Tag: oppression

Protests in Iran escalate

3:37 pm

The protests in Iran this week that began over food prices and unemployment have now escalated into protests calling for the overthrow of the Islamic regime.

We shall see if these protests result in anything, or will be successfully squelched by the regime, as it did to similar protests in 2009. One difference between then and now is the American president. Obama spent most of his administration making nice to the Iranians, hoping that would make them less radical. He thus did nothing to support the protests, and if anything indicated his support for the regime at that time. Trump appears to think such an approach to be a waste of time, and has already indicated that he is sympathetic to the protesters, not the Iranian leadership.

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Trump administration cancels $255 million of military aid to Pakistan

11:55 am

Related to Awan IT scandal? The Trump administration has canceled the last payment of $255 million of military aid to Pakistan, out of a total $1.1 billion package.

“The United States does not plan to spend the $255 million in FY 2016 in Foreign Military Financing for Pakistan at this time,” said a spokesperson of the President’s National Security Council in a statement to Hindustan Times. “The President has made clear that the United States expects Pakistan to take decisive action against terrorists and militants on its soil, and that Pakistan’s actions in support of the South Asia Strategy will ultimately determine the trajectory of our relationship, including future security assistance. The Administration continues to review Pakistan’s level of cooperation.”

The statement reflected and sealed the administration’s complete disillusionment with Pakistan, which had sought to brazenly disregard the explicit warnings issued by President Donald Trump personally and leading members of his cabinet, such as secretaries James Mattis and Rex Tillerson. “This could be the severest blow dealt to Islamabad by this administration if it indeed decided to withhold it,” said a leading US expert on Pakistan, who did not want to be identified. “There is more coming,” the expert added.

I am wondering if this action now might have some connection with the unfolding Imran Awan IT Congressional scandal. There is evidence there that Awan and his brothers were working with both Hezbollah and Pakistan to obtain classified information from the computers of congressional Democrats.

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How the Purge in Saudi Arabia might link to the Democratic computers in Congress

3:41 pm

This essay is going to outline some interesting associations that appear to exist between a number of very unconnected news stories in the past few months, links that might help explain how recent events in Saudi Arabia might have something to do with the U.S. Congress and car dealerships in the U.S. and Africa.

First of all I want to emphasize that I really have no idea if the associations I am going to note even exist. I am no expert on foreign policy, other than being a very well-read follower of the news. However, my skills as a historian have often allowed me to spot connections between disparate events that further research very frequently confirms as true. In this regard I think it very worthwhile to reveal what I have noticed, and let the chips fall where they may.

This trail must first begin with President Trump’s first foreign policy trip in May as President, going first to Saudi Arabia followed by visits to Israel and Europe.
» Read more

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Is Clinton a target of Trump’s order freezing foreign assets of “human rights abusers?”

1:20 pm

Link here. The executive order, quietly issued last week, froze the U.S. assets of 52 people, several of which have ties to the Clintons and the Clinton Foundation.

The article suggests this order might be the first shot across the bow by the Trump administration that it is going to go after the Clintons in connection with the Uranium One deal. I am not so sure about that specifically. However, the order does fit with Trump’s stated hostility to lobbists.

Last Week’s Executive Order could have serious implications for D.C. lobbyists who provide “goods and services” (e.g. lobbying services) to despots, corrupt foreign politicians or foreign organizations engaging in the crimes described in the EO. “Virtually every lobbyist in DC has got to be in a cold sweat over the scope of this EO,” said an attorney consulted in the matter who wishes to remain anonymous.

And because the phrase “person” means “an individual or entity” in the order – any US organization which merely employs a foreigner engaging in the listed offenses is also subject to frozen assets. “Consider, what would happen if Apple, say employed a foreign national who bribed a PRC official for government approvals? How about a hypothetical case of a company like Northrop or Boeing where an employee, or consultant, who is a foreign national bribes a Saudi official to direct government purchases of airplanes and military equipment?

Those lobbyists could include the Clintons, but I suspect the order will affect many smaller fish before it gets to them.

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Academic fascism in 2017

2:42 pm

Rather than publish another weekly update on the fascist culture that presently dominates many American campuses, I thought I would look back on the year and compile a list of all the colleges I reported where acts of oppression or the silencing of free speech were carried out by the administration, facility, or student body.

There were many ways I could have compiled this list. In the end, I decided to list the colleges alphabetically by state, and then sort the states into three groups, based on how those states voted in the past two presidential elections. States that voted Democratic or Republican both times are grouped together as either Democratic- or Republican-dominated. States that flipped from one party to the other (all flipping Republican, by the way) were listed as battleground states. If a college had more than oppressive incident during the year the number of incidents is indicated in parenthesis.

Because the list is so long, I have placed it, as well my analysis of it, below the fold. Before you read on, make sure you scan down take a look at the list of colleges itself.
» Read more

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Trump administration finally takes over Justice and FBI

10:54 am

Four stories at the end of this week, all apparently timed to hit the press over the weekend and thus be less noticeable, all indicate that the Trump administration, specifically Attorney General Jeff Sessions and FBI Director Christopher Wray, might finally be taking control respectively of the Justice Department and the FBI from the Democratic partisan hold-overs from the Obama administration, who for all intents and purposes have apparently been running those agencies during Trump’s first year in office.

