Tag: oppression

House NASA budget cuts all funding for lunar lander but adds billions for “infrastructure”

10:13 pm

The House science committee is about to propose a NASA budget that would cut all funding for a lunar lander but add $4 billion so that NASA can build new buildings and facilities.

An updated draft of the bill, dated Sept. 4, offers good and bad news for NASA. It includes $4 billion for “repair, recapitalization, and modernization of physical infrastructure and facilities” across the agency. The bill does not assign amounts to specific projects or centers.

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson had made funding for agency infrastructure a priority in any budget reconciliation package, seeking more than $5 billion earlier this year. “There’s aging infrastructure that is dilapidated,” he told House appropriators in May. “They’ve got holes in the roof where they’re putting together the core of the SLS” at the Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans. Michoud suffered additional damage from Hurricane Ida last month.

However, the draft bill includes nothing for the other priority identified by Nelson, the agency’s Human Landing System (HLS) program. Nelson said in May he wanted $5.4 billion for HLS to allow NASA to select a second company alongside SpaceX to develop and demonstrate a lander capable of transporting astronauts to and from the lunar surface.

Congratulations America! This is the Congress we have voted for. They want a space agency tasked with finding ways to explore the solar system but will only fund the “repair, recapitalization, and modernization of physical infrastructure and facilities” on Earth.

In other words, NASA will have gold-plated buildings in which they will be able to do nothing but shuffle paper because Congress has given them no funding to fly anything in space.

What a joke. But then, as I said, this is the Congress Americans have chosen, so that means not only is Congress a joke, so are the American people.

23 comments

Today’s blacklisted American: Whites to be segregated at American University

10:29 am

The Civil Rights Act of 1964: repealed at American University in DC.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964: Doesn’t exist at American University in DC.

“Segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!” American University in Washington, D.C., has now instituted a policy segregating students by race in a course on racism, with the segregation specifically designed to give minorities a “safe space.”

According to The Eagle, the university added a Black affinity course section to AUx2, a class where students learn about “race, social identity, and structures of power.” In the course, students will “evaluate how racism intersects with other systems of oppression.”

The student newspaper states that all-Black sections of the course began during the spring 2020 semester, an addition that had been considered for a few years. “We’ve definitely heard from Black students and other students of color that the material can be a lot for them because it is part of their lived experiences,” Izzi Stern, the AUx program manager told the student newspaper. “And we wanted to create a space where they could be together in community and have an overall positive experience with the course.”

» Read more

8 comments

Today’s blacklisted American: Lyft driver fired because his radio was tuned to a black conservative

11:33 am

No freedom of speech allowed by Lyft!
No freedom of speech allowed at Lyft!

The new dark age of silencing: A driver has been fired by Lyft because a passenger complained that he was listening to a racist on the radio, when in fact his radio was tuned to a black conservative.

Ryan Alexander, who had been a Lyft driver for years, tells “The Dan O’Donnell Show” that a Lyft representative told him during a phone call Saturday that his account was suspended because he had been listening to “racist talk radio programming,” a violation of the app’s terms of service.

Alexander says he was listening to former Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke fill in for Mark Belling during the “Mark Belling Late Afternoon Show” Thursday evening when a passenger took exception to the discussion Clarke was having about Black Lives Matter and abortion rates in the African-American community.

“She called Clarke trash, slammed the door to my car when she got out, and specifically referenced abortion which Clarke did talk about briefly while she was in the car,” Alexander says.

During the portion of the program that the passenger heard, Clarke, who is Black, expressed the opinion that the Black Lives Matter organization did not truly care about Black lives because it was not upset about the rate of abortions among Black mothers.

» Read more

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Today’s blacklisted American: Cancelled by his bank for being pro-life, he started his own

12:10 pm

Banks blacklisting conservatives
What too many banks want to do to conservatives.

Today’s story is similar to my blacklist story two days ago about former national security advisor Michael Flynn [See the bottom of this post for an update on the Flynn story!]

Just as Flynn was blackballed by Chase bank, evangelist and motivational speaker Nick Vujicic found himself frozen out by his own bank because of his Christian, political, and pro-life beliefs.

Vujicic said he began to speak out against the innocent killing of unborn babies in March 2019. Within 16 weeks of doing that, he revealed, “we had a grenade at our house, a false magazine article published against me, a lawsuit threat, a spying drone, and a bank kicked me out.”

…”I got kicked out of a bank with no warning. They froze my credit cards, froze my debit cards,” he said. “They gave me a letter to say that they did a review of me as a client and they don’t want anything to do with me.”

What makes this story different from the Flynn story is that Vujicic responded by starting a project to found his own bank.
» Read more

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A Martian sunset in Jezero Crater

10:15 am

Sunset on Mars
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, reduced slightly to post here, was taken by the left navigation camera on the Mars rover Perseverance. Looking west to the rim of Jezero Crater, it catches the Sun as it sets behind that rim.

