Tag: bankruptcy

Google admits to bowing to Biden censorship, and vows to end all bans

10:37 am

Google admits to censorship
Click for original.

In a major announcement, the House Judiciary committee today revealed that Google has admitted that it had bowed to direct pressure by the Biden administration to censor conservatives, and it now vows to never bow to such pressure again.

The company has also agreed to allow everyone it banned due to that pressure to return to Youtube.

The graphic to the right comes from the committee’s announcement. All five points listed are critical to the future. First, Google now confirms the truth of another “rightwing conspiracy theory”. The Democratic Party under Biden was aggressively abusing its power to censor its opposition. Second, Google now admits it participated in this wrong-doing, and pledges to never do it again.

Finally, and most important, it notes the threat to freedom and free speech now posed by Europe and its new censorship laws. That threat is real, and unless American companies have the courage to tell Europe to pound sand, we could see them agreeing to squelch our speech in order to keep their businesses open in Europe. Google is essentially asking Congress and the federal government to do something to protect it from those laws.

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The left’s hatred and violence is finally driving people away

12:51 pm

Erika Kirk, at the moment she publicly forgave her husband's murderer
Erika Kirk, at the moment she publicly forgave
her husband’s murderer. Click for video.

As numerous pundits on the web have already noted, the assassination of Charlie Kirk last week has clarified most starkly the political divide in both the United States as well as across the world.

On the right, we have Kirk’s widow yesterday speaking at a memorial service for her husband, and with tears standing before the world to forgive his killer.

I forgive him. I forgive him because it was what Christ did, and it is what Charlie would do. The answer to hate is not hate. The answer, we know from the Gospel, is love. And always love. Love for our enemies, and love for those who persecute us.

Her speech matched the general tone of most of the speakers at that memorial service. The service itself, as well as the numerous peaceful candlelight vigils nationwide in memory of Kirk, illustrate clearly the response of the right to this heinous act. No riots, no violence, no calls for bloodshed. Only prayer and a cold fury to make sure such violence never happens again.

That tone was set by Kirk himself, before he died. All he ever did was want to debate his very mainstream conservative ideas with leftists, with good will and rationality. He proved it in a text he sent to leftist pundit Van Jones just before his murder:

I’d love to have you on my show to have a respectful conversation about crime and race. I would be a gentleman as I know you would be as well. We can disagree about the issues agreeably.

The left’s response to Kirk however has been not love or good will but hate. Hundreds and hundreds of partisan leftists went on social media to gleefully celebrate his assassination. Leftist politicians and entertainers defamed both him and what he stood for, with lies and slanders. And when the television show of one entertainer, Jimmy Kimmel, got canceled by ABC because Kimmel had falsely claimed on the air that a Trump supporter had killed Kirk, one leftist and former teacher’s union employee decided it was okay to protest Kimmel’s cancellation by firing multiple bullets into the offices of an ABC affiliate in Sacramento. The man, Al Hernandez Santana, also has an extensive X feed where he had expressed hate for Donald Trump, often wishing him dead.

He is clearly not sane, but he is also not an outlier on the left. The response of the left to Kirk’s murder has revealed that for too many Democratic Party supporters, Santana is mainstream.
» Read more

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The swamp comes up with a swamp solution for promoting space

9:01 am

Like pigs at the trough
Like pigs at the trough

A group of senators last week announced the re-introduction of a bill they had proposed previously in 2023 that they claim would encourage new spaceport development across the United States. From their press release:

Today, U.S. Senators John Hickenlooper, John Cornyn, Ben Ray Luján, and Roger Wicker introduced the bipartisan Spaceport Project Opportunities for Resilient Transportation (SPACEPORT) Act, which would encourage the development of commercial spaceports through the modernization of the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) Space Transportation Infrastructure Matching (STIM) grant program.

Spaceports, including the Colorado Air and Space Port in Adams County, are ground-based launch and reentry sites that can be used to support public and private ventures into space. “Spaceports are Colorado’s gateway to the commercial space boom, and we need to prioritize that infrastructure if we want to stay at the top of the space industry,” said Hickenlooper. “American space exploration has come a long way, but we can and should go even further,” said Cornyn. “By investing in our spaceport infrastructure, this legislation helps ensure the U.S. space industry remains competitive and is prepared to handle future national security threats.”

