Hawaii’s highest court takes on TMT case

In a move that appears to be a victory for the protesters trying to shut down the construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii’s supreme court on Friday agreed to bypass lower court procedures and immediately consider the case.

It is even possible the court could rule that it is inappropriate to have any telescopes on Mauna Kea.

Republicans propose replacement after they repeal Obamacare

A plan revealed today and endorsed by nearly 170 House Republicans would repeal Obamacare in total and then introduce a number of tweaks to the many past healthcare laws in an effort to reduce costs and increase competition.

A summary of the 192 page proposal can be read here. Take a look. It is far from perfect, but its main advantage, from what I can see, is that it doesn’t try to fiddle with Obamacare, it gets rid of it and then attempts to make changes to the laws that had existed before Obamacare was passed.

In other words, it tries to do what should have been done back in 2010, when the Democrats forced their crap bill (which most of them didn’t read) down our throats without any negotiations.

Should the Supreme Court rule that the Obamacare subsidies are illegal and the press tries to falsely blame Republicans for that disaster, this bill should be noted as a reasonable offer to solve the problem.

Scott Walker reveals his inner Democrat

In a disappointing move, Scott Walker, Wisconsin governor and presidential candidate, has announced his support for state funding for a new basketball arena, which would require increased taxes as well.

It seems to me that Republicans, no matter how conservative, always eventually disappoint and evolve into big government stooges. This happens partly because they are politicians, who are generally a lower form of life, and partly because politicians tend to do what the voting public wants. Sadly, for the past century the American voting public — even the so-called conservative voting public — has consistently voted for more government handouts, which is why Republicans evolve to the left with time.

For Walker this is unfortunately seems to be happening sooner than I had hoped.

Soyuz rocket to launch this week

In the heat of competition: Despite releasing very vague conclusions to its Soyuz rocket failure investigation, the Russians are going to resume Soyuz launches, beginning this week.

Update: The launch on Friday was successful.

I imagine that NASA will insist on more details before the next manned flight, including how they have solved the flaw that caused the Soyuz/Progress failure. At least, that is what a private company would do. What a government agency will do is sometimes beyond my understanding.

Even more rate hikes expected in 2016 due to Obamacare

Finding out what’s in it: More health insurers have now calculated the costs for the first two years of Obamacare and have realized that they need double digit premium increases.

The real political bottom line here, should the Republicans not go squishy and agree to take the blame for something they had no part in, is this:

The consequences of this inevitable failure of the ObamaCare model puts Democrats in a tough spot. They have to decide whether it’s better to have this hit in October 2015 right before the primaries, or try to delay the inevitable and possibly have it hit in 2016 right before the general election. Of course, just because premiums spike upward this year doesn’t mean they won’t escalate sharply in 2016 for the 2017 plans too.

Obamacare was imposed on us by Obama and the Democrats, entirely on their own. All of its problems were caused by them alone. The last thing the Republicans in Congress should do is to help them tinker with Obamacare to try to fix it. Instead, the Republicans should loudly increase their calls for repeal and an effort to start over, from scratch.

Angara to launch commercial payload on next launch

The competition heats up: Russia has decided to accelerate use of its heavy Angara rocket by launching a commercial payload on its next launch in 2016.

They had initially planned to do more test flights. The technical problems with Proton, combined with increased competition from SpaceX and others, is forcing them to move at a less leisurely pace.

In the meantime, they have concluded their investigation into the Progress/Soyuz rocket failure, issuing an incredibly vague press release that only stated the following:

The damage to the ship during its abnormal separation from the third stage of the Soyuz-2-1a launch vehicle resulted from a particular property of the joint use of the cargo spacecraft and the launch vehicle. This design property was related to frequency and dynamic characteristics of joint vehicles. This design property was not fully accounted for during the development of the rocket and spacecraft complex.

Limitations on further flights of the Soyuz-2-1a rocket with other spacecraft had not been found.

It sounds to me as if they don’t know exactly what caused the abnormal separation between the rocket and the spacecraft, and that they have decided to move on regardless.

I think it would be very wise for the U.S. to get its own manned spacecraft operational as fast as possible.

