Does this make you feel safer? The TSA spent almost a billion dollars hiring behavior detection officers who then detected zero terrorists.
A Democrat reveals his dislike for democracy: New York Senator Charles Schumer proposes disenfranchising tea party voters in order to weaken their impact at the polls.
He also suggested that the IRS harassment of conservatives, and conservatives only, is a good thing.
Finding out what’s not in it: Enrollees in Obamacare in California are discovering few doctors or hospitals willing to accept their plans.
Worse, they are finding that the lists of doctors and hospitals that supposedly accept Obamacare is wrong.
For his part, Peter Lee, Covered California’s executive director, acknowledged that consumers may be getting misinformation from the state agency or insurer about whether their providers are participating. But, he said, the exchange is prepared to help those consumers get new plans that more suitably meet their needs. “If our directory or the directory of the health plan is wrong and a consumer wants to change plans, we’ll work with them to make sure they can do so,” Lee said in a news call this week. [emphasis mine]
Trouble in Russia: A Kazakhstan political party is demanding the end of all Proton launches from Baikonur.
Though I doubt this party’s radical and somewhat ignorant environmental position will gain much traction in a country where Russia’s spaceport is one of its biggest employees, its existence demonstrates why Russia is working hard to get its new spaceport in Vostochny, Russia, finished as quickly as possible.
Come October 2014 astronomers will attempt to weigh Proxima Centauri, the nearest star.
The uncertainty of science: Stephen Hawking, one of the world’s top experts on black holes, has written a paper stating there are no black holes.
At least, there is no such thing as an event horizon, meaning that black holes are not what scientists have believed.
The competition heats up: Sierra Nevada has now set November 2016 as the date for its first orbital flight of Dream Chaser.
The flight will be unmanned, followed by a manned mission the next year.
Pushback: The conservative target of a fake investigation by a Wisconsin Democratic prosecutor — having won in court — is now threatening to sue if the prosecutor doesn’t shut the investigation down immediately.
Eric O’Keefe, who has been identified in media reports as a target of a secret “John Doe” investigation in Wisconsin, today demanded that state prosecutors end their action against him or face a federal civil rights action. O’Keefe is director of the Wisconsin Club for Growth, which was also targeted for alleged unlawful “coordination” with Governor Scott Walker’s campaign for fiscal reforms. “This investigation is political payback by elected prosecutors against conservative activists for their political successes in Wisconsin,” stated O’Keefe. “They are violating the constitutional rights of private citizens and must be held accountable.”
In a letter to the prosecutors, O’Keefe’s lawyer, Washington attorney David B. Rivkin, states that the probe has no basis in Wisconsin law and violates Mr. O’Keefe’s First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and association. The prosecutors’ legal reasoning, the letter states, “is unsupportable as a matter of law and crystal clear evidence of bad faith.”
“I am confident that any federal court that reviews the facts will see your investigation for what it is, put a stop to it, and hold you publicly accountable,” the letter states.
I have missed the story in which a judge had quashed the prosecutors’ subpoenas, which is good news. That the Wisconsin Club for Growth is going on the offensive now is even better news.
The totalitarians of New York.
It is why I left back in 1998. Amazingly, it is getting far worse with the passing years. See for example this story.
It ain’t an accident, they were brought there by Cygnus as part of an experiment to see how an ant colony adapts to weightlessness.
In celebration of the tenth anniversary of Opportunity’s landing on Mars, the journal Science has published a special section of the newest findings from Mars.
The main conclusion of all this research is that Mars was once potentially habitable, though there is no evidence so far to show that anything actually inhabited it. The data obtained however is now giving scientists clues on the best places to look for the remains of that ancient life, should it exist.
The IRS harassment of conservatives continues.
The massive abuse of government power by the Obama administration against their conservative opponents nationwide makes anything done in New Jersey by Chris Christie’s underlings seem petty and inconsequential.
Banning guns by proxy: Gun manufacturers flee California over its microstamping law.
Smith & Wesson announced it will stop selling its handguns in California rather than manufacture them to comply with the new microstamping law. The other publicly traded firearms manufacturer in the U.S., Sturm, Ruger, also said this month that it will stop new sales to California. The announcement late Wednesday came a week after the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), the trade association for firearms manufacturers, filed suit against California for requiring that all new semi-automatic pistols that are not already on the state’s approved gun roster have the microstamping technology.
Microstamping is a patented process that, in theory, would have a unique code on the tip of a gun’s firing pin that would engrave that information on the casing when fired.
