Tag: oppression

India begins countdown for 1st GSLV rocket launch since 2019

9:52 am

India today began the countdown for its first GSLV rocket launch in more than two years, since it launched the lunar orbiter Chandrayaan-2 with the lunar rover/lander that crashed onto the surface shortly thereafter.

The launch is targeted for 8:13 p.m (Eastern) tonight.

The long gap in GSLV launches was almost entirely because of India’s panic over the Wuhan flu. For the past year and a half its space agency ISRO has completed three just launches, all of which were delayed until late in 2020 because of the panic. Prior to that panic, India had hoped to launch as many as 8 to 12 times in ’20 and ’21 each. Instead, their space industry shut down, and the commercial business they hoped to capture went to American private companies instead.

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Inspector general slams NASA spacesuit program

12:39 pm

NASA's failed spacesuit
NASA’s failed spacesuit

A NASA inspector general report released today [pdf] bluntly slammed NASA endless and much delayed project to develop a new spacesuit for its Artemis program.

After noting that the project has been ongoing at NASA for fourteen years, the summary then blasts the program hard:

NASA’s current schedule is to produce the first two flight-ready xEMUs [NASA acronym for spacesuits] by November 2024, but the Agency faces significant challenges in meeting this goal. This schedule includes approximately a 20-month delay in delivery for the planned design, verification, and testing suit, two qualification suits, an ISS Demo suit, and two lunar flight suits. These delays—attributable to funding shortfalls, COVID-19 impacts, and technical challenges—have left no schedule margin for delivery of the two flight-ready xEMUs. Given the integration requirements, the suits would not be ready for flight until April 2025 at the earliest. Moreover, by the time two flight-ready xEMUs are available, NASA will have spent over a billion dollars on the development and assembly of its next-generation spacesuits.

Given these anticipated delays in spacesuit development, a lunar landing in late 2024 as NASA currently plans is not feasible. [emphasis mine]

This bears repeating: NASA will spent more than a billion dollars and fourteen years to build two spacesuits. What a bargain! Imagine if we have to pay a tailor for fitting!

And yet, despite this incredibly inefficient use of money, the report also finds that NASA doesn’t have enough to get the suits made on time!

Besides the endless managerial incompetencies noted in the report, it also notes several technical issues contributing to the problems, including one case where “staff used the wrong specifications” causing a unit’s failure.

Overall, the entire management of this program by NASA and the government appears to have been confused, incoherent, wasteful, and unable to get the job done, a pattern quite typical of almost every government project for the past four decades. Yet, though the report notes that in October 2019 the agency had finally decided to dump this failed program entirely and instead hire private companies to build the suits, the report criticizes this change, noting that the commercial contractors will not be required to use NASA designs, meaning the $420 million NASA has spent will literally be wasted.

So what? That money has been wasted already. I am quite willing to bet that for no more than a quarter of that cost, two private companies could get new spacesuits ready, and do it quickly, as long as our entirely incompetent government gets out of their way.

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Today’s blacklisted American: Medical student expelled for expressing political opinions

12:02 pm

Baby killing okay at University of Kentucky
Harming babies and children appears to be official
policy at the University of Louisville.

Less than a year from completing his four year program as a medical student at the University of Louisville, Austin Clark was expelled because he had revealed his Christian pro-life beliefs by inviting a pro-life advocate to speak at the campus.

In July, 2021 he filed a lawsuit in an attempt to get reinstated.

The medical student’s complaint is against President Neeli Bendapudi of the University of Louisville School of Medicine along 13 others connected to the school. Why does he say he was so suddenly expelled?

In his lawsuit, Austin alleges that the trouble with the school began when his pro-life group hosted speaker Alex McFarland in Fall, 2018. Austin was on the leadership board of the Medical Students for Life group [SFLA] at University of Louisville School of Medicine. The administration did everything they could to prevent the event from happening, largely by mandating impossibly expensive security fees – a common tactic of schools trying to silence views of the students they don’t like, as SFLAction/SFLA President Kristan Hawkins observed in her Wall Street Journal opinion piece. The student group even had to involve Alliance Defending Freedom, a legal foundation committed to the free speech of conservative students, to ensure that the event took place.

As noted in SFLA’s news release on the lawsuit, Austin says that from that point until his 2020 dismissal from the medical school, professors retaliated against him for his views, calling him “stupid” and questioning if his “brain was working” among the derogatory comments made. He was subjected to abuse, changes to his grades and forced to sign a “professionalism contract” that other students had not been required to sign. In his lawsuit, Clark alleges that he was “was physically harassed and bullied” as well.

The article at the link also cites a great deal of evidence that the university’s is closely tied with “the only remaining abortion clinic in Kentucky.”
» Read more

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Eric Berger: FAA regulators should get out of the way

10:16 am

In a essay today for Ars Technica, Eric Berger makes note of the progress that SpaceX is making on its Starship/Superheavy rocket, and points out that the one major obstacle that SpaceX cannot control and that stands in its way is the revised “environmental assessment” the FAA still must approve to permit the rocket to launch from Boca Chica.

