Tag: bankruptcy

Senate committee: NASA must choose two companies to build manned lunar lander

5:09 pm

We’re here to help you! Despite offering NASA only $100 million more for the program, the Senate Appropriations committee has directed the agency to award a second manned lunar lander contract, in addition to the one it gave SpaceX in April.

On Tuesday (Oct. 18), the Senate Appropriations Committee — the largest U.S. Senate committee that oversees all discretionary spending legislation in the Senate — released a draft report of nine appropriations bills for the fiscal year 2022 which included funding for NASA, according to SpaceNews.

The appropriators, in the report, state that NASA’s HLS program is not underfunded, despite the agency’s previous claims to the contrary. As shown in the report, the bill includes $24.83 billion for NASA, which is just slightly more than the $24.8 billion that NASA requested, and a $100 million increase in funding for HLS.

“NASA’s rhetoric of blaming Congress and this Committee for the lack of resources needed to support two HLS teams rings hollow,” the report states. The committee added that “having at least two teams providing services using the Gateway should be the end goal of the current development program,” referencing NASA’s Gateway, a planned lunar space station.

It might be possible for the increase in funding to cover a second contract, if that contract was awarded to Blue Origin. Jeff Bezos has made it clear that he would be willing to waive as much as $2 billion of the price for the contract, using his own ample funds to make up the difference. Whether that is enough to build it, with the $100 million the Senate appropriated, is unclear.

This bill of course has to pass the Senate, be approved as written by the House, and then signed by the President. These directives and budget changes thus might not end up in the final appropriations bill.

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Today’s blacklisted American: The massacred Alamo defenders were a myth, because they were white!

12:19 pm

The Alamo, censored

Today’s blacklist story really begins with with 70-year-old Phil Collins from the rock band Genesis. Though born and raised in England, Collins has been for most of his life a passionate aficionado of all things related to the battle of the Alamo in Texas in 1836. That passion caused him to accumulate in his life a gigantic collection of Alamo memorabilia worth 10 million pounds, including the rifle that belonged to Davy Crockett and the sword that belonged to Mexican general Santa Anna.

In 2014 Collins, who is in poor health, donated that entire 430-piece collection to the state of Texas, on the condition the state build a museum at the Alamo to exhibit it. That museum is scheduled to open next summer, and is expected to attract millions to the site.

So, who is being blacklisted? Well, it appears it is the Alamo itself, or at least the true history of that battle, where a Mexican army of 6,000 overwhelmed a small outpost manned by only 200 Texan volunteers. No prisoners were taken, all were killed. That butchery became the rallying cry for Texas independence from Mexico.

It appears that this story must no longer be told, even though true, because it celebrates the unwavering courage of the settlers from the United States who created Texas, while illustrating the cruel dictatorship of Mexico at that time.
» Read more

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Did China test a hypersonic weapon in August?

10:14 am

Long March 2C rocket
China’s Long March 2C rocket

On October 17th The Financial Times published a story claiming, based on anonymous sources, that one of China’s five launches in August tested a hypersonic weapon, which supposedly circled the globe to impact the Earth only 24 miles from its target.

The Financial Times story is behind a paywall, but not surprisingly it was picked up by much of the mainstream press, with the conservative press — as illustrated by this Daily Wire story — accepting the weapon as fact, while the leftist press — as illustrated by this CNN story — giving China the opportunity to deny the claim.

Did it actually happen? I have no idea. I would add however that I would not trust any story dependent wholly on anonymous sources, considering the unreliability of today’s press and the repeated evidence that numerous federal agencies in the military and intelligence communities routinely feed it disinformation for their own political purposes. These agencies, including the Space Force, want to encourage Congress to fund them, and creating a bogey man threat that the press can tout has for decades been the standard way to do it.

To get a better idea whether this hypersonic flight happened, let’s review the actual Chinese launches in August to see if any might be a likely candidate. For a launch to fit the description, there would have to be almost no information about its payload, and that payload would have to have not reached orbit, since the hypersonic test circled the globe once and then impacted the Earth.
» Read more

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Today’s blacklisted American: Doctor banned from seeing patients because he has natural immunity

11:49 am

UC's ban of Kheriaty
The University of California’s action against Kheriaty.
Click for full image.

The modern dark age: The University of California has placed Dr. Aaron Kheriaty on administrative leave, preventing him from seeing any patients, because Kheriaty has sued the college for its vaccine mandate that refuses to recognize the documented stronger and safer effects of natural immunity over the COVID vaccines.

