io9 has the article New Test Suggests NASA’s “Impossible” EM Drive Will Work In Space.

The EM drive is controversial in that it appears to violate conventional physics and the law of conservation of momentum; the engine, invented by British scientist Roger Sawyer, converts electric power to thrust without the need for any propellant by bouncing microwaves within a closed container. So, with no expulsion of propellant, there’s nothing to balance the change in the spacecraft’s momentum during acceleration. Hence the skepticism.

I have just realized the value of dark energy and dark matter in physics. The answer to every seemingly impossible invention that seems to defy the laws of physics is “but what about dark energy and dark matter?” Since all we know about dark energy and dark matter are their effects on the expansion of the universe, we might as well attribute all unexplained behavior to them. Well, I don’t really mean attribute it to these factors. The issue is that you can’t say anything is impossible when you know you have something that affects physical objects, but you don’t know what that something is. As our <sarcasm>beloved</sarcasm> former Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, would say this is something we know we don’t know. As he would go on to say, what about all the things we don’t know we don’t know?

The New York Times has an opinion piece Bernie Sanders Yells His Mind written by Gail Collins.

Our topic today is: Bernie Sanders for president?

“My fifteen minutes of fame,” the Vermont senator said gruffly over the phone. Gruff is pretty much his normal way of speaking, but Sanders was actually in a good mood at this point in the conversation. Later, the volume would escalate.
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Question: Sanders self-identifies as a “democratic socialist.” Aren’t people going to think that’s a little extreme?

Answer: This week, the governor of Texas announced he was putting a special watch on U.S. military exercises this summer, due to public speculation that the soldiers might take over the state and confiscate everyone’s guns. Also, the Idaho Legislature recently killed a bill that would have provided federal aid in tracking down deadbeat dads, due to concern that it might involve the use of Shariah law. I do not want to hear you calling Bernie Sanders an extremist.

My apologies to my Texas friends for exposing the kind of place they have chosen to live. Some of them deserve it, while others actually try to fight it.

Should I even mention the Talking Points Memo article Shooting Reported At Anti-Islam Group’s Cartoon Contest In Texas? <sarcasm>Where were the Texans’ guns if they thought this event was such a good idea? What’s the right to bear arms for if it isn’t to protect yourself when you have an event that is meant to poke potentially angry people in the eye?</sarcasm> I hope my friends in Garland weren’t too close to the scene.

Thanks to Michael Horan for posting The New York Times item on Facebook.

There is a new Facebook page Sturbridge For Bernie Sanders.

If you want to encourage people of Sturbridge and the surrounding towns to learn about Bernie Sanders, then go to the above link and “Like” the page. Tell others who might become interested in Bernie Sanders to at least take a look at the page.

Elizabeth Warren has a Facebook post about The Washington Post article Battle rages over key Obama trade policy.

A group of legal experts question a key facet of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal.

It just amazes me how in the face of contrary opinion from so many respected experts, that Obama can still think he is right, they are wrong, and they just don’t understand. I wonder if he has been hypnotized.

One excerpt from the article really makes me wonder what on earth the President has been smoking.

The Obama administration would argue that ISDS does not function as a shadow mechanism outside American courts; it provides a fair, stable mechanism for resolving disputes between American companies and other countries’ governments.

“Part of our goal here is to make sure that there is a neutral process that is legally recognized, so that if an arbitrary burden or tax or tariff is imposed on a U.S. company in these countries, that they have recourse to a fair, impartial venue to resolve it,” Obama said recently. “Foreign countries already have that here in the U.S.”

If his goal is to provide a fair and stable mechanism, then why would he upend centuries of work on establishing just such a fair and stable mechanism. Surely as a lawyer and as a scholar of the U.S. Constitution, he must understand all the effort and experimentation that has gone into making our system as fair and stable a mechanism as we have been able to figure out how to do so far. That’s not to say that we can’t come up with additional ways to make it more fair and more stable. However, President Obama seems to be quite willing to undo all the effort that has been made so far.

Remember the last President who thought that we needed to undo 50 years of precedent on how to regulate banks. The exact disaster that those precedents had prevented from recurring for 50 years were the result of getting rid of those regulations. I am talking Bill Clinton here. Why is President Obama so stubbornly anxious to create a disaster larger than the one Clinton created? Is this some kind of contest?

Politicus USA has the article Chief Justice Roberts Admits Conservatives Believe Politicians Should Serve The Rich.

Although it appeared that all of the Court’s conservatives believe campaign finance laws and regulations have outlived their relevance in American politics, Roberts agreed with liberals that “States may regulate judicial elections differently than they regulate political elections, because the role of judges differs from the role of politicians. Politicians are expected to be responsive to the preferences of their supporters. Indeed, such responsiveness is key to the very concept of self-governance through elected officials. The same is not true of judges. In deciding cases, a judge is not to provide any special consideration to his campaign donors. Our precedents applying the First Amendment to political elections have little bearing on the issues here.”

No, I am afraid that Roberts does not understand the role of politicians and what we expect of them. He also misunderstands the “very concept of self-governance through elected officials.” The article does not specify exactly what Roberts fails to understand. So let me explain exactly what is wrong with what Roberts says. Politicians are expected to be responsive to the voters. That is why the election officials are supposed to count ballots, not campaign contributions to decide who wins an election.

