Judge rules that Christians should be persecuted if they disagree with gays

9:56 pm

Fascists: A judge in Washington state ruled Wednesday that a florist should be “personally ruined” because her Christian faith prevented her from promoting same-sex marriage.

“The message of these rulings is unmistakable: The government will bring about your personal and professional ruin if you don’t help celebrate same-sex marriage,” said ADF Senior Counsel Kristen Waggoner. “The two men had no problem getting the flowers they wanted,” she said. “They received several offers for free flowers, and the marketplace gives them plenty of options. Laws that are supposed to prohibit discrimination might sound good, but the government has begun to use these laws to hurt people – to force them to conform and to silence and punish them if they don’t violate their religious beliefs on marriage.”

Once again, the issue here was not the oppression of gays, since these two men were not prevented by anyone from getting married, were not denied flowers or wedding cakes or any options for celebrating their wedding. All they were denied was the ability to force someone who disagreed with them about same-sex marriage to participate in their same-sex wedding. For that thought crime, they — and the government of Washington — have decided to destroy someone.

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How scientists lose the average layman

7:55 pm

Link here.

A superb essay. I have written about this myself numerable times, but sadly our modern elite intellectual society finds it somehow impossible to get the point, which Shaw sums up very well in his last paragraph:

The point of all this is simply to say that scientific conclusions change over the ages. Complicated things take time. But when you come out and start lecturing us – or worse, start telling us how the government should orient policy – based on your own favorite theory of the day while not yet proving it to a satisfactory degree (even to we simpletons) then you can expect some of us to push back and demand you show your work. And it’s not because the pastor told us to think that way on Sunday.

Read it all. It also illustrates quite well why increasingly the public does not trust scientists or journalists when it comes to hot button issues like climate change.

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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 print edition can be purchased at Amazon, any other book seller, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, 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

Work stalls on Mars One robotic missions

7:03 pm

Mars One, the company that just this week announced the 100 finalists in its competition to send 24 people on a one-way trip to Mars, has quietly suspended all work on two robotic missions heralded as precursors to that manned mission.

These facts just add weight to my conviction that the Mars One competition is at the moment nothing more than a reality television show. It is a cool idea for a television show, but journalists should stop selling it as anything more than that.

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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 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.

Stratolaunch airplane 40% complete

9:28 am

The competition heats up: Stratolaunch has revealed that construction of the gigantic airplane — the largest ever to fly — that will take its rockets into the air is now about 40% complete.

The first flight is still scheduled for 2016. The article also includes some good analysis which indicates the competitive problems Stratolaunch faces:

Its Orbital Sciences-supplied solid-fuel rocket will be able to carry 15,000 pounds to low Earth orbit. But this is about half the lift of the competing SpaceX Falcon 9 and just 30 percent that of a Boeing-built Delta IV. Stratolaunch will be able to orbit only smaller satellites.

Nonetheless, watching this mother-ship take off will be quite breath-taking.

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Leaving Earth cover

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

Islamic cleric insists Sun orbits Earth

4:04 pm

Islamic science: At student discussion on Sunday an Islamic cleric insisted that the Sun orbits the Earth.

Sheikh Bandar al-Khaibari told a student that the Earth is “stationary and does not move,” according to Al-Arabiya, justifying the statement with religious texts and statements. But then he tried to debunk the common knowledge about the Earth’s rotation using “logic,” in a visual demonstration that prompted the speech to go viral. “First of all, where are we now?” he asked. “We go to Sharjah airport to travel to China by plane, clear?!” Khaibari argued, confusingly, that the Earth cannot rotate because it would render air travel impossible.

Even if Islam was peaceful, which it is not, it remains a problem because it apparently also encourages this kind of ignorance.

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A stellar fly-by 70,000 years ago

11:14 am

Astronomers have identified a nearby star, now 20 light years away, that 70,000 years ago flew past the solar system at a distance of only 0.8 light years.

