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One reason why I moved from Maryland: A legal gunowner gets abused by the police because he’s a legal gun owner.
In a House hearing today, cybersecurity experts once again warned that the Obamacare website is not secure, and that the Obama administration is doing nothing to fix it.
“The site is fundamentally flawed in ways that make it dangerous to people who use it,” Kevin Johnson, one of the experts who reviewed Kennedy’s findings, told Reuters. Johnson said one of the most troubling issues was that a hacker could upload malicious code to the site, then attack other HealthCare.gov users. “You can take control of their computers,” said Johnson, chief executive officer of a firm known as Secure Ideas. [emphasis mine]
But hey, not to worry. If it’s the Spanish language version you won’t understand anything anyway!
Now available in hardback and paperback as well as ebook!
From the press release: In this ground-breaking new history of early America, historian Robert Zimmerman not only exposes the lie behind The New York Times 1619 Project that falsely claims slavery is central to the history of the United States, he also provides profound lessons about the nature of human societies, lessons important for Americans today as well as for all future settlers on Mars and elsewhere in space.
“Zimmerman’s ground-breaking history provides every future generation the basic framework for establishing new societies on other worlds. We would be wise to heed what he says.” —Robert Zubrin, founder of founder of the Mars Society.
All editions are available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and all book vendors, with the ebook priced at $5.99 before discount. All editions can also be purchased direct from the ebook publisher, ebookit, in which case you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
Autographed printed copies are also available at discount directly from the author (hardback $29.95; paperback $14.95; Shipping cost for either: $6.00). Just send an email to zimmerman @ nasw dot org.
Honesty! The UN climate chief this week declared that communism is the best way to fight global warming.
United Nations climate chief Christiana Figueres said that democracy is a poor political system for fighting global warming. Communist China, she says, is the best model. China may be the world’s top emitter of carbon dioxide and struggling with major pollution problems of their own, but the country is “doing it right” when it comes to fighting global warming says Figueres. “They actually want to breathe air that they don’t have to look at,” she said. “They’re not doing this because they want to save the planet. They’re doing it because it’s in their national interest.”
Putting aside the minor detail that communist states have routinely had the worst environmental record — “ghastly” as the article above accurately notes — this statement by Figueres is remarkably refreshing in that might be the first time an environmentalist has admitted the movement’s true agenda. They don’t want to save the environment, they want to gain power and then use it to squelch everyone else’s freedom.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
Cowards in action! The Republican leadership begins an effort to back off from repealing Obamacare.
While the Democrats always push for their ideology, no matter how unreasonable (see previous post), too many Republicans are always cowards, chickening out and giving in, even when faced with unreasonable Democratic demands.
Elections have consequences: A Democrat wins election in Virginia and a push for more gun control follows.
Democrats always put on a fake halo and say their regulations are “reasonable,” even as the regulations they demand become increasingly unreasonable year by year.
There are now only 3 copies left of the now out-of-print hardback of Leaving Earth. The price for an autographed copy of this rare collector's item is now $150 (plus $5 shipping).
To get your copy while the getting is good, please send a $155 check (which includes $5 shipping) payable to Robert Zimmerman to
Behind The Black, c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652
Leaving Earth is also available as an inexpensive ebook!
Leaving Earth: Space Stations, Rival Superpowers, and the Quest for Interplanetary Travel, can be purchased as an ebook everywhere for only $3.99 (before discount) at amazon, Barnes & Noble, all ebook vendors, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit.
If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big oppressive tech companies and I get a bigger cut much sooner.
"Leaving Earth is one of the best and certainly the most comprehensive summary of our drive into space that I have ever read. It will be invaluable to future scholars because it will tell them how the next chapter of human history opened." -- Arthur C. Clarke
I am shocked, shocked! NASA’s first test flight of both the Orion capsule and the heavy-lift SLS rocket in 2017 might be delayed because of design problems with the European-built service module.
