Tag: bankruptcy

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

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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

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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.
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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:
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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

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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:
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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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).

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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

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The failure of the COVID jab and the people who pushed it

2:42 pm

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

I think it is time to do an update on the recent research outlining the disaster that the mRNA COVID jab has brought to humans worldwide. The news has generally been bad, though sadly none of it has been a surprise to anyone paying attention since 2021 and 2022.

Note to that no where in any of my reporting do I ever call these shots “vaccines.” In the past, when you got a vaccine it protected you from the targeted disease. The jab does not do that. It is not even clear that it reduces your chances of catching the disease, with significant evidence actually suggesting it increases your chances.

We begin with a study published in August 2023 that found that the jab appeared to damage the immune system of children.

Kids who got Pfizer’s mRNA Covid jabs had a weakened immune response to other viruses and bacteria, Australian researchers reported in a study published last week. The diminished response appeared within weeks after the second Pfizer dose, the authors found. Blood taken from the children produced fewer crucial signaling molecules when stimulated with several common potential bacteria and viruses.

Over time, the immune response to bacteria returned to normal. But the diminished response to viruses lasted at least six months, for as long as the researchers collected data.

This study was small, involving only 29 kids, but the data was “troubling” to all researchers involved, and demanded further research.

Then in September a study of health care workers found that getting the jab actually made them sicker.
» Read more

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A sign of hope and disaster: Students rip out tampon dispenser in boy’s bathroom 20 minutes after it was installed

12:18 pm

Marc Belanda, principal of Brookfield and leading the way to a queer future!
Marc Belanda, principal of Brookfield HS,
leading the way to a queer future!

Last week a story made news when administrators at Brookfield High School in Connecticut installed a woman’s tampon dispenser in the boy’s bathroom, as now required by an insane law passed by the state legislature in 2022.

A bill passed in the 2022 legislative session requires public school Boards of Education to provide free menstrual products to students in all girls restrooms, in any all-gender restrooms, and in at least one boys restroom. According to Connecticut’s Department of Public Health (DPH) “The intention of the law is to address period poverty, meaning the struggle to purchase period products due to lack of income.”

It wasn’t however the installation that made news, but the fact that only twenty minutes after the dispenser was installed students at the school (likely teenage boys) ripped it out.
» Read more

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Texas state court rules in favor of activist lawsuit against SpaceX

9:00 am

The activists who sued SpaceX and local authorities, claiming the beach closures required during tests and launches at Boca Chica violate the Texas constitution, have had their lawsuit reinstated by a higher state court after a lower court had dismissed it.

Texas’ 13th district court of appeals ruled in favor of SaveRGV, the Sierra Club and the Carrizo/Comecrudo Nation of Texas in suits alleging that a 2013 state law allowing beach closures for space flight activities goes against the Open Beaches Amendment to the Texas Constitution.

In July 2022, Cameron County’s 445th District Court dismissed the coalition’s lawsuit, saying the organizations lacked standing in their complaint against Texas Land Commissioner Dr. Dawn Buckingham, the Texas Land Office, Cameron County and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.

The appeals court reversed that decision Thursday, allowing the lawsuit to proceed.

The lawsuit still must be litigated, so these activists have not yet won their case. However, this decision might prevent further beach closures while the case plays out in the courts, which would essentially shut down any further tests or launches at Boca Chica. If so, it will not matter if the FAA finally finishes its paperwork and approves a third test launch of Starship/Superheavy later this month. The launch will not be possible.

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Shoddy Harvard — home of plagiarism and bigotry — loses another big donor

12:52 pm

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

One of Harvard’s biggest donors, Ken Griffin, has announced that he is pausing all further donations to the university due to its now obviously shoddy educational standards combined with its advocacy of racial quotas under its Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion program.

Griffin announced his decision to stop donating to Harvard during a keynote talk at a conference hosted by the Managed Funds Association in Miami. Griffin, however, left open the possibility that the University could win back his support. “I’d like that to change and I have made that clear to members of the corporate board,” he said. “But until Harvard makes it very clear that they’re going to resume their role as educating young American men and women to be leaders, to be problem solvers, to take on difficult issues, I’m not interested in supporting the institution.”

He added that Harvard students were “whiny snowflakes” caught in a misguided ideology of oppressor and oppressed during his remarks.