The first story is significant in that the lawyer reassigned, James Baker, was also the lawyer used by Andrew McCabe for his defense during his eight hours of stone-walling during a closed-door House hearing this week about his part in the Mueller Russian collusion investigation, and is also a good friend to fired FBI director James Comey. The Trump administration has now removed this lawyer from the game.

The middle two stories indicate that the Trump administration is not going to let Obama and Clinton off the hook for their own apparent collusion with both the Russians and terrorists. (An update: It behooves every American to read the full and very detailed Politico report about the Obama administration’s effort to shut down any investigations of Hezbollah’s drug operation in order to get the Iran deal signed. I finally got around to reading it carefully, and found it to be quite damning, both for Obama and for everyone in his administration. And remember, this is coming from a media source that has generally been favorable to Democrats.)

The last story involves what appears increasingly to be a terrible abuse of power by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and the Justice Department in its prosecution of the Bundy family following their stand-off with federal officials, a prosecution that has now resulted in a mistrial because the Justice Department improperly withheld exculpatory evidence from the defense.

That it took this long for the Trump administration to make these moves strongly illustrates how fragile our hold on democracy presently is. Trump was duly elected. By law, he is in charge, and has the right to fire anyone in the executive branch, as well as set policy there. Yet, he and his appointed cabinet officials have apparently felt they needed to tiptoe carefully during the first year of their administration, as if the people that Obama appointed and the policies he established were still in control.

Even now, I am unsure that these actions will put the Trump administration truly in charge of the administrative state. There is ample evidence in both the Uranium One deal and Iran deal that the Obama administration committed acts that at the least should destroy political careers, and at the most might even send some people to prison. Unless one of those scenarios actually happens, however, Trump will have done little to rein in the administration state. They will continue to act as if they can do whatever they want, defying elected officials, with impunity, because it will be apparent that there are no consequences for such actions.

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Benjamin Shapiro – Theme from Schindler’s List

6:01 pm

An evening pause: Performed live in 1996, when Shapiro was twelve years old. Note that this is that Ben Shapiro, the orthodox Jew and well-known conservative columnist whom leftists ignorantly love to call a Jew-hater and white supremacist. How they come to that conclusion can only be because they are willfully ignorant or so filled with hate and their ideology that they can’t look at reality with any honesty.

I think, during this holiday season, it is wise to also reflect on humanity’s tragic failures, one of the worst of which was the Holocaust during World War II.

Hat tip Jim Mallamace.

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This week in fascist academia

2:47 pm

Time for another depressing update on the fascist and childish culture that unfortunately seems to presently dominate the college campuses of modern America. (To read my earlier updates, posted almost weekly since October, go here.)

To begin, below are some stories illustrating the fascist and intolerant nature of many college administrations:

In every case above, we either have the college administrations taking actions to suppress speech they did not like, or college facility announcing to the world that they haven’t the faintest understanding of freedom of speech or its fundamental basis for the establishment of western civilization.

The last story describes a recent Columbia Journalism Review report about how a number of universities have become very hostile to working journalists, and have even taken actions to have journalists arrested. The universities mentioned including the University of Colorado-Boulder, Keene State College, and two New York state colleges, Bronx Community College and Kingsborough Community College.

However, as I have noted in earlier updates, the fascist culture at academia is unfortunately not limited to the administrators and teachers. Many students advocate intolerance as well.
» Read more

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A weaponized and partisan Justice Department and FBI

12:42 pm

On many of today’s complicated political stories, I tend to hang back and avoid posting my thoughts about them when the stories initially break. Often I do so because the story itself is either unreliable or simply trivial, and time is needed to find this out. Often I wait because I want more information to confirm my initial conclusions. Sometimes I wait because I consider the story merely a Republican partisan attack that is not strong on the merits and will fade with time.

Though I have previously posted my impression that Robert Mueller investigation into Russian-Trump collusion during the campaign is nothing more than a Democratic Party witch hunt against the Trump administration, I have recently held back noting recent stories because I wanted to compile them to see if they really did fit this pattern. Below are those stories, all of which have appeared in the past two weeks. They strongly prove that Mueller’s investigation is exactly what I first surmised.

These stories all confirm a July story that was headlined: Here’s a Look at Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s 15 Attorneys: A Who’s Who of Liberal Activism. Of those 15 attorneys, four have now been proven to be part of the Democratic Party partisan machine. Furthermore, evidence has been found that the FBI agent directly involved with both the Clinton and Trump investigations, Peter Strzok, moved to change the Clinton investigation conclusions to exonerate her, despite the evidence, while he was also repeatedly expressing strong partisan and anti-Trump opinions to one of those 15 attorneys.

