Tag: bankruptcy

Coeur d’Alene’s regional chamber proves it hates the First Amendment and free speech

1:47 pm

Hostile to free speech
Hostile to free speech

An uproar took place in the Idaho town of Coeur d’Alene prior to July 4th this year when the town’s regional chamber issued regulations on what was allowed to be displayed by individuals during its July 4th holiday parade.

Under parade regulations adopted by the chamber board this year, “Symbols associated with specific political movements, religions, or ideologies” were unacceptable. [Linda Coppess, chamber president and CEO,] wrote that in the past, the chamber received numerous complaints about displays that people found offensive, including “Confederate flags, derogatory illustrations, harsh politically-based language, and graphic photographs.” Coppess wrote that last year alone, she received over 50 complaints about different signage and symbols that were deemed offensive.

To address those concerns, the chamber consulted national organizations to ensure its guidelines were transparent and fair, she wrote. “Our intention with this policy was simple: to create an environment where everyone feels welcome and respected,” Coppess wrote.

The chamber listed several other things as unacceptable for the parade, including signs promoting controversial political issues, displays containing divisive or inflammatory language related to political debates and signs displaying slogans or messages that incite political division or unrest. [emphasis mine]

Within days the chamber was overwhelmed with thousands of complaints from local citizens, most of whom appeared to be especially offended by the ban of religious symbols. As a result, the chamber backed down partly, rescinding that particular restriction. Below is a short clip from the July 4th Coeur d’Alene parade. As you can see, a lot of people came carrying crosses. I suspect they would have been there whether or not the religious ban was rescinded, expressing defiance.
» Read more

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European Parliament member demands cancellation of launch deal with SpaceX

9:26 am

Christophe Grudler, a member of the European Parliament (MEP) has written a letter to the government-run weather satellite company Eumetsat, demanding that it cancel its decision on June 26, 2024 to use a Falcon 9 rocket rather than the Ariane-6 on its next launch.

In a letter headlined “Request to reconsider launch decision in favour of European strategic interests”, Grudler disputes the decision of EUMETSAT, the intergovernmental European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites, to choose America rather than Europe for launching its new satellite. He argues it goes against the principle of giving preference to Europe, something the organisation denies.

“I am writing to urgently request that you reconsider the recent decision to allocate the MTG-S1 satellite launch to a non-EU launch provider, and instead await the results of the inaugural launch of Ariane-6, which was your first choice for this satellite,” the Liberal member of Parliament wrote in a letter to the board.

…Grudler’s requests are threefold: “Cancel the last Council decision regarding a specific launcher solution, Await the inaugural launch of Ariane-6 before making any final decisions for MTG-S1; Reaffirm your dedication to European strategic autonomy by supporting European launch solutions”.

Eumetsat’s decision was clearly a financial one. SpaceX charges much less than Ariane-6, and its Falcon 9 rocket is proven and launching routinely. Ariane-6 won’t have its first launch until next week, on July 9th.

Grudler’s demands are purely political, but since the EU has generally been run top-down, letting politics and power determine its policy, he could force a cancellation of the contract. In the short term this will help ArianeGroup, a partnership of the aerospace companies Airbus and Safran that own Ariane-6, while hurting Europe’s weather satellite capabilities. In the long run it however might aid the growth of Europe’s new competing rocket startups, as it will provide them a guaranteed market. At the same time, having a guaranteed market by government fiat tends to limit competition and thus raise costs.

It appears that some politicians in Europe are still not sold on capitalism and freedom.

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Pushback: Jury awards former BlueCross researcher almost $700K for firing her vindicatively for not getting the jab

12:10 pm

BlueCross BlueShield of Tennesse, eager to blacklist
…and now paying for it.

Bring a gun to a knife fight: A jury has now awarded Tanja Benton, a former BlueCross research scientist, $687,000 in back pay and punitive damages against BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee for firing her vindicatively in 2021 after she asked for an exemption from getting the COVID jab due to religious concerns.

I call the firing vindicative because by all measures, the fact tell us it was so.

Hamill [Benton’s attorney] said Benton’s job rarely involved direct interaction with clients, with only 1% of her total annual working hours involving client interaction. In the lawsuit, Hamill said Benton “never performed any work or attended any meetings in medical facilities where patients were being treated” and “physical in-person interaction with co-workers was never a job requirement.”

Moreover, for nineteen months prior to her firing, Benton had done all her work remotely, as ordered by BlueCross itself due to the COVID panic. As noted in her lawsuit:
» Read more

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Democrats: You got what you asked for when the Supreme Court ruled presidents have absolute immunity for official actions

3:18 pm

Cry havoc and let loose the dogs of war!

As always, the Democrats have once again demonstrated their utter inability to reflect even slightly on the consequences of their actions.

On July 1, 2024 the Supreme Court, faced with an appeal from Donald Trump that claimed he as president should have immunity from prosecution when his political opponents gain power, ruled that yes, Trump is right, that presidents do have absolute immunity for their “official” actions while in office.

The majority opinion finds that presidents have absolute immunity for core constitutional powers and presumptive immunity for other official acts. This immunity does “not extend to conduct in areas where his authority is shared with Congress,” and unofficial acts taken while in office receive no immunity at all.

