Category: Points of Information

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

Obama and the Democrats solve the terrible terrible problem of the terrible name of the Washington Redskins.

9:21 am

Obama and the Democrats solve the terrible terrible problem of the terrible name of the Washington Redskins.

In a move certain to delight most of official Washington, D.C., it has been decided to change the name of the Washington Redskins football franchise to the Washington Reds. President Obama, himself, voiced his approval of the decision, as did Harry Reid, who was practically giddy upon hearing the news. The stadium will be painted red, in keeping with the new name, and its own name will be changed to Red Stadium. All players who play for the Reds, as well as all Red staff, Red cheerleaders, and Red coaches, will be asked to pay a 60% surtax on their exorbitant salaries and to divest of their pension plans entirely in order to share their wealth more equitably with all of the people of the District of Columbia. Any profit-sharing from games played by the Reds will be placed into the general coffers at Treasury Department and administered by Jack Lew.

Click on the link. It is worth it.

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IRS official Lois Lerner illegally provided private tax information to other government agencies.

9:16 am

Working for the Democratic Party: IRS official Lois Lerner illegally provided private tax information to other government agencies.

A conservative government watchdog says it has obtained emails revealing that the Internal Revenue Service sent conservative groups’ private tax exemption application and tax return information to the Federal Elections Commission, in violation of federal law.

According to Judicial Watch, the emails from Jan. 2009 to the present, provided by the FEC in response to an August 2013 Freedom of Information Act request, yielded a “revealing email chain” between former Internal Revenue Services (IRS) Director of Exempt Organizations Lois Lerner and enforcement attorneys at the Federal Election Commission (FEC).

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Obamacare does not provide patients or doctors or hospitals any way of finding out who is in or out of network.

9:07 am

Not finding out what’s in it: Obamacare does not provide patients or doctors or hospitals any way of finding out who is in or out of network.

“In many cases, consumers are shopping blind when it comes to what doctors and hospitals are included in their Obamacare exchange plans,” said Josh Archambault, senior fellow with the think tank Foundation for Government Accountability. “These patients will be in for a rude awakening once they need care, and get stuck with a big bill for going out-of-network without realizing it.”

All of this represents a larger problem with the Affordable Care Act, said Archambault, who has extensively studied the law. “It reflects deeper issues in implementation,” he said. “Some hospitals and doctors don’t even know if they are in the network.”

In addition, this story indicates that many major hospitals are opting out of Obamacare, with no way for patients to find out beforehand.

Aren’t you glad the Democrats and President Obama shut down the federal government earlier this month to make sure Obamacare went into effect?

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A fundamental design failure appears to be the cause of the fuel leak that caused the launch postponement of India’s first home-made geosynchronous powered rocket in August.

8:57 am

The complete failure of the fuel tank appears to be the cause of the massive leak that caused the launch postponement of India’s first home-made geosynchronous powered rocket in August.

Mr. Radhakrishnan [head of India’s space agency] said while the expert committee had attributed the fuel leak to stress corrosion cracking of the tank filled with propellants, exactly why this happened was “a research problem” that remains to be investigated. The next GSLV mission will switch to a better aluminium alloy material for its propellant tanks.

Up to now the reports have been somewhat vague about the cause of what was clearly an extensive leak. This story tells us that the tank essentially failed. As they filled it with propellants, cracks apparently showed up everywhere, with fuel spewing out in all directions. As far as I can remember, I don’t think there has ever been a rocket tank failure quite this spectacular.

This suggests there were fundamental design flaws in the tank or very serious quality control problems in its manufacture. With the next launch attempt scheduled for December 15, I hope India has identified the source of this incredibly basic problem and taken action to prevent it from happening again.

Update: Reader Patrick Ritchie found this older article which suggests the failed tank was an old tank of a design that was “prone for delayed cracks”. The error here then was in using this substandard old equipment rather than a newer tank.

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The first Earth-sized exoplanet, just discovered, makes no sense to scientists.

1:14 pm

The first Earth-sized exoplanet, just discovered, makes no sense to scientists.