One anti-Trump text by FBI agent Strzok is especially disturbing. In responding to a statement by Special Counsel Liz Page that she thought there was no way Trump could win, Strzok wrote the following:
» Read more

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Local Florida officials battle over $8 million grant to Blue Origin

9:51 am

Local county officials in Florida are involved in a court fight over the decision by the county to borrow $8 million in order to pay a grant to Blue Origin for locating its factory there.

Brevard County commissioners narrowly approved a plan that would allow the county to borrow money to pay for an $8 million economic incentive to rocket manufacturer Blue Origin. The vote was 3-2, with Chair Rita Prichett and Commissioners Jim Barfield and Curt Smith supporting the proposal. Vice Chair Kristine Isnardi and Commissioner John Tobia voted against the plan.

Brevard County Clerk of Courts Scott Ellis told commissioners he plans to go to court to challenge the legality of the county borrowing money to pay for the grant to Blue Origin.

Isnardi is quoted in the article as saying “I don’t think it’s a great policy to give $8 million to a billionaire.” The opposition to this grant also questions the legality of borrowing money to pay it.

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The Trump administration’s space policy, according to Scott Pace

10:12 am

Scott Pace, the executive secretary of the National Space Council, outlined at a symposium earlier this week the overall space policy of the Trump administration.

The United States should seek to ensure that its space activities reflect “our values and not just our technologies,” Pace urged. “We should seek to ensure that our space activities reflect those values: democracy, liberty, free enterprise, and respect for domestic and international law in a peaceful international order.”

To influence the development and utilization of space, the United States needs to “create attractive projects and frameworks in which other nations choose to align themselves and their space activities with us, as opposed to others.”

He went on to outline several very general concepts that they are using to shape this policy. He also praised the Outer Space Treaty, and was challenged about this by another symposium participant.

Pace was challenged on the last point by University of Mississippi space law professor emerita Joanne Gabrynowicz. She agreed that the concept that space is the common heritage of all mankind has not been accepted internationally. Pursuant to the Outer Space Treaty, however, it is the “province of all mankind” and that language is based on the principle of res communis, she asserted. Pace held his ground, saying he takes advice from the State Department’s Office of Legal Adviser which has concluded that it is not. Asked later what framework he does use, Pace replied that international law can be created by the pen or by practice and ultimately is whatever sovereign nations decide to do with each other. He added that involving the international private sector is also important because it brings in best practices that can be turned into guidelines.

In other words, Pace is going along with the general Washington culture that is afraid to push for a significant change in the Outer Space Treaty, and is instead saying that property rights can still be established by other agreements within international law and individual national negotiations.

As I have been saying for years, this is bad policy. Without a right to establish sovereignty and borders in space, there will be no mechanism for nations and individuals to function legally, which is only going to cause conflict while discouraging investment and development.

Nonetheless, the position taken by Pace and the general culture in Washington is par for the course. I have very seen few good policy decisions coming out of Washington in the past three decades, especially when it comes to space. This is only another example.

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Arizona’s Court of Appeals sides with Pima County on space balloon deal

9:48 am

Arizona’s second highest court has agreed with Pima County and approved a deal the county made, without competitive bidding, with the space balloon company World View.

In a unanimous ruling, the three-judge panel acknowledged the purpose of competitive bids is to ensure that the county — and, by extension, the taxpayers — gets the most money for the property. But Judge Peter Eckerstrom, writing for the court, said that does not apply when the real goal is not immediate income but longer-term economic development.

The Goldwater Institute, which brought the suit that claimed that the deal violated the state constitution because the lease was signed without competitive bidding, has said it will appeal to Arizona’s Supreme Court.

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This week in fascist academia

1:04 pm

The childish nature of modern American culture often gets me very depressed. Sadly, this depression is worsened by the fascist and intolerant culture that dominates much of America academia and that I have been noting with regular weekly reports since October. If our intellectual community acts like jack-booted thugs how can we expect our overall culture to be mature and civilized?

Anyway, here are a few more stories from the past week that unfortunately intensify my depression and the lack of enthusiasm I presently have for posting anything related to culture or politics. It all seems to be a cesspool, and horribly the academic community appears to relish the idea of swimming in it.

First, some stories indicating the close-mindedness and intolerance of the teaching community:

The second story is especially disturbing. The professor, Donna Riley, is head of the School of Engineering Education at Purdue. This is what she advocates for her school’s engineering program:

She claims that rigor can “reinforce gender, race, and class hierarchies in engineering, and maintain invisibility of queer, disabled, low-income, and other marginalized engineering students,” adding that “decades of ethnographic research document a climate of microaggressions and cultures of whiteness and masculinity in engineering.” She evens contends that “scientific knowledge itself is gendered, raced, and colonizing,” asserting that in the field of engineering, there is an “inherent masculinist, white, and global North bias…all under a guise of neutrality.”

To fight this, Riley calls for engineering programs to “do away with” the notion of academic rigor completely, saying, “This is not about reinventing rigor for everyone, it is about doing away with the concept altogether so we can welcome other ways of knowing. Other ways of being. It is about criticality and reflexivity.”

