Interesting Items
Alex Gimarc
[email protected]
Monday, Mar 21, 2011
Howdy all, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy –
In this issue:
FORMAT INTERESTING ITEMS 3/21
Interesting Items
Alex Gimarc
[email protected]
Monday March 21, 2011
Howdy all, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy –
In this issue:
1. Salami
2. MESSENGER
3. Panic
4. Strike
5. Wisconsin
6. Palin / Hilly
1. Salami. Last week I wrote about the House leadership going wobbly
regarding budget cuts. The particular problem is the $105 billion self-licking
ice cone funding of ObamaCare in the continuing resolution. Got some
additional perspective last week courtesy of Dr. Jack Wheeler’s Half Full
Report. Wheeler reports that the series of continuing resolutions has created
complete chaos in the federal bureaucracy; for without a budget for the year
and not knowing from week to week what their budget for the rest of the year
will be or even if there will be a budget for their particular agency, they
have lost the ability to do anything long term, which included planning and
projects. While continued funding of ObamaCare is unfortunate, exploding this
sort of fiscal bomb in the Executive Branch agencies and federal bureaucracy is
a welcome outcome and could not be better news. Also remember that there will
be at least three more votes on budgets
before the end of the year, and with them the opportunity for Reid and Obama
to orchestrate a shutdown of the federal government. These include the next
continuing resolution (and there may be more than one), the vote to raise the
debt ceiling in April, and finally the vote on the 2012 budget in October.
Every day this continues will be another day that the budget is front and
center in public discussion. Every day this continues, the pressure from
conservatives to gut this bloated, overripe, rotting carcass of an overbearing,
overlarge, lawless federal government through a series of budget cuts will
grow. Every decision point so far has been won by conservatives. They will
win the shutdown that the democrats and their cheerleaders in the state-run
media so desperately want. Buy popcorn.
2. MESSENGER. We now have a probe in orbit around the planet Mercury. The
MESSENGER space probe successfully entered orbit Thursday evening. The trip
included several planetary fly-bys for gravity assist. During each, we found
things out about Mercury that we did not know – mostly that it has been
massively volcanic in the not so distant past. The orbit is a polar one and
over the course of the next year or so, we will get hundreds of thousands of
images in a variety of wavelengths and map the entire planet. Due to the close
proximity to the sun, Mercury is a brutal environment for a spacecraft which
requires a solar shield between it and the incoming solar radiation.
Spacecraft orientation is critical to the health of the spacecraft which makes
timing orbital maneuvers tricky. Over the course of the next few weeks, the
mission team will be waking up and checking out instrumentation. Expect the
first photos by the first week in
April. You can follow the mission at its JPL web site. They have a number of
photos from multiple flybys prior to orbital insertion:
http://messenger.jhuapl.edu/
3. Panic. The media-led panic over radiation leaks and partial meltdowns of
the Fukushima Daiichi reactors continued unabated last week as radiation
started making its way into California. There was panic buying of military
surplus gas masks and iodine pills, which is a hoot, as the iodine pills have
trace levels of radiation. Media coverage of this from all sources has been
little more than despicable, and point out quite nicely the problem that clean
energy advocates face. The media overreaction has triggered some significant
pushback, as British environmentalist and writer George Monbiot wrote early
this week a column that the earthquake and tsunami changed his opinion about
nuclear energy from an agnostic to a strong supporter. He noted that these
40-year old plants, with all the usual problems of inspections, materials and
shoddy design, survived both the quake and the tsunami, a complete power
disruption, partially melted down and
burned and to date, nobody received a lethal dose of radiation. In my mind,
the plants preformed magnificently. Do not forget that there was a refinery
fire that started after the earthquake that was just extinguished yesterday.
Here’s a link:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/03/21/japan-refinery-idUSL3E7EL0UN20110321
Anyone else note the media concentration on the drama at the reactors and the
complete silence on refinery fires? Energy generation is a dangerous
business. Dams collapse. Refineries blow up. Reactors melt down. Wind
turbines burn up. Coal mines explode. Do we decide to stop doing something
after an accident or do we figure out how to do it better? How do we determine
what is and what is not acceptable risk? However it is done, there are better
ways than via breathless, screaming, scaremongering headlines of impending doom.
