Tag: government

In 2016 federal government improperly paid out $144 billion

9:21 am

Our government in action! In testimony before the Senate Budget Committee yesterday, the controller general revealed that the federal government improperly paid out $144 billion in 2016.

The problem is growing, he said, from $125 billion in 2014; to $137 billion in 2015; to the most recent estimate of $144 billion in 2016. “This includes estimates for 112 programs at 22 federal agencies, so it is a pervasive problem,” he added.

Since 2003 – when Congress required many executive departments and agencies to estimate the amount of improper payments annually – the cumulative total is estimated to be “in excess of $1.2 trillion,” Dodaro said. “So it’s a significant amount of money.” Dodaro said three big federal programs – Medicare, Medicaid and the Earned Income Tax Credit — account for most (75 percent) of the improper payments. “But there are a number of programs across government where this problem is an issue,” he said.

And the problem is worse than the numbers indicate, because 18 “risk-susceptible” programs – including Temporary Assistance for Needy Families — do not report estimates at all. SNAP (food stamps) stopped reporting in 2015. And the $144 billion in 2016 does not include estimates from the Defense Department, which could be a sizeable number, Dodaro said.

Obviously, the solution is to hire more auditors and increase the budgets at these agencies so they can better track the improper payments. Simply cutting these budgets, well now, that’s a terrible idea.

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Cruz to hold hearing on updating Outer Space Treaty

5:19 pm

Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) revealed today that he plans to hold a hearing next week on reviewing the Outer Space Treaty.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said in an on-stage interview during The Atlantic magazine’s “On the Launchpad” event here that the hearing, scheduled for May 23, would explore modifications to the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 to better enable commercial space activities. “We’ll be hearing testimony both from lawyers who have studied the issues and also from business leaders that want to expand commercial investment in space,” he said, “considering how do we update and modernize the treaty to reflect the realities of the modern world.”

He said he was concerned that the treaty, crafted at the height of the superpower space race of the 1960s, does not reflect the needs and interests of emerging commercial space companies. “The central focus of that treaty was preventing nuclear weapons in space. That’s a very good thing,” he said. “But, 50 years later, we’re in a very different environment.”

Cruz said he didn’t have specific changes to the treaty in mind. “I don’t want to start by making decisions before we hear testimony and before we think through it,” he said. He added he hoped that, like recent space-related legislation that has passed Congress, including the Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act of 2015, to win bipartisan agreement to pursue efforts to “modernize it to create the incentives for continued investment.”

I had sensed this might be Cruz’s next move, based on the last hearing, and it is gratifying that he is going to go forward with it.

Update: The list of witnesses can be found here. The committee webpage also says they will be focusing on Article VI of the Outer Space Treaty, which does not discuss the issue of sovereignty (Article II). Instead, Article VI says this:

States Parties to the Treaty shall bear international responsibility for national activities in outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, whether such activities are carried on by governmental agencies or by non-governmental entities, and for assuring that national activities are carried out in conformity with the provisions set forth in the present Treaty. The activities of non-governmental entities in outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, shall require authorization and continuing supervision by the appropriate State Party to the Treaty. When activities are carried on in outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, by an international organization, responsibility for compliance with this Treaty shall be borne both by the international organization and by the States Parties to the Treaty participating in such organization.

I begin to sense the direction this negotiation will head. Rather than claim sovereignty, they will rework this clause to allow each nation’s laws to apply to the activities of their citizens. In a sense, this is an end-around Article II.

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Trump rules out moving embassy to Jerusalem

2:45 pm

Breaking promises: Despite firm and loud promises during the campaign to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, Trump administration officials today said that no move is planned, for the near future.

And the Republicans wonder why they can’t get the Jewish vote. I have talked to numerous Jewish relatives, and though many are conservative, all of them have great reservations about the Republican Party, which they perceive as two-faced towards Israel and the Jewish people. Repeatedly they have seen Republican presidential candidates (from Reagan to Bush to Bush to Trump) promise to move the embassy, and then betray that promise once they were in office.

Granted the Democrats are very hostile to Israel these days, but they already have the blind loyalty of many Jews. You want to change their minds? Don’t backstab people, as the Republicans and Trump are now doing.

But then, this behavior has become typical for the Republican party. Across the board they show little loyalty to the people who voted for them. Instead, once in power they routinely ally themselves with the Washington power elites, often in direct betrayal of their campaign promises.

A side note: The link explains nicely how moving the embassy would probably aid the peace talks. Based on the failure of everything that has previously been tried, I see no reason not to do it.

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NASA Inspector General blasts agency construction of SLS test stands

10:09 am

The hits keep coming! A report [pdf] issued today by NASA’s Inspector General strongly criticizes the construction by NASA of two SLS test stands at the Marshall Space Flight Center.

