OPEN THREAD: Here, for your delectation.
Archive for 2021
June 26, 2021
A NEW SPACEFARING NATION: Papua New Guinea?
International space law and the treaty regime have remained largely theoretical constructs for most of the Space Age. While great for moot-court exercises or the occasional congressional hearing on treaty obligations, their real-world applications were scarce. Yet those of us who have practiced commercial space law have long warned that a time would come when “Space Law 101” would play an important part in opening the high frontier.
That time is now. The FCC faces a decision that goes beyond whether to grant AST & Science a “market access” request for a new constellation of non-geostationary spacecraft in the crowded 700-kilometer orbit. Far more important is whether the FCC will require companies seeking authority to operate in the United States to be licensed by countries which agree to be bound by the norms of international space law.
The AST & Science application itself is problematic enough, with its 243 gigantic satellites each with a cross-section of 450 square meters. NASA initially filed a report raising significant concerns with this application, arguing that the number and size of the satellites in the AST constellation posed a significant risk and would cause NASA to “experience a very large number of satellite conjunctions, certainly with debris objects and potentially with A-Train satellites themselves, both as part of the AST satellites’ ascent/descent to on-orbit locations and during regular operations.”
TechFreedom filed comments raising similar concerns, adding that AST & Science has zero experience building large structures in space.
But the greater problem is that rather than seek a license directly from the FCC for their enormous satellites, AST & Science got a license for its system from Papua New Guinea (PNG). This is more than a “flag of convenience” situation, however, as PNG has signed neither the 1971 Liability Convention nor the 1974 Registration Convention. While PNG has signed the 1967 Outer Space Treaty (OST), those latter two treaties are what put actual “meat on the bone” of the OST. Choosing not to sign these leaves PNG outside of the sphere of countries which have agreed to both norms of governance and resolution procedures for outer space disputes.
In short, PNG has not stepped up to accept specific international responsibility or liability for the activities of commercial entities it has licensed.
Well, under the Outer Space Treaty, the launching state retains responsibility for those things, and they’re not going to be launching from Papua New Guinea any time soon.
WHY NAME A LAW SCHOOL CHAIR AFTER SOMEONE WHO WAS DISBARRED FOR OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE? Flap over ‘Clinton’ change.
In 1999 the University of Arkansas at Little Rock’s Bowen Law School established an endowed professorship called the “Distinguished Professor of Law and Public Policy.” It’s since been available for a five-year term to UALR faculty members who apply, though held solely since inception by soon-to-retire Professor John DiPippa.
I’m told DiPippa and the dean of the law school several months ago began calling this appointed position the “William J. Clinton Professor of Constitutional Law and Public Service.” It appears the decision to rename (and seemingly refocus) the professorship after Clinton was made without the current faculty’s involvement.
Normally when you rename a chair, there’s a big donation involved. Rather doubt Bill has ponied up anything.
UPDATE: A friend emails: “Will it have interns?”
WELL, MITTENS, YOU OPPOSED A PRESIDENT WHO WAS WORKING AGAINST THE CHINESE COMMUNIST PARTY, IN FAVOR OF ONE OWNED BY IT:
SCIENCE: Massive human head in Chinese well forces scientists to rethink evolution.
Analysis of the remains has revealed a new branch of the human family tree that points to a previously unknown sister group more closely related to modern humans than the Neanderthals.
The extraordinary fossil has been named a new human species, Homo longi or “Dragon man”, by Chinese researchers, although other experts are more cautious about the designation.
“I think this is one of the most important finds of the past 50 years,” said Prof Chris Stringer, research leader at the Natural History Museum in London, who worked on the project. “It’s a wonderfully preserved fossil.”
The skull appears to have a remarkable backstory. According to the researchers, it was originally found in 1933 by Chinese labourers building a bridge over the Songhua River in Harbin, in China’s northernmost province, Heilongjiang, during the Japanese occupation. To keep the skull from falling into Japanese hands it was wrapped and hidden in an abandoned well, resurfacing only in 2018 after the man who hid it told his grandson about it shortly before he died. . . .
Mark Maslin, a professor of earth system science at UCL and the author of The Cradle of Humanity, said: “The beautifully preserved Chinese Harbin archaic human skull adds even more evidence that human evolution was not a simple evolutionary tree but a dense intertwined bush. We now know that there were as many as 10 different species of hominins at the same time as our own species emerged.
“Genetic analysis shows that these species interacted and interbred – our own genetics contain the legacy of many of these ghost species. But what is a sobering thought, is that despite all this diversity, a new version of Homo sapiens emerged from Africa about 60,000 years ago which clearly out-competed, out-bred, and even out-fought these other closely related species, causing their extinction. It is only by painstaking searching and analysis of their fossils, such as the Harbin skull, do we know of their existence.”
That’s less surprising if you think about how people are today.
IT’S COME TO THIS: Biden Administration Imposes Cruel Border Restriction Barring Mexicans from Crossing to the US to Sell Blood Plasma. “By exacerbating an already severe blood plasma shortage, the new policy will cost lives – and also deprive poor Mexicans of much-needed income.”
The New York Times was forced to admit what has been obvious for a while: Minority communities don’t support progressives’ radical views on criminal justice.
Democrats most left-wing supporters claim their calls to “defund the police” will help minority communities, but those communities know the truth.
From the Times:
In a contest that centered on crime and public safety, Eric Adams, who emerged as the leading Democrat, focused much of his message on denouncing progressive slogans and policies that he said threatened the lives of “Black and brown babies” and were being pushed by “a lot of young, white, affluent people.” A retired police captain and Brooklyn’s borough president, he rejected calls to defund the Police Department and pledged to expand its reach in the city.
