Tag: policy

A judge has ruled that JPL had no right to displine five scientists for sending emails at work protesting the security measures taken by the Bush administration after 9/11.

10:34 am

A judge has ruled that JPL had no right to displine five scientists for sending emails at work, protesting the security measures taken by the Bush administration after 9/11.

I have no problem with this decision, and in fact I applaud it, as I think it completely inappropriate for JPL to discipline anyone for expressing their opinions about the politics of our time. I contrast this ruling however, which essentially celebrates the freedom of JPL employees to attack the policies of a Republican administration using government resources, with the case of David Coppedge, who was fired by JPL because he happened to express conservative religious opinions while working at JPL. In the case of Coppedge, the courts ruled that it was okay for JPL to fire him.

The contrast illustrates the double standard of our time. In modern America, you are always allowed to express liberal or Democratic Party values, anywhere, anytime, and with whatever resources you can take advantage of. Freedom insists that you have that right. Should you express conservative values, however, be careful. You can be punished for doing so. For some reason (political I suspect) freedom does not permit the expression of these ideas, in all circumstances.

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Seventeen of the nation’s largest healthcare insurance companies now say premiums will rise from 100 to 400 percent under Obamacare.

8:23 pm

Finding out what’s in it: Seventeen of the nation’s largest healthcare insurance companies now say premiums will rise from 100 to 400 percent under Obamacare.

The key reasons for the surge in premiums include providing wider services than people are now paying for and adding less healthy people to the roles of insured, said the report.

Now ain’t that a surprise? The rates go up when you require insurance companies to provide more services while simultaneously requiring them to insure more sick people! Who wudda thunk it?

Actually, every Republican and conservative in the nation, as well as millions of Americans at townhall meetings in 2010, were screaming these basic facts of reality to the Democrats. They just refused to listen.

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Ten crazy and unconstitutional demands made by the IRS to conservative organizations in its effort to harass opponents of the Democratic Party.

10:47 am

Ten crazy and unconstitutional demands made by the IRS to conservative organizations in its effort to harass opponents of the Democratic Party.

All of the examples above are taken from actual IRS correspondence received by ACLJ’s 27 clients. There were many versions of the in-depth questionnaire sent to different organizations, suggesting there was more than one agent or one office involved. Though IRS officials blamed “low-level” employees in the Cincinnati office, which is the central IRS office in charge of tax exemptions, French said the abuse was far more widespread. ACLJ’s clients dealt with inquiries from IRS offices from “coast to coast.” Of ACLJ’s 27 clients, 15 finally had their status approved after 6-7 months with legal help. There are 12 groups whose status remains in limbo.

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House Republicans have refused to recommend anyone to the Obamacare Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB), labeled “the death panel” by some.

8:57 am

House Republicans have refused to recommend anyone to the Obamacare Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB), labeled “the death panel” by some.

“We believe Congress should repeal IPAB, just as we believe we ought to repeal the entire health care law,” the Boehner and McConnell letter reads.

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America the fallen: Twenty-four signs that our once proud cities are turning into poverty-stricken hellholes.

10:18 pm

The day of reckoning looms: America the fallen: Twenty-four signs that our once proud cities are turning into poverty-stricken hellholes.

It is important to note that every single one of the cities cited in this article has been under Democratic Party rule for decades. While the decline is not entirely their fault, their tax-and-spend policies combined with a passion for heavy regulation certainly share much of the blame.

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Senator Max Baucus (D-Mont.) said Wednesday he fears a “train wreck” as the Obama administration implements Obamacare

11:30 am

Idiot: Senator Max Baucus (D-Mont.) said Wednesday he fears a “train wreck” as the Obama administration implements Obamacare.

Baucus was one of the key architects of Obamacare and voted for it, along with every other Democrat in Congress. That he is only now discovering what a bad law it is is just further proof that he should fired.

The real question is whether the voters will fire him. After the last election I have my doubts.

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Because its FAA test flight permit will expire on May 23, SpaceShipTwo’s first powered flight has to occur by then and be supersonic.

11:00 am

The competition heats up: Because its FAA test flight permit will expire on May 23, SpaceShipTwo’s first powered flight has to occur by then and be supersonic.

What is unclear to me is how the expiration of this permit could affect future flights. Does Virgin Galactic have to get a new permit to continue test flights? What about the tourist flights that are supposed to follow?

