China's Lunar Landing is No Big Deal

I yawned when I heard about it.

But see Telegraph UK, "Why America lacks lunar ambition":

Barack Obama split the US space community when he abandoned plans for American astronauts to return to the Moon and set new sights for Nasa.

While China celebrated its lunar landing, America’s National Aeronautics and Space Administration has no plans to return to the Moon.

Many Americans believed they had won the space race when Apollo 11 landed on the Moon in 1969 and Neil Armstrong set the first feet in the lunar surface, famously declaring: “This is one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.”

Another 11 US astronauts walked on the Moon over the next three years. And nobody has been back since. A year after taking office, President Barack Obama controversially ditched the Constellation human space flight programme pursued by his predecessor George W Bush and with it plans for new lunar landings by 2020.

Instead, he set Nasa’s sights on further-flung targets, most ambitiously to tow an asteroid back to Earth and to launch a manned mission to Mars within the next 20 years. That left US space operations in what is known as near-Earth orbit to the private sector.

“Nasa is not going to the moon with a human as a primary project probably in my lifetime,” Charles Bolden, the agency’s administrator, told a panel this year.

Mr Obama’s decision to axe the Constellation programme and bypass the Moon has split the US space community. Buzz Aldrin, the second man to step on the lunar crust, agrees that returning there is a waste of limited American financial resources.

"Do not put Nasa astronauts on the moon,” he wrote in his book Mission to Mars: My Vision for Space Exploration. They have other places to go.”

And in the meantime, Nasa’s Mars Curiosity rover vehicle continues to send back intriguing evidence that the Red Planet may have once supported life.

But other space veterans and experts believe that the US is making a disastrous mistake. Former astronaut Harrison Schmitt, another Moon-walker, was scathing critical of the Obama space policy. "It's bad for the country," he said. "This administration really does not believe in American exceptionalism."

I'm with Aldrin on this one, and amazingly, with the president as well.

Arapahoe Shooter Karl Pierson Was 'Very Opinionated' Leftist, a 'Committed Socialist'

The kid obviously had issues. What a waste.

But let's just be clear on who this guy was. He wasn't the stereotypical "right-wing crazy" that the diabolical left always uses to demonize conservatives. In fact it's never a typical right-winger. Usually the gunman's a freakin' nutcase, but in the Arapahoe shooting, the suspect's friends described him as a committed, "very opinionated" leftist.

Weasel Zippers has it, "Colorado School Shooter a “Very Opinionated Socialist”…"

Also at Fire Andrea Mitchell, "Arapahoe High School shooter Karl Halverson Pierson – leftist strongly for gun control."

And at Astute Bloggers, "STATE-RUN MEDIA COVERING UP FOR THEIR FELLOW-TRAVELER, ARAPAHOE SHOOTER KARL PIERSON" (via Memeorandum).

#ObamaCare: One Punt After Another

At Politico:

Why do Republicans even bother trying to delay Obamacare? President Barack Obama’s doing it all by himself.

On Thursday, the Obama administration gave customers permission to pay their premiums as late as Dec. 31 for coverage that starts Jan. 1, and officially gave customers an extra week — until Dec. 23 — to sign up for January coverage.

The move was just the latest in a long list of extensions, delays and punts that have plagued the health care law.

Sure, Obama’s not doing the things Republicans have suggested — push off centerpieces like the individual mandate, or even put the entire law on hold for a year. But piece by piece, the Obama administration keeps giving itself extensions on smaller parts of the law, because there’s always some piece that isn’t quite ready.

It’s an attempt to put out fires — but it’s also a painful admission that, yes, there are fires.

The administration is also extending a critical program — the temporary high-risk pool for people with pre-existing conditions — through the end of January, to make sure none of them suddenly lose their health coverage because they can’t sign up for new Obamacare insurance by Jan. 1.

That’s after it postponed the employer coverage requirements for a year, delayed the online enrollment for the federal health insurance exchanges for small businesses, and told health insurers they can extend people’s coverage for an extra year — a last-minute attempt to un-cancel millions of canceled policies. It also delayed the Spanish-language website, even though Hispanics are a large proportion of the uninsured population. It even postponed next year’s enrollment period, pushing it conveniently past the November elections.

“This is the least shocking thing since the sun came up in the east. This is what they do,” said Douglas Holtz-Eakin of the American Action Forum. “They’ve essentially established that there’s going to be a rolling start to this thing.”

