Tag: politics

Obamacare to punish small businesses for helping employees

8:42 am

Finding out what’s in it: The IRS has announced that the annual fine to businesses — even businesses with less than 50 employees — for helping employees pay their medical expenses will be a mere $36,500.

“We were told over and over during the Obamacare discussions that if you had less than 50 employees there’s no requirement to provide coverage, so you don’t have to worry about any cost factor,” said Ron Aldridge, Mississippi director for the National Federation of Independent Businesses. … If a company has five employees, the total tax would be $182,500. A “large” employer with 50 employees that did not provide insurance in compliance with the Affordable Care Act, would be subject to $2,000 per employee, with the first 30 employees exempt, for a total of $40,000, Aldridge said.

And then there’s this gem:

The Mississippi Insurance Department said: “The rule appears nowhere in the Affordable Care Act but was developed by the Obama administration’s regulation writers at the IRS.” [emphasis mine]

Not only is this IRS rule illegal, as it isn’t based on anything written in the Obamacare law, it starkly illustrates the inhumane attitude of the Obama administration and people there who wrote it. The rule demands that employers look the other way if their employees are in trouble because of medical expenses. It also surprises everyone by suddenly imposing Obamacare on all businesses, even tiny ones which had been promised they were exempt from the law.

In fact, based on the information in this article, even an independent contractor like myself could be found in violation of this rule and subject to fines.. Essentially, I am not allowed to use my profits from my business to pay for my medical costs,

In other words, this administration wants to hurt people.

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Judge rules IRS must disclose White House requests for private taxpayer information

1:13 pm

The noose tightens: A federal judge today ruled that the IRS must turn over any records showing White House requests for private confidential taxpayer information.

Questions about potential White House meddling in taxpayers’ private information stretch back to the beginning of the Obama administration, when the then-White House chief economist seemed to describe the tax structure of Koch Industries during a briefing with reporters. His description was apparently incorrect, but it left some watchdog groups wondering if the White House had quietly sought information on conservatives, such as the billionaire Koch brothers.

Cause of Action sued in 2013 to get a look at whatever requests the White House, or other federal agencies, had made. The IRS refused, saying even the existence of those requests would be protected by confidentiality laws and couldn’t be released, so there was no reason to make the search. The judge said Friday, however, that the agency couldn’t use the privacy protection “to shield the very misconduct it was enacted to prohibit.”

If evidence is found that the White House was delving into the confidential tax records of its opponents, with IRS help, I think this scandal will finally reach critical mass. People might not go to jail, but the evidence will allow the individuals involved to sue and win in court. For the Democrats, Obama, and the IRS, this will not be pretty.

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New EU tax law puts thousands out of business

11:42 am

We’re here to help you! A major revision to the VAT tax in the European Union tax has caused the shutdown of thousands of businesses because they cannot afford to meet the complex rules and bureaucracy required.

Designed to prevent large businesses locating themselves in VAT-competitive territories, it had the predictable effect of drowning small businesses under a sea of bureaucracy, forcing them to access the data required to prove the customer’s location, figure out which of more than 80 VAT rates to apply, and issue an invoice in the correct language, currency and layout. Unable to afford the costly software required to deal with the regulation, thousands of small business and sole traders have closed or abandoned their enterprises. Most of those who have continued to trade have either moved to third party platforms, losing up to 70 percent of their total revenue (not just non-domestic sales) in commission, or spent thousands on software.

“The human cost to these businesses is vast”, Clare Josa is co-founder of EU VAT Action commented for EU Observer. “The only reason the Digital Single Market is still functioning is because awareness levels are below 5 percent, so most businesses are continuing to trade under the former system. As awareness rises, the damage will soar.”

Read the whole article. The quote above only gives a small taste of the problem caused entirely by government bureaucrats and elected officials who seem divorced from reality. And though this is a European governmental disaster, it is instructive for Americans to learn about it. Like Obamacare, the new VAT tax rules were imposed with the best of intentions, but completely ignored the reality of meeting those intentions. The result is financial ruin for thousands of businesses and individuals.

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Hawaii Supreme Court hears arguments on TMT constructions

8:15 am

Hawaii’s Supreme Court on Thursday heard arguments for and against the construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope on the summit of Mauna Kea.

Based on reading the various news reports of the hearing and the questioning by the judges, it appears to me that the judges have already decided against the telescope. Race, ethnicity, and hatred of western technology must take precedent over all else.