This is going to sound familiar, but the report found that the construction of both test stands took much longer than scheduled and went significantly over budget, almost doubling. Worse, this was caused by some basic managerial decisions that should not have happened. From the report’s conclusion:

To meet its ambitious schedule of an initial SLS launch in December 2017, NASA designed and initiated construction on Test Stands 4693 and 4697 based on preliminary testing specifications and before test stand requirements and capabilities were fully understood. As a result, the cost of the stands increased by $35.5 million from an original estimated cost of $40.5 million. …Finally, NASA failed to establish adequate funding reserves to cover anticipated contract and requirement changes or adequately document consideration of alternative sites for the testing. In short, rushing the decision regarding the test stands to support a December 2017 first flight raised the cost of constructing the stands by tens of millions of dollars.[emphasis mine]

Marshall vs Stennis

The report strongly criticized the agency for deciding to build the stands at the Marshall Space Flight Center. NASA could have chosen to build them at the Stennis Space Center in Mississippi, but did not consider that location in its decision.

Similarly, of three possible construction sites – one at Stennis and two at Marshall – NASA officially considered only the two Marshall locations for testing the structural integrity of the SLS’s liquid hydrogen tank. Although teams from both Marshall and Stennis proposed designs for possible test stands, only the Marshall designs were reviewed and listed as possible alternatives at the final decision review. [emphasis mine]

The map on the right is figure 6 on page 16 of the IG report, and shows the absurdity of choosing Marshall over Stennis. As the report continued,

As a result, we question whether such costs as transporting the tanks to Marshall from Michoud were adequately considered as part of the Agency’s analysis. This approximately 1,240-mile trip will entail shipment by barge along the Mississippi River, the Ohio River, and finally the Tennessee River; take about 2 weeks; and cost approximately $500,000 per tank (see Figure 6 below). Because each tank will need to be transported separately and the barge will need to return to Michoud between loads, the total transportation time for both tanks is 6 weeks. In contrast, transporting a tank from Michoud to Stennis would take less than one week and cost approximately $200,000.

You can wonder whether the influence of porkmaster Senator Richard Shelby (R-Alabama) had anything to do with NASA’s decision to favor Marshall but I personally have no doubt.

Overall, this IG report, as well as yesterday’s GAO audit, show us a government agency that has no idea how do to things in an efficient and expedient manner.

The timing of the release of these reports is interesting. They describe bad managerial decisions made during the Obama administration. Yet, during that administration it had been my impression that audits by GAO and NASA’s IG tended to pussy-foot around NASA’s problems. Their reports noted delays and cost issues, but always couched their criticisms with care. Now that Obama has left office, however, it appears they feel free to state their conclusions more bluntly, which is that none of the upper management in the Obama administration, either at NASA or at the White House, was ever willing to take a hard look at how NASA was doing things.

However, this isn’t just the Obama administration. These kinds of bad managerial decisions in the federal government have been going on now for decades. This has been a clearly bi-partisan failure, by presidents from both parties in Washington. Based on these reports, a lot of heads should roll, throughout the executive branch. The question remains whether there is anyone in Washington, including the present president, willing to do this.

Moreover, the problems are not just in the executive branch. Elected officials, such as Shelby, have been micromanaging NASA’s effort foolishly now for decades. Worse, their micromanagement has done little to serve the needs of the nation, and in fact, has done us great harm. For example, for the past decade Congress has squeezed commercial space in order to throw more money to SLS, and as a result the country’s inability to launch its own astronauts into space has stretched out far longer than necessary, the longest ever since the dawn of the space age.

The last few elections have suggested that the public recognizes this, and wants Congress to change. Unfortunately, I see little indication so far that Congress recognizes this.

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Dubai of the UAE and its push for science, space, and technology

11:38 pm

Link here. The article provides some context for the various stories I have posted recently about the UAE’s ambitions in both space and other hi-tech projects.

They are without doubt thinking big, and the article gives their effort a strong positive spin. However, this quote seemed significant to me:

If Dubai’s future is as a knowledge hub, it will have to fulfill the dreams of more than just the Emiratis. With rare exceptions, only they are allowed to be citizens, and since visas are based on employment, deportation isn’t so much an extreme consequence as an everyday worry. That may have mattered less to the Emiratis when labor was expendable. But to compete for global talent, Dubai needs to transform from a transitory polyglot society to a permanently cosmopolitan one—an ambition that has become a talking point of Sheikh Mohammed. “The uniqueness of Dubai is the fact that it is a melting pot of the world’s cultures, ethnicities, and minds in one city,” he said in a statement.

Al Gergawi acknowledges the challenge of that transition in his own vague way. “I’m saying we’re not perfect,” he says. “We are young kids on the block, if you look at the block as the world. Every day we say: ‘How can we improve? How can we move to the next step in every single aspect?’”

Maybe it is necessary to grade Dubai on a curve. By the standards of a liberal democracy, Dubai remains retrograde. There is no democratic representation, poor freedom of the press, and homosexuality remains illegal. But compared with the rest of the Arab world, Dubai is a beacon of openness and modernity. Thirty percent of the cabinet members are female (compared with 0 percent in Saudi Arabia and 6 percent in Jordan), as is 66 percent of the government workforce.

Then there was this quote, by Sarah Amiri, the 30-year-old science lead for the UAE’s Mars mission, dubbed Hope.