Black and brown voters in Brooklyn and the Bronx flocked to his candidacy, awarding Mr. Adams with sizable leading margins in neighborhoods from Eastchester to East New York. Though the official winner may not be known for weeks because of the city’s new ranked-choice voting system, Mr. Adams holds a commanding edge in the race that will be difficult for his rivals to overcome.
As the Times admitted, the evidence provided by Adams’ support in New York shows “a disconnect between progressive activists and the rank-and-file Black and Latino voters who they say have the most to gain from their agenda.”
Heck, even those who want to defund the police don’t believe it themselves: Jamaal Bowman requested special police protection for his Yonkers home.
Freshman U.S. Rep. Jamaal Bowman — a champion of defunding cops who claims policing is rife with “white supremacy” — asked for and received a special police detail to guard his Yonkers home in the days following the Jan. 6 Capitol Hill insurrection, The Post has learned.
“About a week after the Jan. 6th incident at the Capitol, we received a request from the Congressman’s office for increased police presence at his residence,” Yonkers Police Department Detective Lt. Dean Politopoulos told The Post.
“In response, our Intelligence Unit was notified of the request and the local precinct instituted what is called a directed patrol at the Congressman’s home for the next two weeks,” Politopoulos said.
Politopoulos said police have not detected anything unusual in Bowman’s area for the last several years.
Earlier: Riots for thee, but not for me.
IT’S COME TO THIS: The term “trigger warning” is now triggering because it “has connections to guns.”
More here: Who’s Oppressing Whom?
But that’s not why Brandeis wants to get rid of the term. It thinks “trigger” is associated with violence. Okay, if we’re going to take that seriously, let’s note that the word “trigger” derives from the Dutch word trekker, from which we get “trek.” Today, trek means a journey, but it originally meant to pull, like a wagon pulled by oxen (hence the evolution of the word). “Trigger” means something you pull; it may indeed be associated with violence, but only in the minds of people who make that association.
But if words associated with violence have to go—Muad’Dib!—there are far deadlier killing words out there. For instance, our political discourse is drenched in military language: “battleground states,” “ad blitzes,” “taking flak,” “over the target,” “scorched earth,” “political crusade,” “pyrrhic victories,” “skirmish,” “belligerents,” “political ambushes,” “nuclear options,” “war on poverty,” etc.
As I wrote in January of 2011, when the left’s moral panic du jour was focused on Sarah Palin’s clip art, and Michael Hirsch of the National Journal went on MSNBC and demanded “a moral sanction in the way that we’ve stopped using certain epithets like the ‘n’-word [in] public forums,” for gun and war related language. “Stop using that kind of language, those kinds of metaphors.”
Why, there’s even a narrow-interest cable channel that reaches millions of viewers while using such hateful militaristic rhetoric 24 hours a day. Imagine how they are influencing impressionable minds, with language such as this:
- The Blitz
- The Bomb
- The Crackback
- The Red Zone
- The Special Teams Gunner
- The Shotgun
- The Suicide Squad
- Tackle
- The Trenches
I’d make a joke that Roger Goodell will be banning those hateful words any day now. But given that it’s now 2021 — he probably will be.
UPDATE: Forget the militaristic language, which has been a part of football nomenclature for decades — the NFL has a real-life gun problem. “Why are so many NFL players, mostly physically imposing college men, busted for carrying weapons, often the kind designed to spray many bullets and kill many people? Where do they go, why, when and with whom that they find it essential to carry guns? If they expect life-threatening trouble, why go there? If they expect to have to defend themselves with deadly force why is that a logical destination?”
(Updated and bumped.)
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Why You Should Carry a Handgun Every Day.
BUT WITH THE WORLD’S MEDIA AND ELITES BOUGHT OFF, WHO WILL DO ANYTHING? New Research Shows Extent of China’s Cover-Up of COVID-19’s Origins.
OUT: PUFFY SHIRTS. IN: PUFFY SAILS. Michelin Puts Puffy Sails on Cargo Ships.
STUDY: LOCKDOWNS ‘SINGLE BIGGEST PUBLIC HEALTH MISTAKE, POSSIBLY OF ALL HISTORY.’
Earlier: Lockdowns were not effective in slowing COVID spread, engineering professor concludes.
As Jordan Schachtel wrote late last month in a Substack article titled, “What to make of the COVID-19 lab leak theory,” “The virus was not the cause for global catastrophe. It was the response to the virus that crippled the global economy and our society. The disease was not nearly as damaging as the ‘cure’ for the disease.”
Or to put it another way:
CANADIAN FORCES HAVE RIGHT TO KNOW IF THEY GOT COVID AT THE OCTOBER 2019 MILITARY WORLD GAMES IN WUHAN. “‘This was a city of 15 million people that was in lockdown,’ said a source who participated in the Games. ‘It was strange, but we were told this was to make it easy for the Games’ participants to get around.’”
March and April of 2020 felt exactly like what was promised by cheesy eco-doomsday-themed early-’70s sci-fi movies; hopefully going forward we can avoid the apparent upcoming repeat of Soylent Green.
THAT’S WHAT XI SAID: ChiComs agree with Robert Reich’s warning that that ‘the greatest danger’ America faces isn’t China, but ‘our drift toward proto-fascism.’
Even setting aside the Wuhan Play-Doh Fun Factory, with their murderous concentration camps, eugenics, corporatism, propaganda mills, central planning taken to ludicrous ends, and increasing desire for more and more lebensraum, I would love to hear an explanation from Reich as to why the CCP isn’t “proto-fascist” — but the real thing.
Perhaps Reich would respond, “I claim no higher truth than my own perceptions. This is how I lived it.”