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Cortaro, AZ 85652

 

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Ohio wedding photographer threatened with legal action over beliefs

9:55 am

Here we go again: A Christian wedding photography now faces legal action because she declined photographing a same-sex marriage.

Although the [same-sex] couple filed the complaint, Ohio is one of 13 states that does not allow same-sex marriages, and Bexley is also a municipality that does not prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation. Additionally, the Bexley Chamber of Commerce does not prohibit its members from discriminating based on sexual orientation.

The Bexley Chamber of Commerce issued a statement through Facebook on Monday condemning Schmackers’ refusal of service. The post continued by stating that board members have decided that the chamber’s policy must be changed so that this type of “discrimination” does not happen again.

Damn right. These evil Christians have got to be squelched and destroyed. They have no right to their religion. In fact, maybe we should round them up and put them in camps! That will show them that we believe in tolerance and freedom!

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Obama administration considers Munich-like UN deal to partition Israel

9:45 am

Having failed in its effort to depose Benjamin Netanyahu as Israel’s elected leader, the Obama administration is considering making several international deals that will bypass Israel’s government and force that country to accept a Palestinian state — even though the leaders of the Palestinians are still vowing to destroy them.

More here.

Anyone with any education at all knows how well Chamberlain’s deal at Munich with Hitler worked out. Expect the same from Obama and the Palestinians.

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Conscious Choice cover

Now available in hardback and paperback as well as ebook!

 

From the press release: In this ground-breaking new history of early America, historian Robert Zimmerman not only exposes the lie behind The New York Times 1619 Project that falsely claims slavery is central to the history of the United States, he also provides profound lessons about the nature of human societies, lessons important for Americans today as well as for all future settlers on Mars and elsewhere in space.

 
Conscious Choice: The origins of slavery in America and why it matters today and for our future in outer space, is a riveting page-turning story that documents how slavery slowly became pervasive in the southern British colonies of North America, colonies founded by a people and culture that not only did not allow slavery but in every way were hostile to the practice.  
Conscious Choice does more however. In telling the tragic history of the Virginia colony and the rise of slavery there, Zimmerman lays out the proper path for creating healthy societies in places like the Moon and Mars.

 

“Zimmerman’s ground-breaking history provides every future generation the basic framework for establishing new societies on other worlds. We would be wise to heed what he says.” —Robert Zubrin, founder of founder of the Mars Society.

 

All editions are available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and all book vendors, with the ebook priced at $5.99 before discount. All editions can also be purchased direct from the ebook publisher, ebookit, in which case you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.

 

Autographed printed copies are also available at discount directly from the author (hardback $29.95; paperback $14.95; Shipping cost for either: $6.00). Just send an email to zimmerman @ nasw dot org.

Mars One finalist kicked out for publicly criticizing company.

9:31 am

The Mars One finalist who publicly criticized the company’s proposed one-way Mars mission has been kicked out.

The company claims he breached their confidentiality rules. In addition, other finalists have contested his criticisms. Their points seem reasonable, but the bottom line remains that the project is unrealistic and will not fly. They lack the funding and the technology to do it, and won’t have it for decades.

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Obamacare is crushing small business with its cost and complexity

9:15 pm

Finding out what’s in it: Obamacare is costing small businesses thousands of dollars to fulfill its complex regulations that they didn’t have to spend beforehand.

The Affordable Care Act, which as of next Jan. 1 applies to all companies with 50 or more workers, requires owners to track staffers’ hours, absences and how much they spend on health insurance. Many small businesses don’t have the human resources departments or computer systems that large companies have, making it harder to handle the paperwork. On average, complying with the law costs small businesses more than $15,000 a year, according to a survey released a year ago by the National Small Business Association. “It’s a horrible hassle,” says Mete, managing partner of the Miami-based company.

And how are these small businesses paying for this? Either they have to raise prices, so that you the customer pay, or they

cut back on workers’ bonuses and raises. “[The employees] understand it didn’t emanate from us,” Patton says. “They’re just disappointed that $25,000 could have gone into a bonus pool.”

