Tag: bankruptcy

Two Democrats in Congress go after SpaceX for the alleged Russian theft of Starlink terminals

9:58 am

Two of the more radical Democrats in Congress, Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland) and Robert Garcia (D-California), have issued a public letter [pdf] to SpaceX, accusing the company of not having the “appropriate guardrails and policies in place to ensure your technology is neither acquired nor used illegally by Russia.”

The letter then demands SpaceX answer a number of detailed questions, such as the number of thefts SpaceX has detected, what does the company do to prevent such thefts, and how the company is acting to adhere to the present federal sanctions against Russia. It demands answers by March 20, 2024.

SpaceX has made it very clear it is doing what it can to prevent the use of stolen Starlink terminals, not only in the war situation in the Ukraine but elsewhere. It is not in the company’s interest to allow such thefts.

This letter therefore is just another effort by the Democrats to harass Elon Musk, because Musk has also made it clear he personally no longer supports the agenda of today’s Democratic Party. These two politicians likely intend to use whatever answer they get from SpaceX to further attack the company, and even institute sanctions against it.

Welcome to the new America, where politicians can routinely abuse their power to harass any private citizen who disagrees with them.

6 comments

Budget bill includes very short extension of commercial space “learning period”

9:39 am

The budget bill that Congress has just passed and awaits signature by the president included a very short extension of commercial space “learning period” that supposedly prevents heavy safety regulation by the FAA of the new commercial space industry.

That learning period was first established in 2004, and has been extended several times since. This new bill extends that period until May 11, 2024, only two months, supposedly to allow Congress time to pass a new commercial space act.

The truth is that, at present, the Biden administration has long since abandoned that learning period exemption, and has been applying a much stricter safety regulatory framework from space companies than required by law, as best illustrated by its treatment of SpaceX’s Superheavy/Starship launches. The FAA now expects all launches to function perfectly, even if testing a prototype, and should anything not go perfectly it treats the failure the same as an airplane mishap that requres any investigation to get full government approval before further launches can resume.

Unless there is a change in leadership in Washington, it is very likely we shall see few new American rocket companies from here on out. The existing companies with lots of money and power will survive, but under this heavy regulatory atmosphere it will be hard if not impossible for new companies to get established.

Leave a comment

If Trump wins in November, expect a real insurrection from Democrats

3:29 pm

The Democratic Party: Fostering election tampering everywhere
The Democratic Party

The reaction by Democratic Party politicians and pundits to the Supreme Court ruling on March 4, 2024 — voiding the effort by Colorado to throw Donald Trump off its ballot — reveals some very fundamental realities that must be faced by all Americans. To put it bluntly: These Democrats have no intention of accepting a victory by Donald Trump in the upcoming election, even if he should win by a majority so vast that no amount of election rigging can disguise it.

The first reaction to that decision was a major tell. Jean Griswold is the secretary of state of Colorado who had taken Trump off the ballot, claiming he was an insurrectionist even though that was merely her opinion as Trump has not only never been convicted of that crime, he has not even been charged with it. Immediately after the court rejected her actions unanimously, she tweeted the following:

I am disappointed in the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision stripping states of the authority to enforce Section 3 of the 14th Amendment for federal candidates. Colorado should be able to bar oath-breaking insurrections from our ballot.

Spurred by her blind hatred of Trump, Griswold’s refusal to deal with reality here is disturbing, to say the least. First, the court made it very clear, unanimously, that the states don’t have this authority when it comes to federal elections. That she as a lawyer could not recognize the plain legal arguments here that were agreed to by even the most radical leftists on the court indicates how blind she has become to reasonable disagreement.

Second, Griswold clearly thinks she by herself, based on nothing but her opinion, has the right to determine who is or is not an insurrectionist. In a country where by law and a very long tradition all people are innocent until proven guilty, by what law does she think she has that right?

The bottom line is that Griswold reveals the mindset of the Democrat Party. They are mentally unprepared to accept a Trump election victory, no matter what, and will do anything to block his victory.

This mindset is further revealed by this CNN article published today, attempting to figure out other ways in which the Democrats can block a victory by Trump.
» Read more

43 comments

Is the Saxavord spaceport in the UK about to finally get approved for launches?

9:22 am

Proposed spaceports surrounding Norwegian Sea
Proposed spaceports surrounding Norwegian Sea.

According to the head of the Saxavord spaceport in the UK, it is finally poised to get all the necessary approvals from the government of the United Kingdom that will allow the first launches before the end of this year.

Following on from the CAA licence being granted just before Christmas, management at SaxaVord Spaceport is confident it will receive its ‘range licence’ later this month to finally become a “fully-fledged spaceport”. This second licence, also issued by the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA), allows rockets launched from SaxaVord to use the airspace.

