Tag: policy

Orbital Sciences picks another Russian engine for Antares

7:02 pm

The heat of competition: In its effort to replace the old Cold War Soviet-era refurbished Russian engines for the first stage of its Antares rocket, Orbital Sciences today announced that it will instead buy a different modern-built Russian engine.

Designated the RD-181, the new engine will be used on Antares in shipsets of two to accommodate as closely as possible the two-engine configuration built around the AJ-26 engines supplied by Aerojet Rocketdyne, Orbital Sciences managers said Dec. 16. A descendant of the RD-171 that powers the Ukrainian-built Zenit launch vehicle, the RD-181 will be manufactured in the same Khimki factory that builds the RD-180 used on the United Launch Alliance Atlas V. It closely resembles the RD-191 on Russia’s new Angara launcher and the RD-151 that powers South Korea’s Naro-1 launch vehicle.

It appears that this is the only engine presently available that can do the job. In the long run however it puts Antares and Orbital Sciences at a competitive disadvantage. Even though the sanctions against using Russian engines, passed by Congress, only apply to military launches, Orbital’s continuing reliance on Russian engines will limit their customer base.

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What Gazans really think about Hamas

4:12 pm

A real journalist went to Gaza and the West Bank and rather than retype the crap that Hamas was feeding him, he interviewed the Palestinians there and found out what they really think of Hamas and its attacks on Israel. And it ain’t good.

This one quote sums it up nicely:

“Don’t get fooled. Gazans are not in love with Israel yet, but they do not want to fight Israel anymore. We do not want to embrace Israel; we just want to live normally without wars. We want to live and work in Israel like we used to. We are under Hamas occupation, and if you ask most of us, we would rather be under Israeli occupation, instead. I would welcome Netanyahu to rule Gaza so long as Hamas leaves, and I think most Gazans feel the same way. We miss the days when we were able to work inside Israel and make good money, we miss the security and calm Israel provided when it was here, but politically speaking, we just think of it as the better of two evils: Israel and Hamas.”

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The arrival of two new childhood diseases to America

10:42 am

Link here.

In the span of four months, at least 94 children in 33 U.S. states have developed a devastating form of paralysis with symptoms similar to polio. Some require a ventilator to breathe. And some of the greatest government health minds in the country say they have no idea what’s causing it. At the same time, during the past four months, at least 12 children have died after falling ill with a respiratory virus called Enterovirus D-68 (EV-D68). Again, federal health officials are at a loss to explain the origin of the epidemic.

It appears that the first, now dubbed acute flaccid myelitis (AFM), might be linked to the second.

In a November 7 alert to practitioners, the CDC noted, “the unusual clustering of acute limb weakness occurred against a background of a nationwide outbreak of severe respiratory illness among children due to enterovirus-D68 (EV-D68). Several of the patients in California and nearly half of the 11 cases identified in Colorado had tested positive for EV-D68 from nasopharyngeal (NP) swabs at the time of admission for their neurologic illness. This raised a possible association between these neurologic illnesses and the ongoing outbreak of respiratory disease due to EV-D68.”

Whether both are linked to the flood of illegal immigrant children allowed to enter the U.S. this past summer remains unclear.

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Another reasonable look at this week’s Congressional budget deal.

10:53 am

Link here.

Mitchell correctly notes that this deal occurred because of the reality of divided government. While Republican leaders have often acted like weak-kneed wimps, there still remains a limit on how much they can get, not controlling two-thirds of the government. As I noted earlier in discussing the science budget, the federal budget is no longer growing uncontrollably, evidence that the voters’ wishes from 2010 and 2014 are beginning to be heeded.

Only when we have elected more conservatives will it then start to shrink.

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Last three years the quietest for tornadoes ever

11:55 am

The uncertainty of science: 2014 caps the quietest three year period for tornadoes on record, and scientists really don’t understand why.