Though two of these four senators are Republicans (Cornyn and Wicker), the political leanings of this group is decidedly uni-party and establishment based. Polls for example show that Cornyn is not liked by conservatives in Texas, and will lose a primary challenge from the state’s attorney general Ken Paxton. Wicker doesn’t have the same polling issues, but he has also taken positions that suggests he is a willing member of the Republican establishment that has resisted change for decades.

And the actual bill [pdf] itself proves that all four senators are pure swamp. It doesn’t do anything to directly support spaceport development, as Hickenlooper and Cornyn claim. Instead, it would create a $10 million grant fund that the transportation secretary could hand out willy-nilly each year to political friends and buddies. It would also require the heads of Transportation, Defense, Commerce, and NASA to issue a report every four years that simply reviews the state of America’s space industry and describes it.

The bill does nothing to reduce regulation, the main obstacle blocking the U.S. rocket and space industry. If anything, it allows that red tape to flourish by creating this slush fund that politicians can later use to bribe private companies. The report itself will require more bureaucrats and paperwork, and will act to prevent that bureaucracy from doing its regulatory responsibilities, thus slowing license approvals further.

Introducing a bill like this does not guarantee passage of course. It failed previously in 2023. I suspect it is even more likely to fail now, because the trend appears to be moving away from this kind of funding and legal gabblygook.

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At last some real pushback against the left’s slander culture

12:04 pm

For years I have been writing about the slander culture of the left, whereby they can say any lie about anyone who disagrees with them without any consequence. These lies are often pure slander and defamation, based on no facts. Often they grow to a point that anyone attacked in this manner becomes a persona non grata, ostracized by all society out of fear.

Here are some recent examples of this kind of slander:

This is what destroyed the Proud Boys organization. The left — and the propaganda press that works for it — labeled it as “racist”, “white supremacist”, and “neo-fascist” based on no evidence, so that soon it collapsed because ordinary people were afraid to associate with it. And in describing this slander campaign back in 2019, I correctly predicted even worse:

I fully expect the rhetoric against Trump supporters in the coming election to spread and get more vicious. This in turn will act to encourage more extreme actions, including violence comparable to what Antifa now does with impunity in Portland. Be prepared. When people abandon the truth for emotional labels inspired by hate, they are liable to do anything.

Meanwhile, this lying name-calling never seemed to carry any consequences. Big name Democratic Party politicians, celebrities, and leftist pundits could defame conservatives routinely in the same manner and get away with it. The only ones who would suffer would be the unjustly accused.

The events in the past two days in connection with former host Jimmy Kimmel of Jimmy Kimmel Live! however tells me that the murder of Charlie Kirk has truly changed things.
» Read more

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Europe once again delays test flights of its Callisto 1st stage hopper

11:05 am

Callisto's basic design
Callisto’s basic design

First proposed in 2015 as Europe’s answer to SpaceX’s Falcon 9, the first test flights of the European Space Agency (ESA)’s Callisto grasshopper-type reusable test prototype, as shown on the right, has once again been delayed, now from 2026 to 2027.

On Friday, CNES published a call seeking a partner to provide mechanical operations and procedures support ahead of the Callisto flight-test campaign, including contributions to operations user manuals, drafting mechanical operation procedures, and conducting detailed studies of mechanical interfaces between the vehicle and the ground segment. In the preamble to the scope of work, the notice states that the campaign will be carried out from the Guiana Space Centre in French Guiana in 2027. It will include an integration phase followed by eight test flights and two demonstration flights, all to be completed over a period of eight months.

The project, in which Japan’s space agency JAXA is participating, had an initial budget of $100 million, and originally planned to do its first hops in 2020. Instead, ESA spent a dozen years making powerpoint presentations, while SpaceX flew hundreds of operational flights with its Falcon 9, for profit.

Worse, this program is not attached to any rocket. It is a dead end. ESA and JAXA might get some useful engineering data from it, but it will belong to no one, and it is unclear anyone will care. At this moment it appears several private companies in Europe will have flown their own new rockets before Callisto even gets off the ground, and the data from those real rocket launches will be much more useful to them down the road.

