Tag: freedom

Saudi Arabia has launched a military strike against Yemen

3:28 pm

Saudi Arabia has launched a military strike against Yemen’s defense ministry.

It wasn’t immediately clear if the attacks were air or missile strikes, but they came following reports that Iran had manufactured the ballistic missile fired by Yemen’s Shiite rebels toward the Saudi capital a week ago.

Remnants of the missile bore “Iranian markings,” the top US Air Force official in the Mideast said Friday, backing the kingdom’s earlier allegations.

This isn’t that much of a surprise, considering the recent purge in Saudi Arabia as well as the recent reports of both Saudi Arabia and Kuwait warning their citizens to leave Lebanon. The military strike today in Yemen appears to therefore merely be a precursor of a more significant escalation.

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Update on the development of Blue Origin’s orbital rocket New Glenn

9:36 am

Link here. The article provides a lot of interesting details about Blue Origin’s plans and status, including this tidbit about the New Glenn assembly facility, now expected to be finished by February 2018 at the latest:

The facility will largely be used to build the second and third stages for New Glenn, with Blue Origin actually planning to construct very few first stage boosters.

With each first stage booster planned to be reused up to 100 times, the factory will mainly concentrate on – and for large periods of time is only planned to – produce 2nd and 3rd stages. Mr. Henderson noted that once the first stage boosters are retrieved after flight, their storage will be managed across the refurbishment facility at LC-36 (capable of holding three or four boosters), the integration facility at LC-36 (also capable of holding “at least” three or four boosters), and the Merritt Island production facility (which can hold four boosters).

This would seemingly reveal that Blue Origin plans to rely on roughly only 12 first stage boosters at a time (once New Glenn is fully operational and recovery is “routine”), relying almost exclusively on booster recovery and refurbishment to maintain its first stage boosters manifest.

The article also notes the Blue Origin intends to always land its stages on a barge, and is about to finalize the purchase of that barge.

What I am puzzled about is the almost complete disappearance from the news of the company’s suborbital project, New Shepard. The last news story I’ve seen, from mid-September, said they hoped to resume test flights before the end of the year, with manned flights in 2018. Since then, however, there has been no updates, which makes me wonder if Blue Origin has decided to put that suborbital tourism project aside.

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This week in fascist academia

3:24 pm

This week’s collection of stories illustrating the fascist culture that permeates today’s academic community actually includes some good news. (My last fascist academia post can be seen here.)

First the bad:

The first story illustrates that this intolerance is not limited to the left. In this case a conservative university kicked out a speaker with more moderate views.

Nonetheless, the majority of these attacks on freedom of speech continue to come from the left or from left-leaning organizations. The last story indicates the trends, which include a significant shift towards violence and a disrespect for property rights.

Now for the good news.

In the first story we see a rare example of someone experiencing bad consequences for their bad fascist behavior. If only this would happen more often. In the second story the theatrical community, including the normally very leftwing partisan Dramatists Guild of America (!), has actually come out against censorship, even if that censorship involves opinions that attack modern liberal sacred cows, such as the racist Black Lives Matter movement. This action is so out of the norm that I am somewhat speechless.

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Tuesday’s election results

10:47 am

The election results from Tuesday, where Democrats won most of the significant races, has produced a lot of commentary, from both conservatives and liberals, about its significance.

To me, however, these results merely confirmed the increasingly regional nature of today’s partisan politics. This story, about a victory by a Democrat state senator candidate that puts the Democrats in complete control of Washington’s legislature, illustrates this best.

Dhingra’s victory in Washington state over Republican Jinyoung Englund means the West Coast is now the solid center of the resistance, with Democrats controlling legislatures and governorships from Seattle down to San Diego.

The Democratic victories on Tuesday all took place in areas where they strongly dominate (the coasts and urban centers), thus merely solidifying their control over those localized regions. I expect that future elections will show Republicans solidifying their control over their own regions (which is the rest of the country). In other words, people are beginning to choose sides, and we are heading to a regional and political divide that can only be solved in one of two ways: The U.S. splits, or a civil war (in the literal sense) breaks out.

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A simple and inexpensive skin cancer detector wins award

10:10 am

A simple and inexpensive skin cancer detector has won the $40,000 2017 James Dyson award.

Designed by a team from McMaster University in Canada, the sKan can make more accurate diagnoses quickly and reasonably cheaply. It’s based around the fact that cancer cells have a faster metabolic rate than healthy cells, meaning they release more heat. To check if a patch of skin has the beginnings of a melanoma, the suspected area is first cooled with an ice pack before the sKan device is placed against the skin.

Using an array of temperature sensors called thermistors, the sKan will then monitor the area as the skin warms back up. If there’s a melanoma present, it will warm up faster than the surrounding skin, revealing itself on a heat map and temperature difference time plot created through a connected computer program.

