Tag: politics

Prosecutors investigate scientists while blocking efforts against plant disease

8:50 am

The coming dark age: Italian prosecutors have ordered that all efforts to halt the spread of a deadly disease that attacks olive plants cease while they investigate scientists who study the disease.

Under European Union rules, Italy is obliged to carry out a scientifically based containment plan to stop the disease from spreading to other EU countries. In addition to culling infected trees, this plan involves destroying healthy trees to create buffer zones. But farmers, supported by environmental activists who deplored the destruction of ancient trees, have protested against its implementation. Individual court rulings have found in their favour, stopping tree felling and the spraying of insecticide on their land.

On 10 December, just over a week before Italian public prosecutors announced their investigation, the European Commission opened an infringement procedure over Italy’s failure to carry out containment measures quickly enough. Commission spokesman Enrico Brivio says that he does not know what will happen now that Italian courts have blocked the entire containment plan. “Xylella in all its strains is the most dangerous pathogen for plants, and epidemics have huge economic impact,” he says. “The emergency measures are necessary and need to be implemented.”

The article also notes that the disease can only have come from Costa Rica, which is an area that none of the scientists under investigation have ever worked.

Let me sum up: Environmentalists, hostile to the killing of “ancient trees”, have worked to block any effort to stop the disease, which can now run rampant killing “ancient trees.” Prosecutors, searching for blame, have teamed up with the environmentalists to attack the scientists studying the disease, making sure that any effort to either cure the disease or stop its spread will be discouraged now and in the future.

Maybe the prosecutors and environmentalists should get some torches and pitchforks and burn the scientists at the stake. That will surely solve the problem!

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Russia hints at Vostochny schedule

8:36 am

The competition heats up? Russian sources today suggested that the first unmanned launch from Vostochny will occur on April 25, 2016 (subject to testing) while the first manned flight will occur in 2023

The second story is more significant, as it demonstrates the slow, laborious pace of this government operation. Based on the pace being set by the private companies in the U.S., by 2023 they will be flying regular manned missions from several privately run launch sites, all built quickly with as little cost as possible, with some flights possibly going beyond Earth orbit. Vostochny is expected to cost about $2.9 billion and take more than a decade to complete. The first manned missions will go to ISS only, with the first lunar manned mission not expected until after 2025 (this link also gives some details about the Russian government’s ongoing struggle to establish a 10 year plan for its space program amid continuing and changing budget crises).

The differences here are striking. While the Russian government builds an expensive spaceport built on old technology, Americans will be launching innovative and low-cost rockets that no one has ever seen before. Who do you want to hitch your ride to?

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“The Democrats’ theme for 2016 is totalitarianism.”

10:11 pm

There are those who have read Behind the Black who have been very offended when I refer to the policies and behavior of the Democractic Party and the left as fascist. This article provides a nice summary of their recent activity, which when read all together should make every freedom-loving American downright horrified:

Donald Trump may talk like a brownshirt, but the Democrats mean business. For those of you keeping track, the Democrats and their allies on the left have now: voted in the Senate to repeal the First Amendment, proposed imprisoning people for holding the wrong views on global warming, sought to prohibit the showing of a film critical of Hillary Rodham Clinton, proposed banning politically unpopular academic research, demanded that funding politically unpopular organizations and causes be made a crime and that the RICO organized-crime statute be used as a weapon against targeted political groups. They have filed felony charges against a Republican governor for vetoing a piece of legislation, engaged in naked political persecutions of members of Congress, and used the IRS and the ATF as weapons against political critics.

On the college campuses, they shout down unpopular ideas or simply forbid nonconforming views from being heard there in the first place. They have declared academic freedom an “outdated concept” and have gone the full Orwell, declaring that freedom is oppressive and that they should not be expected to tolerate ideas that they do not share. They are demanding mandatory ideological indoctrination sessions for nonconforming students. They have violently assaulted students studying in libraries and assaulted student journalists documenting their activities. They have staged dozens of phony hate crimes and sexual assaults as a pretext for persecuting unpopular organizations and people.

