When I was about six I caught some sort of hallucinatory fever that convinced me evil vines and creepers were taking over everything and we had to evacuate the planet.

My mother was trying to get me to sleep it off and I kept screaming at her "You don't understand, we have to get to NASA! The plants are coming!"

Dragon capture was successful too this morning.
some highlights (Nasa): https://youtu.be/PbXKCUH6h28

Watching this live was awesome. NASA has some good footage of the launch and landing here.

Christ....

Odd how Republicans always scream about "redistribution of wealth", but are fine with the fact that most employers no longer pay living wages the way they used to. They are fine if it's some rich guy taking his wealth generated by his employees' hard work for himself, but god forbid that the government take anything to help those that rich guy is leaving behind. Over half the people who work for Walmart qualify food stamps (only about 30% actually take it), despite the fact Walmart's profits are so high it could pay them all living wages, give them benefits, higher more, give more hours, and still make a huge profit while not raising prices... but it's the people needing food stamps that are bad, not the people who own and operate the company and take so much from their workers.

The one true small government candidate that the Republicans had was Rand Paul, and they rejected him for big government, tough talk, candidates that capitalize on their fears... most of which are fairly unjustified. Americans aren't lining up on the streets to get the sort of jobs that they accuse Mexican's of coming here to take. Our own actions of telling Muslims how to live is the reason they want to kill us, leave them alone and govern themselves... stop preemptively attacking... you know be more Christ like who wouldn't support such things...

And as @oritteropo basically noted, Reagan was far to the left what today's Republican party is. Reagan wouldn't even get through the Primary process. Fox News, Rush and all of them would be ripping him a new asshole for not being "conservative enough". Obama is far closer to Reagan style politics and economics than most today's primary candidates. McCain once upon a time was close to Reagan, but he swung to the right to appeal to the extreme right base, and then added an idiot running mate. Had he ran down the center as he used to be, and got a centralist running mate, he would have had a chance of winning... though Obama sort of captured a hope for progressive change that never came, he turned out to be a Democrat in Name Only and was closer to a Reagan Republican than a true progressive.

Let's also not forget that Congress controls the purse strings and the US economic outlook (at least to what degree the government can, since the rest is in the hands of investors and business owners). Congress has been obstructionist for the last 6 years, and haven't allowed ANY of Obama's policies through, any of his attempts to help fix the economy. Want to blame somebody in the government for the mess, blame Congress, not Obama... if they attempted his stuff, then yes it would be his fault, but they haven't tried a single one of them. You can't say no to trying something, then when what you did instead doesn't work blame the person you said no to.

For the price of the F35 program so far, a plane that only barely passed some of it's flight tests, the rest still failing, we could have bought every homeless person a $600,000 home.... in this area a $150,000 home is very nice (good 3 bedroom home, nice safe neighborhood with good schools), let alone what $600,000 would get you... for the price of it this year, we could fund the school lunch program for 24 years. Now to be fair, I haven't fully vetted those two "facts" myself, but what I have vetted, is for the price of the war in Iraq from 2001 to 2011, we paid more than NASA's entire history, even after adjusting for inflation. It's all a question of priorities. Republican's don't care how much the military costs the taxpayer, but suggestions to help the people being left behind as the rich take more and more for themselves (redistributing the wealth generated by their workers to themselves, rather than their workers) and suddenly they start screaming bloody murder.

Every time a Republican opens their mouth and spouts such things like this video I hate their gullibility... and all too often they talk about their faith and Christ... and I've already covered how the Republican views are 100% opposed to the teachings of Christ and it's why I first lost faith in God as he'd be screaming at them and trying to convict them that their views are wrong were he real. Don't just trust the first few Google results you see, as they filter their results to appeal to you and your views. Don't listen to the echo chamber. Learn to truly vet sources and understand what is actually going on. Don't parrot claims about a "liberal media" or whatever, when over 95% of the news sources out there are controlled by the same 5 companies, none of which have an incentive on letting people know just how bad they are being fucked by the business interests in this country... supporting gay marriage, supporting a minimum level of help isn't liberal, it's being a decent person... being against equal rights under the law because somebody sins differently than you, or not wanting to help somebody because they aren't working 80-100 hours a week is being a heartless asshole. But feel free to keep living in your echo chamber of stupidity, "You are a sad, strange little man, and you have my pity."