“We get told by His Highness Sheikh Mohammed that the most important part is the scientists and engineers who are going to come out of this,” she explains. Accordingly, the mission staff skews young. Everyone is under 35, the average age is 27, and 30 percent are female. Amiri speaks passionately about inspiring the youth of the Arab world. “We need to give them monumental challenges to solve.” [emphasis mine]

“Get told.” This is still a top-down society. Sheikh Mohammad might have wonderful dreams, but such dreams cannot easily be imposed on a society by one man. I remain skeptical, though I readily admit that they have done remarkably well in a very short period of time.

At the same time, I cannot help wondering if they would welcome any Israeli scientists or engineers. Somehow I doubt it, no matter how much they claim that they are a melting pot.

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A former leftist sees the light

4:55 pm

Link here.

I have been wondering why more people on the left are not speaking up against violence, in favor of free exchange of ideas and dialogue, in favor of compassion. But I know why. I was in the cult. Part of it is that you are a true believer, and part of it is that you are fearful of being called an apostate — in being trashed as a sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic, Islamophobic, xenophobic, fascist, white supremacist nazi. A friend recently wrote to me privately to say they find my latest posts “refreshing,” and that they believe in free speech, but as someone who works in entertainment, they can’t say anything that might cause them to lose their job. As someone who has gone through and is still going through a change in my underlying systems of belief, I can say this: when you finally get past fear, it is so liberating. After a lot of self-reflection, I eventually came to the opinion that if I lose friends or jobs over trying to speak and find the truth in situations, and to do so in a way that reflects my belief in compassion, then perhaps those were not friends or jobs that were healthy for my growth.

There is a lot more. Read it all. The key is that the violence, thuggery, and outright viciousness of the modern left is actually doing nothing to persuade anyone. If anything, it is offending people, turning them off, and making people like the writer above rethink their assumptions. Suddenly, she finds herself listening to conservatives, and discovering that they are actually not fascists, but believe in freedom, tolerance, justice, and treating people with respect, ideas that have increasingly disappeared from the leftist community.

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GAO: Cost and scheduling problems with many big NASA projects

1:07 pm

A new Government Accountability Office audit [pdf] that reviewed 22 major NASA projects, including Orion and SLS, has found that many of them have significant scheduling and cost problems.

Let’s just go through them all:

  • SLS: “The SLS program’s schedule is deteriorating and it is at increased risk of exceeding its cost baseline and missing its November 2018 launch readiness date.”
  • Orion: “The Orion program is increasingly at risk of missing the November 2018 launch date for its first uncrewed exploration mission.”
  • Mars 2020: “The Mars 2020 project has not met key best practices for reducing product development risk.”
  • Asteroid Redirect Robot Mission (ARRM): “In August 2016, the ARRM project entered the preliminary design and technology completion phase with a higher cost and longer schedule than previously estimated.”
  • Europa Clipper: “At the project’s most recent decision review, its independent review board stated that it was at risk of exceeding its preliminary cost and schedule ranges unless its scope or complexity was reduced.”
  • Ground Systems (EGS) upgrade: “The EGS program’s schedule is deteriorating and it is at increased risk of exceeding its cost baseline and missing its November 2018 launch readiness date.”
  • ICESat-2: “The ICESat-2 project has encountered problems with the flight lasers in its sole instrument—the Advanced Topographic Laser Altimeter System (ATLAS)—that will likely cause it to miss its committed launch date and could cause it to exceed its current cost baseline.”
  • InSight: “The InSight project missed its committed launch date of March 2016 and exceeded its cost baseline due to technical issues with its primary science payload—the Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure (SEIS) instrument—which is contributed by the French space agency (CNES).”
  • Ionospheric Connection Explorer (ICE): “The ICON project has experienced technical issues and delays in system integration and testing, but it still on track to launch in July 2017—3 months earlier than its committed launch date.”
  • James Webb Space Telescope: “In December 2016, we found that the primary threat to the JWST project continues to be the ability of the observatory development and integration contractor, Northrop Grumman, to control its costs.”
  • Radiation Budget Instrument (RBI): “NASA’s joint cost and schedule confidence level analysis indicated that the likelihood of the project meeting the date is low and the project’s independent review board described the schedule as optimistic when compared to similar instruments. … The RBI project’s prime contractor Harris continues to experience cost overruns.”
  • Space Network Ground Segment Sustainment (SGSS): “The SGSS project has exceeded the new cost and schedule baseline NASA set for it in June 2015 and further cost and schedule growth is likely.”

Not all the projects audited were a disaster. GRACE-FO, Landsat-9, NISA, Solar Probe Plus, SWOT, TESS, and WFIRST have few significant problems, though even with these there have been delays with each project still facing significant cost and scheduling risks.

As for Commercial Crew, the audit notes delays and problems, but these appear to be mostly linked to the bureaucratic and somewhat unjustified demands by NASA for increased safety, such as the agency’s refusal to accept the use of the Atlas 5 with a Russian first stage engine and its concerns about SpaceX’s plans to fuel the rocket with astronauts on-board (even though astronauts have been aboard fueled rockets with every other manned launch for the entire history of space exploration).

Overall, this audit does not speak well of either NASA’s management or the contractors with whom the agency has routinely worked. Space engineering is hard, but many of these problems seem more related to either incompetence or a willingness of NASA to forgive bad work too often. The number of contractors or government agencies listed here who have failed entirely at their jobs is appalling.

