Who Is 'Racist'?

Thomas Sowell

quote:

One of the first things presented in the media was a transcript of a conversation between George Zimmerman and a police dispatcher. The last line in most of the transcripts shown on TV was that of the police dispatcher telling Zimmerman not to continue following Trayvon Martin.

That became the basis of many media criticisms of Zimmerman for continuing to follow him. Only later did I see a transcript of that conversation on the Sean Hannity program that included Zimmerman’s reply to the police dispatcher: “O.K.”  [emphasis added]

Comment:

Zimmerman's acknowledgement of an instruction not to follow Martin doesn't square with I what read about the incident.  It now appears that the charges against Zimmerman have been trumped up completely. Unless some new evidence emerges, it is hard to imagine how this guy can be convicted.  Yet, he may be anyway in order to appease the mob.

Switzerland’s “Debt Brake” Is a Role Model for Spending Control and Fiscal Restraint

Townhall

Americans looking for a way to tame government profligacy should look to Switzerland. In 2001, 85% of its voters approved an initiative that effectively requires its central government spending to grow no faster than trendline revenue. The reform, called a “debt brake” in Switzerland, has been very successful. Before the law went into effect in 2003, government spending was expanding by an average of 4.3% per year. Since then it’s increased by only 2.6% annually.

We need something because what we've got isn't working.  The left is working hard to impose massive tax hikes because that spending opm is all they know.

GDP Miss Far Bigger Than Announced; Real GDP is 0% Using More Reasonable Deflator

Townhall

quote:

Once again the BEA has used "deflaters" that will strain the credibility of the public, especially if they buy gasoline. To correct the "nominal" data into "real" numbers the BEA assumed that the annualized inflation rate during 1Q-2012 was 1.54%. As a reminder, lower "deflaters" cause the reported "real" growth rates to increase -- and once again very low seasonally adjusted BEA inflation "deflaters" have been the headline number's best friend. If the raw "nominal" numbers were instead "deflated" by using the seasonally corrected CPI-U calculated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) for the same time period, nearly the entire headline growth rate vanishes -- and the resulting growth rate would have been a minuscule 0.08% with "real final sales" contracting.

Comment:

If I understand this correctly, the BEA is underestimating inflation, which in turn, overestimates real GDP growth.  Just goes to show you, there are lies, damn lies, and statistics.

Maybe charts don't lie as much.  This one says economic growth since WWII is slowing down.  The dotted red line is a statistical trend line over the period and it is going down.


Update:

It takes over 2 bucks debt to get 1 buck of GDP growth.

Space Business Blog: Does your Mom Understand your Business Plan?

Space Business Blog: Does your Mom Understand your Business Plan?: Several months ago Jonathan Goff, CEO at Altius Space Machines , called me.  ASM was preparing for a business plan “sprint” to compete in t...

Excerpts ("Here are a few highlights the team at Altius and I kept discussing while developing this plan":)

• Is there a problem people will pay you to solve? If not, you do not have a market.
• An attractive Market is even more valuable than an attractive technology. 
• Your customer is the organization that pays you 
• Once you have found a market, be cautious before competing head to head with incumbents
• There is no substitute for the right market and the right team.
• Money: how much do you need and how are you going to get it? 
• If your Mom doesn’t understand your plan, VC’s won’t take the time to understand it either. Simplify. Simplify. Simplify.
• The “prize” in most public competitions is the publicity and connections made as a result of winning, not in a the few dollars at stake.

Analogy for Space: Aviation or Seafaring?

