Tag: bankruptcy

Movies when our culture was not run by barbarians

2:58 pm

Today’s essay will in a sense be part two of an essay I wrote earlier this week, entitled “We are becoming a nation of barbarians”. Then, I tried to show the decay in the western civilization by describing the accepted — almost encouraged — crudeness of modern language. While public cursing could easily be consider only a small and trivial issue, I think the increased use of obscene language in normal discourse is equivalent to the “broken windows theory” of psychology, which posits that minor visible signs of disorder and misbehavior encourage further and worse disorder and misbehavior, eventually leading to collapse.

Today I’d like to instead give some examples of the much more civilized nature of popular entertainment from only a half century ago, in order to contrast this with the present. To do this I will cite just four movie examples, and challenge everyone today who is a passionate fan of modern films to watch them (all of which are available for free on the internet) and recognize the differences that I will describe. If you like movies, you will enjoy the experience, but I warn you, modern popular entertainment films do not compare well with these mid-twentieth century pop movies.
» Read more

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Regulatory problems for Saxavord spaceport in Shetland?

9:53 am

In a short statement reported in the local Shetland press, the under-construction Saxavord spaceport in Scotland has apparently laid off some construction workers, claiming it has done so “because the project was so far ahead of schedule.”

The statement however also alluded to the United Kingdom’s Civil Aviation Authority (CAA), which must issue a launch license before any launches can occur.

SaxaVord Spaceport said: “SaxaVord continues to have excellent dialogue with the authorities and is fully expecting to receiving its spaceport licence very soon from the Civil Aviation Authority. We are looking forward to hosting vertical rocket launches in the coming months.”

The application for this launch license was submitted in November 2022. It appears that the CAA still needs a year or more to approve any launch license, a slow and endless process that if not corrected will make launches from the United Kingdom completely unprofitable.

Saxavord had hoped to get its first launch off this year, by fall. It now appears that will not happen.

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Today’s blacklisted American: California city harasses Rabbi for having guests over for dinner

1:20 pm

Beverly Hills: Where Jews are forbidden to pray
Beverly Hills: Where Jews are forbidden to pray

They’re coming for you next: The headline above is literally true, though you need to know a bit about Judaism, especially Orthodox Judaism, to understand what I mean exactly.

The story is this: Because Rabbi Levi Illulian, like all Orthodox Jews, routinely invites friends and acquaintances to join his family for Friday night dinner and Saturday lunch at his home during the weekly Saturday Sabbath, officials in Beverly Hills in California sent him a “notice of violation” on June 12, 2023, telling him that these dinners must cease, and ordered him to “terminate all religious activities” that included any “non-residents.” It also threatened him with civil and criminal proceedings if he didn’t stop praying with friends in his home.

It appears that the city’s actions were instigated by the complaints of one unnamed neighbor. As described in the letter [pdf] sent by Illulian’s lawyers to the city in response to its notice of violation, after receiving those two complaints in February and March about parking, trash, and noise, the city instituted an investigation that involved stake-outs of Illulian’s home and the use of drones over his property (without a warrant) in which city officials “not only tallied the number of individuals and cars coming and going from the Home, but also photographed Rabbi Illulian’s guests.”
» Read more

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Two-thirds of all approved cancer drugs do nothing for patients

4:26 pm

A long term study in Sweden of 22 cancer drugs that its government had approved for rapid use before being tested fully has found that two-thirds provided absolute no benefit to patients.

The Gothenburg team examined 22 cancer drugs approved for reimbursement in Sweden over the last 10 years, examining studies that tested their ability to improve quality of life or lengthen lifespans. On average, these reports examined the drugs for 6.6 years.

Results revealed only seven of the 22 drugs had at least one study which showed a clear benefit for cancer patients. Randomized controlled trials on the other 15 failed to show any tangible benefits for people with cancer. Only one drug in the study showed an ability to both improve the quality of life and extend lifespans for patients.

