After all the bad news from the Supreme Court, a small win

In a loss for the Obama administration, the Supreme Court ruled that the EPA unreasonably interpreted the Clean Air Act when it decided to set limits on the emissions of toxic pollutants from power plants without first considering the costs of the industry to do so.

At least there is some brake on the legislation pouring from the bureaucracy, although I'm sure those crafty paper pushers will find another way to cripple the economy, in the left's continued push in their plan to implement a Cloward-Piven economic and societal collapse.

After all, a brake is needed since everybody thinks they have legislative power nowadays: Congress, naturally, but very unnaturally there is the President, with his executive orders, the bureaucracy, and the Courts.

Don't like what Congress passed?  Get the prez to change it by executive order, or the bureaucrats by rules and regulations, or the courts by interpretation of intents and feelings.

Meanwhile, the rest of us obey what we think is the law, go to work, pay our taxes and raise our families best we can.  God help the elites when all of us bitter clingers decide we are tired of their bunk and funk.

Get your woodpiles stocked up and your fuzzy slippers ready.

The UK MET office has published a study which suggests solar activity is currently plummeting, the fastest rate of decline in 9300 years. The study also raises the odds of Maunder Minimum style conditions by 2050 from 8% to 15 – 20%.

The Maunder Minimum coincided with the middle part of the Little Ice Age, during which Europe and North America were subjected to very cold winters. A causal connection between low sunspot activity and cold European winters has recently been made using the longest existing surface temperature record, the Central England Temperature record  and also using the ERA-40 re-analysis dataset.  A potential explanation of this has been offered by observations by NASA's Solar Radiation and Climate Experiment, which suggest that solar UV output is more variable over the course of the solar cycle than scientists had previously thought.

Some scientists hypothesize that the dense wood used in Stradivarius instruments was caused by slow tree growth during the cooler period. Instrument maker Antonio Stradivari was born a year before the start of the Maunder Minimum.

Mondays, they're like that

Swimming hole of dreams

Littoral Combat Ship 5 Milwaukee side launch

Freckles, they are good.

Funny

• “Adam and Eve on a raft and wreck ’em”: two scrambled eggs on toast
• “Burn one, take it through the garden, and pin a rose on it”: hamburger with lettuce, tomato, and onion
• “Burn the British and draw one in the dark”: English muffin, toasted, with black coffee
• “Adam’s ale, hold the hail”: water, no ice
• “Give it shoes”: an order to go
• “Honeymoon salad”: “lettuce alone”
• “Life preservers”: doughnuts
• “Noah’s boy on bread”: ham sandwich
• “Put out the lights and cry”: liver and onions
• “Zeppelins in a fog”: sausages and mashed potatoes.

Via Futility Closet

Launching stuff into space isn't easy.

An unmanned American Falcon-9 rocket has broken apart in flames minutes after lifting off from Cape Canaveral in Florida.

Debris from the SpaceX vehicle tumbled out of the sky into the Atlantic Ocean.

The rocket, which had 18 straight successes prior to Sunday's flight, was in the process of sending a cargo ship to the International Space Station.

As well as carrying supplies for the astronauts, the Falcon had also been transporting a new docking port. 

"The vehicle has broken up," said Nasa commentator George Diller, as TV images showed the white rocket falling to pieces.

"We appear to have had a launch vehicle failure," he added.

The problem occurred 139 seconds into the flight, just before the first-stage of the rocket was about to separate from the upper-stage, or top segment of the Falcon-9. 

"There was an overpressure event in the upper-stage liquid oxygen tank," tweeted SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. 

"Data suggests counterintuitive cause. That's all we can say with confidence right now. Will have more to say following a thorough fault tree analysis."

She loves it, I can tell.

Hold my beer and watch this.

Sometimes the hard lessons are the best ones.  I wonder how that slime water tastes?

Reminds me of Mono Lake

The Uvs Nuur Basin sits on the northern edge of the Central Asian steppes, bounded on all sides by mountains. Though largely arid, the basin is dotted with water. A large salt lake, the Uvs Nuur Lake, sits at the center of the basin, and several smaller lakes are scattered across the 600 kilometers east to west and 120 kilometers north to south that make up the basin. Rivers, the largest of which is the Tes-Khem River, run from the surrounding mountains into the basin, but no rivers flow out of the basin, making it an enclosed basin. This image shows one of the smaller lakes near the western edge of the basin.

The sapphire waters are nestled against the southern face of the Tannu Ola Range, which forms the northern edge of the Uvs Nuur Basin. The angle of the Sun on the mountains’ steep peaks and ridgelines creates sharp lines and angles that color the rocky landscape shadowy black to pale tan. The mountains block moist air from the north, leaving the entire Uvs Nuur basin drier than the land on the north side of the range. This rainshadow effect is evident even in the small area shown in this image. The northern side of the Tannu Ola Range is much greener than the tan desert landscape to the south. The mountains also form a boundary between the taiga (evergreen forests) of southern Siberia and the deserts and steppes (grasslands) of Central Asia.

Since little rain falls in the basin, the most vibrant green in this image comes from the wetlands that surround rivers flowing into the small lake. A web of bright green lines the river that flows in from the west, culminating at a broad green delta. Other wetlands cluster around rivers on the northeast and southern sides of the lake. Possibly the most striking feature of this image, the wetlands are an important wildlife habitat. Streaks of white running across the desert are likely seasonal streams that flow when snow melts off the mountains in the spring. The Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER), flying on NASA’s Terra satellite, captured this image in the late summer on September 4, 2001.

Via NASA

Cultural confusion

Gimme a big pile.

Awesome aeronautic tech

Via Xbrad

The only way to fly

Gun Porn

Ruger Charger, custom stock