields.”
The battle begins: The House Budget Chairman, Paul Ryan, says that all spending bills will be written to exclude all funds for ObamaCare.
As I say, expect the squealing to be loud.
Freedom of speech alert! Fire’s speech codes for the year of 2010 and for January 2011. For the yearly “award,” get these rules::
UMass Amherst’s policy on “Rallies” has special regulations applicable to what it calls “controversial rallies”—and it leaves “controversial” wholly undefined, giving the administration unfettered discretion to invoke the policy when it sees fit. If a rally is deemed controversial, it may only take place between noon and 1 p.m. on the Student Union steps, and must be registered at least five days in advance. That’s just one hour a day on one tiny area of a campus of more than 27,000 students! Worse yet, the policy also requires that when holding a controversial rally, “The sponsoring RSO [Registered Student Organization] must designate at least 6 members to act as a security team.” In other words, student groups wishing to publicly express a controversial opinion on campus must give at least five days notice, may only do it on one small area of campus for one hour a day, and must be willing to put themselves in harm’s way by acting as their own security in order to do so.
More progress: Two House bills have been introduced to eliminate funding for NPR and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
Stand by for loud squealing.
Progress! The House today approved rules for debating the repeal of ObamaCare, with a vote expected on January 12. Note that some Democrats voted in favor of this bill, indicating that it has some bipartisan support.
More on the tolerance of Islam and that assassination of a Pakistani governor because he opposed Islamic blasphemy laws. Key quote:
Specifically, [Governor] Taseer was supportive of a Christian woman, Asia Bibi, who has been sentenced to death for “insulting Muhammad.” Bibi had offered some fellow farm laborers some water. They refused to drink it because Christian hands purportedly make water unclean. An argument followed. She defended her faith, which they took as synonymous with attacking theirs. Later, she says, a mob of her accusers raped her.
Naturally, a Pakistani judge sentenced her to hang for blasphemy.
And Governor Taseer, who bravely visited her and sympathized with her plight, had 40 bullets pumped into him by one of his own bodyguards.
As one commenter to my previous post on this story noted, “If they praise murder, what’s next? What kind of religion is this?”
Why the sun’s atmosphere is hotter than its surface.
Has the TSA gone from touching your junk to stealing it?
TSA: Living on borrowed time? Key quote:
The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year. At TSA headquarters alone, there are 3,526 staff whose average salary tops $106,000. And while the TSA has gotten very good at groping airline passengers and undressing them with full body scans, the organization has yet to prevent a single terrorist attack. A Government Accountability Office (GAO) investigation released last spring revealed that at least 17 known terrorists have been able to pass through TSA security totally unhindered. [emphasis mine]
A nation choking on endless laws. I like the subtitle for this article as well: “The rising dictatorship of the bureaucrats.”
A proposal to revive a project to send a private science probe to an asteroid.
The original project, NEAP, was proposed back in 1997 by the late Jim Bensen of SpaceDev (now Sierra Nevada). Benson wanted to not only do research, but he planned to claim the asteroid as his property upon landing. Though his proposal never flew, it was clearly a forerunner to today’s resurgence of the private space industry, and in many ways kickstarted that resurgence.
NASA management has once again delayed the launch of Discovery, pushing it back to late February in order to finish repairs to its external tank.
A depressing but honest unemployment update.
The early Lunar Orbiter images, taken in the mid-1960s, have been reprocessed and recovered, in a spectacular manner.
December 14 has been set as the target date for the first test launch of Orbital Sciences’s commercial ferry to ISS. Key quote:
The flight is scheduled to include delivery of a token cargo load using Orbital’s first Cygnus visiting vehicle, a service module combined with a pressurized cargo module.
Using old Apollo data, scientists have detected the Moon’s molten core.
Here’s some good news: Egyptian Muslims have volunteered to act as “human shields” at the upcoming Coptic Christmas Eve mass.
Progress? The NPR manager who fired Juan Williams has resigned. In addition, NPR’s CEO has been denied her 2010 bonus because of “concern over her role in the termination process.” And what does Juan Williams think of this?
“It’s good news for NPR if they can get someone who is the keeper of the flame of liberal orthodoxy out of NPR. . . , She had an executioner’s knife for anybody who didn’t abide by her way of thinking. . . . And I think she represented a very ingrown, incestuous culture in that institution that’s not open to not only different ways of thinking, but angry at the fact that I would even talk or be on Fox.”