He keeps going. And with every statement he provides a link to a documented story that backs-up his accusation. Worse, he doesn’t even address the attacks on traditional religions and their practitioners.

The Democratic Party and the left have become the party of brownshirts and dictators. No wonder they often seem more sympathetic to Islamic terrorists and tyrants than they do to the innocent people those terrorists and tyrants have killed. They empathize with this oppressive behavior, especially because it appears to be attacking their own enemies.

Unfortunately, there are too many powerful Republicans who have little problem with this behavior, because they themselves see the behavior of the Democrats as useful because it also attacks their own enemies. It is thus imperative for the voters to aggressively vote against all these brownshirts, from either party, and support those candidates — who unfortunately appear to only be running in the Republican Party — who are dedicated to defeating these fascists.

In fact, it appears this is exactly what Republican voters appear to be doing, illustrated by their consistent support for outsider-type candidates like Trump and Cruz.

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U.S. production of plutonium-238 resumes

7:10 pm

After a 30 year hiatus, the Department of Energy has produced the first plutonium-238 in the United States since the late 1980s.

Plutonium-238 is the fuel of choice for deep-space exploration. But for nearly 30 years, nobody in the United States was making it.

On Tuesday, that all changed. The Department of Energy announced that 50 grams of the stuff had been made by researchers at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tenn. Fifty grams isn’t much, but this is the first time the substance has been made in the country since the Savannah River Plant in South Carolina stopped making it in the late 1980s.

What this does is provide NASA and the U.S. the ability to fly unmanned deep space missions for many more years. Without this plutonium-238, there would be no practical way to power spacecraft traveling out beyond Mars orbit.

And why did the U.S. stop making plutonium-238 in the late 1980s? The story is of course complicated, but one of the big factors is that at that time nuclear power had become politically incorrect after the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl nuclear power plant failures, and thus politicians fell over themselves to be the first to ban any such production, even if it was harmless and incredibly beneficial.

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ULA buys 20 more Russian engines for Atlas 5

6:54 pm

With the Congressional ban on buying Russian rocket engines lifted, ULA today wasted no time and immediately purchased 20 more engines from its Russian supplier to use in its Atlas 5 rocket.

I could also title this post “The Death of the Vulcan Rocket”. With at least 20 engines available, ULA no longer has any need to develop that new rocket. The Air Force is still willing to overpay for Atlas 5 launches, and they will now have enough engines to fly that rocket for probably 5 to 10 more years. Since there have already been indications that the bean-counters at ULA have been reluctant to fund Vulcan’s development, I expect them to now kill it.

This of course will be a very short-sighted decision. They might get some business with the Altas 5 and the Delta from the government for those few years, but this will not make them competitive in the new rocket industry. Eventually, they are going to go the way of the American steel industry, which failed to innovate and compete with foreign companies, and in the end lost its business to those foreign companies.

In the case of aerospace, however, the competition is coming from American companies. And that is wholly to the good.

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Fossil fuels might cool the planet

10:38 pm

The uncertainty of science: New data suggests that the burning of fossil fuels might actually act to cool the planet, not heat it as predicted by all global warming models.

Major theories about what causes temperatures to rise have been thrown into doubt after NASA found the Earth has cooled in areas of heavy industrialisation where more trees have been lost and more fossil fuel burning takes place. Environmentalists have long argued the burning of fossil fuels in power stations and for other uses is responsible for global warming and predicted temperature increases because of the high levels of carbon dioxide produced – which causes the global greenhouse effect.

While the findings did not dispute the effects of carbon dioxide on global warming, they found aerosols – also given off by burning fossil fuels – actually cool the local environment, at least temporarily.

