Friday night eclipse, full moon, comet, Stargazer’s Alert!

image credit: The Telegraph

A Stargazer's Triple Header: Eclipse, comet, full moon

Friday night will be quite a show: an eclipse (7:43 Eastern Time), a full moon, and a comet (10:30 pm) to light up the night sky. From the report at the Independent:

Friday night will in fact see that comet – a green, shining light followed by a purple trail, known as 45P/Honda-Mrkos-Pajdušáková – joined by a bright, shining full "snow moon" and a lunar eclipse, all at the same time.

Starting early Friday evening, a penumbral lunar eclipse will begin. That means that the sun, moon and earth all line up and cast a strange effect on the moon.

But the forecast in northern Ohio is cloudy, so here is the astronomy website that all the online reports are linking to if you’d like to watch a live stream (the eclipse and later, the comet):

http://live.slooh.com/stadium/live/the-full-snow-moon-eclipse

And if access to the link is slow, it’s probably because the website is overloaded. Over the weekend, I’ll update this with a YouTube link (if there is one), or just try the link after the fact, when the traffic is lighter.

UPDATE Feb-11-17: These potentially spectacular celestial phenomena may have been over-hyped duds. On the link posted above, one had to stick with it for a long time to see . . . not much of anything. The best shot of the elusive comet that I found was at the Bold Corsican Flame website here. If any readers found a better set of video or photos, please post in the Comments. 

# # #

The next phase for Tea Party people

image credit: The American Mirror

As reported by Breitbart News:

The Spirit of America: Conservative Grassroots Leaders Plan Massive Pro-Trump Demonstrations Nationwide

Conservative grassroots leaders are planning a series of massive pro-President Donald Trump rallies nationwide, Breitbart News has learned exclusively.

On Feb. 27 and March 4, the rallies—dubbed the Spirit of America Rallies—will spring up nationwide in cities and towns across America.

“These rallies are inclusive, non-partisan, and open to anyone supporting President Trump in his efforts to bring back manufacturing jobs to America, put the security of our nation ahead of political correctness, improve our infrastructure, revitalize the inner cities and secure our nation’s borders,” Debbie Dooley, a national co-founder of the Tea Party movement and a key organizer of the Spirit of America rallies, says in a press release obtained by Breitbart News ahead of its public release.

Since President Trump’s election, during his time as president-elect and since his inauguration on Jan. 20, hardcore progressive leftists have been repeatedly protesting him in a sometimes violent manner. These rallies, organizers say, are meant to be a peaceful show of force from the “silent majority” that delivered Trump a landslide electoral college victory over failed Democratic president Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Dooley told Breitbart News that since the anti-Trump women’s march in D.C. after the president’s inauguration, she has received so many calls from Trump supporters–including many, many women Trump supporters–urging her to organize a show of force among the silent majority nationwide in response–that she had to turn off her cell phone so she could get work done. The Spirit of America rallies are not Tea Party rallies, she adds, and she hopes that Democrat groups backing Trump–there were many of them nationwide, forming a collective called the “Trumpocrats”–will get involved and step up to help the president, too. She also notes that the selection of Feb. 27 as the kickoff date of these pro-Trump rallies is significant, since that was the first day of the Tea Party movement back in 2009.

“I am proud to lead the charge here in Louisiana to get supporters of President Trump to show their support of his policy agenda through these Spirit of America rallies,” Col. Rob Maness, a retired Air Force colonel, founder of GatorPAC and two-time conservative Senate candidate in Louisiana who’s also involved in helping the rallies in his home state, added in the release. “Average citizens from across the political spectrum and all walks of life elected Mr. Trump and we at GatorPAC are especially pleased to help him with his national effort to Make America Great Again and #DrainTheSwamp priorities in Washington D.C.”

Ralph King, an elector for President Trump from Ohio and the co-founder of Main Street Patriots, added that he believes “the American electorate spoke loud and clear this past November.”