The court ruled that President Trump’s conversations with the acting attorney general were core conduct subject to absolute immunity. It also ruled that his conversations with the vice president about the counting of the votes were part of his official duties, thus subject to presumptive, but not absolute, immunity—finding that Judge Chutkan should now assess whether prosecution of these actions intrudes on the authority and functions of the executive branch, and prosecutors will have to rebut the presumption of immunity if so.

Since then Democrat politicians and pundits have been gnashing their teeth in horror, claiming that this ruling now allows presidents to do almost anything once in office, from assassinating their opponents to using the military to arrest and eliminate judges he or she does not like.

The irony here of course escapes the Democrats. First, hasn’t Biden and his Department of Justice and the FBI been doing a milder form of the same abuse of power in their lawfare against Trump and those who worked for him?

Second, this case would never have gotten to the Supreme Court in the first place if the Democrats had not started that lawfare campaign. By prosecuting Trump on numerous weak and sometimes utterly bogus charges, it forced the issue to the courts, which was then forced to rule.

The biggest irony of this whole issue is that the Democrats are right. » Read more

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Blue Origin expands deal to fly citizens free on New Shepard

9:16 am

Blue Origin, in partnership with a non-profit, has expanded its program to fly citizens free on suborbital flights of New Shepard, adding India and what it calls “the small island developing states (SIDS)” to the recently announced deal to fly a Nigerian.

The non-profit, dubbed Space Exploration and Research Agency (SERA), has purchased one seat on each of the next half dozen flights, and will only charge passengers $2.50 for the ticket.

In an unprecedented move, SERA will allow people around the world to vote on which citizens will take the approximately 11-minute journey. Anyone living in one of the program’s partner nations can apply to secure a seat. Applicants must be proficient in English, at least 18 years of age, and meet Blue Origin’s parameters for height, weight, physical fitness, and citizenship.

Five of the seats will be allocated to specific nations, and candidates will be voted on by citizens of those nations. The sixth will be open to anyone within a SERA-partnered country and chosen through a global vote. Remaining seat assignments will be announced later this year.

Overall, this continues the PR stunt nature of Blue Origin’s suborbital New Shepard, which apparently does not have enough business to fill its passenger manifest, and thus is arranging these give-aways. While the gesture is nice, it would be far better if the company got its orbital rocket off the ground and actually began flying real cargos and passengers into space.

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New Polish suborbital rocket to be test flown from Andoya spaceport in Norway

10:26 am

Proposed spaceports surrounding Norwegian Sea
Proposed spaceports surrounding Norwegian Sea

A new Polish suborbital rocket, dubbed “ILR-33 Amber 2K,” and being developed by the Łukasiewicz Institute of Aviation, will do its next test flight from the Andoya spaceport in Norway.

After four consecutive test missions completed successfully in Poland, the next stage of preparations of the ILR-33 AMBER 2K to reach the edge of space will take place this year in July. Polish technology will be tested in Norway where one of the key European space centers for launching space vehicles is located.

According to this report, this rocket has a core stage with a hybrid-fueled engine plus two strap-on solid-fueled boosters, a configuration rare for suborbital rockets. After this test flight it will then begin operational suborbital flights, run by a Polish company Thorium from 2025 to 2027.

This deal is another competitive blow to the Saxaford and Sutherland spaceports in the United Kingdom. Both started commercial operations years ahead of either Andoya or Esrange, but because of red tape nothing has been yet allowed to launch from either. This Polish deal one of several for both the Andoya and Esrange spaceports that might have gone to the UK otherwise.

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Sixteen Nobel economists once again prove that our “expert” class is expert at nothing

1:57 pm

Our modern intellectual class
Our modern intellectual class

Earlier this week a group of sixteen Nobel laureate economists issued a public letter endorsing Joe Biden’s economic agenda and claiming that a return of Donald Trump to the White House would lead to economic ruin.

“We believe that a second Trump term would have a negative impact on the U.S.’s economic standing in the world, and a destabilizing effect on the U.S.’s domestic economy,” the economists write in the letter. “Many Americans are concerned about inflation, which has come down remarkably fast. There is rightly a worry that Donald Trump will reignite this inflation, with his fiscally irresponsible budgets.”

You can read their letter here. It was signed by the following (the date of their Nobel award in parenthesis):

George A. Akerlof (2001), Sir Angus Deaton (2015), Claudia Goldin (2023), Sir Oliver Hart (2016), Eric S. Maskin (2007), Daniel L. McFadden (2000), Paul R. Milgrom (2020), Roger B. Myerson (2007), Edmund S. Phelps (2006), Paul M. Romer (2018), Alvin E. Roth (2012), William F. Sharpe (1990), Robert J. Shiller (2013), Christopher A. Sims (2011), Joseph Stiglitz (2001), and Robert B. Wilson (2020).

What is hilarious about their letter is how it exposes these so-called economic giants as partisan hacks. A dive into their campaign contributions finds that eleven are donors to Joe Biden or the Democrats, while the remaining five have all previously endorsed Biden publicly. Before the 2020 election two of these sixteen economists signed a similar letter, calling for Joe Biden’s election, claiming he would “…build an economy that works for all Americans.” In 2021 thirteen of these same economists then followed up with another letter, endorsing all of Biden’s spending proposals then before Congress (costing an expected $1.9 trillion).