I was being placed on “Investigatory Leave” for my failure to comply with the vaccine mandate. I was given no opportunity to contact my patients, students, residents, or colleagues and let them know I would disappear for a month. Rather than waiting for the court to make a ruling on my case, the University has taken action.

…[H]alf of my income from the University comes from clinical revenues generated from seeing my patients, supervising resident clinics, and engaging in weekend and holiday on-call duties. So while on leave my salary is significantly cut. Furthermore, my contract stipulates that I am not able to conduct any patient care outside the University: to see my current patients, or to recoup my losses by moonlighting as a physician elsewhere, would violate the terms of my contract.

Kheriaty, who has had the Wuhan flu (along with his entire family) and now had natural immunity, opposes mandating a vaccine for such individuals because the costs far outweigh the benefits. As he writes:
» Read more

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Rocket Lab reschedules next launches

9:41 am

Capitalism in space: Rocket Lab has now announced that it has delayed its next two launches from mid-October to mid-November.

A two-week window is planned for the first launch — from Nov. 11 to Nov. 24 —when its Electron rocket will deploy two satellites into low-Earth orbit. The company aims to deploy two more satellites in the second launch for the mission after Nov. 27.

Both launches are scheduled to take place at the Rocket Lab Launch Complex 1 on New Zealand’s Māhia Peninsula.

The announcement does not provide an explanation for this delay. However, Rocket Lab had originally scheduled these launches for August/September, but lockdown restrictions in New Zealand due to its panic over COVID-19 had forced it to trim its launches there by half for the rest of the year. Rather than do five as planned, the company is only going to do two, and it appears those two are the launches now set for November.

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California environment overregulation sole cause of shipping backup

3:32 pm

California environment regulations that ban the use of any truck more than three years old, essentially banning half of all fleet trucks and practically all small private truck companies, is the real cause of the shipping backlog that is piling up outside the ports of Los Angles and Long Beach.

This banning was established by a deal the EPA made with California in October 2020, when Trump was still president.

In effect, what this 2020 determination and settlement created was an inability of half the nation’s truckers from picking up anything from the Port of LA or Port of Long Beach. Virtually all private owner operator trucks and half of the fleet trucks that are used for moving containers across the nation were shut out.

In an effort to offset the problem, transportation companies started using compliant trucks (low emission) to take the products to the California state line, where they could be transferred to non-compliant trucks who cannot enter California. However, the scale of the problem creates an immediate bottleneck that builds over time. It doesn’t matter if the ports start working 24/7, they are only going to end up with even more containers waiting on a limited amount of available trucks.

Essentially, California is now holding the entire nation hostage. The backlog is only going to get worse. Moreover, the deal as designed favored big operations, such as Amazon, Walmart, UPS, FedEx, Samsung, The Home Depot and Target, because they can afford the extra costs of shipping to alternative ports. The small companies are essentially shut out.

So much for protecting the little guy, Mr. Trump. This highlights again Trump’s primary failure. He did not clean house when in office, and thus allowed the bureaucracy — clearly operating as agents of the Democratic Party — to double cross and stymie him at every opportunity.

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Today’s blacklisted American: Fired from a school for having a “Keep America Great” bumper sticker

12:22 pm

Cancelled Bill of Rights
Doesn’t exist at the University of San Diego.

The new dark age of silencing: Nicholas Ratekin, a masters student at the University of San Diego (USD), was fired from a teaching position, and then booted from the school’s masters program, because he apparently had a “Keep America Great” bumper sticker on his car.

Ratekin is now suing the university for kicking him out without cause. More information here.

As part of the requirements for Ratekin to earn his masters at USD, he needed to also do some student teaching. To do so he got a job a local high school, Canyon Crest Academy. He also worked there as the head coach of the high school’s water polo team, leading the team to back-to-back championships in his first two years of coaching.

Apparently, Ratekin made it a point to avoid discussing politics, both at USD and at the high school. However, because of his bumper stick, his colleagues at both assumed he was a Republican and Trump supporter and began harassing him. They could not tolerate having anyone from a different political party working with them. It was be a Democrat or be nothing.
» Read more

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Today’s blacklisted American: Thomas Jefferson blacklisted by NY mayor de Blasio

11:19 am

Thomas Jefferson banned in New York
Thomas Jefferson, banned by New York’s Democrats

The modern dark age: A commission appointed by New York’s Democratic Party mayor, Bill de Blasio, which is also headed by his wife, has quietly moved to remove a statue of Thomas Jefferson from the city’s council chambers, where it has stood since 1834.