“We have shown that the majority of the drugs launched with limited evidence still lack clear evidence of how they actually affect survival and quality of life in patients,” says Gabriella Chauca Strand, a doctoral student at Sahlgrenska Academy at the University of Gothenburg and the lead author of the study, in a university release.

This sentence from the university’s press release was even more striking:

Only one of the drugs had scientific evidence of both increased life expectancy and improved quality of life for its indication.

Essentially, 95% of these approved drugs were failures. Most did nothing and were worthless, despite the Swedish government paying huge amounts of money buying them. A few either improved the quality of life (but failed to keep the patient alive) or kept the patient alive longer (but made their lives miserable).

Does this sound familiar? Doesn’t make you wonder about the drug approval process in the U.S., especially after the disaster of the emergency approval of the COVID shots that we know now not only failed to prevent infection, were actually very harmful to many.

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West Virginia University: to save money it eliminates 32 majors instead of its bloated overhead

1:15 pm

West Virginia University logo
West Virginia University: An example of bankrupt academia?

Bankrupt academia: The bankruptcy of intellectual thought in modern American academia is finally beginning to percolate down to the bankbook, at least in West Virginia. On August 11, 2023 the administration at West Virginia University released a report proposing the elimination of 32 majors while also eliminating 169 faculty positions.

The preliminary recommendations, released Friday afternoon, said 12 of those programs are undergraduate majors and 20 are graduate-level majors. Other programs were told to reduce their faculty size — 169 faculty jobs are on the line for cuts.

Programs marked for discontinuation included: master’s and doctorate in Mathematics; master’s and doctorate in Higher Education Administration; master’s of Public Administration; master’s of fine arts in Creative Writing; and a bachelor’s in Recreation, Parks and Tourism Resources. The Department of World Languages, Literatures and Linguistics, which includes Spanish, Russian and Chinese studies, was marked to be completely dissolved.

You can read the full report here. It is important to look closely at it, as it reveals some stark facts about how bankrupt academia remains. » Read more

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SpaceX report on first Starship/Superheavy launch failure submitted to FAA

9:34 am

Though we don’t know exactly when this was done, SpaceX has submitted to the FAA its final report on its investigation into the launch failure during the first Starship/Superheavy test launch in April, and now awaits the FAA’s response.

Now comes the FAA’s review of SpaceX’s investigation, fulfilling the agency’s role as the regulator charged with ensuring public safety during commercial launch operations. “When a final mishap report is approved, it will identify the corrective actions SpaceX must make,” an FAA spokesperson told Ars. “Separately, SpaceX must modify its license to incorporate those actions before receiving authorization to launch again.

Do not expect that response to be fast, or accepting. I predict the FAA will demand a lot more investigation and changes from SpaceX, actions that will take time to implement and be approved. Furthermore, I fully expect the FAA to take at least two months to review the SpaceX report before it issues those demands. As I have been predicting since May, there will be no Superheavy/Starship launch this year.

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We are becoming a nation of barbarians

2:16 pm

From Netflix's Barbarians series
Making heroes of barbarians, on Netflix

I have previous railed against the decline in the use of language in the United States. Not only do Americans now routinely use obscenities in normal language, they have been meekly acquiescing to the demands of the radical and somewhat insane queer movement to accept its weasel words in order to hide what it really is.

The recent viral and passionate endorsement by conservatives of all stripes to a new song and the performance by a new country singer, Oliver Anthony, illustrates how this decline to barbarism is accelerating. The focus of Anthony’s song is the cruel destruction of the American way of life by the power-brokers in Washington, and how those power brokers are making life so difficult for ordinary people.

What makes Anthony’s song indicative however of society’s increasing barbarous trend is his language. Right from the start he nonchalantly uses obscenities that would have once been considered unacceptable by everyone, and until recently utterly unacceptable among our more conservative population.

Yet now, even conservatives see nothing wrong with Anthony’s use of obscenities. Apparently, it is now okay for everyone to spew curse words everywhere, in public, in songs, for all to hear, from children to adults. Anthony’s message condemning the tyranny coming from Washington is too important to ignore. It must be touted widely, no matter how obscenely he couches his statement.