The star’s trajectory suggests that 70,000 years ago it passed roughly 52,000 astronomical units away (or about 0.8 light years, which equals 8 trillion kilometers, or 5 trillion miles). This is astronomically close; our closest neighbor star Proxima Centauri is 4.2 light years distant. In fact, the astronomers explain in the paper that they are 98% certain that it went through what is known as the “outer Oort Cloud” – a region at the edge of the solar system filled with trillions of comets a mile or more across that are thought to give rise to long-period comets orbiting the Sun after their orbits are perturbed.

I feel it necessary to note that the Oort Cloud itself has never been directly observed and only exists theoretically based on the random arrival of comets from the outer solar system.

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The crooks in the tea party movement

9:41 am

John Hawkins has released a blockbuster report revealing which tea pary/Republican PACS are legitimate and helpful to conservative candidates and which are nothing more than scams.

The bottom line:

If you gave a dollar to the gold standard of PACs that we researched, Club for Growth Action, 88 cents of every dollar you gave went to a candidate. On the other hand, there were a number of PACs that gave 10% or less of the money they received to candidates. When there’s a 78 cents per dollar difference in the effective use of money between the top of the heap and more than half of the PACs we researched, there’s an elephant in the room that needs to be addressed.

It is essential that conservatives review carefully the graph at the link before they give money to anyone.

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Ceres comes into focus

9:22 am

Ceres as since on February 12, 2015 by Dawn

Cool images! The Dawn science team has released new even sharper images of the giant asteroid Ceres, taken by Dawn on February 12 at a distance of 52,000 miles.

Though the surface appears to have many of the typical craters, scientists continue to be puzzled by the bright spots. This newest image suggests that they are ice-filled craters, but don’t hold me to that guess. For one thing, why are only a handful of craters filled with ice, and none of the others?

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South Korea unveils its own lunar rover

8:57 am

The competition heats up: South Korea has revealed its preliminary design for a lunar rover, set to launch in 2020 on a Korean-built rocket.

The article does not indicate whether this project has actually been approved or is merely being touted by Korea Institute of Science and Technology, which made the announcement. The cost to build it is estimated to be more than $7 billion, which seems quite exorbitant and over-priced.

Update: I had misread the conversion in the article from U.S. to Korean currency and thought the proposed cost for this mission was way more than it really is, which is about $7 million, a much more reasonable number. Thanks to Edward for the correction.

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What the Islamic State really wants

4:00 pm

Link here. This is an incredibly detailed and intelligent background analysis into what the Islamic State is, what it stands for, the roots of those principles, and the dangers it presents to the civilized world.

The article is long but worth every word. Number one take-away from this essay, however, are these two paragraphs:

The reality is that the Islamic State is Islamic. Very Islamic. Yes, it has attracted psychopaths and adventure seekers, drawn largely from the disaffected populations of the Middle East and Europe. But the religion preached by its most ardent followers derives from coherent and even learned interpretations of Islam.

Virtually every major decision and law promulgated by the Islamic State adheres to what it calls, in its press and pronouncements, and on its billboards, license plates, stationery, and coins, “the Prophetic methodology,” which means following the prophecy and example of Muhammad, in punctilious detail. Muslims can reject the Islamic State; nearly all do. But pretending that it isn’t actually a religious, millenarian group, with theology that must be understood to be combatted, has already led the United States to underestimate it and back foolish schemes to counter it. We’ll need to get acquainted with the Islamic State’s intellectual genealogy if we are to react in a way that will not strengthen it, but instead help it self-immolate in its own excessive zeal. [emphasis in original]

Another quote almost as important:

[T]he Islamic State is committed to purifying the world by killing vast numbers of people. The lack of objective reporting from its territory makes the true extent of the slaughter unknowable, but social-media posts from the region suggest that individual executions happen more or less continually, and mass executions every few weeks.

I am once again reminded of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, where he bluntly told us what he intended to do, and was ignored. We ignore the Islamic State and what it stands for at our very very great peril.

