Monthly Archives: August 2010

Nuke ’em!

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The enviro-wackos are determined to stop our use of carbon fuels—coal, oil and gas. Forty years ago, they had a different target. Then, they were protesting nuclear power plants.  And, for the most part, they won.  There hasn’t been a new nuke plant built in decades.

That may be changing.

By Melanie S. Welte
Monday, August 30, 2010

DES MOINES – It’s been 33 years since Raye Fleming’s arrest outside Southern California’s Diablo Canyon nuclear plant, near the height of the furor against nuclear power. 

That was the first arrest of many, and Fleming thought such actions paid off as a generation of Americans turned against nuclear power. 
“It was just the correct, moral thing to do,” said Fleming, 66.
But after years of believing they had won the fight against nuclear energy, activists feel the battle is starting all over again. And they’re trying to figure out how to win in an era of Facebook and Twitter and get the younger generation involved in the movement. 
Lately, the option for nuclear energy has gotten more popular.
President Obama has backed billions of dollars in federal loan guarantees to build two nuclear reactors in Georgia. If approved, they would be the first nuclear power plants in the United States to begin construction in almost three decades. Political support for nuclear power has grown, especially after the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico highlighted risks of fossil fuel production. And people are more open to nuclear energy.

The environmentalists have blocked the construction of new refineries.  Their NIMBY fellow travelers has triumphed in closing many of the existing refineries. 

At my last count there are only four major refineries in the country. One on the west coast, one on the east coast and two in the gulf.  When the gulf refineries were damaged five years ago from Hurricane Katrina, gas prices sky-rocketed and gas-lines formed in many areas of the country.

In another instance a major pipeline burst and cut-off the Northeast with similar results.  We were fortunate it wasn’t in the middle of winter when dependencies on fuel oil for heating is at a peak demand. We walk a tightrope with our supplies of fuel and can and do have shortages at a growing pace

The enviro-wackos want us to move to electric vehicles.  The truth of that is that our electrical power infrastructure cannot support the dramatic drain on electrical power needed to re-charge those vehicles. Not in the amount needed to relieve our dependence on carbon fuels.

More nuke plants could relieve some of that congestion.  When the anti-nuke movement was in full swing in the US, France was building more nuke power plants.  Today, France receives 77% of their power requirements from nuclear power plants. The US, on the other hand, receives only 20% of our power from nuke plants.  Size aside, Sweden, Korea and Switzerland produces a larger percentage of their power from nuclear plants than does the US.

Some in the environmental movement are coming to understand that.

Some, like Patrick Moore, have simply changed their minds. He was once a leader in the anti-nuclear movement, and now he’s co-chair of the Clean and Safe Energy Coalition, which supports the expansion of nuclear power. 

“I personally believe that because we were so focused at that time on the threat of all-out nuclear war and the emotional aspect of that, we were a bit blinded and included nuclear energy in with nuclear weapons as if everything nuclear was evil,” he said. 
“The bottom line is, I believe we made a mistake,” he added, noting that although construction costs for nuclear plants are high, operating costs are low. He also contends that nuclear energy is a safe and valuable resource. 
Nuclear-power protesters who were on the picket lines years ago know that to be effective now, they have to update their tactics. No more protests, sit-ins and horror stories rooted in the nuclear disasters at Chernobyl and Three Mile Island decades ago.
“It’s 2010. It’s not 1979. It’s a different generation. There are different styles,” said Michael Mariotte, a longtime opponent of nuclear power who heads the Maryland-based Nuclear Information and Resource Service. “The whole idea of mass marches and that kind of thing doesn’t have the same kind of resonance as back then.” Mariotte’s group alerts members to big issues via Facebook, links to anti-nuclear stories through Twitter and posts videos on YouTube. — Washington Post, August 30, 2010.

Perhaps it is time, once again, to use the nuclear option. 

Can’t brag anymore

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For years I’ve bragged that I’ve been able to keep my hide intact—excluding some stitches in my forehead a long time ago. That will end next week.  I visited my doc this morning and I need to have surgery to correct a minor condition before it turns into a big issue.  I have to get it before my health insurance runs out in a few months. He said it is better get it done now when it should be just an easy task.

It’s not a “big” deal.  I’m just getting a hernia fixed. But it will require general anesthesia and maybe an overnight stay in the hospital.  The last time I spent a night in the hospital was when I was born. 

If I find some interesting items to post, I’ll queue them up ahead of time.  Worst case, I’ll just miss a day or two in my posting schedule.

I’ll be back and will continue bashing Obama and libs as before.

Mexico’s Civil War Continues

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 More evidence of Mexico’s civil war came to light this week with the discovery of 72 bodies of non-Mexicans just 90 miles south of the US border.  There was one survivor who, though wounded, managed to find help and lead elements of the Mexican Marines to the massacre site.

There are two crucial elements in the last sentence.  “Managed to find help” and “Mexican Marines.”  In the first example, the survivor was turned away a number of times by local residents who feared retaliation from the Zeta Cartel.  He finally found help at a military checkpoint. It was reported that the Zetas were the ones responsible for the murders.  In the second example, it is the Mexican Navy and Marines who lead the fight against the drug cartels.  The Army has been infiltrated and cannot be trusted.  