Airspacemag

excerpts

• Space flight has very little in common with aviation; it is much closer in spirit to ocean voyaging – Arthur C. Clarke, Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible, Harper and Row, New York, 1963.
• From the beginning of the Space Age in 1957, spaceflight and rocket development has had a strong association with aviation, particularly the military variety.
• The analogy of manned spaceflight to aviation (at least in the first fifty years of spaceflight) is not altogether inappropriate.
• The template for aviation has some resonating parallels in manned spaceflight. The pilot’s objective is to complete the assigned mission and return to base. 
• A navy has a different operational style. Sea voyages can last many weeks or months, even years. Navies can travel to any distant land, anchor off shore and explore it at length
• In contrast to its parallels with aviation, space has yet to show much correspondence with seafaring. But we should begin to think in such terms 
• John F. Kennedy (a former naval officer) did call space “this new ocean.”

Stott Space: Asteroid Mining Tech is 30 Years Old

pesn

excerpts

• the technology to get up into space, grab an asteroid, bring it safely into orbit where it can be mined, has been around for three decades. "What has been lacking has been the balls to do it", said Isaac.
• The Stott brothers are hoping to interest Apple Computers in getting behind their initiative, to set up a friendly competition between Apple and Google to see who can be the first to successfully bring an asteroid into orbit.
• Check out this graphic from Cutright's document, showing the disbursement of known asteroids in January of 2010, with the same size dot, regardless of asteroid size, and not taking direction vector into consideration. [ note:  they seem to be everywhere]
• link to 1 hour plus video of an interview with the Stotts

Dr. Kiki's Science Hour 84: The Nuclear Alternative

I noticed a feature of YouTube that I overlooked before.  You can link to a video at a certain point in the video that you may want to focus on.  This is useful for very long videos, which this one is, and this will allow you to focus in a particular question of interest in case you are too busy to watch all of it.  With that in mind, I broke down the video into smaller pieces that will allow an interested viewer to zero in on a particularly interesting question or point.

This video is about the LFTR with Kirk Sorensen.  It is in an interview format.  By the way, here is demonstration of its usefulness in terms of clarifying a question someone may have which came up in the interview:  What is a LFTR?

I will start with the waste issue since that is when I got the idea to do this post.

Nuclear Waste, why it is a problem and how the LFTR minimizes it by a factor of 300.

Why the nuclear waste issue is addressed with the LFTR design

Dr. Kiki summarizes the answer to the nuclear waste question

What kind of waste does the LFTR produce, why the waste is itself useful for exploring space and in medicine?

The entire video can be seen from the beginning below:




Update:

Here's some more links for your perusal:

Where's the technology currently?  Within the next ten years, can we see LFTRs being put together?

What would the costs be for a LFTR?

Are LFTRs really safe?  Isn't all radioactivity inherently unsafe?

This isn't a question, but a statement by Sorensen that nuclear waste isn't really waste.  See his video on this that he mentions.

Update:

"Kiki, you are going to love this story".

Key tests for Skylon spaceplane project

bbc news     h/t     behindtheblack

The test stand will not validate the full Sabre propulsion system, but simply its enabling technology - a special type of pre-cooler heat exchanger.

Reaction Engines' breakthrough is a module containing arrays of extremely fine piping that can extract the heat and plunge the intake gases to minus 140C in just 1/100th of a second.

"It is important to state that the geometry of the pre-cooler is not a model. That is a piece of real Sabre engine," said Mr Bond.

Comment:

I get a bad feeling about our own efforts here.  If this works, they will have outsmarted us.

People seem to have this notion that spending a lot of money will guarantee a successful outcome.  But that is not necessarily so.  Newt Gingrich discussed that in his political speech in Florida about prizes for space achievements- which was criticized for being unrealistic.  He said that a well funded group that tried to perfect flying- failed.  But the Wright Brothers succeeded despite the fact that they weren't as well funded as that group.

Having deep pockets won't guarantee success in this line of work.  A well executed plan that is sound will succeed even if it isn't well funded.  The point is that the brains are what counts, not the bucks.

Green-Washing a Young Mind

Published on Apr 24, 2012 by videosuss

quote from description:

Brian Sussman, author of Eco-Tyranny, interviews 6th grader at the Earth Day festival in Santa Cruz, California. With her proud mother standing by, the youngster says she has been taught in school that anthropogenic climate change is threatening the planet and that sometimes she thinks humans "shouldn't exist."

