Tag: politics

A congressional report, issued by Republicans in the House and Senate, says that Obamacare will increase healthcare costs by 200 percent.

9:22 am

A congressional report, issued by Republicans in the House and Senate, says that Obamacare will increase healthcare costs by 200 percent.

Though the report is partisan, it is worth reading because of the depth of the analysis as well as the range of its historical research. For example:

The report notes that a number of states have already imposed requirements on health coverage and the result has been fewer choices and higher premiums. In New York, for example, a 30-year-old male paid an average of $1,200 a year in annual premiums in 1993, but one month after the state passed Obamacare-like reforms, premiums soared to $3,240. At the time Washington state passed similar reforms, 19 insurance carriers wrote policies for state residents. Within six years, only two carriers remained in the state.

I was living in New York when the state legislature passed this early version of Obamacare and can attest to truth of the above facts. Costs doubled and insurance companies fled the state, reducing competition. I even wrote about an article about it. The evidence from these state efforts illustrates the likelihood that Obamacare will do the same, nationwide.

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The Democrat mayor of Philadelphia has demanded an investigation against a local magazine because he doesn’t like what they wrote.

11:07 am

Free speech according to Democrats: The Democrat mayor of Philadelphia has demanded an investigation against a local magazine because he doesn’t like what they published.

I ask the Commission consider specifically where Philadelphia Magazine and the writer, Bob Huber, are appropriate for rebuke by the Commission in light of the potentially inflammatory effect and reckless endangerment to Philadelphia’s race relations probably caused by the essay’s unsubstantiated charges. While I fully recognize that constitutional protections afforded the press are intended to protect the media from censorship by the government, the First Amendment, like other constitutional rights, is not an unfettered right, and notwithstanding the First Amendment, a publisher has a duty to the public to exercise its role in a responsible way. I ask the Commission to evaluate whether the “speech” employed in this essay is not the reckless equivalent of “shouting ‘fire!’ in a crowded theater,” its prejudiced, fact-challenged generalizations an incitement to extreme reaction. [emphasis mine]

Under this Democratic mayor’s standards, anything that offended anyone could be banned. In fact, it would destroy all free speech. All any bully would need to do to silence his critics would be to complain about the inflammatory nature of their statements.

You can read his entire letter here. [pdf]

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According to a federal report, businesses nationwide remain reluctant to hire because of Obamacare.

9:51 pm

According to a federal report, businesses nationwide remain reluctant to hire because of Obamacare.

Earlier this month, the Fed released its latest “beige book” – a monthly report on economic conditions across the country. The book noted that employers across the country have “cited the unknown effects of the Affordable Care Act as reasons for planned layoffs and reluctance to hire more staff.”

And it is only going to get worse. Read the whole article. The new taxes imposed by Obamacare are going to crush the healthcare industry.

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More fraud in climate science

3:17 pm

Fraudalent data

Steve McIntyre, the man who had demonstrated that Michael Mann’s hockey stick graph was a fraud, has now demonstrated that the work of a group of climate scientists attempting to resurrect it is even more fraudulent. It seems that in order to recreate the illusion of warming in the past four hundred years, the scientists, led by geologist Shaun Marcott, changed the dates on a series of ocean cores in order to get the results they wanted.

McIntyre found that Marcott and his colleagues used previously published ocean core data, but have altered the dates represented by the cores, in some cases by as much as 1,000 years.

Most significantly, the scientists made no explanation for changing these dates. It is as if they wanted to hide this decline, y’know?

The chart on the right, by McIntyre, illustrates the fraud. The black line shows the temperature numbers of the ocean cores used by Marcott. The red line shows the temperature numbers, as originally published in the scientific literature, for these ocean cores.

The discrepancy here is so egregious that it screams at you. More important, as John Hinderaker says,
» Read more

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Sarah Brightman’s visit to ISS in doubt.

8:49 am

Sarah Brightman’s visit to ISS in doubt.

Soyuz taxi flights normally visit the International Space Station for a period of about eight days. NASA and Roscosmos are considering extending a 2015 visit to one month, however. If that happens, Brightman would have to give up her seat to a scientific researcher, who would perform some short-term experiments aboard the space station.

Roscosmos manned space flight director Alexei Krasnov had previously indicated that Russia might consider carrying two paying customers on the 2015 taxi flight. So, it would be theoretically possible for Russia to fly Brightman and the researcher. It’s unknown whether Brightman would want to spend that long aboard the space station, however, and pricing policy to longer-duration stays have not been worked out.

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Visiting a nuclear missile silo

10:04 am

a fuel line for the Titan missile
A fuel line for the Titan missile.

Last week my oldest friend Lloyd and his wife Denise came to visit Diane and I here in Tucson. One of Lloyd’s requests was to visit the Tucson Missile Museum. This museum is built at the site of one of the now disabled missile silos built in the 1960s as a means for launching nuclear weapons against the Soviet Union. Fifty-four silos total had been built and operated, with eighteen of those silos scattered around the Tucson, Arizona area. When the U.S. signed a nuclear arms treaty with the Soviet Union in the 1980s these silos were then shut down and sold. Some became private residences. Others remain buried and abandoned.

One silo, however, was kept as intact as allowed by treaty and made into a museum in order to preserve this artifact of history. Because Diane and I happen to know Chuck Penson, the archivist at the museum, we were able to arrange an augmented tour of the facility. Below are some of my pictures as Chuck took us down into the deepest bowels of the silo.
» Read more

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Europe today inked a partnership deal with Russia for its two spacecraft ExoMars mission, planned to launch in 2016 and 2018.

9:01 am

Europe today inked a partnership deal with Russia for its two spacecraft ExoMars mission, planned to launch in 2016 and 2018.

Russia essentially replaces the United States, which backed out of the deal last year when the Obama administration eliminated the funding for most of NASA’s planetary program.

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