Count Basie- Flight of the Foo Birds
An evening pause: A nice contrast with last night’s Beatles pause.
Hat tip Edward Thelen.
Year: 2016
Titan’s tallest mountains
After more than a hundred flybys by Cassini of Titan scientists think they have located most of Titan’s mountains, including what they think will be its highest peak.
New Jersey actor sentenced to 10 years for using a prop gun
The coming dark age: An actor now faces ten years in prison because he used a air gun that shoots harmless plastic pellets while shooting a movie in New Jersey.
Read the article. As the writer properly concludes, “no film production company of any size should ever do business in New Jersey.” In fact, when it comes to guns I would avoid this fascist state in any way possible.
Saying “All Lives Matter” is now white supremacy
The coming dark age: A group of sixty professors at American University’s Washington College of Law have signed a letter claiming that to say “All lives matter” instead of “Black lives matter” is an example of “white supremacy.”
Dozens of professors from American University’s Washington College of Law (WCL) openly condemned an unknown student as a white supremacist for posting a sign with the catchphrase “All Lives Matter” on a faculty member’s door.
“The ‘All Lives Matter’ sign might seem to be a benign message with no ill intent, but it has become a rallying cry for many who espouse ideas of white supremacy and overt racism, as well as those who do not believe the laws should equally protect those who have a different skin color or religion,” the professors wrote in a statement to the WCL community.
For college professors to no longer recognize the plain meaning of words, and to instead assign a meaning of their own to those words, for their own political purposes, tells me that if I had a son or daughter attending this university I would pull them out immediately. Not only are students not being educated properly there, they are being taught nonsense and hate.
Another Rosetta close-up of Comet 67P/C-G
Cool image time! As Rosetta completes a several weeks of in-close observations it took the above oblique view (cropped and reduced to show here) of Comet 67P/C-G. The image was taken from about 7.5 miles with a resolution of about 3 feet per pixel. It shows the Imhotep flat area with the large 80-foot-high Cheops boulder in the center. It is worthwhile to compare this image with one taken in January.. Though the angle is far different, you can recognize the same areas in Imhotep where some of the surface has apparently evaporated away.
What I especially like about today’s image is that it really gives one a feel for what it would be like to stand on the surface here. The light gravity allows some strange rock configurations, such as that giant weird balancing outcrop on the horizon. If you were standing in Imhotep that outcrop would hang above you threateningly.
The spacecraft is now moving away from the comet for the next few weeks
Following the brief encounter at these close distances, Rosetta is now heading out on an anti-sunward excursion to around 1000 km to investigate the comet’s wider coma, tail and plasma environment. Today, 24 March, Rosetta is already over 200 km away from the comet. The current plan is for Rosetta to make a 30 km zero phase flyby around 9 April, before entering back into closer bound orbits by 21 April.
New Horizons’ future research goals
On Monday at a planetary science conference Alan Stern, the project scientist for New Horizons, outlined the science goals in studying the Kuiper Belt should the spacecraft’s mission be extened through 2021.
The main goal will be the January 1, 2019 fly-by of Kuiper Belt object 2014 MU69, estimated to be between 12 to 24 miles across. However, the proposal also includes the following:
“In addition to making a close flyby of MU69, we’re also going to be close enough in range to study quite a number of other small KBOs, and some large ones that are on the Pluto scale,” Stern said. New Horizons will be able to study them in ways that could never be accomplished from Earth. The closeness of the spacecraft will enable high resolution observations, and the ability to look for satellites that cannot be seen from Earth observatories or with the Hubble Telescope.
“Because we are looking back on the rest of the solar system, at the Kuiper Belt and the Centaur Population,” Stern said, “we’re going to be able to study another 18 or 20 small bodies to determine whether or not the recently discovered rings around the centaur Chariklo are a common occurrence, or something anomalous. And I don’t know of any other way over the next several years, except through New Horizons, that we can develop a data set like that.”
What I find amazing is that it appears from Stern’s remarks that NASA has not yet approved this proposal. Before the team discovered 2014 MU69, I would have been more skeptical about extending the mission, but since they will be able to do a close fly-by of a type of object never before seen, and considering the time and cost it takes to get to the Kuiper Belt, it seems foolish now to not approve this mission extension.
House proposes killing Commerce Department
In a just released budget resolution, the House budget committee has proposed eliminating the Department of Commerce in an effort to cut costs.
The biggest potential shift from the status quo would be breaking up the $9 billion commerce department. DOC is one of the least-known, and most unloved, of all federal agencies. But it nonetheless oversees a huge scientific portfolio that includes the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and the Census Bureau. Under the heading “options worthy of consideration,” the budget committee suggests moving NOAA to the Department of Interior, placing NIST within NSF, and assigning the Census Bureau, including the massive decennial census, to the Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics. Another commerce agency, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, would become an independent agency.