Perhaps the biggest hurdle of all will be clearance from the Federal Aviation Administration, which is working with SpaceX to conduct an environmental assessment of launching such a mammoth rocket from these South Texas wetlands. After a “draft” of this assessment is published, there will be an approximately 30-day period for public comments. This will be followed by other steps, including a determination by the FAA on whether SpaceX’s proposed environmental mitigations will be enough or if more work is required.

The stacking of the rocket late last week, and the photos released by Musk of that stacking, Berger sees as Musk’s effort to quietly apply pressure on those bureaucrats to get their work done already. As he writes, “Holding back Starship means holding back this progress, Musk wanted regulators to understand.”

Read the whole essay. In addition to illustrating the poltical games required by SpaceX to get past the stifling rules of our modern government, it very nicely shows how America has changed since the early 20th century. Then, no such regulators stood in the way, and Americans were thus about to build fast and with great skill, reshaping the cities of the world forever.

Though I expect the politics of the moment to favor SpaceX, forcing the FAA to get its work done quickly to allow the rocket to take off as planned, this is only going to happen because of the political clout SpaceX has with the public, and thus with politicians. For small companies no such clout exists, and thus expect U.S. innovation to continue to suffer in the coming years because we have given our govenrment too much power over our lives.

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Evidence proves lockdowns bad; Democrats scream, “We must have more lockdowns!”

3:55 pm

Modern science!
How Democratic Party policy makers interpret data!

Almost a year and a half since the Wuhan panic swept across the world, the evidence continues to show that the policy decisions by our so-called “intellectual” class of experts to impose mandates and lockdowns were almost all stupid, producing disaster after disaster while completely failing to achieve any of their goals.

First we have Sweden, which refused to impose any lockdowns and now has practically no COVID-19 deaths at all.

An Imperial College model suggested that 85,000 people would die without a lockdown, and an Uppsala University team projected that 40,000 people would die from COVID-19 by May 1, 2020 and nearly 100,000 by June.

But by May, Sweden reported roughly six deaths for every one million people, according to the Financial Times, with 48.9% of its initial coronavirus deaths taking place in nursing homes, according to an analysis by the Swedish Public Health Agency. More than a year later, Sweden recorded 1.1 million coronavirus cases with 1.07 million people having recovered from the virus, and 14,620 coronavirus-linked deaths, according to woldometers.info as of Aug. 8, 2021.

Of the currently 12,248 people who have tested positive for COVID-19, 12, 219 are experiencing mild symptoms (99.8%) and 29 (0.2%) are in serious or critical condition, according to woldometers.info.

In other words, the models were so ridiculously wrong they weren’t even in the same galaxy as the results in the real world. Sweden’s population very quickly reached herd immunity and is now relatively immune from the virus and its later variants.

Moreover, Sweden’s economy has suffered little during the epidemic, and is doing nicely. Not so much in the U.S., where power-hungry politicians with their lockdowns have caused the destruction of 40% of all small businesses.

Nor is Sweden the only data point. A new study of 43 countries as well as all 50 U.S. states has found that lockdowns were worthless.
» Read more

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Today’s blacklisted American: For too many, it ain’t my problem

11:52 am

Rick, stating the truth in Casablanca
Still asleep, and tragically, they refuse to wake up.

Last week I took a break from publishing my daily “Today’s blacklisted American” column. It is without doubt a depressing chore to detail day after day examples where power-hungry thugs smash their jackboots on the faces of innocent people, merely because those innocent people committed the horrible crime of disagreeing with thugs.

I found I needed that break. I also had sensed — from the overall decreasing interest by news aggregate sites in my column — that the news business, even the conservative news business, was becoming bored with these stories.

Worse, I sensed that many readers found these stories distasteful and wished to avoid them. Though I don’t give a rat’s ass that these ostriches (with their heads in the sand) were bothered, it was nonetheless depressing to sense such people existed, and nothing I did could ever penetrate their close-minded brains.

My post announcing this break sadly confirmed my worse fears.
» Read more

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Hawaiian TMT protesters found not guilty of obstructing the road they obstructed

9:05 am

The law for thee but not for me: An Hawaiian judge has ruled that the protesters of the Thirty Meter Telesecope (TMT) who had obstructed the access road to the top of Mauna Kea are not guilty of obstructing that road.

[I]n announcing her verdict, the judge noted that during the trial, officials testified that the access road was closed and there were no permits issued for oversized vehicles. “Evidence that Mauna Kea access road was closed or restricted to the public, coupled with no permits, equals no obstruction,” Laubach said. “There would be no unreasonable inconvenience or hazard.”

The state failed to meet its burden beyond a reasonable doubt, she said.

This ruling is a joke. The reason the officials closed the road was because the protesters were there. The officials did not want anyone hurt by the oversized trucks that had legal permission to drive through carrying TMT construction equipment.

Such a ruling however is not a surprise. From top to bottom Hawaii’s government in controlled by the Democratic Party. The judge almost certainly was a Democrat. The Democrats favor the bigoted anti-white and anti-technology agenda of the protesters, and have gone out of their way to help them in their protests.

In general, protesters for Democratic Party causes can loot, burn, kill, obstruct traffic, and do all sorts of violent things — including physically attacking women and children in a park in Portland — and are either never arrested, quickly released on dropped charges, or found innocent.