FEC tries to force PAC to change its name

We’re here to help you! The Stop Hillary PAC has refused to obey a Federal Election Commission (FEC) demand that it change its name.

The commission believes that, unless the PAC is authorized by the candidate, it has the right to force it to change its name. I like the PAC’s response to this unconstitutional demand:

“This committee would encourage the FEC to vigorously investigate who it is that is so stupid that they would think a political committee named ‘Stop Hillary PAC’ is in any way an authorized committee of Hillary Clinton,” the letter continues. He went on to say that since the committee filed before Mrs. Clinton declared her own candidacy, Mrs. Clinton was invited to “make any necessary name changes to alleviate whatever apparent confusion has befuddled the commission.”

“Finally, in anticipation of any further harassment of this Committee by partisan agents of any federal candidate intent on hypocritically gagging the opposition, the Committee preemptively advises that it is unaware of any effort by Sir Edmund Hillary to seek federal office, despite the precedent set by the Commission in FEC AO 2011-15 to allow a non-US citizen to run for President (though not participate in matching funds),” the letter concluded. “In any event, the committee invites the commission to clarify which particular images on its website the commission thinks bear a resemblance to the rugged Sir Edmund (or his now-rotting, desiccated corpse).”

Senator proposes criminal charges against global warming skeptics

Fascists: Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Rhode Island) has proposed that racketeering charges be considered against fossil fuel companies who express skepticism about human-caused global warming and dare to disagree with any environmental regulations imposed based on this theory.

As he writes today in his Washington Post op-ed:

 The fossil fuel industry, its trade associations and the conservative policy institutes that often do the industry’s dirty work met at the Washington office of the American Petroleum Institute. A memo from that meeting that was leaked to the New York Times documented their plans for a multimillion-dollar public relations campaign to undermine climate science and to raise “questions among those (e.g. Congress) who chart the future U.S. course on global climate change.”

Gee, industry skeptics of global warming wish to use their first amendment rights to debate the issue! How dare they! Worse, they might use money to finance their effort! (I wonder why I and most other skeptic bloggers never get any of this cash.)

As noted at the first link, the idea that any disagreement with global warming advocacy should be criminalized is not a new thing, and has increasingly been advocated by that leftwing community. Whitehouse is now tying this to the criminalization of the use of money to express that disagreement. Tie that to the effort of the Democratic Party to rewrite the first amendment to allow government to restrict speech, and you have the basic outline of a fascist movement intent on squelching freedom.

ULA to trim management by 30%

The competition heats up: In order to make itself more efficient and competitive, ULA has decided to cut its management by 30%.

ULA CEO Tory Bruno has said ULA must shrink to remain successful under reduced U.S. military budgets and with Elon Musk’s SpaceX (Space Exploration Technologies Corp.) being certified to compete against ULA for national security mission launches. “To achieve that transformation, we are reducing the number of executive positions by 30 percent and offered a voluntary layoff for those interested on the executive leadership team,” said ULA spokeswoman Jessica Rye. “It is important for ULA to move forward early in the process with our leadership selections to ensure a seamless transition and our continued focus on mission success.”

This news should be looked at in the context of a proposed Senate bill that requires the Air Force to significantly cut funding to ULA.

Not only would the bill cut an annual $1 billion payment from the Air Force to ULA, it would put severe restrictions on the number of Russian engines ULA could use in its Atlas 5, which in turn will limit the number of launches the Air Force can buy from the company.

India’s spaceplane prototype to fly by August

The competition heats up: The first test flight of India’s prototype scaled-down version of a reusable spaceplane is expected by late July or early August at the latest.

It appears the Modi government is accelerating development of this mini-shuttle, which is essentially India’s version of Sierra Nevada’s Dream Chaser. If they build it first, it will mean they will have the chance to grab the business that Sierra Nevada has been hoping to grab.

