Free Republic

Lebanon's civil war has been described as a house of mirrors in that "it was easier to find your way in than to find your way out," (Thomas Friedman). The longer the war dragged on the more disorienting the "house" became until the most impossible ironies emerged as Lebanon's very reality. At one point following the 1982 invasion, Israel supplied Iran with US manufactured TOW missiles in a hostage exchange agreement. Iran thereafter transferred the missiles to Hezbollah within Lebanon where they were then fired back at the Israelis occupying the south. I inspected the assortment of rocket launchers in...

Embedded below in two parts. This podcast actually features science writer Joe Pappalardo talking about Orbital ATK’s effort to make solid rockets competitive in the commercial rocket industry. John Batchelor asked me to join him in asking some questions.

Time to once again delve into this month’s release of high resolution images from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

"Take a virtual tour of the Moon in all-new 4K resolution, thanks to data provided by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft. As the visualization moves around the near side, far side, north and south poles, we highlight interesting features, sites, and information gathered on the lunar terrain."

Irked at the prospect that President Trump may send US troops to guard the border against illegal immigration, the Mexican Senate unanimously passed a resolution that would end the bilateral cooperation between US and Mexican law enforcement agencies against the violent drug cartels that have run rampant along the border. President of the Senate, Pablo Escudero Mora defended the seemingly irrational move as “totally justified given the long history of US aggression toward our country. First they seized Texas. Then they invaded Mexico and forced us to cede California, and what are now Arizona and New Mexico to them. Now,...

For the April 5, 2018 John Batchelor Show; science-writer Bob Zimmerman discusses his recent tour of Biosphere-2, and updates on the effects of the Bush/Obama Policy concerning the SLS/Orion boondoggle.

"Time for some more weird Mars geology! Today the science team for the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter released its monthly batch of new images. There is a lot of interesting stuff buried therein...."

Rail workers across France have gone on strike for the first day of a three-month rolling walkout, the latest and potentially biggest battle over labor laws in the country since President Emmanuel Macron took office last May promising to transform the jobs market. Train services have been severely disrupted, with around 87% of high-speed trains and 80% of regional services canceled Tuesday, according to SNCF, France's state-owned rail company. Eurostar services were also affected, with one in four services from Paris canceled. High-speed Thalys trains towards Belgium and the Netherlands were operating almost as normal, but there were no services...

"One of the prime areas of research for Mars planetary geologists is the region on Mars where the geography appears to transition from the southern cratered, rough terrain to the northern low, generally smooth, and flat plains. It is theorized by some scientists that the northern plains were once an ocean, probably shallow and probably intermittent, but wet nonetheless for considerable periods..."

The US Census Bureau's plan to include a citizenship question on the 2020 census spurred an outpouring of deranged rhetoric from assorted Democrats and their allies. Tom Perez, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, incorrectly portrayed the plan as an attempt to "only count citizens" and contended it is a "voter suppression" strategy. "Combined with the Republican insistence that voters show IDs before they can cast a ballot, the citizenship question strikes at the very heart of the democratic ideal that every person—citizen or not—have a say in who rules over him." New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman vowed to...

"Capitalism in space: In order to maintain its goal of launching its orbital New Glenn rocket by 2020, Blue Origin has changed the engine it will use in the rocket’s second stage from a version of its main BE-4 engine to new version of their already developed BE-3 engine, used in their reusable New Shepard suborbital spacecraft...This quiet change, which the company made with no fanfare, carries with it some significant information as well as important ramifications."

Honda brings Clarity to the plug-in hybrid market By Jim BrayTechnoFile.com It's loud. It's whiny. Its interfaces are incoherent. But it'll help you save the world, and you might be able to make other people help you pay for it!It's Honda's new Clarity, in this case a plug-in hybrid model. Honda calls it the newest member of their "completely redesigned lineup," even though it sports exactly the same dashboard abomination – as in no knobs for tuning the stereo or tuning the volume up or down - that the company is finally moving away from with its new Accord and...

In California, the Center for Climate Protection is pushing legislation that would ban gasoline-powered vehicles after Jan 1, 2040. A bill drafted by Assemblyman Phil Ting (D-San Francisco) would require that only vehicles relying on “clean” technologies could be registered in the state. Even hybrids that sometimes use gasoline would be barred from being registered. “I envision a future where the roads are traveled by nonpolluting vehicles using batteries, fuel cells, or wind as their source of energy,” Ting imagined. “My favorite, of course, is the wind-powered car. For centuries humans traveled the seas with only wind to push them...

So in light of Delta's stance on the NRA AND the fact that they transported March for Our Dems protestors for FREE, I am cancelling my flight to Maine in late August.

"Over the past few years, I’ve been keeping track of Russia’s annual launch failures. For reasons I can’t quite recall, the table I’ve used only went back to 2009. Recently, I saw a graphic on a Russian website about launch failures, and I realized I hadn’t gone back far enough. So, I dug into the records of the last 30 years from 1988 through 2017, which covers Russia and the last four years of the Soviet Union. And holy crap! There were a helluva lot of them. Launch failures are not a bug in the system, they’re a feature..."

"...On Earth quartz veins indicate past water flow, and also indicate the presence of valuable minerals like gold. What these veins on Mars mean is presently unknown, though I guarantee the Curiosity science team is using the rover to find out everything they can. Almost certainly the veins suggest the past presence of liquid flows, probably water (but I make no promises)."

Summary: Curiosity continues its exploration of Vera Rubin Ridge, including several drilling attempts.Since my February 8, 2018 update, the Curiosity science team has apparently been loath to leave Vera Rubin Ridge... Opportunity is currently halfway down the inside of Perseverance Valley...when the Mars winter ends, Opportunity will begin to move more aggressively.

This week the US Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that job openings increased to a record 6.3 million. The number of openings now equals the number of currently unemployed Americans. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif) assailed these statistics, saying "this is the economic disaster our Party tried to avert, but the GOP rammed through their tax cut, which as we now see, has created a serious labor shortage. Millions of unemployed Americans will now be pressured into taking jobs they'd rather not do." Pelosi also contended that "these statistics validate the foolishness of the Administration's determination to throttle immigration....

Mike Munger of Duke University talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about private and public rent-seeking. When firms compete for either private profit opportunities or government contracts, there are inevitably firms or people who spend resources but end up earning little or nothing. What are the differences, if any between these two forms of competition? How do they related to competitions that award prizes for discovering new technologies? The conversation begins with a discussion of a recent trip Munger took to Chile where he observed the current state of the Chilean bus system, a topic he has discussed in the...

Driving north on Interstate 75 across the Mackinac Bridge into Michigan's Upper Peninsula.