The White House has now delayed the deadline for signing up for health insurance by six weeks.

9:38 am

The White House has now officially delayed the deadline for signing up for health insurance by six weeks.

Gee, didn’t Obama just force a 16 day government shutdown when some Republicans suggested he delay the Obamacare mandate?

Note that this is only the first delay. Before they are done I predict the Obama administration will do exactly what those evil Republicans suggested: delay the Obamacare mandate for one year. Which will essentially prove that the Republicans were right in the first place.

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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 or any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. 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

Europe turns off Planck

8:32 am

Europe turns off Planck.

Planck operated four-and-a-half years, three times longer than originally planned. Launched in May 2009 on an Ariane 5 rocket shared with ESA’s Herschel telescope, Planck measured the cosmic fingerprint of the Big Bang, detecting subtle variations in background light originating 380,000 years after the genesis of the universe.

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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.

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

The definitive guide to how Obamacare is destroying American lives

11:04 am

The definitive guide to how Obamacare is destroying American lives.

The author asked people to write him, describing to him the consequences of Obamacare. This article provides us those stories, and they are not good. In fact, they are routinely horrible. As he says:

This is about people who can no longer afford their health coverage, their mortgages, their lifesaving medication. This is about doctors and nurses leaving medicine behind, driven away by destructive bureaucratic interference. This is about moms and dads losing their jobs so that their employers can compensate for the financial burden of Obamacare. This is about people without insurance because of Obamacare, now being fined for not having insurance because of Obamacare. This is about business owners driven to the edge of bankruptcy. This is real. We heard a lot of fantasies about what Obamacare was “supposed” to accomplish, now it’s time to talk about what it’s actually doing.

So when they say you are “heartless” for opposing Obamacare, show them why it’s heartless to support it.

But don’t worry! Those Democrats will save you all from those evil Republicans who want to delay or repeal Obamacare.

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A federal court has ruled that police must have a warrant before attaching a GPS tracker to your car.

10:59 am

Victory for freedom: A federal court has ruled that police must have a warrant before attaching a GPS tracker to your car.

That this ruling took several appeals depresses me. The language of the Constitution on this issue couldn’t be more plain. The government must have probably cause and a warrant before it can do these kinds of things.

What baffles me even more is that the police had probable cause in the specific case above. Why they didn’t bother to simply get a warrant makes no sense.

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A D.C. businessman faces two years in jail because he happens to own guns and stores them legally in Virginia.

8:44 am

A D.C. businessman faces two years in jail because he happens to own guns and stores them legally in Virginia.

The story also describes a SWAT team raid on the man’s home, which included barging in on his 16 year old son while he was taking a shower.

Read the whole thing. You will discover what it is like to live in a fascist state, where an unelected official can make your life hell, merely because he doesn’t like you.

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In an engineering test, LADEE successfully used a laser to beam information back from the Moon this past weekend.

8:25 am

In an engineering test, LADEE successfully used a laser to beam information back from the Moon this past weekend.

Lasers could enhance space communications and lead to radical changes in spacecraft design. Today’s spacecraft communicate with radio, but radiofrequency wavelengths are so long that they require large dishes to capture the signals. Laser wavelengths are 10,000 times shorter than radio, the upshot being that a spacecraft could deliver much more data then even the best modern radio system. For scale, NASA says that the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) spacecraft that’s carrying this laser experiment would take 639 hours to download an average-length HD movie using ordinary S-band communications. LLCD could download the film in less than eight minutes.

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The next Dragon flight has now been scheduled for no earlier than February 11.

8:13 am

The next Dragon flight has now been scheduled for no earlier than February 11.

The next flight of SpaceX’s Dragon has been realigned to a February 11, 2014 NET (No Earlier Than) launch date. The launch will mark Dragon’s first ride on the upgraded Falcon 9 v.1.1 rocket, potentially sporting landing legs, as Elon Musk plans his next attempt at proving the rocket’s ability to return its stages back to Earth for reuse.

SpaceX must first launch two commercial satellites with the upgraded Falcon 9 before its NASA flight. Also, 2014 will be a very business year for the rocket, as it is scheduled to send three cargo missions to ISS plus launch eight commercial satellites.

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An engineer describes how he and four other engineers debugged a fully fueled Saturn 5 rocket while it was the launchpad.

12:09 am

An engineer describes how he and four other engineers debugged a fully fueled Saturn 5 rocket while it was the launchpad.