Obviously, it is Bush’s fault that this is happening! Who would dream of blaming the Democrats and Obama, even though they wrote this law and were the only ones who voted for it? If Bush hadn’t been President, they would never have done it! In fact, I am sure it is Reagan’s fault also!

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Genesis cover

On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.

 
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.


The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
 

"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News

Leaving Earth cover

There are now only 3 copies left of the now out-of-print hardback of Leaving Earth. The price for an autographed copy of this rare collector's item is now $150 (plus $5 shipping).

 

To get your copy while the getting is good, please send a $155 check (which includes $5 shipping) payable to Robert Zimmerman to
 

Behind The Black, c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652

 

Leaving Earth is also available as an inexpensive ebook!

 

Leaving Earth: Space Stations, Rival Superpowers, and the Quest for Interplanetary Travel, can be purchased as an ebook everywhere for only $3.99 (before discount) at amazon, Barnes & Noble, all ebook vendors, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit.

 

If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big oppressive tech companies and I get a bigger cut much sooner.

 

Winner of the 2003 Eugene M. Emme Award of the American Astronautical Society.

"Leaving Earth is one of the best and certainly the most comprehensive summary of our drive into space that I have ever read. It will be invaluable to future scholars because it will tell them how the next chapter of human history opened." -- Arthur C. Clarke

An iron rain fell on Earth early in its formation

9:35 am

New research attempting to explain why the Earth but not the Moon has so much iron splattered through its mantle has found that iron can be more easily vaporized during impacts than previously thought, and thus rained down on the planet during the early asteroid bombardment.

Principal investigator Kraus said, “Because planetary scientists always thought it was difficult to vaporize iron, they never thought of vaporization as an important process during the formation of the Earth and its core. But with our experiments, we showed that it’s very easy to impact-vaporize iron.” He continued, “This changes the way we think of planet formation, in that instead of core formation occurring by iron sinking down to the growing Earth’s core in large blobs (technically called diapirs), that iron was vaporized, spread out in a plume over the surface of the Earth and rained out as small droplets. The small iron droplets mixed easily with the mantle, which changes our interpretation of the geochemical data we use to date the timing of Earth’s core formation.”

The Moon’s gravity in turn wasn’t sufficient to pull its own iron vapor down. Thus, it does not have much iron in its mantle.

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Sierra Nevada introduces its cargo version of Dream Chaser

6:35 pm

The competition heats up: Sierra Nevada has unveiled a revised cargo version of Dream Chaser, competing for NASA next round of freighter contracts to ISS.

They have made a number of changes, but the most significant is the new folding wings, allowing the spacecraft to fit inside the fairings of most rocket systems. This also eliminates one of the concerns I have read about the previous design on whether its wings could have withstood exposure to the maximum atmospheric stresses experienced during launch.

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Lockheed Martin enters the competition to supply cargo for ISS

5:42 pm

The competition heats up: Lockheed Martin has joined Sierra Nevada, Orbital ATK, Boeing, and SpaceX in bidding for NASA’s next contract to ferry cargo to ISS.

Lockheed’s proposal is different in that it proposes a two spacecraft operation. The cargo would be hauled up in a very simple storage bin, where a long-term orbital tug would grab it and take it to ISS. The idea is that they would only have to build and launch the complicated thrusters, robot arms, computers, and avionics of their cargo freighter once, thereby saving money.

Two companies will be chosen. Since the first competition back in the mid-2000s, when NASA picked SpaceX and Kistler for the first cargo round, the quality of the bids has improved remarkably. Back then, NASA had to choose from a bunch of new companies, none of which had ever done this before. The big companies (Boeing, Lockheed Martin) then poo-pooed the competition, saying that it couldn’t be done as cheap as the new companies claimed. After Kistler went under and was replaced by Orbital, they and SpaceX proved the big companies were wrong.

Now the competition includes all the big players, except that those big players are no longer offering expensive systems but cut-rate efficient designs that are as cost effective as SpaceX and Orbital’s first designs.