The image was taken on July 20, 2021, the 52nd anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing on the Moon. Seems somehow fitting to catch a sunset on Mars on this date, to illustrate how far we have come in that half century.

To my mind, not enough. Our ability to send robots to other worlds has certainly improved, but in 1969 we were able to put a human on another world. Since 1972 we no longer have had that capability, so that in 2021 all we can do is fly robots elsewhere.

It is time for this to change. I’d much prefer to make believe this photo was a sunrise suggesting a bright future, than the sunset it actually is, indicating a coming dark age.

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Launch schedules impacted by shortages and delivery delays of oxygen/nitrogen

9:53 am

The launch dates of several upcoming launches have been pushed back because of a shortage of liquid oxygen, needed instead for medical purposes, which in turn has slowed deliveries of liquid nitrogen because trucks have been reassigned to delivering oxygen to hospitals..

The effects of a nationwide liquid oxygen shortage caused by the recent spike in hospitalized coronavirus patients has already delayed the launch of a Landsat imaging satellite by a week, and threatens to impact more missions from launch sites in Florida and California.

NASA said last week that the launch of the Landsat 9 satellite aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California would be delayed one week until no earlier than Sept. 23 due to a lack of liquid nitrogen at the military base. ULA uses gaseous nitrogen, which is converted from liquid nitrogen, for purges during testing and countdown operations.

The space agency said pandemic demands for medical liquid oxygen impacted the delivery of liquid nitrogen to Vandenberg.

SpaceX officials have also indicated that their launch schedule may be effected as well.

While the Wuhan flu is being blamed for this shortage, I think it is possibly more related to the rise in launches themselves. Such flu epidemics have happened in the past, causing similar spikes in hospitals, without causing delays in rocket launches. However, the U.S. this year has already almost doubled the number of yearly launches as had occurred during most of the 21st century. In addition, there are now numerous companies building and testing new rockets, all of which require liquid oxygen. The demand by rocket companies for such fuels is thus far higher than it has been for decades.

So, what is the solution? I just described it. The high demand will force the price up for liquid oxygen, which in turn will make it profitable for new providers to enter the market producing liquid oxygen to meet the new demand. It simply appears that at this moment the industry that produces these gases has been slow in reacting to its new demand.

We need only give the situation time and freedom to get solved and, most important, stay out of the way. Freedom and capitalism will solve the problem, as it always does.

19 comments

Today’s blacklisted American: Mother of slain soldier censored by Instagram and Facebook

11:27 am

Screenshot of Instagram censoring

The new dark age of silencing: Apparently because her posts on Instagram and Facebook were highly critical of Democrat President Joe Biden, both social media companies immediately either shut down or restricted the accounts of Shana Chappell, the mother of one of the soldiers killed in the Kabul Airport suicide bombing.

The mother of a Marine killed in the suicide bombing in Kabul, Afghanistan, last week had her account removed from Instagram and “incorrectly deleted” from Facebook following her fierce criticism of President Biden in the wake of her son’s death.

Shana Chappell, the mother of Kareem Nikoui, 20, took to Facebook on Monday to slam Instagram for removing her account after she started posting about what happened to her son and her belief that Biden is to blame. Chappell claimed the social media platform started to flag several of her “posts from months ago,” and began to send her warnings that she could have her account disabled.

“It seems Instagram took it upon themselves to delete my account because i am assuming it was because i gained so many followers over my sons death due to Biden’s negligence, ignorance and him being a traitor,” she wrote on Facebook. “I’m gonna assume that Facebook is gonna delete me next! Funny how these leftist one sided pieces of crap don’t want the truth to come out!

It appears both Instagram and Facebook have since restored her accounts and apologized, with both saying that her account was “accidentally deleted.” Hogwash. These actions are never an accident. They are almost always against people criticizing the left or the Democratic Party (I repeat myself), with many such bannings never explained or corrected.
» Read more

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Report: 43K of 61K absentee ballots in Georgia county were counted despite being illegal

3:19 pm

According to a newspaper in Georgia, 72% of the absentee ballots (43K out of 61K) obtained from drop boxes in DeKalb County, which covers part of Atlanta, violated the legal chain-of-custody requirements, and thus should have been deemed invalid.

The problem was actually worse than that:

All told, 43,907 absentee ballots deposited in drop boxes in DeKalb County … were counted in the certified results of the November 3, 2020 election despite being delivered to the registrar’s office in clear violation of the chain of custody documentation of the Georgia State Election Board’s July 2020 rule.

Another 24 percent – 14,925 absentee ballots collected from drop boxes – were documented as received by the elections official more than an hour after being collected by a two-person collection team, but on the same calendar day. Arguably, these additional 14,925 absentee ballots could also be considered in violation of the election code rule that requires absentee ballots placed in drop boxes “shall be immediately transported to the county registrar.”

Less than 5 percent of the absentee ballots collected from drop boxes during the November 2020 election were recorded as being received by the elections official in an hour or less. [emphasis in original]

That a chain of custody for the drop-box absentee ballots was not maintained means that during the time gap someone could have gone through the ballots and eliminated votes they do not like, or replaced those votes with “corrected” votes.

