Tag: government

Indicted Democratic IT staffers suspected of selling sensitive info to hostile foreign governments

9:20 pm

Update on Democratic IT scandal: Investigators now suspect that the computer staffers, hired by numerous Democratic legislators (most notably former party head Debbie Wasserman Schultz) and already indicted for bank fraud, might have stolen and sold sensitive data to hostile foreign governments.

Investigators now suspect that sensitive US government data — possibly including classified information — could have been compromised and may have been sold to hostile foreign governments that could use it to blackmail members of Congress or even put their lives at risk. “This is a massive, massive scandal,” a senior US official familiar with the widening probe told The Post.

Alarm bells went off in April 2016 when computer security officials in the House reported “irregularities” in computer equipment purchasing. An internal investigation revealed the theft of hundreds of thousands of dollars in government property, and evidence pointed to five IT staffers and the Democratic Congress members’ offices that employed them. The evidence was turned over to the House inspector general, who found so much “smoke” that she recommended a criminal probe, sources say. The case was turned over to Capitol Police in October.

When the suspected IT workers couldn’t produce the missing invoiced equipment, sources say, they were removed from working on the computer network in early February.

During the probe, investigators found valuable government data that is believed to have been taken from the network and placed on offsite servers, setting off more alarms. Some 80 offices were potentially compromised.

Wasserman Schultz is especially suspect here. While every other Democratic lawmaker fired these IT staffers months ago, Wasserman Schultz kept them on her payroll (though they had lost security clearance and could do no work for her) and has gone out of her way to hinder the investigations.

Note that this is real scandal, involving actual indictments, the misuse of sensitive government data by foreign nationals of countries not friendly to the United States, and the possibly blackmailing of elected officials. Too bad our insane media today is trapped in a bubble and can no longer see a scoop, even when it is forced down their throats.

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Local officials deny pro-Trump group rally permit

8:50 pm

Fascist California: Citing safety concerns local officials in the town of Upland, California have denied a permit for a pro-Trump rally.

An ACT for America rally was being planned for Sept. 9 in Upland at the Madonna of the Trail, according to a Facebook post. The location of the rally, which now says “Inland Empire ((somewhere))” was changed Friday after a top Upland official made it clear a permit for the rally would be denied.

It is part of “America First” rallies being held nationwide that day. “This event will be in dedication to all first responders and national security. We appreciate all the hard work our men and woman of service has provided for our protection. As Americans we are giving thanks for protecting our beautiful country,” the Facebook description stated. [emphasis mine]

These officials are essentially endorsing the heckler’s veto, and I bet they are doing it because they agree with the fascist leftwing brownshirts that are attacking conservatives nationwide in order to silence them.

In other words, the first amendment no longer exists in California. Be warned if you go there to protest or speak any conservative ideas. You will either find government officials working to squelch your right to speak, or they will look away (as they did in Berkeley) when thugs move in to beat you up.

Let me add this question: Since when did Americans need permission from government officials to protest?

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SpaceX postpones Mars Dragon missions

9:55 pm

Based on statements from one NASA official, it appears that SpaceX has put its plans to fly a Dragon capsule to Mars on “the back burner.”

Jim Green, head of NASA’s planetary science division, told Spaceflight Now in an interview that SpaceX has told the agency that it has “put Red Dragon back on the back burner.”

“We’re available to talk to Elon when he’s ready to talk to us … and we’re not pushing him in any way,” Green said. “It’s really up to him. Through the Space Act Agreement, we’d agreed to navigate to Mars, get him to the top of the atmosphere, and then it was up to him to land. That’s a pretty good deal, I think.”

It is my impression that, because NASA has forced SpaceX to give up on propulsive landing of its Dragon manned capsules, the company cannot afford to invest the time and money on it themselves, and thus do not have a method yet for landing a Dragon on Mars. Thus, they must postpone this program.

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Imran Awan, Wasserman Schultz’s computer geek, indicted

3:33 pm

A grand jury today indicted the computer expert who for years ran the computers for numerous congressional Democrats, led by Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Florida).

