Nov 112020
 

The Biden-Harris transition team has announced who is on the NASA agency review team. Here’s the bio for one reviewer, Dave Noble:

For the past two years, he has been consulting with national progressive groups on strategic planning, coalition building, communications, electoral engagement, and leadership development.

Prior to this work, Dave spent eight years in the Obama Administration. He was the Deputy Director and Acting Director of the Presidential Personnel Office (PPO), where among other responsibilities he oversaw teams building pipelines of diverse candidates for political appointments and teams creating leadership development programming for all 3500 administration appointees. He also helped the First Lady organize mayors committed to ending food deserts and create safer and accessible places for kids to play as part of her “Let’s Move!” campaign, and was the White House Liaison and Deputy Chief of Staff at NASA, where he led the combined federal campaign to raise charitable donations from NASA HQ employees. He served on President Obama’s campaign in 2008 as the Director of the LGBT Vote and was deployed to Michigan to help spur voter turnout.

Yep. Good hands.

 Posted by at 1:33 pm
Nov 112020
 

Nothing to see here. Move along.

UPDATE: check the comments. It seems that what these folks found were “spoiled” ballots… ballots that had been mis-marked and turned in for replacement. But their disposal seems to have been sloppy at best, providing at the very least bad optics. And this could be due to cherry-picking by the admittedly partisan guy in the video, but it does seem odd that so many were for one candidate, so few for the other.

 Posted by at 2:23 am
Nov 102020
 

Richard Carranza’s grading policy aims to bar failing marks: NYC DOE memo

Euphemisms are to be used in place of “you’re failing” in the New York school system.

Good job!

Bah. I’ve said it before: a better approach would be to split the educational system apart: for student who want to learn and who can learn, educate them to the best level of attainment possible. For those who don’t want to learn, can’t learn, or are so troublesome that they are an educational detriment to the others in class… send them to farms and factories to learn trades.

 Posted by at 8:47 pm
Nov 102020
 

It certainly doesn’t seem like it will belong to NASA:

Biden administration expected to emphasize climate science over lunar exploration at NASA

Satellites looking down on Earth, measuring temperature and atmospheric makeup? Sure, useful. But someone PLEASE explain to me why *NASA* is meant to do this and not the NOAA.

The people who dreamed as children and struggled through college to get science and engineering degrees with the goal of working for NASA did so because they want to send Men to the Moon, Mars and beyond. It must surely be a small  minority indeed who were enthralled not with visions of exploration and going out to the frontiers, but with looking at clouds.

So if the new administration does not use regulations to strangle SpaceX (including jacking up taxes so that SpaceX simply can’t afford to work here anymore), I would be utterly unsurprised to see a mass exodus of talent from NASA, heading to SpaceX.

 Posted by at 1:30 am
Nov 092020
 

Back before society became afraid of every damned thing, we used to play with lawn darts. Now the damn things are banned. Imagine an alternate reality where the moral panics of the 1980’s never happened, and instead of lawn darts getting banned they got turned back into Roman Plumbata.

These things seem like fun.

 Posted by at 5:23 pm
Nov 092020
 

So, we appear to be on the edge of some potentially very dark times. The probable next administration has massively destructive plans and likely the will to carry them out. The only thing standing against them being able to launch a war of aggression on tens of millions of law abiding Americans is the control of the Senate which will be decided in early January in a pair of run-off elections which are sure to be spectacular examples of election fraud on an unprecedented scale. If those go badly, expect to see the Supreme Court get packed and the basic concepts of constitutional limited government go out the window as, in the words of Chuck Schumer, the worst people in the country “take Georgia and then we change America.”

This is the sort of thing that can make a rational feller a tad depressed. Perhaps not to the point of murdering effigies of political opponents in the streets; that sort of thing is for the party of crazy people. But there is another approach to dealing with the craziness… not depression, not  lashing out in violence, but recognizing clown world for what it is, and joining in on the laughter. This is the approach that seems right to me. In that regard, I am kinda the opposite of the guy who put the below video together. He has assembled a *lot* of clips showing how modern society is promoting flat-out insanity, making clown world literally real; his message seems to be that we shouldn’t accept it, that we should fight it. There is validity there. But how do you fight people who are quite possibly truly out of their minds, being backed up and promoted by people who are *not* crazy, but simply malevolent? I don’t know. But I *do* know that it would fill me with no end of glee if President BidenHarris’ inauguration was populated by a very large group of people who, once heshe started speaking, whipped out clown horns. If their words were drowned out by a sea of laughter wherever they and their idiot policies went.

If there’s anything that authoritarians dislike, it’s being laughed at. If nothing else, it lets them know that they have not beaten you down, that you retain mastery of yourself. So my suggestion over the next few years is laughter. Let “Ha Ha No” be your motto.

 Posted by at 2:34 pm