In other words, now even conservatives don’t care if our culture is debased and damaged. It doesn’t matter if we teach young children that they can act like barbarians, cursing and expressing wild emotions without thinking. It is policy and political power that matters, not doing right and behaving properly.

For though curses and obscenities have their place and proper time, in a civilization of rational civil adults one does not encourage their use. » Read more

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Today’s blacklisted American: Gestapo police in Kansas raid home of 98-year-old newspaper owner, causing her death

12:44 pm

Joan Meyer
Joan Meyer, now dead because of police raid

On August 11, 2023 the entire police department of Marion, Kansas, performed a Gestapo-like raid of the home of 98-year-old Joan Meyer, co-owner of the local newspaper, the Marion County Record, resulting in her death from a heart attack the next day.

The elderly woman, who co-owned the newspaper with her son Eric, was subjected to the raid by five officers and two sheriff’s deputies on Friday – which caused her to be ‘stressed beyond her limits and overwhelmed by hours of shock and grief.’ Eric, 69, has bashed the officers for their ‘Gestapo’ tactics in an attempt to seize information that hadn’t even gone to presses yet. Police have defended their actions.

Ms Meyer could not eat or sleep after the traumatizing hours-long ordeal. She was crying while the police raided her home and took her Alexa smart speaker – and died one day later. [emphasis mine]

It appears the police also that day raided the newspaper’s offices as well as the home of one of its reporters.

And why? All the evidence suggests this is a case of a local businesswoman working in teamwork with the police and a local judge to harass and destroy a newspaper. From the second link:
» Read more

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Today’s Blacklisted American: Best Buy joins the bigotry crowd

1:14 pm

They’re coming for you next: An anonymous employee at Best Buy has released through James O’Keefe’s new journalism outlet photographs of Best Buy’s new segregated and discriminatory management training program, specifically designed for minorities only, whites need not apply.

The picture below is from one of those photographs, cropped to show the instructions for applying to the program. The sections highlighted in red illustrate the program’s illegal and discriminatory nature.

Best Buy's Bigotry ProgramClick for original image.

If you have any doubt that Best Buy and its partner McKinsey & Company are doing this, you need only read Best Buy’s own press release announcing the program.
» Read more

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Retractions of peer-reviewed scientific papers has risen 13,750% in this century

11:47 pm

Modern peer review in science
Modern peer review in science

The present and growing dark age: According to the watchdogs who run the website Retraction Watch, the number of peer-reviewed scientific papers that have been retracted each year has risen from 40 in 2000 to 5,500 in 2022, an astonishing increase of 13,750%.

According to these watchdogs, there are two reasons for this increase in research failure:

Retractions have risen sharply in recent years for two main reasons: first, sleuthing, largely by volunteers who comb academic literature for anomalies, and, second, major publishers’ (belated) recognition that their business models have made them susceptible to paper mills – scientific chop shops that sell everything from authorships to entire manuscripts to researchers who need to publish lest they perish.

These researchers are required – sometimes in stark terms – to publish papers in order to earn and keep jobs or to be promoted. The governments of some countries have even offered cash bonuses for publishing in certain journals. Any surprise, then, that some scientists cheat?

I think the watchdogs are missing the major and much more basic source for this problem. » Read more

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Today’s blacklisted American was fired for refusing to participate in company’s programs that purposely excluded whites

12:50 pm

Cancelled at Compass Group
Cancelled unilatiterally by Compass’ management

They’re coming for you next: Courtney Rogers, who was fired as a human resources employee from the large food services company Compass Group because she refused to participate in any way with its “whites-need-not-apply” training and mentoring programs, has now filed suit against the company.