I repeat: If the court shuts down TMT astronomers should consider moving out entirely. Furthermore, Americans should maybe consider other places for their tourism, considering how hostile Hawaiians now appear to be.

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More than half of published psychology papers cannot be replicated

11:51 am

The uncertainty of science: An attempt to replicate 98 different psychological research studies has found that significantly less than half could be replicated.

In the biggest project of its kind, Brian Nosek, a social psychologist and head of the Center for Open Science in Charlottesville, Virginia, and 269 co-authors repeated work reported in 98 original papers from three psychology journals, to see if they independently came up with the same results. The studies they took on ranged from whether expressing insecurities perpetuates them to differences in how children and adults respond to fear stimuli, to effective ways to teach arithmetic.

According to the replicators’ qualitative assessments, as previously reported by Nature, only 39 of the 100 replication attempts were successful. … There is no way of knowing whether any individual paper is true or false from this work, says Nosek. Either the original or the replication work could be flawed, or crucial differences between the two might be unappreciated. Overall, however, the project points to widespread publication of work that does not stand up to scrutiny. [emphasis mine]

None of this surprises me. The focus of much science research, especially in the soft sciences like psychology, is statistical in nature and easily manipulated. In fact, most of it isn’t science at all, but an attempt to use mere statistics to prove a point. Science would instead try to find out why something happens, not just demonstrate through statistics that it does.

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The terrible political consequences of Iran deal to the Democratic Party

9:55 am

Several stories in the news today outline for me the terrible political consequences faced by the Democratic Party by their support for the nuclear deal with Iran:

This quote from the middle article however highlights how bad the consequences for the Democrats will be:

if Obama is left with a deal that is opposed by a majority of either the Senate or the House, the Democrats will be stuck with it. They will then be on the defensive with every hostile move Iran makes with the $150 billion the mullahs are going to get.

Like Obamacare, only Democrats are going to support this Iran deal. They will own it entirely. Thus, the first time Iran does something to violate the treaty or to use the $50 billion or more of cash they will get for signing the deal to promote terrorist attacks, it will be Democrats and only Democrats who will share the blame.

Yet, like Obamacare, the Democratic Party seems oblivious to these political risks. Come hell or high water, they are, as described in the first story, working as hard as they can to get the votes to sustain an Obama veto and make this deal law.

As much as I want these Democrats kicked out of office, I think having the Iran deal approved will be worse for the nation and the world. It will immediately dump billions of dollars into the hands of Iran’s radical terrorist leaders, surely resulting in more violence against many innocents across the globe. And it will announce to the world our willingness to allow Iran to develop nuclear weapons, which will almost certainly instigate a nuclear arms race in the Middle East and probably prompt Israel to attack Iran, possibly with its own nuclear weapons.

None of this is good. Better that the Democrats should save themselves the political cost and oppose this horrible deal.

Unfortunately, I am not hopeful. The track record of today’s Democratic Party is that of a group of people willing to put ideology ahead of everything, even if it means they will lose elections like crazy afterward. I see nothing to make me think they will do different here.

Our only option afterward then will be to throw them out of office. I pray that come 2016, the election results will make the Republican landslides of 2010 and 2014 look like mild rebukes in comparison.

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States okay big insurance premium increases caused by Obamacare

9:22 am

Finding out what’s in it: State insurance regulatory agencies have been routinely granting the gigantic rate increases requested by health insurance companies due to the costs imposed on them by Obamacare.

It’s the third year in a row for huge rate hikes, all due to the uncertainties built into the mandate-driven system of ObamaCare. The White House explained the hikes after the first year as an artifact of sudden access to care, but by year three that explanation has worn thin. The cost curve isn’t bending downward in any phase of health care, and it’s not even bending upward any longer. It’s skyrocketing, and insurers are reflecting that in their premium hikes.

At the same time that premiums have escalated, of course, deductibles have expanded almost exponentially for some families. Consumers are paying outrageously high premiums for insurance they will almost certainly never access, thanks to the need to spend thousands more out of pocket on top of these premiums before insurers have to cover anything but wellness checks.

Obviously this is the fault of Bush-Reagan and the evil Republicans in Congress, none of whom wrote or voted for Obamacare and in fact opposed it vehemently. Obama and the Democrats, who wrote the law and then forced it through Congress, are obviously innocent of any blame for that law’s disasters. Let’s vote for them again!