Once this device is in the hands of dermatologists, they will be able to very quickly diagnose whether a skin mole or freckle is dangerous or not.

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New study confirms the cost effectiveness of commercial crew

8:18 pm

Capitalism in space: A new study shows that the commercial private cargo capsules are far more efficient then the space shuttle was in delivering cargo to ISS.

According to the new research paper by Edgar Zapata, who works at Kennedy Space Center, the supply services offered by SpaceX and Orbital ATK have cost NASA two to three times less than if the space agency had continued to fly the space shuttle. For his analysis, Zapata attempted to make an “apples to apples” comparison between the commercial vehicles, through June 2017, and the space shuttle.

Specifically, the analysis of development and operational expenses, as well as vehicle failures, found that SpaceX had cost NASA about $89,000 per kg of cargo delivered to the space station. By the same methodology, he found Orbital ATK had cost $135,000 per kg. Had the shuttle continued to fly, and deliver cargo via its Multi-Purpose Logistics Module, it would have cost $272,000 per kg.

…The detailed study then attempts to calculate the costs of the commercial cargo and crew programs combined, comparing that total to continued shuttle flights, which could carry both supplies and astronauts at the same time. Zapata’s best estimate is that the commercial programs cost only about 37 to 39 percent of what it would have cost NASA to continue the space shuttle program.

The benefits of the private programs go beyond cost savings, however. With multiple providers, NASA now has redundancy in case of a failure of supply lines to the space station. And there are indirect benefits as well, especially from supporting the efforts of US companies to develop new spacefaring technologies.

None of this is really news. There was once a time in the U.S. where these facts were understood without much thought. Americans once knew that private enterprise, competition, and freedom always work better than government-imposed projects. Today however we live in a post-freedom America, where the idea of depending on Americans to use their innovative talents freely to get things done is considered oppressive and racist, and must be squelched by a much wiser government.

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Engine failure for SpaceX upgraded Merlin engine during static test

7:50 pm

Capitalism in space: An upgraded Block 5 Merlin engine, undergoing static fire testing at SpaceX’s Texas test facility, experienced what the company is calling “an anomaly.”

The current generation of engines, known as Block IV, have not been impacted by the failure and will continue to fly payloads for SpaceX customers, meaning the incident will not affect this or next year’s launches. That includes next Wednesday’s planned launch of a secretive payload for Northrop Grumman from Kennedy Space Center’s pad 39A.

“We are now conducting a thorough and fully transparent investigation of the root cause,” SpaceX told FLORIDA TODAY. “SpaceX is committed to our current manifest and we do not expect this to have any impact on our launch cadence.” A company spokesperson said the anomaly occurred when liquid oxygen was being loaded into the engine during an operation known as a “LOX drop.” The tests are designed to root out any cracks or leaks in the engines.

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Driverless shuttle crashes on first day

4:24 pm

Only hours after initiating service, a driverless shuttle in Las Vegas crashed.

No one was hurt, nor is the accident described in any detail at the link. However, I think this incident highlights a reality about driverless cars: Either every vehicle on the road must be one, or none of the vehicles on the road can be one. It will be almost impossible to program a driverless car to handle the unpredictability of human drivers. If we want to leave the driving to computers (which I don’t), we will have to ban humans from driving.

Such a ban will be a terrible loss of freedom. And not surprisingly, I think the whole a push for driverless vehicles is a push in that direction.

I found a second article that describes the incident as caused by a truck driver backing into the shuttle, thus blaming the human driver (who was given a ticket by the way) and using the incident to argue against human drivers.

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Arianespace successfully launches Morocco’s first reconnaissance satellite

9:05 am

Capitalism in space: Morocco’s first reconnaissance satellite, built in France, was successfully launched into orbit last night by Arianespace’s Vega rocket.

This was Arianespace’s tenth launch in 2017, one more than its total for 2016 With one more launch scheduled, it appears the company will achieve close to its desired launch rate of one launch per month, despite labor problems in the spring that shut it down for almost two months.

Increasingly, Arianespace’s business (or ArianeGroup, depending on the rocket) seems restricted to European satellites. Its market share of American satellites is more and more being taken by American companies. This doesn’t appear to be reducing the company’s overall launch rate, however, proving once again that competition is not a zero sum game. Introduce it, and instead of the players fighting over a never changing pie of business, the pie grows so that everyone is doing more.

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Bezos sells another $1 billion in Amazon stock to fund Blue Origin

9:33 am

Capitalism in space: Repeating a stock sale he did in May, Jeff Bezos this week sold another million shares of his Amazon stock to raise another $1.1 billion in cash to finance his Blue Origin rocket company.

The stock sale reduced his holdings in Amazon by 1.3% to 16.4% total.

With this much cash available, Bezos has the luxury of developing and building his business with no help from the government and completely free to do whatever he wants. This freedom puts him in a very enviable position.

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