You can read her complaint here [pdf], filed by her attorneys working with the non-profit legal firm, the Thomas More Society. The introduction of that complaint outlines clearly the bigotry of Compass’s management and the policies it wished to install, as well as Rogers sincere and futile effort to not participate in this segregation and discrimination:

In early 2022, COMPASS—one of the largest companies in the world—devised a “diversity” program that it misnamed “Operation Equity.” The program offered only women and persons of color the opportunity to participate in training and receive mentorship, with a promise of guaranteed promotion.

The program’s accurate name would have been “White-Men-Need-Not-Apply.” The program was motivated by racial animus against white men held by certain members of COMPASS’s senior management. COMPASS executives like JOANN CANADAY, Vice President of Human Resources Operations (Canteen), and RALENA ROWE, Vice President of Talent Acquisition, stated that the program was intended to “right the wrongs of the last hundred years.” And they threatened would-be opponents of their program: “This is the direction the world is going, jump on the train or get run over.” And they proclaimed: “We are not here to appease the old white man.” Of course, RALENA ROWE and JOANN CANADY anticipated that “There would be a homogenous group of people against this program,” and they planned to draft a response to objections made by people in that “homogenous” group.
» Read more

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Pushback: Judge rules that libel suit against two black professors for slandering white real estate assessor can proceed

12:38 pm

Mott (l) and Connolly, eager to defame whites
Mott (l) and Connolly, eager to use race to
defame an innocent white man

Bring a gun to a knife fight: A U.S. district judge on August 2, 2023 ruled [pdf] that the defamation lawsuit of real estate assessor Shane Lanham against two black Johns Hopkins professors can now proceed.

And boy, does Lanhan stand a good chance of winning. This is a followup of an earlier blacklist story from February. The two professors, Nathan Connolly and Shani Mott, had publicly accused Lanham on national television of being a bigot because they had not liked the value he placed on their house. As I wrote then:

This story began when Connolly and Mott asked Lanham (who is white) and his company, 20/20 Valuations, to appraise their house. When they were unhappy with his appraisal, they decided to get another appraisal, but this time do what they themselves called a ““whitewashing experiment.” For the second appraisal they removed all evidence that a black family owned the house, to the extent of having a white friend present himself as the owner instead. The second appraisal, done months later, came up with a higher price.
» Read more

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Real pushback: Judge slams Southwest Airlines for violating settlement terms of free-speech court case

1:38 pm

Southwest: Enemy to free speech

Bring a gun to a knife fight: We now come to another chapter in the continuing saga of flight attendant Charlene Carter, who was fired in 2017 by Southwest Airlines because she had expressed opinions that were not liked by both the company and union officials. In 2022 a jury awarded her $5.1 million against the airline and the union.

In December 2022 the federal judge in the case, Brantley Starr, reduced the settlement award to $810,000 in order “to comply with federal limits on punitive damages.” However, he also approved the rest of the jury award, which required Southwest to rehire Carter as well as change its policies that violated the first amendment, and announce these facts publicly to its employees.

Only a month later Carter went back to court, demanding that the judge sanction Southwest for violating settlement terms of her court victory. Not only did the company not admit error to its employees, as required by the settlement, one company-wide memo slandered Carter again, calling her previous communications for which she was fired as “inappropriate, harassing, and offensive.”

Judge Starr yesterday responded to Carter’s demand for relief, slamming Southwest in no uncertain terms.
» Read more

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Today’s blacklisted American: Chase bank politically cancels the accounts of several doctors, their families, and their employees

1:06 pm

JP Morgan Chase: eager to blacklist you for your opinions

They’re coming for you next: Continuing what increasingly appears to be its bank policy, JP Morgan Chase bank suddenly and without warning or reason recently canceled the bank accounts of several doctors, their families, and their employees, apparently because these doctors don’t abide by the lockdown policies and medical health advice of our government.

JPMorgan Chase is back to debanking. Once again, it’s not providing any explanations. And once again it’s targeting people who dare to question the Left Government/Woke Business conspiracy against liberty. At about the same time, it appears, Chase debanked, without warning, Drs. Syed Haider and Joseph Mercola. Wait, no. Not just them, but also Dr. Mercola’s employees – and his and their families. All without explanation.
» Read more

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Today’s blacklisted American: Pediatrician fired for raising questions about COVID jab at public meeting

2:26 pm

Renata Moon, testifying on December 7, 2022
Renata Moon, testifying on December 7, 2022.
Click to hear her testimony.