The newspaper also reports similar issues with drop box absentee ballots in other counties.

While these problems do not necessarily suggest fraud or vote tampering in this county, it certainly stinks to high heaven, especially since the drop boxes themselves were a very bad idea that made election fraud easy.

Biden won Georgia by only 11,779 votes. Who knows what the real count was? We shall probably never know.

8 comments

Today’s blacklisted American: Chase Bank closes Lt. General Mike Flynn’s credit card accounts because they don’t like his opinions

12:10 pm

Chase Bank blackballs Mike Flynn

They’re coming for you next: Chase Bank has unilaterally closed the credit card accounts held by President Trump’s first National Security Advisor Lieutenant General Mike Flynn, either because they don’t like his political opinions or are terrified of the left’s wrath if they don’t blackball him.

The language from Chase’s terse cancellation letter to Flynn, also shown to the right, is most revealing:
» Read more

27 comments

Sweden — land of no lockdowns or mandates — is doing best of all European nations against COVID

4:44 pm

Present European statistics on COVID
Click for full image.

Sweden has been slammed repeatedly by our panic-stricken mob of elitist leaders in politics, academia, and journalism for refusing to impose lockdowns or mask mandates. Instead, they essentially followed the recommendations of the Great Barrington Declaration and focused on protecting the vulnerable (the old and sick) while allowing everyone else (the young and healthy) to live normal lives. (This approach is what western civilization had done for the last two centuries when faced with a new flu epidemic, and only abandoned it in 2020 when our new leftist masters decided they knew better.)

The result was that the COVID virus quickly spread through Sweden’s strong and healthy population, did little harm, but left behind a nation of people who all have a natural immunity to the Wuhan flu and its later strains. Thus, while the rest of Europe — home of totalitarian and mindless governmental restrictions, lockdowns, mask and vaccine mandates — is now dealing with new outbreaks of the Wuhan flu and new deaths, Sweden is not.

The chart above, from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control and annotated by Doug Ross, illustrates this starkly. He also notes this disgusting fact about the bankrupt journalists of today:

It took me well more than 12 seconds to find the website of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, where weekly Covid updates from each country are tabulated. That level of effort finding the numbers apparently is too difficult for Pro Journalists at the HDNY Times*, CCNN, NBS, Politishmo, Yapoo and the rest.

Natural immunity is the best way to protect against the arrival of new flu strains. The drugs that have been developed might do okay, but against respiratory diseases like the coronavirus they have never been a real solution, only a bandaid that is best reserved for that old and sick population who really needs it. This is why we have always advised older people to get flu shots, but not the young.

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Today’s blacklisted American: Conservative student disqualified from student government because he’s conservative

1:22 pm

No free speech at Auburn University
No freedom of speech allowed at Auburn University!

The new dark age of silencing: A conservative student at Auburn University was voted down for government office essentially because it was revealed that he was conservative and Christian, and had expressed entirely reasonable views on Twitter criticizing the Black Lives Matter movement and its racist and Marxist agenda.

A junior nominated for a position on Auburn University’s student government was successfully shot down because he expressed Christian and conservative beliefs on social media.

Stephen Morris was nominated for the position of chief justice of Auburn University’s Student Government Association. To his surprise, at the session where his nomination was to be taken up, held remotely over video, several members of the student senate strongly opposed his nomination.

Morris’s critics accused him of racism over tweets they found offensive, and declared him unfit for service in student government.

The story at the link provides three examples of Morris’s tweets. None show the slightest indication of racism, merely a strong opposition to the agenda of Black Lives Matter, which despite its name seems entirely disinterested in the terrible crime rate in black communities, where innocent blacks are daily killed and robbed by the black criminals in their midst. Instead, all BLM cares about is eliminating any police protection for those innocent blacks, and for gaining as power and money for itself.
» Read more

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FAA’s space bureaucracy chief touts desire to limit his agency’s regulatory fist

10:18 am

Wayne Monteith, the man in charge of the FAA’s office of commercial space — which is tasked with regulating commercial space — revealed in a speech on August 25, 2021 that his goal is to speed that industry’s growth, not hinder it with odious regulations.

Wayne R. Monteith, a retired Air Force general who served for years in space billets in Colorado Springs is now the FAA’s associate administrator for commercial space transportation. He told a Space Symposium crowd at The Broadmoor Wednesday that to a large extent, he’s trying to keep his agency out of the way of the rush to space. “A regulatory agency can either be an accelerator or an inhibitor of industry,” he said. “We choose to be an accelerator.”

Sounds good, doesn’t it? Don’t be so sure. While right now Monteith noted that the agency is taking a laissez-faire approach to anyone who wants to fly in space, acting only to make sure space accidents will not harm “the uninvolved public,” he also said this in his speech:

Monteith warned, though, that mishaps for manned space flight that escalate to what he called “catastrophe,” have consequences. “The worst case is a catastrophic failure,” he said. “Then, we will regulate.”