Not surprisingly, some of the scientists who wrote this study, who also happen to be central to the tampering of global temperate data at NASA to create the illusion of more warming in the last century than the raw data indicates, immediately spun the result as proof that carbon dioxide is a greater threat for global warming than they previously thought. How they came to this conclusion is to me quite inexplicable, unless they really don’t care what results they get as long as they can say that humans are killing the planet.

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Strong academic objections to unopposed election for National Academies president

5:49 pm

The president of the National Association of Scholars has written a scathing letter to the National Academy of Sciences condemning the unopposed candidacy of Dr. Marcia K. McNutt, the present editor-in-chief of the journal Science, as president of the Academy.

Their complaint has to do with her policy at Science of censoring any dissenting opinions on a number of science subjects, including climate change.

Science [the journal] promotes the so-called consensus model of climate change and excludes any contrary views.  This issue has become so polarized and polarizing that it is difficult to bring up, but at some point the scientific community will have to reckon with the dramatic discrepancies between current climate models and substantial parts of the empirical record.  Recent evidence of Science bias on this issue is the June 26, 2015 article by Dr. Thomas R. Karl, “Possible artifacts of data biases in the recent global surface warming hiatus”; the July 3, 2015 McNutt editorial, “The beyond-two-degree inferno”; the November 13, 2015 McNutt editorial, “Climate warning, 50 years later”; and the November 25, 2015 AAAS News Release, “AAAS Leads Coalition to Protest Climate Science Inquiry.”

Dr. McNutt’s position is, of course, consistent with the official position of the AAAS. But the attempt to declare that the “pause” in global warming was an illusion has not been accepted by several respected and well-informed scientists. One would not know this, however, from reading Science, which has declined to publish any dissenting views.  One can be a strong supporter of the consensus model and yet be disturbed by the role which Science has played in this controversy.  Dr. McNutt and the journal have acted more like partisan activists than like responsible stewards of scientific standards confronted with contentious claims and ambiguous evidence.  The relevant documents and commentary regarding the Karl paper and McNutt editorials can be examined at https://www.nas.org/images/documents/Climate_Change.pdf. [emphasis mine]

The letter outlines two other areas where McNutt has appeared to play favorites in areas of scientific controversy, and thus questions the wisdom of allowing her to run unopposed for presidency of the National Academy of Sciences.

What is important about this letter is that indicates that there is an increasing pushback from scientists against the demands of orthodoxy. Rather than going along with the powers-that-be, the National Association of Scholars is stating its increasing distrust of the scientific integrity of those powers.

Posted from Sedona, Arizona.

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Cause of Soyuz docking problems pinpointed

8:48 am

The failure of a Soyuz capsule to dock automatically with ISS last week is now attributed to a software problem that failed to provide the right commands to the spacecraft’s thrusters.

The problem has now been linked by the Russian press to three different causes. I wonder if they actually have any idea at all, or are simply throwing out red herrings in order to distract everyone from noticing the problem at all.

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Budget bill lifts ban of Russian engines on Atlas 5

11:53 pm

The giant omnibus budget bill negotiated and announced by Congress today includes language that effectively lifts the limit on the number of Russian engines that ULA can use in its Atlas 5 rocket.

John McCain (R-Arizona) is very unhappy about this, and is threatening to ban the use of any Russian engines on any further Atlas 5 in future bills.

On the record, I make this promise. If this language undermining the National Defense Authorization Act is not removed from the Omnibus, I assure my colleagues that this issue will not go unaddressed in the Fiscal Year 2017 National Defense Authorization Act. Up to this point, we have sought to manage this issue on an annual basis, and we have always maintained that, if a genuine crisis emerged, we would not compromise our national security interests in space. We have sought to be flexible and open to new information, but if this is how our efforts are repaid, then perhaps we need to look at a complete and indefinite restriction on Putin’s rocket engines.