Sounds great, eh? Except that the spaceport is still waiting approval from a local commission of its plan for allowing spectators to watch launches. In addition, no launch license has yet been issued to any rocket company. The German company Rocket Factory Augsburg (RFA) is planning to take over one specific launchpad at Saxavord where it hopes to do as many as ten launches per year, with the first test launch later this year. The UK’s Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) has not yet issued that license.

Another rocket startup, ABL, is also waiting CAA approvals. Its first test launch (which failed in January 2023) was conducted in Alaska, with a second launch planned there in the next month or so. If successful the company hopes to launch regularly from Saxavord, assuming the CAA gives it approval.

Saxavord submitted its license applications to the CAA in November 2022, with the hope launches could begin in 2023. It took the CAA however more than a year to issue the spaceport license, and it still has not issued the range license, nor has it issued RFA any launch licenses yet. For these companies to prosper the government approval process has got to be streamlined.

Leave a comment

Amazingly Justice actually charges two leftist activists with felonies for defacing the display case holding the Constitution

12:55 pm

Security guards watch as vandals of the Constitution preach their message
Rotunda security guards do nothing so that these
vandals of the Constitution can preach their message.
Click for video.

In a move that is astonishing considering the political favorism of the left by the Biden administration’s Justice Department, that agency has now charged the two leftist activists who defaced the display case holding the Constitution with felonies.

On Friday, the Department of Justice charged Donald Zepeda of Maryland and Jackson Green of Utah with felony destruction of government property, according to Fox News. Zepeda and Green have been accused of dumping red powder on the case that displayed the historic document. The incident occurred on Feb 14 and the DOJ said their stunt caused more than $50,000 worth of damages.

It is not clear what penalities these two thugs face should they be convicted. For all we know, Justice is merely prosecuting them now for effect, and will allow them to skip with light charges when the case comes to court.

Nor should be we surprised if these vandals end up walking free. » Read more

5 comments

JPL requests proposals from the private sector for Mars exploration

9:44 am

Capitalism in space: JPL, which is the lead agency running NASA’s very troubled Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission, has now issued a request for proposals from the private sector for doing a variety of Mars missions.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory issued a request for proposals Jan. 29 for “commercial service studies” for future robotic Mars mission concepts. The studies, with a value of $200,000 or $300,000, would be carried out over 12 weeks. The studies are intended to examine four specific design reference missions to explore commercial opportunities to support Mars exploration: delivery of small payloads of up to 20 kilograms to Mars orbit, delivery of large payloads of up to 1,250 kilograms to Mars orbit, services to provide high-resolution imaging of the Martian surface and communications relay services between Mars and Earth.

Missions to provide imaging or communications from Mars orbit could quite easily be provided by numerous private companies. Delivering payloads to the Martian service is exactly what SpaceX proposes with Starship, and is also what several lunar lander companies have now been doing.

Up until now, JPL has always built everything in-house, or if it didn’t it designed and managed everything very closely. The result with MSR is a project that is now poorly managed, vastly over budget and behind schedule, and very likely to fail. This proposal suggests JPL is now recognizing that private enterprise might be able to do it better, as NASA has now proven with its shift from being the builder to becoming merely a customer.

If so, this proposal might be indicating the first step at JPL and NASA in imposing a major change in MSR itself, coming as it does just days after the release of an inspector general report about that project’s many problems.

3 comments

Texas approves SpaceX land swap

9:31 am

Despite a concerted effort by a small group of activists to stop it, the Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission yesterday approved a proposed land swap that would give SpaceX 43 acres of state park land in exchange for receiving 477 acres in a nearby wildlife refuge.

The commission said that the land swap “would create a tenfold return,” allowing the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department to begin planning for a new state park that would give the public access to fishing, kayaking, hiking and other outdoor activities.

…The 43 acres it would give to SpaceX are “noncontiguous,” with the commission noting that most of the acres “do not connect to each other or to areas offering public access at Boca Chica State Park.”

“These smaller, noncontiguous tracts do not provide beach access and are dotted among private properties or immediately adjacent to SpaceX’s facilities, meaning they aren’t readily available for public use and provide less cohesive wildlife habitat than offered by a connected and consistently managed tract of conservation land,” the announcement reads.

The opposition came from the same activist groups that have been attempting by lawfare in every way to shut SpaceX down. They claim in the article at the link that “SpaceX has a history of being a bad neighbor, wreaking havoc on the communities and habitat nearby,” but there is zero evidence of this. Even Fish & Wildlife was forced in its own environmental report to admit that there was no reason to block Starship/Superheavy launches at Boca Chica. And the general community is enthused about the presence of SpaceX because of the billions of dollars of new investment and tens of thousands of new jobs it has brought to the Brownsville region.

These activist groups are simply another visible expression of the irrational hatred the left now holds for Elon Musk, because he has dared defy the left in a number of ways. Sadly, these groups routinely get strong help from every media source (also part of that left), always getting quoted and always getting treated as if they are a major political force in the region, when only a tiny minority in south Texas is on their side.