So, would you want to fly on a rocket built by engineers taught at Purdue, under this professor’s program?

Next we have stories that show that the intolerance is definitely not confined to the teachers, that the students are becoming as intolerant and as fascist.
» Read more

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Sea Launch will assemble rockets in U.S.

10:14 am

Capitalism in space: S7, the Russian company that now owns Sea Launch, announced today that it plans to assemble its rockets in United States.

This means the dock for the floating launch platform will remain in California. The article also indicates that S7 will continue to use Ukrainian Zenit rockets, which the platform was designed for, despite the desire of the Russian government to cut off all dependence on Ukrainian technology. There is also this tidbit:

The S7 company, which is about to resume the Sea Launch program, has enough clients, S7 Group co-owner and chair of the board of directors Natalia Filyova told the press. “We have [launch] orders, there is a long line [of clients], and we offer a good price. We are expecting revenue, but this will not happen right away. We will be investing heavily but we realize that we will make money,” Filyova said.

No details of the clients or the launch schedule were announced, however, so I remain skeptical. Meanwhile, Roscosmos announced today that it is negotiating with Boeing for future space tourism flights. This second story is directly related to Sea Launch, but you would only know this if you read Behind the Black. To pay off Boeing, which used to be a half partner in Sea Launch and was owed $320 million by the Russians, Roscosmos gave Boeing an unspecified number of seats on future Soyuz capsules to sell to others. Two of those seats were sold to NASA.

These new negotiations probably are an effort to arrange further sales for Boeing to help it get its money back. Boeing’s lawsuit for that money has placed a lien on the Sea Launch platform, and until its concerns are satisfied, S7 really can’t begin operations.

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Trump signs new space policy directive, making Moon 1st priority again

2:57 pm

Yawn. President Trump today signed a new space policy directive that makes the Moon the U.S.’s first exploration priority again.

“The directive I am signing today will refocus America’s space program on human exploration and discovery,” said President Trump. “It marks a first step in returning American astronauts to the Moon for the first time since 1972, for long-term exploration and use. This time, we will not only plant our flag and leave our footprints — we will establish a foundation for an eventual mission to Mars, and perhaps someday, to many worlds beyond.”

As I wrote above, yawn. Same old same old. In 2004 Bush declared we will go to the Moon. In 2010 Obama declared we will go to an asteroid. In 2017 Trump declares we will go to the Moon.

In all those years, where have we actually gone? Nowhere. The government’s effort during all that time to build a rocket and a manned spacecraft to do any of this stuff has come up completely empty. Neither will carry humans into space for at least another five years, if not longer.

The only thing these empty promises have accomplished is to waste a god-awful amount of taxpayer money, now about $33 billion, with appropriations likely to increase that to more that $43 billion before that first manned SLS/Orion flight.

I predict that this government promise will come up empty as well, at least in the manner the government and NASA is trying to sell it. It won’t be the government rocket and capsule that will get us back to the Moon, but a host of new private companies, making profits and doing things efficiently and fast, that will get us there. And I am firmly confident that they will do it before the government even gets off the ground.

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Update on Russia’s troubled Sea Launch

8:35 am

Link here. It appears that the launch platform faces numerous additional obstacles before it can become operational again, including complex political maneuvering withing Russia and with Ukraine.

Yuzhmash officials [in Ukraine] gave their Russian counterparts at the S7 Group a list of components which are no longer available for the Zenit [rocket]. One of the most important items on the list is the ignition systems produced in the Lugansk region which has been taken over by pro-Russian rebels and remains practically cut off from the rest of Ukraine. The igniters burning black powder are used to initiate small solid-propellant motors which generate reverse thrust to facilitate the safe separation of the first and second stages during the ascent of the Zenit rocket to orbit.

According to industry sources, the S7 company has been so far unable to secure the delivery of Russian equivalents of the necessary hardware and materials, probably due to lack of permissions from Moscow. Instead, the S7 Group asked KB Yuzhnoe to organize the production of missing components in Ukraine. However, in the case of black powder, launching its production in Ukraine would not make economic sense due to lack of other applications beyond the very small amount required for the ignition systems, one source said.

Some observers question whether the S7 company has a real motivation to see the Sea Launch venture through because the airline with no prior experience in the space launch business ended up with the Sea Launch assets in its lap likely under pressure from the Kremlin. [emphasis mine]

S7 has also proposed using the Sea Launch platform to launch Russia’s next generation unmanned freighter, but this faces numerous technical issues. Regardless, the highlighted sentence above indicates how much the Russian government and the top-down Russian approach to everything interferes with efficient operations. It suggests that S7 didn’t buy into Sea Launch because it thought it could make money on it, but because of political pressure. Such pressure does not produce effective and profitable companies.

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Leftist prosecutors spied on conservatives, defied court orders

11:15 am

The law is such an inconvenient thing: Newly released documents in connection with the leftwing Democratic Party political “John Doe” witchhunt in Wisconsin against conservatives have revealed that the prosecutors not only used their power to obtain private and inappropriate information about their political opponents, they continued to do so even after the courts had repeatedly ordered them to cease and desist.