Whether McCain will be able to do this however is somewhat questionable. He is up for election next year, is very disliked in Arizona, and is likely going to face a very tough primary battle that he very well might lose. Even so, it really won’t do ULA much good if they get the right to keep using Russian engines. As I said earlier today, ULA’s future as a rocket company is extremely limited if it doesn’t develop a cheaper rocket. Continued use of the Atlas 5 and these Russian engines does nothing to get that cheaper rocket built.

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Builders of TMT begin removing equipment

11:23 pm

The coming dark age: The builders of the Thirty Meter Telescope today began removing construction equipment from the summit of Mauna Kea.

After the Dec. 2 court ruling voiding the permit, the state attorney general’s office said telescope equipment could remain on the mountain. The court sent the matter back for a new contested-case hearing. Telescope officials haven’t indicated whether they will pursue a new hearing, which could mean a construction delay of several years. [emphasis mine]

Essentially, even if the new permitting process approves the telescope, it will be a very long time before they can begin construction. And approval is certainly not guaranteed, considering the anti-white, anti-technology, and anti-civilization attitude that is clearly growing in Hawaii. I suspect that the builders of TMT are planning to get out, and not come back.

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The Democratic Party’s disconnect from reality

12:07 pm

Three stories today once again illustrate better than anything the leftwing Democratic Party’s profound disconnect from reality:

The first story is a new poll of the public’s opinions on the subject of gun control and the idea of banning “assault weapons” (whatever those might be). Not surprisingly, the public opposes future bans, and the trend lines show a continuing and nonstop shift away from gun control and towards gun rights that has been on-going since the 1990s.

A majority of Americans oppose banning assault weapons for the first time in more than 20 years of ABC News/Washington Post polls, with the public expressing vast doubt that the authorities can prevent “lone wolf” terrorist attacks and a substantial sense that armed citizens can help. Just 45 percent in this national survey favor an assault weapons ban, down 11 percentage points from an ABC/Post poll in 2013 and down from a peak of 80 percent in 1994. Fifty-three percent oppose such a ban, the most on record.

Indeed, while the division is a close one, Americans by 47-42 percent think that encouraging more people to carry guns legally is a better response to terrorism than enacting stricter gun control laws. Divisions across groups are vast, underscoring the nation’s gulf on gun issues.

The second story describes how, despite the above very broad and obvious poll numbers, ninety-one House Democrats today introduced a bill to ban the sale and manufacture of “assault weapons”. In announcing the bill, its lead sponsor, David Cicilline (D-Rhode Island), made this vague effort to define “assault weapon”:
» Read more

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Russian officials decide to broadcast launches

10:12 am

The return of the Soviet Union! After experimenting with the online broadcast yesterday of the Soyuz manned launch, Russian officials announced today that they will continue these broadcasts on future launches.

The launch from Baikonur was for the first time broadcast via the Luch (Ray) satellite retransmission system. More than 1,000 people have watched the live broadcast.

The Luch system is designed to solve the problems of relaying information of monitoring and control of low-orbit spacecraft, manned space systems, including the Russian segment of the International Space Station, and to serve in controlling launch vehicle flights using an alternative technology. The Luch is a series of geosynchronous Russian relay satellites, used to transmit live TV images, communications and other telemetry from the Soviet/Russian space station Mir, the Russian Orbital Segment of the International Space Station and other orbital spacecraft to the Earth, in a manner similar to that of the US Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System. “One of the main spheres we intend to develop is our functions of mobile communications and data retransmission, including for the broadcast of launches as the most interesting events for the promotion of space exploration,” Komarov said. According to the Roscosmos chief, the Gonets company will be engaged in the development of this sphere. [emphasis mine]

Wow! A thousand people watched the launch! Isn’t that amazing!

In other words, either they didn’t make it easy for the public to find the broadcast online, or they didn’t make it public at all and the 1,000 viewers were merely government apparatchiks. It is clear from the article that they are still working to get their communication satellite network back into operation — which crumbled in the 1980s and 1990s with the collapse of the Soviet Union — but if they can broadcast to 1000 people they can broadcast to far more than that. Hopefully after this first effort they will broaden its access for future launches, though I wonder if that will happen. All of Russian aerospace is now government-controlled, and the natural inclination of government bureaucrats is to squelch information so that people don’t see bad things happen.