“These Spirit of America Rallies are a continuation of the collective voice of Americans that embrace President Trump’s policies to put the American workers and citizens first once again,” King said.

Rallies are in the works in states as far-flung as Arizona, Georgia, Colorado, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, New Jersey, Ohio, South Carolina, and Washington state—as well as other states, organizers say. More information is available on the Spirit of America rallies website.

 # # #

Heather MacDonald on the ruthlessly competitive hierarchy of victimhood on display at Berkeley

“UC Berkeley’s descent from place of learning to victimology hothouse” 

Image credit: A Voice For Men

Heather MacDonald is always a voice of sanity, especially on her frequent topics (racial profiling, cops, homelessness). At the LA Times yesterday, she had an op-ed on political correctness and the violent “protests” on the Berkeley Campus. Here are a few extracts:

Controversy and unrest has followed Milo Yiannopoulos' speaking tour at U.S. colleges. 

Even before its students rioted in the streets, distressed that right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos would dare to open his mouth in their presence, UC Berkeley presented a visual illustration of the academy’s decline from a place of learning to a victimology hothouse. Within walking distance on the Berkeley campus are emblems of both a vanished academic world and the diversity-industrial complex that ousted it.

Emblem 1: In Bauhaus-era typography, a quotation from Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Cardozo adorns the law school’s otherwise brutalist facade.

“You will study the wisdom of the past, for in a wilderness of conflicting counsels, a trail has there been blazed. You will study the life of mankind, for this is the life you must order, and, to order with wisdom, must know. You will study the precepts of justice . . .”

. . .

No law school today, if erecting itself from scratch, would think of parading such sentiments, first uttered in 1925, on its exterior. Cardozo’s invocation of “mankind” is alone cause for removal, but equally transgressive is his belief that there is wisdom in the past and not just discrimination. He presents learning as a heroic enterprise focused not on the self but on the vast world beyond, both past and present. Education is the search for objective knowledge that takes the learner into a grander universe of thought and achievement.

. . .

Emblem 2: UC Berkeley’s Division of Equity and Inclusion has placed vertical banners across the main campus reminding students of the contemporary university’s paramount mission: assigning guilt and innocence within the ruthlessly competitive hierarchy of victimhood. Each banner shows a photo of a student or a member of the student-services bureaucracy, beside a purported quotation from that student or bureaucrat. No rolling cadences here, no exhortations to intellectual conquest. Instead, just whining or penitential snippets from the academic lexicon of identity politics.

. . .

Berkeley funds the Division of Equity and Inclusion with a cool $20 million annually and staffs it with 150 full-time functionaries: It takes that much money and personnel to drum into students’ heads how horribly Berkeley treats its “othered” students.

. . .

What this seemingly gratuitous admonition really means is: “Do not violate any politically correct taboo.”

Cardozo invited students to the life of the mind. The diversocrats who have commandeered the American university invite students to a cultural reeducation camp where they can confess their political sins or perfect their sense of victimhood.

Read the rest here.

# # #

Putin hacked the Super Bowl

image credit: ThePeoplesCube.com and Real Climate Science (h/t Flopping Aces)

# # #

Google Redefines The Word ‘Fascism’

image credit: The Right Stuff

Left is right. Up is down. And now Google is redefining the word “Fascist.” From Derek Hunter at the Daily Caller:

Has Google, the world’s most popular search engine, changed the definition of the word “fascism” to protect liberal mobs using violence to silence those who disagree with them politically? The evidence suggest they have.

You see it on signs at every protest or riot — liberals accuse President Donald Trump of being a fascist. The word’s association with Adolf Hitler and its use now is no accident, it’s meant to strike fear in people’s hearts of tyranny.

Merriam-Webster defines the word “fascism” as “a political philosophy, movement, or regime (as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition.” The secondary definition is “a tendency toward or actual exercise of strong autocratic or dictatorial control.”

This definition reflects the fact that Nazis were, in fact, both fascists and of the political left. They were the “National Socialist German Workers Party,” which favored a heavy-handed government in business and the personal lives of its citizens.

