A potentially dangerous asteroid called Bennu has a 1 in 1,750 chance of hitting Earth between now and the year 2300.

That's according to the most precise calculations of an asteroid's trajectory ever made, and the odds are slightly worse than NASA previously thought.

Still, the researchers studying Bennu say this doesn't keep them up at night.

"The impact probability went up just a little bit but it's not a significant change," says Davide Farnocchia at the Center for Near Earth Object Studies at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.

He points out that there is a 99.94% probability that Bennu is not on an impact trajectory.

Dear Boss,

Compelling any employee to take any current Covid-19 vaccine violates federal and state law, and subjects the employer to substantial liability risk, including liability for any injury the employee may suffer from the vaccine.

Many employers have reconsidered issuing such a mandate after more fruitful review with legal counsel, insurance providers, and public opinion advisors of the desires of employees and the consuming public. Even the Kaiser Foundation warned of the legal risk in this respect. (https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/issue-brief/key-questions-about-covid-19-vaccine-mandates/)

Three key concerns: first, while the vaccine remains unapproved by the FDA and authorized only for emergency use, federal law forbids mandating it, in accordance with the Nuremberg Code of 1947;

second, the Americans with Disabilities Act proscribes, punishes and penalizes employers who invasively inquire into their employees’ medical status and then treat those employees differently based on their medical status, as the many AIDS related cases of decades ago fully attest;

and third, international law, Constitutional law, specific statutes and the common law of torts all forbid conditioning access to employment upon coerced, invasive medical examinations and treatment, unless the employer can fully provide objective, scientifically validated evidence of the threat from the employee and how no practicable alternative could possible suffice to mitigate such supposed public health threat and still perform the necessary essentials of employment.

At the outset, consider the “problem” being “solved” by vaccination mandates.

The previously infected are better protected than the vaccinated, so why aren’t they exempted?

Equally, the symptomatic can be self-isolated. Hence, requiring vaccinations only addresses one risk: dangerous or deadly transmission, by the asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic employee, in the employment setting.

Yet even government official Mr. Fauci admits, as scientific studies affirm, asymptomatic transmission is exceedingly and “very rare.”

Indeed, initial data suggests the vaccinated are just as, or even much more, likely to transmit the virus as the asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic.

Hence, the vaccine solves nothing. This evidentiary limitation on any employer’s decision-making, aside from the legal and insurance risks of forcing vaccinations as a term of employment without any accommodation or even exception for the previously infected (and thus better protected), is the reason most employers wisely refuse to mandate the vaccine.

This doesn’t even address the arbitrary self-limitation of the pool of talent for the employer: why reduce your own talent pool, when many who refuse invasive inquiries or risky treatment may be amongst your most effective, efficient and profitable employees?

First, federal law prohibits any mandate of the Covid-19 vaccines as unlicensed, emergency-use-authorization-only vaccines. Subsection bbb-3(e)(1)(A)(ii)(III) of section 360 of Title 21 of the United States Code, otherwise known as the Emergency Use Authorization section of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, demands that everyone give employees the “option to accept or refuse administration” of the Covid-19 vaccine. (https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/21/360bbb-3)

This right to refuse emergency, experimental vaccines, such as the Covid-19 vaccine, implements the internationally agreed legal requirement of Informed Consent established in the Nuremberg Code of 1947. (http://www.cirp.org/library/ethics/nuremberg/).

As the Nuremberg Code established, every person must “be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, overreaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion; and should have sufficient knowledge and comprehension of the elements of the subject matter involved as to enable him to make an understanding and enlightened decision” for any medical experimental drug, as the Covid-19 vaccine currently is. The Nuremberg Code prohibited even the military from requiring such experimental vaccines. (Doe #1 v. Rumsfeld, 297 F.Supp.2d 119 (D.D.C. 2003).

Second, demanding employees divulge their personal medical information invades their protected right to privacy, and discriminates against them based on their perceived medical status, in contravention of the Americans with Disabilities Act. (42 USC §12112(a).) Indeed, the ADA prohibits employers from invasive inquiries about their medical status, and that includes questions about diseases and treatments for those diseases, such as vaccines.

As the EEOC makes clear, an employer can only ask medical information if the employer can prove the medical information is both job-related and necessary for the business. (https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/guidance/questions-and-answers-enforcement-guidance-disability-related-inquiries-and-medical). An employer that treats an individual employee differently based on that employer’s belief the employee’s medical condition impairs the employee is discriminating against that employee based on perceived medical status disability, in contravention of the ADA. The employer must have proof that the employer cannot keep the employee, even with reasonable accommodations, before any adverse action can be taken against the employee.

