Tag: oppression

Starship/Superheavy 2nd test launch likely delayed until next year by federal bureaucracy and White House

9:52 am

Starship stacked on Superheavy, September 5, 2023
Starship stacked on Superheavy, September 5, 2023,
when Elon Musk said it was ready for launch

They’re coming for you next: While answering questions from reporters at a conference yesterday on when SpaceX might get its next Starship/Superheavy launch license, FAA acting chief Polly Trottenberg said she hoped that license will be awarded by October, but then slipped in one minor additional detail that had not previously mentioned or required:

SpaceX would still need a separate environmental approval from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service before a launch. Trottenberg did not say how long that might take.

Not surprisingly, the story from Reuters buries this detail, spinning the story to make it seem that the FAA is eager to help SpaceX launch. Similarly, this NasaSpaceFlight.com story (a space news outlet which has also tried to spin things to make the delays appear the fault of SpaceX) fails to even mention this detail.

SpaceX is now destacking Starship from Superheavy (live stream here).

I predicted in the spring that intransigence from the federal bureaucracy, controlled by the Biden administration, would likely delay this launch well past August, and likely into next year. I also said I would be thrilled if my cynical prediction turned out to be wrong.

Sadly, it looks like that prediction will be correct, and in fact might have actually been conservative. » Read more

24 comments

Pushback: The momentum builds against the Marxist American Library Association

12:20 pm

Emily Drabinski, now president of the ALA, proudly Marxist and queer
Emily Drabinski, president of the ALA and proudly
Marxist and queer

Bring a gun to a knife fight: Back in July I reported how the library commission of Montana had decided to withdraw its support from and membership in the American Library Association (ALA), not only because of the Marxist agenda being pushed by its new president, Emily Drabinski, but because of the ALA’s aggressive effort to insert pornography in school libraries.

At the time I wrote this:

[I]f more local library organizations followed through as Montana has, the ALA might finally feel the pinch and rethink its policies. Or if it didn’t, it would justify these libraries leaving its fold, as it does not represent them.

Since then there has been a rising flood of other states moving to break free from the ALA. In July, almost immediately after the decision in Montana, the secretary of state of Missouri, who oversees the Missouri State library, withdrew from the ALA, citing the organization’s public effort — pushed under Drabinski’s leadership — to block a “faith-based publisher from holding story hours in libraries.”
» Read more

14 comments

Real pushback: Defiance from all sides to New Mexico’s unlawful suspension of the 2nd amendment

1:27 pm

Michelle Lujan Grisham

When New Mexico’s Democratic Party governor Michelle Lujan Grisham suddenly declared on September 8, 2023 that she was unilaterally suspending the second amendment by outlawing for 30 days the right to carry firearms by any citizens in Albuquerque and its surrounding Bernalillo county, no one should have been surprised.

All Grisham was doing was following the many precedents set during the COVID epidemic, where nationwide governors routinely made unilateral and unlawful declarations violating the Constitutional rights of citizens, with no pushback at all. Grisham was merely following those precedents. To her, it was now okay for a governor to routinely declare a “health emergency” for any reason under the sun (in this case the violent shooting death of an innocent eleven-year-old boy), and declare any law she didn’t like to be null and void.

Grisham was simply demonstrating forcefully the worst lessons learned from the COVID panic. It taught power-hungry politicians that they could get away with any abuse of power they conceived, as long as they dressed that power grab as part of some sort of “health emergency.”

You see, power is very habit-forming, and when you find you suffer no pain for abusing it it is then very easy to abuse it again, and again and again.

The response to Grisham’s unlawful abuse of power however suggested strongly that things are no longer going to follow the script of the COVID panic, when the public meekly went along. Instead, the uproar in the past three days has been astonishing, not so much from the ordinary citizens defying the ban, but from politicians and pundits from across the entire political spectrum.
» Read more

20 comments

The actual truth behind the so-called “hidden figures” of the early space race

9:57 am

It is Monday, and thus the news in the morning is somewhat slim. With this in mind I offer my readers some worthwhile history, a long review dubbed “The Portrayal of Early Manned Spaceflight in Hidden Figures: A Critique. The actual review is available here [pdf].

The review uses primary source material, the actual words of the engineers and managers who worked next to black mathematician Katherine Johnson at NASA in the 1960s (both new and old writings and interviews), assessing the historical accuracy of Margot Shetterly’s book Hidden Figures, which essentially claimed that Johnson was a central figure making possible the entire American effort land on the Moon, and whose credit was purposely squelched because she was black, and a woman.

Not surprisingly, you will find that claim to be absurdly false. Not only was Johnson only one of many who did the work, she was treated then fairly and with respect. If anything, her place at NASA was proof that the agency was a forceful part of the civil rights movement, working to give qualified people of all races a fair chance.