Harold Brooks, a meteorologist with the National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Okla., said there’s no consistent reason for the three-year lull — the calmest stretch since a similar quiet period in the late 1980s — because weather patterns have varied significantly from year to year. While 2012 tornado activity was likely suppressed by the warm, dry conditions in the spring, 2013 was on the cool side for much of the prime storm season before cranking up briefly in late May, especially in Oklahoma, SPC meteorologist Greg Carbin said. Then, activity quickly quieted for the summer of 2013.

Global warming activists had confidently predicted that, because of global warming, we were about to see killer tornadoes of unprecedented frequency. Well, not only has the climate not warmed these past 18 years, we are seeing fewer extreme weather events.

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A more positive conservative take on the budget deal

10:48 am

Link here. I think Lambo nails it. The deal might not be ideal, but it is only the beginning, and was written when Republicans only control one house of Congress, and still pushes back at many Democratic-passed initiatives.

Next year that changes. If we do not see significant cuts in the budget from Republicans when they control both houses of Congress I will then join the many conservatives who justly distrust the Republican leadership and want their heads.

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Science spending steady in proposed Congressional budget

9:18 am

The proposed budget deal announced by Congress yesterday essentially leaves level the overall spending on science.

I have a spreadsheet where I track the budgets of the various science agencies in the federal government, and from this I can say that since the Republicans took control of the House in 2010 the funding has remained very steady. Despite the partisan screams from the left that Republicans are destroying science, all these science agencies have pretty much gotten stable funding in the past four years.

Nonetheless, much of this funding could be trimmed significantly, as there is enormous featherbedding and pork among these science agencies. That won’t have a chance of happening until next year, when the Republicans control both houses of Congress. Even then, Obama and much of the Republican leadership will oppose significant cuts, Obama because he wants to see increases and the Republican leadership because they wish to maintain the status quo.

The unending growth in these budgets, routine from the 1970s through the 2000s, has definitely ceased. I also expect the political pressure to cut these budgets to grow with time. The newer Republican members of Congress tend to be much more radical than their leadership, and are much more willing to slash budgets radically.

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Lame duck Congress agrees to $1.1 trillion budget

5:03 pm

Faced with the threat of a government shutdown, Congress has worked out a continuing resolution that will fund the government through its fiscal year ending in September 2015.

There has been a lot of gnashing of teeth among conservatives about this deal. Many wanted the Republicans to fight harder now and limit this deal more. I am less worried. The political winds are clearly favoring conservatives and tea party ideals. Come next year Congress will be controlled by Republicans, and the 2016 budget will be shaped by their concerns. Whatever small gains the Democrats and Obama get now will be stymied then.

And then will come the 2016 elections. I expect an even greater win for conservatives, since Obama is making it clear he will continue to stand firm in support of Obamacare and many other liberal issues that have proved to be poison at the ballot box.

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Jonathan Gruber grilled by Congress over Obamacare

2:34 pm

During his testimony today at a House hearing, Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber essentially admitted that not calling the individual mandate penalties a tax was a trick by the Obama administration and the Democrats in order to get the law passed.

Below the fold I also include a video excerpt of Congressman Trey Gowdy’s questioning of Gruber today. It is high entertainment as Gowdy easily highlights the dishonesty of Gruber and the Obama administration in its writing and passing of Obamacare. However, it is important to stay with the clip to the very end, when Chairman Darrell Issa proves with one simple question how Gruber was not alone in his contempt for the American voter, and that this contempt was held by everyone at every intellectual conference Gruber attended and spoke at.

It is very important for the American public to be aware of this intellectual contempt, for it will tell them to stop listening to this intellectual elite. They are not trustworthy, and are willing to screw the general public in order to impose their will on everyone.
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NOAA admits that California drought is not man-made

2:17 pm

A new study by NOAA scientists has confirmed that the recent severe California drought was not caused by the human-caused increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere but was instead the result of natural weather patterns.