2 comments

Real pushback: Faced with a legal requirement to end its DEI programs, University of Florida shuts them down

12:34 pm

Martin Luther King Jr
A real victory for Martin Luther King Jr

Bring a gun to a knife fight: In the past year there have been a variety of bills in state legislatures attempting to rein in or eliminate the racist Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs and departments at state universities. Some have been relatively weak feel-good, failure theater efforts, such as those that merely “ban” the teaching of these ideas, something that the leftist academics in charge easily get around by simply renaming the programs.

Other states imposed stronger legislation, threatening to cut the budgets of these colleges if they didn’t eliminate the programs. A few states have actually followed through.

Florida however took the strongest action under the leadership of Governor Ron DeSantis and its Republican controlled state legislature. It passed legislation that not only banned the teaching of these programs, it cut their budgets as well. No threats of budget cuts, the budgets of DEI programs were cut, right off the bat.

The University of Florida on March 1, 2024 demonstrated the effectiveness of this strong action.
» Read more

9 comments

In the NASA budget now approved, Congress demonstrates once again its utter bankruptcy

9:44 am

Negotiators for both the House and Senate have now released a federal budget for the 2024 fiscal year that includes NASA’s budget, and in doing so clearly illustrates by that NASA budget how utterly incompetent, irresponsible, and useless this Congress continues to be.

First of all, this budget is for this fiscal year, that actually began six months ago in October 2023. That Congress can’t come up with a budget on time has not only become routine, those budgets continue to arrive later and later, or not at all.

The budget itself was an attempt to fix things, because it actually is a detailed budget made up of six appropriation bills that the House began developing last year, rather than a massive omnibus bill that no one had reviewed or read. The goal with each bill was to reduce actual spending across the board — as much as 28.8% — not simply slow the growth of that spending.

However, that effort this year has been a failure. The use of continuing resolutions to keep the government running at previously high levels for the first six months of this fiscal year has largely defeated that effort. Do not expect the budget to shrink in 2024 in any major manner at all.

The budget for NASA also gives us a good window into Congress’s bankruptcy.
» Read more

6 comments

Local county now in full support of SpaceX land swap

8:41 am

According to a local Cameron county judge, who had previously expressed opposition, county officials including himself are now in full support of the proposed land swap, giving SpaceX 43 acres of Boca Chica State Park land in exchange for 477 acres at a national wildlife area about 10 miles away.

A special meeting of the Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission to vote on this land swap is now scheduled for March 5, 2024 in Austin, and it appears it is ready to approve. That meeting however should be entertaining, because it also appears that the small minority of leftist activists organizations in the area that oppose everything SpaceX is achieving are organizing carpools to attend the meeting. Expect them to perform the typical shennigans of the left, screaming and shouting and attempting to take over the venue to prevent the vote.

What these activists of course refuse to recognize, or simply don’t care, is that the change of opinion by local officials is because the local community and in fact the majority of Texans support what SpaceX is doing. It has revitalized the Brownsville area, bringing billions of new investment capital and tens of thousands of new jobs to the region. It has also demonstrated repeatedly it is being a good steward to the environment at Boca Chica, and will do much as a launch site to help preserve the coastal wildlife there, just as NASA has done at Cape Canaveral for three quarters of a century.

17 comments

National Science Foundation decides to fund only one giant telescope

8:56 am

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has decided that its astronomy program does not have sufficient funds for building both the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) in Hawaii and the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) in Chile, and will decide in May which one it will choose.

The GMT and TMT—both backed by consortia of universities, philanthropic foundations, and international partners—set out to build their next generation instruments in the early 2000s. But this privately funded approach, which during the 20th century produced the twin 10-meter Keck telescopes in Hawaii and the two 6.5-meter Magellan telescopes in Chile, stumbled when it came to multibillion-dollar projects. Although design work and mirror casting forged ahead, both projects failed to amass enough funding to complete construction. (A dispute with Native Hawaiians over the Hawaii site has also slowed the TMT.)

I predict that this decision puts the final nail in TMT’s coffin. That telescope was on schedule in 2015 — when construction was set to begin — to be already operational now, well ahead of GMT. The opposition in Hawaii by a minority of leftist protestors, who also had the backing of the state government (run entirely by the Democratic Party), blocked that construction even as the building of GMT’s mirrors proceeded.

Almost a decade later, while TMT sits in limbo, unbuilt, GMT is nearing completion, with its last mirror presently being fabricated and construction at its site now more than half done. It is expected to be finished by 2028, and is almost certainly going to get that NSF funding.

As I noted however in July 2023,

Not that any of this really matters. In the near term, ground-based astronomy on Earth is going to become increasingly impractical and insufficient, first because of the difficulties of making good observations though the atmosphere and the tens of thousands of satellites expected in the coming decades, and second because new space-based astronomy is going to make it all obsolete. All it will take will be to launch one 8-meter telescope on Starship and [GMT] will become the equivalent of a buggy whip.