In other words, he recognizes that if he tried now to impose his bureaucratic will on commercial space, it would not fly politically. What he really needs to expand his power is some space accident, a crisis you might say, that he can then use to convince others that he should be controlling things more.

Based on the response of the press, public, and American culture in the past half century, his thinking is quite sound. Routinely since World War II, as soon as something goes wrong in any field of endeavor the American public and political class has repeatedly wanted the government to move in and take greater control, under the false premise that somehow the government can prevent further failures.

Instead, we have accomplished less, and fueled the rise of an all-powerful bureaucracy capable and quite willing to squelch achievement. This is the pattern that Monteith is relying on, and based on recent history, he is entirely justified in believing so.

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Amazon protests SpaceX’s Starlink plan to FCC

9:23 am

Amazon on August 25, 2021 filed a protest with the FCC against SpaceX’s proposed expansion of its Starlink constellation that would allow almost 30,000 satellites to be launched.

“Should the Commission depart from its rules and precedent and endorse the approach of applying for multiple, mutually exclusive configurations, the consequences will extend far beyond the SpaceX Amendment,” wrote Mariah Shuman, corporate counsel for Amazon’s broadband megaconstellation venture Project Kuiper, in an Aug. 25 letter to the FCC. “However inefficient this strategy might be for the Commission and parties responding to applications, other prospective licensees will surely see the benefit in maximizing their optionality by describing multiple configurations in their license applications.”

Shuman asked the FCC to “dismiss SpaceX’s Amendment, and invite SpaceX to resubmit its amendment after settling on a single configuration for its Gen2 System.”

It appears Amazon does not want the FCC to approve multiple proposed satellite configurations put forth by SpaceX in a single application. Instead, it wants the FCC to force SpaceX to pick one, and submit that alone. It also appears that doing what Amazon requests would be more in line with past FCC policy.

While Amazon might have a point, the optics once again make another Jeff Bezos’ company look ugly, more interested in using the courts to stymie its competitors than actually launching anything. Amazon’s Kuiper internet constellation was first proposed in early 2019. More than two years have passed and none of its more than 3200 satellites have launched — not even one test satellite — with no clear indication yet on when launches will finally begin.

SpaceX began testing its Starlink system in 2018, and already has about 1,700 operational satellites in orbit. The comparison between the two companies is stark, and not favorable to Amazon.

In fact, Elon Musk was not shy in taking advantage of these optics to note them quite sharply in a tweet yesterday, saying, “Turns out Besos [sic] retired in order to pursue a full-time job filing lawsuits against SpaceX.”

Amazon is not Blue Origin, but both companies were founded by Bezos, and it appears right now that both prefer court battles to rocket engineering.

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Today’s blacklisted American: World’s top vaccine expert censored by Twitter & LinkedIn and punished by the CDC

12:14 pm

No real scientists allowed!
The opinions of real scientists banned!

They’re coming for you next: Even as Martin Kulldorff, a Harvard medical professor and one of the world’s foremost experts on vaccines, has been repeatedly censored by Twitter and LinkedIn, he has been banned and punished by the CDC for daring to publicly dissent from its government lockdown and mask and vaccine mandate policies.

First, I think it important to know who Martin Kulldorff is. This article provides a succinct resume of his qualifications:

Dr. Martin Kulldorff is a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and a biostatistician and epidemiologist at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He helped develop the CDC’s current system for monitoring potential vaccine risks.

Then there is this opinion by one of his collegues:

Kulldorff is a “world-class” vaccine safety “superstar,” said Jeffrey Brown, a Harvard Medical School colleague specializing in drug and vaccine safety research. “His qualifications are spectacular,” Brown said of Kulldorff. “He’s an international expert in vaccine safety. No one on earth would question whether he’s qualified. … He’s a pioneer.”

And yet, he has now become a pariah on social media as well as at the CDC, all of whom are apparently no longer interested in a robust and honest discussion about COVID.
» Read more

13 comments

Spanish judge invalids agreement to build TMT in Canary Islands

9:05 am

The consortium attempting to build the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT), blocked by protesters in Hawaii, has now had its back-up location in the Canary Islands blocked by a Spanish judge, who last month invalidated the agreement between the consortium and local authorities.

[A]n administrative court in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, the capital of the Spanish archipelago, ruled last month that the 2017 concession by local authorities of public land for the tentative project was invalid. The ruling was dated on July 29, but only became public this week after local media reported about the decision.

In the ruling obtained by The Associated Press, Judge Roi López Encinas wrote that the telescope land allocation was subject to an agreement between the Canary Astrophysics Institute, or IAC, and the telescope’s promoter, the TMT International Observatory (TIO) consortium. But the judge ruled that the agreement was not valid because TIO had not expressed an intention to build on the La Palma site instead of at the Hawaii site.

In other words, it appears the agreement was ruled invalid because the TMT builders had not made a firm commitment about building at the Canary Islands.