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IAU balks at some Pluto names picked by New Horizons team

9:12 am

Irritated that the New Horizons team did not consult with the International Astronomical Union (IAU) before it announced its proposed names for many Pluto features, IAU officials are now threatening to reject them once submitted.

“Frankly, we would have preferred that the New Horizons team had approached us before putting all these informal names everywhere,” said Rosaly Lopes, a senior research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory who is a member of the IAU’s Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature.

The group’s chair, Rita Schulz of the European Space Agency, said the New Horizons team has not yet submitted a formal proposal for naming features on Pluto and its moons. “Usually, there are always some features for which this process goes rather fast, some for which more checks and balances are required (which then takes a bit longer) and there are usually also some names or descriptors that cannot be approved and need to be replaced by others,” she told GeekWire in an email.

There has been a conflict between the IAU and the principal investigator for New Horizons, Alan Stern, for years now. Stern also runs the private company Uwingu, which offers citizens the ability to name unnamed craters on Mars for a fee, without asking the IAU. Stern, like myself, believes that the IAU’s claim that it is the only authority that can approve names for every object not on Earth is hogwash. Stern also strongly objects to the IAU’s decision to demote Pluto’s planetary status to a dwarf planet.

These comments by IAU officials suggest that they are being somewhat petty and are threatening to reject the New Horizons names to get back at Stern.

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Russia delays first manned Vostochny launch seven years

8:41 am

The heat of competition: Russia has finally admitted that it will not be able to fly manned missions from its new Vostochny spaceport in 2018, and had instead rescheduled that first flight for sometime in 2025.

The reasons were not spelled out, and it was unclear if financial considerations were behind the delay.

Space agency spokesman Mikhail Fadeyev made clear the change of plan in stating: ‘The first manned flight from the Vostochny Cosmodrome is scheduled for 2025 with an Angara-AV5 rocket, according to the federal space programme.’ The move reflected the ‘founding principle of Vostochny as an innovative cosmodrome’, he claimed. Under the plan, the first test flight of the Angara-A5B is scheduled for 2023, while the rocket’s first unmanned flight is slated for 2024.

Russian prime minister Dmitry Medvedev recently visited the spaceport, stressing the importance of the first unmanned launch, due in four months from now, being a success. His statement appeared to allow for the possibility of slippage in this timetable also.

Vostochny was first proposed in 2007, so that means it will take Russia almost two decades to get this spaceport ready for manned flights. Only a government operation, designed to create jobs instead of accomplishing something, takes such an ungodly long time to get finished.

Meanwhile, Russia will continue to use Baikonur for manned flight for at least one more decade.

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EPA withholds Colorado disaster documents demanded by Congress

3:58 pm

Surprise! The EPA, when ordered by Congress to release documents describing that agency’s planning prior to the toxic waste disaster it caused in Colorado, has failed to meet the deadline set by Congress for turning over those documents.

“It is disappointing, but not surprising, that the EPA failed to meet the House Science Committee’s reasonable deadline in turning over documents pertaining to the Gold King Mine spill,” said Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX). “These documents are essential to the Committee’s ongoing investigation and our upcoming hearing on Sept. 9. But more importantly, this information matters to the many Americans directly affected in western states, who are still waiting for answers from the EPA.”

Smith – who frequently spars with the EPA – is chairman of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee. EPA director Gina McCarthy has been asked to appear and answer questions about the agency’s role in creating a 3-million-gallon toxic spill into Colorado’s Animas River on Aug. 5. Critics say McCarthy and the EPA have been unresponsive, secretive and unsympathetic toward millions of people who live in three states bordering the river.

The word “coverup” comes to mind, though how could anyone believe that the Obama administration (the most transparent in history!) would do such a thing baffles the mind.

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Boeing lobbies for renewal of the Export-Import Bank

9:37 am

Boeing on Monday told its satellite workers that it will eventually lay off hundreds because of lost contracts due to the failure of Congress to renew the Export-Import Bank.

Boeing Co (BA.N) on Monday told its workers that it expected to cut as many as “several hundred” jobs in its satellite business through the end of 2015 due to a downturn in U.S. military spending and delays in commercial satellite orders. Multiple commercial orders were being delayed by recent failures of launch vehicles and uncertainties about the future availability of financing from the U.S. Export-Import Bank, whose government charter lapsed on June 30, the company told key managers in an internal communication.