Comment:

If you follow their ideology to its conclusions, you will no longer exist because you will have committed suicide.   Yeah, that's pretty tough rhetoric, but watch the video and see for yourself.

Krugman's voodoo economics

Krugman is very depressed these days. Yeah, me too, but for different reasons. Not to worry, though. There has been no conversion for yours truly. Nope. Here's the problem- although Krugman can write something that is ostensibly true, that budget deficits can help fight a contraction, what he doesn't show is that it brings prosperity. Here's what caught my eye:

Then there’s the assertion that bond yields might rise. Well, sure, and there might be a flu outbreak or whatever. But nothing in recent experience suggests that countries with their own currencies are at risk from an attack by bond vigilantes — Japan’s 10-year rate, after more than a decade of warnings that the bond crisis was coming any day now, is 0.91 percent.

Japans debt is horrendous.  Yet Japan has endured a long bout of slow growth.  Did all of that Keynesian spending pull Japan out of its morass?

All of that spending may have made some people feel better, but it doesn't cure what ailing you.  For that, you actually need to do a little more thinking, and less sloganeering.   Voodoo economics?  Whatever the slogan, it worked.  Prosperity returned under Reagan's stewardship, and it took a lot less time than Obama claims that he needs.  Maybe Obama needs as much time as Japan has had, and when that two decade disaster has finished, he will still claim that he didn't have enough time.

"proudly consuming dog meat is so cool it hurts"

quote from this post

By the way, we shouldn't think of ourselves as kids.

Thinking Can Undermine Religious Faith, Study Finds

Free Republic

Scientists have revealed one of the reasons why some folks are less religious than others

Comment

Truth is a slippery word, that's what I think.

Afterburner with Bill Whittle: The Train Set

Bill Whittle tells you why this is the greatest sentence ever written: "The love of theory is the root of all evil."

Dick Morris Predicts Liberal Media Will Turn On Obama

ace

Comment: I'll believe it when I see it.

Zimmerman Raised With Black Children, Is Black

Classical Values via Instapundit

The 28-year-old insurance-fraud investigator comes from a deeply Catholic background and was taught in his early years to do right by those less fortunate. He was raised in a racially integrated household and himself has black roots through an Afro-Peruvian great-grandfather – the father of the maternal grandmother who helped raise him.

Comment:

Shameful how the media has reported this.  There has been racially motivated violence due to the way this was reported.  There ought to be a response similar to what was orchestrated against Limbaugh, which was far, far less of an infraction than this.

Lassie

Uploaded by ShaniaRichards on Jun 16, 2007

How old was that kid in that old TV show?



Update:

Yeah, I'm going to pound on this until November.

Ed Morrissey: What happens when a news anchor holds Obama accountable for his performance?

hot air

On Sunday evening, CNN’s Don Lemon told viewers that “people like Sarah Palin have a point” when they say that Barack Obama needs to stop blaming everyone else for the shortcomings in his own performance, including the economy. Noel Sheppard called this “heresy,”

Comment:

Heresy is the violation of religious doctrine.   They said it, and that's what it looks like.  The left's general position is like a religion and therefore, the establishment of that religion is a violation of the first amendment to the US Constitution.

Update:

The "heresy" was the CNN guy talking about Obama taking responsibility for the poor economic performance during his presidency as opposed to blaming others.  Obama's excuse is that it was the worst economy since the Great Depression, but was that true?  It was really about the same thing as Reagan faced in 1981 during his first term. Obama makes excuses, but Reagan got results.

Senate Votes to Abandon Budget Control Act

powerline

Last summer, Republicans in Congress agreed to increase the federal debt limit in exchange for the Democrats’ pledge to cap future spending at agreed-upon levels. The compromise was embodied in the Budget Control Act; discretionary spending was to increase by no more than $7 billion in the current fiscal year. 