A comparison between the claims in all three letters and what actually happened also reveals how little these economists know about economics. As noted at this City Journal article by James Piereson:
» Read more

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Supreme Court to SEC: Use of in-house administrative law judges unconstitutional

1:43 pm

SEC: no longer above the law
SEC: no longer above the law

The Supreme Court today ruled 6-3 that the SEC has violated the Constitution with its use of in-house administrative law judges to rule on its various securities fraud cases.

The agency, like other regulators, brings some enforcement actions in internal tribunals rather than in federal courts. The S.E.C.’s practice, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote for a six-justice majority in a decision divided along ideological lines, violated the right to a jury trial. “A defendant facing a fraud suit has the right to be tried by a jury of his peers before a neutral adjudicator,” the chief justice wrote.

This ruling against the use of administrative law judges has a direct bearing on SpaceX’s own lawsuit [pdf] against the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). In January the NLRB filed a complaint against SpaceX, accusing it of firing eight employees illegally for writing a public letter criticizing the company in 2022. Rather than fight that complaint directly, SpaceX’s response was to file a lawsuit challenging the very legal structure of the NLRB itself, including its use of administrative law judges.
» Read more

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Japanese government proposes 300-mile-long conveyor belt for moving packages

12:27 pm

Pork to the max! A supposedly “expert panel” in Japanese government’s Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism Ministry has proposed building a 300-mile-long conveyor belt — possibly underground in a tunnel — between the cities of Tokyo and Osaka for moving packages, to be completed by 2034.

The biggest challenge is cost. According to a survey of construction companies, the cost of building an underground tunnel ranges from ¥7 billion to ¥80 billion per 10 kilometers, so a system linking Tokyo and Osaka would cost up to ¥3.7 trillion. When the ministry in the year 2000 first planned logistics links above ground, it estimated construction costs of ¥25.4 billion per 10 kilometers.

In dollars, the total cost of ¥3.7 trillion equals about $23 billion.

The so-called goal would be to eliminate 25,000 trucks, supposedly saving the world from those evil fossil fuels. That the belt would have to be powered of course is not mentioned, which I bet would probably require burning about the same amount of fuel.

The panel also claimed the conveyor belt would save money and reduce labor needs because it would also eliminate 25,000 truck drivers. With Japan facing a crash in population, the panel claims a shortage of labor is expected in the coming decades, and this plan will supposedly solve that. That’s also a fantasy. Who would upload the pallets onto the belt? Who would offload them? And how would those pallets be delivered at each point? And what about maintaining this giant conveyor belt? In the end, this plan will do nothing to reduce labor needs.

Nor is such a plan really necessary. When the population drops, the amount of cargo will drop as well. There will be no labor shortage in the shipping industry.

All this plan does is create a gigantic public works project that will almost certainly go over budget, fail to meet its schedule, and increase the cost of goods for both the companies and the public. But boy, it sure is going to employ a lot of government workers to supervise construction and operations!

Note I found about this project through a report at New Atlas, which as a left-leaning techno website accepted the plan instantly as brilliant and awe-inspiring.

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Breakup of defunct Russian satellite forces astronauts on ISS to retreat to lifeboat capsules

10:04 am

Because an old and defunct Russian Earth-observation satellite broke up into about 100 pieces as it began falling back to Earth on June 26, 2024, the astronauts on ISS spent an hour or so today sheltering in the three manned capsules (Endeavour, Starliner, and Soyuz) docked to ISS just in case one of those pieces hit the station.

Nothing hit the station, and the astronauts resumed their normal activities.

One wonders it this action was done simply out of normal caution, or if NASA officials did it to show their confidence in using Starliner as a lifeboat and thus help stem some of the bad publicity the agency is getting for the repeated delays in returning Starliner and its crew back to Earth. I don’t know the exact altitude in which that satellite broke up, but such things usually happen when a satellite dips below 100 miles, well below ISS’s present orbit. If so, there was absolutely no danger at all, and the retreat to the capsules was pure show.

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Firefly signs deal to launch its Alpha rocket from Esrange spaceport in Sweden

9:43 am

Proposed spaceports surrounding Norwegian Sea
Proposed spaceports surrounding Norwegian Sea

Firefly has now signed a deal to launch its Alpha rocket in 2026 from the Esrange spaceport in Sweden, becoming that spaceport’s second orbital customer.

Esrange is not really a new spaceport. It was originally built in the 1960s and was used for decades for suborbital test launches, much like Wallops Island in the U.S. In January 2023 it upgraded one launchpad to allow commercial orbital launches, and in May 2024, signed a launch deal with a new rocket startup from South Korea named Perigee.

This new contract with Firefly is a bigger deal, because Firefly has already launched several times, and is more established.

These developments indicate as well the cost of red tape in the United Kingdom. The map to the right shows the spaceports competing for business in Europe. The two UK spaceports (Saxaford and Sutherland) began construction years before Esrange decided to upgrade, but both are now losing business to Sweden because regulatory delays at the Civil Aviation Authority in the UK has delayed all launches there for years.

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Arianespace calls for Europe to require all European space payloads use European rockets

9:57 am

Arianespace, whose many-decade-long European launch monopoly is presently threatened by a wave of new rocket startups and an effort by European governments to created a competitive launch industry of many companies, has now urged Europe to require that all European space payloads use European rockets.