Be a conservative and spend a dozen minutes inside the Capitol Building taking a few selfies, however, and you will find yourself imprisoned for months, with no charges brought and no sign they ever will be brought. You are guilty, and you will be punished. How dare you do anything that opposes the Democratic Party and its storm trooper thugs?

TMT is never going to be built in Hawaii. In fact, I am beginning to doubt it will ever be built anywhere. Considering the increasing difficulty that ground-based astronomy is going to have dealing with the many satellite constellations now being launched, it is very possible the support for the telescope will begin to dry up. And maybe this failure will be a signal to astronomers that they should finally begin spending their money on space-based optical telescopes.

Meanwhile, Hawaii has become a place hostile to science, to new knowledge, and even to tourism. The dark age there has come quite quickly.

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Rocket Lab shifts another launch from Virginia to New Zealand

12:15 pm

Foot-dragging by NASA bureaucrats has apparently forced Rocket Lab to shift the launch of its CAPSTONE lunar orbit cubesat from its new launchpad in Wallops Island, Virgina, to its New Zealand launchpad.

CAPSTONE would be the second Rocket Lab mission in recent weeks that shifted from Virginia to New Zealand. The most recent Electron launch July 26 placed into orbit Monolith, a smallsat developed by the Air Force Research Laboratory. Monolith was originally going to launch on the first Electron mission from Virginia.

Rocket Lab said at the time that it shifted the launch of Monolith because of ongoing work by NASA to certify the software for the rocket’s autonomous flight termination system. A NASA spokesman said in July that the agency expected to complete certification of the unit by the end of the year.

Note too that Rocket Lab had originally hoped to launch from Wallops in 2020, but was forced to delay that launch to 2021 then because of NASA’s inability to approve this system. Now it looks like they won’t be able to launch in ’21 either.

This flight termination system is likely the same one that Rocket Lab has successfully used now for four years and more than twenty launches in New Zealand. Why it should take NASA literally years to approve it is shameful. As I wrote in November,

While I have no evidence of this, I cannot help being suspicious of these various government agencies. For years numerous people in the government put fake roadblocks up to slow or stop SpaceX’s first manned launch, merely because it threatened their turfs. This autonomous termination system will make the ground crews at Vandenberg and at Cape Canaveral irrelevant, and I would not be surprised if some of these issues were drummed up to delay or block this system because of that.

I know I am being cynical, but based on history it is not unreasonable to be so.

I think we are seeing evidence now that my cynicism was entirely justified.

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Having an off day

1:50 pm

To my readers: This is one of those days where I just cannot get up the oomph to write. First, I am becoming bored by my daily “Today’s blacklisted American” column. It is not that the number of people being ruined and harmed by the oppressive thugs of the left has dropped, it is that I am finding that people are becoming desensitized to the oppression. I get the impression that my posts are being skimmed or ignored, because they are merely repeating the same story over and over again.

“Oh, yeah, big deal, another person lost their job because they dared to express an opinion. Call me when something new happens.”

Such a situation I find so depressing words can’t express it. Makes it very hard to work.

Second, I have a bunch of new cool images to post, but I am either waiting for answers from scientists before posting, or I don’t have the mental energy today to work up a post. Sorry. I think I simply need a real day off.

Unless I get energerized later today, you all will simply have to wait until I return in full force on Monday (though if something exciting pops up on the weekend it might get my writing juices flowing sooner).

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As thousands of teachers endorse critical race theory, home schooling surges

12:45 pm

What apparently Critical Race Theory sees as education for elementary school kids.
What apparently Critical Race Theory sees as education for
elementary school kids.

In the past few months state legislatures across the country have passed resolutions that ban schools from teaching the Marxist and bigoted program dubbed Critical Race Theory (CRT).

Not surprisingly, the leftists who dominate our school systems have fought back. The very leftist Zinn Education Project immediately created a petition calling for teachers to defy such laws and to continue to teach CRT, which teaches children to hate whites and to give minorities privileged status.

In the two months this petition has been on line almost 6,000 teachers have signed it, with many adding comments of defiance. This one is typical:
» Read more

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Details on the Russian movie to be shot on ISS in October

9:13 pm

Link here. The article provides a lot of details about who will fly, who will do what, and who is slated as back-ups if the primary crew of actress and director fail their training. However, I found the description of the movie to be the most interesting thing:

Shipenko revealed the script is still being fine-tuned, but the plot involves a cosmonaut who suffers a cardiac arrest during a spacewalk and, although he survives, he will require surgery to ensure he can handle the Soyuz return to Earth. A female cardiac surgeon, named Zhenya, has to be sent to the ISS to perform the procedure with only a few weeks to prepare for the trip.

Unlike the American space films like Gravity, this story is incredibly well grounded in reality. The Russians have actually experienced examples of station astronauts getting so sick in space that their missions had to be aborted early. In one case it was a prostate infection. In another it was the mental illness of the entire crew.

This story is also comparable to situations that have occurred in Antarctica, a very similar environment to the station. In the early 2000s the doctor in Antarctica had to perform surgery on herself because she had developed cancer. Then in 2016 Buzz Aldrin had to be evacuated due health issues.

If done right, this could not only make a damn good movie, it will also do so by revealing the true dangers of going to space.