The city is apparently going to indefinitely loan the statue — which is a plaster copy of the original that presently stands in the Rotunda of the Capitol in Washington — to the New-York Historical Society. The present plans call for it to be removed by October 21st, well before de Blasio leaves office at the end of this year.

The explanation for this action by Councilman I. Daneek Miller (D-Queens) illustrates well the level of hate and ignorance about the United States and its noble history by our modern so-called elite:

“There’s so much about Thomas Jefferson and his own personal writings, memoirs about how he treated his slaves, his family members and things of that nature and how he perceived African Americans and slaves — that they lacked intelligence, that they were not to assimilate into society,” Miller told The Post.

As someone who has read all of Jefferson’s writings, I can tell you that Miller is an ignorant fool, who is expressly cherry-picking phrases from Jefferson to create a false slanderous picture of the man. Miller might be better to go to the Jefferson Memorial in Washington and read the words inscribed there:
» Read more

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Today’s blacklisted American: Brownstone Institute blackballed by LinkedIn for associating with famed Harvard epidemiologist

11:12 am

They’re coming for you next: The non-profit Brownstone Institute, founded in 2021 to provide an outlet for educated dissent on science and economic issues, has found itself repeatedly censored by LinkedIn in the past two weeks because one of its founders is famed Harvard epidemiologist Martin Kulldorff.

Brownstone Institute: Censored

If you are a regular reader of this column you might remember Kulldorff’s name. He was blacklisted by the CDC, Twitter, and LinkedIn in late August because he dissents from the oppressive lockdown policies those organizations advocate. He was also one of the leading authors of the Great Barrington Declaration [also available here a pdf], which strongly opposes the policies of lockdowns, mandates, and the other totalitarian actions taken by governments since 2020, and instead calls for the more traditional (and successful) “focused” approach for dealing with epidemics and diseases: Protect the vulnerable (the old and sick) from the disease while letting everyone else (the young and healthy) live normal lives and thus get infected quickly, become immune, and thus squelch off the virus.

Kulldorff is also one of the world’s preeminent experts on vaccine safety and “helped develop the CDC’s current system for monitoring potential vaccine risks.”

Anyway, it appears that on October 1st, LinkedIn suddenly discovered that Kulldorff was one of the senior scholars at the Brownstone Institute, and began deleting the institute’s posts.
» Read more

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Today’s blacklisted American: Trump’s former lawyer and anyone associated with him shunned and censored

12:20 pm

Today's modern witch hunt
The witchhunt against Trump lawyer John Eastman continues.

Blacklists are back and the Democrats have got ’em: For the crime of representing President Donald Trump during the post-election fervor from November 2020 to January 2021, John Eastman has not only been fired as a teacher by Chapman university back in January, more than 250 professors who belong to the American Political Science Association (APSA) have now petitioned that organization to blacklist and censor both Eastman as well as anyone associated with him.

A September 23 letter, signed by over 250 professors and graduate students, accused Eastman of being part of an “attempted coup.” … David Karpf, a professor at George Washington University, organized the letter. “John Eastman has violated our discipline’s professional ethics by participating in the dangerous attempt to overturn the institution of electoral democracy in the United States,” the political scientists wrote.

The letter then demanded that the APSA “strip John Eastman of APSA membership” as well as sever all ties with those supporting him.

This last demand by these professors forced the APSA to kick out of its convention the live presentations by the Clairmont Institute because Eastman was giving two of those presentations.
» Read more

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Today^s blacklisted American: Volunteers at the Art Institute of Chicago fired for being mostly white

11:54 am

Discriminated against in Chicago
Discriminated against by the Art Institute of Chicago.

“Segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!” The Art Institute of Chicago (AIC) has fired all 122 of its unpaid volunteer docents because they happen to be mostly white.

Many of the volunteers—though not all—are older white women, who have the time and resources to devote so much free labor to the Museum [average length of service 15 years]. But the demographics of that group weren’t appealing to the AIC, and so, in late September, the AIC fired all of them, saying they’d be replaced by smaller number of hired volunteers workers who will be paid $25 an hour. That group will surely meet the envisioned diversity goals. [emphasis mine]

Let me translate the highlighted words more honestly and accurately:
» Read more

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Today’s blacklisted American: Policeman suspended for four months for praying

10:17 am

The Bill of Rights cancelled in Louisville
No freedom of speech allowed in Louisville.

They’re coming for you next: Matt Schrenger, a police officer in Louisville, Kentucky, was suspended for four months simply because, while off duty and not in uniform, he quietly prayed with his father on the street outside an abortion clinic.

The prayer event took place on February 2021.

