Category: Points of Information

Very brief descriptions, with appropriate links, of current or recent news items.

The law gives the government the final say on how your doctor treats you.

6:54 pm

Obama’s next Obamacare lie: Despite a promise by Obama that Obamacare would not come “between you and your doctor,” the law gives the government the final say on how your doctor treats you.

Section 1311(h)(1)(B) of the health law gives the secretary of Health and Human Services blanket authority to dictate how doctors treat patients. Not just patients in government programs like Medicare and Medicaid, but patients with private plans they pay for themselves. On Dec. 2, 2013, we learned from the Federal Register that the rules are now being written. Starting in 2015, insurance companies will be barred from doing business with doctors who fail to comply. The rules will be offered in the name of ensuring “health-care quality,” which of course could mean anything.

“The powers given to the secretary are so broad, he or she could literally dictate how all physicians nationwide practice medicine,” warns Congressman Phil Gingrey (R. Georgia), himself a physician. Gingrey is sponsoring a bill to repeal Section 1311(h)(1)(B). Otherwise, he says, the HHS secretary — a Washington bureaucrat with no medical training — could, for example, bar doctors from doing routine mammogram screenings until female patients turn 50. In short, the federal government will be calling the shots on what patients get.

It appears that Sarah Palin’s death panels are coming, despite the denials of Obama, the Democrats, and their toadies in the media.

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Scientists tell the truth.

8:46 am

Scientists tell the truth.

I especially like this one: “We assume 50 Ivy League kids represent the general population because actual ‘real people’ can be sketchy and expensive.”

Recently there were two college students with me on a cave trip and they were talking about their lab work and said the exact same kind of thing: Sometimes the parameters of an experiment are chosen not for scientific reasons but for convenience or emotions irrelevant to the experiment.

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“Unfortunately, it’s easier for our franchisees to open a restaurant in Siberia than in California.”

12:37 am

“Unfortunately, it’s easier for our franchisees to open a restaurant in Siberia than in California.”

Kind of sums everything up, doesn’t it? And unless the American public starts to vote aggressively for freedom and less government — even if that means their favorite programs or benefits might be cut — it ain’t gonna get better.

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How global warming activists ended up getting stuck in the ice fields surrounding Antarctica.

8:45 pm

How global warming activists ended up getting stuck in the ice fields surrounding Antarctica.

The first error expedition leaders made was under-estimating the prevailing sea ice conditions at Mawson Station, their destination. The scientists seemed to be convinced that Antarctica was a warmer place today than it had been 100 years earlier, and thus perhaps they could expect less sea ice there. This in turn would allow them to charter a lighter, cheaper vessel.

And then there’s this:

Why the vessel got trapped in the first place may be because [project leader and professor Chris] Turney never bothered to look at sea ice charts, which showed near record high levels of sea ice surrounding Antarctica. Moreover, Turney even denied that the overall sea ice trend was expanding around the continent. Fox News writes, “Turney said it was ‘silly’ to suggest he and 73 others aboard the MV Akademic Shokalskiy were trapped in ice they’d sought to prove had melted. He remained adamant that sea ice is melting, even as the boat remained trapped in frozen seas.”

Did he expect to find less ice than Mawson did 100 years earlier? This appears to be what he expected, given his expedition’s planning. [emphasis mine]

In other words, this group and its so-called scientific leader are typical of the entire global warming climate community. Facts are irrelevant. The Earth is warming, the icecaps are disappearing, and to hell with any data that says otherwise.

Eventually, however, reality bites. Personally, I would much rather focus on reality first, so that I am prepared to deal with it when it jumps up at me.

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AmeriCorps volunteers have discovered that the health plans provided by this federal program are insufficient to meet the requirements of Obamacare.

5:14 pm

AmeriCorps volunteers have discovered that the health plans provided by this federal program are insufficient to meet the requirements of Obamacare.

If they don’t buy additional health insurance they will be subject to fines under the healthcare law.

I especially like this quote:

Sarah L. Sklaw, a 22-year-old Vista member from New York City, said: “I really support the Affordable Care Act, and I don’t want to be a naysayer. But it was surprising and frustrating to be told that our health coverage would not meet the law’s standards, especially because the Corporation for National and Community Service told us at orientation in August that we did not need to worry about the issue.”

In other words, she supported Obamacare, partly because she was told “if she liked her health plan, she could keep her health plan. Period.” She has now discovered that this was a lie and is angry. Who wudda thunk it?

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The geological history of Venus: What’s known, not known, and unknown.

11:48 am

The geological history of Venus: What’s known, not known, and unknown.

This is a very clearly written overview by James Head, one of the world’s preeminent planetary geologists, of what has been learned about the geology of Earth’s sister planet, the planet of a million volcanoes. Key quote:

Many features on Venus (folded mountain belts, rift zones, tesserae) were like Earth, but there were few signs of Earth-like plate tectonics, so that Venus seemed to have a single lithospheric plate that was losing heat conductively and advectively. But the cratering record presented a conundrum. First, the average age of the surface was <20% of the total age of the planet, and second, the average was not a combination of very old and very young surfaces, such as Earth’s continents and ocean basins. Third, the lack of variability in crater density, and of a spectrum of crater degradation, meant that all geological units might be about the same age. This implied that the observed surface of Venus must have been produced in the past hundreds of millions of years, possibly catastrophically, with very little volcanic or tectonic resurfacing since then! Suddenly, Venus was not like Earth, nor like the Moon, Mars, or Mercury.

Some scientists even believe that Venus was essentially resurfaced in a massive volcanic event about a half billion years ago. Others disagree. Meanwhile, the European probe Venus Express has gotten hints that volcanic activity is still going on.