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Another California speaking event shut down by students

1:07 pm

Fascist California: Protesters from the student chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) shut down another speaking event at a University of California campus, this time at Irvine.

A group of roughly 30 protesters descended upon the event when it was about halfway through, initially engaging civilly but quickly turning to insulting the speakers and shouting over them as they attempted to answer questions.

Video footage of the proceedings, chronicled by former UCI professor Gary Fouse, shows the protesters leading chants of “Israel, Israel, you can’t hide/we charge you with genocide” and “Israel, Israel, what do you say?/how many people have you killed today?” for nearly five minutes, eventually leaving after the police were called. “You people are colonizers or occupiers and you should not be allowed on this f*****g campus,” one of the protesters exclaimed, shouting “**** you” before leaving the venue with her applauding peers.

Kevin Brum, the founder and sole member of Students Supporting Israel at UCI, told The Algemeiner that members of the school’s police department were scheduled to be present for the duration of the “high-risk program,” but didn’t arrive on the scene until ten minutes after they had been called. “After not showing up when we first needed them, UCIPD took us out not by a safe alternate route or by clearing a path [through the corridor], but they decided to take us through a path of protesters who posed a high likelihood of violence,” Brum added.

It appears once again that the authorities in California support this violence, and are willing to aid these protesters in their jackbooted acts of intimidation.

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North Korea completes ballistic missile test

12:06 am

North Korea today successfully completed a ballistic missile test.

The unidentified ballistic missile was launched at 5:27 a.m. Sunday Seoul time (4:27 p.m. Saturday ET), off Kusong north of the North Korean capital of Pyongyang, a South Korean military official told NBC News. The missile flew around 30 minutes and landed in the Sea of Japan, also known as the East Sea, Japan’s chief cabinet secretary said.

The missile is not believed to be an intercontinental ballistic missile, U.S. Pacific Command said. Defense officials said the U.S. is assessing whether it was a success of failure. “Right now it sure looks successful,” one U.S. defense official said.

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The press begins to turn against SLS

5:28 pm

This report by Eric Berger of Ars Technica, describing the press teleconference today where NASA announced that they would not fly humans on the first SLS flight in 2019, reveals a significant political change.

In the past, most mainstream reporters would routinely accept NASA’s announcements about SLS. If the agency said it was great, their stories would wax poetic about how great it was. If NASA said its greatness was causing a delay, their stories would laud NASA had how well it was doing dealing with SLS’s greatness, even though that greatness was forcing another delay. Never, and I mean never, would NASA or these reporters ever talk about the project’s overall and ungodly cost.

This press conference was apparently quite different. The press had lots of questions about SLS and its endless delays. They had lots of questions about its costs. And most significant, they had lots of questions for NASA about why the agency is having so much trouble building this rocket, when two private companies, SpaceX and Blue Origin, are building something comparable for a tenth the money in about half the time.

During the teleconference, Ars asked Gerstenmaier to step back and take a big-picture look at the SLS rocket. Even with all of the funding—about $10 billion through next year—how was the agency likely to miss the original deadline by as much as three years, if not more?

“I don’t know,” Gerstenmaier replied. “I don’t know—I would just say it’s really kind of the complexity of what we’re trying to go do, and to build these systems. We weren’t pushing state-of-the-art technology, like main engines sitting underneath the rocket or new solid rocket boosters. But we were pushing a lot of new manufacturing, and I think that new manufacturing has caused some of the delays we’ve seen. No one welds the way that we’re welding material at the thicknesses we’re welding.”

…Later, the NASA officials were asked about private companies such as SpaceX and Blue Origin, which are also building heavy-lift rockets but at a very limited cost to taxpayers. What would they have to say about just buying those vehicles off the shelf, at significantly lower cost than an SLS launch, and preserving NASA’s funds to execute in-space missions?

Gerstnmaier’s explanations for SLS’s delays and costs, that it is a very complex and advanced piece of rocket engineering, is total bunk. This was supposed to be an upgraded Saturn 5, but it will only be able to lift about 70% of the payload. It is using the actual shuttle engines, and upgraded shuttle solid rocket boosters. While new engineering was required to refit these for SLS, none of that should have been so hard or expensive.

The key here is that members of the press are finally aware of this, and are asking the right questions. With Falcon Heavy about to launched multiple times before SLS even launches once, the continuation of this boondoggle is becoming increasingly difficult to justify.

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NASA nixes plan to fly humans on first SLS flight

3:33 pm

Common sense prevails! In a joint decision with the White House, NASA announced today that they will not fly humans on the first test flight of SLS, now scheduled for sometime in 2019.

Bill Gerstenmaier, NASA associate administrator for human exploration and operations, said that the study turned up fewer technical issues with putting a crew on EM-1 than he originally expected. “What I was surprised by was that I thought there would be a whole lot of really negative work that would actually maybe make this not very attractive to us,” he said. “But when [acting NASA administration Robert Lightfoot] and I look at this overall, it does add some more risk to us, because it’s the first crew on the vehicle,” he said. The work to add crew to EM-1 would have cost NASA an additional $600–900 million, and delay the launch likely to the first or second quarter of 2020.