Holy Crap! I better get my ass down there and claim that 1/5 that's left. It might not be too long before it's useable land, perhaps the most inhabitable land left, certainly the most inhabitable unclaimed land on the planet....unless, that is, the ocean currents stop, then it might actually get COLDER there.

That's not science fiction fantasy or a problem we might face a thousand years down the road, it's a real predicted possibility in the near future...right now, in the middle of winter, it's well above freezing in the Arctic,

and it's cold arctic water that drives the ocean currents. If there's no cold water in the arctic, there's no ocean current, and the oceans 'die' fairly quickly, with everything else to follow shortly thereafter from toxic gasses if not starvation.

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2004/05mar_arctic/

just saw this today on my feed and that the federal government has issued a no fly zone.which will be in place for months!

estimations on the total cost and impact are surpassing BP horizon's failure in the gulf of mexico.

NASA has applied to break the no-fly in order to fly drones and collect as much data as they can.this is a fucking ecological disaster of epic proportions.

christ on a stick.....

Your video, NASA | Thermonuclear Art – The Sun In Ultra-HD (4K), has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

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I'll cover IUD's first. While there is some evidence that the older style copper ParaGard might have a slightly increase in preventing a fertilized egg from implanting, the evidence for the Mirena. Here are two medical journals documenting as such:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/4018277
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.3109/13625180903519885
If those are too much reading, they are summarized in http://videosift.com/video/Myths-About-IUDs

Remember Google gives personalized search results. No two people get the same results, even when signed out of Google... More details at http://videosift.com/video/There-are-no-regular-results-on-Google-anymore

I'd also agree that there are many things America gets right. Overall it's a good country.

And I think I started out by pointing out it isn't about guns, or just about guns.

Now I'm not sure what you mean assigning attributes to the right. I was pointing out policies that are consistent with the conservative right, Republican platform positions that are not pro-life.

The Death Penalty. This is a typically Republican strong stance position. And has been at various times part of the party's official platform. The Democrat party official position supports the death penalty too, after a DNA testing and post-conviction review. The point isn't wither or not the Death Penalty is right or wrong, I'd personally argue it's wrong, it's the claim of being pro-life while supporting the death penalty. There can be no way to reconcile those two positions.

One needs only to look at how Bush and the present day regime of Republicans in Washington think of handling issues in the Middle East to see what that they support a strong military and an interventionist doctrine (http://www.ontheissues.org/Celeb/Republican_Party_War_+_Peace.htm). One of the key factors of the Bush Doctrine is preemptive strikes. While one normally wouldn't cite Wikipedia, I'll let their page on the Bush Doctrine and their references clear things up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_Doctrine. Heck Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize largely just because he wasn't Bush... sadly he did little to lower US involvement in the Middle East, a situation we should have left alone ages ago. Again the Democrats aren't as peace loving as they should be, and generally the most peace loving people in Congress tend to be Libertarians (who object more to the expense of war than war itself, and love pointing out how the war in Iraq from 2001 to 2011 cost more than NASA's entire history to that point, even after adjusting for inflation (https://www.nationalpriorities.org/cost-of/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA)) and Libertarian leaning Republicans like Ron Paul, and the Congressional Progressive Caucus (http://cpc.grijalva.house.gov/). Again, war isn't pro-life, it is perhaps one of the most anti-life things one can support short of supporting murder itself.

