Tag: bankruptcy

Astronomers organize lobbying group to block satellite constellations

10:13 am

The International Astronomical Union (IAU) has now created an office to lobby governments worldwide to block the coming commercial launch of numerous satellite constellations.

The IAU claims that the first goal of this new office will be to study the effects of these satellites on ground-based astronomy accompanied by an effort to work with industry to mitigate those effects.

That is a lie. This is the office’s real purpose:

Another role for the center will be to create national and international laws and norms for what regulators allow in orbit. “We need to codify these good intentions, to have some backup,” says Richard Green of the University of Arizona’s Steward Observatory. “We’ll take a two-pronged approach: Cooperate and develop legislation to apply if necessary.” IAU and other bodies are working to convince the United Nations’s Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space of the need for legislation. “We are confident that we will have guidelines that will have to be followed by companies in the near future,” Benvenuti says. Cosmologist Aparna Venkatesan of the University of San Francisco says it would be good if there were laws in the United States and elsewhere that echoed the influential U.S. Clean Air Act: “Many of us dream of a Clean Skies Act.”

Rather than realize that things are changing and Earth-based astronomy is becoming obsolete, the astronomers wish to use the force of law to block progress by others so that they can continue to live in the past.

The time to have moved all cutting edge astronomical research off the planet arrived more than three decades ago. The astronomers refused to recognize this, focusing instead on building giant telescopes on the ground that had less capability than the Hubble Space Telescope and were dogged by political and engineering challenges that hindered their success.

Had astronomers instead focused on building many small orbiting optical telescopes, the threat of satellite constellations now would be minimal. Instead, astronomers would be poised to build the bigger space-based telescopes they need. Instead, they are grounded, with the needed future space-based telescopes possibly decades away.

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Pushback: Doctor suspended for opposing mandates sues hospital

1:39 pm

Dr. Mary Bowden, refusing to bow to the authorities
Dr. Mary Bowden, refusing to bow to the authorities

Pushback: Mary Bowden, a doctor who was suspended from working at Houston Methodist Hospital because she publicly opposed COVID shot mandates and used ivermectin in treating her Wuhan flu patients, has now sued the hospital to get data on the effects, pro and con, of those shots on its own patients.

The hospital had accused her of “spreading dangerous misinformation which is not based on science” because she had successfully treated about 2,000 COVID patients, none of which ever needed hospitalization, with both ivermectin and monoclonal antibodies.

Bowden apparently has publicly advocated choice by both doctors and patients, something the lords at Houston Methodist cannot tolerate.

Bowden added, “We all know that early COVID treatment works, it saves lives, and I’m not going to be silenced, intimidated, or bullied by Houston Methodist, Houston Chronicle, or anyone else who wants to target physicians that question the narrative.”

In November, [her Attorney Steve] Mitby said that Bowden had never peddled disinformation, as a Stanford University-trained physician who has had vast experience in treating coronavirus patients. “She is helping her patients, through a combination of monoclonal antibodies and other drugs, to recover from COVID. Dr. Bowden’s proactive treatment has saved lives and prevented hospitalizations,” he said at the time. “Dr. Bowden also is not anti-vaccine as she has been falsely portrayed. Dr. Bowden has opposed vaccine mandates, especially when required by the government. That is not the same as opposing vaccines.”

Hospitals nationwide have been blocking doctors from considering these other treatments, even though there is building evidence that they work. Bowden’s own success is an example of that evidence.

The lawsuit is not seeking damages. Instead, it wishes to obtain from the hospital its data on its own success at treating the Wuhan flu, as well as what it has gained financially by that treatment.
» Read more

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Pushback: Cop wins $75K settlement for being punished for praying

11:19 am

A victory for liberty in Louisville
A victory for liberty in Louisville

Do not comply: Policeman Matthew Schrenger has won a $75,000 settlement from the city of Louisville, Kentucky, for suspending him after he prayed, while off duty, in front of an abortion clinic.

Officer Matthew Schrenger was off-duty when he stopped to pray with his father on the public sidewalk outside the EMW Women’s Surgical Center nearly a year ago, on Feb. 20, according to the Thomas More Society. Schrenger arrived in the early morning, before the abortion provider opened, as part of 40 Days for Life, an international grassroots campaign dedicated to ending abortion through prayer and fasting.

Matt Heffron, senior counsel for the Thomas More Society, previously said that Schrenger, a 13-year police veteran, was praying the rosary, according to the local Fox affiliate, WDRB News.

For his actions, Schrenger was suspended for more than four months with pay, stripped of his police powers, and placed under investigation.

» Read more

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Another SLS delay

9:23 am

NASA today announced in an update for its Artemis program that the wet dress rehearsal of its SLS rocket, essentially a full countdown on the launchpad fully fueled to T-0, has been delayed from February to March.

NASA has added additional time to complete closeout activities inside the VAB prior to rolling the integrated rocket and spacecraft out for the first time. While the teams are not working any major issues, engineers continue work associated with final closeout tasks and flight termination system testing ahead of the wet dress rehearsal. [emphasis mine]

Engineers and managers are now reviewing the schedule to see if the actual launch can be scheduled for April or May, assuming the dress rehearsal goes well.