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Today’s blacklisted American: Cybersecurity experts want people fired for expressing unpopular opinions on line

1:09 pm

1966 in communist China
Mao’s cultural revolution in 1966, what the leftists
at Respect in Security want for America and the world.

Persecution is now cool! A new project being developed by leftist cybersecurity experts calls for corporations to use their software to identify and fire individuals that their software identifies as having expressed what they define as “offensive” speech online.

Cancel Culture and Big Tech are a match made in hell, as cybersecurity experts call to target the livelihood of internet users who get too edgy online. “The initiative, called Respect in Security, was launched on Tuesday by two cybersecurity experts. According to the founders, several companies have already signed up,” Reclaim The Net reported. “For a lot of people, it’s a no man’s land,” founder Lisa Forte and Red Goat Cyber Security employee told the BBC. “It can feel like the platforms do nothing, the police don’t do a lot, lawyers are expensive and the publicity legal action generates can be negative.”

The BBC reported that co-founder and Trend Micro Vice President Rik Ferguson said “many companies had anti-bullying policies but they tended to focus on internal behaviour.” In what may be a reference to his Respect in Security program, he wrote a few weeks ago: “Inside my ‘Projects’ email folder resides a subfolder called ‘Kill Trolls’ and it is now only a couple of weeks away from becoming a real thing (sadly not with that name).”

Free speech advocates concerned about Ferguson and Forte’s work may have good reason to be. Forte explained her clear fix for people saying offensive statements via the internet: “The best solution we have, if the culprit is identifiable, is to approach their employer.” [emphasis mine]

It is bad enough that the big social media companies — Google, Facebook, Twitter — are routinely banning conservatives for expressing opinions or even facts they don’t like. Now the storm troopers above want to extend the blacklisting to get those same people fired for daring to speak their mind publicly. From another story:
» Read more

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Gil Levin passes away

9:48 am

Gil Levin, a instrument project scientist for one of the science experiments on the Mars Viking landers in the 1970s, has passed away at 97.

Levin deserves special mention because he believed for years that his experiment, called “labeled release,” had possibly found evidence of life.

Dr. Levin’s experiment employed a nine-foot arm to scoop Martian soil into a container, where it was treated with a solution containing radioactive carbon nutrients. Monitors detected the release of radioactive gas, which Dr. Levin interpreted as evidence of metabolism.

“Gil, that’s life,” Straat said when they saw the results.

The findings held true for both Viking 1 and Viking 2, which took samples from different regions of the planet. Other experiments aboard the Viking, however, used different methods to conclude that Martian soil did not contain carbon, an element found in all living things.

Dr. Levin stood by his findings, but top NASA scientists disagreed, saying that the response he observed was the result of inorganic chemical responses, not biological processes. “Soon thereafter,” Dr. Levin told the Johns Hopkins University School of Engineering Magazine last year, “I gave a talk at the National Academy of Sciences saying we detected life, and there was an uproar. Attendees shouted invectives at me. They were ready to throw shrimp at me from the shrimp bowl. One former adviser said, ‘You’ve disgraced yourself, and you’ve disgraced science.’”

I met Levin once and interviewed him several times. With amazing grace and cheerfulness he always emphasized that his results needed to be confirmed, and there was certainly room for skepticism, but to reject them outright was not how the scientific method worked.

Levin however was never awarded another NASA project, essentially blackballed because of his 1970s claims, even though later research hinted at the possibility that he may have been right.

R.I.P. Gil Levin. Though the overall data we have gotten from Mars in the half century since still favors a non-life explanation for his experiment, the uncertainty remains quite large. He could have been right.

More important than his uncertain result, however, was his dedication to the proper scientific method, where you let the data speak for itself and never dismiss any possibility if that is what the data shows you.

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Today’s blacklisted American: 65,000 Americans censored by social media

12:03 pm

The Bill of Rights cancelled by Google, Facebook, and Twitter
The Bill of Rights cancelled by
Google, Facebook, and Twitter.

The new dark age of silencing According to the legal team for former president Donald Trump, almost 65,000 people have submitted examples of censorship by the social media companies Google, Facebook, and Twitter, and the lawyers have amended Trump’s the lawsuit to add those individuals to it.

According to the America First Policy Institute (AFPI), Trump’s July 7 lawsuit against Facebook, Twitter, and Google is adding ”additional censorship experiences” from some of the nearly 65,000 people who submitted them to the institute. ”Late last night, Amended Complaints were filed in the Big Tech lawsuits against Facebook, Inc., Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter, Inc., Jack Dorsey, Google LLC, and Sundar Pichai,” AFPI said in a July 28 statement.

“Since the initial filing on July 7, 2021, nearly 65,000 American people have submitted their stories of censorship through America First Policy Institute’s (AFPI) Constitutional Litigation Partnership (CLP) at TakeOnBigTech.com,” AFPI added.

