The good news, as the New York Times noted on Thursday, is that Hillary Clinton now has an opponent on the Democratic side. The entertaining news is that the opponent is Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont. Sanders is the one socialist in the United States Senate who admits to being one. The rest call themselves Democrats.
The Speech: A Historic Filibuster on Corporate Greed and the Decline of Our Middle Class
According to a Thursday story on CBS News, Blue Origin, the private space company owned by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, launched its New Shephard suborbital spacecraft. A dummy crew capsule separated from the propulsion stage at an altitude of 58 miles. While the crew capsule parachuted safely back to Earth, the propulsion stage was not so lucky. A hydraulic prevented the first stage from achieving a soft landing.
The Amazon Way: 14 Leadership Principles Behind the World's Most Disruptive Company
While some media reports that NASA has accidentally created a warp field during a test of the EM drive are, at best, premature, the progress being made on the space drive that does not use rocket fuel has been, nevertheless, impressive. The EM Drive uses a closed microwave cavity to produce thrust in a way that seems to defy what is currently known about the laws of physics. NasaSpaceFlight.com reported on Wednesday that engineers at NASA’s Eagleworks, located at the Johnson Spaceflight Center, have tested the EM drive in a vacuum for the first time.
If any further proof was needed that electing and then reelecting Barack Obama to the presidency in 2008 and then 2012 was among the biggest mistakes that American people ever made, the news from Hot Air on Wednesday that 1st Quarter 2015 growth was an anemic .2 percent should confirm the supposition. Add to that the historically low employment participation rates, 62.7 percent according to the Board of Labor Statistics, and one can only conclude that the president is a failure where economic policy is concerned. In the seventh year of his presidency, Obama seems ill-disposed to change his failed policies.
Hot Air noted that the Iranians have started behaving as what can only be considered as pirates by seizing two cargo ships from the Marshall Islands, an American ally, in international waters while navigating through the Straits of Hormuz. Even though the United States is obligated by treaty to come of the defense of the former American territory, the Pentagon has concluded that the obligation does not extend to defending ships seized by a third party. The implications to freedom of commerce on the high seas, which is guaranteed by American naval power, are bone chilling.
Act of War: Lyndon Johnson, North Korea, and the Capture of the Spy Ship Pueblo
Russia has made a number of pronouncements about its plans for space exploration, including a vow to land cosmonauts on the lunar surface by 2030. Space observers, noting the fragile state of the Russian economy and the skimpy funding that the Russian Space Agency is receiving, cast doubt on such grandiose claims. So that makes Wednesday’s announcement that Russia is in talks with China for a joint lunar program that would lead to a joint “lunar science station” all the more interesting.
According to a Monday story in Space News, outgoing Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Maryland gave voice to an ongoing problem that NASA has faced for quite some time. Specifically, the space agency is not getting enough funding to conduct all of the programs that it has been mandated to execute. Mikulski, who is the ranking member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, has vowed to do something about it. How much more money Mikulski can garner for NASA and even if she would be able to increase its budget higher than the president’s $18.5 billion request for FY 2016 is an open question.
As CNN noted on Tuesday, authorities are finally moving to put an end to an orgy of rioting in Baltimore by issuing a 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. curfew starting Tuesday night enforced by National Guard troops. It is too late, however, especially for Baltimore’s hapless Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, who said at a press conference on Monday, in effect, that the rioters had permission to have at it. They did so with a will in a day long orgy of looting, burning, and mayhem that made the city resemble a war zone that local police seemed helpless and unwilling to prevent.
One of the things that veterans of the Clinton scandals of the 1990s used to bemoan was how different the media of that time dealt with them than they did, for example, Watergate. The narrative went something like this: Clinton has done some ethically challenged things, but they surely do not rise to the level of impeachment. Conservatives are just being overreaching and partisan if they think they can make President Clinton accountable. Fast forward more than 15 years, and it looks like Hillary Clinton is not being afforded the same privilege that her husband was, as illustrated by a Monday story in The Daily Beast by the venerable Eleanor Cliff.
