The truth finally out: ObamaCare purposely crafted as opaque, confusing, for the “stupid American voter”

[Paramount today: thank a Veteran for their sacrifices on behalf of our freedoms.]

ObamaKare SignFrom FoxNews.com:

ObamaCare architect says lack of transparency helped law pass, cites ‘stupidity of the American voter’

by Patrick Howley

ObamaCare architect Jonathan Gruber said that lack of transparency was a major part of getting ObamaCare passed, and that it was written in such a way as to take advantage of “the stupidity of the American voter.” 

Gruber, the MIT professor who served as a technical consultant to the Obama administration during ObamaCare’s design, also made clear during a panel quietly captured on video that the individual mandate, which was only upheld by the Supreme Court because it was a tax, was not actually a tax.

So first, thanks to Justice John Roberts for his scintillating take on ObakaKare and the fix we’re in.  The ACA was created to fool you — and you were the perfect SCOTUS patsy.  Nifty work, John.  Yay, John.  You blinked then bit.

Nicely done, Mr Gruber.

Let’s just lie to the people, kick them in the ass, call them stupid and then turn their pockets inside out.

Yay, federal government!  Yay, Demorats!

Let’s not forget:

This is also the same Gruber who said in January that Obamacare wasn’t designed to save money, even calling the idea that savings were a “misleading motivator” for Obamacare. This was after he very actively promoted the deficit-reducing side of the law before it was adopted and called Obamacare “a historic and cost-effective step in the right direction” toward saving our health-care cost problems. He’s also the guy whose work was used to create the appearance of a consensus among health economists about the ACA, without revealing that he was a paid contractor.

Then, from Bloomberg.com:

Meet the Mild-Mannered Investment Advisor Who’s Humiliating the Administration Over Obamacare

by David Weigel

A “nobody” named Rich Weinstein keeps digging up damaging clips about the ACA.

Rich Weinstein is not a reporter. He does not have a blog. Until this week, the fortysomething’s five-year old Twitter account had a follower count in the low double digits.

“I’m an investment advisor,” Weinstein tells me from his home near Philadelphia. “I’m a nobody. I’m the guy who lives in his mom’s basement wearing a tinfoil hat.” (He’s joking about the mom and the tinfoil.)

He’s also behind a series of scoops that could convince the Supreme Court to dismantle part of the Affordable Care Act. Weinstein has absorbed hours upon hours of interviews with Jonathan Gruber, an MIT professor who advised the Massachusetts legislature when it created “Romneycare” and the Congress when it created “Obamacare.” Conservatives had been looking for ways to demonstrate that the wording of the ACA denied insurance subsidies to consumers in states that did not create their own health exchanges. Weinstein found a clip of Gruber suggesting that states that did not create health insurance exchanges risked giving up the ACA’s subsidies; it went straight into the King v. Burwell brief, and into a case that’s currently headed to the Supreme Court.

The first question coming to my mind: why is it that a man named Weinstein is uncovering this information instead of an inquisitive media?  The Demorats accused George Bush of having an incurious mind.  I would accuse the American Media Maggots of the same, although for a longer period of time and with extreme selectivity.

The ACA and the people behind it are a dissembling, disgusting, timorous, shameful, cynical lot.

It’s all a scam, a fleecing, a purposeful lie, a purposeful deceit.

But it’s out now.

And not only is the Emperor naked, but he is flaccid and vacuous and, well, I’m starting to run out of appropriate verbs.

BZ

 

Unmasked: Area 51’s Biggest, Stealthiest Spy Drone Yet

Northrop-Grumman RQ-180From ForeignPolicy.com:

by Zach Rosenberg

The drone that spied on bin Laden and on Iran’s nukes was just the start. Meet its bigger, higher-flying, stealthier cousin, the Northrop Grumman RQ-180. It’s probably been flying for a few years now, but you weren’t supposed to know that; the existence of this secret project, based out of Area 51, was revealed Friday by Aviation Week.

The RQ-180 is likely flying from the secret Air Force test facility at Groom Lake, Nevada, widely known as Area 51. Its exact specifications, including such crucial details as the number of engines, is unknown, but Aviation Week suggests a wingspan of over 130 feet, based on hangar construction at Northrop’s Palmdale, California facility. The number of aircraft built is also unknown; however, a flight test program, relatively quick entry into service and open budget documents suggest a small fleet are flying routinely.