Arianespace head of public affairs Charlotte Lang has advocated for legislation that would require European missions to be launched aboard European rockets. Lang made the comments during the “Ensuring Long Term Autonomous Access to Space for Europe” panel on the first day of The European Space Forum conference. “The EU should enforce the principle of European launcher preference,” said Lang.

In a follow-up statement, Arianespace reiterated “the need for the EU to legislate that European missions are launched from European territory using launchers and technology manufactured in Europe by European providers.” The company identified the European Union’s planned IRIS² constellation as the “perfect opportunity to advance this initiative.”

Arianespace is like Blue Origin. It can’t get its rockets built and flying at a competitive price, so instead it advocates lawfare to limit competition in order to give it a favored position when it bids on future launch contracts.

In the case of Europe, I think this Arianespace effort will generally fall on deaf ears. The trend among numerous European governments (Germany, France, Italy) is to encourage new rocket companies to compete with Arianespace, in order to create options. These governments will of course wish to favor these new European rocket companies with any contract awards, but they will also not want to tie their hands with the kind of legislation Arianespace proposes. They all discovered in the past two years what could happen if they do that, when Arianespace failed to get Ariane-6 launched on time, and Europe ended up with no launch capabilities. During that time period they still had the option to use other non-European options (such as SpaceX). Having that flexibility in the future makes great sense.

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Blue Origin to FAA: Limit future SpaceX Starship launches at Cape Canaveral

9:38 am

Blue Origin has once again decided to use lawfare against SpaceX rather than actually build rockets that are competitive. As part of the process by the FAA to do a new Environmental Impact Statement on SpaceX’s plans for Starship/Superheavy launches at Cape Canaveral, Blue Origin last week submitted its own comment asking the FAA to cap the launches of its competitor, citing environment concerns.

The company recommends the following mitigation method for SpaceX’s Starship launches, prior to the company being issued a Vehicle Operator License:

“Capping the rate of Ss-SH launch, landing, and other operations, including but not limited to test firings, transport operations, and fueling, to a number that has a minimal impact on the local environment, locally operating personnel, and the local community, in consideration of all risks and impacts, including but not limited to anomaly risks, air toxin and hazardous materials dispersion, road closures, and heat and noise generation.”

Along with requesting a max number of Starship launches at the site, Blue Origin argues that the government increase launch infrastructure that opens other launchpads to nearby lessees when roads are forced to be closed for SpaceX launches. The filing also notes that SpaceX has already received environmental testing at its Starbase site in Boca Chica, Texas.

You can read Blue Origin’s full comment here [pdf]. Essentially, Blue Origin is attempting to use this new impact statement to have the federal government damage or destroy its competition.

Musk’s response was a two word tweet: “Sue Origin.”

It is very clear that Jeff Bezos’s company is poorly focused. In the last decade it has built almost nothing, while spending a lot of time filing lawsuits against its competition. This action is simply another example.

Worse, Blue Origin’s comment will provide ammunition for the continuing Biden administration lawfare against Musk and SpaceX, making it difficult for the FAA to approve the impact statement as requested by SpaceX. If so, the development and operational use of Starship/Superheavy will be seriously threatened.

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Collins reportedly in the process of canceling its NASA spacesuit contract

9:19 am

As if NASA didn’t have enough spacesuit problems, with a ISS spacewalk this week canceled because one of the NASA-built suits on the station began leaking water again, Collins Aerospace, one of the two companies that won contracts to build new spacesuits, is now in negotiations to end that contract.

But Collins’ role in the program has been bumpy and development has fallen behind schedule, and the company has been in talks with NASA officials on how to wind down its role in the program, the two people said. “After a thorough evaluation, Collins Aerospace and NASA mutually agreed to descope Exploration Extravehicular Activity Services (xEVAS) task orders,” a Collins spokeswoman said in a statement, referring to the spacesuit contract.

If this story is confirmed, it means at present only Axiom is building new spacesuits that can either be used on ISS or on future Artemis missions to the Moon and Gateway. Whether NASA will put out the Collins contract for bid again is unknown. In its original cargo capsule contracts early in the 2010s, one company failed to raise sufficient funds to build its capsule, so NASA cancelled it and awarded Orbital Sciences and its Antares rocket and Cygnus capsule the deal.

If the contract is put out for new bidding, SpaceX would be in a very strong position to win, as its own internally financed spacewalk spacesuits are about to get their first flight test on Jared Isaacman’s Polaris Dawn mission on the Resilience Dragon capsule later this summer.

The failure of Collins here is disturbing, and might be an indicator of an overall loss in American engineering capabilities. Once a challenge like this would have posed no problem for any American aerospace company. Now such tasks are increasingly difficult and unachievable.

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More garbage science about wildfires and global warming from Nature

12:31 pm

Nature: the science journal that no longer does real science
The science journal which no longer
understands how real science is done

The once highly respected science journal Nature continues its descent into propaganda and bad science, all because it bows unskeptically before the altar of global warming and leftist science fantasies.

Today’s example is an article this week entitled “You’re not imagining it: extreme wildfires are now more common,” describing a new Nature paper that attempted to use satellite data to prove that the intensity of wildfires has increased in the past two decades.

