Tag: politics

Trump administration goes all in for LOP-G

11:23 am

The swamp wins! In a speech today Vice President Mike Pence made it clear that the Trump administration is giving its full endorsement to the construction of the Lunar Orbiting Platform-Gateway (LOP-G), as well as SLS and Orion. These big boondoggles, which will trap us in lunar orbit while the Chinese set up lunar bases and take possession of the surface and its resources, are going forward, with both the president’s support as well as Congress’s.

Providing further evidence that the Trump administration has bought into these projects, in his introduction of Pence NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine gave a big public endorsement to the executive secretary of the National Space Council, Scott Pace, a man who has been a big supporter of these projects of the bureaucracy. Pace believes we need these projects, despite the fact that they have been under construction for two decades, have cost an ungodly amount, and have literally flown nowhere.

Pence also said that they intend to have the space force a reality by 2020, and also hinted that the Trump administration is making a careful review on the future of ISS.

Overall, the speech was a big endorsement for government space, in every way, with the private sector designed not to lead as free Americans following their personal dreams but to follow, servants of the desires of the government and its wishes.

If you want to listen to about 30 minutes of pro-government promotion, I expect it will be posted here at some point.

20 comments

NASA considering purchase of communications services

9:33 am

Capitalism in space: Rather than build its own communications satellites, as it has done in the past, NASA is now considering purchasing these services from private communications satellite companies.

NASA had been studying a next-generation communications system that would ultimately replace the current generation of Tracking and Data Relay Satellite (TDRS) spacecraft in Earth orbit, as well as support missions beyond Earth orbit. That included the possibility of partnerships with the private sector.

“Past networks have been expensive to operate and maintain because they were designed to only serve government customers, which has limited their ability to leverage commercial partnerships,” the agency said in its fiscal year 2019 budget proposal released in February. “The next generation project will engage with commercial industry through mechanisms such as services contracts, hosted payloads, and other public-private-partnerships to allow multiple commercial entities to partner with the Government in order to significantly reduce and eventually eliminate reliance on NASA or NASA contractor run ground systems.”

In a paper presented last year by several NASA officials at the International Astronautical Congress in Adelaide, Australia, the agency said working with both commercial and international partners would be among the elements of its next-generation architecture. “Using open, commercial, and international standards will enable the use of commercial services by specifying required performance and interfaces without specifying provider-specific capabilities,” the paper stated. “Commercial entities will compete based on price, quality, timeliness, support and other factors that maintain a competitive environment.”

That desire to work with the commercial sector, along with harnessing new technologies like optical communications, was a reason cited by NASA a year ago for not exercising an option for an additional TDRS satellite under a contract NASA awarded to Boeing in 2007. The last satellite built under that contract, TDRS-M, launched in August 2017.

Using commercial communications satellites makes perfect sense. It will be faster, provide more redundancy, and will save the taxpayer a lot of money.

7 comments

Arianespace’s Vega launches European satellite to study the Earth’s winds

9:18 am

Arianespace’s Vega rocket has successfully launched a European satellite dubbed Aeolus designed to study the Earth’s winds.

Funded by the European Space Agency and built by Airbus Defense and Space, the 480 million euro ($550 million) Aeolus mission is nearly two decades in the making. Since receiving ESA’s formal go-ahead in 2002, Aeolus has suffered numerous delays as engineers encountered problems with the mission’s laser instrument.

Aeolus will gather the first comprehensive worldwide measurements of wind speed — over oceans and land masses — from Earth’s surface to an altitude of nearly 100,000 feet (30 kilometers).

Data collected by the Aeolus satellite will be fed into numerical weather prediction models, replacing simulated “boundary conditions” in the computers models with near real-time measurements from space.

The updated leader board for the 2018 launch standings:

22 China
15 SpaceX
8 Russia
6 ULA
5 Arianespace

In the national race, the U.S. and China remained tied at 22.