A Wisconsin Attorney General report on the year-long investigation into leaks of sealed John Doe court documents to a liberal British publication in September 2016 finds a rogue agency of partisan bureaucrats bent on a mission “to bring down the (Gov. Scott) Walker campaign and the Governor himself.” The AG report, released Wednesday, details an expanded John Doe probe into a “broad range of Wisconsin Republicans,” a “John Doe III,” according to Attorney General Brad Schimel, that widened the scope of the so-called John Doe II investigation into dozens of right-of-center groups and scores of conservatives. Republican lawmakers, conservative talk show hosts, a former employee from the MacIver Institute, average citizens, even churches, were secretly monitored by the dark John Doe. State Department of Justice investigators found hundreds of thousands of John Doe documents in the possession of the GAB long after they were ordered to be turned over to the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

The Government Accountability Board [GAB], the state’s former “nonpartisan” speech cop, proved to be more partisan than originally suspected, the state Department of Justice report found. For reasons that “perhaps may never be fully explained,” GAB held onto thousands of private emails from Wisconsin conservatives in several folders on their servers marked “Opposition Research.” The report’s findings validate what conservatives have long contended was nothing more than a witch-hunt into limited government groups and the governor who was turning conservative ideas into public policy.

No charges can be filed because the hard drive that held the most damning evidence has mysteriously vanished.

And in an all-too familiar occurrence involving allegations of government abuse, a key hard drive believed to contain the court-sealed John Doe documents leaked to The Guardian in October 2016 has suspiciously disappeared – GAB officials with knowledge of the hard drive can’t seem to explain what happened to it. Still, despite a damning report laying out myriad examples of criminal misconduct by government bureaucrats, Schimel, a Republican, says his Department of Justice cannot file criminal charges – chiefly because of disappearing evidence, less-than-cooperative John Doe agents and the “systemic and pervasive mishandling of John Doe evidence (that) likely resulted in circumstances allowing the Guardian leak in the first place.” Such failures prevent prosecutors from proving criminal liability beyond a reasonable doubt, the attorney general wrote, although the report points to a small universe of GAB employees that had access to the leaked documents. They also seemed to have a political ax to grind.

Essentially, this corrupt political operation and abuse of power by leftists in Wisconsin appears to have been a dress rehearsal for the political witch hunt now being engineered in Washington by the FBI and political hack and Democratic operative Robert Mueller.

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“Mueller’s anti-Trump investigation is effectively dead.”

3:24 pm

Link here. The article details the legal reasons why it will be difficult if not impossible for Special Counsel (and partisan Democratic Party hack) Robert Mueller to bring further criminal charges against anyone in the Trump administration.

Under federal law, a prosecutor is required “to disclose exculpatory and impeachment information to criminal defendants and to seek a just result in every case.” Specifically, pursuant to Giglio v. United States, prosecutors are obligated to provide defendants with impeachment evidence, which includes, according to the DOJ’s guidelines, evidence of a witness’s biases, “[a]nimosity toward defendant,” or “[a]nimosity toward a group of which the defendant is a member or with which the defendant is affiliated.”

As a result, in any prosecution brought by Mueller against a Republican target, defense counsel would be entitled under the Constitution to all evidence in the government’s possession relevant to exploring the apparent biases of FBI agent Peter Strzok and his animosity toward Trump and the Republican Party. This, in and of itself, could be a case-killer because it is very unlikely that Mueller or the DOJ would want defense counsel poring through all the records and documents, emails, and texts in the DOJ’s and Strzok’s possession revealing the agent’s biases since this could fatally undermine any other cases or investigations the agent has worked on—such as the FBI’s decision to recommend charging General Flynn with lying to federal agents even though Hillary Clinton’s besties, Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin, were given a free pass despite apparently doing the same thing.

Significantly, the fatal damage done to Mueller’s anti-Trump investigation does not only rest in the fact that defense counsel will be able to conduct an unlubricated prostate examination on the FBI’s key agent at trial. Instead, the real reason why Mueller will not risk a criminal trial is the lasting damage that would be done to the FBI’s reputation by having Strzok’s baggage brought into the daylight.

To expose the agent’s biases, defense counsel would have the opportunity to cross-examine the agent and his apparent mistress, an FBI lawyer who also worked on Mueller’s investigation and the Clinton email probe, about their exchanged messages showing support for Clinton and hostility to Trump. Additionally, the agent’s wife, a high-profile attorney at another federal agency, apparently was a member of several pro-Obama and pro-Clinton Facebook groups and is a follower of a Facebook page called “We Voted for Hillary.”

One can only imagine the fun that an aggressive defense attorney would have shredding Strzok’s credibility by grilling him to see if he shared his wife’s posted political views. [emphasis in original]

To anyone with the slightest objectivity and common sense, this whole investigation into “Trump/Russian collusion” has been a joke, from the start. During the process however it has become increasingly clear that both the FBI and the Obama administration worked together to try to undermine the election, to spy on Obama’s political opponents for purely political purposes.