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Budget deal boosts NASA budget

9:56 am

The gigantic $1.1 trillion omnibus budget deal announced today by Congress leaders would increase NASA’s budget by $1.3 billion.

The increase to the NASA budget goes mostly to SLS and the planetary program. Congress also decided this year to fully fund the administration’s budget request for the commercial space budget, the first time this has happened since the program began back in 2006.

Though the increase to the planetary program as well as the funding to commercial space is good news, the fact that the Republican leadership in Congress agreed to increase spending at NASA illustrates everything that is wrong with Washington. These Republicans leaders promised they would bring fiscal common sense to Washington, cutting the budget to bring the deficit under control. You don’t do that by funding everything.

SLS/Orion is a waste of money. It will accomplish little if nothing, as it is so expensive that we can’t afford to finance any actual missions using it. It should be eliminated entirely. Instead, these guys raise its budget 68%. If they were serious about cutting the budget, they would have recognized the inefficiency and impracticality of SLS/Orion and cut it, allowing them to fund the programs at NASA that are working (science and commercial space) while simultaneously reducing the budget.

Sadly, they are not yet serious about regaining control of the budget. The public has been screaming for this to happen, and their failure to do as the public wants is a further explanation for the success in this election cycle of outsiders like Trump, Cruz, and Carson.

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Soyuz docking issue during ISS arrival

9:37 am

When the manned Soyuz rendezvoused and docked with ISS yesterday, there was a problem with the automatic docking system, requiring the astronauts to take over and manually dock the spacecraft.

Initial reports suggested the failure was with the radar system having a conflict with the communications systems on the berthed Cygnus capsule. The link above instead claims the failure was caused by a malfunction in one of the Soyuz attitude thrusters. The former would be annoying but less of a concern than the latter. A thruster malfunction is somewhat rare, and would be another indication of the serious quality control problems in the Russian aerospace industry.

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New China manned vehicle under development

7:42 pm

The competition heats up: China has begun development of two versions of a second generation manned capsule.

Instead of the three-module arrangement of the current Shenzhou vehicle, the future Chinese crew vehicle will adopt a two-module arrangement, with a large inhabitable crew module at the front, and an uninhabitable cylindrical-shaped service module at back. The size of the re-entry vehicle will be twice of Shenzhou’s, capable of accommodating up to six crew members. A docking port and its associated docking sensors are fitted to the front-end of the crew module. The spacecraft can be fitted with two different service modules, with different propulsion systems and propellant capacities.

In other words, rather than copy and upgrade the design of the Russian Soyuz, as they did with their Shenzhou capsule, they will copy and upgrade the American Apollo capsule.

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Government audit finds EPA broke the law!

9:38 am

A new government audit has found that the EPA broke the law with its aggressive social media campaign lobbying in support of the Obama administration’s proposed clean water regulations.

The Environmental Protection Agency engaged in “covert propaganda” and violated federal law when it blitzed social media to urge the public to back an Obama administration rule intended to better protect the nation’s streams and surface waters, congressional auditors have concluded.

The ruling by the Government Accountability Office, which opened its investigation after a report on the agency’s practices in The New York Times, drew a bright line for federal agencies experimenting with social media about the perils of going too far to push a cause. Federal laws prohibit agencies from engaging in lobbying and propaganda. “I can guarantee you that general counsels across the federal government are reading this report,” said Michael Eric Hertz, a professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York who has written on social media and the government.

I am sure this news comes as a complete surprise to everyone. Who ever heard of a modern government agency ignoring the law for its own benefit? The concept boggles the mind!

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Hype in science papers on the increase

9:19 am

In the past forty years the use by scientists of descriptive words to positively hype their results in their papers has increased steadily.