The Saturn V was more noisy and ghostly than I had ever expected and it had grown much taller and certainly more threatening since last week. The venting fuel made loud hissing sounds when relief valves popped or opened up suddenly. It was very easy to let your imagination infect your brain. This is a very dangerous place and everything seems to be moving in the heavy foggy mist. There was no way to talk to each other, heck, we could barely see each other and…we hadn’t thought of this problem so we held onto each others yellow protective clothing like kindergartners crossing the street. We all wore safety helmets but they just did not make you feel like you were really safe.

This was also the first test launch of the Saturn 5, so the unknowns were significantly magnified.

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Why the shutdown was a total victory for conservatives, both in the short and long runs.

9:48 am

Why the shutdown was a total victory for conservatives, both in the short and long runs.

The shutdown/debt limit imbroglio wasn’t a defeat. Defeats leave the losers feeling defeated. But the designated losers, the conservative base of the GOP – which, more accurately, now is the GOP – is more eager and excited than it has been in a long time.

Why? Someone fought. Finally.

Sure, we didn’t win the repeal of Obamacare. The only people talking about actually repealing Obamacare as a direct result of the tactical moves of recent weeks were the doddering dinosaurs and their media accomplices trying to put out the notion that Ted Cruz and his band of merry marauders had suckered us numbskull conservatives with promises of total victory right here and right now.

Being very familiar with the Constitution, we realize that it’s kind of difficult to pass a law when we only hold the House. We’re clear on that. We were always clear on that. What Ted Cruz did – and what the go-along, get-along gang of Republican stegosauruses hate – is that he fought. He fought. There’s a huge value to drawing a line, to taking a stand, to rallying the troops.

Real leaders – which the GOP establishment lacks – know that. We’ve had two presidential elections in a row with a demoralized base. That’s bad. Just ask Presidents McCain and Romney. [emphasis in original]

The key for determining which side is winning this battle is to look at the positions that new politicians are taking. That tells you the trend. And what I see is that the challengers all want to be Ted Cruz, not John McCain.

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Even when they admit that Obamacare isn’t working, liberals still refuse to recognize that they are now agreeing with Ted Cruz.

9:27 am

Leftwing bigotry: Even when they admit that Obamacare isn’t working, liberals still refuse to recognize that they are now agreeing with Ted Cruz.

I call it bigotry because that is what it is. No matter what you say to these types of liberals, no matter what they experience or conclude, they remain incapable of considering the possibility that a conservative or Republican might have the right idea. Instead, they believe that conservatives or Republicans must be opposed at all costs because conservatives or Republicans must be evil and wrong.

And such close-mindedness is nothing short of downright bigotry.

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A new company is now offering balloon flights to the edge of space for one third the price of a suborbital flight.

9:15 am

The competition heats up: A new company is now offering balloon flights to the edge of space for one third the price of a suborbital flight.

World View passengers will soar to an altitude of about 30 kilometers (about 100,000 feet) — far short of SpaceShipTwo’s intended 110-kilometer (68-mile) high peak. Inside the capsule there will be little sensation of microgravity. Rather, the whole point of the ride is the view. “You can be sitting up there having your beverage of choice watching this extraordinary spectacle of the Earth below you and the blackness of space,” project co-founder and Paragon president Jane Poynter told Discovery News. “It really is very gentle. You can be up at altitude for hours, for days for research if you need to be… I think we have the opportunity to give a really, really incredible experience to people — and for a lot less than most of what’s out on the market right now,” she said.

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The great Martian dust storm of 1971.

8:49 am

The great Martian dust storm of 1971.

There has only been one comparable global dust storm on Mars since then. What made the 1971 even more significant historically is that the first human orbital probe had arrived at that very moment to record it.

By late 1971 and into January 1972 the storm abated, and Mariner 9 began to send back some spectacular images – a total of over 7,300 pictures that mapped the entire martian surface with resolutions ranging from 1 kilometer per pixel to as good at 100 meters per pixel.

The image here gives a sense of the magnitude of the storm. This was what the scientists began to see as the dust settled. The only visible features are the three great Tharsis Montes shield volcanoes, poking up through the haze in a line. The tallest of these reaches an altitude of over 18 kilometers. These peaks, and the enormous bulk of Olympus Mons had never been imaged by a spacecraft before, earlier flybys had missed them.

The late Bruce Murray (Caltech) was on the camera team and recalls, “there was a gradual clearing, like a stage scene, and three dark spots showed up.” The Mars that came out of the storm was a revelation, from these colossal mountains to the great rift of Valles Marineris and the steep valleys of Noctis Labyrinthus.

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