6 comments

Man beaten by antifa thugs for carrying American flag

1:06 pm

They’re coming for you next: A man who was attacked and beaten by antifa thugs for carrying an American flag during a Portland demonstration is actually a Democrat and a Bernie Sanders supporter who was at the demonstration to show that even liberals can be patriotic Americans.

In addition to the open embrace of violence exhibited by the Antifa member, the other problem for the group, The Oregonian underscores, is that Welch was not some Proud Boy or Patriot Prayer fan, he was “one of hundreds of progressive Portlanders who had turned out to oppose the right-wing rally held at the Tom McCall Waterfront Park.”

“I didn’t come as a part of any one group,” Welch told The Oregonian. “I was just protesting outsiders coming here for their tacitly fascist event.”

“I had felt like showing that a liberal, free Portland — or any major city, really — is much more American and much more numerous and strong than any of these interloping groups,” said Welch, who the outlet notes is a registered Democrat who voted for Sanders in the 2016 primary and Hillary Clinton in the general election.

More here. Watch the video at the link. Masked thugs try to steal the flag, and when he refused to let go one smashes him on the head with what looks like a baton. Another then comes over and appears to hit him again while he lies on the ground.

I repeat: These are brown-shirted, KKK, Nazi, communist, fascist, jack-booted thugs, who will not tolerate any dissent, and hate the United States and the freedom it stands for.

16 comments

Mob rips down Confederate statue

10:50 am

They’re coming for you next: A mob of protesters yesterday pulled down a Confederate statue in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

The monument was ripped down after 9:15 p.m. Earlier in the evening, protesters covered the statue with tall, gray banners, erecting “an alternative monument” that said, in part, “For a world without white supremacy.”

Protesters were apparently working behind the covering with ropes to bring the statue down, which happened more than two hours into a rally. It fell with a loud clanging sound, and the crowd erupted in cheers.

After Silent Sam tumbled to the ground, people darted in and out of the crowd through a haze from smoke bombs. Atop the statue someone placed a black cap that said, “Do It Like Durham,” an apparent reference to the toppling of a Confederate statue there a year ago.

Just remember, this protest has nothing to do with fighting racism. This mob, some of whom were masked in black, not unlike the KKK, is instead telling you that they will do whatever they have to do make sure no one ever disagrees with them. And if you do, they will come after you with the same violence and force.

And if you don’t believe me watch the video at the link. These are not peaceful demonstrators promoting love. They hate, and they believe they have the right to do anything, no matter how violent, to get what they want.

6 comments

Trump EPA proposes new power plant climate rules

10:23 am

The Trump administration has now proposed a revision to the climate rules established by the Obama administration to limit carbon dioxide releases at power plants.

President Donald Trump’s administration released a plan today to regulate carbon dioxide emissions at power plants, undercutting a much broader effort by former President Barack Obama to slash planet-warming gases.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposal would give states wide latitude for determining how to cut greenhouse gases from the power sector, a key contributor in the U.S. to climate change. The proposed rule is far narrower than the Obama plan, which sought to cut emissions across the power sector rather than only at individual plants.

On the campaign trail in 2016, Trump promised to repeal Obama’s rule, called the Clean Power Plan. His administration stopped short of that today and is instead offering a weakened alternative to avoid a potentially damaging defeat in court.

Based on the article and the actual proposal [pdf], I am far from convinced this change reduces regulation that much. It appears to shift the regulation to the states, but whether this simplifies things for power plant operators is very doubtful.

Not surprisingly, the Democrats and various leftist environmental groups oppose the change. Expect lawsuits, since it is absolutely forbidden for any subsequent president to ever change policies set by past Democratic presidents.

1 comment

Air Force to accelerate hypersonic weapon development?

10:12 am

By signing two different contracts worth $1.4 billion in the past four months with Lockheed Martin, the Air Force is claiming that it is accelerating the development of hypersonic weapons in order to keep up with similar development by the Chinese and the Russians.

