Where the current NASA Administrator points out that NASA will not send another human to the moon in his lifetime.
On the one hand, the utter uselessness of NASA (not entirely their fault, of course) depresses the bejeebers out of me. On the other hand… bring on the billionaires and the private corporations. I’ll take the Weyland-Yutani Corporation over a bloated government bureaucratic monopoly any day.
You know what’s more dangerous than a gun? A nut with a gun. What’s more dangerous than a nut with a gun? An anti-gun nut with a gun.
The details are entertaining.
James Schiliro, mayor of Marcus Hook, Pennsylvania, apparently had one of his cops bring a 20-year-old male to his home, where he got said minor liquored-up and tried to make the Republican With Two Backs with him. When the kid chose to not be involved, the mayor reportedly pulled out a pistol and fired it into the floor (or maybe the wall) to force the guy to play along.
Superfun: the mayors 13-year old daughter was home at the time.
From the White House (no, really):
BARACK OBAMA
Ummm…
The Outstanding Public Debt as of 01 Apr 2013 at 07:28:24 PM GMT is:
 |
The estimated population of the United States is 314,699,864
so each citizen’s share of this debt is $53,327.12.
Claim: North Korea sent 20 kilos of meth to each of several diplomats with instructions to sell it and raise $300,000. Apparently there is a pretty substantial official government meth production program, worth hundreds of millions of $$ per year, used to sell to foreigners (including, perhaps unwisely, the Chinese). But it’s breaking out into the North Korean populace as a whole. Famine, despair and methamphetamines: what better combination could there possibly be?
NASA Administrator Charles Bolden testified yesterday before a subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee about the recent security troubles at NASA and what he’s doing about them.
Bad news: “I have closed down the NASA technical reports database while we review whether there is a risk of export-controlled documents being made available on this website.” So, yeah, NTRS is closed to the public until an army of bureaucrats go through the whole thing.
Good/about-damned-time news: “I have ordered a moratorium on granting any new access to NASA facilities to individuals from specific designated countries, including China, Burma, Eritrea, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Uzbekistan.”
Was NASA *really* providing access to people from North Korea and Iran? Well, at least they wised up enough to put Saudi Arabia on the list.
One of the more useful and interesting resources for aerospace researchers and historians has been the NASA Technical Report Server. Millions of documents available for download. But now, it seems, a Chinese spy has ruined it for everyone. Pull up NTRS now, and you see:
What’s the cause of this? It’s not certain, but it’s a safe bet that just-arrested alleged Chinese spy Bo Jiang was at the heart of this. SpaceRef.com has some interesting and depressing info:
Washington, D.C. (March 18, 2013) – Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA), chairman of the House Appropriations subcommittee that funds NASA, today held a press conference revealing a significant new development concerning a Chinese national allegedly involved in security violations at several NASA centers.
…
NASA should immediately take down all publicly available technical data sources until all documents that have not been subjected to export control review have received such a review and all controlled documents are removed from the system.
Arrrgh.
It’s hard to see how a spy would have made use of NTRS. Did he upload sensitive documents for the world to see? Seems unlikely. Did he download stuff from there he shouldn’t have? Hard to imagine much on NTRS that would have been of concern… plus, it was available to anyone on the planet with an internet connection. I suspect China had downloaded everything on NTRS and has their own backup of the archive.
Short form: a “mountain man” who lives on his own 500-acre plot of North Carolina mountain property, has had the entire state government land on him due to “building code violations. Such as:
lumber that isn’t “grade-marked,” meaning it doesn’t specify the mill where it was produced.
But…
The lumber’s not stamped with a grade because he produced it himself at his own sawmill, from trees felled nearby, he says.
The whole point of the guys property is to live primitive. But the nanny state just can’t allow that sort of thing.Heck, he might even have mugs of more than 16 ounces! The Horror!
To me the system should be simple: If someone owns their own property and uses it for their own private use, then building code inspectors need not apply. If someone owns property for public use, for *conventional* purposes such as grocery stores or book stores or churches or brothels or whatever, then the building code inspectors should do their job. If someone owns private property for public use, but it is *unconventional,* such as a mountain-man retreat or a rocket test site, then the building code inspectors should be able to inspect, write a report, and hang their findings on the front gate with a “caveat emptor” for the public.
Senator Cruz questions Senator Feinstein, who refuses to answer the question. Not that it’ll help, but it’s instructive to witness the fecklessness of the fascists in the US FedGuv like Feinstein as they try desperately to avoid the implications of what they are attempting to foist upon the people.
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One of the anti-Constitutionalist legislators in Colorado trying to ban standard magazines and conventional firearms turns out to have a criminal record. How good of an idea is it to allow criminals to write the laws, especially where it impacts the ability of the people to defend themselves against criminals?