Back to Work: Why We Need Smart Government for a Strong Economy
A myriad of reasons exists for reforestation. Trees are a natural resource that provides material such as wood and other products. Forests help to restore ecosystems and soak up pollution. They also are instruments that help to alleviate global warming by absorbing carbon dioxide. According to a Saturday story on GoodNewsNetwork, a former NASA scientist and current CEO of BioCarbon Engineering named Lauren Fisher has come up with the bright idea of planting trees through the use of aerial drones.
Former President George W. Bush has decorously avoided making public comment about political or public policy matters. He has confined himself to writing, painting, and philanthropy. Indeed, he has made it known that he will avoid “getting in the way” of his brother Jeb’s campaign for the presidency, the theory being that Americans abhor dynastic politics. However, Bloomberg reported on Sunday that the former president laid on to President Obama at a private meeting of the Republican Jewish Collation in Las Vegas, Nevada.
According to a Sunday story in Breitbart, the Global Warming Policy Foundation is gathering together a group of eminent scientists, which will include climatologists, physicists and statisticians, to attempt to settle the “settled science” of global warming. At issue are two sets of data, one from ground-based monitoring stations, the other from satellites, that tell two different stories concerning the phenomenon that some call climate change. To put the matter succinctly, the ground-based stations show that human-caused global warming in occurring while the satellite data does not.
Cool IT (Movie Tie-in Edition): The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming
Ted Cruz, along with most of the other Republican presidential candidates, actual and potential, appeared at the Iowa Faith and Freedom Summit on Saturday. He decried what he sees as “liberal fascism” that has ensured "there is no room for Christians in today's Democratic Party." Ironically, some people who support LGBT rights are busily making Cruz’s case, albeit inadvertently. Indeed, recently, Hillary Clinton, still the likely Democratic presidential nominee despite the play for pay scandal that is consuming her campaign, recently gave Cruz a boost.
Space News’ Jeff Foust was sitting in on one of those myriad Washington meetings in which people discuss the future of space when he noted an interesting exchange involving going back to the moon between Mary Lynne Dittmar, a space consultant and strategist formerly of Dittmar Associates, and William Gerstenmaier, Associate Administrator for Human Exploration and Operations at NASA. Dittmar noted that NASA’s short to midterm goals did not align with international partners, who are focused on returning to the moon. Gerstenmaier replied that, in fact, NASA is aligned. The Orion spacecraft and the heavy lift Space Launch System can take people to cis-lunar space. If an international partner would provide a lander, then a joint mission to the lunar surface could happen.
The first opportunity for such a joint mission, by the way, would be in the 2021-22 time frame, roughly 50 years after the end of the Apollo program.
Hillary Clinton, the once and current presidential candidate, has been accused with some evidence of selling her office of secretary of state for money. Whether it’s handing over a fifth of America’s uranium mines to Vladimir Putin or somehow profiting from the earthquake in Haiti, the Clintons have blazed new frontiers in epic graft and corruption. So, as Bloomberg reported on Friday, Hillary is going hat in hand to supporters to ask for more money based on the accusations that she has already raked it in great piles.
The next round in what is likely to be a battle over NASA spending priorities has ensued, the Houston Chronicle reported on Friday. The House version of the 2016 NASA Authorization Bill lops $500 million from the president’s request for Earth science. Most of the money is transferred over to the space exploration account, which includes the development of the Orion spacecraft and the heavy-lift Space Launch System. Planetary Science gets an increase over President Obama’s request as well.
Hot Air noted Thursday that Sen. Ted Cruz, a candidate for president, attended a campaign event held at the swank New York apartment owned by Ian Reisner and Mati Weiderpass, two hoteliers who happened to be gay. Speculation arose that Cruz, an opponent of same-sex marriage, would be hurt among his base for hanging out with a pair of gay men. That doesn’t seem to have happened, despite the best efforts of the media to make it so. But, the New York Times notes that a group of not the usual suspects are leaping the lengths of their chains at the idea that Reisner and Weiderpass would let somebody like Cruz in their presence.