Thus, the effort of modern leftist revisionists, led by Barack Obama when he gave Johnson the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015, to smear America and NASA in the 1960s as racist and bigoted in supposedly suppressing Johnson’s participation is not only unfair, it is an outright lie. If anything, her magnification to star status by today’s politicians, historians, and the entertainment industry has acted to discredit the work done by the many others who worked side-by-side with her, as co-workers.

If you’ve got the time, read the critique. It will not only teach you something about the behind the scenes effort that made the lunar landing possible, it will help you recognize the bigoted dishonesty that is so rampant in today’s intellectual and political culture.

Hat tip to reader Chris Dorsey for letting me know of this review.

6 comments

Today’s blacklisted American: Law professor fired and escorted by police off campus for being conservative

1:29 pm

Law professor Scott Gerber
Law professor Scott Gerber

They’re coming for you next: In an ugly act of outright thuggery, Ohio Northern University (ONU) recently fired tenured law professor Scott Gerber, without any standard due process as required by its own procedures, and did so by having the campus police arrive unannouced in his classroom to escort him off campus.

As Gerber recounts, “Around 1 p.m on Friday, April 14, Ohio Northern University campus security officers entered my classroom with my students present and escorted me to the dean’s office. Armed town police followed me down the hall. My students appeared shocked and frightened. I know I was.”

Gerber was not given any concrete reasons after being told that he was being banned from campus, other than his lack of “collegiality.” He was directed to sign a separation agreement.

The reason for Gerber’s firing however appears quite obvious if you want to look. The university did not like his uncompromising and public opposition to ONU’s racist Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion policies, which focus solely on favoring minorities in hiring and admissions while working to eliminate and remove any opposition to those racist policies. As he wrote in an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal:
» Read more

18 comments

Good news? FAA issues own report on April Starship/Superheavy launch

11:30 am

The FAA today closed out its own investigation into the April test launch failure of SpaceX’s Starship/Superheavy rocket, stating that it found “63 corrective actions SpaceX must take” before another launch license will be issued.

Corrective actions include redesigns of vehicle hardware to prevent leaks and fires, redesign of the launch pad to increase its robustness, incorporation of additional reviews in the design process, additional analysis and testing of safety critical systems and components including the Autonomous Flight Safety System, and the application of additional change control practices.

It is not clear how many of these corrections have already been completed by SpaceX. The FAA made it clear however that it does not yet consider its requirements to have been met.

The closure of the mishap investigation does not signal an immediate resumption of Starship launches at Boca Chica. SpaceX must implement all corrective actions that impact public safety and apply for and receive a license modification from the FAA that addresses all safety, environmental and other applicable regulatory requirements prior to the next Starship launch.

The timeline suggests FAA is demanding additional actions from SpaceX. The company submitted its own investigation report to the FAA on August 16th. The FAA then spent almost a month reviewing it, during which it almost certainly decided some of SpaceX’s corrections were insufficient. It has now followed up with its own report, listing additional actions required.

Remember, no one at the FAA is qualified or even in a position to do a real investigation. They are simply acting as a chess kibitzer on the sidelines, making annoying commentary based on less information than held by the players of the game (in this case SpaceX). Unlike a chess kibitzer, however, the FAA controls the board, and can force SpaceX to do its recommended moves, or declare the game forfeited by SpaceX.

If the FAA has required additional actions, we will find out in the next few days when SpaceX destacks Starship/Superheavy and rolls both back into the assembly building. It is also possible we instead shall have a few weeks of back-and-forth negotiations by phone, zoom, paper, and face-to-face meetings, whereby SpaceX engineers will be desperately trying to make FAA paper-pushers understand some of their engineering work which will eventually result in an agreement by the FAA to let SpaceX launch.

Remember, none of this kind of regulatory interference and investigation took place between SpaceX and the FAA during the Trump administration when SpaceX was flying a Starship suborbital test flight almost monthly. The heavy boot of regulation arrived soon after Biden. The two are closely linked.

16 comments

Senate approves Biden’s FCC nominee, giving him a Democrat majority on FCC

9:48 am

FCC: now controlled by Democrats
The FCC, now controlled by the
power-hungry Democratic Party

Failure theater: The Senate yesterday voted 55 to 43 to approve Biden’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC) nominee, Anna Gomez, thus giving the Democrats a 4 to 3 majority on the Commission.

This was Biden’s second nominee to the commission, with the first withdrawn when it was clear the Senate opposed the nominee.

Biden tried again in May with the nomination of Gomez, a State Department digital policy official who was previously deputy assistant secretary at the US National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) from 2009 to 2023. A lawyer, Gomez was vice president of government affairs at Sprint Nextel from 2006 to 2009 and before that spent about 12 years at the FCC in several roles.

Gomez got through the confirmation process with relative ease, though most Republicans voted against her. Both parties seem to expect the FCC to reinstate net neutrality rules now that Democrats will have a majority.