The first contract, announced in April, awards $928 million to develop something called the Hypersonic Conventional Strike Weapon (HCSW). And last week, the Air Force disclosed another deal, worth up to $480 million, to begin designing the Air-Launched Rapid Response Weapon (ARRW).

“We are going to go fast and leverage the best technology available to get hypersonic capability to the war fighter as soon as possible,” Secretary of the Air Force Heather Wilson said in a statement last week.

Hypersonic vehicles travel at least five times faster than the speed of sound (Mach 5; Mach 1 at sea level is 762 mph, or 1,226 km/h). And they’re designed to be maneuverable, which differentiates them from intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and other fast-flying conventional weapons systems that follow predictable paths. “We don’t currently have effective defenses against hypersonic weapons because of the way they fly; i.e., they’re maneuverable and fly at an altitude our current defense systems are not designed to operate at,” Richard Speier, adjunct staff at the nonprofit RAND Corp., told CNBC in March. “Our whole defensive system is based on the assumption that you’re gonna intercept a ballistic object.”

I am a bit skeptical here. The military has been playing around with hypersonic development now for the last fifteen years, spending a lot of money flying a handful of test flights of three different design concept prototypes. Nothing is even close to an actual operational vehicle. These new contracts might produce something, but I fear that they are also pork-laden, and will be too expensive and take far too long, producing nothing more than test prototypes once again.

6 comments

South Africa begins confiscating white-owned farms

11:58 pm

They’e coming for you next: The South African government has begun the process to confiscate, without compensation, thousands white-owned farms, and it appears it is willing to do it without regards to the country’s constitution.

The South African parliament voted in February to send its Constitutional Review Committee a motion to work on such a measure introduced by the Marxist Economic Freedom Fighters party with ANC support. Mr. Ramaphosa said the ANC would make sure the amendment “outlines more clearly the conditions under which expropriation of land without compensation can be effected.”

But in another warning shot to white farmers and a possible foreshadowing of Seizures even beyond Akkerland Boerdery, the president hinted that the government might not even see itself as needing that amendment. A “proper reading” of the constitution and its current property clause, he said, “enables the state to effect expropriation of land with just and equitable compensation, and also expropriation without compensation in the public interest.”

Mr. Rampahosa, defending that position, said that the state having the power to seize property for no compensation will encourage economic growth. “The ANC reaffirmed its position that a comprehensive land reform program that enables equitable access to land will unlock economic growth by bringing more land in South Africa to full use and enable the productive participation of millions more South Africans in the economy,” he said.

This might be in South Africa, but these actions, bigoted and racist at their core and being pushed by the left, are only another reflection of the tyrannical lust for power that drives collectivists everywhere. In the U.S. the left for now merely attacks whites for being whites in academia. The aim however is no different that that of the Marxists in South Africa, to oppress one race for the fake benefit of another, with all power devolving to the corrupt leftist demagogues who make believe they are fair-minded politicians while pushing race hatred.

24 comments

NASA officially approves SpaceX’s fueling system

9:08 pm

Surprise, surprise! NASA on August 17 officially approved SpaceX’s fueling system where the astronauts would enter the Dragon capsule before the Falcon 9 rocket would fueled.

In a statement published late Aug. 17, the agency said that it was allowing SpaceX to move ahead with plans to use what’s colloquially known as “load-and-go,” where the Falcon 9 launch vehicle is filled with liquid oxygen and kerosene propellants after astronauts board the Crew Dragon spacecraft on top of the rocket.

“To make this decision, our teams conducted an extensive review of the SpaceX ground operations, launch vehicle design, escape systems and operational history,” Kathy Lueders, NASA’s commercial crew program manager, said in the statement. “Safety for our personnel was the driver for this analysis, and the team’s assessment was that this plan presents the least risk.”