At this moment it truly looks like TMT is dead. It has no alternative site, and its political support in Hawaii is nil. While the Democratic Party politicians that rule that state have mouthed support for it, almost all their actions since the protests began has been to help the protesters and stymie construction.

What I think will soon begin happening is that the partners in TMT will begin to back out, switching their support to the other large ground-based telescopes being planned, the Giant Magellan Telescope and the European-Extremely Large Telescope. Since these are both being built in Chile, the loss of TMT means that there will be no large ground-based telescope coverage of the northern sky.

The real solution? Stop building ground-based telescopes. Put them in space, where such political issues won’t exist, and the view will be unimpeded by either the atmosphere or the tens of thousands of new satellites expected to launch in the coming years.

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Today’s blacklisted American gets an apology from Illinois regulators for threatening his medical license for opinions they didn’t like

2:39 pm

Today’s blacklist story is actually an update from my blacklist story two days ago about Dr. Jeremy Heinrichs, who because he had publicly expressed strong skepticism about the mask mandates being imposed by his state government in Illinois, had been threatened with the loss of his medical license by state regulators.

It appears those regulators have now quickly apologized for getting caught acting like jack-booted thugs.

“The initial response to your inquiry requested information that the Department does not need,” Dina Martin, an attorney with the Illinois Department of Professional and Financial Regulation, said in a letter to Henrichs’ legal counsel. The department had originally asked for “a detailed statement on your opinion about masks, and whether you support and will enforce a mask mandate based on your elected position as a school board member.”

“I sincerely apologize for the tone and content of those communications,” Martin said in her August 19 letter, obtained by Just the News.

It also appears that the regulators plan to drop their complaint investigation.

This is how you treat bullies. You don’t back down. You don’t apologize. And you certainly don’t hide in shame out of fear their unjustified attacks will hurt you. No, you fight back hard, and brightly expose them for all to see. Like all bullies they will immediately back off themselves, especially if their attack has no merit (which is almost always the case).

There is no indication however that the regulators who sent those improper initial communications have been punished in any way. I expect not. The Illinois government got caught this time, but has no intention of preventing this from happening in the future. If anything I expect the government has simply asked these employees to lay low for awhile and try the same thing again later, in the hope that others will be more easily intimidated.

To really fix this the voters need to fire everyone in these governments, from the Democratic Party elected officials who control Illinois to the lowest bureaucrat who thinks such behavior can sometimes be justified.

10 comments

Today’s blacklisted American: A man’s life destroyed because he visited the Capitol on January 6th

1:17 pm

Twitter's idea of debate
Show trials: The Biden administration’s goal for pro-Trump protesters

Genocide is coming: Because the Biden Justice Department is determined to throw the book at him, the life of truck driver Robert Reeder has been thoroughly shattered, losing his job and friends and even alienating his family, simply because he decided to participate in the protests at the Capitol on January 6th and got caught up in the chaos that ensued.

All the evidence suggests that Reeder, along with almost all the protesters on January 6th, did nothing particularly violent. Their actions were spontaneous (as an FBI investigation has reluctantly admitted), and mostly peaceful. Moreover, Reeder’s behavior, along with his fellow pro-Trump protesters, pales in comparison to the violence and rioting committed routinely by leftist protests from Antifa and BLM, for which they are never charged or punished.
» Read more

25 comments

Today’s blacklisted American: Illinois threatens to cancel doctor’s license because it doesn’t like his opinions

3:46 pm

The Bill of Rights cancelled in Illinois
No first amendment in Illinois

They’re coming for you next: State regulators in Illinois are threatening to take away a medical license of a doctor, Jeremy Heinrichs, because he has publicly challenged the mask mandate being imposed by his state government.

In a provided statement, Henrichs said: “I have considered authoritative medical evidence that questions the necessity of mandatory masking in our schools. As a result, the [Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation] has threatened my medical licensure unless I expressly support and enforce a mask mandate for all students.

“The [IDFPR] has commanded me to ‘toe the line’ or suffer personal and professional consequences,” he added.

…In a separate email, a state medical investigator, whose name was redacted from the email, said a complaint filed against Henrichs “appears to be a parent or concerned citizen who did not agree with the doctor’s opinion on the masking motion for schools. That would fall under the unprofessional conduct part of the medical practice act,” the email said. “What the medical disciplinary board wants to know is if the doctor will support and enforce the mask mandate by the Governor.”

» Read more

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Why only NOW is there mounting concern over President Biden’s mental health?

12:36 pm


Biden as he forgets what truths we hold as self-evident in March 2020.

A Daily Mail story from last week reported on the growing concern of doctors and other health experts about the mental state of Joe Biden, the oldest American president ever.

Questions have been raised about US President Joe Biden’s cognitive wellbeing after a car crash interview over his handling of the unfolding Afghanistan crisis. America’s oldest president provided jumbled responses to questions and mixed up details about his son in an interview with ABC. The stumbles did not make the broadcasted version but were revealed when a full transcript of the interview was published overnight.