They’re coming for you next: After pediatrician Renata Moon testified at a December 7, 2022 public Capitol Hill event organized by Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin), where she raised serious and very legitimate questions about the COVID jab and the risks it might carry, she was fired as a teacher by Washington State University for daring to express such thoughts out loud.

So, what horrible things did she say at that December 2022 event?

Dr. Moon testified that she had only seen two or three cases of myocarditis, a form of heart inflammation, while practicing for more than 20 years. But after the COVID-19 vaccines were rolled out, she said, she has been seeing more cases, and heard about others from fellow doctors. “There’s clearly been a massive increase,” Dr. Moon said.

Dr. Moon also pulled out the package insert for the vaccines, or a piece of paper that typically outlines warnings, ingredients, and other information for a vaccine. The insert for the COVID-19 vaccines has no information and says, “intentionally blank,” the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has acknowledged. “How am I to give informed consent to parents when this is what I have?” Dr. Moon said.

All she did was note the obvious increase in myocarditis after the rollout of the jab, something that has now been documented repeatedly by studies (see just a few examples here, here, here, and here), while adding that though by law she as a doctor is required to provide patients with all information about the risks of a treatment, the government had intentionally denied her that information.

For this, Washington State University officials immediately reported her to the Washington Medical Commission (WMC), which at that time (and maybe even now) considers any statement expressing any skepticism about the efficacy of the COVID jab by any doctor to be “misinformation” that justifies the revocation of his or her medical license. In the university’s letter [pdf] informing her of its actions as well as warning her that it was considering firing her, it clearly indicated that it considered her testimony as her fundamental crime.
» Read more

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Pushback: Student wins against school officials who tried to suppress her first amendment rights

12:39 pm

Maggie DeJong
Maggie DeJong, fighting back hard and winning

Bring a gun to a knife fight: In April Maggie DeJong, a student at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville (SIUE), sued [pdf] three of the college’s faculty members for attempting in 2022 to both punish her and well as silence her from her first amendment right to speak, simply because some other leftist students complained they did not like her opinions. As I wrote in April when I first reported this story:

These officials issued three “no contact” orders against DeJong, forbidding her to have any contact with three co-students in her program, simply because she had religious and political opinions they disagreed with and did not wish to hear. This orders essentially blacklisted her from the program, because of its small nature, and were literally a priori gag orders on her right to freely express her opinions. The officials also admitted that DeJong had violated no school policy, nor did they provide her any due process before issuing the orders. When challenged by DeJong’s lawyers, the university quickly realized the utter illegality of these orders, and cancelled them.

Unlike most recent cases of blacklisting, DeJong did not sue the university but the individuals involved, making them personally liable. » Read more

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Unless Congress acts soon, the unelected administrative state will rule unopposed

1:53 pm

A dying document
A dying document

While much of the conservative press has been focusing on the illegal abuse of power by security agencies like the FBI, the CIA, and the Department of Justice, in the past week a whole slew of stories having nothing to do with election politics or Donald Trump have even more starkly illustrated the growing power of the many alphabet agencies of the federal government’s executive branch, power that is cancelling the real constitutional power of Congress — even as Congress looks on impotently.

Unlike abusive and illegal indictments of Trump, or evidence that the Justice Department and FBI are acting to protect Joe Biden and his son Hunter, however, these others stories have generally gone unnoticed, except by your intrepid reporter here at Behind the Black.

First, on July 26th we had the Space Force proposing new regulations that would allow it to literally take control over all private space assets in any declared international emergency, without any need to compensate the owners.

