Finding out what’s in it: An analysis across 49 states reveals that Obamacare cause premiums to rise by 41%.
Interestingly, a handful of blue states, where insurance is already the most heavily regulated, benefit from Obamacare, with their rates dropping. Most everyone else, however, gets creamed with higher costs.
Obama lies again, claiming in a speech yesterday that he never really said “If you like your plan you can keep your plan. Period.” dozens of times.
The dishonesty is breath-taking. Worse is the willingness of so many people to accept it.
Students crash rockets into the ground on purpose! With video.
In what at first glance seems like a terrible sense of direction, in March students from the University of Washington fired rockets from kites and balloons at an altitude of 3,000 ft (914 m) straight into the ground at Black Rock, Nevada: a dry lake bed in the desert 100 mi (160 km) north of Reno. This may seem like the ultimate in larking about, but it’s actually a serious effort to develop new ways of collecting samples from asteroids.
At the same time announcing that a third powered test flight of SpaceShipTwo will occur in about a month, Virgin Galactic has now admitted that commercial flights will not occur in 2013.
For its next science mission the European Space Agency (ESA) has now decided to give first priority to an X-ray space telescope.
They have demoted a space-based gravity wave detector to second place. As is typical for ESA, the pace here is quite slow, as both missions are now scheduled for launch in 2028 and 2034, decades away.
The competition heats up: India successfully launched its first probe to Mars today.
The mission, also known in India as Mangalyaan (which means “Mars-craft”), has at the moment only reached Earth orbit. To get to Mars, it must still complete an additional engine firing on November 30.
Some minor news on the “If you like your healthcare plan, you get to keep your healthcare plan” front:
I am sure all those people are thrilled by this news.
Scientists now estimate that one in five sunlike stars have Earthlike planets in the habitable zone.
This conclusion is entirely statistically based, and should be treated with some skepticism. Still, it seems reasonable, and I think it is likely to be a close approximation of the truth, when we finally begin to gather some real data.
“The biggest failure of Obamacare: Increasing the number of uninsured.”
The author outlines in great detail the numerous failures of the law before noting how it will only increase the numbers who don’t have insurance rather than decrease those numbers as touted by Democrats. And it will do so just before the 2014 elections.
He obviously must be a racist!
And in related news, another expert estimates that only 129 million people will lose their health insurance plans because of Obamacare.
The quote comes from an article in a mainstream newspaper, not a conservative new media website, which suggests that those low information Democratic voters might actually be rethinking their voting habits because of Obamacare. That article itself, a reasonably detailed, accurate, and generally negative description of Obamacare, suggests that even the mainstream leftwing press is recognizing the truth of the situation.
Leftwing tolerance: Twitter has repeatedly suspended @mycancellation, an account critical of Obamacare that is gathering images of insurance cancellation letters.
Higgins speculated about why the account was canceled on the website Ricochet.com. “Since we haven’t abused any of Twitter’s (seemingly quite subjective) standards, either someone at Twitter objects to the real cost of these ‘liked insurance I wanted to keep’ cancellations being given a human face,” Higgins wrote, “or there is an organized campaign by Obamacare-reality-deniers to spam Twitter with false claims of abuse. Either way, keep those photos coming!”
India has begun the countdown for the November 5 launch of its first Mars orbiter.
Just today, spacetoday.com lists fourteen different stories in the Indian press about this mission, all enthusiastic, thus indicating the excitement in that country over space exploration and this mission in particular. Nor is this event unusual. I’ve noted before how space happy India is. They not only want to catch up and pass their neighbor China, they want to catch up with the United States and Russia. Should be fun to watch.