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A real hero of freedom

3:10 pm

Who, when faced with numerous death threats from Islamic fundamentalists — including an actual physical attack last week that killed one and wounded three — had this to say, “I’m not going to let this attack scare me. I’m going to continue just like I always have.”

Such an individual should be heralded by all in our society and backed up with so much firepower from everyone that no terrorist would dare attack him. Sadly, this is not the case.

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Democrats discover that Obamacare fines are costly

10:23 am

Finding out what’s in it: Congressional Democrats are pleading with the Obama administration to create an illegal waiver of the Obamacare tax penalities for people who fail to obtain health insurance by this past weekend’s deadline.

Idiots. They have voted numerous times in lockstep for Obamacare, resisting all efforts to repeal or even amend it. Yet when the law they supported and forced upon us is finally about to take effect they suddenly discover they don’t like it?

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Republicans continue to show little enthusiasm for Obama Attorney General candidate

10:17 am

A lack of enthusiasm by Republican senators for President Obama’s candidate to replace Eric Holder as Attorney General suggests her appointment might actually be threatened.

To be confirmed by the Senate, attorney general nominee Loretta Lynch only needs four Republicans to support her nomination. But it is unclear where those votes will come from. Sen. Orrin Hatch (Utah) is the only Republican so far who has signaled his intention to vote for Lynch, though several others have spoken favorably about her.

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Origin of Chelyabinsk meteorite remains unknown

10:10 am

The uncertainty of science: The origin of the Chelyabinsk meteorite that crashed over that Russian city two years ago remains murky to scientists.

Originally, astronomers thought that the Chelyabinsk meteor came from a 1.24-mile-wide (2 kilometers) near-Earth asteroid called 1999 NC43. But a closer look at the asteroid’s orbit and likely mineral composition, gained from spectroscopy, suggests few similarities between it and the Russian meteor.

The scientists noted in their paper that you really can’t use the similarity of orbits to link different asteroids, as their orbits are chaotic and change too much.

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A television reality show to pick 24 candidates to go to Mars — one way

10:01 am

The competition heats up? The private effort to choose 24 people to make a one-way flight to Mars has narrowed its candidates down from more than two hundred thousand to 100 finalists.

More here.

As interesting as this effort is, it is very important to remember that it is not an effort to fly these people to Mars. They don’t have the money and no one yet has the technical ability to make the flight. What they are actually doing is putting together a television reality show, where these 100 individuals will compete to be the final 24. If they do it right, which I am somewhat doubtful, the show will be entertaining and scientifically educational.

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Europe’s last ATV leaves ISS

9:44 am

Europe’s last ATV cargo freighter for ISS left the station and burned up over the Pacific Ocean this past weekend.

Because of a technical problem on the ATV, a camera designed to record what happened inside the freighter as it burned up during re-entry was removed prior to undocking so that it could be used instead during a later re-entry.

Meanwhile, instead of supplying ISS with cargo, Europe has decided to meet its contribution to ISS by building the service module for NASA’s Orion/SLS program, which has no plans to ever go to ISS. Note, however, that Europe has also not committed to building more than two service modules, so how Orion/SLS will go beyond Earth orbit after these two modules have been launched remains a mystery.

If you are scratching your head at all this, you are not alone. To me, this one decision alone illustrates quite neatly the utter stupidity of big government-run programs.

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The mystery of Martian plumes

9:27 am

The uncertainty of science: Scientists struggle to explain the discovery by amateurs of Martian atmospheric plumes 125 to 150 miles high.

Amateur astronomers spotted the bizarre feature rising off the edge of the red planet in March and April of 2012. It looked like a puff of dust coming off the surface, but it measured some [125 to 155] kilometres high. That is much higher than would be expected from the lower-altitude dust storms that rage across the planet. Now a team of astronomers proposes that the plume was either a cloud of ice particles or a Martian aurora. But neither possibility fully explains the plume — raising new questions about the state of the Martian atmosphere.