That same day, Schrenger was locked out from his work computers, relieved of his police vehicle, and removed from the patrol schedule. Schrenger was suspended and he was stripped of his police powers, pending investigation of his off-duty prayer.

Schrenger was wrongly accused of violating Louisville Metro Police Department Standard Operating Procedures and Kentucky law. By way of a letter dated June 15, 2021, LMPD [Louisville Metro Police Department] Chief Shields admitted that none of the allegations against Officer Schrenger could be sustained. Even after that letter, Schenger’s police powers inexplicably were not restored until June 29, 2021. Even though the facts of the incident were not in dispute, it took the police department more than four months, plus a week, to make its decision after the off-duty prayer incident. [emphasis mine]

The article also notes that on that same day numerous other officers were participating in both a gay rights parade and a Black Lives Matter protest, while on duty and in uniform, and received no punishment though those actions did violate Kentucky law and the department’s procedures.
» Read more

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Today’s blacklisted American: Seattle runs segregated critical race theory classes, teaching that whites are evil

12:58 pm

Discriminated against in Seattle
Eagerly discriminated against in Seattle

“Segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!” The city government of Seattle is funding a series of segregated critical race theory (CRT) seminars for its employees, with whites and blacks sent to different sessions, which then teach from these different perspectives that all whites are racist and evil and work to oppress blacks.

City staffers ‘who identify as people of color’ were invited to the three-hour ‘Internalized Racial Inferiority’ session on September 3, after it was organized by the city-funded Race and Social Justice Initiative (RSJI), revealed KTTH radio host Jason Rantz on Monday.

A similar sister session was offered exclusively to white workers, which taught attendees that they are ‘responsible’ for racism because of the color of their skin.

The lesson was billed as a way to explore ‘the process which American conditioning, socialization and history leads People of Color to internalize racialized beliefs, ideas and behaviors about themselves, undergirding the power of White Supremacy.’ It also outlined 10 ‘truths’ that must be accepted by city employees, which include, ‘colonialism is at the root of white supremacy,’ ‘Racism is based on the legal and social construction of whiteness’ and ‘Government has a responsibility to be anti-racist.’

Those ten truths, shown in seminar documents at the link, also specifically demand that blacks and American Indians be given special and favored treatment.

Essentially, these are Nazi-like courses designed to foster hate between the races, and encourage all to oppress whites. Worse, the racist 10 “truths” that form the heart of these seminars are all lies, based on nothing but Marxist propaganda.
» Read more

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Today’s blacklisted American: Woman denied kidney transplant in Colorado because she is unvaccinated

1:10 pm

The unvaccinated denied healthcare in Colorado
No healthcare in Colorado permitted for the unvaccinated. Let them die!

Persecution is now cool! A woman who has stage 5 renal failure was suddenly told by UCHealth (University of Colorado Health) — just before her kidney transplant operation — that she was banned from the hospital because both she and her donor are unvaccinated.

“Here I am, willing to be a direct donor to her. It does not affect any other patient on the transplant list,” Jaimee Fougner, Leilani Lutali’s kidney donor, told CBS4. “How can I sit here and allow them to murder my friend when I’ve got a perfectly good kidney and can save her life?”

Lutali said she received a letter from Colorado health system UCHealth at the end of September explaining that she and Fougner have 30 days to begin the vaccine process. They would be removed from the kidney transplant list if they refuse the shots. “I said I’ll sign a medical waiver. I have to sign a waiver anyway for the transplant itself, releasing them from anything that could possibly go wrong,” said Lutali. “It’s surgery, it’s invasive. I sign a waiver for my life. I’m not sure why I can’t sign a waiver for the COVID shot.”

According the article, when they first scheduled the surgery in August they were told by the hospital that being unvaccinated was not a problem. This changed suddenly in late September, at the last moment.
» Read more

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Today’s blacklisted American: Football scout fired for refusing to get vaccinated

12:45 pm

Coming to your town in America soon!
Death camps are coming for the unclean unvaccinated.

They’re coming for you next: The Atlanta Falcons football team has fired one its scouts, Rodrik David, simply because he, like many others, had decided that it made more sense for him to not get vaccinated against COVID.

The owner of the company had issued a policy requiring all employees, both full- and part-time, to be vaccinated. David refused, for reasons that were his own.

As noted at this report, David was good at his job, and had been working for the Falcons for the past five years.

This is his fifth season with the Falcons and his second as an area scout. He joined the club as a scouting intern during training camp, prior to the 2015 season, and was hired as a scouting assistant in February of 2016. He was promoted to pro scout prior to the 2017 season.

