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"I learned that in extreme situations when human lives and dignity are at state, neutrality is a sin. It helps the killers, not the victims." Elie Wiesel, Holocaust Survivor who lost his family in the Holocaust - Nobel Prize Author
Socialism - Liberalism Quotation
"The American people will never knowingly adopt socialism, but under the name of liberalism they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program until one day America will be a socialist nation without ever knowing how it happened." – Norman Thomas
NASA launched the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) in February 2010. The five-year mission will provide never-before-seen "ultra high definition images back to earth.
"It's huge. That's solar flare. It
doesn't look like it's that big, but if you take into account the size
of the sun, that is actually tens of thousands of miles off the surface
as it rotates up and falls back in. It doesn't happen as rapidly as
that. This is a time lapse, so it takes a couple hours for it to
actually do that."
The SDO collects enormous amounts of
data every day — enough to fill one
CD every 36 seconds. On InformationWeek, a NASA rep says the observatory's
latest data will have a colossal impact on the study of the sun.
As the true loons of global warming pretend that ClimateGate has not happened, we learn that Artic Sea ice is "about to hit normal," for the first time since 2001, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center for this time of year. The U.S. Senate is finally demanding explanation from NASA about their roll in global warming and their flawed climate data.
There's a lot of ClimateGate news out. The following compilation comes through the amazing Climate Depot. Here are some discussions you might be interested in:
Why Climate Models Lie: Article says "climate scientists have been less than truthful" about their data. We certainly know this to be true after ClimateGate, but this is a good overview of deceptions we can attribute to faulty (inaccurate) computer data.
NASA was able to put a man on the moon, but the space agency can't tell you what the temperature was when it did. By its own admission, NASA's temperature records are in even worse shape than the besmirched ClimateGate data.
Christopher Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute says of NASA's four temperature data sets, "three out of the four...stink." Anyway we look at it, NASA employees are government employees, and it pains me to put it that way.
Whitewashing Professor Jones and CRU: Across the pond, where all the data was accumulated and supposedly "organized" by climate-fraud-once-considered-guru, Professor Phil Jones, we learn that Jones and his fraudulent allies have escaped the whole debacle with their reputations "intact." The thing to remember here is that they escaped prosecution because of a 6-month statute of limitations law.
The report makes the amazing statement that 'The scientific reputation of Professor Jones and CRU remains intact," making the reader wonder what such a committee would consider enough to damage a Warming scientist's reputation - nothing it would seem!
No hope but lots of change coming to the area around The Kennedy Space Center:
VIERA — The local economic forecast tied to President Barack Obama's NASA budget keeps growing bleaker.
Revised projections now show that about 23,000 workers at and around
Kennedy Space Center will lose their jobs because of the shuttles'
retirement and the new proposal to cancel the development of new rockets
and spacecraft.
That sum includes 9,000 "direct" space jobs and -- conservatively
speaking -- 14,000 "indirect" jobs at hotels, restaurants, retail stores
and others that depend on activity at the space center, said Lisa Rice,
Brevard Workforce president.
The organization's earlier estimate of 7,000 direct
jobs reflected just the retirement of the shuttle program. The updated
numbers also include the cancellation of Project Constellation and
other initiatives as outlined in the president's 2011 budget, Rice said.
Chris Horner, a fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), is trying to take a look at NASA's, probably, cooked climate change data. NASA has been in the middle of the fraud, and even furthered it, it appears. Horner and CEI has given NASA until the end of this year to comply with his FOIA request before suing.
Chris Horner
Horner is the author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming and Environmentalism and Red Hot Lies: How Global Warming Alarmists Use Threats, Fraud and Deception to Keep you Misinformed. He has tried for two years, through the Freedom of Information Act, to see NASA's data, which he suspects is fraudulent. Horner believes NASA:
...has shaped its climate data and [that] would explain why the agency has repeatedly had to correct its data going as far back as the 1930's.
I assume that what is there is highly damaging," Mr. Horner said.
"These guys are quite clearly bound and determined not to reveal their
internal discussions about this.
After NASA was compelled to correct it's data, one result was that 1934 - not 1998 - "was the hottest year in its records for the contiguous 48 states." That could not stand, of course, if NASA wanted a part of the global warming paycheck:
NASA later changed that data again, and now 1998 and 2006 are tied for first, with 1934 slightly cooler.
