Category: Points of Information

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

Construction of Russia’s new Vostochny spaceport is essentially back on schedule.

4:35 pm

Construction of Russia’s new Vostochny spaceport is essentially back on schedule.

“I think we have reduced the lag and are getting back to the initial schedule,” Spetsstroy Director Alexander Volosov said on Thursday, November 21. While in July 2013, the lag was about three months, now it has been reduced to ten days. “Funding is provided on time and in sufficient volumes,” Volosov said. The first stage of the project – construction of roads at the cosmodrome – has been completed. The second stage is proceeding as scheduled and is to be completed in December 2014.

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In undercover tapes, the communications director of Enroll America, an organization that helps sign people up for Obamacare, is seen agreeing to help get confidential personal data of enrollees for political purposes.

10:37 pm

Working for the Democratic Party: In undercover tapes, the communications director of Enroll America, an organization that helps sign people up for Obamacare, is seen agreeing to help get confidential personal data of enrollees so that it can be used for political purposes.

From the beginning I have always thought the most vile aspect of Obamacare was how it made your private and personal medical records available to hordes of government workers in multiple government agencies, a situation that is very vulnerable to corruption and abuse. Not surprisingly, it hasn’t taken long for Project Veritas to uncover such political corruption.

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And it ain’t your doctor!

9:38 pm

Finding out what’s in it: It ain’t your doctor!

As Americans have begun shopping for health plans on the insurance exchanges, they are discovering that insurers are restricting their choice of doctors and hospitals in order to keep costs low, and that many of the plans exclude top-rated hospitals. The Obama administration made it a priority to keep down the cost of insurance on the exchanges, the online marketplaces that are central to the Affordable Care Act. But one way that insurers have been able to offer lower rates is by creating networks that are far smaller than what most Americans are accustomed to.

In other words, because of Obamacare, you will either have to pay for your doctor up front and without any help from insurance, or you won’t be able to keep your doctor at all. So much for that promise.

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An update on the arrest of a father for wanting to pick up his kids and walk them home from school.

9:06 am

An update on the arrest of a father for wanting to pick up his kids and walk them home from school.

Key quote from the boss of the thuggish police officer, Avery Aytes, who made the arrest:

Aytes’s boss, Cumberland County Sheriff Butch Burgess is described as saying he “hasn’t seen the video and doesn’t need to, because it won’t tell the whole story. He says Aytes was just doing his job.”

One point I didn’t make yesterday about his story. Exactly what crime was the father committing that justified his arrest? If you watch the video, all he was doing was expressing his disagreement with the school’s policy. And he was doing it quite calmly. Since when is that a crime?

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The federal budget deficit for October was “only” $91 billion.

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The day of reckoning looms: The federal budget deficit for October was “only” $91 billion.

The AP article makes a big deal about how much lower this deficit is compared to past Octobers, but at this level, we would still have an annual deficit over $1 trillion. Even it ends up as half that, the numbers are still terrible.

The budget deal that ended the government shutdown ends on January 15. Be prepared for another shutdown. I expect some Republicans are going to once again tie that shutdown to repealing Obamacare.

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On Tuesday NASA issued a solicitation for bids on providing the agency a manned ferrying capability to and from ISS.

8:38 am

On Tuesday NASA issued a solicitation for bids on providing the agency a manned ferrying capability to and from ISS.

The new solicitation asks for proposals for final design, development, test, evaluation and certification of a human space transportation system, including ground operations, launch, orbital operations, return to Earth and landing.

The article is unclear how this solicitation fits in with the commercial crew program that already exists and is funding the manned upgrade of SpaceX’s Dragon and the development of Boeing’s CST-100 and Sierra Nevada’s Dream Chaser.

Update: This article makes things much clearer, outlining how this solicitation is the next phase in development and is open to all bidders.

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A father is arrested merely because he wants to pick up his kids from school and walk home with them.

4:08 pm

Thugs: A father is arrested merely because he wants to pick up his kids from school and walk home with them.

Watch the video below the fold. It ends with the police officer physically hitting the person with the camera.

I can think of no sane reason why a school would not release this man’s children to him. What difference does it make whether he leaves on foot or in a car?
» Read more

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Some spectacular oblique images from Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter have been released.

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Some spectacular oblique images from Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) have been released.