» Read more

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Today’s blacklisted American: Biracial physician demoted by hospital for criticizing the left

12:54 pm

What apparently passes for medical treatment at the Hennepin Healthcare system
Beliefs apparently required of doctors at the Hennepin Healthcare system

The new dark age of silencing: Tara Gustilo, a biracial physician from the Philippines, found herself quickly demoted from her position as chairwoman of the OB-GYN department for the Hennepin Healthcare system in Minnesota when she dared to post on social media commentary against the Marxist and bigoted Black Lives Matter organization and the equally bigoted critical race theory being pushed by leftist educators in the public schools.
» Read more

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Russia offers conflicting causes for Nauka engine firing

9:34 am

Russian officials have now suggested two explanations for the accidently ignition of the engines on the new Nauka module to ISS, neither of which appears to have involved any real investigation.

Vladimir Solovyov, flight director of the space station’s Russian segment, blamed the incident on a “short-term software failure.” In a statement released Friday by the Russian space agency Roscosmos, Solovyov said because of the failure, a direct command to turn on the lab’s engines was mistakenly implemented.

He added the incident was “quickly countered by the propulsion system” of another Russian component at the station and “at the moment, the station is in its normal orientation” and all its systems “are operating normally.”

Roscosmos director Dmitry Rogozin later Friday suggested that “human factor” may have been at play. “There was such euphoria (after Nauka successfully docked with the space station), people relaxed to some extent,” Rogozin said in a radio interview. “Perhaps one of the operators didn’t take into account that the control system of the block will continue to adjust itself in space. And it determined a moment three hours after (the docking) and turned on the engines.” [emphasis mine]

So, was it human error? Or was it the software programming? Or both?

No matter what the specific cause, these conflicting stories, thrown out in almost an offhand manner, demonstrate that the real fundamental cause was the terrible, sloppy, and error-prone quality control systems at Roscosmos and all the aerospace companies it has taken over since the Putin administration consolidated Russia’s aerospace industry into a single government-run corporation.

These kinds of failures seem to happen with Russia now repeatedly. From launch aborts to launch failures to corruption in contracting to corruption in engine construction to plain simple sabotage, mistakes and errors and poor planning and dishonesty seem to hound their space effort at every level. Thank God Americans no longer have to fly on a Soyuz capsule, though one American on board ISS is still scheduled to come home on one.

Without competition and freedom, there is no pressure in Russia to improve, to improvise, to rethink, and to clean house when a management gets stale or corrupt. Instead, operations stultify and develop dry rot. They can’t see problems or even fix them efficiently. If anything, management circles the wagons to protect itself, while often deliberately ignoring the problems.

Rocket science is hard. It can quickly kill people when done poorly.

I think it will be a great relief to end this partnership. And the sooner the better.

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GAO rejects protests by Blue Origin and Dynectics over lunar lander award

12:50 am

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) today rejected the protests by Blue Origin and Dynectics against the award by NASA of its manned lunar lander contract to SpaceX’s Starship spacecraft.

In denying the protests, GAO first concluded that NASA did not violate procurement law or regulation when it decided to make only one award. NASA’s announcement provided that the number of awards the agency would make was subject to the amount of funding available for the program. In addition, the announcement reserved the right to make multiple awards, a single award, or no award at all. In reaching its award decision, NASA concluded that it only had sufficient funding for one contract award. GAO further concluded there was no requirement for NASA to engage in discussions, amend, or cancel the announcement as a result of the amount of funding available for the program. As a result, GAO denied the protest arguments that NASA acted improperly in making a single award to SpaceX.

GAO next concluded that the evaluation of all three proposals was reasonable, and consistent with applicable procurement law, regulation, and the announcement’s terms.

Finally, GAO agreed with the protesters that in one limited instance NASA waived a requirement of the announcement for SpaceX. Despite this finding, the decision also concludes that the protesters could not establish any reasonable possibility of competitive prejudice arising from this limited discrepancy in the evaluation.

This decision will likely allow NASA to proceed with the contract, and for SpaceX to begin work on the revisions it will need to make to Starship to make it a lunar lander.

The decision also puts companies like Blue Origin and Dynectics on notice: You need to prove you have the goods, or you won’t win customers. Commit some of your own funds to research and development, start building actual prototypes you can test, and the world will begin to beat a path to your door.

20 comments

Today’s blacklisted American: Town tries to silence Trump supporter; he sues

2:05 pm

Banned for being conservative
No first amendment rights in Long Beach, New York!

The modern dark age: Because the town of Long Beach, New York has forced a Trump supporter to hide his car, festooned with pro-Trump and conservative messages, he is suing that town for $25 million for denying him is first amendment rights.

“I believe the city is trying to silence me because I’m pro-Trump,” [Michael Wasserman] told The Post. The 62-year-old entrepreneur has become known in the area for plastering his home — along with his Porsche and Jeep — with a rotating variety of political flags and stickers.

Now he has filed a $25 million federal suit — against the City of Long Beach, the chief of police, the city manager and specific police officers — after officials forced him to remove the flags on his cars.

The town claims they are a violation of an ordinance stating that “[No] sign shall be erected, affixed or maintained within the perimeter of any … public street or public property.” Wasserman parks his car on a public street outside his home.

“They’re bending and massaging the ordinance to fit the crime,” Wasserman told The Post. “This is a blatant attempt to silence me.”

The picture above shows Wasserman leaning on his car, with his home behind him, also covered with flags and political banners.

