PROFIT BEFORE SAFETY SPACE PROGRAMS = DISASTERS

This is what happens when you take "non-profit" government programs and convert them to "for profit" private sector business ventures. Contracting space travel to the private sector puts the focus on making a bigger profit by cutting costs which compromises the quality of the product and safety.

Virgin Galactic Spaceship Crash Kills 1

Authorities in the western U.S. state of California say a space tourism rocket has crashed while on a test flight in the Mojave desert, killing one pilot and seriously injuring another.

The CEO of Virgin Galactic -- founded by British billionaire Richard Branson -- said it will work with the relevant authorities to determine the cause of the accident. Branson said on Twitter that he is flying to California immediately.

The company plans to sell trips on SpaceShipTwo to the edge of space, about 100 kilometers above Earth. Passengers would have a few minutes of weightlessness before returning to Earth.

More than 500 people have already put down deposits to travel in the spacecraft.

When the dust settles what we see is that the space program is now being funded by US taxpayers to entertain the wealthy few with tax-payer funded space rides. 

Space Privatization Update

It is the second accident suffered by a private U.S. space company this week. On Tuesday, an unmanned commercial rocket that was supposed to send a cargo ship to the International Space Station exploded seconds after liftoff from a NASA launch pad in the eastern state of Virginia.

An unmanned rocket owned by private firm Orbital Sciences Corporation exploded Tuesday in a giant fireball and plummeted back to Earth just seconds after a launch from Wallops Island, Virginia on what was to be a resupply mission.

Orbital's Cygnus cargo ship was carrying 5,000 pounds (2,200 kilograms) of supplies for the six astronauts living at the research outpost, a US-led multi-national collaboration.

Officials said the cost of the rocket and supplies was over $200 million, not including the damage caused on the ground.

That's 200 million tax payer dollars up in smoke. The Russians on the other hand are sticking to the tried and true approach and, as they did by being first in space (Sputnik) are now picking up the ball.

Russia Offers To Help Resupply The International Space Station

Russia on Wednesday successfully launched its own supply mission from the Baikonur launch site in Kazakhstan.

Europe stopped delivering supplies to the ISS this summer, and the outpost is now resupplied by Russia and two NASA-contracted private American firms -- Space X and Orbital Sciences.
 

NRA BACKS EATING DOGS and CATS

What kind of hunter would shoot pigeons? Worse still what kind of American would eat dogs and cats?

The NRA proudly supports both of these practices; as lame and demented as they are and lobbied strongly against legislation to ban them in Pennsylvania.

You Can Still Eat This Corgi In Pennsylvania, Thanks To The NRA

Earlier this month, a lopsided majority of the Pennsylvania Senate passed a bill that, among other things, would have subjected anyone who “[b]reeds, keeps, sells, offers for sale or transfers a dog or cat for the purpose of human consumption” to up to seven years in prison. This proposed ban was inspired by a series of investigations by the Pennsylvania SPCA which uncovered kennels where dogs were bred for meat, including one ten year-old incident in Philadelphia where a single kennel kept 150 dogs.

It is currently legal to slaughter and eat dogs or cats in Pennsylvania, and, thanks in large part to lobbying from the National Rifle Association, it will remain so. Although the animal cruelty bill passed the state senate by a 36-12 margin — and even though Gov. Tom Corbett (R) was expected to sign it — legislative leaders in the state house did not include this bill in the final list of legislation that would receive a vote before the end of the house’s 2013-2014 session. The NRA swiftly claimed victory for killing what it viewed as a “misguided” bill.

The NRA’s primary objection to the animal cruelty bill was a separate provision banning what are known as “pigeon shoots” (although it is worth nothing that the NRA assembled a coalition of groups to oppose the bill that includes dog breeders opposed to additional regulation of kennels). According to thePhiladelphia Inquirer, pigeon shoots are “a practice where live pigeons are launched from electronic boxes while shooters fire rounds at short distance. Injured birds that land in the shooting circle get their necks broken – often by teenagers. Wounded birds by the hundreds fly off to die slow deaths.” Animal rights activists have been working to ban this practice for the last 27 years.

Nevertheless, the NRA described pigeon shoots as an “ethical” practice. They also argue that if this “traditional shooting sport” is banned then it will lead to a “slippery slope” where other firearms activity will also be banned.

FOUNDING FATHERS PRO 99% - ANTI 1%

U.S. income inequality is bad, but wealth inequality is a bigger problem


Thomas Jefferson and his fellows were deeply hostile to the accumulation of great wealth, especially by inheritance. In a famous 1812 letter to the printer Joseph Milligan, Jefferson acknowledges that "the overgrown wealth of an individual [may] be deemed dangerous to the State."

In economic terms, he wrote to James Madison, "whenever there is in any country, uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right."

And in his autobiography Jefferson wrote of the bills he had advocated or passed to form "a system by which every fibre would be eradicated of antient [sic] or future aristocracy; and a foundation laid for a government truly republican." His goal was to "prevent the accumulation and perpetuation of wealth in select families, and preserve the soil of the country from being daily more & more absorbed in Mortmain" (that is, the perpetual ownership of real estate by a church, corporation, or other legal entity).