Debating Same-Sex Marriage (Point/Counterpoint (Oxford Paperback))
The problem of space junk has been a vexing one for decades. Everything from dead satellites to small parts and even pain chips are currently orbiting the Earth at great speeds, proving to be a hazard to navigation. NASA estimates that 20,000 pieces of debris larger than a softball are speeding about at 17,500 miles an hour, with 500,000 pieces larger than a marble. Millions of tiny pieces of debris that can’t be tracked exist. Clearly something has to be done. According to a Thursday story in IEEE Spectrum, a research institution in Japan called RIKEN proposes to use a laser mounted on the International Space Station to see how it might be used to deal with space junk.
You Are Here: Around the World in 92 Minutes: Photographs from the International Space Station
Some state governments are wrestling with the problem of getting people from city to city quickly by land. California has an expensive and controversial high-speed rail scheme that would link San Francisco and Los Angeles. A private group is pushing a similar line that would link Houston and Dallas. Of course, Elon Musk has proposed the high tech hyperloop. However, according to a Friday story in ZDNet, Honda is proposing an alternative that involves high-speed dedicated lanes with driverless cars that are linked to each other to control traffic flows and prevent collisions.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory noted on Thursday that April 24, 2015 is the 25th anniversary of the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope, one of the most successful space missions in history. Hubble was deployed by the crew of the space shuttle Discovery STS 31 during a mission that lasted until May 20th, 1990. Despite a troubled start, Hubble has returned uncounted numbers of spectacular images of the universe and has provided scientists insights that will be studied and analyzed for decades.
The Hillary Clinton campaign and its various hangers-on have reacted to Peter Schweizer revelations of corruption on an epic scale on the part of the Clinton Foundation with typical fury. However, as Hot Air reported on Thursday, the effort seems to be falling short. Not only do the hits keep coming, such as a New York Times story about a pay for play deal with Russian uranium interests, but Schweizer is not playing the role of a card-carrying member of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy. He just announced that he is going after Jeb Bush next. “We found some interesting things,” he said.
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich published an oped in the New York Times on Wednesday calling for the doubling of the National Institutes for Health, currently at $31 billion. The idea, coming from Gingrich, is not as crazy as it may sound at first glance. Gingrich helped to start the ball rolling the last time the NIH budget was doubled, starting in the late 1990s. Gingrich has also been an advocate of science research as a means of benefiting the country.
“March 8, 1983” is the name of the final episode of “The Americans” for the third season, which aired on Wednesday. It is also the date that President Ronald Reagan threw down on the Soviet Union with his now famous “Evil Empire” speech before a meeting of the National Association of Evangelicals in Orlando, Florida. Finally, it is the date that Paige betrayed her parents to the now likely doomed Pastor Tim.
Pancreatic cancer, as the Mayo Clinic reminds us, is one of the deadliest forms of cancer a human being can contract. One reason for the high fatality rates for the disease is that more often than not, it is not caught in its early stages because signs and symptoms are not apparent until surgery is no longer an option. The American Cancer Society notes that even at the earliest stage, five year survival rates are just 14 percent. At stage 5, the survival rate plummets to one percent. A Tuesday article in Gizmag points to a possible new treatment for pancreatic cancer that could change that equation.
April 22 is Earth Day, which was the brain child of an activist named Ira Einhorn, a self-proclaimed hippie environmentalist and, of course, and opponent of the Vietnam War. The holiday is Easter and Christmas all in one for the environmental movement. It is said to be a celebration of the Earth, which is thus far humanity’s sole home, but is actually a celebration of misery and death. The opposition of environmentalists to virtually life-saving and life-improving technology from genetically modified organisms and all but the most stringently approved forms of energy bears witness to that supposition.
According to s Tuesday story in Science Now, United Launch Alliance is looking at additive manufacturing, more commonly known as 3D printing, to create many of the parts of its next generation launch vehicle, the Vulcan. In so doing, it joins its main competitor SpaceX, which is also looking at the technique to refine the crewed version of its Dragon spacecraft. Even NASA intends to 3D print parts of the heavy-lift Space Launch System, contradicting jibes from certain quarters that the SLS is based on “50-year-old technology.”