Overweight and struggling with design delays, the European-built service module for the Orion crew exploration vehicle may not be ready for a much-anticipated test flight by the end of 2017. The preliminary design review for the Orion spacecraft’s critical engine and power element is now on track for May after a six-month delay to contend with weight issues, according to Thomas Reiter, director of the European Space Agency’s human spaceflight and operations programs.
I am willing to bet that SpaceX will put astronauts in space on Dragonrider before this unmanned SLS flight occurs.
Astronomers have discovered the first exoplanet orbiting a star almost identical to the Sun.
Astronomers have used ESO’s HARPS planet hunter in Chile, along with other telescopes around the world, to discover three planets orbiting stars in the cluster Messier 67. Although more than one thousand planets outside the Solar System are now confirmed, only a handful have been found in star clusters. Remarkably one of these new exoplanets is orbiting a star that is a rare solar twin — a star that is almost identical to the Sun in all respects.
This discovery is interesting in that some astronomers have proposed that our Sun itself was born in M67, the open galactic star cluster where these exoplanets were found. My March 2012 cover story for Sky & Telescope was on this very subject.
The Obama administration now harasses the military chaplain who sued them because of their actions during the government shutdown.
Father Ray Leonard, the Catholic Navy Chaplain who sued the Department of Defense and the Navy after he was barred from celebrating Mass at Kings Bay Naval Submarine Base in Georgia during the recent the Government shutdown, is now the target of Government retaliation even though the Department of Justice indicated the day after the lawsuit was filed that he could resume his duties as a Navy Chaplain.
The retaliation involves repeated Government assertions that the employment contract under which Father Leonard was working is no longer “valid”, demands that he must sign a new contract containing several pages of onerous new terms if he wants to be paid and refusals to pay for services he had already performed.
I probably have posted an example of this kind of harassment by the Obama administration against innocent citizens about once per day for the past year. And as I said earlier today, the abuse of power by this Democratic administration makes Chris Christie look like a amateur.
Jimmy Kimmel savages Obamacare and ignorant young who support it.
Read and watch it all. Quite entertaining, in a painful sort of way.
The article also notes that while young people should surely be criticized for their blind faith in Obama and the Democrats, the media is as much to blame.
Without question, if America’s media had behaved responsibly in 2009 and 2010, the calls and emails to Congress opposing this legislation would have been so voluminous it never would have passed.
But instead, with the exception of the conservative outlets, America’s media were 100 percent behind this legislation, aiding and abetting the President and his Party to enact something that virtually all late night comics agree is a total joke.
It worked.
It did not work perfectly, and it did not balance the budget or put us on course for a balanced budget. But it did play a critical role in nudging the deficit away from “catastrophic existential threat” territory and toward “terrifying money-suck.” It did this in part by forcing Republicans to accept cuts in military spending, which they are not normally much inclined to do. (It goes without saying that the Democrats are categorically hostile to spending reductions.) Because we cannot rely for very long upon the better angels of congressional nature, these statutory limits are always destined to be short-lived, which should be of some concern to us: Experience shows that when Congress agrees to a budget-control deal, the first thing it does is begin looking for opportunities to undermine that deal.
Orbital Sciences outlines the upgrades it plans for Cygnus and Antares.
Replacing Antares’ Russian engines is their biggest problem, but along the way they are installing a number of improvements to Cygnus that will up its cargo capacity.
A detailed look at how the budget deal effects the NASA budget.
As Messier notes, the budget is generally flat, with little significant change either up or down.
A House investigation has found that the Obama administration acted to make the sequestration cuts as “painful as possible” for rural schools.
I have made no excuses for Chris Christie and the abuse his underlings heaped out in New Jersey against innocent citizens. It was wrong, and it makes me much less likely to support Christie in future campaigns. At the same time, it is also important to note that this one event pales in comparison to the number of similar abuse-of-power stories I’ve noted coming from the Obama administration. When it comes to improperly using the power of government to hurt innocent citizens, Obama and his underlings make Christie look like an amateur.