For the current study, published in Nature Ecology and Evolution on 24 June, Cunningham and his colleagues scoured global satellite data for fire activity. They used infrared records to measure the energy intensity of nearly 31 million daily fire events over two decades, focusing on the most extreme ones — roughly 2,900 events. The researchers calculated that there was a 2.2-fold increase in the frequency of extreme events globally in 2003–23, and a 2.3-fold boost in the average intensity of the top 20 most intense fires each year.

We’re all gonna die! As is usual for these crap climate-related studies, the entire goal is to drum up some manufactured new crisis that justifies the claim that the climate is warming. This study is no different, as the article eagerly notes:

Although the study doesn’t directly connect the fire trend to global warming, Cunningham [the study’s lead author] says “there’s almost certainly a significant signal of climate change”. Research has shown that rising temperatures are drying out ecosystems — such as coniferous forests — that are naturally prone to fire. This provides fuel that can boost the fires’ size and longevity. The latest study also found that the energy intensity of the fires increased faster during the night-time over the past two decades than during the daytime, which aligns with evidence4 that rising night-time temperatures are contributing to fire risk.

Not surprisingly, the New York Times immediately jumped on the bandwagon with its own article that accepts the conclusions of this research with utter naivety.

What junk. First, Cunningham fails to note this minor fact mentioned in the abstract of his own paper:
» Read more

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Reparations: Taking money from people who never owned slaves and giving it to people who never were slaves

12:48 pm

Harvard: where you get can get a shoddy education centered on hate and bigotry
Harvard: where you can spend a lot of money
getting a shoddy education teaching hate and bigotry

The effort to justify the new fad of forcing all Americans today to pay blacks reparations for the evil of slavery that was eliminated a century and a half ago at the cost of more than 600K lives continues. A recent published study by two “Didn’t Earn It” (DEI) academic elites at the Harvard Kennedy School attempts to justify the distribution of reparations now by claiming that the U.S. has a long history of paying out money to harmed individuals. From the paper’s abstract:

[T]he United States has a long-standing social norm that if an individual or community has suffered a harm, it is considered right for the federal government to provide some measure of what we term “reparatory compensation.” In discussing this norm and its implications for Black American reparations, we first describe the scale, categories, and interlocking and compounding effects of discriminatory harms by introducing a taxonomy of illustrative racial harms from slavery to the present. We then reveal how the social norm, precedent, and federal programs operate to provide victims with reparatory compensation, reviewing federal programs that offer compensation, such as environmental disasters, market failures, and vaccine injuries. We conclude that the government already has the norm, precedent, expertise, and resources to provide reparations to Black Americans. [emphasis mine]

The highlighted word is key to understanding the fundamental intellectual dishonesty of these incompetent Harvard academics. In their paper they use numerous examples of cases where the government has provided compensation to actual individuals — such as veterans, individuals harmed by radiation from nuclear tests, and those who lost their pensions due to bankruptcy or mismanagement of their pension funds — and then claim this proves paying reparations to the community of blacks, based merely on their race and the past existence of slavery, is within traditional American jurisprudence.

This is all a lie. » Read more

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Spacewalk on ISS canceled due to spacesuit issue

8:48 am

Two astronauts on ISS were forced today to abort their spacewalk soon after opening the hatch to go outside because a water issue in one suit.

This is the second time this spacewalk has been aborted. The first time, on June 13, 2024, was canceled due to an unspecified “spacesuit discomfort issue.”

This cancellation might cause a problem with the presently unscheduled return of Starliner, as its June 26, 2024 return was postponed to allow this spacewalk to take place without any schedule conflicts. Or it might simplify Starliner’s return, as the spacewalk will not happen due to spacesuit issues.

Note also that the American suits are old, and prone to these kinds of water leak issues. NASA started a project to replace them fifteen years ago, spent more than a billion on designs, getting nothing built, before abandoning its effort and awarding the project to two private companies.

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Japan’s space agency reveals it was hacked in 2023

9:02 am

Japan’s space agency JAXA today revealed that beginning in 2023 and periodically into this year it has been attacked repeatedly by hackers, with data from more than 10,000 files stolen.

Attacks occurred in June 2023 and multiple times a year, although investigations are ongoing regarding whether more information was stolen in this year’s attacks.

In addition to internal data, potentially compromised entities include NASA, Toyota Motor Corp., Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd. and the Defense Ministry, with which JAXA has nondisclosure agreements. Information from numerous aerospace and defense-related organizations and companies was also exposed.

JAXA stated that no sensitive information related to national security or rocket technologies was stolen in last year’s breach. Personal data of approximately 5,000 JAXA personnel and employees from partner companies was used to access the Microsoft 365 accounts of JAXA executives.

It appears JAXA officials only found out about the attack when police told them about it months after the June 2023 attack. Agency officials now say no sensitive rocket or satellite data was stolen. Instead, it appears the attack targeted personal communications as well as research facilities.

The report provided no indication about the source of these attacks, but noted that a 2016 attack is known to have come from China.

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Pro-Hamas lefty arrested for several arson attacks on UC-Berkeley campus

1:35 pm

Casey Goonan, a pro-Hamas activist arrested for arson
Casey Goonan, a pro-Hamas activist
arrested for arson

If you want to know the mentality of the pro-Hamas movement across America and largely centered on many “elite” campuses, you need only look at the story of Casey Goonan. Goonan is a 34-year-old long time leftist activist who was previously arrested in September 2023 for “felony vandalism & resisting arrest” (he had used a hammer to destroy the sign of a hotel at the protest site).