Imposing net neutrality is essentially socialism/communism for the internet. It will squash competition, cost a fortune, and eventually be used as well to squelch dissent online (which translates into silencing conservatives).

From the perspective of space, the majority on the FCC is likely very bad news as well, for several reasons. » Read more

One comment

Why are news organizations still asking advice from the COVID liars of 2020?

1:50 pm

Fauci: Washington's top liar
Anthony Fauci: Washington’s liar-in-chief

Two stories in the past week got some notice in the conservative press as it reported on the increasing ramp up of fear-mongering about a new COVID epidemic (coincidently timed to arrive just before the 2024 election) by politicians, health officials, and the mainstream press.

The first story produced a lot of coverage because it involved the embarrassing appearance of Anthony Fauci on CNN, who when challenged directly on the recent research that has found masks accomplish nothing (which by the way simply confirms decades of earlier research that told us the same thing) still claimed that masks worked, and that this evidence should be ignored. You can watch Fauci’s moment of tragic black comedy here. His key response is at best incoherent, and at worst an utter lie and a denial of plain facts.

“Yes, but there are other studies, Michael, that show at an individual level, for individual, when you’re talking about the effect on the epidemic or the pandemic as a whole, the data are less strong. But when you talk about as an individual basis of someone protecting themselves or protecting themselves from spreading it to others, there’s no doubt that there are many studies that show that there is an advantage. When you took it at the broad population level like the Cochrane study, the data are less firm with regard to the effect on the overall pandemic. But we’re not talking about that, we’re talking about an individual’s effect on their own safety. That’s a bit different than the broad population level.”

Fauci refers to the “many studies” proving his position, but of course he can’t name them because they don’t exist. Even during the worst of the Wuhan panic the few studies that came out claiming some efficacy of masks were all found to be weak or flawed or downright fraudulent. He also makes the patently stupid claim that masks still work on an individual level, even though he admits the evidence for more than a century shows they don’t work at all.

This is what Michael Cantrell at PJMedia had to say about Fauci’s rationalizations:
» Read more

11 comments

Starship and Superheavy: Ready for launch but still blocked by the White House

11:02 am

Starship stacked on Superheavy, September 5, 2023

Elon Musk yesterday tweeted a short video showing Starship prototype #25 as it was stacked on top of Superheavy prototype #9, stating that both were now ready for their orbital test launch, the second attempt by SpaceX to launch this new rocket.

The image to the right is a screen capture from that movie, showing the full rocket ready to go. When it will go however remains a complete unknown, as Musk himself noted in the tweet: “Starship is ready to launch, awaiting FAA license approval.”

In May I predicted that though Musk predicted at that time that SpaceX would be ready to do this launch in August, it would not happen then or likely for months afterward, because the FAA under the Biden administration is slow-walking all launch approvals for SpaceX, as I showed in detail in a later June essay.

It is now September. SpaceX didn’t meet Musk’s original August ready date for launch, but it only missed that target by about five days. And as I predicted, the FAA has also not yet approved the launch license.
» Read more

19 comments

The New York Times suddenly allows two scientists to admit the Big Bang theory might be wrong

9:09 am

Modern science
Modern science

The refusal by many in the scientific community to deny there is any uncertainty of science has been best illustrated for decades by the cosmologists who have put together the framework of the standard model for the creation of the universe, centered on the Big Bang, and their pitchmen in the mainstream press. Since the 1960s any skepticism of this model was generally treated as equivalent to believing in UFO’s, aliens, and the Face on Mars.

Thus, astronomers and astrophysicists did what necessary to protect their careers. Even if they had great doubts about the standard model and the Big Bang, they generally kept their mouths shut, saying nothing. Meanwhile, our increasingly corrupt press pushed this one explanation for the formation of the universe, treating the cosmologists who pushed it as Gods whose every word was equivalent of an oracle that must never be questioned.

This past weekend the New York Times suddenly admitted to the uncertainty surrounding the Big Bang, and for possibly the first time in decades allowed two scientists to write an op-ed that carefully outlined the problems with the standard model and the Big Bang theory, problems that have existed and been growing since the 1990s but have been poo-pooed as inconsequential and easily solved. Data from the Webb Space Telescope however has made that poo-pooing more and more difficult, as astrophysicists Adam Frank and Marcelo Gleiser make clear:
» Read more

17 comments

Real pushback: School district immediately cancels ban on prayer when threatened with lawsuit

1:27 pm

The First Amendment, becoming accepted once again
The First Amendment, becoming accepted once again

Bring a gun to a knife fight: When the officials at West Shore School District in Pennsylvania sent out a letter to the presidents of the various booster clubs at its schools ordering them to “halt prayers at future banquets, and at any other school-sponsored activity” and claiming falsely that “student-initiated prayers at school events are illegal,” two non-profit free speech legal firms, First Liberty and the Independence Law Center teamed up to immediately send a letter to the district challenging that order:

First Liberty and our friends at the Independence Law Center quickly sent a letter to district officials asking them to immediately rescind that threatening letter. Our legal team offered to help draft a new letter and policies to ensure the district would not illegally discriminate against students and staff.

