Year: 2015

Boehner joins Democrats to support funding of Obama amnesty

8:58 am

Working for the Democratic Party: The Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner announced today that he has joined with the Democrats and will allow a vote on a funding bill for the Department of Homeland Security that also funds Obama’s illegal amnesty plan for illegal immigrants.

This flip-flop comes after months of Boehner saying he wouldn’t do this. “The House has acted. We’ve done our job. Senate Democrats are the ones putting us in this precarious position,” Boehner said on Fox News Sunday recently.

It’s unclear whether the vote will pass later on Tuesday, but if it does there are likely to be serious consequences against Boehner for having now flip-flopped into supporting Obama’s executive amnesty.

After this back-stab, I would not be shocked if the Republican caucus tears itself in two as its conservative half tries to get Boehner fired.

Update: The funding bill has passed, with almost 70% of House Republicans voting against it. With numbers like that, it is likely that John Boehner’s days as speaker are numbered. A majority of his own caucus is no longer willing to back him.

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Yutu lives!

8:33 am

Despite an engineering failure that has prevented it from roving after only a few days on the Moon, the Chinese lunar rover Yutu continues to reawaken after each long lunar night, surviving now far longer than its planned three month lifespan.

Since the rover arrived in late 2013, it has now functioned in the hostile lunar environment for more than a year. This, along with other successful long missions, suggests that Chinese space engineering has matured to a point that it has the ability to achieve some significant long term goals.

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Warren to boycott Netanyahu speech

11:25 pm

The modern Democrat: Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) announced today that she will boycott Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress on Tuesday.

Warren voted against the Senate’s new Iran sanctions bill in the Senate Banking Committee in January, one of just four Democrats to oppose legislation that would impose new penalties on Iran in the event it reneges on any nuclear agreement with the United States.

Warren joins a handful of Senate Democratic Caucus members to skip the address, such as Al Franken of Minnesota and Bernie Sanders of Vermont, as well as dozens of House Democrats. Many are skipping because it’s election season in Israel and due to Boehner arranging the speech without consultation with the President Barack Obama, they say.

I single out Warren because she has been touted by many Democrats as their best candidate for President after Hillary Clinton. Yet, she is going to boycott hearing a speech from the only elected leader in the Middle East who happens to be our only reliable ally there. What could he possibly say that she might not like? Might he say that the policy of her Democratic president is dangerous and is allowing Iran, a country that has called for the genocidal destruction of both Israel and the United States, to build its own nuclear bombs? Could it be that she supports Obama’s policy? Her vote on the Iranian sanctions certainly suggests this.

I can tell you that the Democratic argument that John Boehner broke protocol in arranging the speech is petty fiddle-faddle. Considering the threat that Iran poses for the world, and the fact that Israel is our strongest ally to counter that threat, to not attend Netanyahu’s speech for these childish reasons is downright disgraceful. Yet, too many Democrats seem eager to show their hostility to Israel’s leader, while holding out the hand of conciliation to Iran.

Of course, when it comes election time she knows she has nothing to worry about. She knows that American Jews will continue to vote blindly for her and the Democrats.

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Obamacare causes insurance company to lose money

10:10 am

Finding out what’s in it: For the first time in 15 years, Blue Cross/Blue Shield of North Carolina will lose money in 2015 due to Obamacare.

Blue Cross and Blue Shield, the state’s largest health insurer, said Friday that it posted its first financial loss in 15 years as a result of insuring high numbers of older and sicker people under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The Chapel Hill organization signed up 257,704 people under the federal health care law, which requires insurers to provide coverage regardless of a customer’s health condition. New enrollees last year swelled Blue Cross’s covered membership to 3.91 million people, and boosted revenue by 25 percent to an all-time high of $8 billion.

But steep medical claims – for hip and knee replacements, heart procedures, specialty drugs and other costs – drove up medical claims from $5 billion in 2013 to $6.4 billion in 2014. Blue Cross also paid $156 million in ACA-related fees, a new cost for the company.

