Archive for 2020
December 9, 2020
VIDEO: Replay: SpaceX attempts Starship SN8 high-altitude launch test. A friend in the industry (not at SpaceX) writes on Facebook:
That was so totally awesome that awesome needs to be extended in meaning.
Starship made it through almost the entire set of test items on the check list. I am still just mindblown by what I’ve just watched. In-effing-credible.
According to Elon, the one fault in the test was insufficient pressure in the header tank for the landing burn. If not for that they’d have checked off the final item on the list.
No doubt that SN-9 will do it all… the only fault they had was a trivial one to fix.
All correct. But that said, there was an explosion at the end. But SpaceX isn’t afraid to blow things up on the path to getting it right, which is a huge advantage to progress.
SCOTT JOHNSON: Swalwell’s Swill. “The spy not only infiltrated Rep. Eric Swalwell’s network, she may have shared his bed, or so we can infer from Swalwell’s assertion that the response to the question whether she did may be ‘classified.’ Axios seems to have missed that aspect of the story, which the New York Post picked up here.”
1998 FLASHBACK: Charlie Trie Indicted: Clinton Friend Linked To Questionable Fund Raising. “Congressional investigators have alleged that some of the money Trie contributed to Clinton and the Democrats may have come from sources in China, which are barred by federal law from contributing to American election campaigns. Trie also has been linked to schemes by which money was distributed to people legally able to contribute, who then allegedly donated it to the Democrats in their names in order to conceal the actual source of the funds.”
IT’S THE MARION BARRY DEFENSE: Eric Swalwell Implicates Democrat Leadership, Blames Trump for Revelation of Chinese Spy Who Infiltrated Him.
NOTHING SAYS “EVERYTHING HERE IS ABOVEBOARD” LIKE CENSORING ALL CRITICISM: Covid and the New Age of Censorship: It doesn’t promote public health when media and tech companies stifle scientific debate.
Information has never been more plentiful or easier to distribute. Yet we are sliding into a new age of censorship and suppression, encouraged by technology giants and traditional media companies. As someone who’s been falsely characterized as a coronavirus “denier,” I have seen this crisis firsthand.
Since June, Amazon has twice tried to suppress self-published booklets I have written about Covid-19 and the response to it. These booklets don’t contain conspiracy theories. Like the scientists who wrote the Great Barrington Declaration, I simply believe many measures to control the coronavirus have been damaging, counterproductive and unsupported by science.
Amazon has said earlier that “as a bookseller, we believe that providing access to the written word is important, including books that some may find objectionable.” The company sells “Mein Kampf” and “The Anarchist’s Cookbook.” But when it comes to Covid, Amazon has a different standard. At least half a dozen other authors have emailed me that their books have been pulled. Amazon won’t disclose how many, or other details about how it picks books to censor.
Google-owned YouTube censors even more aggressively. The company disclosed in October that it had pulled more than 200,000 videos about the epidemic—including one from Scott Atlas, a physician who was advising President Trump. Facebook has not only censored videos and attached warning labels or “fact checks” to news articles, but removed groups that oppose lockdowns and other restrictions.
That online entertainment and retail companies have benefited financially from lockdowns adds to the ugliness of their suppression efforts. Interestingly, Apple —whose mobile business means it gains less than other big tech companies—has been less aggressive.
Tech companies aren’t alone in their efforts to stifle debate. Traditional news outlets, book publishers and even scientific journals are reluctant to publish information that challenges ideological orthodoxies. The Danish authors of a study on whether masks protect their wearers from coronavirus struggled for months to get it published, despite its obvious public-health importance. When they finally convinced a journal to print the paper, which showed that masks didn’t appear to protect their wearers, the journal’s editor felt compelled to write a piece defending her decision to run it.
News organizations then treated the study’s findings with a skepticism absent from the coverage of most other peer-reviewed scientific research.
If you want to be trusted, be trustworthy. Nothing about this inspires trust.
WON’T BACK DOWN: ‘The Big One’: Trump Will Join Texas Lawsuit to Block ‘Unlawful Election Results’ in Swing States.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN):
Related: Tennessee joins other red states in legal brief supporting Texas voting lawsuit against swing states. I’m hearing that Roger Simon’s column made the difference here.
Statement:
“The Tennessee Attorney General’s Office has consistently taken the position that only a State’s legislature has the authority to make and change election laws,” Slatery said in a statement. “This Office pressed that argument in cases defending Tennessee’s election laws against pandemic-related challenges and in amicus briefs in cases involving similar challenges in other courts.”
Stay tuned.
BOMB CANADA: THE CASE FOR WAR. Canadian Restaurant Owner Charged With ‘Trespassing’ After Reopening in Defiance of Lockdown Orders. How can you ‘trespass’ on your own property?
(Classical reference in headline.)
HERE WE GO: Feds, and 48 States Sue to Break Up Facebook.
SHUT UP, THEY EXPLAINED: YouTube Says It Will Start Deleting Content Alleging 2020 Election Voter Fraud.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Nothing says, “relax, everything is aboveboard” like censoring claims of fraud while they’re still being litigated.
REVIEW: IWI Tavor TS12 Shotgun.
FIGHTING ADMINISTRATIVE TYRANNY: NCLA’s Constitutional Claim at en banc Fifth Circuit Against SEC ALJs Draws Strong Amicus Support.
Background story here.
IF YOU LIKE YOUR PLAN, YOU CAN KEEP YOUR PLAN, HOLLYWOOD STYLE: Actors sue union health plan over loss of insurance.
IT WOULD BE HARD TO BE LESS ACCURATE THAN WHAT WE’VE SEEN IN 2020: Study offers new approach for more accurate epidemic modeling.
IN FAREWELL SPEECH, UDALL SAYS SENATE HAS BECOME ‘GRAVEYARD FOR PROGRESS:’
Senator Tom Udall urged his colleagues on Tuesday to kill the legislative filibuster that he said had helped turn the Senate into a “graveyard for progress,” using his farewell speech to point up a state of dysfunction in Congress that had become painfully obvious to most everyone listening to him.
“I’m not the first to say this in a farewell address, and I won’t be the last, but the Senate is broken,” Mr. Udall, Democrat of New Mexico, said on Tuesday in what is likely his final speech after 12 years in the deeply divided institution.
“The Senate is broken,” he repeated for emphasis.
For months, Americans have watched in anger as Congress remained mired in partisan paralysis over more pandemic relief, allowing unemployment benefits to lapse as many suffer from joblessness. Fewer people approve of the job lawmakers are doing in Washington than at almost any time in recent history. And the government watchdog group Common Cause ranked the current Congress the “least productive in history,” noting that only about 1 percent of bills introduced became law.
Cocaine Mitch plays for keeps. Hopefully the upcoming Georgia Senate elections will allow him to continue to do so.
Incidentally, CTL-F “Pelosi” brings up zero finds in the above New York Times article, whose headline, as Steve Milloy of JunkScience.com notes, spells “Communism” wrong.
THERE’S NO SCIENCE TO SUPPORT THESE MEASURES, SO THEY’RE LEGALLY INDEFENSIBLE, AND HENCE EFFECTIVELY ILLEGAL: Southern California Sheriffs Rebel Over Gavin Newsom’s New Stay-at-Home Order.