In fact, the Army supplies most of the cartels weapons and ammunition, not American gun shows and firearms dealers.  It’s relevant to note that the US government is the prime supplier of arms and ammunition to the Mexican Army so indirectly, the US government is the arms supplier to the drug cartels. 

As usual, the international leftist, like Amnesty International, blames the Mexican government rather than the Cartels.

The case “will turn into an emblem of the capacity or incapacity of Mexican officials to face up” to migrant abuses, Alberto Herrera, director of Amnesty International Mexico, told AFP on Wednesday.


Around half a million clandestine migrants cross Mexico each year, mostly from Central America, according to Mexico’s Human Rights Commission.
Some 10,000 undocumented migrants were abducted in Mexico over six months from September 2008 to February 2009, the commission reported last year. — Yahoo News.

The Investor’s Business Daily editorial on August 26, 2010, opined on this continuing situation.

Unfortunately, Amnesty International is busy blaming Mexico, not the cartels, for the killings. It absurdly claims Mexico should have done more to protect the illegals — we suppose by providing armed escorts across the Texas border.

…

 Indeed, Mexico’s now in roughly the same spot as Arizona. Illegal immigration, after all, is illegal in Mexico, too. Even as Mexico encourages its own citizens to head north because of the remittances they send home, it discourages other nations’ citizens from doing the same, apprehending 43,000 illegals last year alone.
This massacre should make Mexico rethink its claim that Arizona is somehow an enemy, or that legalizing drugs will stop horrors like this. Mexico is a sovereign state, and if it wants to win this war — which it’s now losing — then any state that fights cartels is an ally.
Fact is, illegal immigrant smuggling is done by the same evil people who traffic drugs and want to topple the Mexican state.
The same monsters who hang bodies from Mexican bridges, set off car bombs in Juarez, hurl grenades into tourist bars (as happened in Puerto Vallarta Thursday), kill mayors, servicemen and policemen, and roll human heads onto dance floors, are the criminals with a monopoly smuggling illegal immigrants into the U.S.
So to encourage illegal immigration is about as smart as encouraging drug consumption.

Obama and Janet Reno are failing in their first responsibility—safeguarding the nation.  If that isn’t grounds for impeachment and removal from office, what do we have to do?  Wait for a nuke to be smuggled over the border and detonated in some US city?  Any president who fails to safeguard this country should be removed from office regardless to party affiliation.  Any political party to supports “open borders” is a clear and present danger to our national welfare.

More Liberal Idiocy!

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This may not be something new across the country but it’s new in Kansas City area—a drive-way tax!

The “driveway tax” imposes an annual charge to help pay for better roads. The sensible idea is to collect a kind of user fee that’s based on the number of vehicle trips created by homeowners and businesses.

Of course, the Kansas City “Red” Star thinks this is a great idea.

If Mission can prove this concept is fair and works well, other cities may want to attempt it, and the driveway tax might become as common as storm water fees now collected in many local cities.

The KC Red Star hasn’t yet found a tax it didn’t like. If there is a liberal/progressive/marxist concept floating around, the Red Star is in favor of it. Is it any wonder their subscriptions continue to decline.

The real reason this tax is being imposed is that city revenues have declined. Revenue from sales taxes, revenues from property taxes, revenues from all sources are down. When hard times occur American families tighten their belts. When democrat controlled cities have hard times they don’t tighten their belts. No! That would be difficult. They just raise taxes and think the public is stupid enough to accept them.

A local radio show has suggested that Mission, KS residents track down the homes of their council member and that of the mayor and drive in and out of their driveways for a while and see just how much those idiots like their new tax.

The tax isn’t even limited to Mission, KS. It includes the Shawnee Mission North High School. That district extends beyond the Mission city limits. So it will also spread the impact of Mission’s tax beyond the limits of Mission, KS.

Mission has stated that they are $3,000,000 short for the coming years budget. They claim they can shave off $900,000 through manpower and other cuts leaving the city $2.1Million short.

Well I have a suggestion. Why don’t they go to a zero-based budget? I’ll bet that $2.1 million shortfall will disappear and they won’t need an idiotic driveway tax to do it. Bureaucrats scream when they have to justify their budgets. It’s just so much easier to add 10% or 15% or even 20% to last years budget and go with that than justify each line item like businesses do.

A business can’t raise their prices arbitrarily to maintain a fat budget. Raise their price and their competitors will take their income away. Too bad governments aren’t required to run their budgets like a business and justify every expense to the voters. What the voters can do, however, is turn out these thieves and make sure their replacements know their job is to run government on a balanced budget without raising taxes.

Disturbing News Items

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According to the 9th Circus in California, the government has the right to bug your car and track your movements via a GPS tracker. In the initial appeal to the three Judge panel, two of the three judges upheld the government’s right.  The larger court refused to review the ruling.