Continue reading.

And don't miss this devastating editorial at the Wall Street Journal, "Backdating ObamaCare":

The White House says that ObamaCare is all fixed, but its conduct suggests otherwise. As it has realized that the government-created chaos is exposing patients to nasty and even deadly surprises, the government is now forcing the insurance industry to cover everyone retroactively and also to waive the contractual terms of that coverage—or else.

Late Thursday, the Health and Human Services Department suddenly released a new regulation that explains "there have been unforeseen barriers to enrollment on the exchanges." The passive voice is necessary because the barriers are all the result of politically driven delays, the botched website and the exchanges that transmit false information about enrollment to insurers.

So with a mere 11 business days to go before coverage is supposed to start on New Year's Day, HHS is trying to pre-empt patient uproar by unilaterally ordering plans to backdate all exchange applications. People can sign up for a plan on the exchange as late as Dec. 23. If an application winds up in some technology void, or it is passed to the insurer inaccurately or too late to process, that coverage nonetheless begins on Jan. 1.

Continue reading.

Google Hegemony

At the New York Times, "Google's Road Map to Global Domination":

Fifty-five miles and three days down the Colorado River from the put-in at Lee’s Ferry, near the Utah-Arizona border, the two rafts in our little flotilla suddenly encountered a storm. It sneaked up from behind, preceded by only a cool breeze. With the canyon walls squeezing the sky to a ribbon of blue, we didn’t see the thunderhead until it was nearly on top of us.

I was seated in the front of the lead raft. Pole position meant taking a dunk through the rapids, but it also put me next to Luc Vincent, the expedition’s leader. Vincent is the man responsible for all the imagery in Google’s online maps. He’s in charge of everything from choosing satellite pictures to deploying Google’s planes around the world to sending its camera-equipped cars down every road to even this, a float through the Grand Canyon. The raft trip was a mapping expedition that was also serving as a celebration: Google Maps had just introduced a major redesign, and the outing was a way of rewarding some of the team’s members.

Vincent wore a black T-shirt with the eagle-globe-and-anchor insignia of the United States Marine Corps on his chest and the slogan “Pain is weakness leaving the body” across his back. Though short in stature, he has the upper-body strength of an avid rock climber. He chose to get his Ph.D. in computer vision, he told me, because the lab happened to be close to Fontainebleau — the famous climbing spot in France. While completing his postdoc at the Harvard Robotics Lab, he led a successful expedition up Denali, the highest peak in North America.

A Frenchman who has lived half his 49 years in the United States, Vincent was never in the Marines. But he is a leader in a new great game: the Internet land grab, which can be reduced to three key battles over three key conceptual territories. What came first, conquered by Google’s superior search algorithms. Who was next, and Facebook was the victor. But where, arguably the biggest prize of all, has yet to be completely won.

Where-type questions — the kind that result in a little map popping up on the search-results page — account for some 20 percent of all Google queries done from the desktop. But ultimately more important by far is location-awareness, the sort of geographical information that our phones and other mobile devices already require in order to function. In the future, such location-awareness will be built into more than just phones. All of our stuff will know where it is — and that awareness will imbue the real world with some of the power of the virtual. Your house keys will tell you that they’re still on your desk at work. Your tools will remind you that they were lent to a friend. And your car will be able to drive itself on an errand to retrieve both your keys and your tools.

While no one can say exactly how we will get from the current moment to that Jetsonian future, one thing for sure can be said about location-awareness: maps are required. Tomorrow’s map, integrally connected to everything that moves (the keys, the tools, the car), will be so fundamental to their operation that the map will, in effect, be their operating system. A map is to location-awareness as Windows is to a P.C. And as the history of Microsoft makes clear, a company that controls the operating system controls just about everything. So the competition to make the best maps, the thinking goes, is more than a struggle over who dominates the trillion-dollar smartphone market; it’s a contest over the future itself.

Fascinating.

RTWT, at the link.

And ICYMI, the interview with Google's Sebastien Thrun, "'I think anybody who believes that we are in a period of decline or stagnation probably hasn’t been paying attention...'"