As Head concludes, it has been 20 years since the last spacecraft arrived at Venus to do geological research. It is time to return.

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New York mayor Bill de Blasio: “We are going to get rid of the horse carriages. Period.”

9:53 am

A leftist politician speaks! New York mayor Bill de Blasio: “We are going to get rid of the horse carriages. Period.”

I highlight this story because it illustrates perfectly the priorities of the left. de Blasio wants to shut down the horse carriage industry that takes tourists on rides through Central Park because he and his ilk think it inhumane to the horses. Meanwhile, they don’t seem to care at all what this action will do to the humans who ride, care for, and make a living from those horses.

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Scientists think they have found cloudy skies on a nearby super Earth.

9:25 am

Scientists think they have found cloudy skies on two nearby exoplanets.

One planet is a super Earth, while the other is Neptune-sized.

This finding, as fascinating as it is, is also incredibly uncertain. The data suggests clouds, but the data is quite thin. We are barely seeing what’s there. Without doubt, the reality is far more complex — and interesting — than presently theorized.

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Mars One narrows its applicant pool of would-be Martian colonists from 200,000 to just over a 1000.

6:08 pm

Mars One narrows its applicant pool of would-be Martian colonists from 200,000 to just over a 1000.

People started applying for a voyage to the red planet in April 2013 through Mars One, a Netherlands-based private venture that wants to land humans there by 2025. By the time the company stopped taking applications, more than 200,000 people had submitted one. Today, Mars One announced that it’s made a short(er) list of 1,058 applicants.

These are individuals willing to make a one way trip.

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Mars Express buzzes Phobos.

5:19 pm

Mars Express buzzes Phobos.

Analysis of the data will allow scientists to better estimate the mass of the Martian moon, which in turn will tell us a great deal about its make-up.

And no, there is no evidence the spacecraft was attacked by the Phobosians. But then, this is not a Russian spacecraft.

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Global sea ice area is now at its second highest level ever recorded, and closing in on an all time record.

10:50 am

The uncertainty of science: Global sea ice area is now at its second highest level ever recorded and is closing in on an all time record.

The link is also amusing in that it includes some interesting predictions made by global warming scientists and politicians in recent years, all predicting that the Arctic Ocean would be ice free by 2013.

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Moronic Common Core lessons the federal government is imposing on public schools.

9:35 am

Government marches on! Moronic Common Core lessons the federal government is imposing on public schools.

#4 is especially vile, as its whole point is to encourage racial hatred.

I have not written much about the federally mandated education program Common Core, but don’t worry, nothing about it will surprise you. It is like most things the federal government requires these days, poorly thought out, politically motivated, and destructive to our society.

Other than that, it is peachy cream wonderful!

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Dave Barry looks back at 2013.

9:18 am

Dave Barry looks back at 2013: The year of the zombies.

But getting back to the zombies: It wasn’t just people who came back alarmingly in 2013. The Cold War with Russia came back. Al-Qaeda came back. Turmoil in the Middle East came back. The debt ceiling came back. The major league baseball drug scandal came back. Dennis Rodman came back and went on humanitarian missions to North Korea (or maybe we just hallucinated that). The Endlessly Looming Government Shutdown came back. People lining up to buy iPhones to replace iPhones that they bought only minutes earlier came back. And for approximately the 250th time, the Obama administration pivoted back to the economy, which has somehow been recovering for years now without actually getting any better. Unfortunately, before they could get the darned thing fixed, the administration had to pivot back to yet another zombie issue, health care, because it turned out that Obamacare, despite all the massive brainpower behind it, had some “glitches,” in the same sense that the universe has some “atoms.”

Read it all. It will make you wish an actual zombie apocalypse had happened.

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The Obama administration essentially admits that Obamacare has increased the number of uninsured.

9:02 am

The Obama administration essentially admits that Obamacare has increased the number of uninsured.

The signups on the Obamacare website have been far below their goals. Meanwhile, the numbers of people who have had their insurance cancelled is far far higher. The result: fewer people insured.

Way to go, Democrats!

And then there’s this: Five Obamacare news stories to watch out for in 2014.

Except for the midterm elections, none sound like they will be good news.

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The company for the high resolution cameras that the Russian astronauts were unable to install on ISS during their spacewalk last week has issued an update.

8:42 am

The company for the high resolution cameras that the Russian astronauts were unable to install on ISS during their spacewalk last week has issued an update.

The installation of the cameras proceeded according to plan and without incident. During a spacewalk, Russian cosmonauts were able to transport the cameras to their mounting position and install them quickly and efficiently. However, soon after installation, the Mission Control Centre (MCC) outside of Moscow was unable to receive any data from either camera (contrary to what was reported during the live transmission of the spacewalk). Without this data, engineers in the MCC were not able to confirm that the cameras were receiving the power necessary to allow them to survive the temperature fluctuations of the space environment. As a consequence, senior technical personnel from UrtheCast and RSC Energia (UrtheCast’s Russian partner) jointly decided that the safest and most prudent course of action was to uninstall the cameras and bring them back inside the ISS to be reinstalled at a later date, once the data transmission problem has been solved.

UrtheCast’s Chief Technology Officer, Dr. George Tyc, was present at the MCC throughout the operation, along with the Company’s Chief Engineer for Space Systems, Mr. Greg Giffin. Said Dr. Tyc, “The fact the neither camera could communicate with the MCC strongly suggests that the problem lies inside the ISS and it is not a problem with the cameras or external cables. This kind of issue has been encountered before on the ISS and can be fixed in the near-term. Bringing the cameras back inside to be installed another day was simply the right engineering decision.”

No word on what caused the problem, but as this commercial project is being done in partnership with the Russians and the Russians are whom the company is working to solve the technical problem it was almost certainly on the Russian portion of ISS.

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