He has now been arrested again as the prime suspect in a series of four arson attacks on the UC-Berkeley campus in the past three weeks.

On Monday evening [June 17], Cal Fire announced the arrest of 34-year-old Casey Robert Goonan “in connection with the firebombing attack of a UC Berkeley Police Department vehicle and three other arson attacks on UC Berkeley campus during the month of June.”

Goonan was arrested Monday “following a comprehensive investigation” by Cal Fire’s Office of the State Fire Marshal Arson and Bomb Unit, UC Berkeley police, the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Goonan is now facing multiple felony charges, authorities said, including “the possession and use of destructive devices and multiple counts of arson.” He is in custody at Santa Rita Jail with a bail of $1 million, according to Monday’s statement.

In all these arson attacks, the firebomber (allegedly Goonan) released anonymous statements claiming credit. The first such statement, proudly admitted to firebombing a UC-Berkeley police vehicle and concluded as follows:
» Read more

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Slovenia becomes 23rd member nation of the European Space Agency

9:05 am

Formerly part of Yugoslavia and largely aligned with the communist bloc during the Cold War, Slovenia has now signed on to become the 23rd member nation of the European Space Agency (ESA).

Slovenia has been working with ESA since 2008, when it signed a first Cooperation Agreement, followed by a European Cooperation Agreement. This cooperation was strengthened with its accession to associate membership in 2016, which it upgraded in 2020 with a new Agreement for an enhanced Association. This included a provision that after its expiration in 2025, Slovenia can apply for ESA membership.

Slovenia’s membership still needs to be ratified, but that is expected.

Increasingly Putin’s invasion of the Ukraine has proven to be incredibly stupid. It has not only trapped Russia in a quagmire that it can’t easily escape, with victory nowhere in sight, it has caused all of its other neighbors to look west, away from Russia, out of fear of getting invaded themselves. Slovenia is just the most recent example.

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Kansas sues Pfizer for lying about the safety and effectiveness of its COVID jab

1:13 pm

Apparently a company of liars
Apparently a company of liars

The state of Kansas yesterday filed a detailed suit against the pharmaceutical company Pfizer over the many lies and misrepresentations it pushed as it rolled out its COVID jab, such as hiding the actual documented “adverse events”, including many deaths, that occurred after people got jabbed.

You can read the complaint here [pdf]. It opens as follows;

Pfizer misled the public that it had a “safe and effective” COVID-19 vaccine.

  • Pfizer said its COVID-19 vaccine was safe even though it knew its COVID-19 vaccine was connected to serious adverse events, including myocarditis and pericarditis, failed pregnancies, and deaths. Pfizer concealed this critical safety information from the public.
  • Pfizer said its COVID-19 vaccine was effective even though it knew its COVID-19 vaccine waned over time and did not protect against COVID-19 variants. Pfizer concealed this critical effectiveness information from the public.
  • Pfizer said its COVID-19 vaccine would prevent transmission of COVID-19 even though it knew it never studied the effect of its vaccine on transmission of COVID-19.
  • To keep the public from learning the truth, Pfizer worked to censor speech on social media that questioned Pfizer’s claims about its COVID-19 vaccine.

The lawsuit has lots of juicy factoids. For example, Pfizer kept its own database of adverse events after people took its jab, and lied about that data to the public.
» Read more

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Surprise! Scientists discover that eating cheese makes you happier in old age!

9:52 am

Science discovers the obvious: A computer analysis of 2.3 million people in Europe has found that eating cheese helped make them healthier and happier as they aged.

A mediation analysis identified 33 factors that mediate “between the well-being spectrum and the aging-GIP” – essentially, statistically, the disease, behaviors and lifestyle choices that significantly reduce the healthy aging score. Key ones included TV watching, smoking, medication use, heart failure, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), stroke, coronary atherosclerosis and ischemic heart disease.

Cheese, on the other hand, swung the pendulum the other way in both its impact on the well-being spectrum and aging-GIP. One of five key lifestyle mediators the data testing identified, it had a 3.67% positive impact on those healthy aging factors (whereas, for example, higher fruit intake had a 1.96% positive result and too much TV time, an indication of a more sedentary lifestyle, had a 7.39% negative impact on the score for both indicators).

While interesting, this research is generally junk. The number of uncertainties and assumptions are so large that no one should take any of these positive and negative scores very seriously. Furthermore, the study basically discovers something that is patently obvious from the beginning: If you are active and eat well, you will be healthier in old age. If you are a couch potato who smokes, you will likely be sicker in old age.

Why cheese (and fruit) should improve these scores is intriguing, but simply suggests that the study is not very useful. The intriguing (and amusing) nature of these results guarantees however that it will blasted by every mainstream news source in the coming days, with little mention of the weakness of the research.

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Just remember: These obnoxious disturbers of the peace are all Democrats

12:46 pm

They’re coming for you next: In what is actually a relatively mild example of the obnoxious and almost always illegal protests by pro-Hamas supporters — such as taking over and trashing buildings, attacking Jews and blind children, and blocking traffic — for the past six months protesters have been disturbing the peace at late evening and early morning hours in the residential neighborhood where senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) lives with his family in Houston.