After drilling four shafts and sending in one man to look, engineers still don’t know what is blocking the giant tunnel drill Bertha in Seattle.
The next step, not simple, is to send workers to inspect the drill face itself.
This sums it up: The House is about to vote on a trillion dollar spending bill that no one has really read.
It might include some specific cuts, but in general this budget plan is a surrender to more spending.
The only real solution to this madness, however, really rests with the voters. The spenders in both parties have to be fired, and the only way to do that is to fire them. Sadly, I see no sign of that happening in the hardcore Democratic states such as New York, California, and Illinois, to name just a few. There, the voters are so partisan that they’d rather die than vote for a Republican. And die they will.
Among Republican voters at least there is pressure from the right to spend less. To make it effective, however, the voters still have to do some firing, as far too many Republicans elected officials are willing to go along to get along.
I will be appearing with David Livingston on the Space Show tonight, beginning at 7 pm (Pacific). The show is webcast live as well as podcast. Feel free to call in and ask questions or make comments.
Should be fun, especially considering the good start private space has had in 2014.
The law is such an inconvenient thing: A federal court has thrown out the net neutrality rules imposed by Obama’s FCC appointees, stating that the commission had overstepped its authority.
Have you noticed how the left always comes up for these meaningless terms — “net neutrality”, “single payer”, etc — any time they want to expand their power over our lives?
Finding out what’s not in it: Another innocent patient, having lost his insurance due to Obamacare, is now threatened with death.
I cannot be more accurate. Read the story. The man is not getting treated because his policy was cancelled because of Obamacare.
Thank you Obama and the Democrats. I am so glad you care.
And there’s this horrible story of a disabled family now out of luck: “We did not put ourselves in this situation,” she told The Daily Caller. “The government put us in this situation.”
And we have only just begun. Stay tuned from more horror stories as Obamacare spreads its wings over the entire healthcare industry this year.
Astronomers have identified a star they expect to go supernova very soon.
[SBW2007] 1 (or SBW1) is located 20,000 light-years from Earth and features an enigmatic double-ringed planetary nebula. The rings are gases that have been blasted from the outermost layers of the blue supergiant star in the nebula’s core. The star, which was estimated to be 20 times the mass of the sun before it became unstable, is going through its final death throes before a supernova is initiated. But don’t worry, the supernova would be a safe distance from us, although it will put on an exciting light show.
There is no way to predict when the supernova will occur. On the timescales of stellar evolution, it could happen tomorrow, or in a thousand years. For the full Hubble image go here.
This story is significant in that it shows how much knowledge has been gained in astronomy since Hubble’s launch. In 1987, when Supernova 1987a exploded in the Large Magellanic Cloud, astronomers had not identified even one progenitor of any supernova, and did not have any clear idea what kinds of stars produced these gigantic explosions. Today, they have identified more than a handful, and are even beginning to pinpoint candidates, such as the star above, that could be the next stars to go boom.
The competition heats up: SpaceX has signed a contract with a Japanese commercial satellite company.
The story was first reported on Friday, but I was busy this weekend and forgot to post it. Key quote:
The launch contract award for JCSAT 14, a communications satellite owned by Tokyo-based SKY Perfect JSAT Corp., adds another mission to SpaceX’s backlog, which stands at nearly 50 missions worth nearly $5 billion, according to a company press kit.
As SpaceX rolls these missions out and the money rolls in, it will insure the likelihood that they will build the Falcon Heavy as promised. And when they do, they will have created a heavy lift rocket and done it for pennies, compared to the costs spent on numerous government projects attempting to do the same.
“Over the weekend, it seems as though the national media finally figured out what most ObamaCare critics have predicted all along.”