We explained in our letter that the First Amendment prohibits a school district from acting in a hostile manner toward religious belief.

To my readers this story is familiar. What has normally happened next in the past few years — since censorship and blacklisting has become all the rage by those in power — is that the government officials either ignore the letter or publicly defy it. Sometimes they double down and actually fire someone for exercising their First Amendment rights. What follows next is of course a lawsuit, which almost routinely ends in a crushing defeat for the school that costs it significantly in damages.

This story however ended quite differently:
» Read more

7 comments

Pushback: Class action discrimination lawsuit filed against Gannett newspaper

1:34 pm

The Gannett logo abandoned in 2011
This Gannett logo was abandoned in 2011, for
one that eliminated any mention of equal employment.
We now know why.

“Segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!” In what is certainly going to the beginning of a wave of lawsuits, five current and former Gannett employees, all white, have filed a class action lawsuit against the company, claiming its quota policies instituted in 2020 following the death of George Floyd are racist and discriminatory, favoring minorities over whites simply because of their race.

In the lawsuit, plaintiff Steven Bradley says he was fired from a management job at the Democrat and Chronicle newspaper in Rochester, New York, and then passed over for a different position with Gannett because he is white. Bradley in April filed a similar lawsuit against Gannett in New York state court. The status of that case was unclear.

Another plaintiff, Logan Barry, says he was in line for promotion to a leadership position at the Progress-Index in Petersburg, Virginia. After Gannett acquired the newspaper in 2019, the job went to a Black woman with fewer qualifications, according to the lawsuit.

The plaintiffs accused Gannett of violating a federal law prohibiting race discrimination in contracts. They are seeking to require Gannett to eliminate the 2020 policy, along with lost pay and benefits and other money damages.

» Read more

3 comments

The utter ignorance of modern educators on proud display the last two days in Colorado

3:32 pm

Jaiden and school official
Click to watch the video

In the last few days a story about a 12-year-old boy who was banned from classes because he had a Gadsden flag sticker on his backpack has gone viral, with the school, The Vanguard School, forced to cancel its parents night because of the outrage.

School officials had claimed that the Gadsden flag was not allowed at the school because it had “its origins in slavery and the slave trade,” a false statement of such utter ignorance of American history it leaves anyone with any education breathless with astonishment. The picture to the right shows the student Jaiden reacting in bemused disbelief at the moment that school official (in the background) made this absurd claim. He clearly knows more about American history than this brainless school official.

Not surprisingly, the uproar quickly caused the school’s board of directors to call an emergency meeting in which they backed down, especially as Jaiden had said he intended to continue to come to classes with the sticker on his pack, and would even do a sit-in if they dared try to kick him out again.

My purpose in mentioning this story however is to show how it illustrates so completely the bankruptcy of our education system today. Educators simply do not know American history, even though they are the people we expect to teach it. And when that ignorance is discovered, as in this case, they can’t just admit error and apologize, they have to equivocate and add more lies to their foolishness.
» Read more

9 comments

Reviewing a book blacklisted by Amazon because it dared say things Amazon doesn’t like

1:35 pm

The Plague of Models, blacklisted by Amazon
The Plague of Models, blacklisted by Amazon

They’re coming for you next: Last week I posted an essay on the over-use and misuse of computer modeling in today’s scientific community, focused specifically on the unreliability of all climate models to successfully predict any actual climate trends.

One of the individuals who read my essay, Kenneth Green, immediately commented here on Behind the Black to note that he had just published a book on this very subject, entitled The Plague of Models: How Computer Modeling Corrupted Environmental, Health, and Safety Regulations, describing how the misuse of models has resulted in the proliferation of government regulations based not on actual data but on computer models that in many ways are nothing more than the opinions of the computer programs.

Green also noted that Amazon has refused to make his book available for sale, essentially banning it for no justifiable reason. As he explained to me in an email,

My publisher, who is a start-up small Canadian publisher specializing in public policy books, tried to upload The Plague of Models to Amazon, as he had previously done with half a dozen other books while working at previous institutions as in-house publisher.

This time, unlike his previous experiences, the book was taken down shortly after it was uploaded (and we know the upload process worked, since the book was available briefly for preview, so there was no technical issue with the manuscript file). The publisher got a form-letter email saying that the book had been taken down because it may have violated some (non-specific) Amazon Term of Service. When he sent a note back requesting clarification/appeal, he got another form letter, this one repeating that the book may have violated some term of service, and warning that any attempt to re-upload would get his entire account terminated.
» Read more

15 comments

Pushback: Court rules against East Lansing’s attempt to blacklist Christian for following his beliefs

1:38 pm

Country Mills Farms-banned!
The Tennes are a normal family! We must blacklist them!