The long term decline in the United States’ GDP

This article begins by focusing on the low GDP numbers that have plagued the Obama administration, but I think this fact is far more significant:

Under previous presidents, real GDP sometimes grew massively during the first quarter. In 1950, under Truman, for example, GDP grew at an annual rate of 16.9 percent in the first quarter. In 1955, under Eisenhower, it grew at a rate of 11.9 percent. Under Johnson, in the first quarters of both 1965 and 1966, it grew at a rate of 10.2 percent. Under Nixon, it grew at 11.1 percent in the first quarter of 1971, and 10.2 percent in the first quarter of 1973, it grew at 10.2 percent. Under Ford, in the first quarter of 1976, it grew at 9.3 percent. Under Reagan, in the first quarter of 1984, real GDP grew at a rate of 8.2 percent.

But since 1984—more than three decades ago–there has been no first quarter, in any year, under any president, when real GDP grew even as fast as 5.0 percent. The closest it came was in the first quarter of 2006, when George W. Bush was president, and it hit 4.9 percent.

Note the trend downward, from 16.9% to 11.9% to 10.2% to 11.1% to 10.2% to 9.3% to 8.2% to less than 5%. The only significant other dominant social change during this seven decade period has been the steady rise of the federal government and its crushing regulatory control over all aspects of American life and business, regardless of which party has been in power. We should therefore not be surprised that there has chronic decline in the U.S.’s economic might during this time period. You can’t create new wealth if everything you do is increasingly supervised by a centralized bureaucracy that knows nothing about your business — but thinks it does.

And obviously, the solution is bigger government. Yup, that’s the answer. Just ask the Soviet Union, or Democratic Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders!

Unsafe anthrax shipments more extensive than first revealed

Government marches on! The Defense Department has now admitted that the improper shipment of live anthrax samples was far more widespread than they originally told us.

“As of now, 24 laboratories in 11 states and two foreign countries are believed to have received suspect samples. We continue to work closely with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), who is leading the ongoing investigation pursuit to its statutory authorities. The Department will continue to monitor the situation and provide updates to the public,” Defense Department said in a statement.

The Defense Department had previously reported labs in nine states and Osan Air Force Base in South Korea were impacted.

Words fail me.

Pro-crime policies work!

Link here.

Despite a generation in which radical anti-crime policies such as enforcing the law and locking up criminals slashed murder rates, there’s still plenty of debate over whether anti-crime policies work.

But no one can argue over whether pro-crime policies work.

108 people were shot in New York, Baltimore and Chicago over the weekend. Many of the casualties were saved from that terrible “school-to-prison pipeline” that bedevils promising young crack dealers and instead went straight to the morgue.

Read it all. We went though this leftwing socialist policy disaster before in the 1960s and 1970s. Some cities, like Detroit, never abandoned it. It now appears the cities that did, like New York and Baltimore, are moving to try it again. Woe on those decent citizens that live there.

Then again, they voted for these policies, so I suppose they are getting the government they deserve.

The increased bureaucracy imposed on doctors by Obamacare

Finding out what’s in it: Obamacare has forced doctors to increasingly replace medical care with administrative duties, much of which has been forced on them by the law’s requirement that they switch to electronic records.

The newly elected Barack Obama told the nation in 2009 that “[electronic records just won’t save billions of dollars”—$77 billion a year, promised the administration—“and thousands of jobs, it will save lives.” He then threw a cool $27 billion at going paperless by 2015.

It’s 2015, and what have we achieved? The $27 billion is gone, of course. The $77 billion in savings became a joke. Indeed, reported the Health and Human Services inspector general in 2014, “EHR technology can make it easier to commit fraud,” as in Medicare fraud, the copy-and-paste function allowing the instant filling of vast data fields, facilitating billing inflation.

That’s just the beginning of the losses. Consider the myriad small practices that, facing ruinous transition costs in equipment, software, training and time, have closed shop, gone bankrupt or been swallowed by larger entities. This hardly stays the long arm of the health care police, however. As of Jan. 1, 2015, if you haven’t gone electronic, your Medicare payments will be cut, by 1 percent this year, rising to 3 percent (potentially 5 percent) in subsequent years.

Then there is the toll on doctors’ time and patient care. One study in the American Journal of Emergency Medicine found that emergency-room doctors spend 43 percent of their time entering electronic records information, 28 percent with patients. Another study found that family-practice physicians spend on average 48 minutes a day just entering clinical data.