And what did these giants of intellectual thought finally figure out? They discovered, as conservatives have been trying to explain for four goddamn years, that Obamacare is a insane mess, it doesn’t work, it is raising costs, it is preventing people from getting health insurance, and it should never have been passed in the first place.
What a shock!
Incompetence beyond belief: The Spanish language Obamacare website is unreadable to Spanish speakers.
The site, CuidadoDeSalud.gov, launched more than two months late. A Web page with Spanish instructions linked users to an English form. And the translations were so clunky and full of grammatical mistakes that critics say they must have been computer-generated — the name of the site itself can literally be read “for the caution of health.”
“When you get into the details of the plans, it’s not all written in Spanish. It’s written in Spanglish, so we end up having to translate it for them,” said Adrian Madriz, a health care navigator who helps with enrollment in Miami. [emphasis mine]
I normal expect the government to do a poor job in most things, but this level of idiocy astonishes even me. For example,
As for the language, Plaza, the New Mexico professor, said a recent examination by her research students concluded that the translations were done “by a computer-generated process” and came across as awkward.
“There are problems with the verbs and word order that make sentences hard to understand,” said Plaza, who helped develop an audio version to help residents in New Mexico sign up. “Sometimes,” she added, “it’s just the terms they use.”
The website translates “premium” into “prima,” but that Spanish word is more commonly used to mean a female cousin, Plaza said. A more accurate translation, she said, would be “cuotas,” ”couta mensual” or “costo annual.”
It is a good thing the Democrats have demanded Obamacare go into effect right away, as they are also the ones in charge of implementing it.
China’s rover and lander on the Moon have both been successfully reawakened after hibernating through the two week long lunar night.
Cygnus was successfully berthed to ISS today.
This is the first operational station resupply mission carried out by Orbital Sciences under a $1.9 billion contract with NASA calling for at least eight flights and delivery of 40,000 pounds of cargo and supplies.
The Cygnus captured Sunday will remain attached to the space station until mid February. At that point SpaceX will step up with launch of a Dragon cargo ship around Feb. 22. It will be the third operational resupply flight by SpaceX, which holds a $1.6 billion contract to deliver more than 44,000 pounds of supplies over a dozen missions.
The competition heats up: SpaceShipTwo successfully completed its third powered test flight today.
On release, SS2’s rocket motor was ignited, powering the spaceship to a planned altitude of 71,000 ft. – SS2’s highest altitude to date – and a maximum speed of Mach 1.4. SS2’s unique feather re-entry system was also tested during today’s flight. Two important SS2 systems, the RCS [reaction control system] and thermal protection coating, were tested during today’s flight in preparation for upcoming full space flights. The spaceship’s RCS will allow its pilots to maneuver the vehicle in space, permitting an optimal viewing experience for those on board and aiding the positioning process for spacecraft re-entry. The new reflective protection coating on SS2’s inner tail boom surfaces is being evaluated to help maintain vehicle skin temperatures while the rocket motor is firing.
Seven months after the IRS scandal broke, the FBI has finally contacted some of the conservative groups that were harassed by the tax agency.
“After seven months of no contact from federal investigators, a small number of our clients recently received a request for an interview from the FBI,” said Jay Sekulow, chief counsel for the American Center for Law & Justice, which represents more than three dozen groups.
He said the clients were evaluating FBI’s request but were troubled by the revelation of Ms. Bosserman’s political leanings. “This development creates a serious conflict of interest and raises more questions and doubts about the Obama administration’s promise to get to the bottom of what happened,” he said.
The last paragraph refers to the fact that Barbara Bosserman, the person named by Obama to lead the FBI investigation, is also a big time donor to Obama’s campaign. The conservative groups have very legitimate reasons not to want to talk to the FBI under these circumstances, as anything they say might instead be used against them by this very partisan use of government power.
We must once again contrast how Obama has dealt with this admitted misuse of government power with that of Chris Christie. Tells us a great deal about Obama, doesn’t it?