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The left’s face of evil

12:34 pm

Laughter at learning Charlie Kirk had been shot
Laughter at learning Charlie Kirk had been shot

In the past day social media has been filled with numerous examples of individuals on the left proudly posting videos and commentary on line celebrating gleefully the murder of Charlie Kirk (here, here, here, here, here for just a few examples). There is even now a webpage, Charlie’s Murderers, that is complying these examples, having already obtained more than 20,000 submissions.

One could reasonably argue that these videos and hateful comments do not represent the left and the Democratic Party. They are put out by “influencers” who want to impact opinion. Ordinary Democrats are simply not like that.

Sadly, that is not true. These leftist “influencers” represent without doubt the left’s base culture, and the picture to the right proves it. It comes from a video taken by a student in a class at North Texas University. Apparently the class had just learned that Kirk had been killed, and were joyfully laughing about it. The student recorded this reaction, and then in horror protested.

Why are we cheering for someone getting shot? … He has a family!

Her protests was immediately ridiculed by the others, who as the picture shows were happy to learn Kirk was killed for his political beliefs. Worse, according to the tweet, the teacher “singled her out and asked her to leave.” Watch for yourself:
» Read more

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House committee support for threatened NASA missions is actually quite questionable

9:26 am

According to a House appropriations committee spending bill that it approved this week, it appears on the surface that it is canceling the proposed 24% cut by Trump to NASA’s budget as well as endorsing continued funding for some threatened missions. A close look however suggests this congressional support for NASA is somewhat superficial, and might actually be ephemeral.

The key is the language of the bill. From the link above:

The bill was largely unchanged from what the CJS [commerce, justice and science] subcommittee approved July 14. It includes $24.838 billion for NASA, nearly the same as the $24.875 billion the agency received in fiscal 2024 and 2025, and far above the $18.8 billion the administration proposed for fiscal 2026 in May.

Members adopted a manager’s amendment, a package of noncontroversial changes and corrections, on a voice vote. That amendment also made additions to the report accompanying the bill. The report includes language expressing support for several NASA missions targeted for cancellation, including the Chandra X-ray Observatory, the Juno mission at Jupiter and the New Horizons mission in the Kuiper Belt.

The report does not specify funding levels for those missions, but the “continues support” language signals to NASA that it should fund continue operations within the agency’s science budget. [emphasis mine]

It is the vagueness of this language that suggests the support is ephemeral. The courts recently have consistently ruled that if Congress doesn’t specifically mandate spending on a project, the White House is free to move money around as it sees fit. By not expressly outlining funding for Chandra, Juno, and New Horizons, these congressmen are playing a shell game, whereby to their constituents they can point to this vote and claim they wholeheartedly supported NASA and these missions. At the same time, they also appear to be allowing Trump the freedom to go ahead and shut the missions down, as his budget has already proposed.

None of this is yet real. The bill still must be passed by the full House, as well as the Senate. It then has to be signed by Trump. A lot of changes would happen in that process.

Either way, it appears that within the House at least, there is some movement to at least make some budget cuts possible. The sad thing is that the House is not actually cutting the budget, even as it is allowing Trump a way to cut these relatively inexpensive on-going missions. Considering the debt, it would have been much better had the committee actually trimmed NASA’s budget, even a little, while at the same time allocating specific funds to keep these very cost-effective missions alive.

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America’s educational system is failing because it no longer teaches students how to think

1:06 pm


From the movie Idiocracy: “But Brawndo’s
got what plants crave. It’s got electrolytes!” Click for video.

Recently the satirical site the Babylon Bee illustrated starkly and with great humor the sad state of American universities.

Genius Trump Enacts Plan To Dumb Down Chinese Population By Inviting Them To Attend American Universities

Trump’s plan was praised by national security experts, who cited it as a brilliant maneuver to reduce China’s influence on global affairs in the long term by shrewdly allowing their students to be made substantially less intelligent at educational institutions in the U.S.

“Pretty soon, Chinese kids will all be dumb, just as dumb as American students,” the president reportedly told his advisors. “We’ll let in hundreds of thousands of Chinese students, have them waste their time at American universities sitting in gender studies classes and college courses about Taylor Swift, and the next thing you know, China will be in the toilet. If it worked here, it can work there. It’ll make things very difficult for the Chinamen, believe me. Very difficult.”