David was a riser.

» Read more

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Today’s blacklisted American: Chief editor on Oklahoma State U’s student newspaper forced to resign for holding a dissenting opinion

10:51 am

The Bill of Rights cancelled at Oklahoma State University
No freedom of speech allowed at
Oklahoma State University.

The new dark age of silencing: Maddison Farris, the editor-in-chief for Oklahoma State U’s student newspaper The O’Colly was forced to resign her position after she wrote an op-ed opposing any mask mandate on campus and her fellow editors ganged up on her, demanding she leave.

Two days after publication the newspaper’s editorial board issued “a correction”, essentially condemning Farris’s op-ed. They followed this up two days later with a meeting where they demanded Farris resign.

Farris submitted a letter of “forced resignation,” explaining that she had been called into a September 13 meeting with the rest of the editors and pressed into leaving her post.

Farris told Campus Reform that although most students at Oklahoma State support free speech, but there is a “portion of students who value free speech until it makes them uncomfortable.”

More details here. It appears Farris wrote her op-ed as a result of being forced to leave a classroom because she would not wear a mask, even though the law apparently allows her to do so.
» Read more

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The Arizona election audit found significant issues that could easily have changed the final result

12:22 pm

Maricopa County election audit
Click for full graph.

Now that the election audit of the biggest county in Arizona is complete and released, it is necessary to look at what it found. This article does a nice job of summarizing the audit’s conclusions, which in total make it very clear that a lot of corruption and incompetence occurred in the 2020 election in Maricopa County, some of it possibly bordering on outright election fraud.

The graph to the right, from the audit, illustrates this. In twenty-two different categories the audit found votes that should not have been counted because they were illegal or invalid in some manner. Of those, seven categories described illegal or invalid votes totaling more than 53,000 votes, five times the 10,457 vote margin of Joe Biden’s victory in the state.

Does this meant Trump won Arizona? Who knows? The audit did not determine the number of illegal or invalid votes that went to either candidate. What it did find, however, is that the entire voting system is corrupted and untrustworthy, and must be fixed.

The audit results have also revealed why the election officials in Maricopa County have been fighting this audit from day one. They clearly knew the election system was untrustworthy, and wanted to hide this fact, either to protect themselves from prosecution or to maintain their ability to defraud the voters.

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Today’s blacklisted American: Louisiana health company to punish employees with unvaccinated spouses

11:27 am

Coming to your town in America soon!
Death camps are coming for the unclean unvaccinated.

They’re coming for you next: A Louisiana hospital system, Ochsner Health Systems, has informed its employees that they will be fined $100 per salary check for having an unvaccinated spouse on their health plan.

From the memo sent to all employees:

New in 2022: Ochsner is implementing a new Spousal COVId Vaccine Fee as part of its 2022 medical plan premiums. This means, if a spouse/domestic partner is covered by one of our medical plans in 2022 and unvaccinated against COVID-19, a $100-per-pay-period fee will apply.

The chutzpah and irrationality of this policy is really beyond words. » Read more

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Biden signs budget continuing resolution, preventing shutdown

9:00 am

At the very last second Congress and President Biden passed and signed another budget continuing resolution that will keep the federal government operating till December and thus preventing another shutdown.

From NASA’s narrow perspective, the action means that the asteroid mission Lucy will likely launch in October as planned. From the perspective of the nation, this last second action merely illustrates the overall failure of the federal government and the elected officials who have been tasked to run it. They are all incompetent, and wouldn’t last five seconds in a real job outside the government.

That the voters keep re-electing them also speaks poorly of America today. We all should be ashamed.

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Dennis Praeger asks: Do you know anyone whom you could trust to hide you from the Nazis?

9:24 pm

Link here. The essay begins with something that is always in the back of the mind of every Jew since the day the Romans kicked our ancestors out of Israel:

There is something about most Jews that few non-Jews know: We Jews often ask ourselves if a non-Jew in our lives would hide us in the event of a Nazi-like outbreak.

I don’t know if young Jews think about this, but nearly all Jews who grew up in the decades following the Holocaust often wondered: Would this non-Jew hide me?

If you are Jewish and have been educated at all about your people’s history, you can’t help thinking about this. It is a variation of an essay I wrote back in January, when it was clear the intolerant and power-hungry Democratic Party was going to take power. At that time I said that America was becoming like Soviet Russia, where you chose your friends very carefully because if you didn’t, you might find yourself betrayed and reported to the secret police.

