Tag: bankruptcy

Today’s blacklisted American: Professor defends free speech, is canceled by MIT and attacked by students, yet fights back and wins

11:48 am

No free speech allowed at MIT
No free speech allowed at MIT.

Today’s blacklist story illustrates how it is possible to win the battle against the petty leftist tyrants who now dominate our culture and are trying to silence free speech and destroy anyone who disagrees with them.

Dorian Abbot is an associate professor of planetary geology at the University of Chicago. Beginning in 2020 he began as a side activity posting videos advocating free speech in academia while condemning the growing oppressive movement to blackball anyone who says the “wrong” thing.

For the next year he found himself under increasing pressure from the leftist mob both at his school and outside it. His videos were taken down repeatedly by Google’s YouTube. A group of graduate students from his school wrote a letter denouncing him and demanding the school exempt all students from attending his classes while limiting his abilities to teach to a point where it was impossible. Later, in response to an op-ed Abbot co-wrote for Newsweek condemning the race-based identify politics that now dominate academia, a leftist Twitter mob came after him, demanding he be removed from all venues.

Fortunately, his superiors at the University of Chicago supported him, and refused to bow to these repressive demands. However, when Abbot was scheduled to give a lecture at MIT on his actual field of study, planetary science, “a new Twitter mob, composed of a group of MIT students, postdocs, and recent alumni, demanded that Abbot to be uninvited.”

MIT bowed to the pressure, and blackballed Abbot.
» Read more

41 comments

Today’s blacklisted American: David Horowitz Freedom Center banned from Breakers hotel in Florida

11:10 am

No free speech allowed at The Breakers
No free speech allowed at The Breakers. Photo: David Broad

The new dark age of silencing: The Breakers hotel in Palm Beach, Florida has banned the conservative David Horowitz Freedom Center (DHFC) from holding an event there, despite the fact that it has allowed such an event every year without problems for the past twenty years.

The reason?

“After a 20-year relationship with The Breakers resort, the Freedom Center was informed that we would no longer be allowed to have our annual Restoration Weekend event at the resort due to the Center being too controversial,” DHFC President Michael Finch told The Epoch Times. [emphasis mine]

The hotel claims the ban isn’t because of politics, but because the “logistical and operational requirements” of holding the annual event had become more complex. While the hotel was not specific, its statement strongly implied that the increased cost of security against leftist threats of violence caused it to cancel the contract.

In other words, the hotel endorses the heckler’s veto. Threaten violence against someone who disagrees with you and The Breakers will bend over backwards to silence that speaker for you.

I would say that anyone planning to visit Palm Beach should celebrate The Breakers new policy of cowardice and find some other hotel to stay at. It certainly seems that this hotel really isn’t interested in protecting conservatives from violence. It would rather ban them from existence.

9 comments

NASA expected to finally certify Rocket Lab’s Virginia launchpad by end of year

9:15 am

It appears that after more than a year of delays, the NASA bureaucracy might finally approve launches at Rocket Lab’s new spaceport at Wallops Island, Virginia by the end of the year.

The article at the link is mostly about Rocket Lab’s planned acquisition of another company that builds satellite deployment systems. However, its real story was in the last paragraph:

[T]he company is still waiting for NASA to complete certification of an autonomous flight termination system the company needs to launch from Wallops Island, Virginia. Delays in NASA’s certification of that system has, in turn, delayed the use of Launch Complex 2 there for Electron missions. “The current expectation is that it could be done as early as the end of the year,” [Adam Spice, Rocket Lab’s chief financial officer] said of that certification, “which would allow us to commence flight operations out of LC-2 and Wallops in the first half of 2022.”

The company got FAA approval for launches more than a year ago, and had hoped to launch shortly thereafter. NASA however has blocked that launch, refusing for more than a year to approve the flight termination system Rocket Lab uses to destroy rockets should something go wrong just after launch.

The delay is baffling. Rocket Lab has successfully proven that its system works in that it has used it several times to safely abort launches in New Zealand. This success apparently has not been good enough for NASA’s bureaucrats, and the result is that Rocket Lab’s ability to launch rockets has been seriously hampered in ’21.