Horner has testified before the U.S. Senate Committees on Foreign Relatons and Environment and Public Works.
Greenpeace has repeatedly targeted Mr. Horner, by stealing his garbage
on a weekly basis, issuing press releases announcing with whom he dines
and including him in various other hysterical publications including
most recently "A Field Guide to Climate Criminals" distributed at the
UN climate meeting in Montreal in December 2005.
We have to ask what good the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) does? Up against Phil Jones and the British Climate Research Unit, FOIA did little, if anything at any time. There has been good reason, for years, to believe that the leading "scientists" advocating global warming were wrong and knew they were wrong:
The information sought is directly relevant to the exploding
"ClimateGate" scandal revealing document destruction, coordinated
efforts in the U.S. and UK to avoid complying with both
countries' freedom of information laws, and apparent and
widespread intent to defraud at the highest levels of
international climate science bodies. Numerous informed
commenters had alleged such behavior for years, all of which
appears to be affirmed by leaked emails, computer codes and other
data from the Climatic Research Unit of the UK's East Anglia
University.
Writing for the American Spectator, Horner talks about the taxpayer:
This and the related political activism engaged in are
inappropriate behavior for a taxpayer-funded employee,
particularly on taxpayer time. These documents were requested in
January 2007 and NASA/GISS have refused to date to comply with
their legal obligation to produce responsive documents.
We need to put some meat behind the FOIA, because at this point it seems to be useless.
Today may be the 15th day since ClimateGate broke that ABC, CBS and NBC has refused to mention - even once - ClimateGate.
Stewart David Nozette is a former NASA scientist arrested for attempting to communitcate, deliver and transmit sensitive information, and receiving cash for information from persons he believed to be members of Israel's Mossad. Watch for updates here as available and see two very interesting videos below.
Stewart David Nozette
Dr. Nozette, 52, was arrested at his home in a Washington suburb, after an FBI sting, which claims the scientist demanded "cash and an Israeli passport" in exchange for classified information obtained during a period when he had a high level security clearance with NASA, the Pentagon and an energy agency where he collaborated on developing a radar system to find ice on the moon's south pole.
Stewart Nozette apparently worked "for more than a decade" as a consultant for an Israeli company and was paid by them for work that included" answering the company's questions." This job is reportedly listed in his indictment.
A member of the White House’s National Space Council under the first President
Bush, he developed a radar experiment credited with finding water on the
Moon and worked at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the nerve
centre of US nuclear weapons research, in 1990-99.
He also thrived as a private consultant. According to court documents, he
earned $225,000 (£137,500) as a consultant for Israel Aerospace Industries,
a company owned by the Israeli Government.
According to the report, an FBI agent contacted Nozette in September 2009, posing as a spy for Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency.
"I don't get recruited by Mossad every day. I knew this day would
come," Nozette is heard saying on a wiretap, according to the court
papers.
The indictment does not claim that Nozette had actually been recruited by Israel, or spied for Israel, but the FBI supplied him with $11,000.00 in cash, in exchange for answers about the "U.S. satellite and military early warning systems, and its attack response system."
The same agent recorded that shortly before Nozette travelled abroad in
January he told a colleague he would flee the US if charged with a
crime. That would appear to explain his demand for an Israeli passport.
He was searched while leaving on a business trip to an unnamed country, when
officials found two small external computer hard drives in his luggage.
Searched again on his return, the hard drives were missing.
According to court papers, he was caught putting an encrypted hard-drive into
a post office box.
Dr. Stewart Nozette is described as an "astrophysicist with a top-level nuclear security," a well as an "acclaimed government scientist." Read a NASA bio on Nozette here. The first video below shows Dr. Nozette in happier times, as he answered questions from students about water on the moon and the second is a comprehensive report on the arrest. What a waste of talent.
Three words read by William Anders aboard the Apollo 8 mission on Christmas Eve 1968.
1968 was our Annus horribilis. It was a year of unrest at the Democratic National Convention. It was the year that saw the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. It was a year in which riots and protests were the daily fare on the nightly newscasts. It was a year in which America felt at its lowest point. And America needed a boost.
When the Apollo 8 mission was originally planned the mission was not suppose to go to the moon. It was suppose to be in a low Earth orbit checking out the systems on the Command module and possibly the lunar module if one had been ready by then.