It revealed the President incorrectly stated his late son Beau Biden worked for the Navy in Afghanistan, before correcting himself that he served for the Army in Iraq. It follows a spate of gaffes and slips of the tongue since the 78-year-old ran his successful presidential campaign in 2019.

This story only highlights a growing slew of news stories and op-eds that have appeared recently during the ongoing debacle in Afghanistan, in both the right and leftwing press, that have noticed how President Biden appears repeatedly confused in interviews while showing signs that he does not quite understand what is going on around him.

Of course, for the press and the political class to recognize these facts now, after Biden has become president, is equivalent to closing the barn door after the animals have escaped. As I noted in October 2020, before the election, these cognitive issues have been obvious for the last two years, and had been getting steadily worse throughout 2020 during the election campaign. As I wrote then,
» Read more

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Update on Starship/Superheavy preparations for orbital test flight

9:15 am

Starship prototype #20 being prepped
Screen capture from Labpadre live stream, available here.

Link here. In sum it appears that SpaceX is getting very close to launch, with the permit approval of the FAA increasingly becoming the biggest obstacle to progress.

Although the completion of all of this testing could take a long time, in Elon Musk’s mind, the path to returning B4 and S20 to being an integrated stack could be during this month.

A week ago, Musk tweeted that the “first orbital stack of Starship should be ready for flight in a few weeks, pending only regulatory approval.” Ultimately, once the vehicle is in its launch configuration, there will be a lengthy process of passing the aforementioned regulatory approval, with an environmental public comment period triggered ahead of launch. This has to be completed before the launch license can be granted by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

The screen capture above shows Starship prototype #20 sitting on the suborbital flight test pad, as workers on cherry-pickers work on its exterior. The orange, green, and white tiles are likely tile locations still needing some level of installation work.

Based on SpaceX’s normal pace of operations, the engine testing for both Starship and Superheavy will take several weeks, once both are ready for such testing. While Starship appears just about ready, Superheavy apparently needs more work. When SpaceX stacked both together on the orbital launchpad several weeks ago, it suggested both were closer to launch than they were. Their present status suggests engine testing will likely begin in September, with Starship at the beginning of the month and Superheavy at the end of the month. That would make a launch possible sometime in late October, assuming the federal government doesn’t decide to shut this entire operation down by refusing to issue a permit.

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Today’s blacklisted American: Unvaccinated students at Quinnipac University to be punished

11:53 am

Coming to your town in America soon!
Rounding up the unclean unvaccinated: coming soon to America.

Genocide is coming: Quinnipac University in Connecticut, having reimposed an indoor mask requirement, has now announced that it will fine and punish any students who do not provide proof that they have either been vaccinated against COVID or have a proper exemption.

Quinnipiac students may be fined up to $200 per week eventually until they prove their vaccination status. Fines for students who don’t supply vaccination proof will begin at $100 per week for the first two weeks. The penalty will increase by increments of $25 every two weeks until a max fine of $200 per week.

Currently non-complying students can avoid the fines if they show the proper documentation by Sept. 14. If they fail to meet the directive by then, they will lose access to the campus internet network.

No longer is the left screaming “My body! My choice!” Then that mantra for abortion worked to garner it political support from naive followers. Now the mantra is “Your body is ours! Let us do to it what we want or we will oppress you!”

It is a very short leap from merely punishing those who refuse a vaccine to rounding them up in camps to isolate them from the rest of society. From there, it is an even shorter leap to imposing mass executions to keep society clean from such unpure individuals.
» Read more

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British court dismisses billionaire’s lawsuit against Sutherland spaceport

10:52 am

A British judge today dismissed entirely [pdf] the lawsuit filed by billionaire Anders Povlsen, who had been trying to block the construction of a spaceport in Sutherland, Scotland, a region where he owns thousands of acres and is involved in many environmental issues.

Povlsen instead has been lobbying to have a spaceport instead built in the Shetland Islands, by a company he has invested in.

The ruling on all points went against Povlsen. The judge concluded:

Since I have held that none of the grounds of challenge is well founded it is unnecessary to [do anything], and I do not propose to do so (other than to say what I have already said….)

I shall sustain [the defense’s case and]… repel the petitioner’s pleas-in-law, and refuse the petition. I shall reserve meantime all questions of expenses.

This likely clears the way for construction of the Sutherland spaceport, from which the British smallsat rocket company Obex wants to launch. Lockheed Martin has said it would launch smallsats from Sutherland, but it has also said it would launch from Shetland too.

Povlsen’s opposition based on environmental concerns was of course a smokescreen to get this competing spaceport closed so that the one he has invested in in Shetland would get all the business. For more than three-quarters of a century launches have taken place at both the Kennedy and Vandenberg spaceports in the U.S., with neither doing any harm to the surrounding wildlife. Moreover, at Kennedy that spaceport forced the creation of a wildlife preserve, which prevented development. As long as they are operated with care and properly, spaceports are good for wildlife.