Blah, blah, blah. They had made it clear they were going to approve SpaceX’s fueling approach last week. NASA safety bureaucrats have been whining about SpaceX’s fueling approach for more than a year and a half, for no logical reason, and for what I surmised were purely political reasons having zero to do with safety. At times I have stated that when SpaceX was getting close to actually flying, NASA would back down. And I also expected SpaceX to push its launch dates to force NASA to back down, in contrast to the old-time big space contractors who routinely would kowtow to NASA in these matters and allow its bureaucracy to push them around.

These events are more evidence that the April 2019 manned Dragon launch is on schedule.

1 comment

Liberal media tries to dox jurors in Manafort case

2:32 pm

They’re coming for you next: A coalition of partisan liberal news outlets, including The Washington Post, The New York Times, the Associated Press, CNN, NBC, Politico and BuzzFeed, this week asked that the names and addresses of the jurors in the Manafort trial be released to the public.

The judge today denied the request, noting that he has received death threats and does not want to expose the jurors to similar threats.

Let’s be clear about this: The only reason these Democratic Party advocates disguised as news sources want this information is so that they use it to attack the jurors should they acquit Paul Manafort. This wouldn’t change this particular juror decision, but it would put all future jurors on notice: Don’t you dare rule in a manner the left opposes or you will face retribution and harsh payback.

17 comments

Roscosmos in the news!

9:48 am

Three news stories from Russia, two from today and one from last week, provide us a flavor of the kind of space stories that come out of Russia almost daily, either making big promises of future great achievements, or making blustery excuses for the failure of those big promises to come true.

In the first the head of Roscosmos, Dmitry Rogozin, rationalizes the failure of Russia to compete successfully with SpaceX.
» Read more

7 comments

An update on Trump appointments to the federal circuit courts

10:13 pm

Link here. The article provides a very clear status report on the number of remaining vacancies nationwide, and the politics that explain the nomination status for the 9th circuit court.

The Senate has confirmed a record 24 new circuit court judges nationwide in 20 months — with two more nominees scheduled for votes this week. But Trump has made far less progress in the jurisdiction he criticizes the most: the liberal-leaning U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, including California and eight other Western states.

Since Trump took office, the Senate has confirmed only one 9th Circuit judge — in Hawaii — leaving seven openings. A nominee in Oregon was abruptly withdrawn last month when it became clear he lacked the votes for Senate approval. And Trump has yet to even nominate anyone for the three vacancies in California, partly because of a standoff with Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Kamala Harris.

But there are signs that the administration is beginning to set its sights on the 9th Circuit, likely triggering a bruising fight with Democrats. For one thing, Trump is running out of vacancies in other circuits, particularly in conservative states where confirmation is easier. “They’ve been focusing on lower-hanging fruit,” said Ilya Shapiro, a senior fellow in constitutional studies at the Cato Institute. “After a while there are only so many seats to fill.”

More than half of the 13 vacancies remaining nationwide are on the 9th Circuit.

It appears to me that the Trump administration strategy has been to hold off in these liberal states until after the November election, betting that the Democrats will lose seats in the Senate and thus have less ability to block these nominations. This is a risky but reasonable strategy, considering the number of vulnerable Democratic Senators up for election in states Trump won handily in 2016.

1 comment

Warren: Federal government must have more control over large corporations

10:38 am

They’re coming for you next: Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) this week proposed a new law that would give the federal government more control and power over large corporations.

The bill would create a new bureaucracy, would require all corporations with more than $1 billion in annual revenue to get that bureaucracy’s permission to operate, and require that 40% of their corporate boards be elected by employees.

To translate this into plain language, this is simply a power grab by Democrat Warren, which of course is par for the course for any Democrat. Give them the power to run things, and everything will be perfect! We can see what they mean simply by looking at the past fascist efforts of socialists in Venezuela, the Soviet Union, East Germany, North Korea, and every other socialist paradise where all power was centralized into the hands of ideologues like Warren.