The city claims they are simply enforcing a law that forbids signage without permission on public streets. Yet, how are the signs on Wasserman’s car any different then every bumper sticker you see? They are not, and this is where Wasserman’s claim that it is pure political oppression seems confirmed.

Wasserman’s case is further reinforced by the treatment he gets generally in this blue-state New York town:
» Read more

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United Kingdom passes comprehensive spaceflight regulations

10:39 am

Capitalism in space: As required by the Outer Space Treaty as well as to lay a framework for commercial and private space launches from within the United Kingsom, the UK this week passed new comprehensive spaceflight regulations that appear modeled closely after already existing regulations in the United States.

From the government’s press release:

The legislation provides the framework to regulate the UK space industry and enable launches to take place from British soil for the very first time. It will unlock a potential £4 billion of market opportunities over the next decade, creating thousands of jobs and benefiting communities right across the UK.

This also puts the UK in a unique position as the first country in Europe able to launch spacecraft and satellites from home soil. This could lead to better monitoring of climate change, as well as improved data for satellite navigation systems, improving journeys right here on the ground, too.

The full law can be read here. It is long, so I have not reviewed it entirely, but it does seem to be closely modeled after several U.S. laws, including the 2004 Space Amendments Act that presently guides FAA regulation and licensing of commercial space launches. The UK even gave its own Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) the same job the FAA has in the U.S.

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Today’s blacklisted American: Democrat endorses racial discrimination and press censorship aimed at whites

11:36 am

Discriminated against by Chicago Democrats
Eagerly discriminated against by Democrats

Blacklists and segregation are back and the Democrats have got ’em: Lori Lightfoot, the Democratic Party mayor of Chicago, recently and enthusiastically defended her past racial disciminatory policy of refusing to give any one-on-one interviews to white reporters, saying she intends to do it again.

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot said she would “absolutely” grant interviews only to journalists of color again after she drew waves of backlash earlier in the year when she announced the policy.

“I would absolutely do it again. I’m unapologetic about it because it spurred a very important conversation, a conversation that needed to happen, that should have happened a long time ago,” the Democrat said on a segment of the New York Times’s podcast Sway, released on Monday.

“Here is the bottom line for me: To state the obvious, I’m a black woman mayor,” she said. “I’m the mayor of the third-largest city in the country. Obviously, I have a platform, and it’s important to me to advocate on things that I believe are important. Going back to why I ran — to disrupt the status quo. The media is critically important to our democracy. … The media is in a time of incredible upheaval and disruption, but our City Hall press corps looks like it’s 1950 or 1970.”

» Read more

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Today’s blacklisted American: Twitter bans all election audit accounts in Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Wisconsin

12:48 pm

Liberty and freedom banned
Twitter’s goal: Only Democrats can have freedom of speech.
Photo credit: William Zhang

The new dark age of silencing: In a single purge Twitter yesterday banned all the accounts of all election audits going on in Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Wisconsin.

Earlier today Twitter permanently suspended all nine of the official ‘Audit War Room’ accounts from it’s platform. The accounts were a main source for breaking updates and were banned as part of big tech’s continued attempt to shield the public from the stunning revelations being found regarding the fraudulent 2020 election.

Unsurprisingly, Twitter provided no reason for the suspensions. [emphasis mine]

Note the highlighted sentence. Twitter is no longer even pretending that it is banning these accounts because of some vague “community standard” that each violated. No, Twitter banned them simply because it is possible that the election audits going on in these states might actually uncover evidence of election fraud, and to allow honest and real news reporting can no longer be allowed, if that reporting might threaten the dominant leftist agenda and the Democratic Party politicians who are imposing it.
» Read more

11 comments

Today’s blacklisted American: Tenured professor fired, given no due process, because one student didn’t like what he was doing

11:46 am

The Bill of Rights cancelled at Berea College
No first amendment allowed at Berea College!

Persecution is now cool! The administration at Berea College, a Christian university in Kentucky, fired tenured professor Dave Porter because one student complained about a research survey he was conducting.

Porter’s offense was to have done a survey of attitudes on campus. One student claimed that the survey was a retaliation against her for having filed a Title IX complaint. Writes Porter, “The campus was quickly polarized, and the administration saw a crisis looming. Apparently, the dean had received information from a former student that current students were fearful of attending my classes. There was no investigation and suggestions of mediation or compromise were squelched by the dean’s claim that I was ‘unrepentant and unapologetic.’” [emphasis mine]

More details in this essay Porter himself wrote:
» Read more

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Today’s blacklisted American: Mob tries to blacklist actress for shaking Trump’s hand

1:18 pm

Addison Rae must be banned for shaking Trump's hand
Stone her! She shook Trump’s hand!

Persecution is now cool! Addison Rae, an actress who IMDB calls TikTok’s second most popular and highest earning performer, was attacked by a mob on TikTok, YouTube, and Twitter for daring to shake hands with Donald Trump at a Las Vegas boxing event on July 11th.

As shown on a video at the link, “the two shook hands and she mentioned that she just “had to say hi” and that it was “so nice to meet you.”