Awan and other IT aides for House Democrats have been on investigators’ radar for months over concerns of possible double-billing, alleged equipment theft, and access to sensitive computer systems. Most lawmakers fired Awan in February, but Schultz had kept him on until his arrest in July.

The indictment itself, which merely represents formal charges and is not a finding of guilt, addresses separate allegations that Awan and his wife engaged in a conspiracy to obtain home equity lines of credit from the Congressional Federal Credit Union by giving false information about two properties – and then sending the proceeds to individuals in Pakistan.

What I find interesting is that the indictment completely avoids the issues of security and equipment theft that could have been a direct security threat to the country. It is also interesting how the grand jury investigation was aimed at Awan only, and avoided looking into Wasserman Schultz’s part entirely.

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Japan’s beginning shift to commercial space

9:08 am

Link here. The article provides a good sense of the state of Japan’s private space industry, which at this moment is generally restricted one company, Interstellar Technologies, and its as yet unsuccessful effort to launch a suborbital rocket. The following quote however helps explain why Japan has been unable to interest anyone in buying its H-2A rocket for commercial launches.

Launch costs associated with Japan’s main H-2A rocket are about ¥10 billion per launch (about $90 million), so miniature satellites often ride together with bigger satellites. A period of 50 days is required between launches, meaning the number of launches is low in Japan compared to countries including the United States, Europe, Russia, China and India. Large satellites are given priority in the launch schedule, so it is often difficult to choose a launch window for miniature satellites. [emphasis mine]

I think the $90 million price is a significant reduction from what JAXA used to charge. Fifty days to prep for launch however is ungodly slow.

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Russia to launch twice from Vostochny this year

8:51 am

Russian Deputy Prime Minister announced today that Russia will launch satellites from its new spaceport in Vostochny twice in 2017, first on November 28 and second on December 22.

On July 3, Rogozin said Russia would conduct five launches from the Vostochny space center in 2018. On July 11, Russia’s Roscosmos State Space Corporation head Igor Komarov said the agency was determined to launch up to five carrier rockets for its foreign clients from Vostochny every year starting in 2019.

It appears that the Russian leadership decided to accelerate the launch schedule and move two of those 2018 launches to November and December, 2017. They must be feeling the competitive pressure coming from SpaceX, which has essentially stolen almost their entire share of the commercial launch market.

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North Korea appears to back down

6:27 pm

A news report today out of North Korea suggests that its leader, Kim Jong Un, has stepped back from a plan to test fire four missiles in the direction of Guam.

This could be related to China’s decision this week, under strong pressure from the Trump administration, to finally go along with UN sanctions and ban imports of iron, lead, and coal from North Korea.

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A celebration of hate and ignorance

1:34 pm

The last few days have not been good ones for American free speech and freedom. Not only have we seen violence perpetrated to silence the free expression of dissent, we have seen an effort after the fact to use that violence as a club for destroying any opposition to the liberal and leftist dogma that dominates the American political and academic community.

The following links will provide a nice overview of how our cultural elites, especially on the left, have responded to this weekend’s terrible events in Charlottesville, Virginia, where one person was killed and almost twenty injured when a car rammed into a crowd of competing racist demonstrators.

That is how our elites responded, not with conciliatory remarks aimed at bringing people together, but with anger and hate, hate of Trump, hate of the Republican Party, hate of the NRA, hate of whites, hate for anyone that dared disagree with their leftist agenda. Then, when Trump issued a statement condemning all violence in the name of bigotry, the response was equally hateful:
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Chinese engineers and astronomers fight over new telescope design

9:10 am

A dispute over the design of a new Chinese optical telescope has broken out between the astronomers who will use it and the engineers who will build it.