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The International Astronomical Union has issued a press release condemning the commercial efforts of private companies to issue names for exoplanets.

11:51 am

Turf war! The International Astronomical Union has issued a press release condemning the commercial efforts of private companies to issue names for exoplanets.

Recently, an organisation has invited the public to purchase both nomination proposals for exoplanets, and rights to vote for the suggested names. In return, the purchaser receives a certificate commemorating the validity and credibility of the nomination. Such certificates are misleading, as these campaigns have no bearing on the official naming process — they will not lead to an officially-recognised exoplanet name, despite the price paid or the number of votes accrued.
… [snip]
To make this possible, the IAU acts as a single arbiter of the naming process, and is advised and supported by astronomers within different fields. As an international scientific organisation, it dissociates itself entirely from the commercial practice of selling names of planets, stars or or even “real estate” on other planets or moons. These practices will not be recognised by the IAU and their alternative naming schemes cannot be adopted.

Well la-dee-da, how dare anyone else name anything ever in space!

The truth is, the IAU was originally given this function by astronomers to coordinate the naming of obscure astronomical objects, not to provide the official names for every object and feature that will ever be discovered in space. And though the IAU does tend to favor the choices of discoverers, it has in the past also ignored their wishes. (See for example my book Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, where the IAU rejected the names chosen by the Apollo 8 astronauts, even though those astronauts were the first to actually go and see these features.)

In the end, the names of important features in space will be chosen by those who live there.

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The Fantasy of Extreme Weather

10:06 am

This week there were three stories describing new research proving that global warming is going to cause an increase in the number and violence of extreme weather events. Each was published in one of the world’s three most important scientific journals.

Sounds gloomy, doesn’t it? Not only will extreme heatwaves, cold waves, and droughts tear apart the very fabric of society, you will not be able to drink your soda in peace on your next airplane ride!

However, one little detail, buried in one of these stories as a single sentence, literally makes hogwash out of everything else said in these three articles.
» Read more

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Global warming: time to rein back on doom and gloom?

1:57 pm

From a global warming advocate: Global warming: time to rein back on doom and gloom?

Prediction, as they say, is tough, especially when it’s about the future – and that’s especially true when it comes to the climate, whose complexity we only partially understand. It is, as we all know, naturally immensely variable. And the effect of human intervention is subject to long timelags: it will be decades, even centuries, before the full consequences of today’s emissions of carbon dioxide become clear.

As a result, scientists and policymakers draw on the past to predict the future. Until now, they have therefore placed much weight on the rapid temperature increases in the Eighties and Nineties. But for at least a decade, these have dramatically slowed, even as carbon dioxide emissions have continued to increase. [emphasis mine]

Or as I like to say, every climate model proposed by every global warming scientist has been proven wrong. They all predicted the climate would warm in lockstep with the increase in CO2. It hasn’t.

This is not to say the climate hasn’t warmed in the past five centuries (though some of the data used in for the past 150 years is sadly suspect). What isn’t clear is why. It might be the rise in carbon dioxide. It might also simply be the lingering warming the Earth is experiencing as the last ice age ends. Or it might be because of the Sun.

The field of climate science is very complex, confusing, and in its infancy. We just don’t know yet, and anyone who says they do is not a good scientist.

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The coming Obamacare chaos

10:13 am

The coming Obamacare chaos.

The article is a very detailed summary of the many problems caused by Obamacare, from increased unemployment to loss of healthcare insurance to higher premiums to higher debt. Everyone should read it. However, the most important question is laid out in the very first paragraph:

The biggest political problem faced by so-called “liberals” and so-called “progressives” in President Obama’s second term is how to prevent voters from holding them politically responsible as the public comes to realize how badly they were lied to during the first Obama term to win passage of Obamacare.

It is going to be the number one priority of all Democratic politicians and their allies in the mainstream press to somehow find a way to blame Republicans for Obamacare. The question will be whether they will succeed.

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The scientists who attempted to re-invent Michael Mann’s hockey stick global warming graph and were caught fudging their data have admitted their data is worthless

12:17 am

The scientists who attempted to re-invent Michael Mann’s hockey stick global warming graph and were caught fudging their data have essentially admitted that their data is worthless.

This is what they say in a FAQ they have added to their paper:

Q: What do paleotemperature reconstructions show about the temperature of the last 100 years?