They’re coming for you next: Today’s blacklist story is a follow-up on a August 2021 post, and is a victory, of a sort. As I reported then, after farmer Steve Tennes (shown to the right with his family) made the egregious error of stating his strongly held Christian belief that marriage is for a man and a woman only, and he would only rent his farm for such marriages, and not same-sex marriages, the city government of East Lansing decided to specifically write rules that would ban his farm from participating in its local farmer’s market.

The ban against their business, Country Mill Farms, was begun in 2016. Though a court quickly ruled that it was unconstitutional, the city renewed the ban in 2018 and has maintained it since, claiming the court’s ruling only applied to the 2017 season.

The logic of the East Lansing government is actually quite blatent: It believes it has the right to dictate what others can or cannot say in public, the first amendment be damned.

The city’s new rules quite clearly stated it was illegal for anyone to “make a statement which indicates that an individual’s patronage or presence at a place of public accommodation is unwelcome or unacceptable because of sexual orientation, gender identity, or expression.” You essentially had to agree to its queer agenda policies in all things, even if you were not in East Lansing or were doing business in a farm many miles away. And you better not express any dissent to those policies either!
» Read more

6 comments

Bank of America blacklists Christian nonprofit for what appears to be political reasons

12:38 pm

Bank of America-eager to blacklist

They’re coming for you next: Despite operating two different bank accounts without problems since 2015, Bank of America suddenly shut down the bank accounts of the Christian charitable non-profit Indigenous Advanced Ministries in April 2023, with the bank’s letters announcing the shut down [pdf] exceedingly vague but suggesting that politics played a part.

The initial letters gave no specific reason for the closures, only stating that “upon review of your account(s), we have determined you’re operating in a business type we have chosen not to service at Bank of America.” A later letter said, without explanation, that Indigenous Advance “no longer aligns with the bank’s risk tolerance.” The nonprofit does not advocate for any political causes and has maintained the same mission since it first opened its account with Bank of America.

Officials of the non-profit suspect hostility to its mission was the reason for the cancellations, however, and they have filed a consumer complaint [pdf] against Bank of America with Tennessee’s attorney general, demanding an investigation and noting that the sudden nature of the bank’s action caused a great deal of disruption and the non-profit.
» Read more

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Update on ESA’s much delayed Space Rider X-37B copy

10:34 am

Link here. Space Rider is essentially aiming to be another re-usable mini-shuttle like the X-37B and the unnamed classified version from China. While all three are government-owned and government-run, the X-37B and China’s both were built expressly to do military classified missions. There has been no effort in either case to make them available for commercial flights.

The European Space Agency (ESA) however is developing Space Rider instead for commercial customers. It also appears the government-owned and government-run nature of Space Rider is one of the main reasons it will not fly its maiden mission this year, and won’t fly until late 2025, at the earliest.

“As an outcome of the previous ministerial council of 2019, the Space Rider received quite significant financial support to cope with Phase C and D activities. However, the participating states contributed in a way that was not possible — due to the need to comply with the Geo-return mechanism — to keep the industrial consortium as it was operating up to that moment [end-2019],” Galli said.

ESA’s Geo-return mechanism was established to boost fairness among member states, ensuring that the nations that invest in the agency will generate a “fair return.” In a nutshell, participating states in an optional development program should receive industrial contracts in a proportional way with respect to their contribution to that program to ensure that money invested benefits the countries that actually contributed to that program. That is to say for example, if you put 30% of the funds into the program, you are expected to receive as close as possible to industrial contracts accounting for 30% of the overall program.

As the program must abide by the Geo-return mechanism, Galli explained that the initial consortium involved was required to significantly be rebuilt “in compliance with the available funds and their member state relevant origin. … This caused first a not negligible delay in setting up the new industrial consortium… that was finally concluded only in late 2020 with the signature of the new contract with the prime contractors. And then, a so-called bridging design phase was needed on the subsystems affected by the change of industrial supplier, resulting in a longer-than-expected completion of the design phase.

In other words, Space Rider can’t just sell payload space to anyone. Only private businesses in those nations who help finance it can bid, and the customers don’t match well with the ESA’s nations that had been doling up the money. The consequence apparently has been a lot of complex negotiations and jury-rigging to make the two match, all of which has nothing to do with producing a viable product that makes money.

12 comments

Reality strikes: Democrats in Democratically-controlled cities complain about the consequences of Democratic Party policies

1:34 pm

The Democratic Party, always failing but always voted for
The Democratic Party, though always failing it remains
the only party the voters in these cities can support

You get what you vote for: The utter disaster of the Marxist policies of the modern radical Democratic Party are now coming home to roost in numerous cities across America, making them all increasingly “unlivable” in ways that are savage, violent, and devastating. Crime is up, shoplifting is now a sports event, and murderers go free while local prosecutors indict ordinary citizens for simply defending themselves.