The obvious goal would be to eliminate the expensive upper management positions at Commerce and thus reduce cost. Such changes however are going to face opposition in the privileged science community. While that community has been unable to sustain the growth of its funding in the past decade, it has successfully prevented the elimination of any program or any significant reduction in the science budgets. We shall see if that record will hold in the coming years, with the electorate appearing to steadily shift more and more to the right.
The article, by Science reporter Jeffrey Mervis, also included this wonderful example of yellow journalism:
The proposed budget resolution talks repeatedly of the need to reduce spending and, in particular, curb the clichéd “waste, fraud, and abuse” that is allegedly rampant across the federal government by killing duplicative or unnecessary programs. [emphasis mine]
I’ve noted Mervis’s agenda-driven writing in the past. In the sentence above he illustrates his unreliability as a reporter. For any educated journalist to consider waste and fraud in the federal government to be “alleged” is to be a person either with his head in the sand or having so strong a bias that he is intentionally misreporting the facts. Sadly, in the case of Mervis and many in today’s so-called elite intellectual community, I think it is both.
Nation’s largest health insurance company wants out of Obamacare
Note: This post was supposed to be published in November, 2015. I just discovered that it had not done so. Though late, the news it contains is still current and important, so I am publishing it now.
Finding out what’s in it: The nation’s largest health insurance company is considering pulling out of the Obamacare exchange because of cost and red ink.
The release added that, “UnitedHealthcare has pulled back on its marketing efforts for individual exchange products in 2016. The company is evaluating the viability of the insurance exchange product segment and will determine during the first half of 2016 to what extent it can continue to serve the public exchange markets in 2017.” The company said it expects “earnings pressure” of $425 million, which “is driven by projected losses on individual exchange-compliant products related to the 2015 and 2016 policy years.”
Insurers have had trouble signing up young and healthy individuals on the Obamacare exchanges, which is necessary to offset the costs of covering older and sicker enrollees. This has forced insurers to hike premiums, raise deductibles, and slash the number of doctors and hospitals offered on its plans. Meanwhile, the Obama administration has cut its enrollment expectations for 2016 to about half of what they were when the the legislation became law.
It appears that even if Congress does nothing, sometime around 2017 Obamacare will force the entire collapse in the health insurance industry. To stay in business under Obamacare, insurance companies have had to increase co-pays and deductibles so much there is increasingly little reason to have an insurance policy at all, especially since the premiums have also skyrocketed.
The biggest irony of all this is that all insurance is beginning to resemble those so-called “junk ” insurance policies that Obamacare banned, These were the inexpensive plans that provided few benefits except coverage for the costs coming from a catastrophic injury or sickness. Today, Obamacare is forcing all insurance to be like this, except that Obamacare has turned these once inexpensive junk policies into very expensive ones.
It’s the Beatles
An evening pause: Broadcast on December 7, 1963 by the BBC, this excerpt from the 30 minute television show before 2,500 members of The Beatles’ Northern Area Fan Club gives us a glimpse into the craziness that heralded the Beatles arrival on the world scene. The clip includes the last third of the show.
Why do these teenage girls remind me of modern voters attending rallies for Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders?
Hat tip Rocco.
An estimated $55 billion in Obamacare waste
Finding out what’s in it: Since its signing Obamacare has caused the government and public to waste approximately $55 billion.
Though most of that number, $45 billion, is an estimate of the amount of money businesses and people have been forced to spend filling out Obamacare paperwork and thus somewhat guesswork, the remaining $10 billion is based on hard data and real waste, such as handing out almost a billion in improper subsidies or spending $2 billion to construct a website that did not work.
But who’s counting? It is more important that we can go to bed at night knowing that the Democrats care about us, and will try anything, even if it is insane or completely stupid, to make us feel better about ourselves.
DOD opens ULA investigation
The deputy inspector general of the Defense Department has notified the Air Force that he is beginning an investigation into ULA and the DOD over their relationship and contract.
He also made it clear that the investigation was sparked by last week’s comments by a ULA executive who subsequently resigned.
This is all a game. The Air Force and ULA have been colluding for years to squeeze out any competition. There is no one in Washington who needs an investigation to find this out. The inspector general will issue a report, the Air Force will admit its error and promise to do better, and they will then try to have things continue as they have.
The one difference, however, will be that SpaceX will be there, providing real competition. Thus, what matters isn’t the investigation by the inspector general. What matters is the existence of a competing company willing to put cost pressure on ULA and the Air Force.
TMT leadership looks at alternatives to Hawaii
Though they have refused to comment publicly, the Facebook page for the Thirty Meter Telescope on Monday showed the telescope’s management visiting the Canary Islands, a potential alternative site to Hawaii.
Their Facebook post serves two purposes. It shows that they mean business when they say they must start considering abandoning Hawaii. It also might force the Hawaiian state government to stop dragging its feet in the permitting process that protesters have forced TMT to go through, a second time.