Griffin also stated that his companies will hire no students who signed a group letter that expressed support for Hamas’ rape, torture, and massacre of more than 1,400 Israelis on October 7, 2023.

Griffin has donated more than half a billion to Harvard in recent years, including a $300 million donation to Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences last year.

He is also not the first billionaire to announce a boycott of Harvard. In November Bill Ackman, a billionaire hedge fund manager and Harvard alumni, released a long letter condemning the university’s former president Claudine Gay for allowing anti-Semitism to fester at the school. Like Griffin, he is apparently withholding further donations while refusing to hire students. Ackman has since repeatedly harangued Harvard in public for its refusal to take any serious reform actions.

Then in December billionaire Leonard Blavatnik stopped his own donations, also because he was appalled by the uinversity’s willingness to allow anti-Semitism to run rampant on campus.

These three men combined had previously donated almost a billion dollars total to the university. One would think their boycott would carry profound weight, and force some immediate changes at Harvard.

Don’t bet on it. » Read more

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Today’s blacklisted American: U.S. Court rules against coach fired for simply stating a fact in a casual conversation

2:51 pm

Vermont: Where you are only allowed to say things that support the queer agenda
Vermont: Where the only speech allowed must
support the queer agenda

If you are depending on the federal courts to defend your fundamental rights, as outlined very bluntly in the Bill of Rights, you are being very naive. On December 28, 2024 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit ruled against David Bloch, who had been fired in February 2023 without due process as the snowboarding coach at Woodstock Union High School in Vermont — a team that he had founded in 2011 — because he had simply mentioned in a casual and very civil conversation with two of his students that men and women are genetically different.

He was fired the next day, even though no investigation into the incident had been done, and no one involved in the conversation had complained. School officials made it clear that Bloch was being fired for daring to have an opinion they did not like.

The notice accused Bloch of violating Windsor Central Supervisory Union Board’s Harassment, Hazing, and Bullying policy and the Vermont Principals’ Association related policy for “ma[king] reference to [a] student in a manner that questioned the legitimacy and appropriateness of the student competing on the girls’ team to members of the WUHS snowboard team”—all outside the student’s presence.

» Read more

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The FBI must be wiped clean, or wiped out, on Day One of the next Repubican administration

1:05 pm

Christopher Wray, the world's most powerful mobster

Should Donald Trump become president in 2024 and the acts to make major changes within the federal executive bureaucracy, cleaning house from top to bottom with major firings and layoffs (something he should have done in his first administration and failed to do), without question the first agency he must attack mercilessly is the FBI.

There are numerous documented examples in the past decade where the FBI has been weaponized against conservatives and Republicans, investigating, harassing, and even arresting people because they held beliefs that opposed the agenda of the Democratic Party. In some cases the individuals attacked were simply religious Christians who opposed abortion. In other cases the victims were ordinary Americans who simply made public their support of Trump.

Nor were just everyday Americans attacked. The FBI has arrested Republican candidates for office. Its officials have altered evidence to justify illegal seach warrants against Republicans. Its management also targeted and framed Trump officials it did not like. Officials there also abused the FISA court, submitting error-filled applications that were used to get warrants to spy on Americans. It redacted information to hide its misbehavior, claiming dishonestly that the redactions were for national security reasons.

This list is only a very small selection of the many such stories reported in the past decade. Any one of these corrupt actions would justify firing everyone at the FBI and zeroing out its budget as quickly as possible. Last week however the Ninth U.S. Court of Appeals provided us another reason: It ruled that FBI agents literally committed theft in rummaging through hundreds of security deposit boxes at a bank in wealthy Beverly Hills, confiscating millions of dollars it had no right to grab, simply because the cash was there and the agents and the agency wanted that money for their own pockets.
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Bi-partisan bill proposed giving space traffic management to Commerce, not FCC

3:07 pm

On January 25, 2024 a bill sponsored by a bi-partisan group of senators was introduced assigning the job of managing orbital traffic and the removal of defunct satellites to the Commerce Department, essentially telling both the FCC and NOAA that the attempt by those agencies to grab this power, outside of their statutory authority, will be opposed by elected officials.

The bill puts the responsibility of managing satellite and spacecraft traffic and the regulations regarding de-orbiting satellites to Office of Space Commerce (OSC) within Commerce. It is also supported by the comercial industry, which has not been happy especially with the FCC’s regulatory power grab. Unlike the regulations the FCC is creating, this bill relies heavily on industry advice and consensus, the very people who not only know best what needs to be done, but are the only ones qualified to do it.