In other words, while the California legislature might want to make believe the technology is practical, the people who have to build and sell the guns know otherwise and can’t do it. So, this law essentially becomes a backdoor ban on guns and the second amendment. If you make it illegal to manufacture and sell guns, it doesn’t matter whether you have a right to own one.
Note also the basic dishonesty of the legislators who passed this law. They knew it was impractical, and did it not to put microstamping on ammo, but to make it impossible to sell guns. Or to put it more bluntly, they lied about what they were doing.
Finding out what’s in it: The credit rating agency Moody’s has downgraded its outlook for health insurancers from stable to negative because of Obamacare.
In other words, the agency now expects many of these companies to go bankrupt because of the costs and regulations imposed on them by the healthcare law.
Aren’t we all glad Obama and the Democratic Party forced this law on us?
For more information about that newly discovered supernova in the nearby galaxy M82 go here and here.
The first link notes that the supernova has brightened to 11.5 magnitude and could get even brighter in the next two weeks. Though still too dim for the naked eye, it is easily bright enough right now for most amateur telescopes and binoculars. How much brighter it will get remains a question.
Using the Herschel Space Telescope astronomers have detected water vapor spurting from Ceres, the solar system’s largest asteroid.
Herschel’s sensors spied plumes during three of the four observation periods. The strength of absorption varied over a matter of hours, a trend probably caused by relatively small sources of water vapour rotating in and out of view of Earth, the researchers say.
Data gathered in March 2013 suggest that the plumes originated from two widely separated, 60-kilometre-wide spots in the dwarf planet’s mid-latitude regions. Together, these spots ejected about 6 kilograms of water vapour into space each second. Neither ground-based observations nor images from the Hubble Space Telescope are keen enough to identify the as-yet-mysterious areas, says Küppers. “We don’t know what these features are, we just know that they’re darker than their surroundings,” he notes.
The NASA probe Dawn will arrive at Ceres early next year, and take a good look at these plumes. Should be exciting.
The competition heats up: Virgin Galactic today announced the successful testing of their own new rocket engine.
Virgin Galactic, the world’s first commercial spaceline, announced today that it has reached a significant milestone in the testing of a new family of liquid rocket engines for LauncherOne, the company’s small satellite launch vehicle. As part of a rapid development program, Virgin Galactic has now hot-fired both a 3,500 lbf thrust rocket engine and a 47,500 lbf thrust rocket engine, called the “NewtonOne” and “NewtonTwo” respectively. Further, the NewtonOne engine has successfully completed a full-mission duty cycle on the test stand, firing for the five-minute duration expected of the upper stage engine on a typical flight to orbit. These tests are being conducted on two new state-of-the-art test stands that the team designed, assembled and installed internally. [emphasis mine]
Though they say that these engines are for their orbital rocket, not SpaceShipTwo, I find it interesting that their development was in-house, not by Scaled Composites which has so far been building everything for Virgin Galactic. Moreover, note the highlighted words, “rapid development program.” Though you should never be leisurely about this stuff in order to compete, giving this particular title to this engine program suggests they are in a particular hurry to develop it.
Both factoids suggest again that they are not happy with the performance of the hybrid engines Scaled Composites built for them, under their direction, and are now working hard to replace them.
You might have noticed a plethora of stories in the last couple of days, reporting claims by NASA and NOAA that 2013 was one of the hottest years ever on record.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on Tuesday released its global temperature figures for 2013. The average world temperature was 58.12 degrees (14.52 Celsius) tying with 2003 for the fourth warmest since 1880. NASA, which calculates records in a different manner, said Tuesday that 2013 was the seventh warmest on record, with an average temperature of 58.3 degrees (14.6 Celsius).
How can this be, if there has been a pause in global warming for the past 17 years, as has been admitted by the UN’s IPCC and climate scientists everywhere?
The answer, in my opinion: outright fraud.
» Read more
A new supernova, bright enough to be visible to amateurs, was discovered last night in the nearby galaxy M82.
A look at China’s plans to develop a heavy-lift rocket.
A new study outlines the problems British researchers had in their 2012 attempt to drill down into a buried Antarctic lake.
The project had been under development for ten years, and yet:
According to the paper, problems started when the boiler that was intended to melt large quantities of snow to provide hot water for the drill failed to work properly because of short-circuiting in its control panel. More severe problems followed. The two parallel drills — one to drill the main borehole to reach the lake, and one to create a reservoir cavity to recirculate drilling water — ran too slowly. Other failures, including of components designed to ensure vertical drilling, exacerbated the problems.
“The drilling was essentially undertaken blindly,” says Siegert. Probably because one or both holes were not drilled vertically, the cavity failed to link with the main borehole. Water also leaked into the cavity drill and froze the hose in the drill hole. Attempts to remove the hose failed, so it had to be cut. At that point, and with not enough fuel left to reach the lake, Siegert gave up.