Recently, John Logsdon, the dean of space historians and the author of “John F. Kennedy and the Race to the Moon,” published a new volume on the history of space policy, “After Apollo: Richard Nixon and the American Space Program.” It is a book well worth reading. Paul Spudis has an excellent review and critique of the book.
John F. Kennedy and the Race to the Moon (Palgrave Studies in the History of Science and Technology)
Children of Apollo: The Space Race Gambit (Volume 1)
Donald Trump, the great hotel and casino magnate, who moonlights as a media personality and social commentator, is famous for the feuds he picks with other celebrities. The Hollywood Reporter once listed a total of 21 people that the Donald has gotten into verbal brawls with, ranging from the odious Bill Maher (who accused Trump’s mother of having sexual congress with an orangutan) to Rosie O’Donnell. Add to the list, conservative writers Jonah Goldberg and Steve Hayes. Goldberg took to the pages of National Review to express bemusement on Tuesday.
Hillary Clinton, who made her money the old fashion way, through graft and corruption, doesn’t much like people successful at making money in other ways, like creating new industries and providing goods and services of value. That attitude seems to be the gist of a Tuesday story in the New York Times, relating how Ms. Clinton is going full bore Bolshevik by suggesting ” the economy required a ‘toppling’ of the wealthiest 1 percent.” This statement would be off-putting to her corporate donors if they ever thought she meant it.
As Hot Air noted on Monday, Iran and the United States may be headed for a naval battle off the shores of Yemen. That prospect added to the impending sale of Russian made S-300 surface to air missiles to protect the nuclear bomb program Iran claims it does not have would seem to suggest that the deal to make a deal about curtailing said program is about to unravel. The Iranians are, no doubt, counting on President Obama being so desperate to make a deal that he will swallow just about anything, even letting an Iranian flotilla through to provide arms to the rebels in Yemen backed by the Islamic Republic.
Proving that interest in exploring the moon persists worldwide, the Japan Times reported on Sunday that the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) is planning to land a small probe on the lunar surface in 2018. The probe, called Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) will test technologies to achieve pinpoint landings as well as “study the possible use of materials on the moon as well as its environment, which could pave the way for future manned missions.” Funding for the mission is slated to begin for FY 2016.
Hillary Clinton is taking her campaign for the presidency to New Hampshire next for a series of events. However, according to a Sunday story in the New York Times, her quest for the White House may be over before it began. According to an upcoming book, “Clinton Cash” by Peter Schweizer, Ms. Clinton sold her office as secretary of state to foreign business interests and governments for money. This is the sort of thing that lands people in jail for a very long time.
In a Sunday story in the Daily Beast, Joel Kotkin suggested that California is “over,” not just because of the drought, but because of a death grip that the environmental lobby, Silicon Valley special interests, and the Hollywood elite has on that state’s political power. The muscular infrastructure development that built the highways and aqueducts that made California the land of opportunity is out. Mindless environmentalism and limits to growth are in. The drought, which has laid bare the lack of water infrastructure development that has persisted for the past few decades, has just laid bare what amounts to a new feudalism with the left-wing political and business elite on top and the hoi polloi ground under on the bottom.
According to a Saturday post at Legal Insurrection, Christina Hoff Summers, the critic of feminism and author of such books as “Who Stole Feminism” and “The War against Boys” ventured to Georgetown University to give the students the benefit of her wisdom. Apparently what she had to say was such heady stuff that some of the students took it upon themselves to post “trigger warnings,” the purpose being to warn students that what they might hear may cause trauma.
A Friday story in the Springfield News-Sun reported that a group of veterans and family members expressed outrage that a military cemetery in Cherokee County, Georgia was closed off so that a production company could film scenes from an upcoming Ang Lee Film, “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk.” The position of the group is that turning a cemetery into a movie shooting location would heap disrespect on the honored dead. But the subject matter of the film, based on a satirical ant-Iraq War novel by Ben Fountain, may well push the envelope where it comes to disrespecting those who put on the uniform and fight for freedom in foreign lands.