Researchers at the University Medical Center Utrecht in the Netherlands say that the frequency of positive-sounding words such as ‘novel’, ‘amazing’, ‘innovative’ and ‘unprecedented’ has increased almost nine-fold in the titles and abstracts of papers published between 1974 and 2014. There has also been a smaller — yet still statistically significant — rise in the frequency of negative words, such as ‘disappointing’ and ‘pessimistic’.

…The most obvious interpretation of the results is that they reflect an increase in hype and exaggeration, rather than a real improvement in the incidence or quality of discoveries, says Vinkers. The findings “fit our own observations that in order to get published, you need to emphasize what is special and unique about your study,” he says. Researchers may be tempted to make their findings stand out from thousands of others — a tendency that might also explain the more modest rise in usage of negative words.

The word ‘novel’ now appears in more than 7% of PubMed paper titles and abstracts, and the researchers jokingly extrapolate that, on the basis of its past rise, it is set to appear in every paper by the year 2123.

This study was focused on the medical field, so it is unclear if its results could be extrapolated to other science fields. I suspect it can.

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New astronaut crew to ISS, including Brit

8:47 am

A Russian Soyuz rocket today successfully launched a new crew to ISS, including Great Britain’s first official astronaut.

Tim Peake is not the first Brit in space, but he is the first paid for by the British government. The first British citizen to fly in space, back in 1991, was Helen Sharman, whose flight was a publicity stunt mostly paid for by the Russians themselves.

The crew is expected to dock with ISS later today.

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Rosetta hi-res images released

8:41 am

Lots of cool images! The science team running Rosetta’s high resolution camera have finally made available to the public the camera’s large archive of images.

The images cover the period 20 June 2014 – 16 September 2014, corresponding to Rosetta’s approach to the comet, arrival, and insertion into orbit.

In exchange for creating and running the mission, the scientists had been given a 12 month period in which these hi-res images belonged entirely to them. This gave them the chance to use them to publish papers documenting their discoveries. While this is a reasonable arrangement — used by most planetary missions in some manner to reward the scientists who made the mission possible — with Rosetta the hi-res images were kept so close to the vest that practically none have been seen, until now. Moreover, this release is very late, anywhere from 15 to 18 months after the images were taken, not 12.

Most other planetary missions make sure that at least some images are released as the mission proceeds, since the images were paid for by the public. The European Space Agency should take a look at its future policies for publicly-funded missions to make sure the public gets better access in the future.

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Rabbis endorse Cruz as polls show him surging

2:16 pm

Even as new polls show Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) moving into the lead in Iowa, a broad coalition of rabbis today endorsed him for president.

As I noted way back in August and September, Cruz has been very carefully developing a long-term and broad strategy for winning the presidency. He also generally has the truth on his side, which in elections can only benefit him. Moreover as I have noted since the summer, when Republican voters finally have to vote they are going to gravitate towards the more serious candidates who have demonstrated their willingness to fight the status quo.

These factors now seem to be all coalescing around Cruz.

Considering he might be the smartest and most thoughtful candidate on the campaign trail, with the best understanding of the Constitution and the principles behind it, I cannot think of a better trend. Cruz might not become the Republican candidate, but he is certain to come out of this campaign in a strong position to dominate politics for years to come.

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The murder rate on U.S. islands with strict gun laws

9:32 am

A comparison of the murder rate on U.S. islands that have very strict gun control laws with the average U.S. murder rate finds that gun control has no effect on reducing violence, and in fact might help increase it.

The article finds that the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico have far more murders per person than the U.S., while Hawaii has less. The research does demonstrate, however, that the argument used by places like Chicago, New York, and Washington, DC (that the access to guns in nearby communities causes their gun laws to fail) is bogus. It doesn’t matter if guns are available nearby, as shown above. Instead, as the author correctly notes,

A major problem with trying to lower murder rates with gun laws aimed at restricting the entire population’s access to firearms is that only a tiny number of guns are needed to supply those involved in violent crime. From an economic perspective, it does not matter much if you attempt to fill a bucket from a small pond or an ocean; filling the bucket is easy in either case.