A: Our global paleotemperature reconstruction includes a so-called “uptick” in temperatures during the 20th century. However, in the paper we make the point that this particular feature is of shorter duration than the inherent smoothing in our statistical averaging procedure, and that it is based on only a few available paleo-reconstructions of the type we used. Thus, the 20th century portion of our paleotemperature stack is not statistically robust, cannot be considered representative of global temperature changes, and therefore is not the basis of any of our conclusions. [emphasis mine]

They are basically admitting that the data used to create the temperature rise of their hockey stick during the past 100 years is unreliable and therefore useless for scientific purposes. Which raises the question: Why did they publish it in the first place? See especially this analysis of this paper and the press’s reaction to it by climate scientists Roger Pielke.

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James Hansen is retiring from NASA and will dedicate his time to global warming activism.

5:26 pm

James Hansen is retiring from NASA and will dedicate his time to global warming activism.

All that is really changing is that Hansen will no longer work for the government. The activism has been going on for a very long time.

Also, it is interesting how this New York Times article seems very unaware of this fact, which makes all of Hansen’s global warming claims very suspect. Might the Times not want the public to know this annoying detail?

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The collapse of household income since 2009.

3:03 pm

The collapse of household income since 2009.

A comparison of the graph in the article above with the changing federal debt (both graphs below the fold) is quite revealing. The steep drop in household income in 2009 lines up precisely with the steep rise in federal deficits beginning in 2009. I wonder if they have anything to do with each other? The article also notes the possible negative impact of Obamacare. How could they think such a thing?
» Read more

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“We’re just not interested in continuing to support bureaucracies and talkfests.”

2:14 pm

Canada to the UN environmental movement: “We’re just not interested in continuing to support bureaucracies and talkfests.”

The country has pulled out of a UN program supposedly aimed at “combating desertification,” noting that

only 18% of the roughly CAD$350,000 per year that Canada contributed to the U.N. initiative is “actually spent on programming,” [Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper] told Parliament this week during question period. “The rest goes to various bureaucratic measures. … It’s not an effective way to spend taxpayers’ money.”

As is their normal approach to debate, there is a lot of wailing, gnashing of teeth, and name-calling among the environmentalists, but no substantive response to counter Harper’s point above.

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Science and sequestration in context

11:00 am

On March 21, the House accepted the continuing resolution proposed by the Senate for the year 2013. This continuing resolution will fund everything in the federal government though September of this year, and includes the cuts imposed on March 1 by sequestration.

As it always does, the journal Science did a specific analysis of the science portion of this budget bill. As usual, they looked only at the trees, not the forest, comparing the budget changes up or down for the 2012 and 2013 years only, noting how those changes will impact each agency’s programs. As usual, Science also took the side for more federal spending, assuming that in each case any cut was sure to cause significant harm to the nation’s ability to do cutting edge science.

I like to take a wider and deeper view. Below is a chart showing how the budgets for these agencies have changed since 2008. They give a much clearer perspective of the consequences of sequestration and the cuts, if any, imposed by Congress on these science agencies.
» Read more

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A Democratic voter discovers he’s actually a tea party racist.

4:48 pm

A Democratic voter discovers he’s actually a tea party racist.

Today was a bad day. After meeting with my tax accountant, I am now cutting a very large check to the State of California, all of which resulted from Proposition 30 and the “retroactive tax” that was levied on my 2012 income. This despite the fact that I already paid my 2012 taxes back in September.

While the law stipulates that I must surrender this money, I refuse to acknowledge this as a tax at all. This is not a tax. This is an asset seizure plain and simple. The term “retroactive tax” is a despicable euphemism. It is no different than when Hugo Chavez used the benign-sounding “nationalize” to describe his seizure of private property in Venezuela.

He then notes that he is not a tea party member or even a Republican and that he voted for Obama twice.

Wanna bet that in the next election he’ll still vote Democratic? Based on the history of the past three decades, I expect that even after this experience, he will still refuse to abandon the faction he has adopted (the Democratic Party) and change his vote.

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NASA has issued a clarification specifically excluding its press announcements from the suspension of all public outreach efforts.

9:00 am

NASA has issued a clarification specifically excluding its press announcements from the suspension of all public outreach efforts due to sequestration.

I am not surprised. These budget cuts are aimed at grabbing the most publicity as possible, without harming NASA’s ability to lobby for funding. Ironically, the truth is that much of NASA’s education and outreach work can be cut, will not be missed, and so these cuts should illustrate this fact quite effectively.

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