Tag: politics

One third of so-called extinct species have turned up alive

1:00 am

Back from the dead! A new study has found that scientists are significantly over-estimating the number of animal extinctions, with approximately one third of the so-called “extinct” species turning up alive. This quote makes one wonder if politics have been a factor:

The mistakes cannot be blamed on primitive technology or old fashioned scientific methods. “Mammals missing in the 20th century were nearly three times as likely to be rediscovered as those that disappeared in the 19th century.”

Leave a comment

Violence by Democrat Party activists

9:11 pm

Two violent incidents against innocent citizens, exercising their first amendment rights, have occurred in the past week. The first video shows a man being attacked because he is filming the Democratic candidate for governor at a public event.

Details about this incident can also be read here.

In the second incident, a Republican staffer and Iraqi war veteran was filming at a rally for Ted Strickland, Democrat candidate for Ohio governor, when a Strickland supporter came up behind him and poured a cup of hot coffee down his back.

Details can be found here.

Note that in both cases, it is the Democrat that is committing the violence. This has been the pattern since the Tea Party protests started in April 2009. In almost every case, it has been a liberal/Democrat/union employee who has attacked a conservative protester.

To put it mildly, such stormtrooper behavior by Democratic operatives is not the smartest way to win votes.

One comment

House will vote on Senate NASA plan

8:39 pm

The space war appears to be over. Based on several news reports, the House will vote this week on the Senate plan for NASA, not on the House plan.

Despite this agreement in Congress, the future of NASA remains murky, at best. As written, this plan forces NASA to continue construction of some form of heavy lift rocket similar to the Ares I and Ares V it was building under Constellation, but gives the agency less money and time to do it. It also hands out a lot of money to commercial companies for so-called launch services, but outlines few details about how that money should be spent.

One comment

Now it’s “global cooling”!

7:37 pm

So now that the “global warming” narrative is beginning to fall flat (sorry John Holdren, but I refuse to play your game and call it “global climate disruption”), what do the elite apparachiks worldwide decide to do? They get together in a private meeting in Spain in June to discuss the future threat from global cooling.

What was that? Did I hear you right? Did you say “global cooling?”

Yup. Key quote from the meeting announcement:

The 58th Bilderberg Meeting will be held in Sitges, Spain 3 – 6 June 2010. The Conference will deal mainly with Financial Reform, Security, Cyber Technology, Energy, Pakistan, Afghanistan, World Food Problem, Global Cooling, Social Networking, Medical Science, EU-US relations. Approximately 130 participants will attend of whom about two-thirds come from Europe and the balance from North America. About one-third is from government and politics, and two-thirds are from finance, industry, labor, education, and communications. The meeting is private in order to encourage frank and open discussion. [emphasis mine]

If it’s not one thing, it’s another. The goal has never been to save the Earth, but to grab power. Now that the public is questioning the reality of the global warming meme, these blowhards have to come up with some other crisis they can use to maintain their positions of power and control. And if it isn’t getting hotter, maybe it’s getting cooler? Never mind the facts or the science, which remains confused and complex. All they want is some justification, no matter how unjustified, for telling everyone else how to live their lives.

One more thought: How much do you want to bet that a good majority of the participants (the full list) flew in on private jets?

James Delingpole of the Telegraph uncovered this little tidbit, and has some blunt but very true words to say about it.

One comment

UN to appoint astrophysicist to negotiate with aliens

1:37 am

The United Nations in charge! They have decided that — should extra-terrestrials ever arrive on Earth — an obscure Malaysian astrophysicist/UN bureaucrat must be in charge of negotiations. In her words:

“We should have in place a co-ordinated response that takes into account all the sensitivities related to the subject. The UN is a ready-made mechanism for such co-ordination.”

Leave a comment

Federal spending is out of control and NASA’s gonna get what it wants?

10:58 pm

You think NASA’s going get money this year or next? Or ever? In one graph (see below), this article shows how completely out of control federal spending has become, beginning in 2007, with no end in sight. Key quote:

Until this skyrocketing spending growth is arrested and reversed, we suspect that government spending has become disconnected from the ability of any American household to support it.

out of control

Leave a comment

Opossums overrun Brooklyn

10:47 pm

We’re here to help you! The New York city government, in an effort to control its rat population (the small rodent kind), decided to release opossums in Brooklyn to eat rats. Instead, the opossums have ignored the rats, and now Brooklyn is overrun with both rats and opossums. More here. Key quote:

“Didn’t any of those brain surgeons realize that the opossums were going to multiply?”

2 comments

Something’s coming, something good

1:45 pm

Three polls issued today make it very clear that the upcoming November elections are going to be a very different animal than any election anyone has seen in decades.

First, Public Policy Polling (PPP) finds that in the West Virginia race for the Senate seat formerly held by Robert Byrd, long shot Republican John Raese is leading shoe-in Democrat Joe Manchin by 3 points.

Second, Rasmussen finds that not only is Republican Joe Miller leading his opponents in the Alaska Senate race by 15%, the Democrat candidate, Scott McAdams, can only garner 25%. Meanwhile, Lisa Murkowski, who lost to Miller in a primary upset, is doing almost as bad as an independent write-in candidate, with 27%.

Third, a Quinnipiac poll shows Republican Tom Corbett destroying Democrat Dan Onorato by a 54-39 margin in the race for Pennsylvania governor.

Not only do these numbers show a willingness of the public to consider new and unknown candidates and reject incumbents, they also show a surprising hostility to Democrat candidates in regions that have always been considered Democrat strongholds. In West Virginia, the accepted wisdom was that the Democrat Manchin would be nominated and then annointed. Not so. In Alaska, not only did Miller upset the incumbent Murkowski in the Republican primary, voters apparently have little interest in seeing her return to office, or give her Democrat rival the job either. And in Pennsylvania, a swing state that has in recent years been swinging increasingly Democratic, the numbers show instead a complete reversal of that trend and a total rejection of the Democrat candidate.

