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".