The top three images are all oblique. Make sure you click through to the full caption of each image to get more information.

The Lunar Alps image is especially interesting to those who have ever explored the Moon with a telescope from Earth. The rill shown is well known to amateurs, as are the Montes Alpes, or Alps Mountains, adjacent to it. From Earth that rill definitely looks like a meandering river canyon. This LRO image resolves it into a canyon made up of a series of crater-like depressions, a geological feature quite different from the river canyons of Earth.

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The Pentagon has for years routinely been doctoring its budget numbers, and has no idea where billions of its money is going.

12:45 pm

Good enough for government work: The Pentagon has for years routinely been doctoring its budget numbers, and has no idea where billions of its money is going.

In its investigation, Reuters has found that the Pentagon is largely incapable of keeping track of its vast stores of weapons, ammunition and other supplies; thus it continues to spend money on new supplies it doesn’t need and on storing others long out of date. It has amassed a backlog of more than half a trillion dollars in unaudited contracts with outside vendors; how much of that money paid for actual goods and services delivered isn’t known. And it repeatedly falls prey to fraud and theft that can go undiscovered for years, often eventually detected by external law enforcement agencies.

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The Obamacare website apparently has security flaws so significant that experts are afraid to describe them.

11:29 am

The Obamacare website apparently has security flaws so significant that experts are afraid to describe them.

Kennedy, a former U.S. Marine Corps cyber-intelligence analyst, presented a 17-page report describing the problems to the House Science, Space and Technology Committee. It does not go into specifics in some areas, he said, because that could provide criminals with a blueprint for launching attacks. … “There is a lot of stuff that we are not publicly disclosing because of the criticality of the findings,” Kennedy said. “We don’t want to hurt people.” When asked to describe the severity of the threat that they posed to the public, he said it was a “critical risk.”

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The Homeland Security employee who runs a website that calls for the the mass murder of whites has still not been fired.

9:46 am

Does this make you feel safer? The Homeland Security employee who runs a website that calls for the the mass murder of whites has still not been fired.

Kimathi, using the online nom de guerre “the Irritated Genie,” called for “ethnic cleansing” of “black-skinned Uncle Tom race traitors” on his website, which envisioned a massive race war on the horizon. “In order for Black people to survive the 21st century, we are going to have to kill a lot of whites—more than our Christian hearts can possibly count,” he wrote.

In other postings, he warned that whites and their enablers like President Obama are trying to “homosexualize” black men in order to make them weaker, and suggested that a woman’s primary role in life should be to “keep a strong Black man happy.” He also seemed to hold anti-Semitic views, claiming in a Facebook post that his website was under attack from a conspiracy of “zionist smallhats, the Uncle Tom koons,” and, naturally, “the haters.”

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New data suggesting the presence of granite on Mars also suggests that the planet is more geologically complex than previously believed.

9:17 am

The uncertainty of science: New data suggesting the presence of granite on Mars also suggests that the planet is more geologically complex than previously believed.

In my years of science writing, I can’t count the number of times I’ve written the phrase “more complex than previously believed.” For some reason, modern scientists seem to always assume that things will be simple, with one straight-forward answer. From gamma ray bursts to supernovae to planetary formation to whatever, the first example found and the first theory developed from that first example has repeatedly been expected to explain everything.

But that’s not how things work. Instead, the closer scientists have looked, the more complex and interesting things have always become. Many different things can cause gamma ray bursts. Supernovae come in many types. Solar systems don’t have to resemble ours. Everything is always more complex than you first believe.

Scientists would get things wrong less often if they simply kept this thought in mind, at all times.

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To save money, NASA management has shut down a troubled program to build a more efficient plutonium power supply for its deep space missions.

9:06 am

To save money, NASA management has shut down a troubled program to build a more efficient plutonium power supply for its deep space missions.

The cancelled ASRGs would have generated electrical power from the expansion of gas warmed by the radioactive decay of plutonium-238. NASA says that the devices have the same power output as its current generation of Multi-Mission Radioactive Thermoelectric Generators (MMRTG) but use four times less plutonium-238, a scarce resource. One MMRTG with 4.8 kilograms of plutonium is currently powering the Curiosity rover on Mars.