Forget the numbers. Think just of your own doctor’s visits, of how much less listening, examining, even eye contact goes on, given the need for scrolling, clicking and box checking.

The last point is absolutely true. I have found that with most doctors today, they spend most of my visit working their computer than looking at me. It is very bad medicine, which is why my best doctors refuse to do it. Either they have an assistant do it for them (raising costs of course) or they wait until the visit is over (which of course eats into the time available to see patients).

But who are we to argue with Obama and the Democrats? As well-meaning liberals, they know best and everyone else should just shut up and obey their orders.

Live anthrax spores shipped improperly by U.S. military

Does this make you feel safer? The Department of Defense [DOD] has admitted it mistakenly shipped live anthrax spores to nine laboratories that are unequipped to handle them.

The facilities that received the samples did not have systems in place to protect lab employees against anthrax exposure because they were expecting to receive spores that had been killed with radiation. It is not clear how many people were actually exposed. The DOD says that 22 people in South Korea are getting preventive treatment, but it has not confirmed how many people in the United States are being treated.

The failure here was not just with the DOD. The labs that accepted the samples are also at fault.

“These are the brownshirts of our time.”

Link here.

Read it. Though the author describes an event that happened in 2003, it shows us ugly circumstances that have now become quite common, because as she says, “the ‘good’ people did nothing to disperse the hostility.” And unless we do something about it now — stand up to these fascist thugs who hide behind nice-sounding ideologies — what is happening today in the worst places in the Middle East is only showing us what things will be like here in another dozen years.

Russian rocket now garden furniture in England

A British businessman has purchased a discarded Russian rocket and installed it in his garden as decoration.

Almost 40ft long and weighing five tonne, the rocket was first flown in 1991 after being built by the Russians in collaboration with NASA at a cost $10 million. For ten years it held the record for the fastest ever made-made machine before it was jettisoned as archaic.

Somehow it ended up at a car auction at South Marston where it was spotted by Mr Sweet while checking out vintage motors. Mr Sweet, who runs the Cirencester-based computer company Zycko, said: “I saw it for sale at a car auction and decided to buy it, not really knowing what I was going to do with it.”

I am curious how the rocket had ended up being owned and offered for sale by a UK company that “specializes in car restorations.” I also wonder if this might be a major new profit center for the struggling Russian rocket industry.

X-37B orbit uncovered

Space hobbyists have pinpointed the classified initial orbit of the recently launched X-37B.

Observers this week spotted the craft flying overhead in a 194 by 202 mile orbit (312 X 325 km), tilted 38 degrees relative to the equator. That perch is lower than previous X-37B missions and the inclination is lower, too.

“OTV 4 entered the lowest initial altitude of the program,” said Ted Molczan, a respected satellite observing hobbyist. “The ground track nearly repeats every 2 days. Frequently repeating ground tracks have been a common feature of the program. This could be an indication of a surveillance mission, or it may offer some operational advantage I have yet to figure out.”

Not much else has as yet been uncovered.

NSF to help fund the development of implantable antennas

What could possibly go wrong? The National Science Foundation (NSF) is providing funding for the development of an implantable antenna for health care, including the possibility for “long-term patient monitoring.”

The project is being financed in collaboration with the National Research Foundation of Korea to create a high frequency antenna that can be permanently implanted under a person’s skin. “Antennas operating near or inside the human body are important for a number of applications, including healthcare,” a grant for the project said. “Implantable medical devices such as cardiac pacemakers and retinal implants are a growing feature of modern healthcare, and implantable antennas for these devices are necessary to monitor battery level and device health, to upload and download data used in patient monitoring, and more.”

The grant said that an implantable device could be used for “long-term patient monitoring” and “biometric tracking,” or using technology to verify a person’s identity.

Without any doubt there are many very useful applications for such an implantable device. Monitoring battery life on pacemakers is an obvious one. There will be a problem, however, if anyone but the patient can do the monitoring. I can see too many possible misuses occurring should it be in anyone else’s hands. At a minimum, there are big privacy concerns.

Secret Service tries to steal $115K from a business couple

Theft by government: The Secret Service seized a business couple’s bank account with no warning merely because they had withdrawn just under $10,000 several times.