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New evidence of child-smuggling in ancient Mayan human sacrifices

4:58 pm

Isotope testing of the teeth of the skeletons of children found in a cave in Belize has found that none had come from that region, suggesting that the children were kidnapped from other neighboring communities before they were sacrificed to the Mayan gods.

Though the data is still being crunched (the full report will be published when Lorenz presents her thesis later this year), initial analysis indicates that the children whose bones littered the Midnight Terror Cave did not come from the surrounding Upper Roaring River Valley, where the cave is located, or even from Belize. In fact, the young victims appear to have been brought to this spot from as far as 200 miles away (an enormous distance in the 9th century), before being taken deep into the earth to have their beating hearts cut from their chests to appease any number of angry gods.

The article is fascinating not only for the profound archeological discoveries it documents but also for its detailed description of the science process itself. It also is brutally honest. Even though these results cast a poor light on ancient Indian culture, something that is very political incorrect in today’s world, the author minces no words, even if he does wring his hands a bit about these conclusions.

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Water ice volcanoes on Ceres

2:12 pm

Data collected by Dawn since it entered orbit around Ceres on March 6 now strongly suggests that the bright spots on the surface are produced by venting water,

Andreas Nathues, principal investigator for Dawn’s framing camera, says the feature has spectral characteristics that are consistent with ice. Intriguingly, the brightness can be seen even when the spacecraft is looking on edge at the crater rim, suggesting that the feature may be outgassing water vapor above the rim and into space. “Ceres seems to be indeed active,” he says. The feature brightens through the course of the day, and then shuts down at night. Nathues says the behavior is similar to that of comets.

More here. By mid-April Dawn should finally settle this with high resolution images.

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Airline passengers subdue man screaming “Jihad!” on airplane

10:07 am

A United Airlines flight had to turn back when passengers on board were forced to subdue an unruly passenger who was yelling “Jihad!” as he charged the cockpit.

This is another example of why the TSA is a complete waste of money while doing terrible harm to our culture’s concept of freedom. No matter what the TSA does, it can never prevent bad guys from getting on a plane. In the end, it will always be the job of the passengers and crew to resist a terrorist. We should just give that responsibility back to them, as free Americans, and get rid of the TSA. It might increase the risk, but I promise you, if every flight had armed Americans aboard, randomly placed, terrorists would go elsewhere to try to do their dirty work.

Most Americans think my opinion here is crazy, but it is the way our country did things for its first two centuries, and things were actually no more dangerous but we all had much greater freedom.

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Virgin Galactic says LauncherOne will make its first flight in 2016

9:35 pm

The competition heats up: The CEO of Virgin Galactic, George Whitesides, revealed at a satellite conference that they are on schedule for LauncherOne to make its first flight before the end of 2016.

The company recently started hot-fire tests of an engine called Newton 3 developed by Virgin Galactic for the first stage of LauncherOne, Whitesides said. That engine, capable of generating 265,000 to 335,000 newtons of thrust, uses liquid oxygen and kerosene propellants. “We’re now to the point where we’re very confident that we can build a very affordable rocket,” Whitesides said. After his speech, he said the company was on schedule to begin flights by the end of 2016, with even initial test flights likely carrying some satellites.

That it is Whitesides and not Richard Branson saying this makes me more confident that it is true, though I remain very skeptical of any promise made by anyone these days at Virgin Galactic. However, the impression from this article confirms an earlier impression I have had, that the company is beginning to shift its resources away from suborbital tourism with SpaceShipTwo and towards orbital launch services with LauncherOne. Branson had announced LauncherOne as a concept in 2012, but only recently have we begin to hear of any actual work on it.

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A Mars One finalist accuses the company of fraud

9:24 pm

One of the finalists in the one-way-to-Mars competition by the company Mars One has now accused the company of fraud.

Most egregiously, many media outlets continue to report that Mars One received applications from 200,000 people who would be happy to die on another planet — when the number it actually received was 2,761.