Boeing spokesman Tim Neale confirmed the reductions and said the total number of people affected would be finalized in coming months. Some could find work in other parts of Boeing, he said. [emphasis mine]

This announcement is pure lobbying, no more. They might have to lay off workers, but they haven’t done it yet, and when they do the numbers are likely to be far less than they are implying. And even so, the layoffs will probably be good for the company, making it more lean and efficient.

The reason they have made this public now is to generate support for a renewal of the Export-Import Bank, which Congress allowed to expire last month. Boeing wants it back, because the company uses the low interest loans it provides (using government money) to get contracts abroad. However, they really don’t need it to do that. They could trim costs, work more efficiently, and get loans in the private sector, as every other private company is expected to do.

This announcement is really no different than the doom that was predicted prior to the arrival of sequestration. Those budget cuts were going to cause the destruction of the defense industry and the American military, while causing the airline industry to collapse because the TSA and the FAA wouldn’t have the staff to keep the planes in the air. Twas all a lie. Nothing happened, and by some miracle the government still had plenty of cash to keep things running smoothly. Similarly, Boeing can compete without the help of the government. They just have to stop whining and do it.

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IRS reveals Lerner used more than one personal email address

7:29 pm

Surprise! The IRS today revealed that it has just discovered that Lois Lerner used a second private personal email account, under a different name, for conducting government business.

IRS lawyer Geoffrey J. Klimas told the court that as the agency was putting together a set of documents to turn over to Judicial Watch, it realized Ms. Lerner had used yet another email account, in addition to her official one and another personal one already known to the agency. “In addition to emails to or from an email account denominated ‘Lois G. Lerner‘ or ‘Lois Home,’ some emails responsive to Judicial Watch’s request may have been sent to or received from a personal email account denominated ‘Toby Miles,’” Mr. Klimas told Judge Emmet G. Sullivan, who is hearing the case.

It is unclear who Toby Miles is, but Mr. Klimas said the IRS has concluded that was “a personal email account used by Lerner.”

There is additional concern that this insecure account, not yet searched, might have been used by Lerner to communicate confidential taxpayer information.

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Wisconsin spends $1.2 million defending “John Doe” prosecutors.

8:43 am

Working for the Democratic Party: The State of Wisconsin has spent more than $1.2 million defending Democratic Party prosecutors who had instigated investigations against innnocent citizens merely because those citizens opposed that party’s agenda.

The courts have repeatedly ruled against those investigations, sometimes with very harsh words. Yet, the state continues to spend money defending them, even though the governor, Scott Walker, is a Republican and the state legislature is controlled by the Republican Party.

This quote from the article sums it up:

“They lost in the highest court in Wisconsin and they still won’t let go. And we are supposed to keep battling them on our dime while the taxpayers pick up the tab for them to harass us in court. And why is the state of Wisconsin paying legal fees for Milwaukee County officials who are being sued for violating people’s civil rights in a Milwaukee County investigation? Let Milwaukee County taxpayers pay to defend their corrupt public officials.”

If Scott Walker is serious about running for President, he should end the funding of these prosecutors now.

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Oregon forest fires blamed on federal ban on logging

7:12 pm

We’re here to help you! The logging industry is blaming the increased number of severe forest fires in Oregon during the past three years on the federal ban on logging in federal forests.

Logging on federal lands was first limited in the early 90’s. More severe limits on logging on any roadless federal land were then passed by President Bill Clinton in 2000, essentially ending the practice on federal lands.

[Andrew Miller, CEO of Stimson Lumber, one of the state’s largest lumber companies] said this was a huge mistake. “As soon as the ban on logging took effect, fire conditions worsened,” he said. “Four or five years after the ban was put in place fires started to really ramp up.” The reason for the increase is simple, he said. When logging in these areas stopped, more and more trees began to fill the lands. These trees, particularly ones that have died and become dried out, rather than be chopped down by a logging company, give the fire easily combustible fuel. “Once logging was stopped the forests got older and older and more and more trees died off,” Miller said.

The article is well written, and includes a response by a Forest Service official, who dismissed the lack of logging as the cause and instead blamed the increase in fires to extreme weather and less snowfall in the western states.

I am willing to bet that a close look at the weather in the Northwest will find that the only extreme weather they have seen in the past three years has been snow, contradicting the Forest Service official’s claim. I do not know this, and could easily be wrong, but I am still willing to bet.

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“SJW zealots proved their commitment to tolerance, openness and variety by vowing not to read a work found on [an opposing] slate under any circumstances.”