If the employer asserts the employee’s medical status (such as being unvaccinated against a particular disease) precludes employment, then the employer must prove that the employee poses a “safety hazard” that cannot be reduced with a reasonable accommodation.

The employer must prove, with objective, scientifically validated evidence, that the employee poses a materially enhanced risk of serious harm that no reasonable accommodation could mitigate.

This requires the employee’s medical status causes a substantial risk of serious harm, a risk that cannot be reduced by any another means. This is a high, and difficult burden, for employers to meet.

Just look at all the prior cases concerning HIV and AIDS, when employers discriminated against employees based on their perceived dangerousness, and ended up paying millions in legal fees, damages, and fines.

Third, conditioning continued employment upon participating in a medical experiment and demanding disclosure of private, personal medical information, may also create employer liability under other federal and state laws, including HIPAA, FMLA, and applicable state tort law principles, including torts prohibiting and proscribing invasions of privacy and battery. Indeed, any employer mandating a vaccine is liable to their employee for any adverse event suffered by that employee. The CDC records reports of the adverse events already reported to date concerning the current Covid-19 vaccine.(https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/vaers.html )

Finally, forced vaccines constitute a form of battery, and the Supreme Court long made clear “no right is more sacred than the right of every individual to the control of their own person, free from all restraint or interference of others.” (https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/141/250)

With Regards,
Employee of the Year
XXX

• Boeing's most iconic aircraft — the 747 — is celebrating 51 years of passenger service in January.
• Most of the world's airlines, however, are retiring their 747s in favor of new, fuel-efficient jets.
• The final models will be delivered to cargo giant Atlas Air in 2022, marking the end of the program. //

For cargo carriers, the all-important nose door was a key selling point for the aircraft as the 747 is the only Western-built, mass-produced aircraft to feature it. //
As the Queen of the Skies nears the end of its reign, its legacy will surely live on forever as the aircraft that revolutionized the aviation industry and made the world a smaller place for over 50 years.

Blue Origin and Dynetics are still steaming over NASA’s decision to award only one contract — to SpaceX — to build a Human Landing System for the Artemis program. Their protest of the decision was recently rejected, and now the Government Accountability Office’s arguments, which Blue Origin publicly questioned, are available for all to read. Here are a few highlights from the point-by-point takedown of the losing companies’ complaints. //

Even had several of the decisions been successfully challenged, it wouldn’t have changed the outcome, the report explains.

SpaceX received the following evaluation totals:

• Technical: 3 significant strengths; 10 strengths; 6 weaknesses; and 1 significant weakness
• Management: 2 significant strengths; 3 strengths; and 2 weaknesses

While Blue Origin received the following:

• Technical: 13 strengths; 14 weaknesses; and 2 significant weaknesses
• Management: 1 significant strength; 2 strengths; and 6 weaknesses //

…Even allowing for the possibility that the protesters could prevail on some small subset of their challenges to NASA’s evaluation, the record reflects that NASA’s evaluation was largely reasonable, and the relative competitive standing of the offerors under the non-price factors would not materially change…

The protests are denied.

Aimee Ortlip (1888)

[R]acial discrimination is not inherently racist. … The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination. – Ibram Kendi, How to Be an Anti-Racist. //

Liberal tv personalities like to accuse conservatives of being obsessed with CRT but what they are obsessed with is avoiding the return of segregation. This principal felt completely comfortable not only segregating her students, but doing it without even bothering to inform parents. That type of woke arrogance is too dangerous to tolerate.

But that is where we are all heading if the progressive left has their way. Joe Biden has repeatedly told us that election integrity reforms in states like Georgia and Texas are like “Jim Crow on steroids.” Yet here is a liberal educator (and presumed Democrat voter) who is literally resurrecting Jim Crow in her school and calling it a “special service.” Democrats are the ones who are going to have us all back in chains if we’re not careful.

Pirates of the Caribbean actor Greg Ellis wrote a book about corruption in the family courts called The Respondent: Exposing the Cartel of Family Law, detailing not only his experience but the experiences of people all over the country who say they’ve been railroaded by a money-making criminal organization dressed up as justice. Ellis sat down with me on “The Fringe” to discuss his harrowing experience.

Ellis told PJ Media:

It’s a complex web of intrigue, the family courts… It’s the Wild West of family law. It’s a $60 billion-a-year annual American divorce machine and industry that is racking up billable hours and sacrificing children and parents, and really just looking at estates of families and seeing how much money they can make.