The persistent weather pattern over the past several years has featured a warm, dry ridge of high pressure over the eastern north Pacific Ocean and western North America. Such high-pressure ridges prevent clouds from forming and precipitation from falling. The study notes that this ridge — which has resulted in decreased rain and snowfall since 2011 — is almost opposite to what computer models predict would result from human-caused climate change. [emphasis mine]

The climate models, which have all spectacularly failed to predict the lack of warming in the past 18 years, had also predicted that global warming would cause more rain in California, not less.

The article quotes both fake scientist Michael Mann and his buddy in the climategate scandal Kevin Trenberth in their effort to refute the study. They don’t provide much convincing data to explain why the models were all wrong, only loud whines about how they are right and everyone else is wrong.

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The federal government mines confidential private health data

9:44 am

Finding out what’s in it: Under Obamacare, thirty-five government agencies plan to use your private health data for their own purposes.

This week, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced the release of the Federal Health IT Strategic Plan 2015-2020, which details the efforts of some 35 departments and agencies of the federal government and their roles in the plan to “advance the collection, sharing, and use of electronic health information to improve health care, individual and community health, and research.”

The agencies include the Justice Department, the Defense Department, NASA, the Office of Personal Management, the FCC, and a whole slew of HHS employees.

So, while Congressional legislation forces youto fill out endless forms every time you visit your doctor, and he or she is forbidden from leaving voice messages on your phone out of fear the wrong person might hear it, Obamacare allows these government bureaucrats access to everything.

Aren’t you glad they passed Obamacare?

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Arizona county to ban employees who smoke

2:57 pm

Put ’em in concentration camps! Pima County, which includes Tucson, Arizona, is considering banning the employment of any smokers.

Already employed smokers will be charged 30 percent more for their health insurance. The regulations will apply only to government employees.

I say, why waste time with this nonsense. Anyone who smokes is obviously the scum of the Earth, and should be rounded up and sent to camps, either to be re-educated, or to be killed if they can’t reform themselves. America is now an enlightened place, where freedom and individual responsibility have been replaced with the much deeper wisdom of the state!

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NSF accused of misuse of funds in giant ecological project

11:08 am

The National Science Foundation (NSF) and a contractor have been accused by both an audit and by Congress of a significant misuse of funds in a major ecological monitoring project costing almost a half a billion dollars.

With a construction budget of $433.7 million, NEON is planned to consist of 106 sites across the United States. Arrays of sensors at each site will monitor climate change and human impacts for 30 years, building an unprecedented continental-scale data set. Although some initially doubted its merits, the allure of big-data ecology eventually won over most scientists.

But a 2011 audit of the project’s proposed construction budget stalled three times when, according to the independent Defense Contract Audit Agency (DCAA), NEON’s accounting proved so poor that the review could not be completed. Eventually, DCAA issued an adverse ruling, concluding that nearly 36% of NEON’s budget proposal was questionable or undocumented.

When the NSF green-lit the project, the agency’s inspector-general ordered the audit released on 24 November, which found unallowable expenses including a $25,000 winter holiday party, $11,000 to provide coffee for employees, $3,000 for board-of-directors dinners that included alcohol, $3,000 for t-shirts and other clothes, $83,000 for “business development” and $112,000 for lobbying.

Republican members of Congress have since been attacking NSF for this lax management. And though the amount of funds apparently misused does not seem very large compared to the size of the entire contract, I am willing to bet that this audit only uncovered a tiny portion of the misuse. Based on the recent behavior of federal agencies, I would expect this to only be an indicator of much worst abuse that is still buried behind stone-walling.

A side note: Remember how only a few weeks ago the NSF head was claiming that a shortage of funds was the reason they were unable to cure ebola. What really happened was that they were too busy spending money having parties to do their job.

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Increasing hostility to religion in America

7:27 pm

A yearly survey of incidents of religious discrimination in the U.S. has found a steady rise in the past three years.

For the last three years the Liberty Institute and the Family Research Council has published Undeniable: The Survey of Hostility to Religion in America. The legal group says they’re seeing cases of discrimination against those of faith rising rapidly. “The first time we did it, we collected about 600 cases,” Jeff Mateer, general counsel of the Texas-based Liberty Institute, told CBN News. “We went from 600 to 1,200. And this year we’re up to about 1,600. So, the threats are continuing to increase at a dramatic pace.”