Supporters and donors are important because they help you get votes, but it is the votes and voters who cast them that are supposed to have the final say. If you get the votes, but consistently fail to look out for the interests of the people who voted to make you win the election, then this is a failure of self-governance. This type of politician is not giving proper consideration to the selves that are supposed to be governing through the representation of the people that they elect.

With all the supposed advice and consent of the Senate, how do we select Supreme Court Justices that have so little understanding of what our Constitution says?

The Ed Show has the article Bernie Sanders out-raises Republicans in first day of campaign. I suppose the horse-racey type of coverage of the campaign can be heartening to the fans of Bernie Sanders. I’d much rather watch the issue oriented interview that went along with the article. The issues are what will get him elected. Coverage of his money raising should only be interesting to a small number of inside players.

If you watch the video in my previous post Bernie Sanders’ Press Conference Announcing His Candidacy, you will hear these words from Bernie Sanders.

And I say this to the media. I hate and detest these 30 second ugly negative ads. I believe that in a democracy, what elections are about are serious debates about serious issues, not political gossip, not making campaigns into soap operas, This is not the Red Sox versus the Yankees. This is the debate over major issues facing the American people. … But I would hope, and I ask the media’s help on this, allow us to discuss the important issues facing the American people and let’s not get hung up on political gossip, or the other soap opera aspects of modern campaigns.

Democracy Now broadcast the video and has an article WATCH: Baltimore Prosecutor Charges Six Police Officers, Calls Freddie Gray’s Death a “Homicide”.

Watch full press conference by Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby when she announced charges against six police officers, including one with murder, in the death of Freddie Gray, the 25-year-old African-American man who was arrested and suffered a fatal neck injury while riding in a moving police van.

I was pleased to see how professionally this conference was handled. I appreciated very much The absence of any attempt to justify the behavior of the officers involved. At the same time, it was well worth hearing the respect that Marilyn Mosby showed for the presumably good police personnel that work for the various agencies in Baltimore.

Now I have some hope that justice will be done.

C-Span broadcast the press conference that Bernie Sanders held.

To appreciate this candidacy, you have to hear Bernie Sanders in his own words.

If Bernie Sanders’ message is going to reach the audience that needs to hear it, then we in the grassroots are going to have to take responsibility for making it happen.

It is becoming clear that the media wants to pretend this never happened. The Google News page hardly even mentions this event at the time I am writing this blog post. Their top article was something about football. The only mention of the Sanders’ candidacy was a reference to an entirely bogus opinion piece in The New York Times, Today in Politics: Sanders Offers Clinton Both a Potential Foil and a Pitfall.

This kind of press coverage by Google and The New York Times is the kind of coverage that Bernie Sanders specifically asked the media to rise above. In the video of the conference you can hear him tell a news person that his question is the wrong kind of question, and then he told him what the right question would be.

Not only is Bernie Sanders the Koch brothers worst nightmare (see the Politicus USA story, On Day One Of His Presidential Campaign, Bernie Sanders Is The Kochs Worst Nightmare), but the press is going to find that he is their nightmare too. When the public finally sees a clear demonstration of how little the media want to give them the information they need, they will rise up in rebellion against that media. The internet is not the newspapers’ biggest threat. Their biggest threat is the lack of quality of the product they want us to buy.

Bernie Sanders announced on his Facebook page that he is running for President of the United States.

I am running for President of the United States because America needs a political revolution. We need a government which represents all of us, and not just a handful of billionaires. In this campaign we won’t have the support of the big-money interests, Wall Street or the military-industrial complex. That’s why I need you to join me in an unprecedented grass-roots effort. Sign up at my new website – BernieSanders.com

I take this campaign very seriously. It is not a campaign to move some other candidate in a desired direction, It is a for real campaign to become President and finally put the course of this nation back on the right track.

When we campaigned for Barack Obama in his first campaign, we knew that the nation was in serious trouble. It wasn’t really obvious how serious the trouble was until after Barack Obama actually won the election. By the time he was sworn in, it wasn’t even obvious that the world economy would avoid its destruction.

Now that we know the history of the period and the aftermath, we can appreciate that the change Obama promised was not enough. We can no longer afford to have a President who fails to see just how crucial it is to rein in the power of the oligarchs. A President who refuses to prosecute criminal behavior on Wall Street, and one who thinks we are wrong to oppose an even more devastating trade pact than we have ever had before is not the kind of President we can afford to elect for the foreseeable future.

If anybody who is politically to the right of Bernie Sanders were to get elected President, the prospects for this country would be very dim indeed. If you think that more bipartisanship and splitting the differences between the two opposing sides is what we need, then you just don’t appreciate how far our country has deteriorated. If you were born after 1980, then I can understand why you have no personal knowledge of what this country once stood for. As I believe Bernie Sanders has said, we won’t have too many more chances to save this country.

The Daily Kos has the article Jon Stewart on Baltimore and the police brutality lottery.

Here is the video that is the subject of the article.

This is the commentary we have needed to hear that I have not found at any other source yet. Why is it that only a comedian who, among all the people in the media, seems able to see the forest for the trees? I am sure the people who live the situation in Baltimore have little trouble seeing that forest.