The great tragedy of TMT is that the astronomers themselves at the project were not willing to fight that tiny minority of protesters, whose protests were based on the essentials of critical race theory that makes whites the devils and all other minorities saints. As academics trained in these insane ideas, the astronomy community accepted this bigoted premise, and out of guilt allowed those protesters to rule.

One comment

Today’s blacklisted American: “Progressive” leftists in Seattle can’t even take a joke, blackballing four comedians

1:08 pm

Cancelled comedians
Click for original video.

They’re coming for you next: Not surprisingly, a comedy club located in the heart of Seattle, in the very same CHAZ neighborhood (Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone) that leftist Antifa thugs took over in 2020 after the death of George Floyd, has cancelled the scheduled appearance of four comedians, apparently because all four were considered too moderate and not “progressive” enough for that radical community of close-minded fascists. As rationalized in an email to the comedians, comedy club officials explained:

Capitol Hill is known for its progressive values, and we’ve received significant feedback expressing concerns about the alignment of these upcoming shows with the neighborhood’s ethos. This feedback includes concerns from local advocacy groups that are deeply embedded in our community and work towards upholding its values.

Given the feedback and to avoid any potential negative impact on both our club and the artists involved, as well as to maintain the harmony within our community, we believe the most responsible course of action is to not move forward with the shows for Dave Smith on April 11th, Luis J Gomez for May 31st-June 1st, Jim Florentine for September 20th-21st and sadly Kurt Metzger on October 11th-12th as well.

The email also added most dishonestly, “We truly value the art of comedy and the diverse perspectives it brings to our lives.”

What a crock. » Read more

16 comments

How park volunteers in Tucson illustrated the growing resentment to unjustified authority

11:23 am

Forest Service discovers it ain't our lord and master
Forest Service discovers it ain’t
our lord and master

Recently the National Forest Service suspended its agreement with a volunteer organization, the Santa Catalina Volunteer Patrol, which had unpaid volunteers wear a forest service uniform with a volunteer patch, rather than a badge, and patrol within Sabino Canyon and other Forest Service trails near Tucson, answering questions for the public.

The reasons why the volunteer patrol was suspended were not described initially, except for vague statements that the volunteers needed “retraining.”

This drastic action is needed because we have patrollers not following our Forest Service Agreement, and any additional violations will result in our charter being removed. All patrollers will be required to go through retraining.

This past weekend that suspension was lifted, with the announcement giving a better explanation as to the cause of the suspension.
» Read more

20 comments

Pushback: Stalinist St. Philip’s College in Texas loses 2nd lawsuit, reinstates teacher fired for daring to teach basic biology

12:43 pm

St. Philip's College, home to blacklisting and censorship
St. Philip’s College, the poster child of academic
blacklisting and censorship

Bring a gun to a knife fight: For the second time in less than two months, Stalinist St. Philip’s College in Texas has lost a lawsuit for violating the rights of a teacher.

First, in late December it agreed to pay fired professor Will Moravits a $185K settlement for forceably ejecting him from the campus and firing him, simply because he allowed open debate in his classroom about the queer agenda. Moravits did not want his job back, as he readily admitted he was now very happy teaching at nearby Texas State University where “his peers treat him with respect.”

Now it has been forced to settle a second lawsuit with another professor, Johnson Varkey, who it fired in January 2023 for simply teaching basic biology in his biology class. Varkey had had the nerve during a November 2022 human anatomy and physiology class to state that human sex is determined by the X and Y chromosomes, a basic fact of biology. Four students walked out of the class in outrage, and then filed slanderous and false complaints to the administration, which then fired Varkey without due process.

According to Varkey’s legal firm, the non-profit First Liberty Institute, the college has reinstated Varkey.
» Read more

5 comments

Why the public continues to lose faith with the medical community

1:59 pm

Sudden collapse
One of many sudden public collapses.
Click for full video.

An op-ed today in the New York Post tried to explain why the medical and health community lost the confidence of so much of the public after the COVID epidemic. According to Marc Siegal, a doctor and news pundit (or as described in his bio line at the end of the essay, “a clinical professor of medicine and medical director of Doctor Radio at NYU Langone Health and a Fox News medical analyst”), the distrust was caused by the effort of the Biden administration to force the COVID jab on everyone through mandates while squelching any dissent or discussions of potential risks.

To Siegal, this effort to make believe the jab carried no risks at all was seen from the start as a lie, and has since been proven so. Better to have been honest from the start, Siegal says, so that patients could make up their own minds with all the facts in hand.