The article outlines some specific stories that are quite horrifying. The worst was the case of a man fired from his job because of the sermons he gave during his free time. Sadly, that is only a sample.

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Obama administration defies IRS court order

4:46 pm

The Obama administration announced this week that it is withholding all of the more than 2,000 documents demanded by the court in connection with the IRS scandal and the possibility that the IRS divulged confidential taxpayer information to the White House.

Secretary of the Treasury Jacob Lew, Obama’s former White House Chief of Staff, took the documents that were set to be released and now refuses to ever turn them over. His rationale? Lew cannot release information about improper disclosures of confidential taxpayer information because that would be an improper disclosure of confidential taxpayer information.

Does anyone with any brains actually believe Lew and the Obama administration in this? I certainly don’t. The real reason they are are withholding the documents is because those documents will prove that the Obama administration used confidential taxpayer information for political purposes, and they must prevent that fact from being proven at all costs.

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The failure of single payer government health plans

8:10 am

Link here. Read it and be warned. Many Democrats, faced with the complete disaster of Obamacare, like to claim that none of those problems would have happened if they had instead imposed a single payer plan (a euphemism for nationalizing healthcare under a government run system).

Well, read the article at the link. It will give you an idea what to expect under nationalized healthcare, and it ain’t good.

An aside: I despise the term “single payer,” as it attempts to hide the fact that the proposal is nothing more than the nationalization of healthcare, which puts the government in control. No journalist should use it, and if they do, they should either make it clear what it means, or they reveal themselves to be leftwing hacks.

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A scrambled SLS/Orion flight schedule

12:40 am

It ain’t gonna happen: In trying to figure out what to do with SLS/Orion, NASA has admitted that the earliest any crew mission to an asteroid can occur is now 2024.

I could quote from the article, but then I’d have to quote the entire article and comment on the absurdity of practically every sentence. NASA hasn’t the faintest idea what to do with SLS, it isn’t designed to do much of anything, and it doesn’t have the funding to anything even if they knew what they wanted to do with it. Hence, the constant scheduling rearrangements, all designed to push the actual manned flights farther and farther into the future.

The article does point out how NASA is now planning to fly its first crewed mission on SLS/Orion using an untested upper stage, since the rocket costs so much to launch they can’t afford to spend the money on an unmanned test flight beforehand. Meanwhile, they are demanding that SpaceX and Boeing do all kinds of unmanned test flights with their manned capsules at great cost to these companies, before allowing any astronauts on board.

As I’ve said repeatedly, this rocket is never going to fly anyone anywhere. By 2020 several private companies will be sending humans into space regularly at far less cost and with far greater capabilities. Congress will finally realize that they can spread their pork around more effectively by funding these companies instead, and they will cancel this bloated and wasteful program.

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FAA moves to regulate and thus destroy drone use

1:47 am

We’re here to help you: The FAA is considering a new rule to require a pilot’s license in order to operate a private drone, even drones more akin to model airplanes.

The proposed rules would require that a drone owner would have to get certified as a pilot, “certification that can cost $10,000 and demand many hours flying aircraft that control nothing like a little drone.”

“Knowing the proper flap setting on a short runway approach for a Cessna 172 doesn’t do any good for a DJI Phantom [an inexpensive and popular commercial drone],” said Matt Waite, a University of Nebraska professor and founder of the Drone Journalism Lab. “A lot of people out there already running businesses in conflict with FAA policy, who don’t have pilot licenses, are probably looking at this like, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me.'”

Gee, here we have a new industry that is growing and prosperous, with many people coming up with creative ideas for using drones that none of its inventors ever dreamed of, and the government wants to step in and control it, regulating it to a point where it can’t even exist legally. Isn’t that nice of them?