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Today’s blacklisted American: Priest removed by Catholic Church for condemning Democrats who violate actual Catholic teachings

12:17 pm

Catholic Church now opposes its own basic tenets in order to politically help Democrats
The Catholic Church: Down with Catholic teachings!
Up with the leftist Democratic Party!

They’re coming for you next: A Wisconsin priest was removed from his parish by his superiors in the Catholic Church in late May because he has bluntly condemned Democratic Party politicians for their “pro-abortion, pro-gay marriage, and pro-transgender agendas” that violate the church’s foundational teachings.

The priest, James Altman, is most well known for a video homily he posted that stated the following:

“Here’s a memo to clueless baptized Catholics out there: You cannot be Catholic and be a Democrat. Period,” Altman said in the video. “Their party platform absolutely is against everything the Catholic church teaches. So just quit pretending that you’re Catholic and vote Democrat. Repent of your support of that party and its platform, or face the fires of hell.”

Altman’s homily also strongly criticized his own superiors for their willingness to protect these same Democrats, no matter what those Democrats do.
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The knives aimed at SpaceX are getting sharpened

10:01 am

Starship must be banned!
Banning Starship: The new goal of our leftist masters.

Two stories today mark what appears to be a growing political campaign focused on squelching by any means possible the continued unparalleled success of the company SpaceX. And the simultaneous publication of both stories on the same day also suggests that this campaign is deliberately timed to force the FAA to shut down SpaceX at Boca Chica.

First we have a story at Space.com aimed at SpaceX’s Starlink constellation, making it the big villain in the growing threat of satellite collisions.

SpaceX’s Starlink satellites alone are involved in about 1,600 close encounters between two spacecraft every week, that’s about 50 % of all such incidents, according to Hugh Lewis, the head of the Astronautics Research Group at the University of Southampton, U.K. These encounters include situations when two spacecraft pass within a distance of 0.6 miles (1 kilometer) from each other.

Lewis, Europe’s leading expert on space debris, makes regular estimates of the situation in orbit based on data from the Socrates (Satellite Orbital Conjunction Reports Assessing Threatening Encounters in Space ) database. This tool, managed by Celestrack, provides information about satellite orbits and models their trajectories into the future to assess collision risk.

Though his data appears accurate and the growing risk of collisions is real, it appears from the story that Lewis, one of only two experts interviewed, has a strong hostility to SpaceX. He doesn’t like the fact that SpaceX is so successful in such a short time, and appears to want something done to control it.

The article also nonchalantly sloughs off one very significant fact: Very few satellite collisions have actually occurred. While the risk is certainly going to increase, that increase is not going to be fueled just by SpaceX. At least four large constellations are presently in the works, all comparable to Starlink in some manner. To focus on SpaceX in particular makes this article appear like a hatchet job.

Then we have a news story from CBS and its very partisan and leftist news show, Sixty Minutes+, providing a loud soapbox for the very small number of anti-development environmentalists fighting to block SpaceX’s operations in Boca Chica, Texas.
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China launches two more military surveillance satellites

8:52 am

China today used its Long March 4B rocket to put two more military surveillance satellites into orbit.

No word on whether the spent first stage landed near habitable areas in China. China also said nothing about whether that stage carried grid fins or parachutes for bringing it back to Earth more precisely.

The leaders in the 2021 launch race:

27 China
20 SpaceX
12 Russia
4 Northrop Grumman

Russia plans a launch later today (tomorrow in Russia) of another 34 OneWeb satellites. In the national rankings, the U.S. still leads China 31 to 27.

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Arizona’s governor moves to block any local school mask mandates or closures

3:39 pm

Doug Ducey, the less than useless Republican governor in Arizona during this past year of Wuhan panic, has apparently finally seen the light, and has begun to take action to prevent the Democratically-controlled local school boards and city governments from imposing new mask and vaccine mandates as well as shutting schools out of an unjustified fear of COVID-19.

Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey on Tuesday announced schools that impose mask mandates in the state will not have access to a $163 million grant program backed by coronavirus relief funds he controls.

The Republican governor said schools with mask mandates or that have closed due to COVID-19 concerns will not be eligible for an additional $1,800 per student. The announcement comes one day after he issued an executive order banning cities and counties from mandating vaccinations.

Ducey also announced a grant program to award parents if their schools require quarantining or isolation of students.

The governor also announced a $10 million grant that intends to award parents $7,000 for each student if their public school required isolating or quarantining due to COVID-19 exposure or if it gave preferential treatment to vaccinated children or mandated masks.

As expected, the Democrats in the state legislature railed against such measures, not because the mandates actually prevent the spread of any disease, but because Ducey’s actions rob them and their allies in local government of the unbridled power they have enjoyed for the eighteen or so months. Before they simply had power, and it corrupted them somewhat. Since the arrival of the Wuhan panic they have had absolute power, and it corrupted them absolutely. They are addicted to it, and can’t tolerate giving it up.

Meanwhile, it should not take a governor to recognize the right of the people to live their lives as they choose. That Ducey has to do this tells us that the public has ceded to much power to the government, no matter who is in charge. That too has to change, and it has to change at all levels, from the smallest local school board to the presidency of the entire nation.