4. Strike. I am an unabashed football fan. In recent years, the interest has
swung more to the NFL than the NCAA. I have been watching the game long enough
to remember the absolute disaster the 1987 NFL strike was for the teams, the
owners and the fans. Had the unfortunate opportunity to watch an ESPN
roundtable with a number of NFL Player’s Association representatives don their
union thug hats and threaten new rookies to support them or else. New Orleans
QB Drew Brees gave a very blunt warning to rookies not to show up in NYC for
the NFL Draft. I don’t know what game these clowns are playing, but they are
fixing to murder the golden goose that provides them and the team owners with a
revenue stream of over $9 billion/year. This is not going to end well and I
believe the general public has about had a belly full of union goons,
regardless of what uniforms they may be wearing.
5. Wisconsin. Two bits of news out of Wisconsin last week. The first and
most important is that the democrats found themselves a friendly county judge
that issued an injunction against the Secretary of State from implementing the
law that changed collective bargaining rules for public employee unions
statewide. The excuse given by this democrat union-friendly hack was that the
legislature broke their notification rules when moving the legislation through
the system. So we have a member of the state judiciary issuing an injunction
against both the legislature and the governor for the legislature failing to
follow internal rules for notification of a committee meeting. Yeah, right.
How about this separation of powers stuff, guys? Is this cool or what? It
turns out that Judge Maryann Sumi has a conflict of interest in this case, as
her son was a field manager for the state AFL/CIO and a data dink for the state
SEIU. This is the same
county judge that refused to issue an order the Monday after the strike began
which would order the illegally striking teachers back to the classroom. Judge
Sumi found that what they were doing was not an illegal strike, as it was not a
strike and therefore could not be illegal. The second bit of news comes
courtesy of Roger Hedgecock. He reported over the weekend that while this
injunction is in effect, all bargaining units statewide are busily working on
new 3-5 year long contracts that would not be covered under the new rules as
long as they are finalized and approved before the law goes into effect. The
law is a wonderful thing. Too bad it does not apply equally to all of us.
6. Palin / Hilly. Last bit of news out there is early positioning for the
2012 presidential run. Does anyone out there know that Sarah Palin is on an
overseas trip and that she has had high level visits with government officials
in both India and Israel? Why is this significant? It is significant because
India and Israel are both our closest allies in that part of the world. And
both have been significantly disrespected by the Obama administration. There
is no way that Palin makes this trip unless she is positioning herself to run
for president in 2012. And her opponent will be Hillary Clinton, who announced
last week that this will be her last public office and that she will not
consider serving as Secretary of State or any other position under a second
Obama administration. This should be quite a slugfest.
More later -
- AG
"If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better
than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not
your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your
chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our
countrymen."
- Samuel Adams, speech at the Philadelphia
State House, August 1, 1776.
Note: Interesting Items can be found at the following locations:
Our Home Page http://interestingitems.org/
Archives can be found at http://home.gci.net/~agimarc
The Alaska Standard http://thealaskastandard.com/
MatSu Valley News http://www.matsuvalleynews.com
Subscriber and supporter Elbert Collins at http://thatselbert.wordpress.com/
Rod Martin's The Vanguard site is also a long-time supporter of this column:
http://www.thevanguard.org/
More later -
- AG
"If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better
than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not
your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your
chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our
countrymen."
- Samuel Adams, speech at the Philadelphia
State House, August 1, 1776.
Note: Interesting Items can be found at the following locations:
Our Home Page http://interestingitems.org/
Archives can be found at http://home.gci.net/~agimarc
The Alaska Standard http://thealaskastandard.com/
MatSu Valley News http://www.matsuvalleynews.com
Subscriber and supporter Elbert Collins at http://thatselbert.wordpress.com/
Rod Martin's The Vanguard site is also a long-time supporter of this column:
http://www.thevanguard.org/
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