NASA has produced retro-style travel posters for three alien exoplanets which you can download and print.
The posters are quite cool, which is not surprising, considering that, in the past four decades, the best interplanetary travel that NASA has been able to achieve has been its graphic power-point and pr images. Unfortunately, for NASA actually going there has not been so easy.
Note that the Times has had no reluctance to show images that are as equally offensive to its Christian and Jewish readers. I wonder why the Muslims get this special treatment?
Meanwhile, representatives of the religion of peace have now taken hostages, both in a factory near Charles De Gaulle Airport as well as in a kosher grocery store in Paris.
Update: It appears both hostage situations have ended.
The religion of peace: A new assessment of Christian persecution worldwide has found that of the top ten most religiously oppressive nations nine are Islamic.
North Korea tops the list, but the rest are all countries where the majority of the population is Muslim. The report also found that “Islamic extremism is the main source of persecution in 40 of the 50 countries on the 2015 World Watch List.”
I wonder what these facts tell us? Anyone care to venture a guess? Maybe we should condemn Israel for this oppression? Yeah, that makes sense!
SpaceX and NASA have now rescheduled the Falcon 9/Dragon launch to ISS for Saturday morning at 4:47 am Eastern.
I am wondering if lack of light is going to effect the effort to vertically land the first stage.
The GAO has ruled against Sierra Nevada’s protest of NASA’s decision to pick Boeing for its manned spacecraft decision.
The ruling is not really a surprise. Even if political considerations gave Boeing an unfair advantage, the space agency has enough legal leeway to make this decision as it did. The GAO recognized that it would be inappropriate to overrule them.
Having lost its case before the World Trade Organization China has lifted the limits it had placed on the export of rare earth minerals back in 2009.
Because of low costs, China produces about 90% of all rare earths worldwide, needed for most high tech electronics. This decision eases a concern that has existed now for better part of a half decade.
Finding out what’s in it: Beginning in 2015 employers of more than fifty employees will begin to pay penalties if they do not provide healthcare in precisely the amount and quality as required by Obamacare.
I challenge anyone who reads the article above to tell me exactly what those Obamacare requirements are. They are so complicated and obtuse that no one can easily decipher them. In other words, employers are going to be under increasing pressure — pressure they have already been under for the past four years — to reduce their workforce below 50 to avoid Obamacare.
Should do wonders for the economy, eh?
Link here.
He lists the innumerable examples in 2014 of blatant liberal hypocrisy, and then notes what to me has become the obvious:
What looks like inexplicably staggering hypocrisy from the conservative perspective is actually remarkably consistent from the liberal perspective.
Well, “perspective” is probably the wrong word because it implies a conscious, deliberate, philosophical point of view. What is really at work is better understood as bias, even bigotry.
If you work from the dogmatic assumption that liberalism is morally infallible and that liberals are, by definition, pitted against sinister and — more importantly — powerful forces, then it’s easy to explain away what seem like double standards. Any lapse, error, or transgression by conservatives is evidence of their real nature, while similar lapses, errors, and transgressions by liberals are trivial when balanced against the fact that their hearts are in the right place.
Link here. The author nails it, noting that many of the arrests the cops have stopped doing were probably nothing more than the harassment of citizens and did nothing to improve the city’s quality of life. The cops were doing it under orders of the government, which they are now defying.
The sad part is the police are not defying these orders because they object to the policies, but because they object to the mayor.
Link here.
It is frightening that 6 of the 8 resolutions begin with the words “Stop lying…” while the other two begin “Stop tampering…” and “Stop making up…” In fact, the last is probably the most disgusting, as the data shown at the link demonstrates the fraud in the climate field in as clear-cut a manner as possible.
Link here.
The most absurd is probably #3, where a kindergarten program was cancelled to give the kids more time for college prep.
Read it all. It will help convince you to home school your kids.
In a virtual work stoppage, New York cops have ceased issuing citations for traffic offenses, parking, and other low level drug offenses.
Angry union leaders have ordered drastic measures for their members since the Dec. 20 assassination of two NYPD cops in a patrol car, including that two units respond to every call. It has helped contribute to a nose dive in low-level policing, with overall arrests down 66 percent for the week starting Dec. 22 compared with the same period in 2013, stats show. Citations for traffic violations fell by 94 percent, from 10,069 to 587, during that time frame. Summonses for low-level offenses like public drinking and urination also plunged 94 percent — from 4,831 to 300. Even parking violations are way down, dropping by 92 percent, from 14,699 to 1,241. Drug arrests by cops assigned to the NYPD’s Organized Crime Control Bureau — which are part of the overall number — dropped by 84 percent, from 382 to 63.
I see this as a true improvement to the quality of life for the average New Yorker. It isn’t the murders by police that make life hell in New York, but the constant harassment by police for doing the most minor things wrong. In fact, it is these kinds of offenses that probably cause the most friction between citizens and the police.
