Tag: politics

Venezuela officially signs onto Chinese lunar base project

9:04 am

Venezuela on July 17, 2023 officially signed an agreement with China to participate in China’s lunar base project.

Venezuela is the first nation, after Russia, to sign on to the project.

Since Venezuela has no space industry and is a bankrupt socialist state that can barely feed its people, this at first glance appears to merely be an effort by China for some international PR. One detail from the article however tells us what the deal is really about: “Venezuela will make its satellite control ground station infrastructure available for lunar missions.” In exchange for providing Venezuela some minor educational aid, China gets use of the ground stations that presently exist in Venezuela, and likely the right to build its own there as well.

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Ohio Attorney General to college administrators: Discriminate and YOU will be personally liable

1:28 pm

Making the law mean something again
Making the law mean something again

Bring a gun to a knife fight: In what is certain to become the most powerful deterrent to leftist bigotry in academia, Ohio attorney general Dave Yost has notified the administrators in his state’s public colleges that “qualified immunity” will not be available to them if they are personally sued for discriminating against any individuals and lose.

Employees found guilty of such practices as employing application essays to discern an applicant’s race “might not be protected by qualified immunity, a doctrine that protects public officials from being personally liable in certain situations,” Yost wrote, according to The Dispatch. “Any attempt to invoke that doctrine would likely be frivolous, and my office may be unable to raise any qualified immunity defense on your employees’ behalf,” Yost wrote.

» Read more

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California Democrats retreat on their effort to defend child slavers

12:34 pm

The Democratic Party: eagerly supporting pedophilia
The Democratic Party: caught in the act of eagerly
supporting pedophiles

Pigs fly! After initially killing a bill on July 12, 2023 that would have increased the penalties on child sex traffickers, the Democrats who completely control the California Assembly’s Public Safety Committee reversed course one day later and voted to advance the bill.

With a final vote of 6-0, including two abstentions from progressive Democrats, the bill now moves to the Appropriations Committee, after which, if it is approved, can move the bill to be voted upon by the entire State Assembly. If passed, SB 14 will make trafficking of minors a serious felony that would qualify under California’s three strikes law, which keeps dangerous, serial criminals off the streets, and make individuals convicted of the crime ineligible for early release. [emphasis mine]

I highlight the two abstentions by Democrats. Even after a nationwide uproar over their willingness to block harsh penalties on those who traffic young children for sexual slavery, these two Democrats, including Assembly Majority Leader Isaac Bryan (D-Los Angeles), still could not bring themselves to vote for the bill.

Nonetheless, the reversal by the rest of the Democrats on the committee marks a major event. » Read more

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House committee imposes major cuts to Justice, FBI, Commerce

11:15 am

As had been suggested by its decision to not impose any cuts (or increases) to the NASA budget, the House appropriation subcommittee in charge of Commerce, Justice, Science-related agencies imposed all of the 28.8% cuts required by the House leadership on the Department of Justice, the FBI, and the Commerce department.

Overall, the bill appropriates $58.4 billion for programs under the jurisdiction of the committee, a $23.8 billion cut compared to the current fiscal year. It eliminates 14 “diversity, equity and inclusion” programs in the covered agencies, cuts spending on “wasteful” climate change programs, and saves more than $50 million by ending the Biden administration’s plan to replace auto fleets at the Department of Commerce and Department of Justice with electric vehicles.

According to the GOP summary, the Commerce Department would see a $1.4 billion cut in discretionary funding, and the Department of Justice would see a $2 billion cut. Federal science agencies together would face a $1.1 billion cut under the bill.

The FBI’s budget is to be cut $1 billion, or 9% (an actual cut, not a reduction in the increase in spending), with $400 million of that coming from salaries and expenses. It also forbids the agency from spending a dime on its planned dream of a new posh and palatial headquarters in the DC suburbs, twice the size of the Pentagon and costing more than $3 billion.

This is exactly what Republicans should have been doing for decades, and were too cowardly to attempt. If an agency of unelected employees in the executive branch abuses its power and causes harm to innocent citizens, something the FBI and the Justice Department have been eagerly doing since Trump became president, then it is the responsibilty and obligation of Congress to use its power of the purse to cut those agencies’ funding.

Even now, however, no one should be confident these cuts will end up in the final bill. This is only the recommendations of one subcommittee. There are still many Republican cowards in the full House, and even more in the full Senate, who will gladly team up with the Democrats (who are all in favor of the abuse of power and the harm to innocent citizens) to reinstate the cuts.

Nonetheless, this is a start. It indicates that we might finally have turned a real political corner towards reform.

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NASA survives first budget review in Congress

9:51 am

The first 2024 budgets approved by Senate and House appropriation committees for NASA maintain about the same current numbers from NASA’s 2023 budget.