Kepler-78b is a planet that shouldn’t exist. This scorching lava world circles its star every eight and a half hours at a distance of less than one million miles – one of the tightest known orbits. According to current theories of planet formation, it couldn’t have formed so close to its star, nor could it have moved there. “This planet is a complete mystery,” says astronomer David Latham of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA). “We don’t know how it formed or how it got to where it is today. What we do know is that it’s not going to last forever.”

The planet itself is only 20 percent larger than the Earth, with a comparable density that suggests its composition is similar as well.

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A new dark matter detector has failed to detect any dark matter after its first three months of operation.

1:09 pm

The uncertainty of science: A new dark matter detector has failed to detect any dark matter after its first three months of operation.

Buried about a mile underground in a repurposed South Dakota gold mine, the LUX experiment searches for signs of dark matter particles colliding with the atoms in a vat of liquid xenon. During its first three months of operation, the detector found no such signals whatsoever. “We looked hard for these dark matter particles and we didn’t see anything,” says physicist Rick Gaitskell of Brown University, co-spokesperson for the LUX experiment. The results, presented at a seminar today and submitted to Physical Review Letters for publication, rule out a number of possible masses and characteristics for the particles that make up dark matter. The null result also conflicts with earlier experiments that had reported possible signals of dark matter.

This experiment has not proven that dark matter does not exist. It merely has narrowed significantly the kinds of particles that dark matter could be made of. That the results also contradict evidence from other detectors, however, leaves this specific area of science particularly uncertain.

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A physicians organization has filed a lawsuit against the Obama administration’s decision to delay Obamacare employer mandate by one year.

9:26 am

A physicians organization has filed a lawsuit against the Obama administration’s decision to delay Obamacare employer mandate by one year.

The AAPS lawsuit, which was filed today in the Eastern District of Wisconsin, asks the Court to enjoin the Obama Administration from imposing its “individual mandate” while delaying the “employer mandate.” The law that was passed by Congress in 2010 requires that the employer mandate go into effect at the same time as the individual mandate: Jan 1, 2014.

“The U.S. Constitution requires a strict separation of powers between the three branches of government, such that the executive branch cannot change laws passed by Congress,” AAPS’s lawsuit explains. By imposing the individual mandate in 2014 without the protection of the employer mandate, the Obama Administration has changed the legislation passed by Congress.

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70% of Americans want to delay the Obamacare individual mandate.

9:07 am

Poll: 70% of Americans want to delay the Obamacare individual mandate.

One, I suspect that many of those polled really think they are asking for a delay of Obamacare entirely, and do not understand that delaying the mandate will do nothing to save their present insurance plan. If Obamacare requires that plan to die, it will die, regardless of when the mandate goes into effect.

Two, this is strong evidence that, when the next budget deadline arrives in a few months, the Republicans should once again demand to either delay, defund, or repeal Obamacare. They should force the Democrats to once again vote for this law. If the Republicans do this, they might actually be in a position to force Democrats to agree to a repeal.

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“If you like your plan you can keep your plan.”

8:50 am

I am posting the video below mostly as a marker, so that I can find it again easily when I am confronted by Democrats who can’t seem to understand what a lie is and what a liar looks like.

But watch it anyway. I knew it was a lie when he said this repeatedly in 2009 and 2010, but it is even more infuriating to see it now, especially considering the wreckage that lie is causing across the country as people find they no longer can afford any health insurance, no matter how minimal.

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According to insurance executives, the White House is threatening them with “retribution” if they don’t keep silent about the problems Obamacare is causing them.

8:32 am

Fascist thugs: According to insurance executives, the White House is threatening them with “retribution” if they don’t keep silent about the problems Obamacare is causing them.

“What is going on is a behind-the-scenes attempt by the White House to at least keep insurers from publicly criticizing what is happening on this Affordable Care Act rollout,” reports Andrew Griffin of CNN. ”Basically, if you speak out, if you are quoted, you’re going to get a call from the White House, pressure to be quiet.”

According to Griffin’s sources, Bob Laszewski of Health Policy and Strategy Associates – a prominent consultant for insurance companies with a history of criticizing ObamaCare – says he’s getting calls from the executives he works with, asking him to speak out on their behalf, “because they feel defenseless against the White House PR team.”