After months of litigation against the United States government, Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen West moved to dismiss the case earlier this month, meaning the Bednars will get their money back. However, the government refused to cover the Bednar’s $25,000 in legal fees, which the couple is entitled to under the Civil Asset Forfeiture Reform Act. Though the fight to get their $115,000 back is now over, the family is continuing to push to have their expenses covered. [emphasis mine]

First the government tries to steal their money. Now, it is trying to ignore the law by not paying their legal fees, even though the law requires it to.

But hey, we all know the best solution to all our problems is the government!

Obamacare overhead eats 22% of all health care costs

Finding out what’s in it: A whopping $270 billion, 22% of all health costs, is being spent on administration and bureaucracy under Obamacare.

The experts at the link who have revealed these numbers are hostile to private industry and are instead advocates for nationalizing healthcare. They claim it is private industry that causes these high costs. I say it is the complexity and Kafkaesque regulations that Obamacare imposes that make healthcare difficult to administer. I say the solution would be simplify things by repealing Obamacare entirely.

Instead, the Democrats want to expand Obamacare. The Republican leadership in Congress meanwhile suggests chipping at it piecemeal, which will only increase its complexity and make things more difficult to administer.

With leaders like this we are certainly doomed.

Criminal charges against Russian workers who caused Proton failure

The three Russian technicians and their supervisor whose sloppy work caused the spectacular 2013 crash of a Proton rocket immediately after launch have now been indicted on criminal charges and will face trial.

According to investigators, Grishin, Nikolayev and Gudkova in 2011 were tasked with installing the angular rate sensors on the Proton rocket that are responsible for yaw control. “As a result of their violation of technical discipline envisaged by engineering and technological documentation, these sensors were installed incorrectly / at 180 degrees from their correct position/,” Markin said.

The installation error accounted for the vehicle’s wild trajectory, causing its crash and destruction. During the investigation, Grishin and Nikolayev partly admitted their guilt in committing the crime, he said.

In his turn, Nasibulin guided by the fact that over a long time no violations had been found during the installation process and also amid the job cuts withdrew the control operation from a respective list. He did not monitor the process and the sensors were installed without the due control.

Note that they didn’t sabotage anything intentionally. They only did bad work. In the U.S. such incompetence would certainly get them fired, but no one would dream of prosecuting them under these circumstances. It appears that Putin’s government has decided to make them scapegoats and an example to everyone else: Do your work right or else!

Along these lines, Russian government officials have also indicated they are considering imposing fines on manufacturers for any future failures or delays.

Both the criminal indictments and the fines would surely work to prevent further disasters. They will also work very effectively in preventing any risk-taking or innovation from anyone. Who wants to build something new and untested if there is a strong possibility its failure will get you in prison?

Do not expect much creativity from the Russian aerospace industry in the coming years.

Hawaii’s governor imposes new deal for Mauna Kea

In his effort to appease the protesters hostile to building the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) on Mauna Kea, Hawaii’s Democratic governor has thrown out the decades-old agreement that had guided telescope construction there and has instead imposed a new deal, which will allow for TMT but will force astronomers to remove one quarter of the other telescopes on the mountain.

Astronomers have always honored the original agreement, allowing the construction of no more than 13 telescopes on the mountain. For example, to build TMT the Caltech Submillimeter Observatory was to be removed this year. Now they will have to remove some additional telescopes that had been built with the understanding that they could remain there, based on the original agreement.

The governor’s plan will also limit access to the mountain by non-natives, and require visitors to receive “cultural training”, likely a session explaining the sacredness of the native religion and how it must be obeyed at all times.

To my mind this new deal is another indication of the slow retreat of western civilization in the U.S. Once again our ability to push the unknown will be limited in favor of fostering the superiority of one ethnic group over another.

NOAA caught tampering with temperature data again

A close look at NOAA’s temperature data for Maine has revealed that sometime between 2013 and 2015 the data was drastically adjusted to cool the past and warm the present.

No explanations for these changes has been offered. For some years they cooled the past as much as 4 degrees Fahrenheit, an adjustment that cannot be justified under any scientific method. As asked at the link, “Would someone please try to explain why this isn’t the biggest scandal in the history of science?”