5:13 pm

The story describes the battle this year in the science fiction field between Social Justice Warriors (SJW) — leftwing ideologues who want to limit the books that win the Hugo Awards to only those that support leftwing identity politics — and a slate of science fiction authors who oppose this intolerant attitude and wanted to get the Hugos opened up to a wider range of ideas.

This quote sums up the attitudes of the left quite nicely:

The facts of this case are the same as in gaming and in every other industry that social justice warriors touch. They do not care about art forms. They do not care about science fiction. They do not even particularly care about talent. They care about enriching and ennobling themselves and their friends, and pushing a twisted, discredited, divisive brand of authoritarian politics.

In politics, in the environment, in science, and in any number of other important fields in today’s society, the left really has no interest in achieving its stated goals. (Just read this one report about the EPA’s mine disaster in Colorado, for example.) Instead, the goal is power, and control, and gaining the ability to dictate how others shall live their lives — even if it destroys everything else in the process.

When Americans finally understand this, they might finally choose to throw these thugs out of power. Until then, however, expect them to continue their scorched Earth policy of destroying innocent people, because they can.

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The one climate prediction that has come true

1:23 pm

Fraud at NOAA: Several years ago Steve Goddard predicted that, no matter what the temperature records told us, NOAA scientists would begin to declare every month the hottest on record. It turns out he was 100% right!

Be sure and look at the next to last graph at the link. It shows the increasing difference between the raw, unadjusted temperature data and the adjustments made by NOAA scientists. Not surprisingly, the adjustments all increase the trend towards warming, and have been doing so more and more with each year. Nothing can justify such adjustments, under any rational scientific argument. These guys are either incompetent, stooges for their political bosses, or political hacks. Or all three.

Posted on the outskirts of Phoenix.

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Making excuses for moden Islamic slavery

1:03 pm

The bankrupt academic community: In this op-ed, Islamic expert Robert Spencer describes a typical example of a different Harvard professor finding excuses for recent examples of slavery in Islamic countries, including somehow equating the slavery we abolished 150 years ago with slavery that Islamists are proudly doing now.

As Spencer notes, this type of blindness to evil is not unique to our modern leftwing academic community. You would almost think they actually support Islamic slavery. Or maybe they hate western civilization and its concepts of freedom and personal responsibility so much they are willing to support any evil that opposes it. Either way, they have become a sort of fifth column within the U.S., doing whatever they can to weaken out ability to fight this evil.

Posted on the road north to Prescott, Arizona.

Update: The post has been rewritten slightly to make it clearer that Robert Spencer is not the Harvard professor making excuses for Islam, but someone who is observing the blindness. I have also corrected my misspelling of Spencer’s name. I was typing in a car, on a tiny tablet. Hat tip Ted.

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Florida demands real skim milk be declared “imitation” because nothing was added to it.

11:12 am

You can’t make this stuff up! An all-natural creamery in Florida has been forced to destroy rather than sell its skim milk because the state’s agriculture department wants them to either artificially add vitamins or label the skim milk “imitation”, even though it came directly from the cow.

Webster’s dictionary defines skim milk as simply “milk from which cream has been removed,” with no mention of added vitamins. But Department lawyer Ashley Davis told a judge consumers expect whole milk and skim milk to have the same nutritional value and that the Wesselhoefts’ skim milk is nutritionally inferior because vitamins are removed when the milk fat is removed. “Ocheessee’s product is imitating — literally imitating — skim milk,” Davis said.

Judge Robert Hinkle said he’s not so sure consumers expect skim milk to have the same nutritional value as whole milk. “You know something’s been removed in order to make it skim milk,” he said. Hinkle also seemed to have problems with the word imitation. “It’s hard to call this imitation milk. It came right out of the cow,” Hinkle said. “Anyone who reads imitation skim milk would think it didn’t come out of a cow.” [emphasis in original]

The article also describes the story of a sausage company destroyed by similar absurd regulations.

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The next Lois Lerner, this time at the Federal Election Commission

10:05 am

Working for the Democratic Party: The chairwoman of the Federal Election Commission (FEC) has voiced support for Lois Lerner’s harassment of conservatives at the IRS, and wants to wield her agency’s power in the same manner.