Instead the mission was changed and Apollo 8 would be the first manned mission to go to the moon. In itself it would be a very dangerous mission, the first of anything is alway a dangerous mission to accomplish. Because of the nature of the mission and the decision to change it, the true mission was kept a secret from the public until the official announcement on 12 November 1968, less than 40 days before the scheduled launch.
Apollo 8 launched at 7:51:00 a.m. on December 21, 1968. During the flight, three fellow astronauts served on the ground as capsule communicators (usually referred to as "CAPCOMs") on a rotating schedule. The CAPCOMs were the only people who regularly communicated with the crew. Michael Collins was the first CAPCOM on duty and at 2 hours, 27 minutes and 22 seconds after launch radioed, "Apollo 8. You are Go for TLI". This communication signified that Mission Control had given official permission for Apollo 8 to go to the moon. Over the next twelve minutes before the TLI burn, the Apollo 8 crew continued to monitor the spacecraft and the rocket. The S-IVB third stage rocket ignited on time and burned perfectly for 5 minutes and 17 seconds. The burn increased the velocity of Apollo 8 to 35,505 feet per second (10,822 m/s) and the spacecraft's altitude at the end of the burn was 215.4 miles (346.7 km).
At this time, the crew also set the record for the highest speed humans had ever traveled.
Five hours after launch, Mission Control sent a command to the S-IVB booster to vent its remaining fuel through its engine bell to change the booster's trajectory. This S-IVB would then pass the Moon and enter into a solar orbit, posing no further hazard to Apollo 8. The S-IVB subsequently went into a 0.99 by 0.92 AU solar orbit with an inclination of 23.47° and a period of 340.80 days.
The Apollo 8 crew were the first humans to pass through the Van Allen radiation belts, which extend up to 15,000 miles (25,000 km) from Earth. Scientists predicted that passing through the belts quickly at the spacecraft's high speed would cause a radiation dosage of no more than a chest X-ray, or 1 milligray (during the course of a year, the average human receives a dose of 2 to 3 mGy). To record the actual radiation dosages, each crew member wore a Personal Radiation Dosimeter that transmitted data to Earth as well as three passive film dosimeters that showed the cumulative radiation experienced by the crew.
By the end of the mission, the crew experienced an average radiation dose of 1.6 mGy.
At about 55 hours and 40 minutes into the flight, the crew of Apollo 8 became the first humans to enter the gravitational sphere of influence of another celestial body.
At 64 hours into the flight, the crew began to prepare for Lunar Orbit Insertion-1 (LOI-1). This maneuver had to be performed perfectly, and due to orbital mechanics had to be on the far side of the Moon, out of contact with the Earth. After Mission Control was polled for a Go/No Go decision, the crew was told at 68 hours, they were Go and "riding the best bird we can find".
At 68 hours and 58 minutes, the spacecraft went behind the Moon and out of radio contact with the Earth.
When the spacecraft came out from behind the Moon for its fourth pass across the front, the crew witnessed an event no one had ever seen — Earthrise. Borman saw the Earth emerging from behind the lunar horizon and called in excitement to the others, taking a black-and-white photo as he did so: Earthrise, seen for the first time by human eyes. In the ensuing scramble Anders took the more famous color photo, later picked by Life magazine as one of its hundred photos of the century.
In the Beginning...
As they rounded the Moon for the ninth time, the second television transmission began. Borman introduced the crew, followed by each man giving his impression of the lunar surface and what it was like to be orbiting the Moon. Borman described it as being "a vast, lonely, forbidding expanse of nothing." Then, after talking about what they were flying over, Anders said that the crew had a message for all those on Earth.
Each man on board read the story of creation from Book of Genesis. Borman finished the broadcast by wishing a Merry Christmas to everyone on Earth. His message appeared to sum up the feelings that all three crewmen had from their vantage point in lunar orbit. Borman said,
"And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, and a Merry Christmas to all of you, all of you on the good Earth"
After 10 lunar orbit, Apollo 8 returned to Earth on 27 December 1968. A successful and historic mission.
So on this Christmas Eve, we should remember a historic moment in Human history that took place 40 years ago.
William Anders
"We are now approaching lunar sunrise and, for all the people back on Earth, the crew of Apollo 8 has a message that we would like to send to you.
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.
And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
"And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.
And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.
And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.
"And God said, Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.
And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good.
And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas – and God bless all of you, all of you on the good Earth."
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