These facts are not news however. Since the 1960s Democratic Party policies have routinely done damage to the livability of American cities. What makes this collapse in civilization now even more significant however is who is noticing, as shown by three recent articles in the past week.

Let’s start with Minneapolis, where numerous videos document a formerly pleasant midwest city that has now become a hellhole.
» Read more

26 comments

SpaceX completes successful 6-second static fire test of Superheavy

11:28 am

screen capture during static fire test
Screen capture during static fire test

SpaceX today successfully completed a full 5-second static fire test of all 33 Superheavy Raptor-2 engines as well as the deluge system of the launchpad at Boca Chica.

The link goes to the live stream, which is still on-going. The static fire test occurs at about 42 minutes, if you wish to see it.

According to the narrators of the live stream, Elon Musk tweeted that the static fire was a success. It certainly appeared to go for the full five seconds, and it certainly appeared more robust than the previous test. We will have to wait however for confirmation that all 33 engines fired as planned.

The company clearly appears just about ready to do an orbital test flight. Too bad the Biden administration still stands in the way. There is yet no word on when the FAA will approve a launch license, and the decision of the Justice Department yesterday to file a bogus discrimination lawsuit against SpaceX strongly suggests the White House is working hard to figure out ways to squelch this private effort by an American citizen and his company.

Hat tip to Jay, BtB’s stringer.

32 comments

Today’s blacklisted American: Real estate company fires a mother for expressing her opinions

3:43 pm

Janet Roberson and her family
Janet Roberson and her family

They’re coming for you next: A California mother of three, Janet Roberson, was fired only days after she stood up at her local school board and objected to the queer curriculum the board was forcing on young children. This is what she had said:

Janet Roberson spoke at a Benicia Unified School District (BUSD) meeting on April 20, where she expressed concerns about the district’s sexual education curriculum that she said taught “gender confusion, not gender clarification” because it told 10-year-old students they could choose their own gender and receive puberty blockers. She said teaching “vulnerable children that lifetime dependence on medical care is a viable option is completely unacceptable and evil.”

“Children are being asked to identify their pronouns and this is now part of the ten-year-old curriculum,” Roberson said of the curriculum. “This forces a gender discussion beyond the scope of the state requirements and complicates an already overburdened classroom environment.”
» Read more

8 comments

Biden’s Justice Department sues SpaceX

9:51 am

The corrupt and very partisan Justice Department of the Biden administration today sued SpaceX for discriminating against refugees and illegal immigrants because it restricts hiring to “U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents.”

The lawsuit states SpaceX “failed to fairly consider” and “refused to hire” the asylees and refugees who ended up applying anyway. It also alleges that SpaceX “wrongly claimed” that the US’s export control laws allowed it to only hire US citizens and lawful residents. Additionally, the DOJ claims SpaceX hired “only” US citizens and green card holders from September 2018 to September 2020.

“Our investigation found that SpaceX failed to fairly consider or hire asylees and refugees because of their citizenship status and imposed what amounted to a ban on their hire regardless of their qualification, in violation of federal law,” Kristen Clarke, the assistant attorney general of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, says in a statement.

Justice is demanding compensation and back pay for anyone “deterred or denied employment”, as well as civil penalties.

This suit is utter garbage and puts SpaceX between a rock and a hard place. I guarantee if SpaceX had hired any illegal or refugee who was not yet a legal citizen, Biden’s State Department would have immediately sued it for violating other laws relating to ITAR (the export control laws mentioned) which try to prevent the theft of technology by foreign powers.

The Biden administration considers Elon Musk an opponent, and since it is now moving to indict and even imprison all political opposition, it is no surprise it is beginning to use lawfare against him. As I have written repeatedly, it has almost certainly pressured the FAA to slow walk any launch license approvals for SpaceX’s Starship/Superheavy. This lawsuit today simply provides further evidence that my prediction will be right that the next orbital test flight of that rocket will be delayed months.

34 comments

Blacklisted 12-year-old appeals lower court decision saying he has no free speech rights

1:18 pm

The shirt that offended teachers at Nichols Middle School
Liam Morrison, wearing the evil shirt that he wore the
second time teachers at Nichols Middle School sent
him home.

Bring a gun to a knife fight: Today’s blacklist story is a follow-up from May. At that time 12-year-old Liam Morrison had discovered that his school, Nichols Middle School in Middleborough, Massachusetts, would not allow him to wear a shirt that said “There are only two genders,” and when he tried to return to school with a shirt that instead said “There are only censored genders,” he was sent home again.