The Space Force’s draft framework for how commercial satellite services could be called up in times of crisis or conflict to support military missions would allow the Defense Department to deny participating companies the right to sell their wares to any other client in times of “war, major conflict, national or international emergency.” [emphasis mine]

What is the point of owning anything if the U.S. military has the power to simply steal it from you, without paying you for it, anytime any president or Congress on a whim decides to declare an international emergency? Such declarations were once rare, but now they happen routinely, with dire consequences for private citizens, as we all learned during the COVID panic.

On that same day we also learned that the FAA has refused to allow the private company Varda from bringing back to Earth a capsule it had launched to space several months ago, with the express intent to manufacture needed pharmaceuticals in weightlessness that can’t be made on Earth.
» Read more

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Senate committee gives NASA and Commerce responsibility for removing space junk

9:10 am

The Senate Commerce committee has now okayed a bill that would require NASA to develop several space junk removal projects while giving the Commerce department the responsibility of identifying what space junk needs to be removed.

The core of the bill would direct NASA to establish an active debris removal program. That would include funding research and development activities “with the intent to close commercial capability gaps and enable potential future remediation missions for such orbital debris,” the bill states. NASA would also fund a demonstration mission for debris removal and allow it and other agencies to procure debris removal services.

The version of the ORBITS Act approved by the committee is different from the version introduced earlier this year. Among the changes is in a section that originally called on NASA to develop a prioritized list of orbital debris to remove. In the new version, that responsibility is given instead to the Commerce Department. The Commerce Department, through its Office of Space Commerce, is developing a space traffic coordination system called the Traffic Coordination System for Space (TraCSS) that will take over civil space traffic management roles currently handled by the Defense Department. That involves taking in data from Defense Department and other sources and using it to provide warnings of potential close approaches to satellite operators.

Though unstated, this bill appears to be a direct slap at the FCC’s effort under the Biden administration to claim the power to regulate space junk, despite its lack of statutory authority to do so.

The bill is of course not yet law, as it still needs to be approved by both the House and Senate. However, some version that stops the FCC now seems very likely, as the House itself has already rejected a bill that would have approved the FCC power grab.

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Sunspot update: In July the Sun continued its high sunspot activity

5:05 pm

Today NOAA released its monthly update of its graph that tracks the number of sunspots on the Sun’s Earth-facing hemisphere. As I have done every month for the entire thirteen years I have been doing this website, I have posted that updated graph below, adding to it some extra details to provide some context.

Though the sunspot count in July was slightly less than the very high numbers in June (the highest seen in more than two decades), the decline was almost inconsequential. Except for June’s activity, the activity in July was still the highest sunspot count in a month since September 2002, when the Sun was just beginning its ramp down after its solar maximum that reached its peak in late 2001. From that time until the last two months, the Sun had been in a very prolonged quiet period, with two solar minimums that were overly long and a single solar maximum that was very weak with a extended double peak lasting almost four years.
» Read more

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Teachers, parents, and even school districts sue PA Ed Dept over Marxist guidelines

12:34 pm

Parents are rejecting this in droves
Now parents, teachers, and administrators are rejecting this mantra

In April a lawsuit against the Pennsylvania Department of Education was filed by the parents, teachers,and three different school districts in western Pennsylvania, challenging the guidelines issued by the state that would force leftist indoctrination down the throats of kids and teachers.

The Mars Area, Penn Crest, and Laurel school districts, as well as two teachers, several board members and parents, filed a lawsuit Monday trying to stop the Shapiro [Democrat] administration from implementing “culturally relevant and sustaining education,” also known as CRSE, in every school district in Pennsylvania.

Leonard Rich, the superintendent of the Laurel School District, explained to KDKA-TV why he and the district joined the lawsuit. “CSRE goes beyond and tells students what to think,” he said. “I’m more driven to tell students and encourage students on how to think.”

“The district’s objection that we are being mandated to not teach our kids how to think but what to think,” he added. “Freedom of expression is a First Amendment right.”

The Thomas More Society is representing the litigants. You can read the filed complaint here [pdf].

The new guidelines are right out of the critical race theory playbook, requiring schools and teachers to:
» Read more

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