[Critics] take special aim at the commission’s Democratic chairwoman, Ann Ravel, who also served as chairwoman of California’s equivalent to the FEC, the Fair Political Practices Commission, before coming to Washington in 2013. Ravel has lambasted the commission as “dysfunctional” because votes on enforcement issues have often resulted in ties, and she has said the commission should go beyond its role of enforcing election laws by doing more to get women and minorities elected to political office. She has complained that super PACs are “95 percent run by white men,” and that as a result, “the people who get the money are generally also white men.”

To remedy those problems, Ravel sponsored a forum at the FEC in June to talk about getting more women involved in the political process. She has also proposed broadening disclosure laws to diminish the role of outside spending, and suggested that the FEC should claim authority to regulate political content on the Web. She’s also voiced support for eliminating one member of the commission in order to create a partisan majority that doesn’t have tie votes, saying in an interview with Roll Call, “I think it would help.”

In other words, she doesn’t like how Americans vote, and wants to change the results, by any means necessary.

Her partisan willingness to use the FEC to influence elections, something it is fundamentally not supposed to do, illustrates an important aspect of the IRS scandal. Obama might be leading the way in using the government to squelch any political opposition, but he couldn’t do it if he didn’t have the support of a lot of individuals within the government, both political appointees and civil service workers.

I have a saying: “It is the audience that counts.” Having someone in charge demanding action means nothing if he or she doesn’t have a legion of supporters willing to back him or her up. It appears the fascist beliefs of many leaders in the Democratic Party and in leftwing academic circles do have that legion of supporters. We who believe in freedom and democracy had better recognize this at some point, since an unwillingness to do so (as illustrated by the Republican leadership) will only allow these fascists to gain more power.

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Eight telescope protesters arrested on road to summit of Haleakala on Maui

9:16 am

Police arrested 8 protesters on Thursday attempting to block trucks delivering construction materials for the new Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope (DKIST) under construction since 2012 on the summit of Haleakala on the island of Maui in Hawaii.

One of those arrested has been a leader of the protests at Mauna Kea against the Thirty Meter Telescope.

The Hawaii state government continues to waffle on what it is going to do. Either they will make sure that construction of these telescopes can proceed, as per the agreements made after years of negotiation, or they are going to bow to a handful of protesters. Right now it appears that it can’t seem to make up its mind.

Meanwhile, if these protesters really have the support of a majority of Hawaiians, then astronomy in Hawaii is doomed.

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Cruz’s good positioning in campaign recognized by more pundits

11:42 am

It seems I am not the only person who has recognized the smart way Ted Cruz has positioned himself in the on-going presidential campaign.

This article notes that because of Cruz’s clever work, the Republican establishment might find themselves forced to choose between Cruz and Trump, and in that case they will go with Cruz.

By this point, we might be close to the March 1 “Super Tuesday” primaries, most of which will take place in Deep South states where Cruz has trained his focus toward developing strength. He’s been outshone by Trump in most of them to date, but Cruz is building more organization in those states than any other candidate.

We could see a situation where Trump is ahead on the strength of his performance in the early states and still leads in the polls, though he might have commenced fading in the face of the various challenges befalling a presidential candidate and the terror gripping the party of having to nominate a bull-in-a-China-shop like the real estate magnate has not subsided. But while the establishment might believe Trump is beatable, they could be without candidates to beat him. And at that juncture, the unthinkable might become inevitable; namely, that the RINO/Chamber of Commerce GOP establishment might well see Ted Cruz as their only hope to stop Donald Trump from getting the Republican nomination.

The first paragraph in the quote above makes note of something I noticed clearly last week: While the other candidates have been spending a lot of time playing to the cameras, Cruz instead completed a recent campaign swing through the south to prep his campaign for those March 1 “Super Tuesday” primaries, what some are calling SEC primary because so many of them are located in the south. No one else seems to be prepping for this as he is.

Nor is this article the only analysis that has noticed this. Read this commentary of the above article at Hotair. While more skeptical, the author notes, as I do, that in the end the Republican voter is going to go with the more reliable conservative candidate. And that candidate is neither Donald Trump nor Jeb Bush.

So yeah, the establishment would go with the professional politician if they had to decide. And conservative voters, of course, would go with the true conservative. That was the significance of yesterday’s PPP poll out of North Carolina: When given a choice between Trump and Marco Rubio or Scott Walker, righties opt for the latter despite giving Trump fairly solid marks on favorability. Meanwhile, undecideds would line up behind the professional pol, knowing that he’d be less likely to alienate swing voters with his rhetoric in the general election and therefore would be more electable. And even some Trump fans, satisfied that the true RINOs in the race like Jeb Bush had been eliminated, would switch to Cruz knowing that he’s as anti-establishment in his own way as Trump is. I think Cruz wins the war with Trump easily.