The authoritarian government of Nazi Germany not only oppressed opposing political views and used violence to enforce it, they supported a powerful central government which heaped social benefits on its citizens. The second part of Nazism is the “socialist” part, which is very similar to what the modern American political left advocates. For all their bluster to the contrary, Hitler was a man of the extreme left, and so was fellow fascist and Axis Powers member Benito Mussolini.

But if you type the word into Google, the definition they provide is quite different.

The world’s largest search engine pins fascism on the political right, not the left.

Google defines fascism as, “an authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization.” (emphasis added)

Read the rest here.

Not good, but this is not new. A few months ago, I blogged on this subject here.

# # #

Temporary ban on immigration: Is It Legal?

image credit: wisegeek

  

The media is going wild. President Trump fired Sally Yates, the Obama-appointed acting Attorney General, because she would not enforce Trump’s temporary suspension of immigration from seven Muslim majority counties known to aid, abet, and finance terrorists. The legality of President Trump’s EO is at issue, and if you are listening to any of the TV news analyses, his temporary ban is not legal, it’s not American, etc., even though it was reviewed and approved by the Dept. of Justice Office of Legal Counsel. 

Take a minute or two to read through Andrew McCarthy’s legal analysis at National Review. McCarthy was a federal prosecutor for the case against the Blind Sheik and the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. The concluding take-away:

One can debate the policy wisdom of the executive order, which is plainly a temporary measure while a more comprehensive and thoughtfully tailored policy is developed. The seven countries the president has singled out are surely hotbeds of radical Islam; but he has omitted other countries – e.g., Saudi Arabia, home to 15 of the 19 suicide-hijackers who attacked our country on 9/11 – that are also cauldrons of jihadism.

Furthermore, as I have argued, the real threat to be targeted is sharia-supremacist ideology, which is inherently hostile to the Constitution. Were we to focus our vetting, unapologetically, on that ideology (also known as “radical” or “political” Islam), it would be unnecessary to implement a categorical ban on Muslims or immigrants from majority-Muslim countries. That is critical because non-Islamist Muslims who can demonstrate loyalty to our constitutional principles should not be barred from admission; while Islamists, on the other hand, are not found only in Muslim-majority countries – other things being equal, a sharia supremacist from the banlieues of Paris poses as much of a threat as a sharia supremacist from Raqqa.

Yet, all that can be debated as we go forward. For now, there is no doubt that the executive order temporarily banning entry from specified Muslim-majority countries is both well within President Trump’s constitutional authority and consistent with statutory law.

But read the whole thing here.

# # #

A local union is cutting pension benefits

image credit: aarp

Yesterday, Jazz Shaw at the blog Hot Air reported (via the WaPo) on a development in Ohio:

In Cleveland, the Iron Workers Local 17 union has approved cuts to their pension plan to avoid having it become insolvent. The cuts will affect different workers by varying amounts depending on their individual circumstances, but everyone will be feeling the pinch.

. . .

The first thing to remember is that we’re talking about a private sector labor union, not one for government workers. The effects on retirees are going to be serious to be sure, but what are the other options? The union made promises to the workers which it wasn’t able to keep. This is a system which is much like any sort of general entitlement program in that it always requires growth, or at least stability. You have to have more people paying into the system than drawing out of it and if the numbers contract, the math immediately ceases working. (It’s the old question of how many people can ride in the cart as opposed to the number who are pulling it.)

[Shaw] pointed out the private sector aspect of this because the premise of the government guaranteeing these pension funds was always dubious at best. How is it that the taxpayers are on the hook for these shortfalls when the system becomes insolvent? I realize that’s not a solution, but the problem wasn’t created by the government in the first place and the taxpayers had no seat at the table when the deals were originally negotiated. But that’s not stopping Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown, who is still pushing for a federal bailout of the plan.

The problem gets even more complex when we look at state pension plans which are hung around the necks of taxpayers.

Read the rest of the report here. 

# # #