In April, an international committee convened by [Chinese Academy of Science’s] Center for Astronomical Mega-Science, which is responsible for the project, reviewed the competing designs and recommended the three-mirror option [the preference of astronomer Jiansheng Chen and China’s astronomers]. On 10 July, [Xiangqun Cui, the instrument’s chief engineer] organized her own review committee that picked the SYZ design as better. Cui’s panel “leaned toward one side,” Chen says. And one member says that the three-mirror design was not sufficiently presented, partly because no one from the Huazhong team was there. Cui and Su explain in their open letter that a member of their own group who knows it well introduced the Huazhong design. “Members were repeatedly reminded they could abstain from voting,” they write. One-third of the 21 committee members did abstain.

Meanwhile, to date, more than 130 young astronomers have signed an open letter to the astronomical community urging that the recommendations of the international panel be respected.

The fundamental disagreement, according to Chen, is “whether a large science project should be technically or scientifically oriented.” Cui and Su say the choice is between incorporating “rapidly developing new technologies” that ensure a long life for the facility, or “simply replicating a 10-meter telescope built 30 years ago.”

This spat reinforces the impression gained from the recent other story about China’s inability to find a manager for its newly built radio telescope. Its top-down management approach (where decisions are made by well-connected powerful bureaucrats at the top of the chain of command) produces office politics that generally does not lead to good technical decisions.

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China admits it will do nothing to stop North Korea from attacking US

10:25 am

In an official editorial, China has admitted that it will do nothing to stop North Korea from using missiles to attack the US territory of Guam.

Beijing is not able to persuade Washington or Pyongyang to back down at this time. It needs to make clear its stance to all sides and make them understand that when their actions jeopardize China’s interests, China will respond with a firm hand.

China should also make clear that if North Korea launches missiles that threaten US soil first and the US retaliates, China will stay neutral. If the US and South Korea carry out strikes and try to overthrow the North Korean regime and change the political pattern of the Korean Peninsula, China will prevent them from doing so.

In other words, China will not stop North Korea from carrying out its attacks, but if it does so China will also not do anything if the U.S. responds.

The editorial is intellectually dishonest however. It also states,

The real danger is that such a reckless game may lead to miscalculations and a strategic “war.” That is to say, neither Washington nor Pyongyang really wants war, but a war could break out anyway as they do not have the experience of putting such an extreme game under control. [emphasis mine]

The highlighted words are simply wrong. It has been very clear now for several years that North Korea is eager for war, and has been doing everything it can to instigate a conflict.

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University excludes white males from $10K journalism grant

11:20 am

Bigoted academia: For the second year in a row Brandeis University is offering a racist $10K journalism grant only to minorities and women, specifically excluding white males.

The grant’s entire eligibility requirements, from the university’s press release, are quite blunt:

Applications from women and journalists of color working in any type of media — print, audio, video, online — will be considered.

Applicants must be U.S. citizens but can be reporting from abroad.

As the article above notes, federal law forbids any organization that receives federal funds (as Brandeis does) from discriminating based on either sex or race. But then, bigotry today in the leftwing community is perfectly all right, as long as you are oppressing whites or men.

I think Lous Brandeis, for whom this university is named, would be horrified by its actions.

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How did the Democrats’ IT foreigners get in the U.S?

10:48 am

Michelle Malkin has raised an interesting question regarding the three Pakistani brothers who ran the Democrats computer infrastructure in Congress for the past thirteen years and are now charged with bank fraud and are suspected of doing much worse: How did they get in the country in the first place?

Were the Awans and their family and friends H-1B tech workers — like so many of the 650,000 “temporary” foreign guest workers imported into America under that program over the past quarter-century and predominantly working in IT?

And if they’re not H-1Bs, how exactly did Awan and company get here, when did they get here, and who brought them over here and why?

…Awan first landed a job with former Democrat Rep. Robert Wexler as an “information technology director” in 2004 at the ripe age of 24 or 25. His younger brother, Jamal, is reportedly only 23 years old, yet has pulled in a salary of nearly $160,000 a year since 2014 (when he was 20!) as an information technology worker for Democrat Rep. Julia Brownley. That’s 3.1 times greater than the median salary for a House IT worker, according to InsideGov.