My example was generic, applying to everyone under the thumb of a dictatorship. Praeger gives a more nuanced example, from the Jewish perspective where repeatedly the larger society decided all Jews must be killed. In both cases, you no longer can be at ease with everyone you meet. You need to look at each new acquaintance in very stark and cold terms. And as Praeger notes, you need to ask: Would this person turn me over to the Gestapo to save their own lives, or would they do the righteous thing, no matter the risk, and protect me?

These are questions Americans now unfortunately have to think about. More significantly, we are at a moment where we can not only think them, but we can ask them aloud, to people’s faces. We can say to people we know: Would you save me from the Nazis? Or would you hide in fear, or turn me in? By asking that bluntly we might finally get some of the “go-along-to-get-along” types to finally wake up.

Read Praeger’s essay. He goes into great detail describing the kind of people who are more likely to protect the innocent from evil, no matter the risk. You might be surprised by what he says.

The question you next have to ask: Does this describe myself?

28 comments

Today’s blacklisted American: Private school threatened with shut down by Colorado

1:05 pm

Rick, stating the truth in Casablanca
Still asleep, and tragically, too many refuse to wake up.

They’re coming for you next: A private Christian school in Loveland, Colorado, is planning to sue the local health department because it demanded their students wear masks or else the school would be shut down.

Parents at Resurrection Christian School in Loveland, Colorado, were told on Sept. 15 that all persons entering school buildings the next day must wear a mask, by order of the Larimer County Health Department, or their school would be closed. The order allowed for medical exemptions but made no distinction in regards to vaccination status or acquired immunity.

The same evening, school Superintendent Jerry Eshleman vowed in a video message to parents and staff to fight the health department’s edict in court. He urged parents to comply with the public health order for the time being, so that the students wouldn’t have their school year disrupted by a forced school closure while the case was being fought.

Based on the article, it appears that many parents are trying to get medical exemptions for their children, with some succeeding.

Regardless, forcing kids to put on masks is the height of stupidity. » Read more

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Former Blue Origin employee blasts company for sexism and safety issues

12:04 pm

Food fight! While the past two days have been filled with silly back-and-forth barbs between Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, none of which really matters (which is why I haven’t posted anything about it here), today came the publication of a long scree by a former Blue Origin employee blasting the company for sexism and safety issues.

The rant by Alexandra Abrams, former head of Blue Origin Employee Communications, claims it is co-signed by twenty other present and former Blue Origin employees, but provides no information as who those individuals are. The accusations themselves are all hearsay, since Abrams simply recounts experiences of unnamed others, without any documentation.

Could there be management problems at Blue Origin? Certainly. The real evidence in the past five years suggests that CEO Bob Smith has not done well to get the company off the ground. Not only has Blue Origin accomplished little under his tenure, employees are apparently not happy there, with many fleeing the company.

Abrams’ rant however comes off more like she is a disgruntled former employee who was let go because she was pushing social justice issues rather than focusing on getting her job done. Her use of worn leftist phrases like “climate justice” and “gender gaps” suggests this strongly. The response from Blue Origin to her essay reinforces that impression, noting that she was fired for doing things that could have gotten Blue Origin shut down by the federal government:

Ms. Abrams was dismissed for cause two years ago after repeated warnings for issues involving federal export control regulations.

If so, and Blue Origin would not say this publicly if it wasn’t true, Abrams misconduct could have been very serious indeed. Moreover, as noted at this last link, she was the head of the company’s employee communications department, a division that shouldn’t really be involved in such issues anyway.

This whole kerfuffle reminds me of a similar affair at SpaceX several years ago. A disgruntled former employee made all sorts of similar charges, sued, and lost. I expect a similar result here.

Both companies are in the business of building rockets. Their goal is not “gender equality” or “climate justice”. If that becomes any employee’s first priority, as it appears might have been the case with Abrams, that employee has got to be culled from the company, as that person will only become a cancer that will destroy what everyone else there is trying to accomplish.

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Today’s blacklisted American: Suspended for refusing to exempt black students from finals, UCLA professor sues

11:49 am

King's dream banned at UCLA
King’s dream of equal treatment for all
called racist at UCLA

They’re coming for you next: Gordon Klein, an accounting professor at UCLA for 39 years, has sued that university’s Anderson School of Management and its administrators for suspending him for three weeks in June because he refused to favor black students in grading or exempt them from final exams.

Prof. Klein’s alleged offense was that he insisted on treating black students equally. He refused a request by a white student to allow black students preferential treatment on final exams. Because such a racial preference would violate UCLA’s anti-discrimination policies (and maybe even the law), Klein refused. Students then launched a defamatory campaign against Prof. Klein, and the cowards who run UCLA’s Anderson School capitulated, denouncing and suspending Klein. He eventually was reinstated — because he did absolutely nothing wrong — but not before his reputation and career were severely damaged.