“The culmination of changes in all three of those areas said that overall, probably the best plan we have is actually the plan we’re on right now,” Gerstenmaier said. “When we looked at the overall integrated activity, even though it was feasible, it just didn’t seem warranted in this environment.”

The announcement also included an admission by Gerstenmaier that the first manned SLS flight, now set for 2021, will likely be delayed.

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American colleges: Today’s blueprint for tomorrow’s totalitarian state

9:08 am

Link here.

I could quote almost every line. Greenfield successfully says what I have been thinking and noting (but not very successfully) for the past several months, that today’s American colleges have become oppressive places, run by violent leftist and racist mobs, and that this vision provides us a peek into the future of America. As he concludes:

Colleges have always been the training ground for the leaders of tomorrow. The blueprints for a new society begin there. If you wanted to know what leftist ideas would be going mainstream in a decade, you went to a fashionable college. The leftist idea that is going mainstream [today] is a totalitarian state.

… Imagine what tomorrow’s leaders would be like if they all got an education in North Korea. That’s the crisis we face today. The leaders of tomorrow are coming of age in the totalitarian campus states of today. When one of those polls emerge showing that 7 out of 10 college students want to ban offensive speech, it’s not a generational phenomenon so much as it is environmental indoctrination.

The left’s experiment in college totalitarianism has normalized an environment in which free speech and individual rights don’t exist, in which truth and facts were invented by imperialists, and in which a single cultural misstep can have shattering consequences for anyone who isn’t part of the right identity clique.

Today’s campus is unsafe for America. Taxpayers have invested enormous amounts of money into funding an educational system that rejects everything that makes our society work. If that does not change, then our society will be destroyed by the consequences.

The battle over freedom on campus is the battle for freedom in America. [emphasis mine]

If we do not cease funding this vicious oppressive culture, it will come back soon and bite us, and bite us hard.

Update: Said by a California professor: “College campuses are not free speech areas.” He said this as he and his students, under his instruction, were attempting to wipe out chalked opinions (placed on the sidewalk with the school’s approval) he did not like

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Assistant principal who harassed pro-life protesters resigns

5:23 pm

The assistant principal of a Pennsylvania high school who harassed several teenage pro-life demonstrators has turned in his resignation.

The key here is the teacher’s admission that he was totally wrong:

Last Friday the administrator appeared at a school district hearing after which he was suspended without pay. The district said Ruff indicated at the hearing that he might resign but requested more time to review the charges, which included violating the protesters First Amendment rights, said Michael Levin, the attorney representing the district.

“Dr. Ruff has acknowledged that the demonstrators had a right to be on a public sidewalk,” the news release said. “He acknowledged that his conduct cannot be defended or condoned, and he deeply regretted his actions as displayed on the video. This school district will not interfere with the rights of anyone to express themselves.”

He might have been a very good teacher. He might still become a very good teacher. What is important is that if and when he teaches in the future, he does so respecting the opinions of others. As Cromwell said, “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.”

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Irreplaceable plant specimens destroyed by Australian customs.

10:29 am

Do the paperwork! Because the proper paperwork was not completed, and then mailed to the wrong address, Australian customs officials destroyed six daisy specimens, some collected in the 1700s.

Earlier this week, many botanists learned about the destruction of six type specimens of daisies—some collected during a French expedition to Australia from 1791 to 1793—which the National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) in Paris had mailed along with 99 other specimens to the Queensland Herbarium in Brisbane, Australia.

After the package arrived in Brisbane in early January, the specimens were held up at customs because the paperwork was incomplete. Biosecurity officers asked the Queensland Herbarium for a list of the specimens and how they were preserved, but the herbarium sent its responses to the wrong email address, delaying the response by many weeks. In March, the officers requested clarification, but then incinerated the samples. “It’s like taking a painting from the Louvre and burning it,” says James Solomon, herbarium curator at the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis.

According to Australia’s Department of Agriculture and Water Resources, which enforces biosecurity rules, part of the problem was that the samples had a declared value of $2—and its agents routinely destroy low-value items that have been kept longer than 30 days. Michel Guiraud, director of collections at NMNH, says his museum’s policy is to put minimal values on shipments. “If it is irreplaceable, there is no way to put an insurance value on it,” he says.

It appears that the fault here is not entirely limited to Australian customs. Both the Paris and Brisbane museums appear to have been very sloppy in this matter.

The result, for now, is that some research organizations are now ceasing all shipments to Australia.

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UAE reveals details on its 100 year Mars colonization plan

10:22 am

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has unveiled some of the reasoning behind its plan to colonize Mars by 2117, including an overall outline of its long term approach.

“In the UAE, we live in a rough neighborhood,” Al Gergawi added. “Our neighborhood has over 100 million youth, with over 35 percent unemployment.”

This high rate of youth unemployment in the region has a well-known negative impact such as radicalisation and even terrorism, Al Gergawi explained. One of the rationales for the Mars 2117 programme, however, is to turn the circumstances of young people in the Middle East into a positive impact that engages them in meaningful goals involving education in science and technology. “This is the impact we’re betting on,” said Al Gergawi. “We want to enable the youth to play an active role in advancing the global efforts toward enhancing the Red Planet and other planetary bodies.”

