Very brief descriptions, with appropriate links, of current or recent news items.
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.
We’re here to help you: U.S. Customs destroys a musician’s 11 flutes, declaring them to be agricultural products.
A Canadian citizen, based in New York and with a green card employment permit, Bouzemaa was flying home from Marrakech, Morocco, when his baggage was opened by Customs at JFK.
‘I told them I had these instruments for many years and flew with them in and out,’ he said. ‘There were 11 instruments in all. They told me they were agricultural products and they had to be destroyed. There was nothing I could do. The ney flute can be made with bamboo. Is that agricultural?’
Ain’t you glad that the healthcare industry is now in the capable hands of this government?
From the second to the final draft of its newest report the IPCC significantly slashed its predictions for how much the climate will warm in the coming decades.
In the second draft of the Fifth Assessment Report it had broadly agreed with the models that the world will warm by 0.4 to 1.0 Cº from 2016-2035 against 1986-2005. But in the final draft it quietly cut the 30-year projection to 0.3-0.7 Cº, saying the warming is more likely to be at the lower end of the range [equivalent to about 0.4 Cº over 30 years]. If that rate continued till 2100, global warming this century could be as little as 1.3 Cº.
This will bring the IPCC’s predictions more in line with the reality of the past two decades, which has seen a complete pause in any warming.
This is actually very good news, as it suggests that the good scientists in the climate community are beginning to regain control of the science. Rather than bend to the political winds, the IPCC is being forced to bend to the data itself. Nonetheless, no one should be sanguine about the situation. As noted by Christopher Monckton at the link,
Multiple lines of evidence now confirm that the models and consequently the IPCC have overestimated global warming. Yet neither that misconceived organization nor any of its host of unthinking devotees has displayed any remorse. Instead, they persist in maintaining that the warming is temporarily paused, though they cannot really explain why; or they blame particulate aerosols, their get-out-of-jail-free fudge-factor; or they pretend warming is really continuing unabated, saying it has gone into hiding deep in the oceans where, conveniently, we cannot measure it, or that the Earth-atmosphere system has a fever driven by four atom-bombs’-worth of heat content increase every second.
What they are not prepared to countenance, notwithstanding the real-world, measured evidence, is the growing probability that they and their precious models have so badly misunderstood the climate, or so well understood it and so badly misrepresented it, that global warming is simply not going to occur at anything like any of the exaggerated rates that they had until now so confidently over-predicted.
Read the whole thing. Look especially at Figure 9, the last figure, as it shows the data in comparison with the predictions in all the IPCC reports.
A box of 100-year-old negatives from the Shackleton expedition, discovered in an abandoned supply hut in Antarctica, have been processed and printed.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has spotted China’s Yutu rover on the Moon’s surface.
These images confirm that the rover landed in Mare Imbrium, not Sinus Iridum, the originally announced landing site and the site that many Chinese news sources continue to report as the landing site.
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?
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.
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.
The Chinese rover Yutu, before going into hibernation for the long lunar night, successfully took its first spectrum of the Moon’s surface.
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.
Virgin Galactic has released video of SpaceShipTwo’s second powered flight.
Messier notes how strained the pilot’s voices are, indicating that this test flight was “one wild ride.” I have put the video below the fold.
» Read more
Elon Musk outlines the upcoming test program for the development of the man-rated Dragon capsule.
The bottom line is that they are planning two major unmanned flight tests in 2014, followed by a manned flight test in 2015. The manned flight would use their employees, not NASA astronauts.
“Why is Israel releasing murderers?”
The question was asked by an 11-year-old Israeli boy, whose parents and three siblings were killed by Palestinian terrorists. The boy only survived because the killers didn’t notice him hiding in terror under a blanket.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