The United States has less than 40 kilograms of plutonium-238 left, but the DOE restarted production this year. Green says he is confident that the DOE will be producing plutonium-238 at a rate of 1.5 kilograms per year by 2019. He says that the stockpiled plutonium-238, along with the new supply, will be enough to send another planned rover to Mars in 2020 and to complete other missions in the 2020s – without any need for the extra efficiency of the ASRGs.

The ASRG program had been a year and a half behind schedule and had had its management team replaced at one point.

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A close look at another government program to try to lower the cost to orbit.

8:59 am

A close look at another government program to try to lower the cost to orbit.

The latest program is know as the Experimental Spaceplane — or XS-1. The objective “is to demonstrate a reusable first stage launch vehicle capable of carrying and deploying an upper stage that inserts 3,000 to 5,000 lb. payloads into Low Earth Orbit (LEO), designed for less than $5M per launch for an operational system.” The system has to be able to perform with aircraft-like operations. And demonstrate the ability to fly 10 times in 10 days. It needs to reach Mach 10 at least once. And provide the basis for next-generation launch services and “global reach hypersonic and space access aircraft.”

Forgive me if I am skeptical. Despite DARPA’s reasonable success (It helped make possible SpaceX’s Merlin engine), these government efforts generally fail because they are unattached to the prime reasons for lowering cost: competition and profits. Consider this very accurate historical summary in the article above:

In the era of bell bottoms and Richard Nixon, there was the space shuttle. When Ronald Reagan ruled the roost, all hope rested in the National Aerospace Plane. During the Bill Clinton era, there were the X-33 and Venture Star. In Barack Obama’s first term, the Air Force pursued its Reusable Booster System (RBS).

Five programs. One objective: to radically reduce the cost to orbit. More than $14 billion spent on development. And the result? A super expensive shuttle program. Four vehicles that never flew. And access to space just kept getting more expensive.

Only when every effort in the aerospace industry is focused on making itself more competitive will we see the kinds of technical advancements this new DARPA program wishes to achieve.

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Newly released emails provide more evidence that IRS official Lois Lerner was lying when she said the IRS scandal was confined to the low-level employees in Cincinnati.

10:35 pm

Working for the Democratic Party: Newly released emails provide more evidence that IRS official Lois Lerner was lying when she said the IRS scandal was confined to the low-level employees in Cincinnati.

An IRS official blasted Lois Lerner for her attempt to blame the agency’s targeting scandal on low-level employees in Cincinnati, according to newly released emails. “Cincinnati wasn’t publicly ‘thrown under the bus’ (but) instead was hit by a convoy of Mack trucks,” wrote Cindy Thomas, former director of the IRS exempt organizations office in Cincinnati, in a May 10, 2013 email to Lerner obtained by the House Ways and Means Committee.

Thomas wrote the email on the very day that the IRS targeting scandal broke when Lerner, a senior agency official based in Washington, D.C., admitted that her exempt organizations division engaged in improper targeting of conservative groups.

The truth was that the low-level employees in Cincinnati were getting their orders to harass conservatives from high up the chain in Washington.

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The Census Bureau apparently faked the unemployment numbers prior to the 2012 election to make it appear more people were employed.

10:27 pm

Working for the Democratic Party: The Census Bureau apparently faked the unemployment numbers prior to the 2012 election to make it appear more people were employed.

In the home stretch of the 2012 presidential campaign, from August to September, the unemployment rate fell sharply — raising eyebrows from Wall Street to Washington. The decline — from 8.1 percent in August to 7.8 percent in September — might not have been all it seemed. The numbers, according to a reliable source, were manipulated.

And the Census Bureau, which does the unemployment survey, knew it. Just two years before the presidential election, the Census Bureau had caught an employee fabricating data that went into the unemployment report, which is one of the most closely watched measures of the economy. And a knowledgeable source says the deception went beyond that one employee — that it escalated at the time President Obama was seeking reelection in 2012 and continues today.

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Dukakis and the tank.

2:46 pm

Dukakis and the tank.

An excellent article on what is probably one of the worst photo-ops ever attempted by a political campaign. My one disagreement is how the article focuses on how silly Dukakis looked in the helmet. This wasn’t what made the photo-op a disaster. What really made it fail was how absurd it was for him to think that riding in a tank would make people forget his deep and longstanding opposition to the military. Watch the Reagan campaign’s response ad, which used the tank ride to point this out. This is what made the photo-op a failure.

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