…“The Mars 2117 Project is a long term project, where our first objective is to develop our educational system so our sons will be able to lead scientific research across the various sectors. The UAE became part of a global scientific drive to explore the space, and we hope to serve humanity through this project,” Abu Dhabi Crown Prince His Highness Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan added.

I wish them well. The aims and approach seem to be right, though the hill they need to climb is quite steep.

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Aetna leaves last two Obamacare exchanges

3:50 pm

Finding out what’s in it: Aetna has pulled out of its last two Obamacare exchanges, in Delaware and Nebraska.

Aetna projected more than $200 million in losses from its exchange plan businesses this year following a loss of $700 million for 2014 through 2016. The insurer attributed the losses to “marketplace structural issues, that have led to co-op failures and carrier exits, and subsequent risk pool deterioration.” Aetna said it had 964,000 individual commercial plan members as of the end of 2016, but that number dropped to 255,000 at the end of March.

Essentially, Obamacare is destroying the health insurance industry, because no insurance company can afford to offer insurance when anyone can simply wait until they are sick — “a pre-existing condition” in the politically stupid parlance of the time — before buying insurance. This also means that the Republican plan, in whatever form it will be take when it finally reaches Trump’s desk, will do nothing to save the industry either, since it appears that the Republicans are terrified of being called mean and will thus keep the requirement that insurance companies sell insurance to anyone, whether they are sick or not.

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SLS oxygen tank dome dropped and damaged

11:46 am

You can’t make this stuff up. The dome for the oxygen tank for NASA’s SLS rocket has been accidently dropped and has been damaged beyond repair.

No details yet. It appears they can build another dome from available parts, but this will likely cause additional delays to the SLS launch schedule.

Update: More information here.

The damage was limited to the one dome section of the tank, which was not yet welded to the rest of the tank. “Assessments are ongoing to determine the extent of the damage,” she said. Henry said that the incident was classified as a “Type B” mishap. Such a mishap, according to NASA documents, covers incidents that cause between $500,000 and $2 million in damage. No one was injured, she said.

The liquid oxygen tank involved in the incident was a qualification model, intended for testing, and not flight hardware. Henry said it wasn’t immediately clear how long the investigation would take.

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Palestinian Authority stops shipping medicine to Gaza

11:02 am

They’re such nice people! Because of the political battle between Hamas, running Gaza, and the Palestinian Authority, running the West Bank, the Palestinian Authority has stopped its quarterly shipments of medicine to Gaza.

Palestine Today quotes Dr. Munir Bursh, the pharmacy director at the Ministry of Health in Gaza, saying that the Palestinian Authority has stopped supplying medicines and baby formula to Gaza altogether. “90% of the treatment of cancer patients in the Gaza Strip has stopped due to the lack of the supply of drugs,” he said. Bursh added, “This is reprehensible and very strange, threatening a major health disaster up to the collapse of the health situation in Gaza, because the Ramallah government has been responsible for supplying medicine to Gaza, despite the deficit in the previous years.”

“Whoever made this decision is killing the entire people, and punishing the entire people.” He said that the PA supplies the Gaza Strip with medicines every two months, but it did not send any medicines for three months now.

Hospitals in Gaza are also worried about the closure of the Gaza power plant due to the spat between Hamas and Fatah, saying that they cannot desalinate the water needed for every day purposes.

The last line refers to the decision by the Palestinian Authority to stop paying its Gaza electrical bill, forcing Israel to stop supplying Gaza with electricity.

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Japan begins testing new rocket engine

8:40 am

Capitalism in space: Japan has begun testing the rocket engine it will use in its next generation rocket.

The H-III will succeed the country’s current H-series rockets, H-IIA and H-IIB. The rocket will use commercially available components and a fuselage that can be mass produced, lowering launch costs to about half of the current price tag of approximately 10 billion yen ($88.6 million). The new, more powerful engine will allow the H-III to carry a midsize to large satellite weighing up to 6.5 tons — 60% more than the H-IIA.

If I understand this correctly, a launch with this new rocket will cost about $45 million, which will make it very competitive with SpaceX. At the same time, it is not as powerful, which means it will not serve the exact same customer base. Instead, its capacity makes it a direct competitor to India’s GSLV Mark III rocket.

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The left moves to indoctrinate elementary school kids

9:18 am

Fascists: A new leftist movement has begun inserting racial and leftist indoctrination materials into elementary public school materials, teaching kids the evils of racism that are inherent in American society, before they are even aware that different races even exist.

Marxist theorist Paolo Freire advocated in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, that schools be used to inculcate radical values in students so they become agents of social change. Freire held that the so-called dominant pedagogy “silences” poor and minority children and that there is no such thing as a neutral educational system.

Joining Freire in his desire to use the educational system to level institutions is unrepentant communist terrorist and education theorist Bill Ayers, who has long advocated poisoning the minds of the young so they can agitate to fundamentally transform American society. “If we want change to come, we would do well not to look at the sites of power we have no access to; the White House, the Congress, the Pentagon,” he said in 2012. “We have absolute access to the community, the school, the neighborhood, the street, the classroom, the workplace, the shop, the farm.”