This fact, more than anything else, is probably going to kill this witch hunt. The risks to the corrupt Washington establishment that has been trying to bring Trump down has now grown too great.

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The roots of our modern fascist and bankrupt academia

3:34 pm

Since October I have been posting each week a collection of links illustrating the sad and fascist state of modern American academia. It is now time to post another collection, but this time I will also provide some thoughts that might help explain the roots of this intellectual bankruptcy.

These stories not only illustrate the fascist nature of today’s academic community, they once again show that these so-called institutions of higher learning know nothing about the concepts of liberty, individual responsibility, and thoughtful dialogue that are the hallmarks of western civilization.

First we have the story out of Texas State University of a student writing an op-ed calling for genocide against whites.

Essentially, the author argued that whites are by definition bigoted, and therefore must be wiped out. Though the student body at Texas State appeared to respond correctly to this racist column, one has to wonder how it got published in the first place.

Then we have some stories illustrating the bankruptcy of intellectual thought at some campuses.

The first story in this group is especially interesting. Considering the hate now routinely exhibited on college campuses against whites (as illustrated by second story above as well as my first group of stories above), I think it now behooves every white person attending Brown University to self-identify as black. Doing so makes no sense and has no connection with reality or truth, but hey, what do those values have to do with modern education?

Similarly, the last two stories, about how students disrupted a lecture, preventing its completion, shows that the administration of the University of Connecticut actually agrees with these hecklers’ goals. Rather than punish the hecklers and protesters, the university acted to shut down free speech entirely. Whoopie!

Further examples can be found in my previous updates from October 11, October 13, October 20, October 25, November 3, November 9, and November 22. Before October you can simply do a search on Behind the Black for “academia” and you will find numerous additional horror stories.

What are the roots of this madness? A recent experience on my part might help provide an explanation. I recently finished reading a college philosophy book called Classics of Western Thought: The Modern World that had been assigned to me when I attended college in the early 1970s. Then, I had been assigned to read only one or two of the essays (I don’t remember which), and since then it had been sitting on my bookshelf unread. I recently decided it would be worthwhile to read it all, from the start, as it covers intellectual thought beginning in the 1600s, just before the Enlightenment, with the following chapters providing these excerpts:
» Read more

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Trump declares Jerusalem Israel’s capital, delays moving embassy

12:56 pm

President Trump today declared that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel, though the move of the U.S. embassy to that city will be delayed for several more years.

Since the 1990s, when Congress passed a law that said the embassy should move but allowed presidents to waive that move repeatedly, every president issued a waiver because it was thought such a move would hurt the so-called peace process. Trump’s comments addressed this.

The President repeatedly addressed concerns about a peace agreement between the Israelis and Palestinians being hindered as a result of the recognition. He argued failing to move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, as verified by law and Congress through the Jerusalem Embassy Act, has done nothing to move the region closer to a peace deal. “We cannot solve our problems by making the same failed assumptions and repeating the same failed strategies of the past. Old challenges demand new approaches,” Trump said. “The record is in, after two decades of waivers, we are no closer to a peace agreement.” [emphasis mine]

Trump is correct. We are no closer to Middle East peace now than we were in the 1990s. And I think the reason is illustrated by how the Palestinians (and their enablers) have responded to today’s announcement, with their usual grace and good will:

Gee, doesn’t the Palestinian response now kind of remind you of the gentle response of the Islamic community to some cartoons that were critical of Mohammad?

As I have written repeatedly, you can’t negotiate with someone who wants to kill you. When the Palestinians finally accept the fact that an Israeli state exists and will continue to exist, we will finally have peace. Not before, no matter how many deals get brokered by politicians.

I should also add that this announcement today does not fulfill Trump’s promise to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem. It only makes believe that it does. Only when that embassy actually moves will Trump have done what he (and every previous Republican president or candidate since the 1990s) has promised.

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Argentine scientist indicted for creating census of glaciers

9:44 am

An Argentinian scientist has been indicted on criminal charges for the standard manner in which he designed Argentine’s glacier census.

The lawsuit was filed by a grassroots group after the Veladero mine in northwestern Argentina spilled cyanide into the Jáchal watershed in September 2015. Another spill in the same area occurred this past September.

[Ricardo] Villalba, who led the National Institute of Snow, Ice and Environmental Research (IANIGLA) in Mendoza from 2005 to 2015, launched Argentina’s first comprehensive glacier inventory in 2012. Based on satellite images, the inventory set a minimum glacier size of 1 hectare. “The process of making that inventory wasn’t unusual. That size cutoff is standard practice,” says Bruce Raup of the University of Colorado in Boulder, who is also director of the Global Land Ice Measurements from Space project, an international glacier monitoring project. Argentina’s inventory includes 30 ice masses covering about 400 hectares in the Veladero area, Villalba says.