Democrats propose more Obamacare to solve problems caused by Obamacare

Link here. Read it all, but here is a good quote to get you started:

The problem is that the deductibles on many Americans’ health insurance policies have shot up so high that as a practical matter they can’t afford care. If a couple had a deductible of, say, $500 in the past, and it’s now $3,000, that couple has to spend a lot of money out-of-pocket before reaping the benefits of coverage. And the higher the deductible, the more likely a person is going to skip some sort of needed treatment or medicine because he or she can’t afford the up-front costs. “About a quarter of all non-elderly Americans with private insurance coverage do not have sufficient liquid assets to pay even a mid-range deductible, which at today’s rates would be $1,200 for single coverage and $2,400 for family coverage,” the Wall Street Journal reported in March.

So now, many of the same groups that agitated for Obamacare are agitating for new government spending or tighter controls on the insurance industry and businesses to “solve” the problem. But perhaps the first question to ask is: How did those deductibles get so high in the first place?

The answer is Obamacare.

Bluntly, almost all the high costs and deductibles we see now in health insurance and healthcare that have appeared in the last five years have occurred because they were specifically mandated by Obamacare. So of course, according to the warped logic under which the modern Democratic Party operates, we should immediately expand Obamacare even more! Meanwhile, the Republican leadership is scrambling to prop up Obamacare due to their terror that everyone will blame them for its problems, even though they opposed Obamacare from the beginning, never wrote one word of the law, and contributed not a single vote in favor.

You can’t make this stuff up.

Appeals court rules against Obama immigration executive order

The law is such an inconvenient thing: A federal appeals court has sustained a lower court injunction halting the Obama administration’s effort to make up law and issue amnesty to illegal immigrants.

Three significant take-aways from this:

  • 1. The case will now proceed quickly to the Supreme Court.
  • 2. The courts appear to be united against Obama’s illegal action, a fact that to me is a relief considering the number of Democratically-appointed judges in recent years who have allowed their partisan leanings to influence their decisions.
  • 3. This will strengthen the hand of the lower court judge whose injunction was defied by the Obama administration, making it easier for him to impose serious contempt charges against Obama officials and Department of Justice lawyers.

Overall, this and other recent court rulings against the Obama administration give me hope that we are still a nation of laws, not men, and that we will weather this bad period and come out of it intact as a free nation.

Senate Republican leaders ready to cave to save Obamacare

In the mistaken belief that a court ruling against Obamacare subsidies would damage Republicans, Senate Republican leaders have written a bill that would nullify the court ruling and save Obamacare.

With several Senate Republicans facing tough reelections, and control of the chamber up for grabs, 31 senators have signed on to a bill written by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) that would restore the subsidies for current Obamacare enrollees through September 2017. But the administration would have to pay a heavy price — the bill would also repeal Obamacare’s individual and employer mandates and insurance coverage requirements. …

But even if Johnson could somehow persuade Obama and Senate Democrats to accept his plan — a herculean task — the bigger problem will be his Republican colleagues in the House. The growing divide between the two chambers leaves the GOP in an awkward spot. The court could gut Obamacare in June, handing Republicans a long-sought victory they couldn’t achieve legislatively. But without a backup plan that the whole party supports, the GOP has no way to blunt the political damage if millions of Americans lose the ability to pay for their health insurance.

The madness here is in somehow assigning any blame to the Republicans. They didn’t write this law. They aren’t at fault if it goes down. The only political damage that will occur if the Supreme Court rules against subsidies will be against the Democrats. To think the Republicans will be hurt by this is plain stupidity, which isn’t surprising coming from a Senate leadership run by Mitch McConnell with the help of John McCain.

The Republicans should be arguing that, following a court ruling against Obamacare, the best solution would be to repeal the law outright and start over. Period. That is what the public wants, and has wanted, in poll after poll now for seven years, beginning two years before the law was even passed and continuing even as the law has increasingly gone into effect.

If the Democrats refuse to agree to a repeal than they will be the ones once again causing the problem. The Republicans shouldn’t be afraid to make this clear.

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