Read it all. No explanation really works to explain the plume’s height.

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More Obamacare website problems

9:40 pm

On the final weekend before the deadline to sign up for health insurance, the Obamacare website had a serious technical problem that prevented some people from completing their enrollment.

After you read the description below of the problem, I dare you to tell me you that we are now better off with this law:

Some people trying to get coverage hadn’t been able to get their income information electronically verified. That’s crucial because the amount of financial assistance to help pay premiums is based on people’s income.

The health care law offers health insurance to people who don’t have coverage on the job. More than 8 in 10 of those who apply qualify for help. Without it, most can’t afford the coverage. The IRS handles income verification for the HealthCare.gov website. In a statement, Hill said the problem was due to issues with “external verification sources.”

The glitch seemed to affect people with new applications. People who previously submitted their income details — but hadn’t completed the final step of picking a plan — were still able to do so.

This is a wonderful example of finding out what’s in it. The law makes the process of getting health insurance so difficult and complex, with so many different hands in the process, that it is literally impossible for problems and “glitches” (oh how I hate the bureaucratic word) not to happen. Either something is going to go wrong, or you will have to wait forever to get everyone to agree to the process.

But don’t worry. That it doesn’t work is irrelevant. It was the good intentions of Obama and the Democrats that really matter. Who cares if their ideas are stupid, unworkable, or foolish? They care!

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Gunmen attack free-speech event in Copenhagen

5:49 pm

The religion of peace strikes again: At a free-speech event in Copenhagen — organized by backers of one of the cartoonists who ridiculed Mohammad — masked gunmen unleashed a hail of bullets, killing one and wounding three.

The French ambassador was there and has reported that this was clearly a terrorist attack similar to the murderous attack on the offices of the magazine Charlie Hebdo.

Update: Three people are wounded when a gunman fired shots at a Copenhagen synagogue. It is not yet clear if this attack is linked to the attack above.

Obama would claim these are all random attacks. But then, delusional people will believe anything.

In related news, Islamic terrorists attacked a polio vaccination team in Pakistan, killing one and wounding another. The article also reports that in a separate incident two polio workers and two security guards have gone missing.

At what point will our intellectual elites get their heads out of their asses and recognize the war that Islam is waging on the free world?

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Movies before the code

6:01 pm

An evening pause: I had doubts about posting this initially, not because I’m a prude but because, as I wrote to Phil when he sent me this suggestion, “What is the point? Watching three minutes of 1930s girls taking off their robes to reveal their underwear? I’m not sure that is my goal with my evening pauses.”

But then I thought, why not? The compilation definitely illustrates the differences and similarities between then and now. What was risque then is almost innocent today. And at the same time, what is interesting in terms of sex then is not much different than what is interesting today. Sex still sells. Humans remain human. And Valentine’s Day is tomorrow.

Hat tip to Phil Berardelli, author of Phil’s Favorite 500: Loves of a Moviegoing Lifetime.

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Looking down a comet’s plume

10:00 am

Looking into Comet 67P/C-G's plume

More cool images! The Rosetta science team has released another spectacular image, this time looking down into the plume that is coming out from the neck of the nucleus.

In this orientation, the comet’s small lobe is the foreground and the large lobe is in the background. Particularly stunning is the delicate, ethereal glow of activity that contrasts against the shadowed region between the two lobes. From this viewing position the outflowing material seems to take the shape of a broader fan, rather than the more collimated jet-like features seen at other angles.

The fly-by planned for this weekend is only the first of many. As they note,

For the rest of the current mission plan in 2015, in fact, Rosetta will always conduct flybys, and, based on predictions of increasing cometary activity, can no longer be maneuvered so close to the comet as to be in a gravitationally bound orbit.

In other words, the spacecraft and the comet are now in parallel solar orbits, with the spacecraft doing a dance around the comet as they fly in and around the Sun.

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