Jefferson was in many ways a modern man, but his goals have come to naught, in part because the very legal measures he advocated have been dismantled by conservatives acting, supposedly, in his name.

Emanuel Saez, that assiduous tracker of economic inequality in the U.S., has been shifting his attention away from income inequality to a broader, thornier and more intractable issue: wealth inequality. As he observes in a paper published this week at the blog of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, wealth inequality is "exploding," constituting "a direct threat to the cherished American ideals of meritocracy and opportunity."

Wealth inequality is also an artifact of income inequality; the two trends work together to magnify the former. As the bottom 90% struggle to make ends meet on stagnant incomes, they're unable to accumulate savings. "Today, the top 1% save about 35% of their income," the authors write, "while bottom 90% families save about zero."

Strong measures will be needed to reverse this otherwise inexorable trend, they write. "Ten or twenty years from now, all the gains in wealth democratization achieved during the New Deal and the post-war decades could be lost. While the rich would be extremely rich, ordinary families would own next to nothing, with debts almost as high as their assets."

Among their prescriptions for the rebuilding of middle-class wealth are higher taxes on capital income -- "current preferential rates on capital income compared to wage income are hard to defend in light of the rise of wealth inequality" -- and on inheritances. "Estate taxation is the most direct tool to prevent self-made fortunes from becoming inherited wealth -- the least justifiable form of inequality in the American meritocratic ideal." Progressive estate and income taxation were the key tools that reduced the concentration of wealth after the Great Depression," they write. "The same proven tools are needed today."

FOOTBALL FOR DUMMIES

Universities are handing out degrees in football. Reading, Math, History, etc. not required.

U.N.C. Investigation Reveals Athletes Took Fake Classes

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — It was November 2009, and alarm was spreading among the academic counselors charged with bolstering the grades of football players at the University of North Carolina. For years the players and others had been receiving A’s and B’s in nonexistent classes in the African studies department, but the administrator who had set up and run the fake classes had just retired, taking all those easy grades with her.

The counselors convened a meeting of the university’s football coaches, using a PowerPoint presentation to drive home the notion that the classes “had played a large role in keeping underprepared and/or unmotivated players eligible to play,” according to a report released by the university on Wednesday.

“We put them in classes that met degree requirements in which ... they didn’t go to class ... they didn’t have to take notes, have to stay awake ... they didn’t have to meet with professors ... they didn’t have to pay attention or necessarily engage with the material,” a slide in the presentation said. “THESE NO LONGER EXIST!”

Wednesday’s report, prepared by Kenneth L. Wainstein, a former general counsel at the F.B.I. and now a partner at the law firm Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, found that between 1993 and 2011, two employees in the university’s African and Afro-American studies department presided over what was essentially a “shadow curriculum” designed to help struggling students — many of them Tar Heels athletes — stay afloat.

It is the latest in a series of investigations into the scandal, which first came to public attention three years ago. The revelations have cast a decidedly unflattering light on the university, which has long boasted of its ability to maintain high academic standards while running a top-flight sports program. Until now, the university has emphasized that the scandal was purely academic. On Wednesday, it acknowledged for the first time that it was also athletic, with members of sports teams being steered into and benefiting disproportionately from the fraudulent classes.

FOOTBALL BATTERING CHILDREN

It's obvious from the numbers that Americans are so addicted to football they are willing to put their children in harms way for the sake of the sport.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nearly 173,000 recreation-related traumatic brain injuries to children and adolescents are treated in U.S. emergency departments every year. Boys between 10 and 19 who play football are far more likely to suffer such injuries.

Concussions turn 15-year-old football player's dreams into 'nightmare'

"He's been playing tackle football since he was 5. He has always seen himself as a football player named Rick, not Rick, who plays football."

At 13, in a parent-organized league called the Junior All-American Football Conference, Rick had a concussion that put him out for three games. In his second game back, he was hit from behind on a tackle, fumbled and appeared to go limp for a moment. When parents and coaches started out on the field to come to his aid, Rick popped up and waved them off. Shortly after the game, the concussion symptoms were back.


Under the headline "Football cannot be made safe — not for our kids, not for our souls": Research at Boston University found that the typical high school football player takes 1,000 blows to the head each season, with the average force of 20G. That's more than college football players.

—Dave D'Alessandro, Newark Star Ledger, Oct. 17, 2014


Tom Cutinella played guard and linebacker for a Long Island, N.Y., high school, Shoreham-Wading River. He was 16. He had a collision with another player in a game Oct. 1 and died shortly afterward, "becoming the third high school football player nationally to die in a week." His team had started the season 3-0, and after one of those victories, Cutinella tweeted: "Best moment of my life."

—New York Times, Oct. 2, 2014

Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Real Animals, Fake Paws Footage

Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Real Animals, Fake Paws Footage