2 comments

Europe joins U.S. in condemning Russian anti-satellite test

8:57 am

Europe’s top space policy chief today joined the U.S. in strongly condemning the Russian anti-satellite test that produced a cloud of several thousand pieces of orbiting space junk.

European Commissioner for Internal Market Thierry Breton condemned Russia’s anti-satellite missile system test, which led to the destruction of a satellite in low orbit.

“As European Union (EU) Commissioner in charge of EU Space policy and in particular of Galileo & Copernicus, I join the strongest condemnations expressed against the test conducted by Russia on Monday November 15, which led to the destruction of a satellite in low orbit (COSMOS 1408),” Breton wrote on Twitter late on Tuesday.

The Russians continue to insist the debris poses no threat to ISS, but their own state-run press proves them wrong. This TASS report claims the debris is no threat because it orbits 40 to 60 kilometers (25 to 35 miles) above the station.

That the debris is presently orbiting above the station is exactly why it poses a threat. While mission controllers will periodically raise ISS’s orbit to counteract the loss of altitude due to friction from the very thin atmosphere at that elevation, the various orbits of the satellite debris will continue to fall. Eventually that entire cloud will be drop into ISS’s orbit.

It is likely that the debris spread over time will make it easy for controllers to shift ISS to avoid individual pieces, but the need to dodge will certainly increase with time, raising the odds that something will hit the ISS.

The test seems almost so stupid an act by Russia that one wonders if its purpose was to create a long term threat to ISS itself. At least one private U.S. company, Axiom, plans to attach its own modules to ISS and use it as a base for the next few years for commercial operations. Others want to use ISS as a hotel for private tourists.

The Russians meanwhile are planning to launch their own new station. If the Russians put it in an orbit safe from this debris cloud, this test will have thus conveniently damaged their main competitor in commercial space operations.

8 comments

Today’s blacklisted American: HS student sues after being punished for saying there are only two genders

11:12 am

No free speech allowed at Exeter High School in New Hampshire.
No free speech allowed at Exeter High School in New Hampshire.
Photo: Austin Blake Grant

They’re coming for you next: A freshman student from Exeter High School in New Hampshire is suing his school district and assistant principal for suspending him from one football game because he had stated his Catholic belief that there are only two genders in a text message exchange with another student.

The boy’s name is at this point being withheld, with the lawsuit being handled by his attorney, Ian Huyett of Cornerstone Action, a Christian advocacy group focused on New Hampshire issues.

The lawsuit alleges the student received a one-game suspension in September in violation of his constitutional right to free speech and the New Hampshire Bill of Rights because he expressed what the suit called his Catholic belief there are “only two genders,” male and female.
» Read more

4 comments

Today’s blacklisted American: Texan denied COVID healthcare because he is white

1:34 pm

Racist criteria for medical treatment at MacArthur
Whites go to the back of the bus at MacArthur Medical Center

At the MacArthur Medical Center in Irving, Texas a white man was denied COVID monoclonal antibody treatments for the single reason that he happened to be white.

We know this is true because the individual, Harrison Hill Smith, posted a video of his experience, available at the link. Here is a transcript:

“So I’m not going to be able to get it today because I don’t qualify? What if I smoke or vape? What if I were black and Hispanic. Then I’d be able to qualify?” the white man, presumably Harrison Hill Smith, asks the healthcare worker in the video.

“Yup,” the healthcare worker, who’s black, replies.

“I’m being denied medical service because of my race?” Smith then asks again just to confirm.

“That’s the criteria,” the worker indifferently responds.

It also appears that the Texas Department of Health approves this discriminatory policy.
» Read more

21 comments

NASA IG: Artemis manned lunar landing will likely not happen in ’25

11:01 am

IG's estimate of SLS's per launch cost

According to a new NASA inspector general report released today [pdf], because of numerous technical, budgetary, and management issues, the planned Artemis manned lunar landing now set for 2025 is likely to be delayed several years beyond that date. From the report’s summary:

NASA’s three initial Artemis missions, designed to culminate in a crewed lunar landing, face varying degrees of technical difficulties and delays heightened by the COVID-19 pandemic and weather events that will push launch schedules from months to years past the Agency’s current goals. With Artemis I mission elements now being integrated and tested at Kennedy Space Center, we estimate NASA will be ready to launch by summer 2022 rather than November 2021 as planned. Although Artemis II is scheduled to launch in late 2023, we project that it will be delayed until at least mid-2024 due to the mission’s reuse of Orion components from Artemis I. … Given the time needed to develop and fully test [SpaceX’s Starship lunar lander] and new spacesuits, we project NASA will exceed its current timetable for landing humans on the Moon in late 2024 by several years. [emphasis mine]

Gosh, it sure didn’t long for my prediction from last week — that the new target date of ’25 was garbage — to come true.

Today’s report also states that it does not expect the first test launch of SLS to occur in February ’22, as NASA presently predicts, but later, in the summer of ’22. It then notes that the next SLS launch, meant to be the first manned launch of SLS and Orion and presently scheduled for late ’23, will almost certainly be delayed to mid-’24. And that’s assuming all goes well on the first unmanned test flight.

While the report lauds SpaceX’s fast development pace, it also does not have strong confidence in SpaceX’s ability to get its Starship lunar lander ready on time, and believes that NASA could see its completion occurring from three to four years later than planned.

The report also confirms an August 2021 inspector general report about NASA’s failed program to develop lunar spacesuits, stating that its delays make a ’24 lunar landing impossible.

The report states that Gateway is well behind schedule, and will likely not be operational until ’26, at the earliest. While the present plan for that first manned lunar landing does not require Gateway, Gateway’s delays and cost overruns impact the overall program.

Finally, the report firmly states that the per launch cost of SLS is $4.1 billion, a price that will make any robust lunar exploration program utterly unsustainable.

Before the arrival of Trump, NASA’s original plan for SLS and Gateway called for a manned lunar landing in 2028. The Trump administration attempted to push NASA to get it done by ’24. This inspector general report suggests to me that this push effort was largely wasted, that NASA’s Artemis program will likely continue to have repeated delays, announced piecemeal in small chunks. This has been the public relations strategy of NASA throughout its entire SLS program. They announce a target date and then slowly over time delay it in small amounts to hide the fact that the real delay is many years.

Expect this same pattern with the manned lunar landing mission. They announce a delay of one year from ’24 to ’25. After a year they will then announce another delay to ’26. A year later another delay to ’27. And so forth.

15 comments

Today’s blacklisted Americans: Parents threatened with doxxing by school board for criticizing the board’s mask policies

11:25 am

Owned by government
That’s apparently what the Scottsdale school board thinks.

They’re coming for you next: Parents who have publicly objected to the mask mandate policies of a Scottsdale, Arizona school board have discovered that at least two members of the school board, Jann-Michael Greenburg and Zachary Lindsay, had compiled or had access to a Google drive folder containing personal information of the parents, including social security numbers, financial information, pictures of themselves and their children.

The information as complied clearly suggested the board members were going to use it to harass and harm the parents.

Parents have since dubbed the Google Drive an “online dossier.” The folders housed within the dossier are labeled “SUSD Wackos,” “Press Conference Psychos,” and “Anti Mask Lunatics,” among others. Included under “Press Conference Psychos” was a video that shows parents calmly holding signs that read “CRT is Racist” and “SUSD We Demand Transparency.”

The dossier takes specific aim at the concerned parent group “Community Advocacy Network” (CAN). Administrators and founders of CAN’s active Facebook page have folders dedicated to screenshots of their Facebook comments, pictures of them with their husbands, and in some cases financial records.

Much of the information was apparently gathered by Greenburg’s father, who is documented to have videotaped the parents repeatedly, sometimes hiding his identity. He also has a track record of harassment.
» Read more

82 comments

Today’s blacklisted American: Professor forced to undergo mental examination because students didn’t like exam question

11:31 am

1966 in communist China
Mao’s 1966 cultural revolution comes to the
University of Illinois-Chicago

Persecution is now cool! Law professor Jason Kilborn at the University of Illinois-Chicago was suspended by his university and forced to undergo a mental examination plus drug tests essentially because some unnamed students objected to an exam question that referenced racial slurs and that Kilborn had been using in his tests for a decade.