Who sponsored these young foreign techies and chose them to do work in our nation’s capital doing a job that countless young Americans are qualified to do? If not H-1B, did they arrive first as students on foreign visas (who are supposed to return home after their course of study), then game the system to work through the cheap-labor loopholes, such as the Optional Practical Training program? Or did they switch visa categories? Did they pull strings through their well-connected Democratic employers?

Not surprisingly, she has been unable to get an answer to this question from any of the many Democrats who had hired these Pakistanis. You would almost think the Democrats are stonewalling the investigation. It would also be reasonable for you to think the Democrats seem more interested in protecting non-Americans, coming from a Muslim country with many ties to radical Islamic terrorists, then in defending the security of the United States.

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China has a giant radio telescope and no one to run it

9:04 am

China’s effort to become a major player in the astronomy and space exploration field has run up against a strange problem.

China has built a staggeringly large instrument in the remote southern, mountainous region of the country called the Five hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope, or FAST. The telescope measures nearly twice as large as the closest comparable facility in the world, the US-operated Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico. Radio telescopes use a large, parabolic dish to collect radio waves from distant sources, such as pulsars and black holes—or even alien civilizations.

According to the South China Morning Post, the country is looking for a foreigner to run the observatory because no Chinese astronomer has the experience of running a facility of such size and complexity. The Chinese Academy of Sciences began advertising the position in western journals and job postings in May, but so far there have been no qualified applicants.

Part of the problem here is that it appears the telescope was built by order of the Chinese government, not Chinese astronomers. It would have been better for China to have built something its own astronomers were qualified to run. Instead, they built something to impress the world, and now can’t find a way to use it.

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Webb telescope launch might be delayed again

8:59 am

Because of a scheduling conflict with a European mission to Mercury Arianespace might delay its launch of the American James Webb Space Telescope to 2019.

A time-sensitive mission to explore the planet Mercury, already delayed several times, may force the European Space Agency (ESA) and Arianespace to push back the launch of NASA’s multi-billion dollar James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) into early 2019. The mission, named BepiColombo, is currently scheduled to launch on the same rocket, the Ariane 5, from the same spaceport in French Guiana, during the same timeframe that the JWST is scheduled to launch (October 2018).

A launch delay to BepiColumbo won’t impact the science of the ESA/Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) mission, but it would translate to a longer journey to Mercury. The last launch delay, which pushed it from April 2018 to October 2018, also translated to a year longer voyage to reach Mercury, now expected to arrive in 2025 instead of 2024.

This is a perfect illustration of the difference between governments and private enterprise. Government-owned Arianespace has been flying its Ariane 5 rockets now for almost two decades, but they have not yet learned how to launch two rockets in one month, and don’t appear interested in trying. Meanwhile, private companies like SpaceX and ULA are both working to achieve a normal twice-a-month launch rate, with SpaceX likely to beat that in the next few years.

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California’s public colleges to no longer require students to know math or read

12:40 pm

The coming dark age: California’s public universities have decided to drop its requirements that all in-coming students be able to do basic math and be able to read and write English.

Cal State will no longer make those students who may need extra help take the standardized entry-level mathematics (ELM) exam and the English placement test (EPT).

The new protocol, which will go into effect in fall 2018, “facilitates equitable opportunity for first-year students to succeed through existing and redesigned education models,” White wrote in a memorandum to the system’s 23 campus presidents, who will be responsible for working with faculty to implement the changes. The hope is that these efforts will also help students obtain their degrees sooner — one of the public university system’s priorities. Cal State has committed to doubling its four-year graduation rate, from 19% to 40%, by 2025.

…“This will have a tremendous effect on the number of units students accumulate in their first year of college,” said James T. Minor, Cal State’s senior strategist for academic success and inclusive excellence. “It will have an enormous effect on college affordability, on the number of semesters that a student is required to be enrolled in before they earn a degree, and it will have a significant impact on the number of students that ultimately cross a commencement stage with a degree in hand, ready to move into the workforce, ready to move into graduate or professional school.” [emphasis mine]

In other words, the university has no interest in producing graduates with any useful skills. All the university wants to do is to give them a degree, so that they can claim success. Under this new policy, students incapable of reading and writing English and doing math will still be able to take normal courses that require such skills the moment they enter college. They will likely be pushed through the system, given passing grades, so that when they graduate, they will be like the characters in the movie Idiocracy, functionally illiterate but expected to run society as college educated elites.