The #ObamaCare Panic Button

From Yuval Levin, at National Review, "Pressing the Panic Button?":

As usual, it’s hard to tell just what’s going on inside the administration regarding Obamacare, but I don’t think we can really take the steps announced by HHS yesterday as anything but a bright, red, flashing warning light about the internal expectations regarding January.

Some of what they announced is frankly bizarre and slightly crazy. Beside extending the high-risk pool program (which isn’t nuts, just a strong indication that they’re not ready for January at this very late stage), they are asking insurers to pay claims for consumers who haven’t paid their premiums, to treat out-of-network doctors and hospitals as though they were in-network, and to pay for prescription drugs not actually covered by the plans they offer.

The administration is trying to present this as a set of perfectly ordinary kind of transition measures that insurers normally make available to new customers, and some of the more reliable members of their amen chorus on Obamacare have echoed that. But that’s not what this looks like to me, and a few conversations today suggest it’s not what it looks like to the insurers...

Continue reading.

Black Critics Laud '12 Years a Slave' as Best Film of 2013

I'm heading out to go see this movie in a few minutes.

I'll report back on my experience later. Meanwhile, at the Los Angeles Times, "African American film critics name '12 Years a Slave' best film."



Also, "SAG Award nominations: '12 Years a Slave,' 'Butler' lead the way."

Some #Rule5 Kelly Brook to Mix it Up

Lovely.

And ICYMI, "Kelly Brook 2014 Calendar (PHOTOS)."

Hilarious Miley Cyrus Twerking Santa at Saberpoint

A classic Photoshop, "CHRISTMAS SING ALONG: 'I Saw Miley Twerking Santa Claus -- Underneath the Mistletoe Last Night'."

Baboon Seen Cruising Streets of Bryanston, Johannesburg — Not to Be Confused with Sign Interpreter at Mandela Memorial Service

The Memeorandum thread actually takes us to the story of Thamsanqa Jantjie, the bogus South African sign language interpreter at the Mandela funeral service, although here's the hilarious summary aggregated at the entry: "A baboon has been spotted on the streets of Bryanston in Johannesburg, appearing hungry and confident... watch the eyewitness video." 



Now here's the intended story at the thread, "EXCLUSIVE: Mandela deaf interpreter accused of murder": "Thamsanqa Jantjie, who is being treated for schizophrenia, has also faced rape (1994), theft (1995), house-breaking (1997), malicious damage to property (1998), murder, attempted murder and kidnapping (2003) charges."

A baboon and a criminal schizoid sign-language interpreter? I'm sure it's just an odd coincidence. And that's all I have to say about that, because RAAAAACISM!!

More at Memeorandum.

ADDED: From Robert Stacy McCain, "Schizophrenic Criminal Faker Making Meaningless Gestures? Hmmm …"

African Cape Buffalo Sends Stalking Lion Flying Through the Air

This is something else.

At London's Daily Mail, "Buffalo soldiers! Bull is saved by its friends while being EATEN by lions... which are sent flying through the air."

Rumsfeld's War and Its Consequences

And its consequences now!

From Mark Danner, at the New York Review, "More than a dozen years later we still live in the world that George W. Bush’s “war on terror” made":

A bare two weeks after the attacks of September 11, at the end of a long and emotional day at the White House, a sixty-nine-year-old politician and businessman—a midwesterner, born of modest means but grown wealthy and prominent and powerful—returned to his enormous suite of offices on the seventh floor of the flood-lit and wounded Pentagon and, as was his habit, scrawled out a memorandum on his calendar:

Interesting day—
NSC mtg. with President—
As [it] ended he asked to see me alone…
After the meeting ended I went to Oval Office—He was alone
He was at his desk—
He talked about the meet
Then he said I want you to develop a plan to invade Ir[aq]. Do it outside the normal channels. Do it creatively so we don’t have to take so much cover [?]

Then he said Dick [Cheney] told me about your son—I broke down and cried. I couldn’t speak—
said I love him so much
He said I can’t imagine the burden you are carrying for the country and your son—
He said much more.
Stood and hugged me
An amazing day—
He is a fine human being—
I am so grateful he is President.
I am proud to be working for him.
It is a touching and fateful scene, this trading of confidences between the recovering alcoholic president and the defense secretary whose son is struggling with drug addiction, and shows the intimacy that can be forged amid danger and turmoil and stress. Trust brings trust, confidence builds on confidence: the young inexperienced president, days before American bombs begin falling on Afghanistan, wants a “creative” plan to invade Iraq, developed “outside the normal channels”; the old veteran defense secretary, in a rare moment of weakness, craves human comfort and understanding.