Comment:

All of that drama last summer for this?  Anyway, those on the Republican side who joined the Democrats

The Federal government is out of control.  Who or what can change this?  Will it take a disaster of the first magnitude to get these people to shape up?

Not to mention that if enough of the red state senators held up, this wouldn't have happened.  But all Democrats voted for it.

Like I said at the time, the Democrats got what they wanted, and put on an Oscar winning performance about how bad a deal it was.

Lets see, 60% have consistently said that we are on the wrong track.  One of these polls needs to ask what needs to be done to put the country back on the right track.  It doesn't look as if anything has changed politically that will do that, if the Senate's action is any indication.  The Buffet rule?  That won't raise anywhere near the revenue needed.  Does the public want the kind of massive tax increases necessary?  Evidently, the public doesn't want cuts, or even a slow down in the rate of growth.  A slow down in the rate of growth was all this deal was, and they can't even keep their word on that.  One thing is clear, something must be done, because this isn't working.

Planetary Resources, Inc.,

Press release, courtesy Instapundit.

It gives somebody a reason to be up there and something to do while up there.

The New York Times has a story on it:

quotes:

Drawing on nearby asteroids for natural resources is actually a very old idea.

In 1926, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, a Russian scientist who worked out many of the basic requirements of rockets and space travel, listed colonization of the asteroid belt as number 12 of 16 steps in his “plan of space exploration.”

Also

“The collective net worth of our investors is like $50 billion, and they know what they’re getting into.”

Shoot, their net worth is 1/3 the cost of the Apollo Program in 2005 dollars.  Money shouldn't be an issue.

The energy requirements are less than that of getting to the moon.  If SpaceX can come through with a successful mission, which is now slated for early May, this could be the beginning of something big.

Update via Next Big Future and Al Fin

A picture are worth a thousand words, so here's a video

'The War on Terror Is Over'

weeklystandard

"The war on terror is over," a senior official in the State Department official tells the National Journal. "Now that we have killed most of al Qaida, now that people have come to see legitimate means of expression, people who once might have gone into al Qaida see an opportunity for a legitimate Islamism." 

A little premature, I would think.  Also, it is potentially a risky political move.  What if there's another big attack?

h/t Instapundit

Ann Barnhardt says Obama eating dog is BS

To me, it makes no difference.  At the very least, it is bad political judgment to even say it.  But, he openly said it, true or false, and even if he didn't eat the pooch, he screwed it.

The only thing that saves him is if the Republicans don't use it.  Which is entirely possible.

Why did the "dog wars" start anyway?  The Democrats wanted to raise Romney's unfavorables, so they began to talk about the way Romney treated his dog.  They opened the door.  It is now fair game ( no pun intended).  Why unilaterally disarm?  Why not raise Obama's unfavorables in the same way that they were doing themselves?  It would be poetic justice, if not anything else.

Why is it bad political judgment?  I would think it to be obvious.  Even if you had to eat dog meat to stay alive, the last thing you do is to talk about it.  Americans love their dogs.  The last thing that an American- a real American-would ever say is that he ate a dog.  No matter what the reason was.  Even if he was just a little kid, he still doesn't talk about it.  It is not good politics.  It's dumb politics.  It should raise questions.

The failure to use it also raises questions.  Is this a real campaign, or is it just a "dog and pony" show?

By the way, presidential politics isn't above this kind of thing.  There was the log cabin campaign in the nineteenth century.

I can see where this would be a distraction, but it ain't a bad one.  Besides, it may be pointing out something subtle that people should be thinking about, but aren't.  That's this issue of eligibility.  Should Obama even be President at all?

Asteroid Mining Venture Backed by Google Execs, James Cameron Unveiled

space.com h/t free republic

He declined to estimate when Planetary Resources would begin extracting metals or water from space rocks, saying there are too many variables to lay out a firm timeline. But a recent study sponsored by Caltech's Keck Institute for Space Studies estimated that a 500-ton near-Earth asteroid could be snagged and dragged to the moon's orbit by 2025, at a cost of about $2.6 billion.