Yes, November 2nd is going to be an interesting day indeed.

Update: Another poll released today from PPP and commissioned by the leftwing website, Daily Kos, continues these astonishing trends. In the Wisconsin Senate race, Democrat incumbent Russ Feingold now trails Republican Ron Johnson by 11% points. And in Wisconsin governor’s race, the same poll found the Republican leading by 9%.

One comment

NASA outreach to the Arab world

10:21 pm

Keith Cowing and Frank Sietzen at SpaceRef report that NASA administrator Charles Bolden will soon be heading to Saudia Arabia, ostentively to continue NASA outreach to the Muslim world, with other less obvious motives pertaining to Israeli/Palestine peace negotiations. Key quote:

According to one of several sources knowledgeable on the subject “expect to see a wave of mid-level Administration appointees embarking on a round of carrot-and-stick sweetener overtures” to Saudi officials to entice them to join the Obama effort. For their part, the Saudi government wants the U.S. to exert greater pressure on Israel to stop construction of settlements in occupied territories that might someday be a key in a peace accord. In the meantime the Obama administration is trying to give the Saudis every incentive to craft a stronger relationship with the U.S.

Leave a comment

My Friday night travels

11:12 pm

On Friday I drove up to Westfield, New Jersey, to give a public lecture to Amateur Astronomers, Inc. at Union County College in Cranford, New Jersey. On this, my second visit to this amateur astronomy club, my lecture topic was the story behind the Apollo 8 mission to the Moon, the subject of my first book, Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8.

I visit a lot of astronomy clubs, giving talks on space and its history, so it is not a light complement when I say that this particular club is one of the most active, organized, and enthusiastic astronomy clubs I have ever seen. This is not to say that other clubs are not active, organized, or enthusiastic, only that it seems to me that the members of Amateur Astronomers are particularly so.

This fact only makes the decision by Union County College to throw the club and its observatory off campus seem incredibly stupid. Fortunately, the club has managed to negotiate a two year postponement of their eviction. What will happen after that, however, remains unknown.

One comment

A look at the Washington Post’s take on the space war

10:25 pm

The Washington Post today includes an excellent article outlining quite succinctly the mess that’s resulted from the space war between the House, the Senate, and the administration over NASA’s manned program. Key quote:

In an effort to restore a NASA consensus and fund future human space travel, negotiators from the House and Senate have been meeting frequently in recent weeks. Participants say, however, that the sides are dug in and that stalemate is a real possibility.

As I have been saying for months, don’t expect anything good to come from Congress, even if they come up with a compromise. Obama and NASA under Bolden did a very bad job selling their ideas to Congress, and Congress returned the favor by rejecting those ideas and instead coming up with two different plans, both of which serve their own parochial interests rather than the nation’s. The result is a micromanaged mishmosh that won’t get anything done, while wasting huges sums of cash that the federal government does not have.

3 comments

The Space War, in a nutshell

12:38 pm

Bumped, with update below

This Christian Science Monitor article gives a nice summary of the present state of war between the President, the House, and the Senate over NASA’s future.

All in all, things do not look good. With so much disagreement, whatever Congress and the President eventually agree to is going to be a mess, accomplishing little while spending gobs of money that the federal government simply no longer has. The result will almost certainly be a failed NASA program, an inability of the United States government to get astronauts into orbit, and an enormous waste of resources.

The one shining light in all this is that we still have a unrelenting need to get into space, not merely to supply the International Space Station but to also compete with other nations. It is my belief that this need — and the potential profits to be made from it — is going to compel private companies to build their own rockets and capsules for getting humans and cargo into space. And I think they will do it whether or not the federal government can get its act together.

Thus, though the U.S. might find itself a bystander in the space race for the next decade or so, in the end we will have a vibrant, competing aerospace industry, capable of dominating the exploration of the solar system for generations to come.

So buck up, space cadets. The near term future might be grim, but the long term possibilities remain endless.

Update: This announcement today from Boeing and Space Adventures illustrates my above point perfectly. For decades Boeing has been a lazy company, living off the government dole while doing little to capture market share in the competitive market. Now that the dole of government is possibly going away, however, the company at last appears to be coming alive. Instead of waiting for a deal with NASA, Boeing has been going ahead with its CST-100 manned capsule, figuring it can make money anyway by selling this product to both private and government customers.

One comment

Government high speed railroad and elections

4:31 pm

The federal government’s very expensive and probably unnecessary project to build a high speed railroad line between two cities in Wisconsin — using stimulus money — is having a significant influence on the elections there. Key quote:

With the U.S. economy in shambles and our national debt strangling the country, it doesn’t bode well for Feingold that he supported the wildly unpopular health-care bill, which [challenger] Johnson wants repealed, as well as last year’s big clunker, the stimulus bill. Feingold’s support for the unfunded and bottomless money pit of [high speed rail] doesn’t appear to be working for him either. If an entrenched insider like Feingold loses, it could have serious ramifications for the future of high-speed rail across the country. [emphasis mine]

Leave a comment

ISS’s life expectancy

1:29 pm

Engineers are reviewing the life expectancy of the International Space Station, in light of the desire of politicians to keep it operating through the 2020s. Intriguing quote:

Airlines and airplane contractors commonly inspect aircraft for such fractures, but with the space station out of reach more than 200 miles up, engineers rely on complex models to predict their growth in orbit.

Leave a comment
1 … 370 371 372 373 374