The joke worked because it has now become common knowledge that for much of the American educational system — especially at its so-called “elite” universities — the quality of education has hit rock bottom. Students are not only not learning much of importance, they are being indoctrinated into believing in absurdities, such as a man can become a woman merely by saying so, or that communism will finally work if only the right people were given the power to install it.

Worse, they are being taught that the left is the only correct political choice, and any other ideas are simply evil. The murder of conservatives is therefore absolutely a just act. From an April 7, 2025 tweet by Charlie Kirk:
» Read more

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Democrats today showed us their murderous colors

3:52 pm

The left's response to murder is to celebrate it
The left’s response to this murder
is to celebrate it

I had an essay planned for completion this afternoon on how to reform our education system, but that can wait until tomorrow. What matters today is the public assassination of Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, a college-focused pro-American conservative organization that has done more in the past ten years to reshape American culture than any pundit or politician anywhere.

Why was Kirk murdered? The murderer is still at large but we can make a reasonable guess. Kirk, only 31, was an outspoken conservative who unequivocally believed in the fundamentals of American society, including freedom, small government, color-blind rules, and the right of every person to pursue happiness. This is not propaganda on my part. I have listened to many of Kirk’s speeches and appearances, and at no time did he do anything to contradict these conclusions. If anything, he made these beliefs crystal clear to anyone who would listen.

Because of those beliefs, he had become a major opponent of the Democratic Party and its now radical Marxist/leftist/queer agenda, which also now hates America and everything it has stood for since its founding almost 250 year ago.

As such, the left — including numerous mainstream elected Democrats and their minions in the propaganda press — have repeatedly slandered him — without any evidence — as a fascist, racist, Nazi, hate-monger, and bigot. Those ugly words — utter lies — made him a target for the crazies on the left, and now one of those crazies has snuffed out his life prematurely.

The left and its propaganda press will work hard to make excuses for this evil act, but as they do so they will simply prove my point above. Already anchors on MSNBC are slandering him again, calling him “divisive” and “awful” who said things that upset people and thus we shouldn’t be surprised he was killed. “It was HIS fault!” On social media leftists are celebrating this evil act, showing us how utterly evil they are.

Charlie Kirk
Charlie Kirk

Kirk’s work will go on. In fact, expect it to expand considerably on campuses nationwide. The American people will no longer tolerate this evil. They are going to shut it down, aggressively, and with joyous fervor. And the left will once again scream “Facists!”, but the only fascists Americans will see are the murderous hate-mongering people on the left.

As for Kirk and his family, today’s events are horrible beyond words. We can only express the deepest sympathy to his wife Erika, who is now left a widow with two small children. She and those kids have been robbed of a husband and father, for no more reason that the words that Charlie Kirk spoke.

America stands for better. Kirk knew this, and spent every day of his short life trying to bring our country back to its original values of freedom and good will. It is our obligation to honor that man and those values and do whatever we can to make his dream a reality.

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NASA promotes the non-discovery of life on Mars by Perseverance

11:09 am

It's all a game of Kibuki theater
It’s all a game!

In what can only be called a kabuki theater stunt, NASA today held a press conference and issued a press release promoting what is essentially the non-discovery of life on Mars by the science team operating the rover Perseverance.

Agency officials, led by acting NASA administrator Sean Duffy, proudly claimed the discovery justified the oft-stated goal of Perseverance, to find life on Mars.

“This finding by Perseverance, launched under President Trump in his first term, is the closest we have ever come to discovering life on Mars. The identification of a potential biosignature on the Red Planet is a groundbreaking discovery, and one that will advance our understanding of Mars,” said acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy.

This is all garbage. First, Perseverance’s real objective has never been to find life on Mars. It is there to study the planet’s geology. If it should happen to detect a biosignature that would be great, but doing so has always been highly unlikely.

Second, the discovery that Duffy touts is itself quite underwhelming. The key quote from the press release that immediately precedes Duffy’s claim is very telling:

A potential biosignature is a substance or structure that might have a biological origin but requires more data or further study before a conclusion can be reached about the absence or presence of life.

