MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: Happy Valentine’s Day, You Undatable Hater MAGA Slime.
Author Archive: Stephen Green
February 14, 2024
THE NEW SPACE RACE: Future military target-tracking satellites to be operated by U.S. Space Force. “This network of satellites, known as Ground Moving Target Indicator (GMTI), is being developed by the National Reconnaissance Office in partnership with the Space Force. These sensors in space would give commanders on the ground persistent video-like surveillance capabilities that in the past were provided by aircraft such as the U.S. Air Force’s Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System (JSTARS).”
Harder to shoot down, too.
BECAUSE OF COURSE THEY DO: Democrats Have Another Dirty Trick to Play on Illegal Immigration. “Let’s call this threat what it really is: political blackmail. ‘Give the Democrats what they want,’ ICE said in effect, ‘or we’ll unleash even more illegals on you.’ And what the Democrats want, I don’t need to remind you, is more illegal aliens.”
JUST ANOTHER UPSIDE OF GLOBAL WARMING: Our luscious blue Earth used to be a frozen snowball.
Imagine a time when your favorite character in the Disney movie “Frozen” roamed the Earth — many millions of years ago, scientists say the picture in your mind was a reality. However, like Olaf probably wasn’t traversing that icy ancient Earth, Elsa wasn’t the one responsible for making our planet a big snowball in the first place. Nope, it was the great Mother Nature.
As hard as it might be to think that, at one point, Earth was a bright white bundle of ice and snow, research from a group of scientists from Australia offers pretty concrete evidence of this idea. Moreover, the team might’ve even uncovered how exactly the situation arose. “Imagine the Earth almost completely frozen over,” Dr. Adriana Dutkiewicz, Australian Research Council (ARC) Future Fellow and professor at the University of Sydney said in a statement.”That’s just what happened about 700 million years ago; the planet was blanketed in ice from poles to equator and temperatures plunged.
“However, just what caused this has been an open question.”
I blame a lack of Proterozoic SUVs.
NARRATOR: “IT WAS NOT A GOOD IDEA.” Now We Know Who Thought It Was a Good Idea for Biden to Deliver His Angry Speech.
YOU’RE GONNA NEED A BIGGER BLOG: Why People Hate The Media. “With layoffs left and left across America’s newsrooms, there’s lots of hand-wringing over the state of newspapers and ‘journalism’ these days. Notably absent from these laments are any mention of leftism, wokeness, or the naked contempt today’s MSM journalists display again and again for ordinary Americans. Indeed, it’s such a long running theme on this blog that I had to wade through years of Media Watch-tagged posts to find one of the many specific takedowns of that contempt…”
SHE MUST BE HIGH: Rep. Barbara Lee Wants the Minimum Wage HOW HIGH? “The weakness of being a critic of the minimum wage is that we make a dry, factual kind of sense that puts people to sleep. I caught a couple of you nodding off when I got to the part about the actual minimum wage being zero. Compare that to the He-Man Master of the Universe strength of literally any nitwit know-nothing shouting, ‘FREE MONEY!’ like that late-night TV pitch guy with the dollar signs all over his jacket.”
YEAH, NO: Descendants of slaves who helped build SLU ask for $70B in compensation.
In an effort to pressure St. Louis University officials to honor and support the descendants of slaves who helped build the campus, civil rights attorney Areva Martin on Thursday announced $70 billion in reparations owed to them.
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With access to economists and researchers, Martin said SLU had not disclosed the monetary value of the enslaved labor for the descendants into today’s money.An estimated $365 million in unpaid labor was announced, and with added interest over time, amounts to $70 billion, according to Malveaux.
The number was based on labor done 24 hours per day, 365 days per year for 70 enslaved people from 1823-1865, she said.
“The calculations that we came up with and the method that we used are time-honored methods,” Malveaux said.
That’s about $350 million per descendent but everyone knows that’s just the opening position in their shakedown.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: It Ain’t Paranoia if It’s Happening — ‘Undocumented’ Voting Edition. “It’s disturbing to think about how many illegal voters might be making their way to the polls in November now that their numbers are growing so rapidly during the Joe Biden Border Crush.”
COLORADO: Coming bills would ban new oil-and-gas wells, stop summertime drilling.
Democratic legislators are preparing to introduce three bills that would make industry-redefining changes to the Colorado oil and gas sector, including a ban on new wells after 2030 and an essential shutdown of drilling activities for five months out of each year.
The sponsor of two of the three measures, Democratic Sen. Kevin Priola of Henderson, said the major steps are needed to halt climate change and to prevent what he fears could be a mass extinction of species if carbon production causes the planet to warm too much. Asked about how such measures could impact a $48 billion industry that supports more than 300,000 Colorado jobs, Priola told The Sum & Substance that legislators’ duty is to consider public health and safety above the economy.
Oil-and-gas industry leaders, meanwhile, said that the more appropriate extinction to be discussing is what could happen to their sector if it must cut back operations so severely, as well as to individual and tax revenue it generates for state residents and governments. The quick cessation of production, coming as oil and gas is needed still for everything from home heating to transportation, would require Colorado to import energy from other states or countries, a process that would generate emissions that proponents claim to be cutting, they said.
“There is career-ending language in all of these bills,” said Kait Schwartz, director of American Petroleum Institute Colorado, referring to the many workers likely to lose jobs in the sector if some or all the proposals are signed into law. “I think this is one of the first times they have been blatant enough to use the words ‘phase-out’ or ‘ban.’”