The indictment argues that the 1-hectare limit and the lack of an on-site inspection led to “the exclusion—and resulting lack of protection—of many bodies of ice” around Veladero that should have been considered priorities because of their importance as water sources.

I would say that this is an example of the dog biting the hand that feeds it. The article notes that Villalba is “sympathic” to the activists who filed the lawsuit. They however don’t care about that. They instead want to use his research and the law to distort how glacier research is done in order to gain power over water use that actually has little if anything to do with glaciers.

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FAA submits its red tape recommendations to National Space Council

9:22 am

As requested by Vice-President Mike Pence during the first meeting of the National Space Council, the FAA has now submitted its recommendations for streamlining the launch licensing process.

“We came up with our vision for a 21st century licensing process,” [George Nield, FAA associate administrator for commercial space transportation] said. That process, he said, could include licenses that cover different versions of a family of vehicles, launching from different sites on different missions, “on the same piece of paper.” Nield said other elements of that vision include “performance-based” regulations that don’t limit companies on how they can achieve a certain requirement, as well as ways to accelerate the license review process, which can take up to 180 days once a completed application is submitted.

Some of those changes, Nield said, may take longer to carry our, particularly when they involve issues like environmental reviews. He said the FAA is looking at other near-term streamlining approaches, such as the use of a mechanism called “safety approvals” that provides pre-approval of subsystems or processes — and potentially entire launch vehicles — to speed the license review process.

Nield also put in a request for additional staff for his office, which currently has about 100 people. “If we had some additional folks that could look at fixing the process rather than just having everybody having their head down cranking out these licenses, then we could make a significant improvement” in the license review process, he said. [emphasis mine]

While I do think Nield is sincere about reducing regulation, and has generally been a positive force in his job in helping the new commercial launch business, he is still a bureaucrat. The whole point here is to encourage the policy-makers to give his office the job of regulating space, so that Nield’s responsibilities grow.

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Another negative op-ed of India’s oppressive draft space law

10:04 am

Link here. Unlike the first negative op-ed earlier this week, the writer of today’s op-ed gets closer to the heart of the problem.

It is proposed that all powers to licence private players to launch and operate “space objects” will rest with the Union government (read DoS). And these powers will be quite sweeping. DoS will not only have powers to “grant, transfer, vary, suspend or terminate licence” but also have powers to inspect books of accounts and other documents of licensees and seek all information about partners, directors, etc.

This is particularly worrying because “space activity” under this proposed law not only covers launch of satellites but also “use of space objects” as well as “operation, guidance and entry of space object into and from outer space and all functions for performing the said activities.” This would technically mean even data companies handling satellite imagery or universities operating ground facilities for their microsatellites may also need a licence. If this is going to be so, it is a recipe for a new “licence raj”.

The writer is of course correct. The law as written gives all power and control to India’s government and its bureaucracy, a sure recipe for discouraging private enterprise. However, this writer also avoids the law’s worst component, that it places ownership of all space objects — rockets, satellites, and what they produce — with the government, not the private sector. Such a rule will not only squelch any commercial space development in India, it will likely cause private companies outside of India from buying India’s launch services. Why would I place my satellite on an Indian rocket if that country’s law means I will then no longer own it?

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Trump shrinks two national monuments significantly

2:46 pm

As he had promised, President Trump today announced that two national monuments, one created by Obama against the wishes of local residents and the second created by Clinton, will be reduced significantly in size.

Trump shrunk Bears Ears by nearly 85 percent and reduced Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument by almost half. The plan would cut the total amount of land in the state’s red rock country protected under monument status from more than 3.2 million acres (5,000 square miles) to about 1.2 million acres (1,875 square miles).

I think Trump’s statement explains very well the root reasons this is happening.

“Some people think that the natural resources of Utah should be controlled by a small handful of very distant bureaucrats located in Washington. And guess what? They’re wrong,” he said in the cavernous Utah Capitol Rotunda in Salt Lake City. “The families and communities of Utah know and love this land the best. And you know the best how to take care of your land. You know how to protect it, and you know best how to conserve this land for many, many generations to come,” he said.

“Your timeless bond with the outdoors should not be replaced with the whims of regulators thousands and thousands of miles away. They don’t know your land, and truly they don’t care for your land like you do.”

The establishment of the national parks and monuments involved a lot of good intentions, and we all know where that leads. Today it has led to most of the land in the western states controlled by an oppressive bureaucracy in Washington that doesn’t have the resources to manage the land properly, but has the power to make the lives of the local population quite miserable. And they sadly do both, quite thoroughly.

In the eastern states there are few national parks. Instead, the land was controlled by the states, who treated the natural resources there most reasonably, and at the same time allowed for their citizens to live and work and take advantage of those resources. This is how our federal system of government is supposed to work, and Trump’s action today is merely the first step in shifting policy back in that direction.

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The corruption in Washington DC

10:52 am

If you think there has been any draining of the swamp in Washington DC with recent elections, think again. The passage this weekend of the new tax package illustrates that the Republican-led Congress really is little different than the Democratic-led Congress that passed Obamacare without reading it.