Furthermore, the biosignature that Duffy touts is actually not really a biosignature. They found “a distinct pattern of minerals” that might be sometimes be related to life processes, but not always.

The combination of these minerals, which appear to have formed by electron-transfer reactions between the sediment and organic matter, is a potential fingerprint for microbial life, which would use these reactions to produce energy for growth. The minerals also can be generated abiotically, or without the presence of life. [emphasis mine]

In other words, the data is very uncertain. It certainly doesn’t merit the loud push NASA and Duffy is giving it.

I suspect this push is the result of NASA’s fundamental lie about Perseverance’s so-called search for life, a lie that can never really be fulfilled. It is also related to hiding Perseverance’s limited capabilities. For example, Curiosity has a small lab allowing scientists to analyze samples in great detail. If Curiosity came across a real biosignature, it would be able to identify it.

Perseverance lacks this ability, because in its stead it has equipment for preserving core samples for later pick-up. All it really was designed to do was to gather those core samples. It can’t really do the same kind of ground analysis as Curiosity.

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Rather than streamline red tape, a UK government committee proposes it should fund its space industry directly

9:28 am

Proposed spaceports surrounding Norwegian Sea
Proposed spaceports surrounding Norwegian Sea

In a move that will do nothing to solve the red tape that has stymied the spaceports in Scotland as well as the launch industry in the United Kingdom, a Scottish government committee has concluded that the solution is for the UK government to become a direct investor in its space industry, increasing funding to both its spaceports and any launch companies that wish to use them.

The Scottish Affairs Committee heard from a number of experts and figures involved in the space industry. Professor Malcolm Macdonald, of Strathclyde University, said the UK had not always sustained its “first-mover” advantage in the space launch sector.

The report’s conclusion stated: “It is clear that the UK is falling behind its European counterparts in terms of public investment, leaving Scottish spaceports at a competitive disadvantage in a fast-moving global market. Without sustained backing from the Government – particularly in infrastructure – Scotland risks missing a generational opportunity to lead in space launch. To fully realise this potential, the UK Government needs to go further and faster.”

The MPs called for sustained Government investment in infrastructure.

The report also noted that despite a half-decade head start in establishing its spaceports in Scotland, the Andoya spaceport in Norway is now winning the race to become Europe’s prime spaceport.

Talk about not seeing the forest for the trees. The reason the UK’s spaceports have fallen behind is because its regulatory framework is impossible to navigate, taking years to get any approvals. But rather than fix this, this committee proposes throwing taxpayer money at the problem.

My prediction: It won’t work. Outside rocket companies will continue to move away from the UK, while any that get government investment to stay will find it difficult to get business, because it will still be impossible to get launch licenses when needed.

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India’s government finalizes deal to transfer operation of its SSLV rocket to a private company

9:13 am

India’s government and its various space agencies yesterday finalized its deal with the Indian company Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) to take over the manufacture and operation of its government-designed SSLV rocket (Small Satellite Launch Vehicle) for the next decade.

Under the technology transfer contract that HAL signed with ISRO, Indian National Space Promotion and Authorisation Centre (IN-SPACe) and NewSpace India Limited (NSIL), the aviation major will absorb the technology in the first two years, which will be followed by a 10-year production phase. The agreement grants HAL a non-exclusive, non-transferable license to the SSLV technology, which includes comprehensive design, manufacturing, quality control, integration, launch operations, and post-flight analysis documentation, as well as training and support. HAL will be responsible for the mass production of SSLV to meet Indian and global demands,” the company says in a statement.

Initially the Modi government had implied the transfer would involve ownership of the rocket by the private company, so that it could market the rocket for profit. The actual deal does not do this. Instead, it gives HAL the responsibility to manufacture and operate the rocket, but it appears sales and ownership will still be under the control of India’s space agency ISRO. If this is correct, the deal accomplishes less than nothing, and in fact simply adds another player in the game, making the SSLV rocket less competitive in the international market.

Then again, the Modi government might see this deal as just a first step in the transition from a government-run space program to a competitive independent space industry. It needs to wrest control from ISRO, and this can’t be done politically in one fell swoop.

To me however this deal for HAL is a bad one. It now has the responsibility for making and launching the rocket, but none of the benefits.

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