The House committee is recommending $25.367 billion, just shy of the $25.384 billion NASA has now. The Senate committee is proposing $25.000 billion, a greater reduction from current spending. Biden requested a 7.1 percent increase for FY2024, $27.2 billion.

In the House the Republican leadership is requiring this House committee to impose a 28.8% cut in the total money allocated to all the agencies under its control (Justice, Commerce, and Science). It appears the committee members have decided to find the cuts in the other departments, such as the Justice Department. In fact, this first budget review strongly suggests Justice is about to see huge cuts, something that corrupt and partisan agency richly deserves.

As for NASA, the Senate report [pdf] had harsh words for the growing expense of the Mars Sample Return mission, and proposed major cuts, including the possibility of eliminating the project entirely. Instead, the Senate committee preferred wasting that money on Artemis and SLS.

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UK government reluctantly admits its space regulatory framework is a problem

9:36 am

According to a report issued by a committee formed by a number of members of the United Kingdom’s parliament, the regulatory licensing framework for its space launch industry is a problem that needs fixing, and in a hurry.

The report also expressed concern about the licensing delays that led to the Virgin Orbit launch being postponed. Virgin Orbit and some of its satellite customers were critical of the UK regulatory process, which was led by the Civil Aviation Authority.

But the committee concluded there was no evidence that the regulatory system contributed to the failure of the Virgin Orbit. The report did state, however, that there is “insufficient co-ordination between the large number of regulatory bodies involved in licensing launches, and this continues to place unnecessary burdens of complexity and administration on companies”.

The MPs [members of parliament] are calling on the Government to take steps to improve the licensing system of UK satellite launch.

It is amusing how these politicians speak from both sides of their mouths. First they say the regulatory system did not contribute to Virgin Orbit’s failure, but then admit the regulatory system is so complex and messy that anyone can see that it certainly did contribute to that failure. It took that system fifteen months to approve the launch, even though Virgin Orbit expected that approval to come in half that time.

Whether this MP report will force action remains unclear. As I noted earlier this week, Orbex applied for a launch license seventeen months ago for a launch it hopes to complete at the Sutherland Spaceport before the end of this year, and it is as yet unclear if any license has been issued. The UK’s two spaceports cannot compete if it is going to take one to two years for each launch license to be approved

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Solid-fueled second-stage motor for Japan’s new Epsilon-S rocket explodes during static fire test

9:10 am

A solid-fueled second stage of Japan’s upgraded Epsilon-S four-stage rocket exploded 57 seconds into a two minute static fire test today, likely preventing that rocket’s planned first launch this year.

Police received an emergency call shortly after 9 a.m. from a nearby resident reporting that she heard “a loud noise and saw smoke” rising from the Noshiro Rocket Testing Center.

JAXA said that an explosion occurred during a combustion test of the second-stage engine of the Epsilon S rocket, which is an improved model of the small solid-fuel Epsilon rocket, at the facility in the prefecture in the northeastern Tohoku region.

While explosions during static fire tests of liquid-fueled rockets occur periodically, for a solid-fueled motor to explode seems much rarer, and suggests the mix and placement of the solid-fuel within the stage did not occur properly.

This failure continues a string of failures within Japan’s government-run space program, including a failure during the first launch of its new large H3 liquid-fueled rocket earlier this year. At present Japan’s space agency JAXA has set August 26th for one of the last launches of the rocket the H3 is replacing, the H2A, carrying an X-ray space telescope and a small lunar lander. Though today’s failure involves very different technologies and should therefore not impact that launch, it is possible JAXA will stand down entirely to see if there was some systematic issue throughout its management. It sure appears there is.

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India successfully launches Chandrayaan-3

8:35 am


Click for interactive map.

India today successfully launched its Chandrayaan-3 lunar lander/rover probe toward the Moon, carried aloft by its LV-M3 rocket (a variation of its GSLV) from its coastal spaceport in Sriharikota.

Chandrayaan-3 carries the Vikram lander, which will bring the Pragyan rover to the surface. Pragyan will spend about two weeks operating on the lunar surface. The location is indicated by the red dot on the map to the right, in the high southern latitudes. The white cross marks the lunar south pole. Russia’s Luna-25 is scheduled to launch sometime in mid-August.

It will take time to get Chandrayaan-3 into the right lunar orbit for landing, which is presently scheduled for August 13, 2023.

For India this was its fifth successful launch for the year, the most since 2019, before it panicked over COVID. The leaders in the 2023 launch race:

46 SpaceX
26 China
9 Russia
5 Rocket Lab
5 India

American private enterprise still leads China in successful launches 52 to 26, and the entire world combined 52 to 45, while SpaceX by itself still leads the rest of the world (excluding other American companies) 46 to 45.

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Repost: Freedom is under siege, and the besiegers have now told us they have no mercy

4:53 pm

Earlier today I posted a news item about the failure theater of Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz making a motion to “favorably” report the Biden administration’s FCC nominations for a full vote in the Senate, even as Cruz at the same time stated he was against their nomination. This absurd lack of real fight now prompts me to add this quick comment, and a repost of a January 2022 essay.