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Western Muslim reformers to name extremists in their mosques

9:11 am

Good news! A group of western Muslim reformers, horrified by the violence being perpetrated in the name of Islam, have announced plans to name and shame the extremists within their religious communities.

Khader and other members of the group on Friday released a declaration of principles calling on Muslims to reject violent jihad and endorse religious freedom for all and secular government, and saying they will call out those who reject it. “We reject the idea of an Islamic state,” Khader said.

In imitation of Christian reformer Martin Luther, the group’s members plan to take copies of the declaration and post them on the doors of their local mosques. “If they reject them then we know they’re on the side of the problem,” said Zuhdi Jasser, president of the Phoenix-based American Islamic Forum for Democracy, at a news conference at which the declaration was unveiled.

It is this kind of reaction that has been sorely lacking within the Islamic community since 9/11. If western Muslims had done this then, then the accusations against them for celebrating on that horrific day would not now be so easy to justify. Still, better late than never.

Interestingly, the two groups expressing opposition to their effort are Muslims within their community, which is not surprising, and liberals here in the U.S. and in Europe. Read the article, as I don’t want to quote it all. It is clearly illustrates the fascist roots of modern liberalism, which seems more willing to forge links with the terrorist elements of Islam rather than fight it.

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Boxer cites California gun laws to stop California terrorist attacks

5:28 pm

The reality-challenged Democratic Party: Today Senator Barbara Boxer (D-California), in demanding new gun control regulations in response to yesterday’s terrorist attack in California, noted that “sensible gun laws work. We’ve proven it in California.”

You can’t make this stuff up. The so-called sensible but very restrictive gun control laws in California did nothing to stop the murderers yesterday, but they did do a good job of making sure the innocent people there were unarmed, helpless, and easy targets. (The attack also took place in a government facility that is a gun-free zone.)

So of course, Boxer and the Democrats want to disarm everyone else, so that these killers won’t have as hard a time at killing us.

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Syria’s only astronaut now a refugee

9:57 am

The uncertainty of life: Muhammed Faris, the only Syrian to ever fly in space, is now a refugee living in Turkey with his family.

Then in 2011, just as he was preparing to enjoy a life in retirement, it all went wrong – as it did for his country. In 2012, he defected from the Syrian Air Force and joined the armed opposition. He was deemed a traitor, had all his honours revoked and his belongings confiscated. He eventually had to flee his country, leaving almost everything behind.

Read it all. He says that his reasons for leaving the air force were because it was bombing its own citizens but I wonder if it might be more complicated than that.

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Arm yourself

9:38 am

As usual, yesterday’s mass shooting in California caused President Obama and the entire left to go into spasms demanding more gun control. A gunman shows up at a random site and begins shooting innocent unarmed people, and the first instinct of the left is to disarm more people so that vicious murderers will have more unarmed people to nonchalantly murder.

I say, it doesn’t matter whether yesterday’s killers were Islamic madmen, right-wing madmen, left-wing madmen, or plain-old madmen. What matters is that they had an easy time killing lots of people, because those people decided to remain unarmed and helpless in the face of violence.

I say, arm yourself. Get prepared so that if you find yourself in such terrible circumstances you can fight back and possibly survive, and in the process maybe save a lot of other lives as well. The likelihood that there will more such killers, most of whom will likely be Islamic terrorists because that is whom we are presently at war with, is quite high. To sit helpless and not prepared for battle is the height of foolishness.

You are personally responsible. You cannot depend on the police or government to defend you. You need to be prepared to defend yourself.

Arm yourself. The next time a killer shows up there should be ten free Americans capable of stopping him or her in their tracks, before anyone innocent dies.