This system is well-known by everyone who has been ground through it, but when will the legislatures, which have the power to check judges and clean up this mess, do their jobs? Instead of taking responsibility for the family courts, the state legislatures have abandoned their power to “oversight boards” that are tasked with hearing complaints from litigants. These boards rarely discipline anyone. Reuters just did an incredible investigation into judicial corruption and found that thousands of judges accused of misconduct remain on the bench.

Judges have made racist statements, lied to state officials and forced defendants to languish in jail without a lawyer – and then returned to the bench, sometimes with little more than a rebuke from the state agencies overseeing their conduct.

Recent media reports have documented failures in judicial oversight in South Carolina, Louisiana and Illinois. Reuters went further.

In the first comprehensive accounting of judicial misconduct nationally, Reuters identified and reviewed 1,509 cases from the last dozen years – 2008 through 2019 – in which judges resigned, retired or were publicly disciplined following accusations of misconduct. In addition, reporters identified another 3,613 cases from 2008 through 2018 in which states disciplined wayward judges but kept hidden from the public key details of their offenses – including the identities of the judges themselves.

Charles W. Cooke had the definitive takedown of Ms. Jones in May.

Jones’s central claim is nothing less dramatic than that she has uncovered a massive conspiracy in the third most populous state in the nation, and that, having done so, she has been ruthlessly persecuted by the governor and his “Gestapo.” Specifically, Jones claims that, while she was working at the FDOH last year, she was instructed by her superiors to alter the “raw” data so that Florida’s COVID response would look better, and that, having refused, she was fired. Were this charge true, it would reflect one of the most breathtaking political scandals in all of American history.

But it’s not true. Indeed, it’s nonsense from start to finish. Jones isn’t a martyr; she’s a myth-peddler. She isn’t a scientist; she’s a fabulist. She’s not a whistleblower; she’s a good old-fashioned confidence trickster. And, like any confidence trickster, she understands her marks better than they understand themselves.

The weeks upon weeks of negotiations leading up to the passage of a $1 trillion infrastructure bill were just the prelude to the absolute whopper that is the Bernie Sanders budget resolution, which hit the wires Monday morning and will hit the Senate floor Tuesday.

The $3.5 trillion document is a full-on attempt to remake the American economy, the labor markets, blow off our immigration laws, rewrite the tax code, impose a climate agenda, and profoundly alter the relationship between the government, and those it governs.

Among the bill’s highlights:

• Amnesty for illegal immigrants
• Rewrites Medicaid statutes to bypass the Hyde prohibitions on federal funding for abortion
• Universal pre-kindergarten for 3 and 4-year-olds
• Paid family and medical leave
• Tuition-free community college
• Medicare expansion for dental, hearing, and vision
• Expansive climate change programs
• Language similar to the PRO Act, which is a card-check program for labor organizing, making it easier to unionize
• Expansion of the SALT deduction
• Empowers the IRS with more enforcement capabilities
• Does not include an extension of pandemic unemployment benefits

Jeff Bezos, the billionaire founder of Blue Origin, is offering to knock up to $2 billion off the cost of developing a lunar lander and to self-fund a pathfinder mission in exchange for a NASA contract. //

The specific contract in question relates to developing a lunar lander for the Human Landing System program, which aims to return humans to the moon for the first time since the Apollo days. NASA announced in April 2020 that Blue Origin, SpaceX and Dynetics were chosen for the initial phase of the contract, and it was thought that the competition would likely be whittled down to two final companies to build lunar landers. //

But a year later, in a move that veered from historical practice, NASA announced it had selected just one company for the contract: SpaceX. That company, headed by Elon Musk, proposed a $2.89 billion plan for its lander – around half of Blue Origin’s $5.99 billion proposal. Bezos is now offering to cut that price tag by $2 billion. //

26 Jul

I think Elon Musk and SpaceX should indicate they would support the competition with Blue Origin if Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin accepts an HLS contract at the same $2.89B fixed price as was accepted by SpaceX. It was Blue Origin's choice to distribute their HLS development across multiple companies. SpaceX should not be short-changed for deciding to take it all on in-house while also exceeding the HLS requirements in many important future-looking ways. This would clearly show that SpaceX is not afraid of competition and is supportive of increasing the world's options in expanding access to space. It would also show that Blue Origin is not afraid of competition on a truly equal basis. //

Ben Wah
26 Jul

Just says alot how much they thought they could get away with taxpayer's money. ULA's playbook.