Don’t you want the same here for America?

15 comments

State Department claims orbiting Russian satellite is a military threat

9:19 am

At a conference yesterday a State Department official claimed that an orbiting Russian satellite is behavior in a manner that suggests an unstated military purpose.

Russia has described the satellite in question as a “space apparatus inspector,” Yleem Poblete, assistant secretary for arms control, verification and compliance at the U.S. State Department, said at a conference on disarmament in Geneva yesterday. “But its behavior on orbit was inconsistent with anything seen before from on-orbit inspection or space situational-awareness capabilities, including other Russian inspection-satellite activities. We are concerned with what appears to be very abnormal behavior by a declared ‘space apparatus inspector,”’ Poblete said.

“We don’t know for certain what it is, and there is no way to verify it,” she added. “But Russian intentions with respect to this satellite are unclear and are obviously a very troubling development — particularly when considered in concert with statements by Russia’s Space Force commander, who highlighted that ‘assimilate[ing] new prototypes of weapons [into] Space Forces’ military units’ is a ‘main task facing the Aerospace Forces space troops.'”

If you read the whole speech, you will discover that much of this is somewhat overstated, and that it is simply part of the Trump administration’s aggressive lobbying in favor of creating a Space Force. I don’t deny that this satellite could be testing technologies that could have military uses. I can also recognize it when a government official is trying to use the press to advocate for more funding. At no point does Poblete describe in detail the behavior that makes them think this satellite is doing things “inconsistent with anything seen before from on-orbit inspection or space situational-awareness capabilities.” In fact, if it is making unusual orbital changes that is very consistent with these purposes since any satellite designed to make orbital inspections of other facilities would need that capability.

In fact, I bet it isn’t the satellite’s activity that concerns them, but its vague description. The Russians really haven’t told us what it is. While this is surely a concern, this speech’s purpose is to lobby for the Space Force, not pressure the Russians to provide more information.

3 comments

Second Japanese official indicted in JAXA bribery scandal

8:59 am

Japanese authorities have now indicted a second government official for taking bribes in connection with space work by the country’s space agency JAXA.

Kazuaki Kawabata, 57, the former director-general for international affairs at the ministry, allegedly received bribes worth about 1.5 million yen ($13,570) in the form of wining and dining.

Koji Taniguchi, 47, who served as an executive of a medical care consulting company, was also indicted on Aug. 15 on a charge of providing the bribes to Kawabata. Taniguchi had already been indicted in a different scandal on a charge of helping another education ministry official, Futoshi Sano, receive bribes from Tokyo Medical University executives.

According to the announcement by the Special Investigation Department of the Tokyo District Public Prosecutors Office, Kawabata was on loan to JAXA from August 2015 to March 2017, where he worked as a vice president. During the period, he was wined and dined more than 20 times in return for giving favors to the consulting company. The lavish drinks and dining totaled 1.5 million yen, including taxi fares.

None of this is really news. It is standard operating procedure at the higher levels of most government operations. These guys simply weren’t smart enough to disguise their corruption very well.

0 comments

Trump revokes Brennan’s security clearance

2:39 pm

As threatened last week, President Trump today revoked the security clearance for former CIA director and anti-Trump CNN talking head John Brennan.

President Trump on Wednesday revoked the security clearance of former CIA director John Brennan, citing his “erratic conduct and behavior.” White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, reading a statement from the president, said Mr. Brennan “leveraged his status as a former high-ranking official” to make false charges against the administration.

Mr. Trump’s statement began, “As the head of the executive branch and commander-in-chief, I have a unique constitutional responsibility to protect the nation’s classified information, including by controlling access to it. Today in fulfilling that responsibility, I’ve decided to revoke the security clearance of John Brennan, former director of the Central Intelligence Agency.”

The president said Mr. Brennan’s actions have “exceeded the limits of any professional courtesy.”