The article then describes at length actual examples of leftist and racist indoctrination in a variety of public elementary schools, going on right now. And make no mistake, the educational materials here are outright bigoted in their hatred of whites and American society. I am appalled that American parents are tolerating this.

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The city of the future will watch you all the time

9:09 am

New computer software is making it possible for computers to quickly analyze the data provided by surveillance cameras, which in turn will allow businesses and government to track and identify city dwellers all the time.

Through partner businesses, Nvidia’s technology is set to take things even further, enabling autonomous aerial systems streaming video back from the sky, security robots driving themselves around looking for trouble spots, and ultra high resolution, super-wide panoramic cameras that capture a whole scene instead of needing to track and follow objects.

And instead of just recording and storing footage, every camera’s output would be constantly analyzed and crunched into useful data points. We’re talking facial recognition, vehicle recognition, and pattern tracking in road and pedestrian traffic.

Clearly this will be useful in a law enforcement and security sense, and several Nvidia partners are working along these lines. BriefCam, for example, is demonstrating technology that tracks individuals and vehicles through security footage, then produces super-quick review videos in which all events in a given time frame can be made to happen in a condensed format where a bunch of them are on screen at once.

It seems to me that this new technology fits very well with the urban leftist culture that runs most American cities these days. These fascist communities, run almost exclusively by Democrats, will cheer this surveillance as a way to protect themselves from bad things, including people with opinions they don’t like. Consider how useful this would have been to Berkeley, for instance, during its recent struggle to keep conservative speakers out of town.

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Georgia governor signs spaceport bill

8:50 am

Capitlism in space: The governor of Georgia yesterday signed into law a spaceport liability law that will make that state competitive with other states.

I’m not sure yet how realistic Georgia’s hopes are for a viable spaceport. Vector’s next test suborbital flight is scheduled to occur there, but will other companies shift their business there? I am not sure. Nonetheless, this raises the level of competition, which can never be bad.

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Brittle and weak welds on SLS tanks?

8:39 am

Government in action! The hydrogen tanks that will be used for the first SLS rocket flight were welded using a technique that NASA has since found to be untrustworthy.

Although the weld strength issue stopped welding the qualification and flight articles of the LOX tank before it could start, the issue wasn’t caught until after both LH2 tanks were welded with the modified pin tool last summer. The implications of the two tanks possibly having below design strength welds disrupted the original, post-weld plans.

The LH2 qualification tank, which will be used for structural testing at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, was welded first and after setup and configuration was taken to Building 451 in December of last year both for proof testing of the welds and to qualify the test facility and procedures for subsequent flight tanks. Hydrogen tanks are proof tested by pressurizing them with nitrogen gas while a hydraulic test rig applies loads to the structure. “We wanted to wring out…the control system – 451 was another building that was made bigger to fit the hydrogen tank,” Doering said. “The control system is all new, the reaction fittings are all new, along with all the actuators. We didn’t want to put the flight asset in there to try to use it for the first time, so [using] the qual[ification] article [first] was also trying to wring out the pressurization and the actuation of the control system in 451.”

Originally, the plan included a test case to pressurize the qualification tank to slightly above flight pressure to help as a part of that “pathfinding” work; however, the discovery that the welds may be below design strength forced plans to be reconsidered.“We couldn’t say with any real degree of certainty that these welds would make it to [flight pressure],” Doering said. “In a pneumatic test, pressurizing it like that, it’s like a balloon…there’s a good portion of the community that thinks it will survive, there’s another portion of the community that says you don’t know enough to be able to say that, [and] there’s another portion of the community that says…’no way.’ [emphasis mine]

This is merely the qualification tank, built to find out if the tank design, which appears to be overly complicated to begin with, will work. The flight tank?

Lower pressure isn’t an option for the LH2 flight tank, which must perform at flight pressures both in testing and in flight. The SLS Program developed and is working on multiple, parallel options for consideration that include repairs and/or replacement of the already-welded flight tank. “We’re looking at use as-is – can I get to the point where I’m comfortable using that flight tank?” Doering said. “The answer to that is probably not, just because the analysis tools don’t exist yet to do this.” [emphasis mine]

They are faced with the likely possibility that they will have to repair the tank, which will likely cause the now 2019 launch date for the first unmanned test to be delayed further.

The rumors that NASA is considering making that first test flight a manned one makes me think that they are considering that decision as a cover for these additional delays. “We need more time to make this work as a manned flight,” NASA management will claim, using that extra time to fix the tanks as well. They will also claim they need more money, as they always do.

Meanwhile, NASA is having trouble building rocket tanks, an item that aerospace engineers figured out how to build half a century ago. Way to go, NASA!

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The status of all of Trump’s executive appointments so far

4:51 pm

Link here. The article is a very detailed and thorough look at the number of Trump appointments, nominated, approved, or missing, for almost all the major cabinet positions, noting above all the lack of names submitted for many positions.

At the end of Trump’s first 100 days, only 27 of 556 political appointments had been confirmed, as compared with 69 for former President Barack Obama and 35 for former President George W. Bush.