Even if all goes well, I predict a June launch at the earliest, with mid-summer more likely. While private companies like SpaceX work incessantly to compress schedules to get things done, government agencies like NASA like to expand schedules — as NASA has done here — so that no one feels they are under too much pressure.

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The first signs of a coming revolution for freedom — from the next generation

1:16 pm

A little child shall lead them, by James Johnson
“A little child shall lead them,” painting by James L. Johnson.

If there is any hopeful sign coming out of the last two years of Wuhan panic, it might be the long term reaction of the young to how the political community has treated them.

Let me explain. For decades it has been assumed, quite rightly, that the young would automatically gravitate to the Democratic Party. That party’s tendency to favor social programs based on helping everyone fit well with the young’s lack of experience, their natural instinct to think emotionally, and their personal lives so tightly bound to their school’s social community. The young lived in a type of emotional and socialist existence, so it was natural for them to instinctively favor the socialist ideas based on feel-good emotions put forth routinely by the Democratic Party.

Polls and voting patterns have consistently for decades proven this assumption to be true. For example, small college towns found the politics of their communities suddenly shift significantly leftward when the voting age was lowered from 21 to 18. The large but temporary college population in their towns, mostly leaning left, suddenly swamped out the more moderate voting patterns of the smaller general population.

This assumption has also been illustrated by many get-out-the-vote campaigns put forth by the Democratic Party. Rather than try to get voters of all stripes to vote, the Democrats would routinely focus these campaigns inside college campuses, a tactic that for decades has repeatedly brought them great success.

Above all — and most important — the Democratic Party never put forth policy proposals that would offend the young. Instead, the party would aim its policies at businesses, which the young did not own and would thus not be impacted by any negative consequences of any new leftist laws.

The Democrats love affair with “green” policies is a perfect example. A campaign to save the planet from global warming is something that sounds so good to the emotionally-driven young. For children under eighteen environmental issues would especially resonant. They would naturally like the high-minded idealistic sounding goals of environmentalism while feeling none of the negative effects of its sometimes draconian regulation. When these youngsters reached voting age they would thus instinctively pick the Democratic Party as their home, since it had portrayed itself as the true representative of their idealistic but very naive beliefs.

Environmentalism is just one of a whole slate of policy positions taken by the Democrats, from poverty to police abuse to civil rights, that have been designed to please the young without impacting them negatively in any way. The result has been a young population that routinely favored in great numbers the Democratic Party.

The Wuhan panic however has changed this situation radically. » Read more

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New Mexico legislature dumps space tourism sales tax proposal

9:05 am

Capitalism in space: A committee in the New Mexico legislature yesterday rejected a space tourism sales tax proposal submitted by two sponsors, one from each party, essentially killing the bill.

The vote to kill the bill was 9-1, with the only yes vote coming from the Democrat representing Albuquerque.

That the tax was voted down so conclusively suggests there actually might be some brain cells among the elected officials in New Mexico. Hard to believe, considering that the tax was actually proposed at a time when New Mexico’s only customer for space launches, Virgin Galactic, is in trouble and might go bankrupt. Raising its taxes would likely have only guaranteed that company’s failure.

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Today’s blacklisted American killed himself because of the slander campaign against him at NC State

12:16 pm

The Bill of Rights cancelled at North Carolina State University
Freedom of speech cancelled at NC State.

They’re coming for you next: Blacklisted, attacked, ostracized, and subject to violent threats because he happened to be conservative and had publicly defended such ideas, Chadwick Seagraves, an IT employee at North Carolina State University, killed himself three weeks ago.

The attacks against him were part of an effort to get him fired by NC State, based entirely on anonymous accusations that slandered him as a bigot and racist and “white supremacist”, even though there was no evidence of such things. His anonymous accusers also claimed Seagraves had doxxed about 1,400 leftist activists, including members of Portland’s Antifa organizations, based on no evidence. The college, after an investigation, soon agreed that there was no evidence, and decided he would not be fired or punished in any way.

This wasn’t good enough however for our modern American Stasi storm-troopers. According to an email Seagraves sent to NC State professor Stephen Porter (who has himself been blacklisted by these storm-troopers and has sued the university because of it):
» Read more

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Data: COVID shots are killing little kids

5:06 pm

COVID mortality rates among children 10-14 in theUK

Data compiled by the Office of National Statistics in Great Britain shows that giving young children the COVID shots, especially those aged from 10 to 14, makes their mortality 10 to 52 times higher, depending on the number of shots received.

The graph to the right, from the link, illustrates this starkly. If a child gets one shot, the mortality goes up about ten times. If a child gets two shots, it increases the mortality another five-fold, or about fifty times greater than for children who get no shots at all.

The article at the link also notes that this data was gathered when 10 and 11 year olds were not eligible to get COVID shots. Thus all 10 and 11 year olds at that time fell into the unvaccinated category, where the death rate was low. However, since October 31, 2021, kids in Great Britain in these age brackets began getting shots, which means that we should expect deaths in these age brackets to rise. This also suggests the 52 times increase in childhood deaths caused by the COVID shots is likely understated.

