Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black., You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are four ways of doing so:


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You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above.

Even if you have health insurance, it might be cheaper to pretend to be uninsured and pay cash instead.

8:58 am

Even if you have health insurance, it might be cheaper to pretend to be uninsured and pay cash instead.

This article points out the one fact that might actually be a benefit of Obamacare: The law is so screwed up that it is forcing many people out of their health insurance, where they might discover that by negotiating directly with doctors and hospitals. And that negotiation, more than any thing else — including every regulatory scheme proposed by any politician from the left or the right — will really lower the cost for healthcare.

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After more than a decade of failed attempts, India has finally successfully launched its Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV).

8:43 am

The competition heats up: After more than a decade of failed attempts, India has finally successfully launched its Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV).

Moreover, this rocket was entirely built in India. It now gives that country a rocket competitive in the international communications satellite launch market.

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Genesis cover

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.

 

The print edition can be purchased at Amazon, any other book seller, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.


The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
 

"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

Boeing is moving its X-37B operations to the Kennedy Space Center.

8:16 pm

Boeing is moving its X-37B operations to the Kennedy Space Center.

A spy plane used by the U.S. Air Force is about to get a new home: a garage at Kennedy Space Center that once housed NASA orbiters during the space shuttle era. The move was announced Friday by Boeing, the Chicago-based company that built the X-37B spy plane and is in charge of repairing the spacecraft whenever it returns to Earth. Previously, Boeing had refurbished the 29-foot-long spacecraft at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, but the company decided to relocate its fix-up shop in Florida, where the vehicle now launches.

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Conscious Choice cover

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.

 
Conscious Choice: The origins of slavery in America and why it matters today and for our future in outer space, is a riveting page-turning story that documents how slavery slowly became pervasive in the southern British colonies of North America, colonies founded by a people and culture that not only did not allow slavery but in every way were hostile to the practice.  
Conscious Choice does more however. In telling the tragic history of the Virginia colony and the rise of slavery there, Zimmerman lays out the proper path for creating healthy societies in places like the Moon and Mars.

 

“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 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.

Scientists so good they can predict things after it happens

1:57 pm

Normally I would post this tidbit when I do my monthly update of the Sun’s solar cycle, due out in sometime in the next week. However, this piece of news is so ridiculous that I have got to post it now, just so everyone can see how far science in the modern world has declined.

For the past three years I have documented the number of times the solar scientists at the Marshall Space Flight Center have changed their prediction for the number of sunspots during this solar maximum. They have revised their prediction so many times with such a large range that it appears that they really don’t have any real system or theory for making this prediction, but are merely guessing based on instinct, opinion, or tea leaves. Moreover, they do not archive their earlier predictions. If I wasn’t documenting them here monthly, there would be no way to know that while today they predict one thing (very close to what is the right number), two years ago their prediction was way off, In recent months, because the changes have become so absurd, I have been making screen captures of each change.

For the past two months they have been stating that the sunspot maximum had occurred during the summer of 2013 with an average daily sunspot number of 65. Below is my screen capture from when they made this change in November.
» Read more

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“I have closed all my businesses in Ventura County, California.”

11:30 am

Sign of the times: “I have closed all my businesses in Ventura County, California.”

And the business owner is happy about it!

Never have I operated in a more difficult environment. Ventura County combines a difficult government environment with a difficult employee base with a difficult customer base.

Freedom not only requires that each person be free to follow their own dreams, it also demands that everyone else respect that desire and effort. If you read the story above, you will discover that in this part of California at least, no one respects this business owner’s desire and effort. Instead, from the government to his customers, everyone was out to destroy him, no matter what he tried to do.

So rather than follow his dream, he is shutting down and getting out. Very sad.

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Leaving Earth cover

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.

 

Winner of the 2003 Eugene M. Emme Award of the American Astronautical Society.

 
"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

Obamacare does not provide any easy way for a family to add a new baby to their insurance plan.

9:22 am

Finding out what’s not in it: Obamacare does not provide any easy way for a family to add a new baby to their insurance plan.

There’s another quirk in the Obama administration’s new health insurance system: It lacks a way for consumers to quickly and easily update their coverage for the birth of a baby and other common life changes. With regular private insurance, parents just notify the health plan. Insurers will still cover new babies, the administration says, but parents will also have to contact the government at some point later on. Right now the HealthCare.gov website can’t handle such updates.

It’s a reminder that the new coverage for many uninsured Americans comes with a third party in the mix: the feds. And the system’s wiring for some vital federal functions isn’t yet fully connected. [emphasis mine]

To paraphrase something George Will once said, the law is a blunt instrument, not designed to do many complex things. But with Obamacare the Democrats have asked it to do something incredibly complex, run the health insurance business. It can’t do it, and because of this it is now causing a great deal of heartache and misery for many people, a large number of whom are sick and vulnerable.

But we all know that the Democrats care about the sick and vulnerable, which is why they insisted that Obamacare be enforced now without delay.

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The second commercial launch on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket has been delayed three days until January 6 because an unspecified issue with the rocket’s fairing.

10:40 pm

The second commercial launch on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket has been delayed three days until January 6 because an unspecified issue with the rocket’s fairing.

It appears the company wants to do some additional inspections of the rocket, just to be sure all is well. They haven’t been more specific then this,

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The 30 counties with the highest medium income just happen to be where most people work for the federal government.

3:47 pm

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.

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Frontpage picks Ted Cruz as their 2013 man of the year.

2:56 pm

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.

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The big solar hotshots of 2013.

11:37 am

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.

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A survey of New York businesses cannot find any businesses whose healthcare costs have gone down due to Obamacare.

9:27 am

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?

One comment

The bottom of the barrel.

9:07 am

The bottom of the barrel.

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.

One comment

U.S. Customs destroys a musician’s 11 flutes, declaring them to be agricultural products.

9:54 pm

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?

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In the final draft of its new report the IPCC has significantly slashed its predictions for how much the climate will warm in the coming decades.

9:29 pm

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.

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The law gives the government the final say on how your doctor treats you.

6:54 pm

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.

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Scientists tell the truth.

8:46 am

Scientists tell the truth.

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.

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“Unfortunately, it’s easier for our franchisees to open a restaurant in Siberia than in California.”

12:37 am

“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.

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How global warming activists ended up getting stuck in the ice fields surrounding Antarctica.

8:45 pm

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.

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AmeriCorps volunteers have discovered that the health plans provided by this federal program are insufficient to meet the requirements of Obamacare.

5:14 pm

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?

4 comments

The geological history of Venus: What’s known, not known, and unknown.

11:48 am

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.

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New York mayor Bill de Blasio: “We are going to get rid of the horse carriages. Period.”

9:53 am

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.

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Scientists think they have found cloudy skies on a nearby super Earth.

9:25 am

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.

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