It's also Republicans, aka the right, that are trying to undo the Affordable Health Care Act, a program that ironically enough is modeled after the ones they tried to pass twice under Bush Sr and once under Clinton as to oppose Democrat plans to push for a Single Payer system. Prior to the passing of Obamacare, the US was spending nearly twice as much on healthcare as a percentage of it's GDP than the next nation, and getting only the 37th best results . Just listen to the crowd at the September 12 2008 Republican debate that chant over and over "let him die" as a solution to a guy who needs medical care but elected not to buy private insurance. These same people are the one's who claim to be pro-life. Affordable health care should be a right, as it is in every civilized nation but the US. Obamacare is far from ideal, but much better than the previous policy of only those with good jobs could afford health care everyone else, die or go bankrupt, driving the costs of healthcare up more. One can't say they are pro-life and oppose affordable healthcare, including for services you don't support such as IUDs (it doesn't matter that I object to our overly huge military budget that is much bigger than the next several nations combined, so it shouldn't matter if some medical services such as IUDs are supported), as quality of life matters as much as being alive.

Related to guns however is the Republican stance on stand your ground. Watch Fox News and how they defend the use of guns, or how mass shootings would be avoided if people were carrying concealed weapons and could stop the shooters... again escalating things to a death penalty. Now in the case of a mass shooter, ideally you want to take them down alive, but if death is the only option, then I personally don't object. However stand your ground typically expands to home invasion, where criminals typically aren't looking kill, just rob the place. Here they defend the homeowner's right to shoot to kill (I've been in firearm safety classes, generally the aim is to aim for the center of mass, which will likely result in death, but the odds of making a shot at the legs to impede the crooks is very low, so if you shoot you have to assume it is to kill). This position is contrary to the pro-life stance. All life is equal... which could get into a whole other argument about how they don't value immigrants, especially illegal immigrants, people who just want to improve their lives by moving to what they hope is a better country that will allow for a better opportunity for them and their families, but the Republicans are fighting hard to stop them from improving their lives here just because an accident of birth made them born in another country than the US... heck just look at the way Republicans lined the buses of refugee children fleeing war and gang torn areas of Latin America and they shouted at the children.... children... to go home that nobody wanted them. That isn't a pro-life statement, to tell a child that nobody wants them. The pro-life position would be to want to nurture and protect the children fleeing a dangerous area... We should be moving to a world without borders, as that is the pro-life position, to realize we are all humans, and that we all must share this world, and that we should do all we can to protect one another and this world and all that inhabits it (except mosquitoes, roaches, most parasites, etc... lol)

As to high poverty rates, the Republican policy of trickle down economics helps drive that. Helps spread the ever growing income and wealth gaps in the US. The Walmart heirs alone have more wealth than the bottom 40% of the US population (http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/jul/31/bernie-s/sanders-says-walmart-heirs-own-more-wealth-bottom-/). Now true, some could argue it isn't trickle down economic that is causing the growing wealth and income gaps, but the correlation is very strong, and one is hard pressed to find any other causative points beyond the rich paying less and less to their workers while taking more and more for themselves while the government eases the tax burden on the rich more and more.

Overall I think it's clear that the people who vote Republican because they are "pro-life" are hypocrites given the party's positions in key issues that aren't pro-life. I'm sure many, especially those on the right would disagree. They'd argue the death penalty is needed to discourage others from killing and therefore protects life, and that preemptive strikes ala the Bush Doctrine keep another 9/11 from happening (although the counter to that is fairly easily that we make more extremist the more we use those strikes). So one's mileage may very. For me, I think they are hypocritical saying they are pro-life if they don't value that life as much as their own after they are born.

Wow... even if this is still only a concept, it already makes NASA's last hedgehog robot look kind of shit.

While I am 100% on board with the "carbon bad, not carbon good, global warming = real, made by man and a real prick of a problem" message, the biggest fault made by people like Maher etc in prosecuting their case to the "sceptics" is reliance on bad information.

