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According to a Tuesday story in the UK edition of the International Business Times, Neil degrease Tyson, the celebrity astrophysicist and media personality, advocated a space race between the United States and China. The idea is that such a race would spur innovation and cause industry to grow. The Apollo race to the moon caused a similar explosive period of scientific research and engineering development.

Bill Nye, who once called himself “the science guy,” took advantage of the torrential rains that hit Houston and the surrounding area to get up on the global warming – aka climate change – hobby horse. Tuesday, he tweeted, “Billion$$ in damage in Texas & Oklahoma. Still no weather-caster may utter the phrase Climate Change.” Of course meteorologists, unlike Nye, have spent their careers studying weather and its underlining causes. For a more scientifically accurate explanation of what caused the storms, read the Houston Chronicle’s excellent and fact based analysis.

The more high-brow sorts of reality shows involve taking a group of people, sometimes a family, into a period in history and see how they cope. Examples of this subset of the genre include “The 1900 House” and “The Colonial House.” The viewer was invited to have fun watching people having to cope without modern conveniences while wearing quaint costumes. The Associated Press reported on Friday that a reality show in the Czech Republic, entitled “A Vacation in the Protectorate,” is going to take a family back to the days of the Nazi occupation and see how they cope with...

“Game of Thrones” rarely fails to shock, filled as it is with atrocity porn. However, the brutal rape of Sansa Stark at the hands of the psychotic Ramsey Bolton at the end of Sunday’s episode seems to have crossed the line for many people. It is not like people haven’t been raped and worse before. Remember the Red Wedding, the beheading of Eddard Stark, and the castration and torture of Theon Greyjoy. But, Sansa is an innocent girl, though she has been getting progressively less naïve as the series has proceeded.

Texans argue about a lot of things, including political issues such as education, healthcare and, of course, illegal immigration. But nothing gets the denizens of the Lone Star State exercised more, with the possible exception of football, than barbecue, more specifically the wet rub vs. dry rub question. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott recently came down on the wet rub side of the controversy. The San Antonio Current pretty much proposed revoking the governor’s Texas citizenship for this heresy. “Everyone knows” that real barbecue does not need sauce. It is all in the smoking technique.

The Hollywood Reporter revealed Tuesday that Reese Witherspoon has been cast into the leading role of a new drama called “The Pale Blue Dot” in which she plays a female astronaut whose life spirals out of control after returning from a space mission. She begins an affair with a fellow astronaut and soon finds herself in a love triangle. The story seems to be not so loosely based on the incident in which real life astronaut Lisa Nowak who drove nonstop between Houston and Orlando wearing an adult diaper and disguised in a trench coat and sunglasses to confront a...

A Friday story in the Springfield News-Sun reported that a group of veterans and family members expressed outrage that a military cemetery in Cherokee County, Georgia was closed off so that a production company could film scenes from an upcoming Ang Lee Film, “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk.” The position of the group is that turning a cemetery into a movie shooting location would heap disrespect on the honored dead. But the subject matter of the film, based on a satirical anti-Iraq War novel by Ben Fountain, may well push the envelope where it comes to disrespecting those who put...

Sen. Rand Paul’s campaign for the presidency is not more than a few days old and already his mercurial father, former Rep. Ron Paul, himself a former presidential candidate, is starting to make trouble for his son. According to a Saturday story in the Houston Chronicle, the elder Paul called the famous letter that 47 Republican senators, including the younger Paul, sent to the Iranian mullahs “a joke.” The letter informed the Iranian leadership that any agreement that they reached with President Obama concerning Iran’s nuclear bomb program would not outlast the Obama presidency lacking congressional ratification.

The evidence is mounting that Carly Fiorina is making the left nervous. Her latest assault on the left, according to a Tuesday story in Time Magazine, blamed environmentalists for the water crisis in California. In response, the New Republic published a piece comparing Fiorina to Sarah Palin though not in a good way. Both are strong women of some accomplishment coming from the right side of the political spectrum. Therefore, Fiorina must be destroyed.

With Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, the first major announced presidential candidate, surging in the polls and raking in campaign cash, it was inevitable that the push back would follow. The “Stop Ted Cruz” campaign got off to a roaring start in Salon, a magazine that has always disdained the man from Texas, with a Sunday article by Heather Cox Richardson, a college professor who teaches 19th century American history. Richardson’s indictment against Cruz is a beaut, accusing him of being part of a conspiracy started by the late William F. Buckley and furthered by the late Sen. Barry Goldwater to...

One can figure out that the "science" of climate change has fallen on hard times when its chief defenders are not actual scientists, but rather a pair of comedians, Bill Maher and Bill Nye the former "science guy," according to Politico. Of course a third comedian, albeit an amateur one, is also flogging the idea. John Kerry is comparing "climate change" to the threat of WMDs. When one considers that controversy that ensued when the coalition forces that liberated Iraq failed to find much evidence of WMDs, it was perhaps an unfortunate analogy.

If there is any current example of American exceptionalism, that belief that the United States is a unique country, based around an idea rather than tribal affinities, it is its space program. No other country has had its citizens walk on the moon. A self described "expert in communications" named Linda Billings takes a dim view of American exceptionalism as it is related to the high frontier of space. Indeed she takes an exception to the very idea of a space frontier. Her blog post is a look into how the liberal mind thinks about space issues.

Now that Robert Park is in the winter of his life and James Van Allen is dead, an unlikely person named Charles Seife, not a scientist but rather a professor of journalism, has taken up the banner of the jihad to destroy NASA's human spaceflight program. In an article in Slate and a later post on his personal blog, Professor Seife compared the space agency to a Panda, cute but in danger of extinction. The reason, he suggests, NASA's "fixation" on human space flight. Like Van Allen, Park, and a slew of politicians before him, Seife would see NASA's human...

It is a commentary on how adrift NASA space policy is when one considers that four years after President Obama made his "we choose not to return to the moon" speech that the space agency may be pivoting back to the moon. Paul Spudis, a planetary geologist and return to the moon advocate, has read the tea leaves and has seen the first, tentative steps toward a pivot back to the moon. Elon Musk, the space entrepreneur and political ally of Barack Obama, has recently conceded that expeditions to the moon would be useful. NASA is partnering with private companies,...

Eugene Volokh relates an action by the Westminster Magistrate's Court in England that would be chilling if it were funny. It seems that the court is summoning a leader of a major religion to prove whether the doctrine of his church is true. The court is summoning Thomas Monson, the current President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints to answer charges under the Fraud Act levied by two disaffected ex-Mormons.

Now that New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie's luster as the great moderate hope has somewhat faded due to Bridgegate, the Republican establishment has casted about for a new candidate and has hit upon former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.

Could the United States be rid of President Obama before his term expires in January, 2017, thus saving years of his ruinous policies? Rand Simberg, who usually writes about aerospace subjects, seems to think so. He makes the following modest suggestion. If, at a point, the president's popularity becomes sufficiently low, the Republicans should run for the 2014 midterms on the promise that should they take over the senate, they will impeach and remove both Barack Obama from the presidency and Joe Biden from the vice presidency, making the speaker of the house president.

The fact that the 2014 Winter Olympics is taking place is Sochi, Russia, a city with a mild climate that is close to the volatile region of Chechnya has puzzled many observers. ABC News points the finger to a man named Gafur Rakhimov, Rakhimov is an Uzbek gangster, according to the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, with ties to that country's regime. He has been associated with the production and distribution of heroin in Central Asia. He has ties with the Uzbekistan regime and claims to be a legitimate businessman who founded an import/export business in the wake of...

11 year old Chloe Stirling got some great accolades from her local newspaper for the cupcake business she had started out of her parents' kitchen. Unfortunately the local health department took another view and shut her down. The sticking point was that not only did she lack the proper permits and licenses to run a food business, but according to local and state law she would have to either own her own bakery or have a kitchen separate from that of her parents to continue cooking cupcakes for money. Since this was clearly impossible, Stirling is no longer able to...

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. was recently censored by Arizona Republicans for being too much of a RINO and a generally irascible fellow. Sarah Palin has taken to her Facebook page to rally to the venerable war hero's defense.