Kilborn told Campus Reform that his classes “were cancelled for the entire semester on the very first day of class. He said he also had to undergo “an agonizing several-week period of ‘administrative leave,’” during which he was “barred from campus and prevented from participating in normal faculty communications and activities, including my elected position on the university promotion and tenure committee.”

Kilborn said he was compelled to submit to three hours of mental examination and a drug test by university doctors and a social worker, broken into two segments spanning the course of a week.

The exam question that caused the furor appears to have been part of a program focused on teaching law students how to determine the factual basis for any legal action, as Kilborn explains here,
» Read more

22 comments

Today’s blacklisted American: UCLA threatens to expell remote student for not revealing his COVID shot status

11:49 am

Dictatorial clowns are running UCLA
Dictatorial clowns are running UCLA.

They’re coming for you next: Christian Walker, an online student who never comes on campus was threatened with expulsion by UCLA if he did not reveal whether he had gotten his COVID shots or not.

“You are calling to tell me you will drop my classes after we’ve already paid $70,000 for the year if I don’t upload something about my vaccine status when all of my classes are online,” Walker is heard saying in his video. A UCLA official responded, “Correct.” “Got it.” responded Walker.

“All of my classes are online. I don’t step onto campus. I’ve already paid. We’re a week into classes. My university just called to tell me they are dropping my classes if I don’t report to them about my vaccination.” Walker commented on Twitter.

You can listen to Walker’s recording of this conversation at the link.
» Read more

17 comments

Today’s blacklisted Americans: Hiring white men a sin at major investment firm

11:27 am

Discriminated against in Seattle
Eagerly discriminated against at
State Street Global Advisors

“Segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!” Not only has the investment firm State Street Global Advisor, one of the largest in the world, decided that white men must be considered last in any hiring decision, the company has installed a race- and sex-based apartheid system designed to favor those groups in all matters.

The company aims to triple the number of Black, Asian and other minority staff in senior positions by 2023, the Sunday Times reported. If executives don’t meet the target, they will face lowered bonuses.

Recruiters will now have to establish panels of four or five employees, including a woman and a person with a minority background, when hiring middle management staff. The firm will still hire white men, [said Jess McNicholas, the bank’s head of inclusion, diversity and corporate citizenship in London,] but recruiters are required to show that women and minority applicants were interviewed by the panels.

The company is pledging to “hold ourselves accountable for strengthening black and Latinx owned businesses.”

The comments to this policy at the link are astonishing in their almost uniform hostility to this discriminatory policy. This is a typical comment:
» Read more

13 comments

Today’s blacklisted Americans: If you are unvaxxed you are banned from hospital care in Colorado

10:55 am

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

Blacklists are back and the Democrats have got ’em: It appears it wasn’t enough to ban one woman in Colorado from receiving a desperately needed kidney transplant because she and her donor had not gotten their COVID shots. Now, Jared Polis, the Democratic Party governor of Colorado, has told all hospitals in the state to ban everyone from getting treatment if they refuse to get the experimental drugs being touted, falsely, as vaccines against COVID.

Polis’ order reportedly gives health care professionals the authority to prioritize crisis care under the direction of the state health department. “If you are unvaccinated, a regular trip to the grocery store, a night out to dinner are more dangerous than they have been at any point during this pandemic,” Polis said, according to NBC News. “The delta variant is brutally effective at seeking out the unvaccinated, like a laser-guided missile.”

“While the state has a nearly 80 percent partial vaccination rate, unvaccinated people with severe Covid-19 are overwhelming hospitals, many of which reported being over 90 percent capacity,” said Scott Bookman, Covid-19 incident commander for the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment.

The language of this executive order makes it clear that it authorizes discrimination against those who are not vaccinated for COVID-19.

Polis’ order was likely issued in response to the kidney transplant story in order to give the state’s hospitals some political cover as they ramp up their discrimination against those who refuse to get the experimental COVID shots.

