Virgin Galactic has signed a deal with NBC to televise the first commercial flight of SpaceShipTwo.
I note that with this announcement Virgin Galactic has backed off from its previous schedule for launching this flight this year. They now say it will happen in 2014.
A Texas-based company has printed the first 3D-printed metal pistol, a 45 caliber Model 1911.
Video below the fold. The gun clearly functions, though I noticed that in the video they never loaded more three rounds in a magazine, and that the gun seems to cycle weakly. I suspect that they had some feeding problems when they tried to fire a full loaded five round magazine.
Nonetheless, this achievement further illustrates that 3D printing is about to become a major method of manufacture.
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The Obama administration has issued an order forbidding Navy Seals from wearing on their uniforms the Navy Jack, which includes the words “Don’t Tread On Me”.
They’ve been wearing the Navy Jack for the last two centuries.
After reading the email, I first wondered, ‘why?’ (Actually, first I headed to the gym to take out my frustration and anger on some unsuspecting weights with the fury and intensity only a former Navy SEAL can exert.) Why would our leaders sell out our heritage? Why would they rob present and future sailors of our battle cry?
When a friend of mine asked his leadership the same question, he was told, “The Jack is too closely associated with radical groups.” We must assume that this thought policeman embedded in the SEAL community is speaking of the Tea Party, whose flag (which also dates from the American Revolution) depicts a snake with the same defiant slogan as The Navy Jack.
The Obama administration’s objection isn’t because the slogan is associated with “radical groups.” It’s because that slogan is now associated with their political opponents, who just happen to have more in common with this nation’s heritage that Obama and his ilk.
The FAA has lifted its ban on the use of cell phones during take-off and landings in airplanes.
The ban on mobile devices has been in effect since the early 1990s, when cellphones began to crop up, and the FAA and airlines summarily freaked the hell out for no good reason. Despite no direct evidence that the use of mobile phones or other electronic devices would interfere with the plane’s systems, the ban continued — even after the FAA hired an outside safety agency to find if anything could go wrong. They didn’t. But the FAA and airlines decided to continue the policy. Until today.
The requirement to stow laptops during takeoffs and landings remains, however, as the FAA fears these larger objects could too easily become dangerous projectiles should something go wrong.
Pushback: The man whom the Justice Department and Homeland Security threatened with prosecution because he was selling mugs and T-shirts ridiculing those agencies has now sued them over those threats.
Free speech in modern America: Protesters shout down New York police commissioner Raymond Kelly at Brown University.
I don’t particularly agree with Kelly’s policies, but I am even more strongly offended by these protesting thugs. Kelly came to give a speech. They should be respectful and let him speak.
The best (and worst) concealed carry states for 2013.
I am happy to report that my state, Arizona, is number one. And not surprisingly, the states from which I fled, New York and Maryland, are 46 and 43 respectively.
I strongly believe that where a government respects the right of its citizens to possess and bear arms, freedom will be strongly defended. Take a long look at these rankings. That the most heavily regulated blue states tend to be near the bottom and the less regulated red states tend to be near the top lends weight to my belief.
The author lists many of the most egregious acts of incivility a conservative routinely experiences from the left, some bordering on hate and violence, and then tells us what his real fear is.
A government official today unwittingly revealed a fundamental and unpleasant truth about how governments: operate. In an interview today, the head of India’s space agency denied that his country is in a space race with anyone.
Mr. Radhakrishnan, Secretary in the Department of Space and Chairman of Space Commission, said each country — whether it’s India, the US, Russia or China — had their own priorities.
“There is no race with anybody. If you look at anybody, they have their own direction. So, I don’t find a place for race with somebody. But I would say we are always on race with ourselves to excel in areas that we have chalked out for ourselves,” he told PTI here in an interview.
How typical. By denying the reality of the competition that India is part of Mr. Radhakrishnan illustrates for me and everyone once again the basic reason all government efforts eventually fail.
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The Washington Times is preparing to take legal action in connection with the raid of a reporter’s home by government officials.
The warrant was narrowly written to limit the raid to a search for weapons owned by the reporter’s husband. Instead, the raiders carefully picked through the reporter’s files and took those pertaining to her stories about the TSA. The man in charge of this search also happened to be a former TSA employee who apparently had a direct interest in those files.
That her private files were seized, says Mrs. Hudson [the reporter], is particularly disturbing because of interactions that she and her husband had during the search of their home, as well as months afterwards, with Coast Guard investigator Miguel Bosch. According to his profile on the networking site LinkedIn, Mr. Bosch worked at the Federal Air Marshal Service from April 2001 through November 2007.
It was Mr. Bosch, Mrs. Hudson says, who asked her during the Aug. 6 search if she was the same Audrey Hudson who had written the air marshal stories. It was also Mr. Bosch, she says, who phoned Mr. Flanagan a month later to say that documents taken during the search had been cleared.
During the call, according Mrs. Hudson, Mr. Bosch said the files had been taken to make sure that they contained only “FOIA-able” information and that he had circulated them to the Transportation Security Administration, which oversees the Federal Air Marshal Service, in order to verify that “it was legitimate” for her to possess such information.
“Essentially, the files that included the identities of numerous government whistleblowers were turned over to the same government agency and officials who they were exposing for wrongdoing,” Mrs. Hudson said.
In other words, Bosch used the search to obtain the files so that the TSA could identify Mrs. Hudson’s sources within the agency. Expect those individuals to be punished in the coming years, for the crime of telling the truth about America’s KGB.
Government marches on! The Seattle city council has seized a privately owned parking lot in order to turn it into … a parking lot.
The rise of government-sanctioned home invasions.
These incidents underscore a dangerous mindset in which civilians (often unarmed and defenseless) not only have less rights than militarized police, but also one in which the safety of civilians is treated as a lower priority than the safety of their police counterparts (who are armed to the hilt with an array of lethal and nonlethal weapons), the privacy of civilians is negligible in the face of the government’s various missions, and the homes of civilians are no longer the refuge from government intrusion that they once were.
Plain and simple, every single one of these SWAT raids is illegal under the Constitution. They are an abuse of power, and are exactly the kind of abuse that helped inspire the American Revolution in the first place.