Of course, the bill must pass both the Senate, House, and be signed by the President before it becomes law. Whether that can happen remains uncertain, especially since there appear to be a lot of factions inside DC who want to give federal agencies like the FCC legal carte blanche to regulate however they see fit, superseding Congress, the Constitution, and the law. And it seems that Congress now is so weak, those factions might just get what they want.

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Major donor to Cornell pulls funding, demands firing of university president

3:15 pm

These might be the worst colleges in the country
These are probably the worst colleges in the country,
and it includes Cornell.

Jon Lindseth, a major donor to Cornell for years, has published an open letter to the university’s board of trustees, condemning strongly its bigoted “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (DEI) policies and demanding their shutdown along with the firing of university president Martha Pollak.

I am proud to count myself one of several generations of Lindseths who are Cornell alumni and invested donors, but I am alarmed by the diminished quality of education offered lately by my alma mater because of its disastrous involvement with DEI policies that have infiltrated every part of the university.

President Pollack’s shameful recent response to clear acts of terrorism and antisemitism compared with her swift and strong response to the George Floyd tragedy demonstrates that Cornell is no longer concerned with discovering and disseminating knowledge, but rather with adhering to DEI groupthink policies and racialization. … Today the instruction Cornell offers is in DEI groupthink applied to every field of study. The result is a moral decay, some call it “rot,” that falls in line with prevailing ideology and dishonors basic principles of justice and free speech. Under President Pollack’s leadership the university continues to put more value on DEI’s broad application rather than merit. This was not how Cornell became one of the country’s leading institutions and a proud member of the Ivy League.

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NASA’s useless safety panel once again sticks its nose where it isn’t qualified to go

11:13 am

For the third year in a row, the annual report of NASA’s generally useless and often corrupt safety panel, the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP), is once again focused not on technical safety issues related specifically to engineering — the reason the panel was first formed in 1968 following the Apollo 1 launchpad fire that killed three asteronauts — but NASA’s general management and long term strategies and plans, something that is entirely the responsibility of Congress and elected officials.

As the press release notes right at the top, “The report highlights 2023 activities and observations on NASA’s Strategic Vision and Guiding Principles, Agency Governance, and Moon to Mars Program Management.” On none of these issues does this panel have any expertise, or even qualifications. Most of its membership are former government bureaucrats, with only one panel member coming mostly from the private sector.

More important, while the panel is supposed to be review NASA’s engineering to make sure it is not getting sloppy, its panelists are all management types, not engineers.

To give the panel some credit, its report [pdf] does actually note the many risks NASA is taking on its various Artemis manned lunar flights, including more than a dozen engineering designs which will be flown for the first time on the first Artemis manned mission to land on the Moon. However, while this should be the panel’s number one concern, it buries it inside the report, and simply recommends that NASA redistribute these firsts across multiple missions. How NASA should do this is not addressed.

Last year I simply noted ASAP’s annual report in a quick links post, adding that “It has been so wrong so many times in the past, clearly biased against private space while favoring NASA, its analysis is simply worthless.” That conclusion still applies.

The sooner Congress stops wasting any money on this panel, the better. It provides no real service except to slow down development. And it is now putting itself above Congress in its effort to influence strategic and programming.

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Northrop Grumman writes off $100 million on its fixed-price Lunar Gateway contract

10:00 am

Northrop Grumman announced on January 25, 2024 that it has written off another $42 million on its fixed-price contract with NASA to build the main habitable module for its Lunar Gateway space station, bringing the total losses so far to $100 million.

The company blamed the latest charge primarily on “cost growth stemming from evolving Lunar Gateway architecture and mission requirements combined with macroeconomic challenges.” The company offered the same explanation when it reported the charge in the second quarter.

Northrop received a $935 million fixed-price contract from NASA in July 2021 to build the module, which is based on the company’s Cygnus cargo spacecraft. HALO will provide initial living accommodations on the Gateway and includes several docking ports for visiting Orion spacecraft and lunar landers as well as additional modules provided by international partners. It will launch together with the Maxar-built Power and Propulsion Element (PPE) on a Falcon Heavy.

