“Washington may have the healthiest economy of any major metropolitan area in the country.”

9:20 am

I wonder why? “Washington [DC] may have the healthiest economy of any major metropolitan area in the country.”

The New York Times article has one explanation:

The main lesson the rest of the country should take from the capital’s prosperity is, per Leonhardt, that “education matters.” D.C.’s “high-skill” economy boasts more college degrees than any other major metropolitan area in America. “If you wanted to imagine what the economy might look like if the country were much better educated,” Leonhardt writes, “you can look at Washington.”

The fact that the federal government is spending trillions of dollars, mostly in Washington, DC, is apparently only a side show to this New York Times reporter.

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An Obama-backed Muslim Group is now blaming Congresswoman Michell Bachmann for Sikh shooting this past weekend.

9:14 am

The civility of the left and Islam team up! An Obama-backed Muslim Group is now blaming Congresswoman Michele Bachmann (R-Minnesota) for the Sikh shooting this past weekend.

What did Bachmann do? She raised questions the Obama administration’s links with Islamic terrorists groups. And of course, that must obviously explain why a white-supremacist went on a rampage killing innocent Sikh worshipers in Wisconsin.

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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 or any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. 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

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.

A Russian Proton rocket has failed to put two satellites into their proper orbit.

8:51 am

A Russian Proton rocket has failed to put two satellites into their proper orbit.

This failure of one of Russia’s more reliable rockets comes at a very bad time, as the competition with SpaceX and other competitors for commercial launches is right now heating up. As the article notes,

Moscow, which carries out 40 percent of global space launches, is struggling to restore confidence in its industry after a string of mishaps last year, including the failure of a mission to return samples from the Martian moon Phobos and the loss of a $265-million communications satellite. …

“The last failures to a certain extent undermine Russia’s position as a country that provides space launch services,” said industry expert Yuri Karash, a member of the Russian Academy of Cosmonautics.

Such mistakes strengthen Russia’s competitors, such as Europe’s Arian rockets, Karash said, describing Russia’s space industry, struggling to recover after a generation of brain drain and crimped budgets, as “not in the best condition by a long shot.”

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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

The Muslim leader who was heading an “Tolerance in Islam” conference in Turkey was attacked by one of the attendees.

10:51 pm

Islamic good will: The Muslim leader who was heading an “Tolerance in Islam” conference was attacked by one of the attendees. With video of the attack.

In response to the attack, Morou [sic] said, “I am fine now, the damage is moral… We are here to speak about tolerance, but those people are ignorant of true Islam. I don’t know what his [the attacker’s] political orientation is, and regardless, this is not part of Islam.”

And in what part of Islam do we not see this kind of violence and intolerance?

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Gibson Guitars has struck a deal with the federal government to avoid prosecution for the use of banned wood.

9:48 am

Extortion does work! Gibson Guitars has struck a deal with the federal government to avoid prosecution for the use of banned wood.

The company will pay a $300,000 fine under a criminal enforcement agreement that defers prosecution for criminal violations of the Lacey Act. Another $50,000 fine will go to the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation “to be used to promote the conservation, identification and propagation of protected tree species used in the musical instrument industry and the forests where those species are found.”

Notice the political payoff to an outside environmental group. How nice. I wish my cause could get funding this way, by having the U.S. government threaten companies I don’t like and force them to give me money.

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The new Mars rover…

8:54 am

Tonight at 10:30 pm (Pacific), the new Martian rover Curiosity will hopefully touch down safely on the Martian surface to begin several years of research in the crater Gale.

What has been most amazing to me is the amount of interest in this landing by the press, especially the mainstream press. Normally these outlets don’t care that much for space exploration, a trend that began after the Apollo 11 landing in 1969 when it became trendy in liberal circles to down play space exploration so that “the money could instead be spent solving our problems here on Earth.”

Today, however, I count more than forty news articles on this upcoming landing, most of which come from mainstream sources. It seems that these outlets have finally discovered something that has been obvious from the beginning: the American public is fascinated with space exploration, and if you want to attract readers, it is better to provide coverage of what interests them rather than push a political agenda that few agree with.

Anyway, if you want to follow the landing live, go here for a full outline of options. Or go directly to NASA TV. Most of what you will see will the control room at JPL, with many engineers staring at computer screens waiting to find out if the landing was a success, about twenty minutes after it took place. This is because it will take that long for the communications signals to travel from Mars to the Earth. Essentially, Curiosity is on its own in this landing.

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More signs that the Voyager 1 spacecraft is about to enter interstellar space.

2:27 pm

More signs that the Voyager 1 spacecraft is about to enter interstellar space.