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Ecologists try to control reporting of their presentations

9:37 am

At its annual conference last week, the Ecological Society of America (ESA) demanded that audience members not tweet about presentations unless given permission by the speaker.

The request to gain consent from speakers before tweeting about their presentations rankled many. In a blog post, Terry Wheeler, an entomologist at McGill University in Quebec, Canada, said that ESA was “taking a step backward” from its open social-media policy of past years. But Liza Lester, a communications officer at ESA, says that the society supports tweeting at conferences and did not intend to change its stance. “It was a misunderstanding,” she says.

Writing on the Lyman Entomological Museum blog, Wheeler says that the Twitter restriction caused a lot of frustration among ESA meeting attendees and long-distance observers, who wondered why there was such a lull in social-media chatter. He notes that the last-minute announcement differs from the code of conduct printed in the conference programme, which says that attendees cannot take photographs of slides or posters without permission and that they should avoid posting online “detailed information from presentations.” Those restrictions, he writes, seem reasonable. But the policy in the programme made no mention of requiring permission to live-tweet.

For members of this science organization the restrictions might rankle, but as fellow scientists they will feel some compulsion to obey. However, science conferences like this normally encourage journalists to attend, and if so, such restrictions are garbage. If I was there as a journalist, I would tweet, photograph, and post reports on my webpage to my heart’s content, ignoring these absurd and unenforceable rules.

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Russians consider building reusable rocket

9:17 am

The competition heats up: Roscosmos is studying proposals for building a reusable first stage that will use wings to return to the launchpad for later reuse.

The project draft has been created as part of Russia’s 2016-2025 space program. According to Izestia, Russia could spend over 12 billion rubles (around $180 million) on the creation of the reusable first stage before 2025. The newspaper cites space experts as saying that satellite launches could become much cheaper with the use of renewable launchers as they would allow to save millions of dollars on engines installed on the first stage of the rocket. The cost of the engines used on the current expendable launch vehicles is $10-70 million.

I’m not sure how seriously we should take this. The Russians consider lots of proposals, many times leaking the proposals to the press for any number of reasons. Most of those proposals never come to fruition.

Nonetheless, SpaceX’s effort to make its Falcon 9 first stage reusable, thus making it far less expensive than anyone else’s, is clearly influencing the Russians, as it has ULA and the Europeans. They are feeling competitive pressure, and are thus compelled to respond.

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The modern horror story

9:19 am

Two stories in the news today illustrate the debased and corrupt culture of our modern leftwing society, even though neither story is about anything that society has actually done.

First there is this story out of Syria of the brutal beheading of an 82-year-old retired archaeologist by ISIS.

Mr Asaad had been detained and interrogated for over a month by the ultra-radical Sunni Muslim militants, who demanded to know where many of the ancient city’s priceless artifacts had been taken in the days before and after ISIS took control of the city. Sickening images proudly shared on social media by supporters of the terror group showed the mutilated remains of Mr Asaad chained to a railing, with his severed head – still wearing glasses – placed on the floor between his feet.

Then there is this story about the release of another undercover Planned Parenthood video.

In the latest video produced by the Center for Medical Progress, Holly O’Donnell describes a medical technician using scissors to cut through the face of a newly aborted but nearly fully developed baby boy at a Planned Parenthood facility so that his intact brain could be extracted.

Both stories describe acts of evil by evil organizations. In the first case it is the brutal murder of a scientist by Islamic fundamentalists merely because he couldn’t produce any gold or silver artifacts for them to melt down for money. In the second, it is the nonchalant dissection of a newborn baby boy, with the technician coolly declaring that this was “…the most gestated fetus and closest thing to a baby I’ve seen.”

To me, however, the real horror is not what these organizations have done, as terrible and evil as it is. The real horror is the willingness of our intellectual elite society, most of whom are liberal and Democrat, to look the other way, either to pretend these things aren’t happening (as in the case of ISIS) or to aggressively defend the organization in its behavior (as in the case of Planned Parenthood).

We all know the saying: “For evil to triumph good men need only do nothing.” In today’s society, I have increasing doubts that the people who want to do nothing about these evils are good.

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Another slew of science papers retracted because of fraud

9:07 am

The uncertainty of peer-review: A major scientific publisher has retracted 64 articles in 10 journals after discovering that the so-called independent peer reviewers for these articles were fabricated by the authors themselves.