Laszewski told Griffin, “The White House is exerting massive pressure on the industry, including the trade associations, to keep quiet.” Industry sources confirmed “they fear White House retribution.”

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The president and the Democrats lied us into a bad law.

9:19 pm

“The president and the Democrats lied us into a bad law.”

The Right opposed the law on principle. A single party — the Democrats — own this law in a way that no party has had complete ownership of any major social legislation in a century. They bought this legislation with deceit and the GOP said so. Now that it is going into effect, the facts on the ground are confirming that deceit. Moreover, the same haughty condescending bureaucrats and politicians who told us they were smart enough and tech-savvy enough to do just about anything are being exposed as incompetent political hacks.

And remember: This same President and those same Democrats re-affirmed their support of Obamacare less than one month ago by insisting on shutting the government down rather than agree to even the slightest revision of this disaster of a law.

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The reasons Obamacare makes health insurance much more expensive.

8:55 pm

The reasons Obamacare makes health insurance much more expensive.

All of these reasons were expounded in great detail by conservatives back in 2010 in their effort to get Democrats to negotiate the law. The reasoned response from the left: “You’re a racist!”

Well it now turns out that a lot of very liberal pundits, politicians, and Democratic supporters are racist too, as they are discovering that the conservatives in 2010 were right.

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Sierra Nevada reveals that its Dream Chaser engineering test vehicle survived its bad landing in weekend in reasonably good shape.

5:06 pm

Sierra Nevada reveals that its Dream Chaser engineering test vehicle survived its bad landing this weekend in reasonably good shape.

After lining up on the runway, the spacecraft’s nose landing skid and right main landing gear deployed normally about 200 feet off the ground. But the left main gear hung up for some reason. Sirangelo said the software issued the proper commands, leading engineers to suspect a mechanical problem of some sort.

The landing gear in the test vehicle were taken from an F-5 training jet and will not be used on operational versions of the Dream Chaser.

In any case, the Dream Chaser’s flight software responded to the unbalanced load at touchdown, keeping the spacecraft’s left wing off the ground as long as possible. But it eventually came down and the craft skidded off the runway in a cloud of dust. [emphasis mine]

They should release the video. If the vehicle’s software was able to keep the vehicle stable, even as it was speeding down a runway short one wheel, this would impress people. Not releasing video of this only feeds the doubts people have.

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Steny Hoyer, #2 Democrat in the House, admitted today that Democrats knew that Obamacare would cause the cancellation of millions of health plans.

9:48 am

Steny Hoyer, #2 Democrat in the House, admitted today that Democrats knew that Obamacare would cause the cancellation of millions of health plans.

The Democrats really think Americans are stupid. This is how Hoyer tried to explain away Obama’s often-repeated lie that “if you like your plan you get to keep it”:

Asked by another reporter how repeated statements by Obama to the contrary weren’t “misleading,” Hoyer said “I don’t think the message was wrong. I think the message was accurate. It was not precise enough…[it] should have been caveated with – ‘assuming you have a policy that in fact does do what the bill is designed to do.’”

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Geologists have determined that the magma reservoir under Yellowstone is much bigger than previously thought.

9:25 am

The uncertainty of science: Geologists have determined that the magma reservoir under Yellowstone is much bigger than previously thought.

Jamie Farrell, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Utah, mapped the underlying magma reservoir by analysing data from more than 4,500 earthquakes. Seismic waves travel more slowly through molten rock than through solid rock, and seismometers can detect those changes.

The images show that the reservoir resembles a 4,000-cubic-kilometre underground sponge, with 6–8% of it filled with molten rock. It underlies most of the Yellowstone caldera and extends a little beyond it to the northeast.

The geologists also noted that the threat from a huge volcanic eruption is less of a concern than that of earthquakes.

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Sierra Nevada today released a video of the test flight this past weekend of its Dream Chaser engineering test vehicle.

9:07 am

Sierra Nevada today released a video of the test flight this past weekend of its Dream Chaser engineering test vehicle.

Don’t get too excited. They very cleverly have edited the tape so that we do not see what happened after touchdown. You can see how the left landing gear does not completely deploy, but then they cut away. Nonetheless, the video is posted below the fold.
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