How dare she?! The mob effort grew so loud that a Buzzfeed “news” reporter wrote a story expressly focused on determining if Rae was a Trump supporter, with the reporter stating:

[C]onsidering Rae has ignored questions about whether or not she is a Trump supporter, I decided to test her digital footprint and see for myself. So, I scrolled through all of her likes in 2016, when the Hillary Clinton v. Donald Trump election reached its peak, to see just how many of these accidental Twitter bugs I could find.

The reporter, Alexa Lisitza, discovered a variety of tweets in 2016 that suggested Rae actually might have had an open mind about Trump, and was not all-hate all-the-time, and might even have decided to vote for him. As the reporter concluded, “That’s it for 2016. Who knows what lies in the years spanning throughout the election, but do with this information what you will.” The implication of course is that Rae should be blacklisted for this blasphemy.

Nor was this Buzzfeed article unique. » Read more

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Today’s blacklisted American: Democrats introduce Senate bill demanding companies censor social media

11:54 am

Democrats: No soapbox free speech allowed
Democrats: No soapbox allowed! Photo: GeorgeLouis

Blacklists are back and the Democrats got ’em! Two Democrats, Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-Minnesota) and Ben Ray Lujan (D-New Mexico), yesterday proposed a new law that would force social media companies like Google, Facebook, and Twitter to immediately remove any posts on their platforms that includes medical information those Democrats disagree with.

If the companies do not do so, they will be held liable for those posts.

As has become typical of Democrats, they label any information they disagree with as “misinformation.” To make sure their definition is sustained, their bill would have the federal government determine what is correct and not correct. That definition would then be used to justify silencing any other opinions.

Such a law would essentially repeal the First Amendment of the Constitution. Free speech will be banned. Only government-approved speech in connection with health will be allowed. If such a law was upheld by the courts (a very distinct possibility in today’s legal culture), it could quickly be expanded to cover all speech on any subject.

There is some irony in this Democratic Party proposal. » Read more

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Court rejects Viasat’s effort to stop SpaceX Starlink launches

9:31 am

Capitalism in space? A three-judge panel on July 20, 2021 rejected Viasat’s request for a temporary injunction that would have stopped all SpaceX Starlink launches until Viasat’s lawsuit against that constellation is settled.

While this decision does not settle the lawsuit, it allows SpaceX launches to continue, and likely cause the case to be expedited in the courts. The decision also suggests that the court does not favor Viasat’s claims, which are somewhat dubious on their face, and appear designed merely to shut down a successful competitor through the use of the courts.

Viasat alleged that the FCC did not comply with the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) when it approved SpaceX satellite launches because the commission “refused to conduct any environmental assessment.” Viasat told the DC Circuit court that SpaceX launches should be halted because of potential environmental harms when satellites are taken out of orbit; light pollution that alters the night sky; orbital debris; collision risks that may affect Viasat; and because “Viasat will suffer unwarranted competitive injury.”

The FCC by the way disputes Viasat’s claims, and filed its own brief defending SpaceX.

Viasat’s real concern is that its satellite internet service will be considered inferior to SpaceX’s and will thus lose customers to it. Too bad. Competition means you step up your game and do better, not go to court to try to shut down your opposition.

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Russia’s new module for ISS, Nauka, in trouble after launch

12:02 pm

The new big Russian module for ISS, dubbed Nauka and successfully launched yesterday, appears to have a serious engine issue, according to these twitter reports by Anthony Zak of RussianSpaceWeb.com.

From his two tweets:

UPDATE: #Nauka’s main engines (pictured in operation) are currently out of commission. Specialists are troubleshooting the issue and developing a backup rendezvous plan. The module has ~30 stable orbits at current altitude.

…one more thing: at this point, there is no information that Nauka’s tank membranes have leaks in orbit. Those rumors in the Russian press might be a garbled echo of my reporting here ;)->

Nauka’s launch came about fourteen years behind scheduled, delayed by many engineering and quality control problems. Its construction began more than a quarter century ago. If Nauka fails to dock with ISS the Russians will face a disaster to their space program that almost cannot be measured. It will certainly make the Chinese much more reluctant to depend on Russia in their supposed partnership to build a base on the Moon or to work together on China’s space station. It should also make the U.S. far more reluctant to depend on Russia in its Artemis program.

Worse, it is questionable the Russians can get anything built in any reasonable time to replace Nauka. How can anyone expect them to build anything in a reasonable time for either of the U.S. or Chinese interplanetary projects?

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Today’s blacklisted American: Baltimore’s attorney attempts, and fails, to get FCC to silence and censor local Fox radio station

11:34 am

The Bill of Rights cancelled for conservatives
No first amendment allowed for conservatives,
according to Baltimore’s government attorney.

Blacklists are back and the Democrats got ’em! On May 5, 2021 the office of Baltimore’s state attorney, Democrat Marilyn Mosby, filed a formal complaint with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) against a local Fox news station, demanding that the FCC censor and shut down the station because it has repeatedly published stories that were critical of Mosby and her policies.

The May 5 complaint, addressed to FCC acting chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel, accuses WBFF (a.k.a. FOX45 News) — the Baltimore-based Fox-affiliate — of partaking in an “intentional crusade against … Mosby, which given today’s politically charged and divisive environment, is extremely dangerous.” It also details what Mosby’s communications director, Zy Richardson, believes to be a “disconcerting and dangerous pattern: beginning with a slanted, rigged, misleading, or inflammatory headline; followed by conspiracy theory; and supported with guest commentary from disgruntled ex-employees or political opponents that[sic] lend false credibility.”