As [finalist Joseph] Roche observed the process from an insider’s perspective, his concerns increased. Chief among them: that some leading contenders for the mission had bought their way into that position, and are being encouraged to “donate” any appearance fees back to Mars One — which seemed to him very strange for an outfit that needs billions of dollars to complete its objective. “When you join the ‘Mars One Community,’ which happens automatically if you applied as a candidate, they start giving you points,” Roche explained to me in an email. “You get points for getting through each round of the selection process (but just an arbitrary number of points, not anything to do with ranking), and then the only way to get more points is to buy merchandise from Mars One or to donate money to them.”

There’s more at the link. Essentially, the whole operation has apparently devolved into a petty scam to milk money from the finalists themselves.

None of this surprises me. From the beginning I considered the whole proposal unrealistic, which thus almost forced the people in charge to commit fraud.

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New results from Messenger at Mercury

12:53 pm

Hollows on Mercury

As Messenger nears the end of its lifespan orbiting Mercury, the project scientists have put together a slate of talks on what they have learned, presented today at the 46th annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston.

The images that go with these presentations can be found here.

The image on the right is a close-up of the mysterious and unexpected hollows that Messenger found scattered everywhere on Mercury’s surface. According to today’s presentation, scientists now believe they are very recent features, formed when material with a lower boiling point evaporated away because of Mercury’s harsh and very hot environment. Imagine for example a vein of dry ice in a rock crack. The temperature rises above freezing and the dry ice evaporates. And like the convection bubbles in tomato sauce as it simmers, some of that evaporation pushes its way up by popping out a bubble and leaving behind a hollow.

In the case of Mercury the material is likely not dry ice, though scientists as yet are unsure what it is.

They are also presenting talks on magnesium on Mercury, the planet’s many scarps, and detailed observations of the permanently shadowed polar craters that might have water-ice in them.

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Wait times at the VA remain months long, not 4 days as claimed

11:42 am

The federal government marches on! The wait times to get medical appointments at the VA continue to be months long, not 4 days as the claimed by agency officials in congressional hearings.

Records show on January 15, more than 1,600 veterans who were new patients were waiting 60 to 90 days for appointments. Another 400 veterans have waited up to six months, and 64 veterans had been waiting six months to a year for their appointments. The documents provided to CNN show the lengthy wait times are still happening, within the last several months, and sources say the backlog is happening even now.

And yet last month, the VA’s acting director for the Western region overseeing the Los Angeles VA told Congress that veterans who are new patients there only have to wait a few days for appointments. “The average wait time for a new patient right now is about four days,” Dr. Skye McDougall, the acting director of the Desert Pacific Healthcare Network, Veterans Health Administration, testified before the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs.

Who ya gonna believe, the actual facts or what an important government official claims? Obviously, the official is right and any skepticism by anyone makes them a denier who should just shut up. It makes people uncomfortable!

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Muslim university students campaign to shut down free speech

9:21 am

Fascists: Muslim students at the University of Missouri want to prevent the screening of the film American Sniper because they don’t agree with it.

At the heart of the controversy is a Muslim student activist who declared showing the film on campus would make her feel “unsafe” and demanded an “apology and explanation” as to how and why the movie was even selected for Mizzou audiences.

The uproar was taken quite seriously, and prompted the student government to conduct a meeting to determine whether the flick should be shown. “This film is blatant racist, colonialist propaganda that should not be shown under any circumstances and especially not endorsed by a branch of student government that purports to represent me and have my best interests in mind,” student Farah El-Jayyousi had stated. [emphasis mine]

I haven’t seen the movie, and I am sure neither has Farah El-Jayyousi above. I however wouldn’t dream of censoring it. El-Jayyousi would love to, along with any other person who dares to criticize Islam and the culture of violence and hate that now dominates it.

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New areas of Comet 67P/C-G come out of the shadows

8:56 am

Comet 67P/C-G's smaller lobe

Rosetta has snapped a new image of Comet 67P/C-G’s smaller lobe that not only shows the increased activity around the nucleus but captures areas of the comet that had formally been in darkness. The image also includes the region where engineers think Philae landed, which I think is the area just below the brightest flat area in the center of the lobe. That this area is now in daylight is why engineers are hopeful that Philae might soon wake up.