The aircraft’s performance is said to be similar to Northrop’s white-world entry, the RQ-4 Global Hawk, which can fly for days and cover thousands of miles. Hopefully the RQ-180 performs better; Global Hawk has received mixed marks on its evaluations, and the aircraft it was meant to replace, the venerable Lockheed U-2, will continue to fly for decades to come.

I wrote this past Sunday about the emergence of the Skunk Works-designed Lockheed-Martin SR72.

Conclusion?

Groom Lake, Area 51 and Wonderland are up and not just running, but sprinting.

Good news.

BZ

P.S.
The source Aviation Week & Space Technology article is here.  And with a wingspan of a possible 130 feet?  Payloads and weapons could consist of — anything.

 

 

Lockheed unveils SR-72 hypersonic Mach 6 scramjet spy plane

From the minds of Clarence “Kelly” Johnson and Ben Rich came the original Skunk Works, a Lockheed conceptual project initiated in 1943.

Skunk Works Logo“Many times a customer would come to the Skunk Works with a request and on a handshake the project would begin, no contracts in place, no official submittal process.”

The Skunk Works — still alive and thriving today — resulted in ground-breaking aircraft, such as:

This is an impressive list of airframes from the minds of people unconstrained in their thoughts and willing to push the technological envelope of the times, from every angle.

I proffer that the SR-71 was the most enthralling and technologically advanced aircraft of the entire 20th century and into the 21st.  It was an airframe designed, literally, by white male geeks in short-sleeved dry-cleaned white shirts and thin dark ties, wearing brown plastic framed thick glasses, pocket protectors and utilizing wooden slide rules.  Computers simply did not exist en masse.  They sat at cheap pine tables and produced pages and pages of blue drafts, with hand-lettered notes and ennui enabled by T-squares.

The SR-71 served with the USAF from 1964 to 1998, and a total of 32 aircraft were built.  12 were lost in accidents, but none were lost to enemy action.[3][4]

The SR-71 is an aircraft, completely analog, that was allowed to perish due to age and expense.  It was, arguably, the costliest aircraft to have ever existed in the USAF inventory.

Since its demise there has been much speculation as to its replacement.  Was it Aurora?  And what would an Aurora aircraft look like?  Would it even be manned, considering the ubiquitous nature of drones today?

And, further, why would you not want a replacement?  There exist times of crisis when moving geosynchronous satellites simply won’t do, for two very important reasons: 1) it is too slow, and 2) you can only move a satellite ____ times before you deplete its finite fuel capacity.  America had the capability to hustle an SR-71 from Kadena or Beale and be over a trouble spot in as little as an hour or two.

With all that in mind, however, it appears the successor to the incredible SR-71 has been “outed,” if you will, by an article from ExtremeTech.com.

It has been designated the SR-72.

by Sebastian Anthony

Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works has confirmed that it is developing the SR-72 spy plane. The successor to the SR-71 Blackbird, which was capable of Mach 3.5, the SR-72 will be a hypersonic unmanned aircraft capable of Mach 6, or just over 4,500 mph. At hypersonic speeds, the SR-72 will be able to traverse any continent in around an hour — meaning, if they’re strategically positioned around the world on aircraft carriers, the US military can strike or surveil any location on Earth in about an hour. It is also suspected that the SR-72′s hypersonic engine tech — some kind of hybrid scramjet — will find its way into the US military’s High Speed Strike Weapon (HSSW), a missile that can theoretically strike anywhere on Earth in just a few minutes.

Lockheed SR-72The SR-72, despite the similar name, is a completely new plane. At the moment, the SR-72 is still only a concept, though Lockheed has now confirmed that the plane is in active development. An optionally piloted scale version of the plane with a single engine will be built in 2018, with test flights scheduled for 2023. If all goes to plan (funding hasn’t yet been secured by Lockheed Martin), a full-size SR-72 (about 100 feet long) will be built and tested by 2030. As it stands, the current plan is for the SR-72 to be unmanned. It will be a very, very large drone. It will probably be unarmed, too, and outfitted entirely for intelligence gathering, though it’s too early to say for sure.

While the SR-72 will undoubtedly be a paragon of stealth and fashioned from monolithic crystals of titanium wrapped in carbon fiber, its defining feature is its operational speed of Mach 6 — or 4,567 mph (7,350 kph). At this speed, the SR-72 can cross the Atlantic (or Europe or China or…) in about an hour — or circumnavigate the planet in six hours. At an operational altitude of around 80,000 feet (24,300 meters) and Mach 6, the SR-72 will be almost impossible to shoot down.

Groom Lake and Area 51: Wonderland all over again.

BZ