For the past 6 months, anti-Israel protestors have come to my home just about every Sat morning at 7 am and most Fri nights until 10 or 11 pm. They scream, disturb the peace & wake the neighbors.

I have embedded below the video of these protesters that Cruz included with his tweet:
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Today’s blacklisted American: Entire family kicked out of Catholic school because their 13-year-old son supported patriotism to America

3:56 pm

Jimmy Heyward, blacklisted for touting American patriotism
Jimmy Heyward, blacklisted for extolling
American patriotism

They’re coming for you next: When 13-year-old Jimmy Heyward decided to run for the position of “commissioner of spirit and patriotism” at St. Bonaventure Catholic middle school in Huntington Beach, California, he wrote a campaign speech that not only extolled the idea of patriotism, but wittily mimicked Donald Trump’s own campaign slogans. His conclusion:

So accordingly, I Jimmy Heyward, am running for Commissioner of Patriotism and School Spirit. I want to clarify that my ideas are not promises, but I can promise to make pep rallies great again! … I will make the school spirit great again! I will make patriotism within SBS great again! And most importantly I will MAKE SBS GREAT AGAIN!

The school principal, Mary Flock, didn’t like that. How dare he!
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New evidence suggests some titanium on Boeing and Airbus planes might be fake

12:36 pm

According to information provided to the FAA from Boeing, the documentation from a subcontractor for some of the titanium used on some Boeing and Airbus planes might be faked, suggesting that the titanium is fake as well.

Boeing discovered this possibility when one of its suppliers discovered holes in some metal pieces due to corrosion.

Apparently, Italian parts supplier Titanium International Group found small holes in titanium in December 2023, and also raised suspicions about the authenticity of documentation. It notified Spirit AeroSystems of the issue, which in turn informed Airbus and Boeing in January 2024. According to three anonymous sources close to the matter, affected planes include those built between 2019 and 2023 and involve the Boeing 737 MAX, 787 Dreamliner and Airbus A220 programs.

…The problem has been traced back to a Chinese supplier that sold titanium to Turkish company Turkish Aerospace Industries in 2019. Documentation from this Chinese supplier claimed that the titanium had been sourced from another Chinese firm, Baoji Titanium Industry – however, Baoji Titanium has confirmed that it did not provide this batch of titanium “and has no business dealing with this company.” [emphasis in original]

In other words, no one has any idea where that first Chinese supplier got the titanium, because its documentation was false.

Both Airbus and Boeing have done numerous tests and found no problems, though both have said they will remove any suspect parts. Spirit meanwhile has removed all the suspect parts, even though tests suggested the parts were “of sufficient quality for the aerospace industry.”

The real story here is not that these parts are unsafe (they apparently are not). The real story is the dependence by these airplane companies on so many subcontractors, some of which are subcontractors of subcontractors of subcontractors and also come from a hostile power. It leaves them all very vulnerable to others’ mistakes or malfeasance. During the Cold War it would have been inconceivable to rely on Soviet-built parts. Yet, today American airlines routine rely on Chinese companies when the Chinese government has made it clear it sees us as an enemy to be defeated.

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A new lawsuit filed against Elon Musk by former SpaceX employees

10:12 am

Elon Musk, a target for destruction by the left
Elon Musk, a target for destruction

The lawfare won’t stop until morale improves! A new lawsuit has been filed against Elon Musk by eight former SpaceX employees, who now accuse him of sexually harassing them by his sometimes pointed tweets on X, calling those tweets “juvenile, grotesque sexual banter.”

The suit also says Musk’s tweets “had the wholly foreseeable and intentional result of encouraging other employees to engage in similar conduct.”

At SpaceX’s Hawthorne offices, the suit claims, company meetings and employees mimicked Musk’s humor. At meetings, the lawsuit alleges, senior engineers called mechanical parts “chodes” and “schlongs.” A camera that was placed on the bottom of a second-stage Falcon rocket was referred to as the “Upskirt Camera,” and a structure used by astronauts to transfer from SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station was called the “Fun Tunnel,” a euphemism for anal sex.

Read the whole article. The complaints are quite hilarious. These employees need to get a life. This is all silly stuff, hardly worth even two nanoseconds of concern.

Unfortunately, these anti-Musk employees do have a life, and it is a very sad one, consumed wholly with destroying Musk, not accomplishing anything worthwhile on their own. These eight former employees are the same ones who were fired after they published an internal letter in SpaceX calling for others in the company to denounce Musk for his tweets. Following their firing they also instigated a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) suit against Musk, which is presently suspended because SpaceX is claiming the NLRB’s very existence is unconstitutional, and no further action on the complaint will occur until the courts decide on that claim.

This new lawsuit is simply another example of new harassment of Musk by these former employees.

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FAA announces schedule for new EIS public meetings on SpaceX’s Starship/Superheavy operations at Cape Canaveral

9:48 am

FAA has now announced the schedule of public meetings in connection with the new environmental impact statement (EIS) it is doing for SpaceX’s proposed Starship/Superheavy operations at Cape Canaveral.