In a fixed price contract NASA is not suppose to issue change orders. What must be happening is that either the company or NASA are recognizing there are some issues with the initial and then revised designs, forcing Northrop Grumman to issue its own change orders, delaying development and adding costs.

That the company is having problems however is a bit baffling. First, space station module design is not new. There is a history going back decades on how to do this. Second, Northrop is basing this module design on its already launched Cygnus freighters. Though unmanned, these freighters still have to be habitable after docking with ISS. It should not be so difficult to upgrade them.

Regardless, the company has now become hostile to bidding on any future fixed price contracts, or if it does, it will bid much higher (a decision that caused it to lose in another recent bidding contest). Hopefully this decision on fixed price contracts, similar to Boeing’s own decision, will not cause NASA to abandon such contracts. Just because these big, old-space companies can’t work efficiently doesn’t mean others can’t. Fixed-price is how every business in the real world must function. For most NASA projects such a deal is realistic. If these old companies can’t function practically let new companies bid instead. This will be better for NASA and the entire American space industry.

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African lawfare to take control of space

12:57 pm

Modern academia: Marching with Lenin!
Modern African academia, proudly marching with Lenin!

It appears that a growing cadre of African lawyers are working within international organizations such as the UN and the International Astronautical Union (IAU) to use the Outer Space Treaty as a wedge to take control of space, wresting it from the hands of private commerical companies.

I make this assessment based upon a long article about this new lawfare published today in Wired, describing the training and political goals of a number of young African layers in the field of international space law.

[S]ome players in the global south are gearing up for the orbital future not just by scrambling to launch satellites, but by building up skills in outer space law—the evolving area of international jurisprudence that introduced the “province of all mankind” concept in the first place.

Though the Outer Space Treaty is still the cornerstone of space law, other international agreements have built up around it over the years—and more still are desperately needed to regulate today’s realities in space. “This is an area of rulemaking where they’re just setting up the rules for the future, so you need to have a perspective now,” explains Timiebi Aganaba, a British-Canadian-Nigerian professor at Arizona State University who has been instrumental in driving African interest in space law. “If the system gets built without you—if you come in later—people will start quoting laws to you.”

In 2011, Aganaba helped organize the first teams of African law students to enter something called the Manfred Lachs Space Law Moot Court Competition. The global tournament, named after an architect of the Outer Space Treaty, uses fictional court cases to train young lawyers how to think through the plausible conflicts that could soon arise beyond the atmosphere—and it is far and away the most important professional conduit into the field of space law. Students who make it to the final round of the competition argue their cases before actual judges from the International Court of Justice—the world’s highest forum for legal disputes between countries. And since 2011, teams from Africa have become a force in the competition. In 2018, South Africa’s University of Pretoria won the international championship.

If Aganaba’s name rings a bell to my readers, it is no surprise. » Read more

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All climate models continue to be wrong, overstating warming to significant degrees

12:24 pm

Climate models versus data
Click for full resolution graph.

According to a new analysis comparing actual satellite observations of the climate since 1979 with all the climate models used by the IPCC and global warming activitists, it appears that every single climate model continues to overstate significantly their predictions of warming, with that error increasing with time. From the paper’s abstract:

Warming of the global climate system over the past half-century has averaged 43 percent less than that produced by computerized climate models used to promote changes in energy policy. In the United States during summer, the observed warming is much weaker than that produced by all 36 climate models surveyed here.

While the cause of this relatively benign warming could theoretically be entirely due to humanity’s production of carbon dioxide from fossil-fuel burning, this claim cannot be demonstrated through science. At least some of the measured warming could be natural. Contrary to media reports and environmental organizations’ press releases, global warming offers no justification for carbon-based regulation.

The research was done by Roy Spencer of the University of Alabama, who has also been the principal investigator on one climate satellite. The graph to the right, chart 2 of his paper, shows the error of every single climate model, with some models so wrong they are essentially useless to predict anything.

What is significant about this research is not that these models are wrong, it is that they are all wrong in the same direction. If the climate science community was approaching this work honestly with an effort to be unbiased, we should should expect some models to predict too little warming, and others too much. That all predict too much warming suggests that every single one of these models is tainted by politics and confirmation bias. The people who write the models want global warming to occur (almost certainly for political reasons), and so their models always lean in that direction.

What is even more disturbing is that Spencer’s work shows that the difference between the models and observations is growing, as indicated by chart 3 from his paper, below.
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