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International group forms to get UN protection of Apollo sites

8:43 am

An international group of lawyers, academics, and business people has formed an organization called “For All Moonkind,” aimed specifically at getting UN protections for the six lunar Apollo sites.

They are going to the UN because, based on the Outer Space Treaty, this is the only place that has jurisdiction. Unfortunately. This quote illustrates why:

“Though we are based in the US, we are an international organization,” said Michelle Hanlon, US space lawyer and Co-Founder of For All Moonkind. “Humaid Alshamsi [the UAE participant] brings tremendous experience in public and private aviation and space law to our team. We are thrilled that he has agreed to join our effort.”

For All Moonkind was critical of the auction by Sotheby’s of the Apollo 11 Contingency Lunar Sample Return Bag used by astronaut Neil Armstrong. “The astronauts of the Apollo project represented all of us here on Earth,” explained aviation and space lawyer and Advisory Council Member Humaid Alshamsi, “they went to the Moon in peace for all, and the relics of their historic achievement should be shared by all. The loss of this artifact to a private collector is a loss for humanity.”

The Outer Space Treaty forbids any nation from claiming territory in space, thus leaving it under the control of the UN and the international community, a community that — as demonstrated by this quote — is hostile to capitalism and private enterprise. While I laud this group’s desire to protect these historic sites, I fear their actions are going to place limits on the freedoms and property rights of future space colonists.

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Aetna to withdraw from all Obamacare exchanges

9:22 am

Finding out what’s in it: Aetna has decided to withdraw from all Obamacare exchanges, after seeing its profits increase when it reduced its participation partly last year.

Aetna has been gradually withdrawing from the Obamacare exchanges. It had decided to pull out of the exchanges in other states because it lost $700 million between 2014 and 2016 and was projected to lose $200 million in 2017 despite having already significantly reduced its participation in the exchanges to only four states.

A disproportionate number of unhealthy customers have signed up for the exchanges, which provide tax subsidies to pay for insurance, causing unbalanced risk pools for many insurers. Aetna also has cited uncertainty over the future of the law and over whether it will receive federal payments as a contributing factor to its decision. [emphasis mine]

The highlighted words illustrate the fundamental problem with the Obamacare law. It forces insurance companies to take on sick people who had failed to buy insurance before they became sick. Such an insurance model is unsustainable. Insurance works because enough people buy it before they need it, thus helping to fund those who need it. If everyone can wait until they need it then there is no pool to fund any payouts, and the insurance company goes bankrupt.

As is happening with Obamacare.

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India to almost double launch rate with new rocket assembly building

9:01 am

Capitalism in space: India’s space agency ISRO is building a second rocket assembly facility at its Sriharikota spaceport so that it can prepare two rockets for launch simultaneously.

“We have not reached the limit of two launchpads. With the new assembly facility, we will be able to assemble more vehicles. Once we are able to assemble more rockets but not able to launch them even by reducing launch timings, then we will start work on the third launchpad. But for that, we first need (government’s) approval. So, we are gradually working to eliminate all bottlenecks to increase the frequency of launches.” With the new facility, Isro can achieve launch 12 rockets in a year from the seven at present.

The Times of India also recognizes the value of this upgrade. To quote the article, “With the increased frequency of foreign satellite launches, ISRO can rake in big moolah.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

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EPA stonewalls investigation into its Gold King Mine disaster

11:00 am

The EPA is refusing to release a criminal investigation by its inspector general into the 2015 Gold King mine disaster, caused by the EPA, that polluted water supplies throughout the southwest.

The EPA’s Inspector General (IG) provided the Department of Justice evidence that an employee involved in the August 2015 Gold King Mine disaster violated the Clean Water Act and made false statements. The Justice Department declined to prosecute him, the IG announced in October 2016.