..Prof. Klein has just filed a lawsuit in California state court, and among the things he wants, is for UCLA administrators to be held personally liable. [emphasis mine]

During his suspension Klein was also threatened with violence, requiring an increased police presence at his home to protect him.
» Read more

11 comments

Government shutdown threatens Lucy asteroid mission

9:00 am

Government marches on! The possibility that the federal government could shut down because of the inability of Congress and the Biden administration to pass a funding bill or raise the debt limit now threatens the launch of the Lucy mission to the asteroid belt.

If no budget agreement is reached the government will shut down on October 1st. If the debt limit isn’t raised that shutdown could follow soon thereafter, even if a budget is passed.

The launch window for the mission is from October 16 to November 7, 2021. If the spacecraft does not launch in that window the science team says it will likely require a major rethinking of the entire project, as it will be difficult to find another opportunity to visit the same set of asteroids.

Right now the chances of a shutdown are very high, as the Democrats are pushing big spending bills without any negotiations with the Republicans. In answer, the Republican caucus has said that none of its members will support raising the debt limit. Without the latter any passed spending bill will soon be moot, as the debt limit will soon be reached, blocking further government spending.

Though I personally would be very saddened if Lucy was prevented from launching, that loss would be well compensated for by having the federal government out of business. The evil and corruption promoted by it far outweighs the good work done by several minor space missions.

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Today’s blacklisted American: New cancel culture database lists more than 1,400 examples of censorship and blacklisting in academia

1:20 pm

Orwell's 1984
The instruction manual of today’s academia.

The new dark age of silencing: The news outlet The College Fix today released a new database it calls the Campus Cancel Culture Database, listing all the stories that it has covered in the past decade of blacklisting and censorship on college campuses.

To see the complete list, go here. They plan to update it regularly. As Jennifer Kabbany, editor of The College Fix writes,

At some point, I lost count of how many incidents [of blacklisting] we’ve documented. Earlier this year, however, we began to compile them systematically — and today The College Fix releases the Campus Cancel Culture Database. The detailed repository of information lists more than 650 successful cancellations. They include everything from statues hauled off campuses to renamed buildings to memory-holed mascots. The database also cites more than 750 attempted cancellations.

We define cancel culture as any effort by people or groups to identify someone or something as offensive or unacceptable and seek in some way to censor or punish the transgressor or item.

It includes professors who have been suspended or lost their jobs for saying or researching something unpopular, student groups attacked or barred for their conservative, pro-life or libertarian views, and guest speakers shouted down or disinvited.

Overall, the database documents the terrible state of academic thought in the United States. Across the country college administrators, teachers, and students have teamed up to silence any ideas or opinions they do not like, with the bulk of the attacks going against conservatives and the traditions and concepts of western civilization. Not only have people been fired and blackballed, even discussing openly the history of our nation has become verboten. You must either condemn the American dream as racist white supremacy, or you must shut up.
» Read more

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Today’s blacklisted American: Unvaccinated students at Penn State banned from remote classes

12:23 pm

Coming to your town in America soon!
Rounding up the unclean unvaccinated: It is coming.

They’re coming for you next: Unvaccinated students at Penn State who fail to get a COVID test for three weeks in a row are now banned from the school, including a ban from even attending remote classes.

At Penn State University, 117 students have been placed on interim suspension for failure to comply with the university’s weekly COVID-19 testing requirement.

Students at University Park who are subject to required weekly COVID-19 testing and who have missed at least three weeks of testing have been notified by Penn State that they are out of compliance with the university’s health and safety policies and have been placed on interim suspension through the Office of Student Conduct, a statement from Penn State said.

Students on interim suspension may not participate in classes, in-person or remotely; are not allowed on university property; and may not attend any Penn State-sponsored events, programs, and activities, including football games. On-campus students on interim suspension also are temporarily removed from their residence halls.

The highlighted word prove the insanity and irrationality of this policy. » Read more

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Today’s blacklisted American: Garden hoes banned by Facebook!

12:11 pm

Garden hoes banned by Facebook!
According to Facebook, a garden hoe apparently represents evil
and the worst of white supremacy.

Today’s blacklisted American, garden hoes, is meant more to illustrate the utter brainlessness of the blacklist culture, and why every intelligent American should refuse to bow to it in any way.

It appears that Facebook has been repeatedly flagging and then blocking posts on a gardening group because those gardeners periodically make reference to the gardening tool called a “hoe.”