 Comment:

This looks like a serious business plan.  You can stop laughing now.

Update:

More here from wsj h/t transterrestrial musings

Mr. Lewis, whose 1997 book, "Mining the Sky," helped popularize the idea of extracting natural resources from asteroids, said Planetary's president already owns a small firm that builds spacecraft.

 Comment:

The criticism seems to be that it will cost too much to be viable.  But that overlooks the possibility that this could be overcome, maybe soon.   At any rate, it is no more costly than deep sea drilling.  It costs billions to build an offshore drilling platform.  Even at today's launch prices, this is not projected to cost any more than that.

Update:

Wired also has a story.  Some of the challenges are discussed.

An interesting point is that the best economical move is for the mining to be used for those already in space- not to bring it to the ground.

The key advantage is to get out of the deep gravity well of Earth in order to get stuff that you need.  It is very expensive to launch from Earth, so anything that mitigates this cost is a big deal.

Obama’s Lavish Lifestyle

Dick Morris TV: Lunch Alert!

In this video commentary, I discuss how Obama has taken 17 vacations, played 100 rounds of golf, and spent tens of millions of the taxpayer’s dime to fuel his incredible lifestyle. Tune in!

Comment:

Another example of projection.  Here's Obama accusing of Romney of being upper crust, like he lives like a King.

Man Dies After Peeing On ‘L’ Tracks In Evanston

CBS Chicago

Contrary to legends and lore, the program “Mythbusters” has concluded that urinating directly onto the third rail is unlikely to cause death in itself. In fact, some purported cases of such deaths are actually believed to have involved direct bodily contact with the rail, as appears to be the case in the Sunday night incident.

Comment:

I guess the moral of that story is to be careful where you go.  Even if you gotta go, don't go there.

Shaka when the walls fell

How do you communicate with someone who doesn't understand?

It is easier when the other party is dealing with you in good faith, as this video shows. But, MSNBC has been reporting something that is plainly false. They should know better, so why are they doing it?



Update:

The answer to why they are doing it is that it helps boost ratings and thus makes money. At least that's the working theory.

I did some soul searching this morning on why I did this blog. If it is about money, it is a miserable failure. I mean, I can't do any worse than I am doing in that department- this blog hasn't made a penny. That's the truth.

Why do it then?

In the end, it may be about money after all, since I truly hope to share in the benefits of any ideas that I find that are good and helpful and that I can spread around in any way that I can- including this blog.

But that doesn't seem to work either, so I'm back to square one on that question.

"If I wanted America to fail"

Published on Apr 20, 2012 by FreeMarketAmerica

It is a video against Earth Day, which was yesterday. "Earth Day" is Lenin's birthday.

Do people see Earth Day as against America, or for America?

It may be over the top, just a bit. But what if the day really was meant to cause America to fail?

The truth is a slippery thing indeed

What do you do about this?  I've heard about this from another source and it turns out not to be true.  How can you protect yourself from false information?

I have a doctor's appointment today.  That's why I'm interested in the story.

Highlights of July 20th, 2009 Google Tech Talk

Energy From Thorium: A Nuclear Waste Burning Liquid Salt Thorium Reactor

I've summarized this into 17 screen shots of the lessons for the LFTR from history.  Sign the petition!

40th anniversary of Moon landing during Apollo Era

Nuclear power is much more dense than chemical power.

Thorium is no good for nuclear bombs.

Fancy way of saying that the nuclear reaction is self controlled.

One of many advantages of Thorium fuel cycle over the Uranium fuel cycle.

Much easier to use the fuel in liquid form than in the solid form.

In solid fuel reactors, you have a xenon gas problem.  LFTR avoids this.

Floride salts of uranium and thorium are easy to separate.

Proof of concept already has been done.  It works.

Needs more work for commercialization, but are most of the way there.