Some news reports suggest that this order really only applies to elective treatments, but that does not appear to be the case. The actual order states:
» Read more

34 comments

Today’s blacklisted American: Rutgers bars student from remote classes because he had not gotten COVID shots

11:57 am

Clowns in charge at Rutgers
Clowns in charge at Rutgers

They’re coming for you next: Logan Hollar, a student at Rutgers University, was blocked by the college from his university email account as well as attending remote classes because he refuses to get any of the COVID-19 shots that the school is now requiring.

Logan Hollar, 22, told NJ.com he largely ignored the school’s coronavirus mandate “because all my classes were remote” from his Sandyston home, a distance of some 70 miles from the university’s principle campus in New Brunswick.

But he was locked out of his Rutgers email and related accounts when he went to pay his tuition at the end of last month — and was told he needed to be vaccinated even though he has no plans to attend in person, according to the report. “I’ll probably have to transfer to a different university,” Hollar told NJ.com, revealing at least one other student to his knowledge is in the same position.

“I find it concerning for the vaccine to be pushed by the university rather than my doctor,” he told the outlet. [emphasis mine]

The highlighted sentence is the bottom line. » Read more

6 comments

Today’s blacklisted American: Ivy league professor to fail two students for not wearing masks

10:55 am

Monger email asking students to snitch on others
Click for original screen capture.

Persecution is now cool! Bruce Monger, the director of undergraduate studies for Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Cornell University, has told his students in an email that he is failing two of them, not for bad classwork or poor test grades, but because they did not wear their masks properly in class.

His email was a request to all his students to help him identify these two students, or to put it more honestly, to snitch on them.

To the right is a screen capture of that email, cropped, reduced, and enhanced to post here.

Interestingly, Monger’s threat does not follow university policy, and is likely one that in a just world would get him in trouble, not the students.
» Read more

13 comments

Astronomers release fantasy proposals for government telescopes in the 2020s

8:54 am

The astronomical community today released its newest decadal survey, a outline of what major new telescope projects that community recommends the federal government should fund for the next ten years.

More details here.

This is I think the seventh such decadal survey since the first in the early 1960s. In the past these surveys prompted the construction of numerous space telescopes, such as the Hubble Space Telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope, and many others. Until 2000 these survey were enormously influential, which is why space-based astronomy boomed in the 1980s and 1990s.

Now I call it a fantasy because I think it unlikely that most of its proposals — especially the space-based projects — will see fruition, based on the recent history in this century. For example, the 2001 survey recommended the James Webb Space Telescope among many other recommendations. The cost overruns of that project however eventually caused almost all the other space-based proposals to be cancelled, not only in the 2000s but in the 2010s as well. Furthermore, the 2010 survey called for the building of WFIRST, another Webb-like big space telescope that is now called the Roman Telescope, and that project’s high cost and complexity has further forced the elimination of almost all other new space telescopes. Nor has Roman been built and launched in the 2010s as proposed. It is still under development, with the same kinds of cost orverruns and delayed seen with Webb, which means in the 2020s most of the new proposals in this latest decadal survey will have to take a back seat to it, and will likely never get built.

Prove of my analysis is in the report’s press release:

The first mission to enter this program should be an infrared/optical/ultraviolet (IR/O/UV) telescope — significantly larger than the Hubble Space Telescope — that can observe planets 10 billion times fainter than their star, and provide spectroscopic data on exoplanets, among other capabilities. The report says this large strategic mission is of an ambitious scale that only NASA can undertake and for which the U.S. is uniquely situated to lead. At an estimated cost of $11 billion, implementation of this IR/O/UV telescope could begin by the end of the decade, after the mission and technologies are matured, and a review considers it ready for implementation. If successful, this would lead to a launch in the first half of the 2040 decade. [emphasis mine]

Proposing something that won’t be built for two decades is absurd. And the cost is even more absurd, as it is ten times what Hubble cost and seems more designed as a long term jobs program where nothing will get built but money will continue to pour in endlessly to the contractors and astronomers hired. That is what Webb and Roman essentially became.

25 comments

Today’s blacklisted American: Parents threatened by Child Protective Services for protecting their kids from COVID

12:24 pm

Owned by government

Today’s blacklist story illustrates that no one is safe from the oppressive thumb of government, not even those who are clearly liberal and generally support Democrats. In this case we have the parents of two children, Eli and Kavitha Kasargod-Staub, who decided to keep the kids from their Washington, D.C., school because of their continuing concerns about COVID. As a result they were threatened with losing custody of those children by child protective services.