Continue reading.

Megyn Kelly Shines on Fox

I missed the first week or two of Megyn Kelly's prime-time debut on Fox (I was watching the World Series), but I rarely miss it now. She's fantastic ---- and she's in my wheelhouse with her politics.

At the Washington Post, "Megyn Kelly, Fox News’s brightest star":

NEW YORK — The anchor who might beat Bill O’Reilly gets her eyelash extensions applied one at a time, with tweezers and dabs of glue, about 90 minutes before showtime, right after a motorized gun sprays foundation over her face, neck, shoulders, collarbone and sternum, wiping out a galaxy of light freckles that spreads across her —

Let me stop you right there.

Would you write this way about a man?

About O’Reilly himself?

At least that’s what Megyn Kelly might ask at this point. Kelly, 43, is the host of “The Kelly File,” a live TV program that airs weeknights at 9 p.m. on the Fox News Channel, where she interrupts and challenges guests whenever they resort to talking points or petty distractions. It debuted just over two months ago, and so far its ratings among 25-to-54-year-olds have exceeded those of “The O’Reilly Factor” six times. In November, her first full month in prime time after years in daytime, Kelly was second only to O’Reilly in the overall ratings, which means she’s the No. 2 person on cable news’s No. 1 channel.

“It’s like working on a supermodel every day — a brilliant supermodel,” says makeup artist Maureen Walsh, as she air-brushes Kelly’s skin from milky white to Technicolor...

Continue reading.

Well, Michael Savage made the crude remark sometime back that watching Megyn Kelly's show was like watching porn.

Wedding Party: More Than One Dozen Killed in U.S. Drone Strike in Yemen

I'll tell you, with this administration, it's hard to keep backing the war on terror!

At Fire Andrea Mitchell, "Obama kills 15 on way to wedding in Yemen with drone strike."

Also at Reuters, "Air strike kills 15 civilians in Yemen by mistake: officials."

And London's Daily Mail, "BREAKING NEWS: U.S. drone strike hits wedding party killing 15 people, Yemeni officials say."

Kim Jong Un Uncle Executed in North Korea

You have to think about this for awhile.

This is hardcore leftist ideology in action.

At the Los Angeles Times, "North Korea reportedly executes No. 2 official."

And at the Washington Post, "In North Korea, Kim Jong Un rises and advisers are shoved aside":

SEOUL — When Kim Jong Un became leader of North Korea two years ago, he was surrounded by advisers two, and in some cases, nearly three times his age. Most had decades of experience in the Workers’ Party or military. Two were members of Kim’s own family.

But rather than lean on that support team, Kim has instead sought to dismantle it, using a series of demotions and purges to grab power almost solely for himself. Friday North Korea announced the execution of the most prominent of Kim’s advisers, Jang Song Thaek, accusing him of opposing Kim’s rise and plotting an overthrow.Continue reading.

Mexican Leftists Irate Over Senate Vote on Opening Oil Industry to Foreign Investors

Anything that pisses off leftists is alright by me.

At LAT, "Mexican Senate OKs bill to open oil industry to foreign investors":

On Wednesday, members of the Democratic Revolution Party, or PRD, and other leftists closed off the lower house, the Chamber of Deputies, in Mexico City, chaining doors and blocking entrances with chairs in an effort to prevent lawmakers from considering the bill.

"They are selling the entire subsoil of the country to interests that are against Mexico," former PRD presidential candidate Cuauhtemoc Cardenas said in a TV interview. Leftist leaders hope they can stop the legislation by calling a national plebiscite, though it is unclear whether they will be able to pursue that avenue legally.

The poor dears!

Can Kay Hagan Survive?

At Politico, "North Carolina's choice":

LENOIR, N.C. — It would be tough to find another state where the political terrain has shifted as dramatically as it has here — from kindling hopes of a Democratic revival in the South just a few years ago, to becoming a conservative hotbed that banned gay marriage, tightened restrictions on abortion clinics and enacted a sweeping voter ID law.

In 2014, voters will have a chance to decide which of those two governing visions they prefer — Barack Obama’s Washington or one-party GOP rule in Raleigh ­ — in one of the most competitive, consequential Senate races in the country.

