Repeal it! New regulatory language under Obamacare and just released requires 18 pages of regulations just to define the term “full time employee.”
Theft by government: The Obama administration has extended the power of the ATF to “seize and administratively forfeit property involved in controlled-substance abuses.”
In other words, if the ATF thinks a drug crime has occurred, it now has the right to seize any property involved, without due process. The article gives a particularly pointed example:
» Read more
Losing the youth vote: In a boycott that began in Pennsylvania and has now spread to Minnesota, children are refusing to eat the Obama administration’s lower calorie school lunches.
Starting this year, there are strict limits on calories, sodium and meat portions. Whole milk is off the menu altogether, and kids are required to take a fruit or vegetable. As parents with fussy eaters might guess, some student’s aren’t salivating over those options.
In the halls of Rockford High School, a food fight over some simple things — cookies, condiments and milk — has started taking off after seniors Adam Anderson and Zach Guthrie set up a Facebook group encouraging a brown bag boycott. Bags were prepared in advance, bearing messages like, “Where’s the ranch?” and “We want our cookies.” By Thursday, the school served about 150 fewer lunches than it had the day before, and students promise the movement will only continue to grow even though there may be no resolution.
I think it a travesty that modern parents think the federal government should provide their kids lunch. This is the parent’s responsibility, not the government’s.
More reality from the Democratic convention: A reporter asks delegates if we should ban profits.
It is hilarious and frightening in the same breath. Video below the fold.
» Read more
A website, ScienceDebate.org, submitted a wide range of questions to Barack Obama and Mitt Romney about their plans for science and technology, and the answers, shown in a side-by-side comparison, are interesting, though in general they demonstrate the ability of politicians to speak for a long time without saying much.
This ability to blather is especially apparent to their answers to the question 12: “What should America’s space exploration and utilization goals be in the 21st century and what steps should the government take to help achieve them?” Neither candidate adds much to what was said in the Republican and Democratic party platforms, making it obvious that neither really cares or knows that much about this subject.
Overall, however, the answers do reveal the basic and fundamental differences between the two candidates, which can be seen in their answers to the very first question about encouraging innovation:
» Read more
The Democratic Party platform’s [pdf] position on space and NASA is one sentence long.
President Obama has charted a new mission for NASA to lead us to a future that builds on America’s legacy of innovation and exploration.
This is even worse than the Republican Party platform, and is more inexplicable. Considering how much support the Obama administration has given to private commercial space, this was a great opportunity to sell Obama as supportive of private enterprise. Sadly, they do not, which suggests again that Obama and his party really aren’t that interested in it.
The Republican Party, as part of their national convention taking place in Florida this week, yesterday released their party platform for the upcoming election campaign.
Normally, I don’t waste my time with party platforms. No one really reads it, and no president ever follows it. Granted, it can give you a general sense of where a party and candidate is headed philosophically, but this is politics. If you think philosophy is their number one priority then I have a bridge in Brooklyn I want to sell you.
However, this document is helpful to us, at least when it comes to the nation’s space effort, as it actually devotes one entire (though short) section on the subject. Considering how vague Mitt Romney has been on what he will do with NASA and space, and how schizophrenic the Republicans in Congress have been, any hint on how they might approach this particular program should they win the election is helpful.
Here is the entire statement of the Republican party platform on the subject of space exploration:
» Read more
Russian officials today announced that they will hold additional open cosmonaut recruitment drives, similar to the first held earlier this year, but with revisions.
It appears that the first drive was too short, only six weeks long, and did not get them as many applicants as they would have liked.
The competition heats up: Bigelow Aerospace has expanded its workforce as well doubled its factory space in response to the commercial contracts NASA recently awarded.
The company just opened a 185,000-square-foot addition, bringing its North Las Vegas plant up to about 350,000 square feet. It slashed its work force from 150 before the recession to 50 during the downturn; now, it’s looking to jump back up to 90 workers by Christmas. It’s hiring structural, mechanical and electrical engineers, as well as chemists, molecular biologists and workers who craft composite spacecraft parts.
Hat tip to Clark Lindsey at NewSpace Watch.
How not to go cave exploring:
An international crew of six astronauts will start training for a caving adventure designed to prepare them for spaceflight. CAVES, an abbreviation of Cooperative Adventure for Valuing and Exercising human behaviour and performance Skills, prepares astronauts to work safely and effectively and solve problems as a multicultural team while exploring uncharted areas using space procedures.
Or to put it more bluntly, overly complicated, bureaucratically organized, and not very efficient. For example:
» Read more
NASA has announced its next planetary mission, a lander to Mars that will drill down thirty feet into the planet’s surface.
Though exciting in its own right, this mission is far less ambitious than the two missions which competed against it, a boat that would have floated on the lakes of Titan and a probe that would have bounced repeatedly off the surface of a comet. I suspect the reason this mission was chosen is the tight budgets at NASA, combined with Curiosity’s success which makes it politically advantageous to approve another Mars mission. As the NASA press release emphasized,
» Read more