The cull comes after similar discoveries of ‘fake peer review’ by several other major publishers, including London-based BioMed Central, an arm of Springer, which began retracting 43 articles in March citing “reviews from fabricated reviewers”. The practice can occur when researchers submitting a paper for publication suggest reviewers, but supply contact details for them that actually route requests for review back to the researchers themselves.

Overall, this indicates an incredible amount of sloppiness and laziness in the peer-review field. In total, more than a 100 papers have been retracted, simply because the journals relied on the authors to provide them contact information for their reviewers, never bothering to contact them directly.

I suspect that these retractions are merely the tip of the iceberg. Based on the garbage papers I see published in the climate field, I will not be surprised if even more peer-review fraud is eventually discovered.

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Soyuz rocket builder proposes major upgrade

8:30 am

The competition heats up: The head of the Russian company that builds the Soyuz rocket said today that a new upgrade of that rocket could be built and flying by 2022.

Russia’s future Soyuz-5 carrier rocket will be equipped with advanced new engines using ecology-friendly fuel, according to Alexander Kirilin. “One of the distinguishing features of the Soyuz-5 is the use of liquefied natural gas as fuel,” Kirilin said in an interview with RIA Novosti published on Tuesday. “The engines will be developed from scratch, which would allow us to apply a variety of advanced technological and economic characteristics that would make Soyuz-5 competitive on global markets,” Kirilin said. “The design of Soyuz-5 allows the addition of extra side blocks to make it a heavy-class rocket, but we are focusing now on a prototype with operational payload of 9 metric tons,” he added.

At the same time, Kirillin stressed that the Soyuz-5 will not compete with the ongoing development of the Angara family of carrier rockets. [emphasis mine]

Kirillin is doing a political dance with this interview. On one hand he is trying to sell to the Putin government the idea of developing a new version of the Soyuz rocket — thereby giving his company work for decades hence — in order to increase Russia’s ability to compete in the international launch market. On the other hand, he has to convince that same government that this new Soyuz will not compete with Russia’s new Angara rocket.

The two ideas are contradictory, especially if the upgrade allows the Soyuz to be modular and scalable so it can launch larger payloads, like Angara.

Kirillin’s problem is that the only investment capital available to him comes from the government, which now controls the entire Russian aerospace industry. Under this Soviet-style monolithic set-up, he is not allowed to compete with other Russian companies. However, if he doesn’t convince the government to build something, his company will no longer have a reason for existing.

In other words, creating a single government organization to run all of Russia’s space industry, as Putin’s government has done, was very counter-productive in the long run. It discourages competition while naturally causing the industry to shrink.

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IRS computer hack bigger than previously thought

3:32 pm

Government in action! A hack of IRS taxpayer information was significantly bigger than previously estimated, the IRS revealed today.

An additional 220,000 potential victims had information stolen from an IRS website as part of a sophisticated scheme to use stolen identities to claim fraudulent tax refunds, the IRS said Monday. The revelation more than doubles the total number of potential victims, to 334,000.

Well, no matter, this hack is mere chicken feed compared to the 21 million records stolen from the federal Office of Personal Management. And it hardly compares with the recent Pentagon breach, where the Chinese got almost all federal records. No, the IRS is doing a much better job then those other agencies, only being slightly incompetent and screwing up only a little.

And besides, the IRS does such a good job for Obama by harassing anyone that opposes the Democratic Party agenda! How could anyone complain about them?

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Fund-raising campaign to help bakery threatened by gay fascists

10:17 am

Defiance: The Colorado baker who is threatened with bankruptcy and even psychatric evaluation because he refuses to bake same-sex wedding cakes due to his religious beliefs has begun a fund-raising campaign to support his fight.

There are those who think I am being unkind by describing the attackers of this baker as fascists. Well, consider this tidbit from the above story:

He declined to provide a wedding cake for a gay couple in July 2012, citing his Christian beliefs, after which the bakery in Lakewood, Colorado, became the target of protests and angry phone calls. “The calls were so vile, Jack would not allow the employees to answer the phone for weeks. The second day, a caller threatened to kill Jack as well as anyone in the bakery,” said the Continue to Give write-up.

It is important to note that no one is oppressing any homosexuals here. They are still free to practice their lifestyle. The only one being oppressed is the Christian, who is being threatened and denied the right to practice his lifestyle.

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