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Russia’s ten-year space budget slashed again

9:03 am

The uncertainty of budgets: Russia has once again cut the ten-year budget for its space program, forcing its space agency Roscosmos to reconsider its ten-year plan running through 2025.

Russia’s federal space agency Roscosmos will receive just 1.5 trillion rubles ($22.5 billion) in government funding over the next ten years, less than half of estimated figures cited by space officials earlier this year, a Roscosmos statement said on Monday evening. The space agency was planning on receiving around 3.4 trillion rubles as part of the Federal Space Program 2016-2025 (FSP), a decade-long planning document that lays out Russia’s goals in space and allocates funding for them.

But Russia’s economic crisis and a broad readjustment of government spending across all sectors has forced Roscosmos to redraft its 10-year proposal several times over the past year.

This is not necessarily bad news for Russia’s space program. The cuts will force them to function like a private company, lean and mean, rather than a bloated wasteful government operation. They therefore might actually be more competitive as a result.

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Hawaii’s Supreme Court kills TMT

8:53 am

The coming dark age: As I expected the Hawaiian Supreme Court today ruled that the construction permit given to the builders of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) is invalid, putting all construction on Mauna Kea on hold indefinitely.

It is very clear that the very liberal government of Hawaii is on the side of the protesters and is doing what it can to stop construction. Will the builders of TMT recognize this and try to find a new site for the telescope, or will they continue the legal battle to build it in Hawaii? I think they stand no chance of winning in Hawaii, but they might not have any other choice.

I also ask: What about the decisions to decommission other telescopes to make room for TMT? Do those telescopes still get removed, even if TMT isn’t built?

All in all, this decision probably puts an end to new cutting-edge science in Hawaii. Like the Catholic Church’s attack on Galileo (which essentially killed the Renaissance in Italy), astronomers, and in fact all scientists, will likely go elsewhere now to find a friendly haven for the search for knowledge.

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Money is worthless in 2016 Presidential campaign

4:40 pm

A graph of the amount of money spent by candidates on television ads reveals the utter worthlessness so far in 2016 for spending a lot of money. The big spenders are doing poorly in the polls, while the frugal candidates are doing great.

The campaigns and allies for three establishment presidential candidates – Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio and John Kasich – have spent a combined $47.5 million in TV ads in the 2016 race so far, according to ad-spending data from NBC News partner SMG Delta.

By contrast, the campaigns and allies for the three Republicans who have been leading or surging in the most recent polls – Donald Trump, Ben Carson and Ted Cruz – have spent just $2.9 million.

The full list at the link is even more astonishing. The three bottom Republican candidates in spending (Carson, Cruz, and Trump) are in the lead, while the four top spenders (Bush, Rubio, Kasich, and Christie) have gotten little for their money, with their campaigns mostly doing poorly. Rubio might be the only one with any traction, but I suspect he will crash and burn once Republican voters actually begin voting. They feel betrayed by him after he decided to make immigration amnesty his most important issue after his election, taking a position completely opposite to the positions he campaigned on.

What this graph tells us is that the geography of elections had changed drastically. Big money means much less. Other things are more important, including the reliability and trustworthiness of the candidates.

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NY’s Obamacare co-op failure forces doctors to demand cash up front

12:37 pm

Finding out what’s in it: Facing the possibility that they won’t be paid because of the failure of the New York Obamacare health insurer, doctors there are now refusing to see patients without an upfront cash payment.

Though the article describes examples where patients were turned away, what is really happening is that the doctors would be glad to treat them, as long as the patient pays for the treatment first. Their insurance ain’t worth anything, and the doctor rightly does not wish to work for free.

Meanwhile, our reality-challenged president, who somehow thought Obamacare would cut health premiums by $2500 and wouldn’t require anyone to change their health plans or doctors, is in Paris this week (which experienced a mass shooting only two weeks ago) telling the world that mass shootings only occur in the United States.

Sadly, the entire Democratic Party generally agrees with him on all issues. Let’s vote for them again!

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