A group called WNY Gardeners has been repeatedly flagged by the social network for “violating community standards,” when its more than 7,500 members discussed the long-handled bladed implement, which is spelled with an “e,” unlike the offensive term.

When one member commented “Push pull hoe!” on a post about preferred weeding tools, Facebook sent a notification that read, “We reviewed this comment and found it goes against our standards for harassment and bullying,” a moderator said.

“And so I contacted Facebook, which was useless. How do you do that?,” Elizabeth Licata said. “You know, I said this is a gardening group, a hoe is gardening tool.”

Nor has this been Facebook’s only “hoe” error. It had also been routinely flagging posts that referred to the English seaside community of Plymouth Hoe.

Facebook of course never responded to gardening group when they complained, as is usual for these inhumane big tech companies. However, when this story began appearing in the press, it told the AP that it was sorry about it, had corrected the algorithms that had caused the problems, and had assigned a real human to monitor the gardening group to make sure it is not censored for ordinary gardening discussions.

Hah! That didn’t work. The gardeners soon found themselves censored for writing about the various techniques they use for battling the Japanese beetle, a destructive pest to “flowers, trees and shrubs, fruits and vegetables, field crops and turf.” When on commenter suggested that gardeners should “Kill them all. Drown them in soapy water,” and “Japanese beetles are jerks,” the posts were blocked by Facebook.

It seems Facebook employees really don’t know how to read. Instead, they work eagerly to silence anyone for any statement they think should be silenced, without thought.

Throwing away the Kerwood Derby

All this reminds me of the short clip below from the early 1960s cartoon show, Rocky & Bullwinkle.
» Read more

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Today’s blacklisted Americans: Republicans blacklisted 53 to 1 over Democrats on social media

12:05 pm

Silenced by Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Google
Republicans: Routinely silenced by Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.

Blacklists are back and the Democrats have got ’em: According to a review of the actions of the big social media companies against politicians, the Media Research Center has found that Republicans are censored at a rate 53 times more than Democrats on social media.

The attacks on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google, Instagram, and others have been against both standing Republican members of Congress as well as Republican candidates running for office, with further evidence showing that Facebook very specifically has been favoring Democratic incumbents.

Nor have the top managers and owners of these social media companies been able to counter this data.
» Read more

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Today’s blacklisted American: Weatherman fired after 33 years for not getting COVID vaccine

12:03 pm

Weatherman Karl Bohnak, now a non-person
Weatherman Karl Bohnak, now a non-person.

Persecution is now cool! Karl Bohnak, who had been a weatherman for the Michigan television station WLUC for 33 years, was fired last week because he refused to get the COVID vaccine shot as now mandated by the station.

Bohnak announced his firing in an essay on his Facebook page [requires Facebook login]. I have posted the full text at the end of this essay, also posted here, to illustrate the rational, thoughtful nature of his decision. You might disagree with him, and think he should get vaccinated, but he outlines in clear detail his valid reasons for not doing so.

His essay also raises the very valid constitutional and ethically reasons for resisting the mandate of this company.

The abrogation of our liberty and freedom under the guise of a pandemic is very disturbing to me. Hopefully, whether you lean right or left, you are concerned about what has occurred the last year-and-a-half. I just wanted to go about my business, “live and let live”, and keep my mouth shut. But this act by the federal government through corporate America has brought me to a crossroads. Our way of life, our freedom and liberty, is collapsing before our eyes.

Sadly, Bohnak is not alone in this. Thousands of people across America are willingly losing their jobs because they will not submit to this dictatorial and entirely unconstitutional vaccine mandate. As the left has loudly proclaimed for decades, these Americans are declaring, “Our bodies, our choice!”

From the beginning, the data said that the lethality of COVID would merely be a variation of the flu. » Read more

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NASA awards Aerojet Rocketdyne contract to build 20 Orion main engines

10:21 am

NASA announced yesterday that it has awarded Aerojet Rocketdyne the contract to build twenty Orion main engines for capsules on missions running through 2032, with the first to be used on the seventh Artemis launch..

This engine is the one that Orion will use to enter and leave lunar orbit.

Based on the pace that NASA expects to launch SLS, once per year, I expect the last engine in this contract will fly in 2048, not 2032, since it will take about 27 years to put that many Orions into space after SLS’s first launch, expected sometime in the next five months.

In other words, this is a contract to keep the jobs at Aerojet Rocketdyne in existence for the next three decades, even if that company’s engineers build little and accomplish less. Nice welfare work I must say.

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