For the last seven years, Voyager 1 has been exploring the outer layer of the bubble of charged particles the sun blows around itself. In one day, on July 28, data from Voyager 1’s cosmic ray instrument showed the level of high-energy cosmic rays originating from outside our solar system jumped by five percent. During the last half of that same day, the level of lower-energy particles originating from inside our solar system dropped by half. However, in three days, the levels had recovered to near their previous levels.

A third key sign is the direction of the magnetic field, and scientists are eagerly analyzing the data to see whether that has, indeed, changed direction. Scientists expect that all three of these signs will have changed when Voyager 1 has crossed into interstellar space. A preliminary analysis of the latest magnetic field data is expected to be available in the next month.

Based on this report, expect scientists to announce that Voyager 1 has left the solar system sometime before the end of the year.

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Have astronomers found a future supernova?

1:49 pm

A press release from the Carnegie Institute today described a recent paper by astronomers that might have identified a star in the Milky Way that might go supernova sometime in the future. The star QU Carinae, is a cataclysmic variable, a binary system in which material dumped from one star onto another periodically causes an outburst of X-rays.

I emailed Stella Kafka, the lead scientist of the research paper, to find out how far away QU Carinae is and how soon it might go supernova. She responded as follows:
» Read more

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Archeologists are disputing the age of a jawbone found in a cave in England.

12:37 pm

The uncertainty of science: Archeologists are disputing the age of a jawbone found in a cave in England.

Both sides of the debate agree that there is a lot riding on the outcome. “What is at stake is the entire [prehistory] of Neandertals and early modern humans in Europe,” Pettitt says. Apart from the Kents Cavern fossil and some 43,000- to 45,000-year-old teeth from Italy whose status as modern human or Neandertal is currently also debated, the oldest undisputed human fossils in Europe are about only 40,000 years old and come from a site in Romania. If modern humans really made it all the way to northwest Europe by 41,500 years ago or even earlier, it would mean that they entered Europe much earlier than once thought and also spread across the continent very rapidly. It would also increase the overlap between modern humans and the Neandertals, who already lived in Europe, and who went extinct sometime between 40,000 and 35,000 years ago. What’s more, such an overlap could make it more likely that Neandertals, who made sophisticated ornaments and tools in their last years, copied these techniques from modern humans rather than inventing them on their own.

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When asked in a survey if they would discriminate against conservatives, the academic community freely admitted that it would gladly do so.

10:31 am

The tolerance of the left: When asked in a survey if they would discriminate against conservatives, the academic community freely admitted that they would gladly do so.

One question, according to the researchers, “asked whether, in choosing between two equally qualified job candidates for one job opening, they would be inclined to vote for the more liberal candidate (i.e., over the conservative).” More than a third of the respondents said they would discriminate against the conservative candidate. One respondent wrote in that if department members “could figure out who was a conservative, they would be sure not to hire them.”

Then there’s this:

Mr. Inbar and Mr. Lammers found that conservatives fear that revealing their political identity will have negative consequences. This is why New York University-based psychologist Jonathan Haidt, a self-described centrist, has compared the experience of being a conservative graduate student to being a closeted gay student in the 1980s.

In 2011, Mr. Haidt addressed this very issue at a meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology — the same group that Mr. Inbar and Mr. Lammer surveyed. Mr. Haidt’s talk, “The Bright Future of Post-Partisan Social Psychology,” caused a stir. The professor, whose new book “The Righteous Mind” examines the moral roots of our political positions, asked the nearly 1,000 academics and students in the room to raise their hands if they were liberals. Nearly 80 percent of the hands went up. When he asked whether there were any conservatives in the house, just three hands — 0.3 percent — went up.

This is “a statistically impossible lack of diversity,” Mr. Haidt said.

What is horrifying to me is that this prejudiced behavior is taking place within our society’s supposingly most educated community., the place where thoughtful, rational debate is supposed to be cherished and honored. How can we have a just and fair-minded culture if our elite education system is home to this kind of close-minded and hateful bigotry?

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A Chick-Fil-A was covered with graffiti last night reading “Tastes like Hate” in anticipation of the gay community’s “National Same-Sex Kiss Day.”

10:04 am

Leftwing civility: A Chick-Fil-A was covered with graffiti last night reading “Tastes like Hate,” in anticipation of the gay community’s “National Same-Sex Kiss Day.”

As the lead commenter for this article noted

As a gay man I want to say sorry for what “my” people have done. Im so ashamed of being gay for the first time in my life. This is getting out of control. These gays are giving me a bad name. Not everyone is gonna like or except gays. Hell we dont like alot of straight people. We all have our own opinion. Like I told everyone, if they dont like your opinions then dont eat at Chick-Fil-A. Eat at KFG or churches. Again Im sorry for what the gay community is doing. They should all be ashamed of themselves….

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