I would say, “Gooder and harder,” except that the people in Colorado’s energy-producing areas like Weld County most assuredly did not vote Democrat.
But what’s the fun of running a one-party state if you can’t wield that power to ruin the lives of your political opponents?
THE ROAD TO HELL IS PAVED WITH REUSABLE BAGS: California’s plastic bag ban backfires after customers just start dumping thicker and heavier 10 cent ‘reusable’ carriers instead, triggering more pollution than ever.
California’s plastic bag ban has backfired nearly a decade after the state made history as the first to ban single-use carriers – sparking a nationwide movement.
In the years since the landmark decision, material recovery facilities and environmental activists in the golden state have observed an unexpected surge in plastic bag waste by weight, according to a report by the LA Times.
Customers now dump thicker and heavier ‘reusable’ carriers instead, triggering more pollution than ever – for only an extra ten cents per bag at the check out.
Now, California legislators are working to rectify the growing problem by proposing a new law that plans to ban the thick plastic bags too.
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Senator Ben Allen highlighted that these thick plastic bags were not what consumers had envisioned when supporting the bag ban at the ballot box in 2016.California discarded a whopping 157,385 tons of plastic bags in the year the ban was implemented, according to a report by the consumer advocacy group CALPIRG.
By 2022, this amount nearly doubled to 231,072, marking a whopping 47 percent increase – accounting for population growth.
I keep expecting some smart legislator to propose outlawing unintended consequences but it’s really only a matter of time.
VICTORIA TAFT: It’s Not What Biden Special Counsel Included in His Report — Senators Say It’s What He Left Out.
Two hawk-eyed Senators are asking the Attorney General and his special counsel a big question: Did you guys just pull another fast one?
Sens. Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson say the same special counsel report that called Biden forgetful, old, and guilty of stealing and keeping highly classified documents left out a big chunk of evidence. They’re wondering what happened to nine boxes full of documents that Joe Biden illegally took and then sent to his lawyer’s office, and that were then picked up by the National Archives.
The contents of those files and documents were not in the Hur report, and they want to know why.
#MeToo.
February 13, 2024
ANYBODY BUT JOE: Guess Who Biden Blames for His Own COVID Failure.
ONCE UNLEASHED, INFLATION IS DIFFICULT AND PAINFUL TO CONTAIN: Consumer prices rise 3.1% in January, defying forecasts for a faster slowdown. “Both measures were higher compared to economist forecasts of a 0.2% month-over-month increase and a 2.9% annual increase, according to data from Bloomberg.”
ROBERT SPENCER: Hamas Member Reveals That Organization’s Goal Is Not Just to Free ‘Palestine.’ “Leftists who are expressing their support for Hamas and hatred for Israel these days are likely neither to know nor care that Hamas has these aspirations, as they simply cannot imagine a world in which their Muslim allies would turn against them.”
THEY AREN’T SAYING IT’S ALIENS BUT IT’S ALIENS: Multiple US military whistleblowers reveal how a disc-shaped UFO intercepted nuclear missile and disabled it with ‘laser-beams’ in mid-air over California.
VIDEO: Biden Whacks His Least Vulnerable Spot on Marine One. “Every time the White House tries to change the narrative that Biden is an increasingly senescent elderly man with a growing temper, he goes out and does something that makes him look like an increasingly senescent elderly man with a growing temper. Because that’s what he is.”
WITH MALICE AFORETHOUGHT: How Biden botched the border. “The previously unreported meeting, recounted to Axios by three people familiar with the events, is emblematic of the Biden administration’s struggle with the border crisis during the past three years — infighting, blame-shifting and indecision.”
HAPPY VALENTINE’S DAY: Cocoa prices surge to all-time highs as bad weather hurts West Africa crop yield. “Hershey CEO Michele Buck said Thursday that the chocolate maker’s earnings growth will be flat this year due to historically high cocoa prices. Hershey reported fourth quarter net income of $349 million, a nearly 12% decrease compared to the year-ago period.”
MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: Biden’s Latest Racially Tinged Cringe-Fest Is Just Too Much. “What’s a sure way for Presidentish Joe Biden to win back black voters? Buy ’em some fried chicken, talk some basketball, and then post the cringeworthy video on YouTube for the whole world to see.”
OH NO: NASA Needs a ‘Miracle’ to Save Voyager 1.
The nearly 50-year-old space probe, which is currently over 15 billion miles away, encountered the malfunction on November 14, 2023. This has hindered its capacity to relay vital measurements from its scientific instruments and fundamental engineering information. As a result, the mission’s support team in Southern California has been left in the dark about key parameters related to the craft’s propulsion, power, and control systems.
“It would be the biggest miracle if we get it back. We certainly haven’t given up,” Voyager’s Project Manager Suzanne Dodd told Ars Technica in an interview. “There are other things we can try. But this is, by far, the most serious since I’ve been project manager.”
Engineers believe that the problem originated in the Flight Data System (FDS), specifically related to “frame syncing” data, and suspect that it may be due to corrupted memory within the FDS. This has hindered the team’s ability to pinpoint the exact location of the FDS memory corruption, as the lack of detailed telemetry data from Voyager 1 has made it challenging to identify the root cause of the issue.
The complexity of diagnosing and rectifying a problem occurring at such an immense distance, compounded by the age of the spacecraft and its fifty-year-old technology, has underscored the unprecedented technical and logistical challenge facing the mission’s support team.
Still, almost 50 years and 15 billion miles is a helluva run.