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Sloppy biosafety procedures found at federal disease center

8:43 am

Does this make you feel safer? An investigation of a federal center for studying dangerous diseases in primates has found serious biosafety procedure violations.

Concerns arose at the center in Covington, Louisiana, after two rhesus macaques became ill in late November with melioidosis, a disease caused by the tropical bacterium Burkholderia pseudomallei. In January, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Department of Agriculture investigators traced the strain infecting the primates to a vaccine research lab working with mice. Last month, as the investigation continued, CDC suspended the primate center’s 10 or so research projects involving B. pseudomallei and other select agents (a list of dangerous bacteria, viruses, and toxins that are tightly regulated). Meanwhile, a report in USA Today suggested the bacterium might have contaminated the center’s soil or water.

…In addition, workers “frequently entered the select agent lab without appropriate protective clothing,” the release says. No center staff has shown signs of illness. On 12 March, however, Tulane announced that blood tests have found that one worker has low levels of antibodies to the bacterium, suggesting possible exposure at the center, according to ABC News.

Is there any area of government expertise that isn’t screwing up royally these days? As far as I can tell, the answer is no. The sooner we as a people can cut back on the government’s resources so that they won’t have the ability to do us harm, the better off we will be.

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Whistling now forbidden

3:35 pm

Fascists: After several black employees in a television newsroom were horrified when they heard a photographer casually whistling the folk tune “Dixie”, the station management immediately clamped down and promised such evil will never be allowed to happen again!

On Thursday, two meetings were held with staffers and WBTV general manager Nick Simonette and news director Dennis Milligan. “We wanted the staff to know that we don’t tolerate things in the workplace that make people uncomfortable,” Milligan said. “We encourage people to come forward. I think it was handled in an appropriate way.”

I’m so glad. Now those black employees know that if anyone says anything at all that they disagree with — making them “uncomfortable” — all they have to do is complain and they can shut them up. Modern American freedom!

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Curiosity moves on

9:18 am

After six months and a short pause in work while engineers analyzed a short circuit, Curiosity has finally left the Pahrump Hills are on the slopes of Mount Sharp.

The rover has begun driving away from the Pahrump Hills outcrop where it had spent the last six months. On Thursday, March 12, it drove about 33 feet (about 10 meters) southwestward. The rover team plans on taking Curiosity through a valley called “Artist’s Drive” to reach higher geological layers of Mount Sharp. Curiosity is currently heading towards a rock outcrop known as “Garden City.”

The link has a nice image showing Curiosity’s recent travels as well as its future route.

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Arkansas SWAT team kidnaps a family’s seven kids

9:15 pm

Theft by government: The Arkansas SWAT team kidnapping of seven children from their parents continues, with the hearing that was supposed to settle the issue and get the children home postponed for six weeks for no reason.

It will be at least “6 more weeks of kidnapping” for the 7 homeschooled, homebirthed Stanley children, according to their father. Hal and Michelle Stanley were given no warning that their court hearing scheduled for February 12 would be abruptly postponed until March 23. They say they were not given any explanation as to why the hearing was postponed.

They had been under the impression that their children would be coming home after the hearing, and had held onto the hope that the crazy situation would be resolved, and their family would be reunited. The pain in their voices was palpable as they expressed their disappointment and grief over the postponement.

The father explains to Health Impact News that they are only allowed to visit with their children a few hours a week, under strict supervision. There has to be two observers, and if they talk about things they are not supposed to discuss with their children, the visit is cut short. As a condition to these supervised visits, Hal and Michelle must attend “parenting classes,” even though they have homeschooled their children for many years. Hal Stanley is also a 73 year old ordained Southern Baptist Minister.

As said back in January when I first reported this horrifying story, read it all, it will terrify you. The parents have been charged with no crime and there is no evidence at all of them abusing their children. The whole issue was supposedly prompted because the Stanleys used a legal water purifier for their garden that the has not been approved by the FDA.

Yet, the state now claims the power to steal this family’s children, with no legal justification.

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