PJMedia asked Rounds if he would have time to read the full text before casting his vote.

“No, because the entire bill, there’s two separate parts, first of all, there’s a summary of what each of the parts does, that part we’ve been able to read. The actual text itself will be completed and then it will go into a conference committee where it will come back out again. So most of us have looked at all of the analysis of each one of the sections, section-by-section, that part has been completed,” Rounds told PJM on Capitol Hill on Friday evening.

“But there will still be more work to be completed in terms of the actual fine language within the bill itself.”

In other words, we need to pass the law to find out what’s in it.

This stinks. Though there is some evidence that the new tax law will lower taxes (which generally is a good thing), no one really knows what the law’s full consequences will be. A responsible Congress would never pass such a thing. Congresses before the 1960s never did.

Laws are made of words. If you vote for a law but don’t know the words that actually make up the law you guarantee that some of those words will impose tyranny. This process, and the law that results, is no different than Obamacare, and will likely result in similar disasters.

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Wyoming judge rules against theft by government

9:47 am

Good work if you can get it: A Wyoming judge today ordered the state to return a man’s life savings, $92K in cash, that police officers confiscated for no reason during a traffic stop.

Parhamovich told The Associated Press that he was traveling to several performances in Western states and decided to bring his “life savings” because maintenance staff often came into his rented apartment in Madison, Wisconsin. The 50-year-old hid the money inside a speaker he was bringing along on the trip.

While driving near Cheyenne on March 13, officers with the Wyoming Highway Patrol and the Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigations pulled him over. Parhamovich said officers questioned him about whether any drugs or large amounts of cash were in the car and then used a police dog before physically searching through his minivan and finding the money. Parhamovich said the officers implied that carrying that much cash was illegal. He lied and said it was a friend’s. Parhamovich said officers then told him that he could leave if he signed a form saying he was giving the $91,800 to the investigative agency for “narcotics law enforcement purposes.”

“I remember asking them a bunch of times: ‘What happens if I don’t sign this?'” Parhamovich said. “I couldn’t get a straight answer. What I was told kind of made it seem like I would go to jail or they’d detain me for a long time.”

He drove away with a $25 ticket for failing to wear a seatbelt, he said.

This behavior by the police and the state government is wrong and immoral on so many levels it is hard to count them all. Here are a few: It is not illegal to carry lots of cash. The Constitution expressly forbids the taking of private property without just compensation. Parhamovich was never charged with any crime and yet the state tried to keep his money.

There’s more in the article, including another case where Wyoming stole almost a half a million from an innocent citizen, never charged him with a crime, and was still allowed to keep the money because the state supreme court said it was okay for the state to steal.

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Vostochny failure points to serious problems in Russian aerospace

9:18 am

This update on the launch failure at Vostochny last week suggests there are some very serious problems permeating the entire Russian aerospace industry.

According to a post on the online forum of the Novosti Kosmonavtiki magazine, the Fregat stage for the ill-fated first mission from Vostochny was originally built for the launch of the Rezonans scientific satellites from Baikonur.

At the same time, experts agree that the problem could theoretically have been resolved before launch, if not for the poor coordination between the developers of the flight control systems of the Soyuz-2 launch vehicle and their colleagues working on flight controls for the Fregat. As one poster on the Novosti Kosmonavtiki forum noted: in the deluge of pre-launch paperwork between RKTs Progress in Samara, which built Soyuz-2, and NPO Lavochkin, which developed Fregat, discussing a multitude of legal issues, confirming and reconfirming various agreements and reminders, there was not a single memo attracting the developers’ attention to a different alignment of the launch pad in Vostochny from that of other sites. Obviously, such information was buried in the working documentation on the mission, but nobody thought about the effect of this fact on the launch. The lower echelon of engineers simply missed that detail, while top managers had no idea at all, because, the majority of them lacked the necessary qualifications, the poster said. [emphasis mine]

Top managers who “lack the necessary qualifications?” This smacks of a corrupt hiring system having nothing to do with qualifications or the need to do good work. It also is typical of a government-run operation, which the entire Russian aerospace industry is after Putin consolidated it all into one single cooperation under government control in 2014. And prior to that the big Russian companies didn’t really operate under a system of free competition, but like mob gangsters they divided up the work among themselves and then worked together to prevent any new competition from forming.

I’m not sure how Russia is going to fix this. In a free market the solution would be for competition to produce new companies with fresh ideas, forcing the bad companies out of business. Putin’s consolidation combined with a Russian culture that does not seem to understand the idea of competition appear to make that process difficult, if not impossible.

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China launches another military satellite

8:46 am

The race between Russia, China, and SpaceX for the most launches in 2017 tightened today with another successful Chinese launch this morning of a classified military satellite using its Long March 2D rocket.

The race as of today:

27 United States
18 Russia
16 SpaceX
14 China

According to this article as well as SpacflightNow’s launch log), China, Russia, and SpaceX all have three more launches scheduled in 2017. If that is what happens, these standings will not change.

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