Edit: This is Bezos gameplan. When his proposal is rejected, get things stalled just like with the DOD’s JEDI program. It eventually got cancelled cause his complaint kept our warfighters in limbo for years to get ahead of our near-peer adversaries.

Enjoy the eye opening art of Houghton College students and faculty, as well as visiting artists. Professional grade ceramics, paintings, drawings, watercolors, book/paper making, letter-pressing, woodworking, photography, mixed media, digitial art, and more.

H Willard Ortlip

Emirates’ latest ad features its cabin crew on the tip of the Burj Khalifa, joining an elite group of individuals

On Friday, SpaceX founder Elon Musk sent a clear message to the FAA and other federal regulators. One evocative photo, in particular, drove home his message to anyone watching. It showed workers standing beneath Starship, as it was lowered onto the first-stage rocket. In releasing a black-and-white version, Musk knew exactly what he was doing in harkening back to the age of skyscrapers.

The 21st-century skyscrapers are being built right now, the photo screamed, by modern engineers and welders. Such rockets are not to be found in PowerPoints or wooden mockups any longer. They are living, breathing machines nearly ready to breathe fire.

The bill also gives the secretary of the Department of Transportation (DOT) significant powers to direct funds. It all but eliminates the current formula for distribution of funds and puts almost all funding into competitive grants for the current DOT secretary, choo-choo-train-lover Pete Buttiegeg, to dole out. How does Graham think this will work out for his home state of South Carolina or any other red state?

What conditions will get rammed down the throats of voters in these states to get the funds required to maintain their infrastructure? Could it be the elimination of single-family zoning, which the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing regulation seeks? How about a gas-powered vehicle ban like California’s? What other green policies could be forced on states in order to receive their highway funds? The list of progressive with-list items is endless.

The bill centralizes power in D.C. under the ever-growing bureaucracy in an agency that has presided over the complete degradation of our infrastructure through central planning. Much like the Department of Education has presided over the decline in the performance of America’s public schools, the DOT has failed to maintain America’s infrastructure. Congress should scale back the agency and give control back to states and local communities. Yet it looks like 17 Republicans, including Graham, still believe in the bipartisan project that does nothing but enlarges the central government.

This should be a lesson to American leftists — and Americans in general — that when you engage in smear campaigns and political messaging without verifying the credibility of the information, it’s not just American voters who are listening. And if your message is finding common ground with Communists seeking to shirk blame for unleashing a plague on the world, perhaps it’s time to rethink your allegiance to the message. As Christina Pushaw, DeSantis’ press secretary, told Dunleavy, “Believing Rebekah Jones’s conspiracy theory means you believe that thousands of public health employees from all 67 counties, many of whom are Democrats, conspired to manipulate COVID numbers to help DeSantis politically. This is outlandish and nonsensical, but countless Americans believe it, and the CCP benefits.”

On Monday, Judicial Watch and David Daleiden’s Center for Medical Progress (CMP) released the details of a $3 million grant the National Institutes of Health (NIH) gave the University of Pittsburgh to create a fetal “Tissue Hub” to dismember and distribute the organs of full-term aborted babies, selected by race, for inhumane experiments.

As if that wasn’t appalling enough, new evidence points to the University of Pittsburgh harvesting organs from born-alive babies as a real possibility—meaning the babies would have died while researchers dissected their bodies for kidneys and other organs.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) recently handed over the documents thanks to a lawsuit Judicial Watch filed last year on behalf of CMP when the agency failed to deliver records CMP requested through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

Last month, Daleiden’s group exposed the University of Pittsburgh’s work to graft the full-thickness scalps of unborn babies onto the backs of rodents in a study funded by Anthony Fauci’s NIAID office. The records released this week reveal this wasn’t a one-off incident, unearthing an agreement between NIH and the university to fully operationalize a grotesque baby organ bank funded by federal taxpayers.

As just discovered this week, the specific terms of the grant were to “develop a pipeline to the acquisition, quality control and distribution” of human babies from all levels of development right up to the age of birth. The University of Pittsburgh’s grant application to the NIH requests funding to “generate an ongoing resource” to fetal tissue from babies 6 to 42 weeks old by establishing itself as the “Tissue Hub and Collection Site” for the “GUDMAP” project. The project supplies researchers across the country with aborted kidneys, bladders, and other organs for experimentation. //

The NIH project admitted it used inducing labor as a procedure, almost surely meaning babies who could survive outside the womb were harvested by a barbaric—and illegal—late-term abortion method.