The watchdog wrote a report on its completed investigation but is now keeping it secret. “The material you requested … are part of one or more open law enforcement files,” EPA IG associate counsel Susan Barvenik told TheDCNF in a letter. Producing “such records could reasonably be expected to interfere with ongoing enforcement proceedings.”

An EPA spokeswoman provided conflicting information about the probe.

In other words, the report exposed clear violations of law, but no one in Washington wants to pursue those violations and they are doing whatever they can to bury them in order to protect themselves.

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Court allows lawsuit against police for improper drug raid to go forward

10:36 am

This might be a big victory: A federal appeals court has ruled that a lawsuit by two former CIA agents can go forward against the police for an improper home drug raid against the family because they happened to have a tomato garden.

The police raided the home, threatened the couple and their children, all because they had shopped for garden supplies and had brewed their tea from loose tea leaves. From the court ruling:

This week, the three judge panel — Carlos Lucero, Gregory Phillips and Nancy Moritz — ruled against the state, sending the case back to district court. What’s notable is that the 100-page decision pushed back hard against the claim police officers are immune from legal responsibility if they are just doing their jobs. “The defendants in this case caused an unjustified governmental intrusion into the Hartes’ home based on nothing more than junk science, an incompetent investigation, and a publicity stunt,” Lucero wrote in his opinion. “The Fourth Amendment does not condone this conduct, and neither can I.”

The judge went on to question the department’s claim of probable cause for the raid — particularly on the issue of the supposedly “positive” field-tested tea leaves. “There was no probable cause at any step of the investigation,” the judge wrote. “Not at the garden shop, not at the gathering of the tea leaves, and certainly not at the analytical stage when the officers willfully ignored directions to submit any presumed results to a laboratory for analysis.”

The lawsuit was filed against the specific police officers who conducted the raid, as well as the local county elected officials who sanctioned the raid. I hope they bankrupt them all.

I should also add that the timing here is great, because Trump’s attorney general, Jeff Sessions, appears in favor of more of these kinds of raids.

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The head of Iran’s space effort to step down

10:13 am

Mahmoud Vaezi, Iran’s minister of communications and information technology as well as the person responsible for the management of the Iran Space Agency, is stepping down.

It is likely that Vaezi is simply retiring. He is 65. It is also possible that there are developments in Iran that caused him to leave his post. While Iran had what it claimed was a successful test launch of its Simorgh rocket last week, that rocket put nothing in orbit. Furthermore, in the past two years there have been repeated delays in the launch of a number of announced satellites.

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The difficult task of legally preserving the Apollo lunar sites

2:27 pm

Link here.

While I heartily agree that these historic sites should be preserved, if you read the article you will notice how the focus with these people is not the future, but preserving relics of the past. I say we don’t need more memorials. The best memorial for Apollo 11 would be thriving city on the Moon, even if it trampled on Tranquility Base.

Note also that the restrictions imposed by the Outer Space Treaty once again make things worse. Under the treaty, there is no way for the U.S. to reasonably preserve these American historical sites, without first getting the approval of the UN. The result? I guarantee that any arrangement we manage to work out will almost certainly restrict the freedoms of future space colonists. This not a good thing, and it certainly isn’t something we here on Earth should be doing to the brave people who will someday want to build new civilizations on other worlds.

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Government officials expect disaster during eclipse

10:39 am

We’re all gonna die! According to this trashy Newsweek article, government officials are expecting disaster and societal collapse because a lot of people are going to travel to see the August 21 eclipse.

Here’s why many folks are planning for a disaster: Oregon has a population of 4 million people, and the eclipse is expected to draw 1 million visitors to the state for a few days. In Missouri, preparations resemble that for a blizzard or “everything from St. Patrick’s Day parade to a World Series celebration,” says Chris Hernandez, city spokesman for Kansas City, Missouri, one of the larger metro areas in the path of the eclipse.