The way Siegal couches his language in his op-ed, however, only increases this distrust.
» Read more

14 comments

It is hardly news that Joe Biden is mentally incapable of being president

12:39 pm

Joe Biden at his February 2024 press conference
Joe Biden at his February 2024 press conference

In the past two weeks the press has been buzzing about a report [pdf] by Justice Department special counsel Robert Hur, who decided he could not indict Joe Biden of criminal misuse of classified materials because Biden was “an elder man with poor memory.”

Biden then appeared to confirm Hur’s report with a press conference shortly thereafter, where he made false claims against the report, and acted exactly as a person with serious memory issues. For example, at one point he confused the leader of Egypt with that of Mexico.

What makes this media buzz laughable, especially coming from sources like CNN and the New York Times (the last two links above), is that these facts have been evident since 2020, well before Joe Biden was elected president. On October 26, 2020, just before the 2020 election, I wrote this column: “Joe Biden is just not qualified, for health reasons,” stating the following:
» Read more

15 comments

There is no diversity in American academia, none at all

4:51 pm

Banned on campuses nationwide
Banned on campuses nationwide

The modern academic racist bureaucracy that is usually called “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (DEI) attempts over and over again to gaslight us into believing its goal is to welcome everyone. For example, on Yale’s DEI webpage is this statement in outlining its “Belonging” program:

Advancing Yale’s mission in vibrant community life, in which members encounter and appraise a broad array of ideas, are treated with dignity and respect, and feel welcome to make their voices heard;

Nothing about Yale’s belonging program however encourages free expression, and in fact it works agreesively to discourage it. On a related DEI webpage, it states the following about free expression:
» Read more

14 comments

Enrollment drops force major cuts to academic but not DEI programs at UNC Greensboro

1:39 pm


What the modern college education is becoming: “But
Brawndo’s got what plants crave. It’s got electrolytes!”

Because of an approximate 10% drop in enrollment since 2017, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro has now announced major cuts to many academic programs, while leaving untouched its many racially-based programs.

Five majors are being completely eliminated, according to a recent announcement from Chancellor Franklin Gilliam: anthropology, geography, physics, physical education and religious studies. Three language minors — Chinese, Russian, and Korean — are also on the chopping block. The university is also ending 12 graduate programs and is pausing admissions in its masters drama program.

These cuts were detailed in an announcement by the university’s chancellor, Franklin D. Gilliam, Jr. Interestingly, his announced cuts left entirely untouched the small Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) office is he runs from within his office. Nor did the cuts include the university’s Office of Intercultural Engagement, which appears entirely focused on favoring the queer agenda and students who advocate it. The cuts also left intact the college’s black studies and its women’s, gender, and sexuality departments, both of which might be popular but neither contribute much to providing students a real education.
» Read more

18 comments

The Washington swamp suddenly discovers that Russia has anti-satellite capabilities

9:39 am

The fake kerfuffle in the past few days about a so-called new “serious national security threat” from Russia’s space capabilities is simply the Washington swamp suddenly discovering capabilities that Russia has had for decades and has been working to improve repeatedly, discovered suddenly and pushed in our state-run press (the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Guardian, NBC, the Associated Press, ) to help that swamp lobby for passage of the Senate foreign aid bill, that spends $90 billion for the military and for the Ukraine, Taiwan, and Israel.

The key facts are highlighted below in this quote from the Washington Post propaganda piece about this story:

Exactly what the new Russia weapon is remains unclear, but the system is a “serious national security threat,” in the words of U.S. Rep. Michael R. Turner (R-Ohio), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. “I am requesting that President Biden declassify all information relating to this threat so that Congress, the Administration, and our allies can openly discuss the actions necessary to respond to this threat,” Turner wrote in a statement Wednesday.

In his briefing to reporters Thursday, [White House spokesman John] Kirby would say only that the system is “an antisatellite capability that Russia is developing.” [emphasis mine]

My heart be still. Lordy, the Russians are developing an anti-sat capability! Will wonders never cease.

This is not news. There is nothing here that we haven’t known about the Russian anti-satellite efforts now for decades. Turner and the White House are simply pushing this story now to create a crisis and panic to force the House to approve the Senate bill, even though there is great opposition to it. That opposition sees the bill has spending billions to protect other countries, while doing nothing to protect our own.

Sadly, we are ill-served by our modern press in this manner, which is all-in on this propaganda.

15 comments

Uruguay signs Artemis Accords

8:42 am

Uruguay yesterday became the 36th nation to sign the Artemis Accords, originally conceived during the Trump administration as a political maneuver to get around the legal restrictions against private ownership imposed by the Outer Space Treaty.

It is unclear where Uruguay stands with these goals. The last two signatories, Belguim and Greece, hinted in their public statements that their goals were far different, aimed more at imposing the modern leftist globalist agenda instead (“You will own nothing and be happy.”)

At present these are the nations who have signed on: Angola, Argentina, Australia, Bahrain, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Columbia, Czech Republic, Ecuador, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, India, Israel, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria, Poland, Romania, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, the Ukraine, the United States and Uruguay.