Two fluids meaning a thorium blanket and a uranium core- each a different fluid.

Not under pressure as in a light water reactor- nor handling problems like sodium.

Why it didn't catch on--- politics.

High level waste problem is minimized.  The stuff left over can be used for space program.

Can even help with high level waste from light water reactors.

Liquid floride reprocessing of spent fuel from light water reactors.

What's not to like?

‘Middletown’ USA- ill-equipped for the 21st century

hotair allahpundit

Excerpts:

• “Something seems to be going terribly wrong.”
• The winning strategy is no longer to be more moderate than your opponent, to offer a bigger tent. Instead, it is to be more zealous and committed to your party’s ideology…
• The individual pursuit of rational self-interest by parties and politicians, which in political and economic theory is supposed to generate the best outcome, has instead led to a cycle in which extremism, partisanship and stalemate all beget more of the same.
• America today increasingly looks like the society that the political scientist Mancur Olson wrote about in his 1982 classic ‘The Rise and Decline of Nations.’ 
• “As you might have guessed, I’m arguing that there is a politically underrepresented ‘populist’ constituency in America. Demographically, they are noncollege-educated whites. Philosophically, they are generally Christian conservatives who are also skeptical of big business. They are pro-gun and pro-union. They are pro-life and pro-tariff. They believe in God and government…

Comment:

Prosperity will cure these ills, but what if prosperity is a bridge too far?  The outcome could be unthinkable.

But is prosperity a bridge too far?  Probably not, but this is sobering enough to think that it might be.

The polarization mentioned could be a result of the tribalism alluded to in an earlier post.  The insularity of the internet could be a driving force.  Too many people are being drawn into these churches and emerging as a tribe on a warpath.

Update:

Here's the Washington Post editorial which kicked off the whole discussion.  And a surprising quote that came at the very end of the piece:

Government can’t be the solution when it is the problem.

Didn't Ronald Reagan say that?  The end result of all this is that you can't depend upon the government to solve problems.  What do you depend upon?  Yourselves!

Comparing Obamanomics with Reaganomics, Looking at Evidence from the States

Free Republic

quote:

In 1980, for example, there were 10 zero-income-tax states. Over the decade leading up to 1980, those states grew 32.3 percentage points faster than the 10 states with the highest tax rates. Job growth was also much higher in the zero-tax states. The states with the nine highest income tax rates had no net job growth at all, and seven of those nine managed to lose jobs.

Comment:

Here's another item in the list:

8.  The income tax should be abolished and replaced with a better government financing arrangement.  The current one doesn't work.

update:
Dan Mitchell discusses Reagonomics vs. Obamanomics

Is the Internet Making Us Smarter or Dumber? Yes.

gigaom

I found this search while looking for something else in a google search.  That something else was the question: Is the internet making us more insular?  I found nothing at the top of the search, so I tried the alternate one such as this one.

Insularity relates to intelligence, does it not?  Being detached from the group makes their information inaccessible to you.  But the world wide web should disseminate information more widely, should it not?  Yes, it should, but that may not be happening.  Instead of that, what you may be getting is that people will retreat into like minded sites, which I referred to once as "churches".

Upon finding their church, they will not seek out other sources of information.  Then, they become insular.  This may lead to the phenomenon known as groupthink.  Being super intelligent and well informed does not give immunity to groupthink.  In fact, those most succeptible to groupthink are those who are intelligent and well informed.  Quite the paradox!

The Most Important Story of Our Time — and the Only Journalist Covering It

pjmedia h/t Instapundit

quote:

The hyperlocal news site New Haven Independent seems an unlikely place to find the most in-depth, understandable, up-to-date news about nanotechnology. Yet there it is. Nestled among features about the gelato queen of New Haven and how to get the city to fix your cracked sidewalks — the meat and potatoes of local journalism — you’ll find the work of Gwyneth Shaw, the only independent journalist covering the nanotech revolution full-time in language that we all can understand.