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Court demands documents linked to IRS scandal

12:26 am

Working for the Democratic Party: After years of stonewalling, the Treasury Department has now been ordered by a federal court to release about 2,500 documents connected to the IRS’s illegal release to the Obama administration of the personal tax information of its opponents.

Some time in the next month these documents will become public knowledge. Considering the effort the Obama administration has made to keep them secret, I expect we shall then discover that the IRS was routinely and illegally feeding the Democrats the private tax records of their Republican opponents. Since the documents will also likely name names, we will also find out who among the Democrats demanded this illegal information, who in the IRS gave it to them, and who took that information and used it illegally.

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Obamacare and amnesty: working together to screw Americans

11:46 pm

Finding out what’s in it: Because of the way Obamacare is written, it provides employees an incentive to hire illegal immigrants — temporarily and illegally given amnesty by Obama — instead of legal Americans.

Under the president’s new amnesty, businesses will have a $3,000-per-employee incentive to hire illegal immigrants over native-born workers because of a quirk of Obamacare. President Obama’s temporary amnesty, which lasts three years, declares up to 5 million illegal immigrants to be lawfully in the country and eligible for work permits, but it still deems them ineligible for public benefits such as buying insurance on Obamacare’s health exchanges. Under the Affordable Care Act, that means businesses who hire them won’t have to pay a penalty for not providing them health coverage — making them $3,000 more attractive than a similar native-born worker, whom the business by law would have to cover.

Just remember: Obama and the Democrats care! Though what they care about is maybe something more Americans should ask themselves.

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Billion-dollar-plus NASA medical research contract under dispute

11:24 pm

A bidding dispute has forced NASA to again put up for bid a $1.5 billion contract for space medicine.

The dispute has to do with two dueling contractors, Wyle and SAIC, both of whom want the big bucks.

After Wyle won the Human Health and Performance contract in March 2013, SAIC filed a protest with the GAO, ultimately prompting NASA to reopen the competition.

When NASA reawarded the contract in August 2013, it chose SAIC. The following month, the McLean, Virginia-based firm — which had announced plans the previous summer to split into two companies — rebranded itself as Leidos and spun off its $4 billion government information technology and technical services unit as a publicly traded firm that kept the name SAIC and was slated to get the Human Health and Performance contract.

But Wyle filed its own protest with GAO in September 2013, arguing that NASA should discount SAIC’s lower bid — at $975 million, nearly 10 percent lower than Wyle’s — because it was submitted when the unit was still part of a much larger company with deeper pockets. This time, the GAO sided with Wyle.

The article says practically nothing about what all this money buys me, the taxpayer. And it is an awful lot of money. Is it for medical research on ISS? Is it for monitoring the health of the astronauts? Is it for biological research? What is it for exactly? I honestly can’t imagine how this kind of research or medical monitoring on ISS can cost this much. My skeptical nature has me wondering if this contract might instead be a bit inflated, much like SLS and Orion, in order to funnel pork to congressional districts to employ as many voters as possible.

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Italy’s legislature rejects additional funding for space

12:11 am

The Italian legislature has refused to add an additional $250 million to the budget of its space program, money requested to help pay the country’s share in the development of Arianespace’s next generation commercial rocket, Ariane 6.

The money was also needed for several other ESA space projects. Not having it puts a question mark on Italy’s future in space. The article also illustrates how the committee nature of Europe’s cooperative space effort makes it almost impossible for it to compete in the commercial market.

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Obama proclaims he will fail to do what every President has failed to do since Carter and the right goes crazy.

11:17 pm

I was reading Newt Gingrich”s commentary blasting Obama for his immigration amnesty announcement and was struck by this paragraph:

[Under Obama’s directive] there will be one group, estimated at 4 million or so, who are eligible for the new work authorization program. But at the same time, there will be no resources directed at enforcing immigration law against the other 7 million people here illegally as long as they do not fall into a few narrow categories, according to the President’s Office of Legislative Affairs. And indeed, a “senior administration official” told Roll Call that the administration “will order immigration agents to prioritize deportations of criminals and recent arrivals — and let people who are not on that priority list go free.”