The competing alliance of communist nations, led by China, includes only Russia, Venezuala, Pakistan, Belarus, Azerbaijan, and South Africa. Former deep Soviet bloc nations like Bulgaria and Romania, as well as previously very Marxist Angola, joined the American alliance, suggesting that these two space alliances are not a return of the Cold War of the 20th century. Instead, it appears that both alliances are untrustworthy when it comes to individual rights, freedom, and limited government. Both have tensions within each, with many leaders in both groups working both against and for these ideals, with a large plurality likely focused on power and control, not human freedom.

The U.S. can do much good here, if its leadership stands firmly for freedom (to paraphrase John Kennedy). Sadly, its leadership today does not do this, and it is very unclear whether future leaders will do so either.

Leave a comment

SpaceX announces plans to build $100 million office complex in Brownsville

10:13 am

According to a filing with the Texas Department of Regulations and Licensing, SpaceX is now planning a $100 million office complex in Brownsville, Texas, in addition to the extensive facilities it is building nearby at its launch site at Boca Chica.

Just a few miles away from its launch site, SpaceX will construct the multimillion-dollar office inside an industrial factory. It will be located at 52198 San Martin Blvd., Brownsville, TX 78521, according to the Texas Department of Regulations and Licensing filing.

Construction is slated to begin this month and is expected to have just under a year turnaround. An estimated start date is listed as February 23, with a completion date of January 1, 2025, according to the TDLR filing. All TDLR filings are subject to change.

It seems to me that the activist group Save RGV (Rio Grand Valley) that is suing SpaceX to shut down Boca Chica is acting to destroy this region, not save it. Before SpaceX showed up the economy of Brownsville and the Rio Grand Valley was very depressed and going nowhere. SpaceX has brought in billions in investment capital as well as tens of thousands of new jobs.

One wonders how any court can rule in favor of Save RGV’s lawsuit that seeks to prevent any future temporary beach closures at Boca Chica and thus outlaw any further launches. Such a ruling would essentially shut down much of what SpaceX is doing in the Brownsville region, and would result in the destruction of this new economic growth.

Such a ruling seems insane, but we should not ignore its possibility. Stupider decisions by courts have been made many times in the past. And it does appear we live in very stupid times.

9 comments

Are decent ordinary Democrats finally recognizing the terrible power-hungry corruption of their political party?

2:32 pm

The Democratic Party: Fostering election tampering everywhere
The Democratic Party

I have been hoping and praying for more than three decades for ordinary and decent Democratic Party supporters to recognize the rot that has permeated that party since the 1990s, all to no avail. Beginning with Bill Clinton, a Democratic Party politician could commit perjury, accept campaign donations illegally from hostile foreign powers, lie, cheat, and do all sorts of criminal acts, and ordinary Democrats would routinely and nonchalantly look the other way. “That can’t be true!” they would insist if you tried to point out any of these facts. Others would be even more closed-minded. “Democrats stand for equal rights and the poor! Republicans are fascists!”

In recent days however some anecdotal evidence, along with more firm survey data, suggests that ordinary Democrats (and some not so ordinary) might finally be opening their minds to other possibilities. Maybe Republicans (and Donald Trump) aren’t so bad after all. Maybe there is real corruption and bad policy coming from Democratic Party politicans.

For example, on the afternoon after the Supreme Court had listened to Colorado’s case trying to ban Donald Trump from the November presidential ballot, Justice Elena Kagan participated in a public event at the Library of Congress. During the morning court session it had appeared that all of the judges (including the judges appointed by Democrats) were very skeptical of Colorado’s case, with many legal analysts thinking their questions and comments suggesting they would rule against Colorado by a large majority, possibly unanimously.

At that afternoon public event, Kagan expressed these thoughts:
» Read more

24 comments

Pushback: 9-year-old slandered by left goes to Super Bowl wearing face paint

12:13 pm

Holden Armenta on his way to the Superbowl
Holden Armenta in face-paint and headdress,
on his way to the Superbowl. Click for video.

Bring a gun to a knife fight: Though this will the third time in less than a week I have devoted my column to this story, this update today is absolutely essential, because it might be the happiest and most hopeful story I have reported in years.

The screen capture to the right was taken from a short X video posted by one of the two podcasters who had started a GiveSendGo campaign to send Holden Armenta to the Super Bowl. Armenta had been slandered falsely by Deadspin senior writer Carron Phillips, who claimed the boy was a racist because he attended a Kansas City Chiefs game in blackface, when all the boy did was put on facepaint of the team’s colors to cheer them on, like any ordinary 9-year-old boy. Worse, both that news outlet and Phillips compounded the false slander by refusing to correct their error when it was clearly documented it was false. That defiance was made even more disgusting when it was revealed that Armenta and his family are actually American Indians themselves.