Serving the taxpayer: Federal employees given charge cards that allow them to buy things freely wasted millions of dollars in unauthorized or improper purchases, according to an inspector general report.
Government purchase cards are intended to be used only for purchases of approved merchandise under $3,000. Southern Command employees used the cards improperly nearly 6,000 times at a cost of $5.1 million, according to a Department of Defense inspector general report. Another $160,000 was spent on an estimated 3,500 unnecessary gifts in the years since 2010, often just days before the government’s fiscal years ended. The items remained in storage at least three years. “The wasteful expenditures could have been put to use in other operational areas and are considered abusive use of the [purchase cards],” the IG said.
Not surprisingly, government officials disagreed with the report, even as they admitted there was nothing factually wrong with it.
Despite the clear misuse of taxpayer dollars, DOD officials disagreed with the IG’s recommendations for tighter management. Southern Command’s chief of staff told the IG “he was unaware of unnecessary gifts in the gift locker.”
The federal government is entirely out of control, and needs to be reined in aggressively. Many people who work there need to be fired. Some need to go to prison for theft. Until that happens, it will continue to suffocate our society with its crippling overspending and increased debt.
Finding out what’s in it: Based on how the law was written, the Obamacare penalties for not having insurance will jump significantly in the next two years, going from trivial to serious.
The fines for the 2014 year were relatively modest — $95 per person or 1 percent of household income (above the threshold for filing taxes), whichever is more. But insurance scofflaws face a sharp increase if they don’t get covered soon. The fine will jump in 2015 to $325 or 2 percent of income, whichever is higher. By 2016, the average fine will be about $1,100, based on government figures.
But don’t worry, that’s not all. The law is also going to impact small businesses badly in 2015.
So, explain to me again why you voted for the Democrats who created this law?
The competition heats up: In an interview today Russia’s deputy prime minister said that the construction of Vostochny is back on schedule and should be completed as planned in July.
The Proton rocket which had its launch delayed several weeks in order to repair a faulty gyroscope successfully placed a commercial satellite in orbit today.
Earlier this week there were also two successful Soyuz rockets. For Russia’s aerospace industry, 2014 has definitely ended the year on an up note.
Link here.
I dare my liberal readers to come up with a comparable list of conservative intolerance this past year. If they do, I will gladly highlight such behavior also, as fascism from either camp is unacceptable.
However, I have serious doubts liberals can find as many examples of the right squelching freedom of speech in 2014 with the same gusto as shown by the left this past year.
Pigs fly: Vermont’s very leftwing Democratic Governor actually canceled his attempt to take over the state’s healthcare system when his experts told him how expensive it was.
Mr. Shumlin ran in 2010 on an explicit single-payer platform in the most liberal state east of California, and the plan was conceived as a model for other states. … Under the Vermont plan, all 625,000 state residents were to be automatically enrolled in the government plan, with the same benefits for all. As with Medicare, employers would be subject to a payroll tax that would reduce wages, and workers would pay a premium based on a sliding income scale.
… The state accountants estimated that his plan required an 11.5% tax on worker payroll, with no exceptions. Individuals, meanwhile, would have paid as much as 9.5% of earnings, which would have applied to everyone making more than four times the poverty level, or $102,220 for a family of four—hardly the 1%. The full $2.59 billion in necessary funding would roughly double current state revenues (about $2.85 billion today).
…His ideological comrades are rarely dissuaded by the prospect of economic damage, as ObamaCare proves. But Mr. Shumlin has succeeded in making Vermont a national model: By admitting that single payer will make health care both more expensive and less efficient, he has shown other states what not to do. [emphasis mine]
As the highlighted text notes, Democrats routinely ignore what experts tell them about the cost of their proposals, being gladly willing to bankrupt everyone else in order to impose their ideological fantasies on us. (I exclude them because the costs of their proposals are never born by them but by others.)
Governor Shumlin’s decision to abandon his plan thus makes him a rare exception that proves the rule. If only more Democrats had this much contact with reality.
More climate fraud: NOAA scientists deliberately excluded huge swathes of the ocean acid dataset going back 100 years in order to create the false impression that there has been an increase in ocean acid due to increased CO2. More details here.
How did they do it? They cherry-picked when their dataset would begin, in 1988, rather than using the full dataset beginning in 1920. In addition, they also only used computer models that showed this correlation.
Below the fold I have posted the 2004 graph, produced by these so-called scientists, above a graph using the full dataset of real data. You will see that that the 2004 graph is utter crap.
» Read more
Finding out what’s in it: Required by Obamacare to convert all health records into electronic files, those records are now very vulnerable and experts expect hackers to target them in the coming years.
Electronic records have their advantages, no doubt, but the way this conversion was shoved down the throat of both doctors and patients, by Obamacare, has left everyone exposed. Rather than give the professionals in the field the time to make the conversion when practical, convenient, and affordable, Obamacare demanded it be done now, even though many health organizations and doctors were simply not prepared to make the change.