Kavitha Kasargod-Staub was looking forward to sending her two kids back to elementary school this fall. After a year of remote learning in Washington, D.C., her kids spent the summer attending day camp. “I’m certainly not in the group of people who avoid all Covid risk,” she said, adding that camp activities were outdoors and there was testing for children if someone was exposed to the virus.

But by August, Kasargod-Staub and her husband were watching Delta variant cases rise across the region. When her husband went to the school to review its safety protocols, he left alarmed, having learned that the HVAC system was broken and there was no plan for outdoor eating. Kasaragod-Staub, who had served as PTA president the year before, called up the principal to discuss. “The policies were vague, everyone was scrambling, so we decided to keep [our kids] home for the first week of school in the hopes that [D.C. Public Schools] would realize they made a mistake and catch up with things like testing and outdoor eating,” she told The Intercept. “It feels a little dumb now, but I genuinely thought things would change and they’d figure safety stuff out.”

Things didn’t change, and the children stayed home. Pretty soon, Kasargod-Staub was notified that her family was being referred to D.C.’s Child and Family Services Agency due to her kids’ unexcused absences. “I have a lot of privilege, I know the system, and it was still terrifying,” she said. “My mind immediately goes to, ‘Where will this lead? Are they going to take away my kids?’”

Kasargod-Staub was soon contacted by a government social worker for an intake call. “The person I spoke to said, ‘We don’t know what’s going to happen, we don’t have any sense of where this will go,’” she recalled. About a week and a half later, things escalated, and child protective services called to schedule a home visit. [emphasis mine]

Though the parents began teaching the kids using a variety of home-school programs, they had not officially removed their kids from the school, which would allow them to claim they were home-schooling them. Nor had they qualified for remote learning, because “D.C. Public Schools … requires a doctor to certify that virtual school is necessary.” Thus, the arrival of child protective services, which became increasingly threatening, step-by-step, first by asking the questions that were more and more invasive and inappropriate. Then,
» Read more

7 comments

Today’s blacklisted American: PJMedia banned by Twitter for calling a man a “man”

12:37 pm

Cancelled Bill of Rights
Doesn’t exist at the Twitter.

The new dark age of silencing: The quite legitimate and major conservative news outlet PJMedia was locked out of its Twitter account this week because it had the audacity to state that just because the Biden administration’s assistant secretary for Health for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services likes to wear make-up and dresses, that does not make him a woman, even if he claims he is and the government and Twitter insist we accept that claim, no questions asked.

PJM’s Matt Margolis took issue with that claim in an article titled: “Rachel Levine Is Not the ‘First Female Four-Star Admiral’… Because He’s a Male.” He wrote:

Even if you believe that gender is a social construct and subject to how one feels and not dependent on biology, sex chromosomes determine whether an individual is male or female. Rachel Levine is 100 percent male, right down to his DNA. He is not a female. He may have grown his hair out and changed his name to a woman’s name, but that doesn’t make him a female.

Let me second Margolis’s position. If Levine likes to cross-dress, all power to him. However, he is still a guy, and that is what I will call him, to his face if I ever had the unlikely opportunity to do so. This would likely get me arrested and blacklisted also, as that is now what our present culture demands for anyone who dissents from the leftist agenda, even if that leftist agenda is utterly false and contrary to reality.
» Read more

26 comments

UN committee approves UK proposal on developing rules for military space activities

12:05 pm

A large United Nations committee of nations has approved, by a vote of 163 to 8, a United Kingdom proposal, backed by the U.S., to start a working group to develop rules nations must follow in connection with any military actions in space.

The plan for the Open-Ended Working Group (OEWG), which would meet twice in 2022 and 2023 and work on a basis of consensus, was pushed by the United Kingdom and co-sponsored by a number of Western countries including the United States. It passed First Committee with 163 “Yes” to eight “No” votes, and nine abstentions — 13 more votes than last year’s UK-sponsored resolution passed last year by the UN General Assembly soliciting national views on military space threats and how to ameliorate them.