If blame is appropriate, there’s plenty of it to go around. The administration blames Democrats for slow-rolling nominees. But Democrats and some Republicans counter that the White House isn’t sending names quickly enough. And a handful of nominees have taken themselves out of contention, mostly because of their various business interests. Since the president likes hiring business leaders, that’s proving no small problem.

The lack of confirmed appointees means agencies are severely limited in the scope of their policy action, whether it’s enacting changes made by Congress or following through on dozens of executive orders Trump has signed.

What strikes me is the feeling that probably a lot of these people are simply not needed. They are political appointees, given posh government jobs in exchange for their work helping presidents get elected. Almost across the board, the agencies involved are functioning just fine without these appointees in place. Trump can tell these civil servants what he needs done, and they can do it.

At the same time, the inability to get these appointees named and approved speaks volumes about the increasing failure of the federal government to function. They can’t even get political appointees in place, people who really aren’t needed and are really only there to pay back favors. What does this tell us about their ability to accomplish things that must get done?

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NASA may have decided to fly humans on first SLS test flight

8:32 am

Doug Messier at Parabolic Arc has a story today suggesting that there are rumors at NASA that the agency has decided that it will put astronauts in Orion for SLS’s first test flight, now tentatively scheduled for sometime in 2019.

At he notes, this will only be the second time in history humans will have flown on a untested rocket, the first being the space shuttle, where they had no choice as the vehicle needed people to fly it.

NASA’s arguments in favor of this manned test flight will probably rest on noting how much of the rocket is based on previously flown equipment. For example, the upper stage for this flight will be a modified Delta upper stage, a well tested and frequently flown stage. The first stage will be made of side-mounted first stage solid rocket boosters that are essentially upgrades of the shuttle’s solid rocket boosters. And the first stage engines are actual shuttle engines salvaged from the shuttle’s themselves. In addition, NASA will note that Orion will have a launch abort system, though it appears that there will be no test of this system prior to the flight.

These arguments don’t carry much weight. The Delta upper stage will also be modified for this flight, and this will be that version’s first use. Similarly, the solid rocket boosters have been modified as well, and this will be their first flight. And as I noted, the Orion launch abort system will not have been tested in flight.

Finally, and most important, the goal of this test flight is to see if these different parts have been integrated together properly. As a unit, none of them has ever flown together. To put humans on such a flight is very foolish indeed.

Messier sums this up quite well:

The flight might come off just fine. But, I fear that NASA’s concern about keeping the program funded, and Donald Trump’s desire for some space spectacular to boost his re-election chances, could combine to produce something very unfortunate.

I pray that people in the Trump administration put a stop to this silliness, as soon as possible.

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Trump administration removes members of EPA science advisory board

8:34 am

In a move related to Trump’s effort to change policy at the EPA, the administration yesterday is reported to have forced out as many as a dozen members of EPA’s 18-person Board of Scientific Counselors.

At an April meeting, the Board of Scientific Counselors discussed the importance of climate change research at EPA and “the growing need for information on, and understanding of, climate change and responses to its impacts,” according to an agenda. They also talked about the importance of considering climate change as a stressor in areas of non-climate research.

The Trump administration has already sent signals that it does not value some areas of federal research, in particular climate science and work that could lead to further regulation of the fossil fuel and chemical industries. The board had 18 members, including Richardson, who said he knew of at least one other member fired. Departures could reach a dozen, he said.

There is going to be a lot of pigs squealing about this. The big question will be whether the Trump administration will have the courage to stand up to those squeals.

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The UAE plan to tow an iceberg from Antarctica for drinking water

3:14 pm

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has a project to tow an iceberg more than 5,500 miles from Antarctica in order to provide that arid nation drinking water for about five years.

The National Advisor Bureau, headquartered in Masdar City, Abu-Dhabi, plans to source the massive blocks of ice from Heard Island, around 600 miles (1000 kilometres) off the coast of mainland Antarctica. It will then transport them around 5,500 miles (8,800 km) to Fujairah, one of the seven emirates which make up the UAE. One iceberg could provide enough for one million people over five years, according to the company.

And the scheme could begin as early as the start of 2018.

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China’s space managers now dominate China’s government

2:33 pm

Link here. The story describes how a number of prominent managers from that country’s space program have all been promoted into important political positions throughout the government.

Giving new meaning to the term high-flier, four aerospace engineers have become provincial governors in the past four years. … Until five years ago the quartet worked at either CASTC, a state-owned group that has spearheaded the technological development behind China’s ambitious space exploration programme – producing the country’s rockets, satellites and missiles – or the China National Space Administration, which is in charge of that programme.

In the past, provincial governors were predominantly selected from the ranks of those working in local government or the heads of prominent ministries. The political rise of a group with similar backgrounds has usually been linked to the power of a major faction or influential figure, such as party general secretary Xi.

People who have worked with the former aerospace engineers say the technocrats developed a cocktail of traits that appeared tailor-made to appeal to the current leadership. They did not cook the books, were willing to make necessary but unpopular decisions and were largely untainted by factional allegiances.

Their success also helps explain the increased growth of China’s space program in the past few years. These individuals are all likely to be strong supporters of that space program, and all of them are now very well placed to influence the government in favor of that program.

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