Seems to me that these problems — some very basic engineering design errors — are a good example of some basic incompetence. If I was providing financial backing to this project I would probably demand that a lot of people be fired before I would give them anymore money.
The report also has this interesting detail which confirms the doubts about the Russian drilling effort:
In 2012, Russian scientists broke into Lake Vostok, by far the largest of Antarctica’s hidden lakes, using a kerosene-fuelled drill. But their samples are spoiled with drill fluid and the bacteria they contain are probably contaminant species.
A U.S. Geological Survey science team has determined that the grizzly bear population has recovered enough that the bear can be taken off the endangered species list.
A report delivered in November by the US Geological Survey’s Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team describes a resilient and healthy bear population that has adapted to the loss of pine nuts by eating more elk and bison, keeping fat stores at levels that allow the bears to survive and reproduce. For Christopher Servheen, a biologist who oversees grizzly-bear recovery efforts at the Fish and Wildlife Service in Missoula, Montana, that is not surprising. “Bears are flexible,” he says. “It’s easier to say what they don’t eat than what they do eat.”
Not surprisingly, environmental activists don’t like this decision. They claim that, wait for it, global warming threatens the bear enough that it should not be delisted.
» Read more
The most pessimistic view: Six likely events that will follow an economic crash.
I have doubts about some of the predicted events, but I have no doubt about the precarious state of the United States’ financial situation, as described here. Nothing good can come from this. Nothing.
Repeal the damn law: A woman spends six weeks trying to cancel an Obamacare insurance policy.
Ms Hill was told by an ObamaCare operator that she needed to call her insurance company, who passed her back to the Federal Exchange. Ms Hill claims the terminate button on Obamacare’s website did not work, and that she spent ‘several hours a day’ on hold with the Health Insurance Marketplace. Finally, Ms Hill drove to her insurance company’s headquarters in Kansas City, 100 miles from her home, and they were able to help her cancel her ‘Obamacare’ plan.
Remember, Obamacare essentially asks the equivalent of the DMV to handle the complex task of running the nation’s health insurance industry. And we all know how efficient the DMV is!
Penn State’s Google Lunar X Prize team has now launched a kickstarter campaign to fund its effort.
Because of a computer reboot, Rosetta’s revival from hibernation came 18 minutes late.
[Rosetta] woke yesterday as planned, to the relief of ESA scientists – but the signal it sent home to confirm it was awake reached Earth late, fraying the nerves of some mission controllers in the meantime. Due to call at 1745 GMT, Rosetta did not announce its revival until 1818. Fifteen minutes could be explained because the spacecraft’s computer checked the on-board clock only every quarter of an hour. The additional 18 minutes, however, was a mystery.
Now, the telemetry has shown that soon after Rosetta’s first revival sequence had started, the on-board computer automatically rebooted and the sequence started again, causing 18 minutes of delay.
It seems all is well now, though the engineers plan to spend some time pinpointing the cause of the reboot.
“The potential for abuse is staggering.”
The words Obamacare and IRS should immediately come to mind.
Theft by government: A village government in New York is trying to take a private grocery using eminent domain in order to replace it with a municipality-owned market.
In a statement, the village said it has “been trying, without success, to engage the Whitneys in substantive discussions” about renovating for the past year. “[A]t various times they have clearly stated their inability or unwillingness to undertake the renovation requirement and despite statements to the contrary, no building plans or architectural drawings of any kind have ever been presented to the village for review,” it said.
But here’s where the story becomes particularly frustrating for Whitney: Four engineers, including two commissioned by the village, reviewed the storm damage on the market and ruled that it was not “substantial,” the store owner’s son, Scott, said. “The repairs that are required due to the flooding . . . do not appear to me to be substantial improvements as defined in the building code,” one of the village-commissioned reports reads.
Nevertheless, despite the findings in the reports, village officials continue to argue that the damage is too much for Whitney to handle. Officials also said the veteran’s submitted plans for repairs are insufficient or incomplete.
A donut-sized rock suddenly appears in front of the Mars rover Opportunity.
NASA announced the discovery of the rock at an event at Caltech in Pasadena this past Thursday night, dubbing the rock “Pinnacle Island.” “It’s about the size of a jelly doughnut,” NASA Mars Exploration Rover lead scientist Steve Squyres told Discovery News. “It was a total surprise, we were like ‘wait a second, that wasn’t there before, it can’t be right. Oh my god! It wasn’t there before!’ We were absolutely startled.”