In order to become a reality, the full UN General Assembly now needs to approve the OEWG plan during their session in December, but given the First Committee vote, this is pretty much a foregone conclusion.

According to the announcement by the UN, the opposition was as follows:

The Committee approved — by a recorded vote of 163 in favour to 8 against (China, Cuba, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Iran, Nicaragua, Russian Federation, Syria, Venezuela), with 9 abstentions (Armenia, Belarus, Comoros, Djibouti, India, Israel, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Zimbabwe) — the draft resolution “Reducing space threats through norms, rules and principles of responsible behaviours”.

The Russians further expressed its forceful opposition in TASS, the government’s state-run press.

A detailed explanation of the proposal’s goals can be found here. Overall it appears the UK, with the backing of the United States, wants to begin a dialogue on the use of the military in space, in the hope that some reasonable compromise can be made.

From what I can gather from both articles as well as the UN announcement, I do not see this as good news, even though it was opposed by the authoritarian nations like China, Cuba, North Korea, and Russia. There are a number of clauses in this proposal that were approved that the western capitalist nations of the world opposed.

In the end, I expect these negotiations to produce a treaty not unlike the Outer Space Treaty, whereby most of its mandates make sense but hidden within will be one or two that in the end will be used successfully to squelch individual freedom and private enterprise. Power will be centralized to the governments, not to the citizens, and the rights of future space colonists will be limited significantly. No bill of rights for them!

Meanwhile, Russia today announced it has signed an agreement with Zimbabwe to outline their future cooperation in space.

The battle lines are being drawn, but I have little faith in the commitment to freedom and individual rights by those in power in the west.

3 comments

Today’s blacklisted American: Leftist actor/rapper Icecube forced from Sony film rather than get a COVID shot

12:27 pm

Ice Cube: now an unclean non-person
Ice Cube: now an unclean non-person
Original photo by Adam Bielawski

They’re coming for you next: Actor and rapper Icecube, who has throughout his career been linked to leftist and pro-black racial causes, has pulled out as one of the leads of a Sony film because he refuses to comply with the film company’s COVID shot mandate.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, which broke the story,

Ice Cube has departed Sony’s upcoming comedy, Oh Hell No, in which he would’ve co-starred with Jack Black, after declining a request from producers to get vaccinated, sources tell The Hollywood Reporter.

Apparently this decision has cost him a $9 million check.

The first link above notes this important point about Ice Cube:
» Read more

21 comments

Enrollment decline continues in urban public schools

9:21 am

Some good news: In reporting today that the Chicago public school system this year lost 10,000 students, the Associated Press story also said this:

The enrollment decline, which has been happening each year for the past decade, comes as other big city districts including New York and Los Angeles have seen enrollment declines this year as well. … The enrollment drop this academic year is due to students moving elsewhere, going to private schools or homeschooling, according to recent district data.

The story also noted that this declines appears to be occurring among all ethnic groups, since the school demographics remained unchanged.

Finally, being the Associated Press and thus married to supporting governments run by Democrats, the story had to allow the final word to the city’s Democratic Party mayor as well as the unions that have routinely backed her:

Mayor Lori Lightfoot called the drop a “minor miracle,” saying she was surprised enrollment didn’t decline even more considering the COVID-19 pandemic. “We had to quickly transition to remote learning. We know that didn’t work for a lot of families. There’s been a lot of challenges and struggles that have been revealed throughout the course of this pandemic that hit our most vulnerable residents the hardest, many of whom” have children attending CPS, Lightfoot said.

Meanwhile, the Chicago Teachers Union blamed underfunded schools, particularly in largely Black and Hispanic neighborhoods, as a major driver.

That parents might have finally gotten disgusted with the government’s utter failure to teach reading, writing, or arithmetic does not occur to these political geniuses. Nor does it occur to them that their passion for forcing masks and racial indoctrination on little children might have also contributed to the decline in enrollment.

No, for leftists their failures are always explained by either a lack of funding or circumstances beyond their control. Give us more money and all will be well! We promise!

It appears however that an increasing number of parents are no longer buying these arguments. Thank goodness.

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