“The truth of the matter,” Richardson says, “is I am deeply worried that if the WBFF’s coverage is not curtailed and ceased, then someone is going to get hurt. I implore and encourage you … to enlist the full investigative and enforcement powers granted to you by the Federal government to take action against the WBFF as soon as possible.” [emphasis mine]

The blatent oppressive nature of this demand — in utter violation of the first amendment of the Constitution and all that America has stood for during its first two hundred plus years — should be somewhat shocking, but sadly it has become so common from Democratic Party politicians and many of their supporters in the past five years that it hardly made the news when it happened in early May.

Think about it however. » Read more

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New studies show that the biggest risk to kids from COVID are the policies of governments

3:28 pm

New studies about COVID-19 and its effect on children continue to show that the strigent health policies being demanded by government agencies like the CDC and WHO and many Democrats are actually the biggest health threat for children than the virus itself.

First, a major survey of 48,000 children who had become infected with COVID-19 has found that absolutely no healthy children died from the disease.

Dr. Marty Makary is a medical expert and professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Bloomberg School of Public Health, and Carey Business School. His research team “worked with the nonprofit FAIR Health to analyze approximately 48,000 children under 18 diagnosed with Covid in health-insurance data from April to August 2020.”

After studying comprehensive data on thousands of children, the team “found a mortality rate of zero among children without a pre-existing medical condition such as leukemia.”

Let me repeat that. They looked at tens of thousands of kids under the age of 18 and could not find one case where a healthy child died. All recovered. None needed a vaccine, as their young and very strong immune systems did what those immune systems have always done, fought off a sickness to give them an immunity for the rest of their lives.

So kids are safe from COVID, even if they are not vaccined and actually catch the virus and get sick.

At the same time, other studies have found that both masks and the vaccines are actually a greater health threat to children than the virus itself.
» Read more

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Today’s blacklisted American: Army chaplin, threatened with punishment for criticizing Biden administration, sues and wins Pyrrhic victory

11:59 am

The Bill of Rights cancelled for conservatives
No first amendment allowed for conservatives.

Today’s blacklist story illustrates a growing trend I am finding in these stories of the modern leftist effort to silence and blackball anyone who criticizes or opposes it. Increasingly, the victims of this intolerance are fighting back, both in public and in the courts. How successful that resistance has been however remains unclear.

In today’s story, a decorated Army chaplin had posted in January on Facebook strong criticism of the incoming Biden administration’s decision to allow men who claim they are women (and vice versa) to serve in the military, and was immediately sanctioned by his superiors for doing so.

[U.S. Army Chaplain (Major) Andrew Calvert] objected to the anticipated government policy change. “How is rejecting reality (biology) not evidence that a person is mentally unfit (ill), and thus making that person unqualified to serve. There is little difference in this than over those who believe and argue for a ‘flat earth,’ despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary,” Calvert wrote in his comment, according to Army Times.

“The motivation is different, but the argument is the same. This person is a MedBoard for Mental Wellness waiting to happen. What a waste of military resources and funding!” he concluded.

Following an investigation, Calvert was issued a General Officer Memorandum of Reprimand (GOMOR) on April 22 by Lieutenant General Robert P. White.

In May Calvert obtained legal support and sued. Less than a month later, the Army backed down, ending its persecution of Calvert, clearing his record.

That Calvert fought the effort by the military to reprimand him for his opinions is commendable. Nonetheless, in this case the victory appears somewhat hollow.
» Read more

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Democrat proposes new tax on private manned spaceflight

9:48 am

That didn’t take long! Mere hours after New Shepard completed its first suborbital manned commercial flight, a Democrat in the House of Representatives introduced a bill in Congress to impose a tax on private manned spaceflight.

Oregon Democrat Rep. Earl Blumenauer, who is a member of the House Ways and Means Committee, on Tuesday introduced what he is calling the Securing Protections Against Carbon Emissions (SPACE) Tax Act, which would create excise taxes on commercial space flights carrying human passengers for purposes other than scientific research.

“Space travel isn’t a tax free holiday for the wealthy,” Blumenauer wrote on Twitter. “We pay taxes on plane tickets. Billionaires flying into space—producing no scientific value—should do the same, and then some.”

The measure would include a per-passenger tax on the price of a commercial flight to space and a two-tiered excise tax for each launch into space. The first tier would apply to flights between 50 miles and 80 miles above Earth’s surface, while the second “significantly higher” rate would apply to flights more than 80 miles above Earth’s surface.

This typical Democratic Party response to the acheivement of others reminds me of a pertinent quote from Ronald Reagan:

Government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.

While Reagan was describing many of the actions of politicans from both parties, the Democratic Party is today particularly abusive. Private enterprise has in the past decade done things in space the government and NASA spent years trying to accomplish, with zero success, while wasting billions of taxpayer dollars. The Democrats resent that success, and are very eager to squelch it. Rather than have any American achievement in space, created by the citizens of the nation and independent of their interference, they would rather destroy it. Even as they extort as much money as they can from it.

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