Morrison and his parents enlisted the non-profit legal firm Alliance Defending Freedom to sue for his first amendment rights, but in June Judge Indira Talwani (appointed by Barack Obama) ruled that Morrison had no right to the first amendment, that his shirt infringed other “students’ rights to be ‘secure and to be let alone’ during the school day.”

You can read her convoluted ruling here [pdf], which required her to ignore numerous previous Supreme Court rulings that have specifically protected student speech exactly like Morrison’s. Moreover, her decision is also based on the fraudulent premise that people are supposed to be protected from speech that offends them. If people have the power to silence any speech because it hurts their feelings then no free speech exists at all. We will live in a totalitarian nightmare worse than anything dreamed up by George Orwell.
» Read more

8 comments

I will NOT wear a mask, part two

5:16 pm

Here we go again! When the first panic over COVID arrived in 2020 and government thugs and their leftist minions in the culture began demanding that everyone wear a mask, I wrote the following:

It apparently has not been enough that they have successfully destroyed a thriving economy, put millions out of work, destroyed the airline, entertainment, sports, and restaurant industries, over a disease that, at best is nothing more than a slight blip in the overall death rate, and at worst will be comparable to similar past epidemics that we lived through without government-imposed panic or economic disaster.

No, destroying millions of lives has not been enough. They need to do more. They need to find more ways to squelch our freedom, nullify the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and, to paraphrase Orwell, stamp a boot down on our faces, forever.

And in this case, they mean to do this, almost literally.

They are now beginning to demand that we wear masks at all times in public, in the mindless and stupid belief that this will somehow stop COVID-19 from spreading.

I also declared unequivocally that I would not wear a mask, “and if you demand it of me you will have a revolution on your hands.”
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It is time to devalue the software research of climate models

1:29 pm

When the table of contents of the most recent issue of the American Geophysical Union’s (AGU) Geophysical Research Letters was released on August 16, 2023, I could not help noticing it contained a string of papers repeatedly showing that the models used to prove the coming fire of global warming continue to remain untrustworthy and unreliable. All of the following papers indicated biases and uncertainties of both climate models as well as the data they used, and each did so in their titles:

All of these papers considered the models valid for future research, and were instead focused on refining and increasing the accuracy of the models. All however showed once again how little we should trust these models.

What makes the publication of these papers significant is that it was the AGU that published them, even though the AGU has a decidedly biased editorial policy in favor of global warming. Despite the AGU’s insistence that “realistic and continually improving computer simulations of the global climate predict that global temperatures will continue to rise as a result of past and future greenhouse gas emissions,” it still cannot avoid publishing papers that repeatedly disprove that conclusion.
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Movies when our culture was not run by barbarians

2:58 pm

Today’s essay will in a sense be part two of an essay I wrote earlier this week, entitled “We are becoming a nation of barbarians”. Then, I tried to show the decay in the western civilization by describing the accepted — almost encouraged — crudeness of modern language. While public cursing could easily be consider only a small and trivial issue, I think the increased use of obscene language in normal discourse is equivalent to the “broken windows theory” of psychology, which posits that minor visible signs of disorder and misbehavior encourage further and worse disorder and misbehavior, eventually leading to collapse.

Today I’d like to instead give some examples of the much more civilized nature of popular entertainment from only a half century ago, in order to contrast this with the present. To do this I will cite just four movie examples, and challenge everyone today who is a passionate fan of modern films to watch them (all of which are available for free on the internet) and recognize the differences that I will describe. If you like movies, you will enjoy the experience, but I warn you, modern popular entertainment films do not compare well with these mid-twentieth century pop movies.
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Regulatory problems for Saxavord spaceport in Shetland?

9:53 am

In a short statement reported in the local Shetland press, the under-construction Saxavord spaceport in Scotland has apparently laid off some construction workers, claiming it has done so “because the project was so far ahead of schedule.”

The statement however also alluded to the United Kingdom’s Civil Aviation Authority (CAA), which must issue a launch license before any launches can occur.

SaxaVord Spaceport said: “SaxaVord continues to have excellent dialogue with the authorities and is fully expecting to receiving its spaceport licence very soon from the Civil Aviation Authority. We are looking forward to hosting vertical rocket launches in the coming months.”

The application for this launch license was submitted in November 2022. It appears that the CAA still needs a year or more to approve any launch license, a slow and endless process that if not corrected will make launches from the United Kingdom completely unprofitable.

Saxavord had hoped to get its first launch off this year, by fall. It now appears that will not happen.

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Commercial spaceport in Australia signs its first launch contract

9:42 am

Australia map showing ELA spaceport location
The red dot marks ELA’s location, on the north coast of Australia.

Australia’s first commercial spaceport, Equatorial Launch Australia (ELA), has signed a multi-launch contract with a South Korean startup rocket company, Innospace, with the first launch targeting April 2025.