On June 12 and 13, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) will host a series of public scoping meetings to inform the public and answer questions about SpaceX’s proposal to launch Starship from Launch Complex 39A (LC-39A). There will also be a virtual meeting on June 17 for those unable to attend in person.

…Among those attending the public hearings will be representative of the Department of the Air Force, the U.S. Space Force, the U.S. Coast Guard, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge, Canaveral National Seashore and SpaceX.

FAA officials claim this new EIS is required, after doing one only five years ago, because of major changes in SpaceX’s design of Superheavy. For example, it originally planned to land the rocket on a drone ship. Now it wants to catch it with the arms on the launch tower.

The FAA’s argument for this new EIS might sound plausible at first glance, but these regulations were never intended to require new environmental statements every time a project underwent changes. The goal was to make sure the environment would not be impacted by the work, and the first 2019 EIS achieved that. None of the changes SpaceX is proposing change significantly its impact on the local environment.

Moreover, the FAA has three-quarters of a century of empirical data at Cape Canaveral proving that spaceports help the local environment, not hurt it. We know without doubt that none of SpaceX’s launch plans will do harm. The FAA should get out of the way.

Instead, it is sticking its nose into everything. This new EIS is merely mission creep, government bureaucrats both covering their backsides while creating new work that increases their power and justifies bigger budgets for their existence.

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NASA accidently airs simulated medical emergency on ISS, panicking the public

9:18 am

NASA yesterday accidently aired an on-going drill where ground astronauts were simulating a serious medical emergency, causing public alarm because it appeared the emergency was on ISS itself.

The regular scheduled livestream was interrupted at 6:28 p.m. ET by an unidentified speaker — apparently a flight surgeon — liaising with the crew on the ISS on how to deal with a commander suffering from serious compression sickness.

The speaker advises the crew to “check his pulse one more time,” before placing the stricken astronaut inside a suit pumped full of pure oxygen. She says any action would be “best effort treatment” and better than doing nothing. “Unfortunately, the prognosis for Commander is relatively tenuous,” she says.

She says she is “concerned that there are some severe DCS [decompression sickness] hits” and tells the crew to get him in a suit as soon as possible. She mentions that there is a hospital in San Fernando, Spain, with hyperbaric treatment facilities, in an apparent suggestion of ordering an emergency evacuation from the space station.

But after fueling alarm among the space enthusiasts listening, NASA revealed that the scenario wasn’t real — the ISS crew were all safely asleep at the time.

It appears this was a training exercise on the ground. For reasons that have not been explained, the audio somehow got rerouted onto NASA’s public live stream channel, forcing the agency to quickly issue an explanation.

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A new Chicken Little report: The mega satellite constellations are going to destroy the ozone layer!

1:50 pm

The American Geophysical Union, where science is no longer practiced
The American Geophysical Union, where
science is no longer practiced

We’re all gonna die! According to a new paper touted today by the PR department of the American Geophysical Union (AGU), a new study has concluded — based on computer modeling — that the many giant satellite constellations totaling tens of thousands of satellites pose a risk to the ozone layer because the aluminium used in their structures that gets vaporized upon re-entry will interact with the ozone layer and destroy it.

You can read the paper here. From the abstract:

This paper investigates the oxidation process of the satellite’s aluminum content during atmospheric reentry utilizing atomic-scale molecular dynamics simulations. We find that the population of reentering satellites in 2022 caused a 29.5% increase of aluminum in the atmosphere above the natural level, resulting in around 17 metric tons of aluminum oxides injected into the mesosphere. The byproducts generated by the reentry of satellites in a future scenario where mega-constellations come to fruition can reach over 360 metric tons per year. As aluminum oxide nanoparticles may remain in the atmosphere for decades, they can cause significant ozone depletion.

The uncertainties and biases here are hard to count. First, it is a computer model (“Garbage in, garbage out”). Second, the simulations make many assumptions, most of which cannot be confirmed, or are simply absurd. For example, the model is based on a single “typcial, small satellite” coming from a specific orbit and elevation when we know these satellites will have many variations in size, make-up, and orbits. Third, the scientists admit they use “a worst-case scenario” for determining what would happen when the satellite re-enters the atmosphere.

Finally, and most damning, the whole premise of this threat is based on a somewhat implausive chain of chemical actions.
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Today’s blacklisted American: Federal court rules conservative kids have no free speech rights

1:26 pm

The shirt that offended teachers at Nichols Middle School
Liam Morrison, wearing the evil shirt that he wore the
second time teachers at Nichols Middle School sent
him home.

They’re coming for you next: In a ruling that completely contradicts long standing court rulings that had insisted the first amendment allowed students to wear T-shirts and armbands with whatever political statements they wished, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit on June 9, 2024 ruled that a Massachusetts middle school had the right to censor and ban a 12-year-old boy wearing a shirt that said “There are only two genders.”

This story is a follow-up of a blacklist story from May 2023. At that time 12-year-old Liam Morrison was forced to leave Nichols Middle School when he refused to remove his T-shirt that said “There are only two genders.” He later came to class with the T-shirt shown in the picture to the right, with the words “only two” covered with the word “censored.” He was once again sent home, and subsequently his parents sued.

According to the court’s ruling this week (which you can read here), a student’s political clothing doesn’t have to cause any disturbances at all. All that matters is if school officials think it might (or they simply dislike the ideas expressed).
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