In that essay I quoted the words that open each volume of Winston Churchill’s memoirs of World War II:

In War: Resolution
In Defeat: Defiance
In Victory: Magnanimity
In Peace: Good Will

Cruz’s actions are typical of our conservative leadership for decades. They are good at magnanimity and good will, but know nothing of resolution or defiance. To them, there is no war, and defeat is really just another word for victory.

We are in a war however, and we have been losing that war now for more than a century. We have reached a point where a sizeable part of the American population thinks it is okay to imprison its opponents, even as it firmly supports censorship and blacklisting.

Fortunately, more and more Americans recognize this, and are no longer easily fooled by Republican failure theater. As a reminder to help strengthen that resolve and to remind the fence-sitters of the real war we are in, a war that now requires resolution and defiance by all who value freedom, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the rule of law, I give you my January 2022 essay, which outlined starkly what the other side wants:

————————-
Freedom is under siege, and the besiegers have now told us they have no mercy

Liberty under siege
Liberty under siege.

For many years I deeply and sincerely believed that many rank-and-file Democrat voters honestly did not know how corrupt and power-hungry the political leaders of their party had become. I thought that if I could simply get them to see the clear evidence of misbehavior and abuse of power that has been going on in the Democratic Party without check since Bill Clinton was president, they would reconsider their voting habits and abandon their support of that party.

I thought that the vast majority of Democrats were decent people who opposed oppression and intolerance and simply were unaware that they were voting for it when they supported the Democratic Party.

I now know unequivocally that I was wrong. Two stories in the past week illustrate bluntly that a large number of ordinary Democrats, maybe even a majority, are eager supporters of oppression and intolerance and dictatorship. They like the corruption and abuse-of-power coming from Democratic Party politicians. They even want more of it.
» Read more

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Enthusiastic censorship and blacklisting at St. Philip’s College in Texas

3:27 pm

St. Philip's College, home to blacklisting and censorship
St. Philip’s College, the poster child of academic
blacklisting and censorship

They’re coming for you next: The university was conceived as a place of where young minds would be exposed to new ideas in order to challenge their youthful assumptions and unbridled certainty, with the determined goal to teach critical thinking. (For those who no longer know what critical thinking is, it is the concept that you question everything rigorously, including most importantly your own assumptions.)

It seems most American colleges no longer practice this. In fact, many now teach the exact opposite. Faced with ideas you don’t like, students are encouraged to complain, and hide in “safe spaces” so they don’t have to question anything.

It also appears that St. Philip’s College in Texas is the poster child of this new “teaching” concept. This semester it fired two different teachers when several anonymous students complained because those professors expressed some basic facts in their classrooms that conflict with the modern queer agenda and the leftist hostility to open debate.

First, Dr. Johnson Varkey was fired in January 2023 because he had the audacity during a November 2022 human anatomy and physiology class to state that human sex is determined by the X and Y chromosomes, a basic fact of biology.

Four students walked out of that class in protest, and then complained to the administration. Within weeks it terminated Varkey, with no due process. In its termination letter [pdf] (part of the response by Varkey’s attorney’s at the non-profit legal firm First Liberty), it claimed
» Read more

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Australian industrial space park threatened with shut down

10:03 am

With the loss of government funds caused by decisions of the new Labor government in Australia, a space-centered industrial park proposed for Adelaide Airport is threatened with shut down.

The previous government was going to contribute about $20 million to build a shared facility, and this had encouraged a number of space manufacturers to add their own $26 million. With the loss of that $20 million from the government two of those companies have now backed out.

The article also notes a number of other space-related areas where government funding is being cut off. All this appears to be the result of the change in government, and the decision of the new Labor government to end such subsidies.

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Extremely Large Telescope in Chile marks halfway point in construction

9:51 am

The Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) has now celebrated the halfway point in its construction, with completion targeting 2028 when its 39-meter mirror will make it by far the largest telescope in the world.

The 39-meter diameter, or 127 feet or 1,535 inches, is about four times larger than the largest telescope that presently exists, the 10-meter telescope in the Canary Islands. By the time ELT begins operations however the 21-meter Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) in Chile should also be in operation.

Sadly, the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) in Hawaii will likely not exist, even though it had intended to begin construction before ELT and GMT and be operational now. Leftist opponents in Hawaii have shut construction down now for almost eight years, with little signs of it ever proceeding.

Not that any of this really matters. In the near term, ground-based astronomy on Earth is going to become increasingly impractical and insufficient, first because of the difficulties of making good observations though the atmosphere and the tens of thousands of satellites expected in the coming decades, and second because new space-based astronomy is going to make it all obsolete. All it will take will be to launch one 8-meter telescope on Starship and ELT will become the equivalent of a buggy whip.

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