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Revolt in San Diego over Democrat-imposed mask and vaccine mandates?

3:27 pm

At a board of supervisors public meeting in San Diego yesterday it appeared that a major revolt is rising against the local government’s demand that businesses impose mask and vaccine mandates on their employees and customers.

Hundreds of businesses have already signed a Business Equality Pledge and posted a Proclamation pledging not to discriminate. Citizens are also signing a petition to refuse to comply with these arbitrary and unconstitutional requirements. The rally attendees are not anti-vax, but they are simply against all medical mandates.

The community members and leaders were fired up, and to put it simply, directly called out the San Diego County Board of Supervisors for their overreaching rule, telling them to their face they have forgotten their oath to protect the constitution.

The article includes almost two dozen videos of statements by various citizens and business owners, telling the supervisors to their face, and by name, that they face a quick recall if they don’t back off and instead try to impose these mandates. These are definitely worth watching, as they indicate the rising anger and frustration many Americans are feeling over the mindless and very damaging and totalitarian government actions over the past year and a half.

The videos and the crowd responses suggest that the public in this southern California town at least has finally turned against their government leadership, which presently has a Democratic Party majority. If so, it will be a welcome and long overdue development.

At the same time, based on past experience one should not get too confident. Many past such protests were not matched by the voters. Moreover, this is California, where the election process has been badly corrupted and is very unreliable. Even if the voters vote to throw these bums out, the bums might very well have the power to revise that result to their favor.

I will not breathe easy and feel real hope until I see some actual electoral changes, at that ballot box, something that has not really occurred since World War II. Even when the voters threw the bums out of Congress in 1994 and 2010, nothing really changed.

And at the local level the public has been less than uninterested in who wins elections. This more than anything has got to change to actually change the government we live under.

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Today’s blacklisted American: Professor fired by university for having opinions

11:25 am

Today's modern witch hunt
Burn witches: What St. Joseph’s University is doing,
with great enthusiasm.

Today’s blacklist story is an update from a March 25 story. Then, St. Joseph’s University in Pennsylvania had merely suspended Professor Gregory Manco because he dared to publicly express opposition to the idea of paying reparations to blacks for something (slavery) that hasn’t existed in the U.S. for more than 150 years.

The university has now doubled down on that action by terminating Manco’s employment.

The biggest irony is that the school’s own investigation found that Manco had done nothing wrong.
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Today’s blacklisted American: Big time comic book artist and screenwriter Frank Miller banned from British comic convention

11:28 am

Banned: Artist and screenwriter Frank Miller
Banned: Comic book artist and movie screenwriter Frank Miller

Genocide is coming: Frank Miller, well known comic book artist and the screenwriter of several major Hollywood movies, was banned from a British comic convention recently because fifteen years earlier — only a few years after the destruction of the World Trade Center and during the American effort to defeat the Islamic terrorist organization al-Qaeda — Miller had penned a comic book whose main character fought those terrorists.

And what prompted Miller’s banning by the convention, dubbed the Thought Bubble festival? Apparently, it received a single complaint from one very unknown Islamic cartoonist.

Miller was dropped after Zainab Akhtar, whom The Mix describes as an “award-winning cartoonist and small press publisher ShortBox founder,” said that she would “no longer be attending Thought Bubble festival this November” because Miller was set to be there. Akhtar explained: “As a proud Muslim woman, I cannot in good conscience attend a festival that deems it appropriate to invite and platform Frank Miller, a person who is responsible for the propagation of abhorrent anti-Muslim hate, particularly via his work.”

Akhtar in her complaint never actually cites any specific examples of Miller’s anti-Muslim hate, thus forcing everyone to guess what Miller’s specific crime might be. The only possible example is that earlier work, which very specifically attacked a terrorist group, not all of Islam.

But then, for the oppressive left, which includes radical Islamists like Akhtar, any criticism of their allies or agenda must always be labeled as “racist.”

As usual, what makes this story most appalling is the obsequiousness of the convention management, which immediately bowed to Akhtar’s slanderous complaint, begging forgiveness in the most cowardly way.
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Today’s blacklisted American: Illinois University now proudly discriminating according to race

12:15 pm

The Civil Rights Act of 1964: repealed the University of Illinois
The Civil Rights Act of 1964: Doesn’t exist at the University of Illinois

Genocide is coming to America: The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has established a mentoring program, with financial rewards, that expressly discriminates against Asians and whites (unless the whites happen to have Latin American genes).

From the program’s own webpage:

[W]e are pleased to launch the Milliman Mentorship Program, an actuarial mentorship program for students of underrepresented minorities (Black, Latino, Native American) at the University of Illinois.

…This program is currently targeted towards students of color, early in their college career, who may be interested in a STEM-oriented career.

The webpage then lists the benefits, including financial support and additional free mentoring assistence.

As noted at the Campus Reform article at the first link, this is clearly a violation of numerous civil rights laws.
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