All of those visitors are expected to clog interstates, along with state and local roads, for days before and after the eclipse, much like the rush during emergency evacuations, says Brad Kieserman, vice president of disaster operations and logistics for the American Red Cross. “Some of these places are never going to see traffic like this,” he says. In some areas, “the population will be double or triple.”

Once visitors arrive, they’ll need bottles of water, lodging and restrooms. And, of course, solar glasses.

This fear-mongering reminds me of the Y2K bug. Somehow it was going to shut down society, something I thought was a load of hooey, and turned out to be exactly that, hooey. This Newsweek junk article is just more of the same.

Be prepared, exercise personal responsibility, and all will be well. The only ones who will have a problem will be people who take these articles too seriously.

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Global warming activists tremble as Trump administration reviews their work

9:09 am

This could be a victory: The science journal Nature today published a story, entitled “Fears rise as Trump officials take reins on US climate assessment”, which described the terror that is spreading through the global warming climate field because the Trump administration is bringing in skeptical scientists to review the work done by these government scientists.

Many climate scientists are particularly uneasy about the potential for interference by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), one of 13 agencies that must approve the science report before its expected release in November. EPA administrator Scott Pruitt, who rejects well-established climate science, has raised the possibility of organizing an adversarial ‘red team–blue team’ review of such research. And he has help from the Heartland Institute, a think tank in Chicago, Illinois, that promotes scepticism about climate change.

“We can’t allow science to be held hostage,” says Donald Wuebbles, a climate scientist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and co-chair of the report. “I’m hopeful it won’t get to that, because it would look really bad for the administration to fight this.”

Well, ain’t that just too damn bad! This fake scientist seems to think that his work is so pure it shouldn’t be challenged or peer reviewed. The Nature article at the link is itself an example of fake news, as the author never bothered to interview anyone from the Trump administration, or quote or name any of the skeptical scientists doing the reviewing, something that any good journalist specializing in this field should have no trouble identifying. Had he, he might have found the skepticism reasonable. In fact, the scientific method is founded on skepticism. To believe that your work should never be questioned only proves that you aren’t really a scientist at all.

Be prepared for a lot of squealing when these reviewers step in and request that this climate assessment get reworked to remove any global warming propaganda from it.

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Trump fires chief of staff Priebus

9:31 pm

Change! President Trump has replaced his chief of staff Reince Priebus.

The article gives two basic reasons. First, Priebus was there to help Trump get his legislative agenda passed. The failure to pass any Obamcare repeal was laid at his doorstep. Second, it appears that Priebus is suspected of being the source for many of the leaks that have plagued the Trump administration.

Priebus’s removal as well as Sean Spicer’s last week removes two prominent inside-the-beltway Republicans from the Trump White House.

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John McCain, Liar

12:55 pm

In commenting about the failure yesterday by Senate Republicans to pass a trimmed down version of an Obamcare repeal by a vote of 49-51, Ted Cruz (R-Texas) has this to say:

There are going be a great many Americans who tonight feel a sense of betrayal. …If you stand up and campaign and say we are going to repeal Obamacare and you vote for Obamacare, those are not consistent. And the American people are entirely justified in saying any politician who told me that and voted the other way didn’t tell me the truth. They lied to me.

He then added:

“No party can remain in power by lying to the American people.”

Cruz is right, but only partly. The entire Republican Party did not lie to its voters. Instead, a small contingent of fake Republicans lied, led by John McCain, king liar and the most likely person to stab a friend in the back I have ever seen.
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North Korea launches another ballistic missile

9:58 am

Does this make you feel safer? North Korea today launched another ballistic missile.

Not much is known about the rocket or the launch. My overall impression however is that North Korea is refining its approach to the launch of these rockets. Several years ago they would blast away, with no sense of rhyme or reason, often following up one failed launch with another almost immediately. Sometimes they would even try to launch a bunch of rockets in one day. To me these earlier launches suggested a mindless attempt at bravado, with little serious interest at improving the technology.

Now their launches seem to have a more measured cadence, as if they are properly treating each launch as an engineering test. They then review their results, apply them, and try again.

If so, we have much more to fear from their effort to develop rockets and nuclear bombs.

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