It will be a choice between Kay Hagan, a rookie Democratic senator who voted for Obamacare and says, however haltingly, that she would do so again, and a conservative challenger — perhaps the figure who shepherded that wish list through the Legislature, Thom Tillis, or other rivals like Mark Harris or Greg Brannon who would go even further.

The race underscores the larger challenges facing both parties nationally as they head into the midterms. Democrats are struggling to survive in conservative states as they try to combat Obama’s growing unpopularity and antipathy to the health care law they helped enact. But Republicans are at risk of overreaching with a sharply conservative agenda at a time when their elected leaders are shifting further to the right and independent voters are angry at both parties.

Hagan, who triumphed against longtime Republican Elizabeth Dole to win the seat in 2008, is clearly banking on the hope that voters will punish her opponents for the actions of the GOP-led Legislature and their own hard-right views, whether it’s Tillis’s unapologetic agenda, Harris’s views that being gay is a lifestyle choice or Brannon’s calls to repeal everything from the minimum wage to virtually every gun law.

“This race is not about the president,” Hagan said in an interview, twice refusing to say whether she approves of Obama’s job performance.

But Tillis, a 53-year-old former IBM executive who has the strong backing of the GOP establishment but is by no means the prohibitive front-runner, is betting that Southern Democrats who once thrived here are dying breeds because of the liberal policies coming out of Washington. He is defiant about North Carolina’s hard-right turn, calling it a “reform agenda unlike any other state in the United States.”

“I think for the most part, what I see from the folks who are opposing our agenda is whining coming from losers,” he said in an interview in his Raleigh office. “They lost, they don’t like it, and they are going to try to do everything they can to, I think, cast doubt on things that I think are wise and that the average citizen when they know what we’re doing, I think, like it.”

RTWT.

To Block or Not to Block, That is the Question

To block Twitter trolls, that is the question.

See, "Reverting the changes to block functionality."

More at Ars Technica, "Twitter immediately reverses course on changes to “block” behavior."

And at Tech Crunch, "Twitter Reverts Changes To Blocking Functionality After Strong Negative User Feedback."

#ObamaCare Disinformation Runs Deep

From Jonah Goldberg, at National Review, "The “keep your plan” lie just scratches the surface of the deception":

‘Obamacare was sold on a trinity of lies.”

That ornate phrase, more suitable for the Book of Revelations or perhaps the next installment of Game of Thrones, comes from my National Review colleague Rich Lowry. But I like it. Most people know the first deception in the triumvirate of deceit: “If you like your health insurance you can keep it, period.” The second leg in the tripod of deception was “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.”

But the third plank in the triad of disinformation hasn’t gotten much attention: Obamacare will save you, me, and the country a lot of money. This lie took several forms.

First, Obama promised on numerous occasions that the average family of four will save $2,500 a year in premiums. Where did that number come from? Three Harvard economists wrote a memo in 2007 in which they claimed that then-Senator Obama’s health-care plan would reduce national health-care spending by $200 billion. Then, according to the New York Times, the authors “divided [$200 billion] by the country’s population, multiplied for a family of four, and rounded down slightly to a number that was easy to grasp: $2,500.”

In September, the Obama administration’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services used far more rigorous methods to predict that Obamacare would increase national health-care spending by $621 billion. Using Obama’s own math, that would mean — according to Chris Conover, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute and Duke University — each family of four in America will spend an additional $7,450 thanks to Obamacare.

Of course, that methodology is still bogus. But it’s probably closer to the truth.

The president and his allies also insisted that all of Obamacare’s “free” preventative care would save the country vast amounts of money. As Obama put it in 2012: “As part of the health-care reform law that I signed last year, all insurance plans are required to cover preventive care at no cost. That means free check-ups, free mammograms, immunizations, and other basic services. We fought for this because it saves lives and it saves money — for families, for businesses, for government, for everybody.”

That’s not true either...

Continue reading.

Red Hot Chili Peppers, Rain Dance Maggie, Coachella 2013

I can dig it.



More, "'Adventures of Rain Dance Maggie'."

Nancy Pelosi's Broken #ObamaCare Promise

Fox News reports on AFP's attack on House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi.

And an interesting analysis from Frank Luntz. Watch it.



More from Matt Vespa, "AFP PUTS PELOSI IN THE CROSSHAIRS."