Even though the fund-raising campaign fell short of its $22,000 goal, raising about half that, it appears that the podcasters decided to take Holden and his family to the game anyway. Kudos to them!

The video of Holden is joyous in numerous ways. » Read more

3 comments

Greece signs Artemis Accords

10:00 am

Greece yesterday became the 35th nation to sign the Artemis Accords, joining the American alliance established by these bi-laterial individual agreements between the U.S. and each nation.

The full list of signatories to the Accords is now as follows: Angola, Argentina, Australia, Bahrain, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Columbia, Czech Republic, Ecuador, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, India, Israel, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria, Poland, Romania, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, the Ukraine, and the United States.

The original goal of the Artemis Accords, established during the Trump administration, was to create an alliance focused on allowing property rights in space that would also act to establish legal rules to protect those rights, something that the Outer Space Treaty forbids. It appears that under the Biden administration those goals have increasingly been pushed aside for the globalist goals of the UN. The language of NASA’s press release illustrates this:

“As humanity embarks on a great adventure, returning to the Moon and preparing for traveling beyond the Moon, the Artemis Accords serve as a beacon of collaboration and cooperation among nations, paving the way for a sustainable and peaceful exploration of space,” said [Giorgos Gerapetritis, Greek’s foreign minister].

The Artemis Accords reinforce and implement key obligations in the 1967 Outer Space Treaty. They also strengthen the commitment by the United States and signatory nations to the Registration Convention, the Rescue and Return Agreement, as well as best practices NASA and its partners support, including the public release of scientific data. [emphasis mine]

The highlighted word is one of the many buzzwords used by globalists to signal their priorities, similar to the use of the term ” equitable access” by Belgium officials when it signed the accords in January. Rather than focus on allowing private enterprise and freedom, the focus now is to establish rules to control what people do.

The right leadership from the United States could change this shift in focus, but right now the U.S. does not have such leadership.

6 comments

Pushback: Paypal’s blacklisting causes it to lose significant business

1:15 pm

Paypal: hostile to freedom

It never pays to antagonize your customers: Paypal announced last week that it is laying off 2,500 workers, a reduction of its work force by about 9%, repeating a similar round of layoffs one year ago.

In other words, the company has shrunk by almost 20% since January 2023. The article notes the following financial issues:

Shares of the payments giant have plunged more than 20% over the past year as earnings faltered and the company lowered its full-year guidance for adjusted operating margin. PayPal named [Chief Executive Officer Alex Chriss] last year to replace Dan Schulman.

PayPal was an early disrupter in the payments industry, but rivals including Apple Inc. and Zelle have since crowded the space, leaving PayPal struggling to keep pace. At least four analysts downgraded the stock this month, citing a range of concerns from rising competition to pressure on profitability.

What the article ignores is the blackballing and censorship by Paypal under the leadership of Dan Schulman that directly antagonized its customer base.
» Read more

19 comments

Pushback: Parents of 9-year-old slandered by Deadspin reporter sue

11:55 am

Holden (R) with his father Bubba
Holden (R) with his father Raul, being interviewed
on television following the slander. Click for video.

Bring a gun to a knife fight: This is follow-up to my story only two days ago about the defamation and slander of 9-year-old Holden Armenta by Deadspin Senior Writer Carron Phillips. Both had falsely accused this innocent child of racism because he attended a game wearing facepaint with the red and black colors of the Kansas City Chiefs, like numerous fans have done for decades. My story was about a GiveSendGo fund-raising campaign still on-going to send Holden to the Super Bowl in Las Vegas this coming weekend to see his team play, in person.

On that same day the boy’s parents filed a lawsuit against Deadspin and its parent company, G/O Media, accusing both of defaming both Holden and themselves, and demanding actual and punitive damages.

You can read the complaint here [pdf]. It is a heart-breaking document to read, especially when it describes the painful consequences to Holden because of Phillips’ vicious and false attack.
» Read more

3 comments

Scientists: We think the Saturn moon Mimas may have a young underground ocean

8:45 am

The uncertainty of science: Using computer modeling based on orbital data obtained from the orbiter Cassini, scientist now believe the Saturn moon Mimas may have a young underground ocean.

[I]n 2014, a team that included Lainey and that was led by Radwan Tajeddine, an astronomer then at the Paris Observatory, analysed images taken by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, which explored Saturn and its moons between 2004 and 2017. By studying how the 400-kilometre-wide Mimas wobbled in its orbit around Saturn, the researchers concluded that it had either a buried ocean or a rugby-ball-shaped core. As more scientists studied how an ocean could have formed and evolved, it became harder to explain the geology of Mimas without invoking an ocean.