For example, the sums have been done on solar and wind, and generally speaking, wind is only borderline viable for supporting a society (and that's only if you don't add the cost of some form of buffering/storage). Solar, particularly home roof grade, is fucking awful, and essentially a waste of time compared to tracking mass production arrays. In terms of energy to build/install/maintain/remove, it barely pays for itself. Solar thermal is also more efficient (helios arrays etc), but the two best bang for buck technologies for producing massive amounts of power at a very low carbon cost are nuclear and hydro.

And they are two technologies that people seem to want to get rid of. Germany shuttered it's nuke capability after Fukushima (and added more coal capacity). Italy's solar market has fallen in a heap, France is almost carbon neutral only because it is predominately nuke powered. One of the original climate change warriors, Dr. James Hansen of Nasa, is fully supportive of nuclear power, and get's constantly lambasted by green types because they do not want nuclear power to play a part.

Refutation of solid science and willful ignorance is not solely the province of people who deny climate change, and it's no less deplorable.

That's only because NASA secretly scattered fake Apollo landers there with the help of grey aliens and stargates!

Original Space X Broadcast with more info. Like and share to show support maybe?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZeiBFtkrZEw

Nasa Broadcast from a different, more clearly visible angle.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2K030HRTutU&feature=youtu.be&t=133


I wonder what an equivalent pile of rocket-shaped money would look like upon breaking up..

@charliem,

Energy is absolutely a better measure and marker of climate change than temperature. I started there since the video did. In reality though, everything in climate change is solely about the energy balance at the Top Of Atmosphere. More TOA energy in and temps go up in the long term, less and temps go down. It's the very foundation of climate change.

The climate models that your links look to for projections of things like methane thresholds are based on modelled temperature predictions. The IPCC notes the following on the state of the art in climate models:
For instance, maintaining the global mean top of the atmosphere (TOA) energy balance in a simulation of pre-industrial climate is essential to prevent the climate system from drifting to an unrealistic state. The Models used in this report almost universally contain adjustments to parameters in their treatment of clouds to fulfil this important constraint of the climate system (Watanabe et al., 2010; Donner et al., 2011; Gent et al., 2011; Golaz et al., 2011; Martin et al., 2011; Hazeleger et al., 2012; Mauritsen et al., 2012; Hourdin et al., 2013).
http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/wg1/WG1AR5_Chapter09_FINAL.pdf
It's in Box 9.1

So, climate models currently FAIL to predict TOA energy accurately and hand tuning is required for modelling temperatures into the known past in order to avoid unrealistic states because the TOA energy is wrong. Maybe we aught not panic just yet on extrapolations from that base. I'm not calling climate models garbage, rather they are a learning tool for climate processes and one lesson is that we have a long ways to go in understanding the central component of TOA energy balance. If you go to google scholar and lookup the references from the IPCC assertions you'll find that the modellers acknowledge that most models still either leak or create energy from nothing. As in, even conservation of energy is imperfect in them still.

Your cursory glance approach is a problem, the devil is in the details.

Looking at energy further from NASA's numbers also tells us that the net contribution to TOA energy trapping from the CO2 we've added in the last 100 years is about 3W/m-2 globally. The global TOA energy imbalance is about 0.5W/M-2. In other words, if we could magically remove all the CO2 we've added to the atmosphere, we'd suddenly have a global energy imbalance at TOA of -2.5W/M-2. That brings two things to mind.
1.The enormous energy imbalance you want to call a catastrophe is 0.5W/M-2, but merely rolling back to 1900 CO2 concentrations today would yield a negative energy imbalance 5 times as large.
2.Of the 3W/M-2 that our actions have pushed on the planet, natural factors(warming and other unknowns) have already balance out 2.5W/M-2 of the imbalance, today.

You also might wanna check how much energy is in the oceans on the whole. If you take the increase in energy as a percentage of OCH instead of straight joules you'll find the trend is << than 1% annually.

Yes, of course Cruz is a climate denying nutbag and that is what this is REALLY about, despite his rhetoric.
Not the total schooling I was hoping for, but Bolden made a great point, if I may paraphrase him:

Yes, NASA is about space exploration, but we can't explore space without a launchpad. Earth is our launchpad.