Very brief descriptions, with appropriate links, of current or recent news items.
Testimony at a House hearing yesterday, including the refusal of an OMB representative to appear, lend weight to the rumors that OMB plans to end NASA’s planetary program.
Scientists have found evidence for the existence of great shallow lakes below the surface of Europa.
Under the radar: The Obama administration is pushing to limit gun use on pubic lands.
Gun owners who have historically been able to use public lands for target practice would be barred from potentially millions of acres under new rules drafted by the Interior Department, the first major move by the Obama administration to impose limits on firearms.
Is shooting down Phobos-Grunt an option?
Curing cancer using DNA and drugs.
The Soyuz capsule with three astronauts has successfully docked with ISS.
The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act offers “premium assistance”—tax credits and subsidies—to households purchasing coverage through new health-insurance exchanges. This assistance was designed to hide a portion of the law’s cost to individuals by reducing the premium hikes that individuals will face after ObamaCare goes into effect in 2014. (If consumers face the law’s full cost, support for repeal will grow.)
The law encourages states to create health-insurance exchanges, but it permits Washington to create them if states decline. So far, only 17 states have passed legislation to create an exchange.
This is where the glitch comes in: ObamaCare authorizes premium assistance in state-run exchanges (Section 1311) but not federal ones (Section 1321). In other words, states that refuse to create an exchange can block much of ObamaCare’s spending and practically force Congress to reopen the law for revisions.
The Obama administration’s solution? Ignore the law as written.
I have a better idea: Repeal the damn thing!
Is Newt Gingrich America’s Churchill?
As the author himself says, “The thought startles.” However, it is quite a fascinating read, founded strongly in history.
The Senate/House final deal for the White House Science Office has slashed its budget by one third.
Frustrated that White House officials [i.e. John Holdren] have ignored congressional language curtailing scientific collaborations with China, legislators have decided to get their attention through a 32% cut in the tiny budget of the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP).
See this story for more background.
We’re here to help you: A government inspector arrives during a meal and forces private citizens on private property to destroy the home-grown food.
Susan [the inspector] deemed our food unfit for consumption and demanded that we call off the event because:
1. Some of the prepared food packages did not have labels on them. (The code actually allows for this if it is to be consumed within 72 hours.)
2. Some of the meat was not USDA certified. (Did I mention that this was a farm to fork meal?)
3. Some of the food that was prepared in advance was not up to temperature at the time of inspection. (It was being prepared to be brought to proper temperature for serving when the inspection occurred.)
4. Even the vegetables prepared in advance had to be thrown out because they were cut and were then considered a “bio-hazard”.
5. We did not have receipts for our food. (Reminder! This food came from farms not from the supermarket! I have talked with several chefs who have said that in all their years cooking they have never been asked for receipts.)
I don’t actually agree with most of the ideas of the organic farm-to-fork movement. However, I find it beyond disgusting that our government thinks it has the right tell us what we can eat.
The Wisconsin doctors who issued fake sick notes during the labor protests earlier this year will face disciplinary hearings on Wednesday.
A wonderful example of why government does such a poor job: Firing incompetent employees “would harm the agency’s work,” according to the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission. More here.
No surprise here: NASA has extended the Messenger mission at Mercury for one more year.
A bronze artifact, resembling the remains of a buckle and a thousand years older than the house being excavated, has been found by archeologists in Alaska.
One Asia archaeologist suggested the piece may have been part of a harness or horse ornament. The researchers are looking for an East Asia expert to confer with on the bronze piece. Mason said it’s not likely the bronze piece was washed ashore after being dropped by a Russian explorer or a whaler. “That’s totally unlikely, in fact nearly impossible, considering where it is,” he said.
The mystery of the Moon’s ionosphere.
Congress has come up with a NASA budget compromise. More details here.
Overall, the NASA budget is cut by about a half billion dollars, the total matching what the agency got in 2009. The key figures are $406 million for commercial manned space, $3 billion for NASA’s in-house heavy-lift rocket and capsule, and $529 million to finish the Webb telescope.
I predict that the $3 billion will be a waste of money, the project getting cancelled before completion.
Voyager 2, 9 billion miles away, has successfully switched to using its backup thrusters in an effort to extend the spacecraft’s life at least another decade.
The Supreme Court has agreed to hear a challenge to Obamacare during this term, with an expected decision to occur prior to next year’s elections.
No matter how the court rules, the timing here is not good for Obama and the Democrat Party. If the court kills the law, it will illustrate how misguided it was. If they uphold it, it will only fire up the voter base that wants it repealed to vote against the party that passed and still supports the law. And that voter base has consistently been made up of large majorities of the population, based on every poll taken since the law was first proposed.
The Chinese have successfully completed today a second test docking between the unmanned Shenzhou space capsule and their space station Tiangong 1.
This is my idea of a family outing: A Singapore businessman, his wife, and two children have paid $1 million to become the first Asian family to fly together on SpaceShipTwo.
The head of the Russian space agency said yesterday that there is still a chance to save Phobos-Grunt.
“The probe is going to be in orbit until January, but in the first days of December the window will close” to re-programme it, he told Russian news agencies at Russia’s Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
He also said that the probe will not pose a threat, and will burn up in the atmosphere if it should fall to Earth.
Scheduling the next Dragon flight, the first to hopefully berth with ISS.
Presently they are saying early January, though it appears that no one will be surprised if it gets delayed to February.
A first glimpse inside the Fukushima nuclear power plant since the March 11 earthquake.
A Soyuz rocket has successfully launched three astronauts into orbit.
This is the first manned launch since the shuttles were retired, and the first Russian manned mission since the failure of a Soyuz rocket in August. If all goes well, the astronauts will dock with ISS in two days.
Update in Portland: The police have cleared out the Occupy protesters there, arresting fifty in the process.
Fortunately, it doesn’t appear that any serious violence occurred. Kudos to the police, as well as the protesters.
I take back my kind words about the protesters above. There is now evidence that at least some Occupy Portland protesters wanted to do serious harm, using “homemade grenades”.
Peace and love: It appears the Occupy Portland protesters are preparing to confront the police with homemade weapons and reinforcements.
People in the camp are expecting 100-300 re-enforcements from various locations. There may even be as many as 150 anarchists who will arrive soon. There is information that people may be in the in trees during a police action and that there are people who are attempting to obtain a large number of gas masks. There is a hole being dug in one of the parks and wood is being used to reinforce the area around it. There are reports that nails have been hammered into wood for weapons and that generally there are people in the camps preparing for a confrontation with police. . . People were seen carrying pallets into the camp shortly after 1:00 a.m. this morning. The destination of the pallets is a structure with graffiti in the northwest part of Chapman Park, also known as “The 420 Hotel”. The people there are very suspicious of any passers by, we are not sure at this point what exactly they are doing. We have been told it looks like they were making shields.
Par for the course: NASA, having successfully completed a 500 second test of the J-2X rocket engine, has halted all further development work on that engine.
The NASA program to build the heavy-lift rocket is expected to get $1.2 billion per year, and yet it doesn’t have enough money to develop both its first and second stages simultaneously? Kind of proves my point that NASA’s fixed labor costs, imposed on it by Congress, makes it impossible for the agency to ever build anything at a competitive price.
The result: every project dies stillborn.
The first manned Soyuz launch since the launch failure in August is set for Sunday night.
We’re here to help you! Various environmental regulations or actions of the Obama administration have eliminated more than 2.6 million jobs.