In the 2024 study, Lainey and his colleagues seem to have nailed the case. They went further than they had in 2014, by analysing not just the orbit’s wobble but also how Mimas’s rotation around Saturn changed over time. The team combined Cassini observations with simulations of Mimas’s interior and its orbit to conclude that there must be an ocean 20–30 kilometres below Mimas’s surface.

The journal Nature published the paper, and the link above goes to an article in Nature describing the results, with a headline “The Solar System has a new ocean — it’s buried in a small Saturn moon.” This is very poor journalism, but very typical these days from Nature. Nowadays that journal routinely pushes the results it publishes with great certainty, even if the data is quite uncertain.

And these results are quite uncertain. They are based on computer simulations using orbital data only. No data from Mimas itself is involved. While that orbital data and computer models might suggest an underground ocean that is very young, that is the best it does, “suggest.” Without question this conclusion is very intriguing, but it should not be treated as a discovery, only a theory that still needs confirmation with much better data.

2 comments

Pushback: Fired by Disney for noting Nazis killed Jews, actress sues, her lawyers paid for by X

2:24 pm

Gina Carano's tweet about the Nazi genocide

Bring a gun to a knife fight: Back in February 2021 my daily blacklist column focused on the horrible blackballing of actress Gina Carano by the Disney corporation. It had fired her because of the tweet to the right, in which she had stated some undeniable facts about the Nazis and their compaign to murder the Jews. As a company spokesperson stated falsely at her firing,

[H]er social media posts denigrating people based on their cultural and religious identities are abhorrent and unacceptable.

It was the company’s false and slanderous position — as demonstrated by numerous other actions at the same time — that Carano’s conservative positions on many issues was the equivalent of “denigrating” the queer and black communities, like a Nazi. To Disney, her effort to retell the history of the Holocaust in order to prevent it from happening again was unacceptable, and so it fired her.

Carano is now suing Disney and Lucasfilms for that firing and its subsequent smear campaign against her. You can read her complaint here. It is easy reading, and outlines in great detail the very reasonable positions taken by Carano in public, and the campaign of slanders against her that followed from Disney officials as well as advocates in the BLM and queer communities. Repeatedly Carano made it clear she was not attacking any particular group, and that her goal was to outline actual facts and defend the free speech rights of everyone. The response from Disney and the activists in the BLM and queer communities were slanders, lies, and falsehoods. Her case is strong, as she is suing under California law, which states that
» Read more

21 comments

JPL to lay off 8% of its work force plus 40 contractors

11:34 pm

Claiming the uncertainty of its federal budget allocation due to Congress’s inability to pass a new budget, the Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) earlier today announced it was laying off 8% of its work force, 530 employees, plus 40 contractors.

In a memo to JPL staff Feb. 6, [director Laurie] Leshin said that a lack of a final 2024 appropriations bill — NASA is operating on a CR [continuing resolution] that runs until March 8 — forced the layoffs after taking other measures such as a hiring freeze and reductions in MSR [Mars Sample Return] contracts and other spending, as well as the earlier contractor layoffs. “So in the absence of an appropriation, and as much as we wish we didn’t need to take this action, we must now move forward to protect against even deeper cuts later were we to wait,” she wrote.

Uncertainty about how the Mars Sample Return project should be designed and built had caused Congress to express doubts about the project, with the Senate suggesting major cuts. NASA responded by loudly pausing the project and suggesting its own cuts. JPL has now followed up with these layoffs. Both have I think done so as a lobbying tactic, and as expected in this game of budget lobbying these actions have caused many legislators to scream in horror: “We really didn’t mean it! We really don’t want to cut anything!”

Expect our bankrupt Congress to fold and provide NASA and JPL the blank check it wants to fly a Mars mission that will cost billions, be years late, and likely be beaten to Mars by SpaceX’s Starship (which could do the job for a tenth the cost).

7 comments

Pushback: Help send 9-year-old KC Chiefs fan, slandered as bigot by media, to Super Bowl

3:17 pm

Holden (R) with his father Bubba
Holden (R) with his father Bubba, being interviewed
on television following the slander. Click for video.

Bring a gun to a knife fight: A fundraiser has been started to send 9-year-old KC Chiefs fan, Holden Armenta, to the Super Bowl, in defiant response to the ugly effort by one racist reporter, Carron Phillips, and his media outlet, Deadspin, to slander the boy as a bigot because he attended a game wearing facepaint with the red and black colors of the Chiefs.

Phillips had unjustly accused the child of wearing blackface, and Deadspin helped Phillips push this lie by printing a picture that only showed the black side of Armenta’s face. A head-on shot showed his facepaint had nothing to do with blackface, but was a typical example of what many football fans do, paint their faces with the colors of their team. The right side of the boy’s face was painted black, the left side red.

What made the slander even more egregious is that Holden is an American Indian, with his grandfather, Raul Armenta, on the board of the Chumash Tribe in Santa Ynez, California.
» Read more

5 comments
1 … 12 13 14 15 16 … 87