I read this and realized that what Obama is doing, or not doing, depending on your point of view, is exactly what every President since Carter has done or failed to do. For the right to blast him for this unconstitutional behavior is fine, but we mustn’t forget that Republican presidents have been just as corrupt and as unconstitutional. Since the 1970s the executive branch of our federal government has simply failed to enforce the immigration laws that exist, in exactly the way Obama outlined it, and the result has been the arrival of millions of illegal immigrants inside the United States.

All Obama has done is admit to this failure, and draped it in the mantle of his approval. Past presidents had instead made believe they were doing their constitutional duty, even as they quietly allowed immigration officials to cease enforcing the law. Why else are so many illegals here?

It is this failure, by Presidents of both parties, that ipitomizes the corruption and failure of the federal government on all issues. From the budget to immigration to healthcare to pushing for wasted funding for SLS, our federal government is a pile of garbage that is choking the life out of American society, on all levels. It is for this reason that I heartily and without fear routinely support the election of untried and sometimes foolish sounding tea party candidates: they can’t possibliy be worse than what we already have and — because of their passion for smaller government — are far more likely to be much better.

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Sheriff tases and arrests homeschooling family because their house is messy

12:51 pm

We’re here to help you! Lacking a warrant, police officers forced their way into the home of a homeschooling family, tased the parents, and then arrested them.

The reason? A child protection caseworker had visited the house a few days previously and had found it to be “messy.” When the caseworker returned with the sheriff and his deputy, without a warrant, the parents refused them entry.

As Jason [the father] turned to go back inside, Glidden [the deputy] sprayed him with pepper spray—first at the back of his head and then directly in his face. Glidden also sprayed Laura [the mother], who fell to the floor. Glidden then turned to Jason, who was still standing, and shot him in the back with his Taser. As Jason fell, Laura closed the front door. Glidden triggered the Taser three more times through the closed door.

Sheriff White joined Glidden on the front porch. Together they forced open the door and found Laura and Jason lying on the floor. Glidden sprayed Laura in the face a second time while White sprayed Jason and tried to turn him over onto his stomach. Laura shouted to the officers that Jason had been taken to the emergency room earlier in the week for chest pains. White nevertheless continued attempting to turn Jason over and sprayed him a third time when he was unsuccessful. The officers also sprayed the Hagans’ dog with chemical agent and threatened to shoot it if it didn’t stop barking.

Finally, the officers handcuffed and arrested Laura and Jason and charged them with resisting arrest and child endangerment.

The charges were dismissed because of the lack of warrant, and the family is now suing. The article does not say whether they are suing the state or the officers themselves. I hope they are suing the officers, as there should be some direct consequnces for this kind of fascist behavior.

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What the Middle East conflict looks like from inside Israel

12:34 am

As I am in Israel this week visiting family, I have had an opportunity to get a feel for the political and cultural atmosphere of the Middle East. Granted, this “feel” is very superficial and subjective, but it is nonetheless instructive, as I am viewing the situation not as a resident but as an outsider who always favors freedom and justice in any political conflict.

Anyway, my sense of the situation here comes from two immediate sources, one cultural and the second personal. First the cultural.
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Even if you liked your plan, Obamacare will pick a plan for you

10:09 pm

Finding out what’s in it: In order to prevent Obamacare enrolless from experiencing the rate hikes expected when they automatically renew their 2014 plans for 2015, the Obama administration is proposing that it instead choose cheaper plans for those that automatically renew, even if that new plan will change the available doctors and hospitals in their network.

So, you decide that the plan you had in 2014 was worth keeping in 2015 and thus allow that plan to automatically renew rather than spend another week trying to struggle through the badly designed and hack-prone Obamacare website. When you visit your doctor however you then discover that you actually didn’t renew that plan, the Obama administration picked a different plan for you, and your doctor is no longer a participant in your plan. You have to change doctors!

Isn’t wonderful how much the Obama administration cares?

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