Very brief descriptions, with appropriate links, of current or recent news items.
The competition heats up: SpaceX on Monday successfully launched its second geosynchronous commercial satellite.
I expect the company to now step up the pace of its launches.
The website went down last evening due to a power outage, and was only recovered this afternoon. Sorry for the inconvenience. I have lost Monday’s posts, which I will now try to recreate.
Nearly two thirds of the fraud and waste lost by the federal government in 2013 was spent by HHS, the agency running Obamacare.
The total amount lost by either fraud, waste, or error equaled $106 billion, slightly down from 2012’s $108 billion figure. Of that, about $65 billion occurred in Health and Human Services.
But hey, what’s a few billion dollars here and there. It’s not like the federal government has a debt problem, does it?
It’s nice to see that despite being on vacation in Hawaii, the President can still carve out some time – between rounds of golf and snorkeling – to insult his political opponents. After all, nothing encourages bi-partisanship in the New Year like a little name calling and mudslinging. While enjoying his multi-million-dollar vacation (oh yeah… you and I paid for that) Mr. Obama decided to chastise Republicans for leaving DC without extending long-term unemployment.
The ability of Obama and the left to consider themselves completely blameless in all situations, with no responsibility ever when the things they do go wrong, is repeatedly astonishing.
Even if you have health insurance, it might be cheaper to pretend to be uninsured and pay cash instead.
This article points out the one fact that might actually be a benefit of Obamacare: The law is so screwed up that it is forcing many people out of their health insurance, where they might discover that by negotiating directly with doctors and hospitals. And that negotiation, more than any thing else — including every regulatory scheme proposed by any politician from the left or the right — will really lower the cost for healthcare.
The competition heats up: After more than a decade of failed attempts, India has finally successfully launched its Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV).
Moreover, this rocket was entirely built in India. It now gives that country a rocket competitive in the international communications satellite launch market.
Boeing is moving its X-37B operations to the Kennedy Space Center.
A spy plane used by the U.S. Air Force is about to get a new home: a garage at Kennedy Space Center that once housed NASA orbiters during the space shuttle era. The move was announced Friday by Boeing, the Chicago-based company that built the X-37B spy plane and is in charge of repairing the spacecraft whenever it returns to Earth. Previously, Boeing had refurbished the 29-foot-long spacecraft at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, but the company decided to relocate its fix-up shop in Florida, where the vehicle now launches.
NASA and Orbital Sciences have rescheduled the Cygnus freighter launch to ISS until January 8 because of cold weather.
Sign of the times: “I have closed all my businesses in Ventura County, California.”
And the business owner is happy about it!
Never have I operated in a more difficult environment. Ventura County combines a difficult government environment with a difficult employee base with a difficult customer base.
Freedom not only requires that each person be free to follow their own dreams, it also demands that everyone else respect that desire and effort. If you read the story above, you will discover that in this part of California at least, no one respects this business owner’s desire and effort. Instead, from the government to his customers, everyone was out to destroy him, no matter what he tried to do.
So rather than follow his dream, he is shutting down and getting out. Very sad.
News you can use: Cats are liquid.
Don’t ask, just go and look.
Finding out what’s not in it: Obamacare does not provide any easy way for a family to add a new baby to their insurance plan.
There’s another quirk in the Obama administration’s new health insurance system: It lacks a way for consumers to quickly and easily update their coverage for the birth of a baby and other common life changes. With regular private insurance, parents just notify the health plan. Insurers will still cover new babies, the administration says, but parents will also have to contact the government at some point later on. Right now the HealthCare.gov website can’t handle such updates.
It’s a reminder that the new coverage for many uninsured Americans comes with a third party in the mix: the feds. And the system’s wiring for some vital federal functions isn’t yet fully connected. [emphasis mine]
To paraphrase something George Will once said, the law is a blunt instrument, not designed to do many complex things. But with Obamacare the Democrats have asked it to do something incredibly complex, run the health insurance business. It can’t do it, and because of this it is now causing a great deal of heartache and misery for many people, a large number of whom are sick and vulnerable.
But we all know that the Democrats care about the sick and vulnerable, which is why they insisted that Obamacare be enforced now without delay.
The second commercial launch on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket has been delayed three days until January 6 because an unspecified issue with the rocket’s fairing.
It appears the company wants to do some additional inspections of the rocket, just to be sure all is well. They haven’t been more specific then this,
Finding out what’s not in it: Unable to verify whether they have the Obamacare insurance plan they enrolled in, patients walk out of hospitals without treatment.
I am shocked, shocked! The 30 counties with the highest medium income just happen to be where most people work for the federal government.
The only county among the Top 5 for median household income not located near Washington, D.C., was No. 3 Los Alamos County, N.M.—which is the smallest county in that state, and which is also home to the U.S. Energy Department’s Los Alamos National Laboratory. The median household income in Los Alamos County in 2012, according to the Census Bureau, was $112,115.
Britain’s citizens want their guns back.
Frontpage picks Ted Cruz as their 2013 man of the year.
From one end of the country to the other, the voices of the inevitable, Democrats and Republicans, politicians, pollsters and pundits, in ink-stained print, on the sprawling feeds of cable news and the endless whirl of the Internet, boomed their message.
Ted Cruz was wrong. Ted Cruz was doomed. Ted Cruz would destroy the Republican Party. Ted Cruz was a mad fool for taking on ObamaCare in all the wrong ways. But as the old year tips into the new, Cruz is standing tall and ObamaCare is being torn apart by its namesake in a frantic effort to save his popularity.
The truth is the truth. If you stand for it, without fear, you will win. Eventually, the bullies and naysayers will have to back off, simply because the truth will have become self-evident to everyone.
The big solar hotshots of 2013.
The article is a nice and visually fascinating overview of the twelve most impressive solar events during the past year. Interestingly, I think #7 is the most significant in that it involved things that didn’t happen.
As small sunspot group NOAA 1838 was falling apart, another active region NOAA 1839 appeared just in time to avoid a spotless day, which would have been the first since 14 August 2011! A spotless day during a solar cycle maximum is not uncommon, but it remains of course a rare event. This absolute low in sunspot number highlighted a period of very low solar activity, with hardly any flares (no C-flares from 7 till 17 September: 11 consecutive days) and no (minor) geomagnetic storms for a full month! Meanwhile, the magnetic field near the solar north pole (finally) completed its reversal, whereas this magnetic flip is still ongoing at the south pole. These reversals testify we’re close to the maximum of solar cycle 24. [emphasis mine]
The phrases in bold clarify where we presently stand with the solar cycle. The southern magnetic field is in the process of reversing, but has not yet completed the flip.
Eleven global warming stories from 2013 you probably never heard of.
#5 is the most revealing, I think.
A survey of New York businesses cannot find any businesses whose healthcare costs have gone down due to Obamacare.
Instead, the survey finds that premiums have gone up, across the board, for everyone.
Once again, who voted for this law? Who has defended it through thick and thin? Who shut the government down to prevent any changes to it?
NBC News was once a trusted source for news, a destination millions of Americans turned to in times of national events. It’s now a punchline, a disgrace.
This didn’t happen overnight, and it didn’t happen by accident. There was a conscious decision on behalf of the management team to change, and change it did. You don’t scrape the bottom of the barrel and come up with the type of loathsome, hate-filled bile spewers regularly filling those airwaves by accident. You scrape all the way to the bottom because this is what you want.
It is very important to emphasize the level of hate coming from this so-called outlet of news. It is also very important to emphasize how unaware or glad NBC is that its reporters and anchors express this hate, repeatedly.