A recent fundraising email that the Ted Cruz for president campaign sent to supporters concerning the 2nd Amendment and the right to bear arms is causing some in the mainstream media to have the vapors. The New York Times opined on Friday that Cruz’s message was “ridiculous” and “strange.” Salon went even further and suggested that Cruz has a “frightening gun fanaticism” and is “encouraging armed rebellion.”
Neil deGrasse Tyson, the celebrity astrophysicist and media personality, appeared on Larry Wilmore’s “The Nightly Show” on Thursday and debunked two common conspiracy theories. The first one was the belief that men never went to the moon and that the television footage a billion people saw on July 20, 1969, had been faked in a studio. The second was the idea that aliens are abducting people on a regular basis and are subjecting them to disgusting experiments, including anal probes.
NASA is not usually known for developing modes of transportation as mundane as cars. However, once astronauts get to destinations such as the moon or Mars, they have to get around some way. During the Apollo program, the space agency created the lunar rover and open electric car that carried two astronauts on several mile trips during the missions of Apollo 15, Apollo 16, and Apollo 17. More recently, as part of the now defunct Project Constellation, NASA rolled out what amounted to a lunar RV called the Lunar Electric Rover that could take astronauts hundreds of miles on the moon’s surface. The latest vehicle on wheels to come out of NASA is called the Modular Robotic Vehicle, according to a Friday story in Gizmag.
The global warming debate has been raging for almost two decades. However, an interesting subset over the climate wars has developed on the right. Recently, in the pages of Reason, Ronald Bailey opined that the science is really settled and human-caused global warming is real. However, Bailey also stated that accepting this supposition does not mean one has to sign on to any of the draconian “solutions” such as banning coal fired power plants, the internal combustion engine, or air conditioners. Friday, Robert Tracinski published a response in the Federalist that was mainly a debunking of the “settled science of global warming.
Recently, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, who recently announced his candidacy for the presidency, and NASA Administrator Charles Bolden got into an argument over NASA priorities at a recent hearing before the senate subcommittee that Cruz chairs. Cruz noted that the Obama administration has vastly increased spending on Earth science, which involves NASA launching satellites that examine the Earth’s environment, while decreasing spending for what he termed NASA’s “core mission” of space exploration. The message, though implied, was clear. Cruz would like to shift funding from Earth science to space exploration to redress what he sees is an imbalance.
Falling to Earth: An Apollo 15 Astronaut's Journey to the Moon
One of the ways that the media has stumbled upon to torment Republican presidential candidates who opposed same-sex marriage is to ask them whether they would attend such a wedding of a family member of a close friend. There is no answer to that question that does not get the candidate into trouble. If one refuses to attend one is a hate filled bigot. If one agrees to attend one is a squishy hypocrite. Hot Air reported on Thursday that the question was put to Marco Rubio and on Friday mentioned that it was also put to Ted Cruz and Rick Santorum. Their answers were illuminating.
When Space Daily reported on Friday that Russia is planning to land cosmonauts on the moon by 2030, the question arose about how serious the announcement was. Reading the story closely, the inevitable answer has to be that they are not that serious at all. The moon landing proposal came from the Federal Space Agency Roscosmos and not from President Vladimir Putin. The Russian moon landing project has not been authorized, not to mention funded.
The Race: The Complete True Story of How America Beat Russia to the Moon
In a hearing before the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden had tense exchanges with several members over various aspects of the 2016 NASA budget proposal, according to a Thursday story in Forbes. Several committee members expressed skepticism about the Asteroid Redirect Mission, which Bolden hotly defended as necessary to send humans to Mars. He seemed to dismiss the suggestion made by the NASA Advisory Committee to repurpose ARM to become a mission to Phobos, a moon of Mars.
When Obamacare passed several years ago, it was touted as the fulfillment of a decades-long dream of the progressive movement to provide universal health care. However, as liberal writer Thomas Edsall noted in the New York Times on Wednesday, Obamacare may constitute the death knell of the progressive liberal experiment. The health care law’s imposition has sparked a massive shift in public opinion against the notion that health care is a right. Indeed, public opinion seems to have turned against all notions that the government should force Americans to “share the wealth.”
Surviving the Medical Meltdown: Your Guide to Living Through the Disaster of Obamacare