Comment:

One of the original purposes of this blog was to be able to predict the future, but that has become somewhat muted.  Anyway, one of the first posts in the blog was about a Speculist Survey about what will be the next big thing in technology.  Nanotech came first.  However, I disagreed, saying energy should be at the top because it impacts everything else.

I suspect too many people don't realize or recognize the significance of energy to our standard of living.  More importantly, to our very survival.  Ninety percent of the calories we eat come from fossil fuels.  Without fossil fuels, we would starve because modern agriculture requires it.  Yet, there are those, such as our President, who will try to stop fossil fuel usage.  This is like committing suicide.  The ignorance that we are heading towards the cliff is what is enabling this potential tragedy.

Despite Glenn Reynold's interest in high tech, I suspect he is part of the problem because he seems to think that nanotech is number one, when it won't matter if the factories and the labs won't have the power to develop this tech if the replacement for fossil fuels isn't found first.

People need to wake up before it is too late.

update:

a quote from the story, which I can relate to

The trouble is, Shaw says, she is writing for the layperson and she is not certain enough laypeople read her work. I found this to be true when I wrote about nanotech full-time. There is an insular community of scientists, entrepreneurs, and investors all talking to one another in an echo chamber. She would rather write for people like herself — a concerned consumer and parent.

“That’s tough because I do feel like at this point we have some important, interesting, pretty in-depth, nuanced coverage,” Shaw says. “It’s just that nobody reads it.”

If you are going to have an Army of Davids, you'd better help them find some slingshots.

US Small-Scale Nuclear Reactor Industry Gains Traction In Missouri

Slashdot via Instapundit

• A pair of energy companies on Thursday announced a new attempt to expand nuclear energy in Missouri, this time by seeking federal energy funds for small nuclear reactors.
• Ameren plans to seek a license that would allow it to build and operate up to five nuclear reactors. The license would be valid for 40 years, and Ameren said the application process could cost $80 million to $100 million and take four years.
• "I can't tell you how big a deal this is for our state. This is the big one," said Barry Hart, the CEO for the Association of Missouri Electric Cooperatives. "This is going to provide jobs and economic opportunity for our state, for the people that live here, that want to raise their families here for a long, long time."
• Westinghouse said a small nuclear reactor could produce 225 megawatts of electricity, about one-fifth the capacity of a large nuclear plant. The small modular nuclear reactors would be built in factories and shipped to where they are needed without altering tunnels and bridges. They are expected to take about two years to build, instead of roughly five years for larger plants.

Comment:

I suspect that this is for a conventional light water reactor design.  This is not necessarily an improvement.  A definite improvement would be for a LFTR design.

By the way, the petition only had a hundred signatures as of yesterday.  If anybody wants to go faster, this might help.

Woman Arrested In Biting Attack Over Parking Space In SF Hunters Point

CBS San Francisco

Obama bites dog, woman bites woman.  What's the world coming to?

PolitiFact goes to the dogs

hotair

Excerpts:

• Although the heart of PolitiFact is the Truth-O-Meter, which they use to rate factual claims. author Louis Jacobson assigned no rating to the seemingly straightforward question of whether Obama ate dog.
• Thus, it is apparent when it comes to stories about Republican presidential candidates eating unusual animals or arguably stressing a dog, PolitiFact has its Truth-O-Meter at the ready. When a Democrat president’s book contains the admission he ate dog, PolitiFact cannot find its Truth-O-Meter. 
• That this supposed Ministry of Truth is biased is not exactly news. A prior study by the University of Minnesota Humphrey School of Public Affairs found PolitiFact harbored a large bias against Republicans.

Comment:

How to sort out facts from fiction when the truth finders are biased?  Here's a way- if the so called fact finders will not admit their political affiliation, that's a dead giveaway.  If they claim non partisanship, that's a dead giveaway.

Political affiliations should be the first disclosure.  If it is denied or claimed to be nonpartisan, take it with a grain of salt.