Though Innospace successfully launched a suborbital test flight in March, it has not yet launched a rocket to orbit. Meanwhile, ELA is negotiating with a number of other rocket companies, but it also appears it is having problems with the administrative state in the U.S.

The South Korean company is first off the blocks as it is not subject to the strict technological transfer regulations applied by the United States.

[ELA’s CEO Michael] Jones says delays to the signing of a Technological Safeguards Agreement (TSA) between Canberra and Washington is holding up several potential US customers. “We’re still waiting with bated breath for the TSA, despite a bilateral announcement by Biden and Albanese in Japan in early June that the deal was done and dusted,” he explains. “We were all expecting it to be released by the end of the financial year and the process of being endorsed by Parliament begun”.

A pattern of delay and intransigence in Washington, blocking commercial space, does seem to be developing since Joe Biden took over as president.

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Today’s blacklisted American: California city harasses Rabbi for having guests over for dinner

1:20 pm

Beverly Hills: Where Jews are forbidden to pray
Beverly Hills: Where Jews are forbidden to pray

They’re coming for you next: The headline above is literally true, though you need to know a bit about Judaism, especially Orthodox Judaism, to understand what I mean exactly.

The story is this: Because Rabbi Levi Illulian, like all Orthodox Jews, routinely invites friends and acquaintances to join his family for Friday night dinner and Saturday lunch at his home during the weekly Saturday Sabbath, officials in Beverly Hills in California sent him a “notice of violation” on June 12, 2023, telling him that these dinners must cease, and ordered him to “terminate all religious activities” that included any “non-residents.” It also threatened him with civil and criminal proceedings if he didn’t stop praying with friends in his home.

It appears that the city’s actions were instigated by the complaints of one unnamed neighbor. As described in the letter [pdf] sent by Illulian’s lawyers to the city in response to its notice of violation, after receiving those two complaints in February and March about parking, trash, and noise, the city instituted an investigation that involved stake-outs of Illulian’s home and the use of drones over his property (without a warrant) in which city officials “not only tallied the number of individuals and cars coming and going from the Home, but also photographed Rabbi Illulian’s guests.”
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Two-thirds of all approved cancer drugs do nothing for patients

4:26 pm

A long term study in Sweden of 22 cancer drugs that its government had approved for rapid use before being tested fully has found that two-thirds provided absolute no benefit to patients.

The Gothenburg team examined 22 cancer drugs approved for reimbursement in Sweden over the last 10 years, examining studies that tested their ability to improve quality of life or lengthen lifespans. On average, these reports examined the drugs for 6.6 years.

Results revealed only seven of the 22 drugs had at least one study which showed a clear benefit for cancer patients. Randomized controlled trials on the other 15 failed to show any tangible benefits for people with cancer. Only one drug in the study showed an ability to both improve the quality of life and extend lifespans for patients.

“We have shown that the majority of the drugs launched with limited evidence still lack clear evidence of how they actually affect survival and quality of life in patients,” says Gabriella Chauca Strand, a doctoral student at Sahlgrenska Academy at the University of Gothenburg and the lead author of the study, in a university release.

This sentence from the university’s press release was even more striking:

Only one of the drugs had scientific evidence of both increased life expectancy and improved quality of life for its indication.

Essentially, 95% of these approved drugs were failures. Most did nothing and were worthless, despite the Swedish government paying huge amounts of money buying them. A few either improved the quality of life (but failed to keep the patient alive) or kept the patient alive longer (but made their lives miserable).

Does this sound familiar? Doesn’t make you wonder about the drug approval process in the U.S., especially after the disaster of the emergency approval of the COVID shots that we know now not only failed to prevent infection, were actually very harmful to many.

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West Virginia University: to save money it eliminates 32 majors instead of its bloated overhead

1:15 pm

West Virginia University logo
West Virginia University: An example of bankrupt academia?

Bankrupt academia: The bankruptcy of intellectual thought in modern American academia is finally beginning to percolate down to the bankbook, at least in West Virginia. On August 11, 2023 the administration at West Virginia University released a report proposing the elimination of 32 majors while also eliminating 169 faculty positions.

The preliminary recommendations, released Friday afternoon, said 12 of those programs are undergraduate majors and 20 are graduate-level majors. Other programs were told to reduce their faculty size — 169 faculty jobs are on the line for cuts.

Programs marked for discontinuation included: master’s and doctorate in Mathematics; master’s and doctorate in Higher Education Administration; master’s of Public Administration; master’s of fine arts in Creative Writing; and a bachelor’s in Recreation, Parks and Tourism Resources. The Department of World Languages, Literatures and Linguistics, which includes Spanish, Russian and Chinese studies, was marked to be completely dissolved.

You can read the full report here. It is important to look closely at it, as it reveals some stark facts about how bankrupt academia remains. » Read more

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