I’m not sure what difference this will make, as it seems a large percentage of the people who work for the CIA are as partisan as Brennan, will gladly leak any information to him that might harm Trump, and know that they likely face no consequences because the law seemingly does not apply to those allied with the Democrats.

15 comments

Christian baker files lawsuit against Colorado for continuing harassment

10:32 am

Fascist Colorado: Despite a victory in the Supreme Court allowing him to refuse to back cakes with political themes he disagrees with, the Christian baker in Colorado has been forced to file another lawsuit against the state’s Civil Rights Commission for continuing harassment.

On the same day the high court agreed to review the Masterpiece case, an attorney named Autumn Scardina called Phillips’ shop and asked him to create a cake celebrating a sex transition. The caller asked that the cake include a blue exterior and a pink interior, a reflection of Scardina’s transgender identity. Phillips declined to create the cake, given his religious conviction that sex is immutable, while offering to sell the caller other pre-made baked goods.

In the months that followed, the bakery received requests for cakes featuring marijuana use, sexually explicit messages, and Satanic symbols. One solicitation submitted by email asked the cake shop to create a three-tiered white cake depicting Satan licking a functional 9 inch dildo. Phillips believes Scardina made all these requests.

Scardina filed a complaint with the civil rights commission, alleging discrimination on the basis of gender identity. The matter was held in abeyance while the Supreme Court adjudicated the Masterpiece case.

Three weeks after Phillips won at the high court, the commission issued a probable cause determination, finding there was sufficient evidence to support Scardina’s claim of discrimination. In a somewhat strange development, the probable cause finding reads that Phillips violated state law, even though the proceedings are still in a preliminary stage.

Masterpiece has filed suit against the commission for instituting these proceedings, which clearly contradict the Supreme Court ruling.

Essentially this campaign by one gay rights lawyer in league with the commission, is aimed at destroying this business, merely because of its owner’s personal religious beliefs. He gladly sells his products to anyone, he merely refuses to create cakes with political messages he disagrees with. To try to destroy him for this, using the government, is the epitome of fascism.

16 comments

An update on China’s private smallsat rocket companies

10:09 am

Link here. The article describes the most recent news from OneSpace (which recently secured $44 million in financing), Landspace (building larger rockets), and Exspace (next launch planned for September).

While these companies are structured like American private companies, in China nothing having anything to do with space is really private. None of these companies can do anything without the full approval of China’s authoritarian communist government. Unlike Russia, however, China, has decided to allow competition to drive its space industry, not central control. It is encouraging small independent operations to come up with their own ideas and to compete with each other.

In the end, they will all be co-opted by the government, but for now this policy is producing for China some real results.

0 comments

India’s prime minister: manned mission by 2022

9:43 am

The new colonial movement: Facing an election next year, India’s prime minister Narendra Modi produced his own Kennedy-like space speech today, announcing a plan to launch a manned Indian mission by 2022.

Wearing a flowing saffron turban, the Hindu nationalist leader also announced the plan to take the “Indian tricolor to space” in a manned mission that would make India the fourth nation to launch one, after the United States, Russia and China. “India is proud of our scientists, who are excelling in their research and are at the forefront of innovation,” Modi said from the ramparts of the Mughal-era Red Fort in Delhi to a crowd numbering in the tens of thousands.

“In the year 2022 or, if possible, before, India will unfurl the tricolor in space.”

He also announced a healthcare initiative that has been dubbed “Modicare.” He was elected in a landslide to replace the socialist policies of the leftwing Congress Party. He is now beginning to act like the U.S.’s establishment Republican Party, who love to mouth conservative values but advocate leftist programs to win re-election.

The question is whether the Indian people will be more like Americans of the 20th century, buying into these government programs proposed by a fake-conservative, or whether they will be more like an increasing number of Americans today, sick of too much government. I suspect the former, which will bode ill for India’s future.

0 comments
1 … 308 309 310 311 312 … 593