Since the chances of death from the Wuhan virus itself among these children is practically nil, it is insane to give them these shots. Any government official who advocates it, such as Dr. Anthony Fauci, should be fired at once. At a minimum, such fools should certainly not be listened to or used as a guide for establishing any government health policy.

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NASA’s second SLS mobile launch tower now behind schedule

10:47 am

Par for the course: According to one member of NASA’s safety panel, the contractor building NASA’s second SLS launch tower, is having performance problems and is already behind schedule.

On Thursday, during a meeting of NASA’s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, one of its members provided an update on Mobile Launcher-2. George Nield, an engineer and scientist who previously led commercial space transportation for the Federal Aviation Administration, said the 90-percent design, review, and fabrication drawings for the large structure are behind schedule. These are the engineering drawings that should closely represent the final design and inform a construction schedule and logistics plan.

“Mobile Launcher-2 has encountered some challenges,” Nield said. “The selected contractor, Bechtel, has experienced some performance issues associated with underestimating the complexity of the project and some supplier related issues, as well as COVID.”

Note that NASA spent about $1 billion on the first tower, to be used only three times, at most. Its contract with Bechtel says the second tower will cost $383 million, but no one expects that number to be met.

Assuming Bechtel does not go over budget (hah!), NASA will have spent $1.4 billion on SLS’s launch towers, one of which will be used two or three times and then abandoned. That’s three times the cost of what SpaceX spent developing Falcon Heavy, and about a third the total development cost of Starship/Superheavy, including its planned launchpads in both Boca Chica and Florida.

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Israel, overrun with Covid, proves the vaccines have failed and must be abandoned

11:43 pm

Link here. The analysis is data driven, extensive, and thorough. It shows that with each COVID shot and booster the effectiveness against the Wuhan virus goes down, and in fact eventually reduces a person’s immunity against the virus. Key quote:

Israel is first, always.

Other highly vaccinated and boosted countries are a few weeks behind, and their boosted patients may still have some partial protection against severe disease and death. (People who received two doses last winter or spring probably have none at this point, if the data out of Scotland and the United Kingdom are to be believed.)

But that won’t last. The Israeli experience this month could not be clearer. A third dose does not provide long-term protection. When it fails, the boomerang effect is severe. Hospitals come under even more pressure than they would in a “natural” Covid wave, because the vaccine failure is highly synchronized – everyone becomes exposed at once.

And so – insanity upon insanity – the Israelis are offering a fourth dose.

Why would anyone believe at this point that a fourth dose will help for more than a couple of weeks? Not months, weeks. The trend line was obvious even BEFORE Omicron arrived; and Omicron drives vaccine efficacy down even more quickly. In countries with good data, vaccinated people actually are more likely to be infected than the unvaccinated.

Further, a fourth dose is likely to have MORE severe side effects – remember, the second and third doses produce notably increasing levels of heart inflammation in men, and mRNA therapeutics were repurposed as vaccines because of problems with toxicity after repeated dosing. [emphasis mine]

I am beginning to believe the reason so many lovers of the COVID shots want to force everyone else to get them is because they realize the facts above, either consciously or unconsciously. They are terrified of the consequences for themselves, and thus resent those who are not in the same boat. Rather than face their mistakes and admit error, they instead want no one to escape. Everyone has got to get the shots, so that everyone is equally in danger.

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Today’s blacklisted American: United suspends pilot and prohibits her from getting another job for refusing COVID shot

1:08 pm

United Airlines: Run by fascist clowns
United Airlines: Run by fascist clowns

They’re coming for you next: Because pilot Sherry Walker has refused to get a COVID jab, United Airlines has put her unpaid active leave, which prevents her by contract from getting another job, and also prohibits her from accessing her 401(k) account.

Walker told Fox Digital on Monday that she is considered an “active employee” after being put on unpaid leave for not complying with the airline’s vaccine mandate in November. “That means that they can call us back with two weeks’ notice at any given time, they can just grab us and pull us back. But because we’re active, we haven’t had a qualified lifestyle change. So Schwab, which owns our 401(k) accounts, refuses to let anyone access them,” Walker told Fox.

Walker added that employees in similar shoes have been prohibited from finding other jobs because United has cracked down on non-competes. “In this case, they have said that no, no outside employment. In fact, you must go through ethics and compliance, and it can’t be a company that we could have … a non-compete” with.

And why might United be doing this?
» Read more

19 comments

Pushback: Blacklisted doctors opposed to present Biden/CDC/FDA policies testify to Congress

12:55 pm

Do not comply: A large group of highly qualified doctors and nurses, almost all of whom have been blacklisted, fired, suspended, or prevented from treating patients simply because either they opposed the COVID shot mandates or wished to treat their patients as they saw fit, testified on January 24, 2022 in Congress, describing in horrible detail the many times they were forced to watch as their patients died because their hospitals had forbidden them from providing the treatments they knew would work.

Below is a 38 minute-long video showing the most dramatic testimony during the five hour hearing. If you want to watch the full hearing, go here.
» Read more

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