Federal subsidies under Obamacare are supposed to cover these loses, but then we must ask where is the bankrupt federal government going to get this money? In the end, someone is going to go bankrupt and we will all be worse off.

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SpaceX has another successful commercial launch

9:26 am

The competition heats up: SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket successfully launched its first two-satellite payload to geosynchronouse orbit on Sunday.

The satellites were unusual in that they both have replaced all their chemical engines with ion engines, thus saving weight and cost.

While the satellites will need six to seven times longer to reach the desired orbit, the cost savings is enormous. “The advantage of that, of course, is you don’t carry liquid chemical fuel, which is very heavy,” Betaharon said. “This particular satellite, each of them weigh around 2,000 kilograms. Typically, if you get a satellite like that from other manufacturers, or even from Boeing using chemical propulsion, they would weigh something around 3,500 to 4,000 kilograms, or in some cases maybe more. That’s why, because it’s lower mass, we managed to put two of them on one rocket, which right away reduces your launch costs in half.”

When ABS and Eutelsat signed up for Falcon 9 launch services several years ago, the rocket cost about $60 million. “We paid under $30 million for each satellite, which is almost unheard of,” Betaharon said.

More information about the new satellite designs can be found here.

Nonetheless, the combined weight of the two satellites plus the need to get them to geosynchronous orbit forced SpaceX to forgo another attempt to land its first stage vertical. The rocket needed the fuel to get the satellites where they had to go.

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California bans Christian clubs at its colleges

10:27 pm

Modern fascism: Christian clubs at California colleges have been banned because the clubs insist that their elected leaders must be Christians.

Leaders of Cru, formerly known as Campus Crusade for Christ, as well as the two other Christian clubs at San Luis Obispo that were derecognized – InterVarsity Christian Fellowship and Chinese Christian Fellowship – have insisted that they couldn’t allow any non-Christians to be leaders.

“We have no issue with anybody of any kind of race, religion coming to our weekly meetings and being a part of who we are,” San Luis Obispo Missionary Leader Jamey Pappas said. “It’s a question of who’s going to be leading our students in a Bible Study, mentoring them individually, or deciding what kind of content goes into our weekly meeting, and we want people who agree with what we’re about.”

More evidence that the concept of freedom of association is dead in America, and with it freedom itself. The result here is that it is impossible to have a religious organization on these campuses. (Note that the Islamic clubs have joined with the Christian clubs to fight the policy.)

Since I have no doubt that atheist and gay clubs accepted this policy knowing that college administrators will look the other way if they discriminate because they are considered “politically correct,” I think these religious clubs should test the policy for real. Pick an atheist club and swamp it with religious members so that a religious person gets elected as leader. We will quickly find out that the real intent of these policies has nothing to do with preventing discrimination but to squelch the freedoms of traditional American values in favor of new ideologies.

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Small satellite industry predicted to blossom

2:07 pm

The competition heats up: An industry study now predicts that more than 500 small satellites, including nanosats, cubesats, microsats, and minisats, will be launched in the next five years.

Note however this important detail, highlighted below:

75% of the 510 satellites to be launched during the next five years will be for government civil and defense agencies. Growth in government demand will be stronger than in the commercial world where a total of 130 satellites are expected. “Large constellation projects such as those announced in 2014 by OneWeb and by SpaceX in association with Google have not been included in our forecasts/scenarios for launch by 2019,” said Rachel Villain, Principal Advisor at Euroconsult and Editor of the report. “Large constellation projects could, however, represent a very significant component of launches over the following five year period (2020-2024).” [emphasis mine]

Even though the predicted launches represent a two-thirds increase per year compared to the previous decade, this launch rate does not include the big private constellations that appear almost certain to fly. In other words, all signs point to the possibility that we are about to see a real boom in the space industry.

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