Does this bother you?  It does bother me.  It is a clear invasion of privacy.  A basic right, one not enumerated in the Constitution, is the right to travel freely and without interference.  When the government tracks you, they have placed constraints on where you can travel.  If you go somewhere they don’t want, they can track you down and arrest you.  

Some would say the government already has that right.  After all, the government restricts access to Area 51 in Nevada. The difference there is that Area 51 is government property and violating that perimeter is trespassing.  The government cannot, however, prevent you traveling on the public roads next to Area 51. The dissenting judges in the 9th circuit believe this is just another violation of personal privacy.

It is a dangerous decision – one that, as the dissenting judges warned, could turn America into the sort of totalitarian state imagined by George Orwell. It is particularly offensive because the judges added insult to injury with some shocking class bias: the little personal privacy that still exists, the court suggested, should belong mainly to the rich. — Yahoo News.

I had an email exchange yesterday discussing mobile phones.  In that discussion, the other party said he wanted a GPS app.  His son travels the boonies and wanted a Garmin-like GPS capability.  I said that while my current phone has a GPS module, I have it turned off (except when calling 911).  I don’t want to publicize my movement, where I’ve gone, nor whom I see.  It isn’t anyone’s business except perhaps my wife and if she asks I’ll tell her.  

I once owned a GMC Yukon that had On-Star installed at the factory.  I took the Yukon to a local mechanic and had it disconnected. (By the way, did you know the cops can ease-drop on you via On-Star and track your movements?  With a warrant of course, but it seems that it’s easier and easier for cops to get such warrants.) 

Perhaps I’m a bit paranoid, but I prefer to preserve my privacy against anyone most specifically governments.               

More Science Fiction tech becomes a reality

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I’ve been reading and watching science fiction since I was able to read. Since that time, some (mumble…mumble) years ago, I’ve seen SF tech come to life.

I was in the Air Force when I watched Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin make those first historic human steps on the surface of the moon.  Years later I watched a telecast from a robot showing the surface of Mars. Over the decades, I’ve seen photos of the moons of Jupiter and the rings of Saturn.  In addition, some well respected scientists now believe that Star Trek’s warp drive may be possible.

But there is one bit of technology that has evaded us.  A recurring tech over the decades has been 3D-TV or as it has occasionally been known—Holo-TV.  It even appears on the TV show Bones to recreate faces from a skull.  

Thee-D movies have been around since the 1950s and have had a resurgence in the last decade.  So called three-D TVs have been marketed for a year or so. But all of these implementations have a fatal flaw. They all required special glasses to fool the eye into seeing the appearance of three dimensional scenes.

No more.

Toshiba is about to launch a true 3D-TV that does not require special glasses. You can see true 3D from any angle without any other assistance than human eyes.  The Holo-TV has arrived.   

Aug 24 03:49 AM US/Eastern
Japanese electronics giant Toshiba plans to market the world’s first 3D television that does not need special glasses later this year, a report said on Tuesday.
Toshiba will unveil three models of the television, which will cost several thousand dollars, before Christmas, the Yomiuri Shimbun said.
The company has developed a new system that emits a number of rays of light with various angles from the screen so that viewers can see stereoscopic images without glasses, the daily said. 
“People can enjoy images in three dimensions from various positions and suffer less stress,” it said. 

Japan’s major electronics makers launched 3D television this year, but sales have not been as strong as expected while many customers have complained of being irritated by the glasses.

Yes, the SF Jubilee has arrived. I wonder if I can afford it?          

Liberal Tyranny and other items

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When rats get cornered, they turn and attack.  There were two items I’ve read, of many, that illustrate this.  First, a group of progressives, including Moveon, SEIU, La Raza, AARP, the AFL-CIO, and others organized by Families, USA, held a national conference call on the election forecasts for the democrats this fall.  

It isn’t good.

Politico reports: “Democrats are acknowledging the failure of their predictions that the health care legislation would grow more popular after its passage, as its benefits became clear and rhetoric cooled. … The presentation also concedes that the fiscal and economic arguments that were the White House’s first and most aggressive sales pitch have essentially failed.” — The Heritage Foundation’s Morning Bell, August 23, 2010.

The liberals will do anything to stave off the wave of opposition. This is an example of their thoughts—license bloggers!  Philly tries to excuse licensing blogger’s First Amendment rights as needed for revenue to maintain the city’s coffers.  The truth is that if a license is required to exercise a basic right, that right can be controlled—read that as content censorship.
Between her blog and infrequent contributions to ehow.com, over the last few years she says she’s made about $50. To [Marilyn] Bess, her website is a hobby. To the city of Philadelphia, it’s a potential moneymaker, and the city wants its cut.
In May, the city sent Bess a letter demanding that she pay $300, the price of a business privilege license.
“The real kick in the pants is that I don’t even have a full-time job, so for the city to tell me to pony up $300 for a business privilege license, pay wage tax, business privilege tax, net profits tax on a handful of money is outrageous,” Bess says. — The Washington Examiner, August 22nd, 2010.

The reality is that while this effort is disguised as creating revenue for the city, the amount of funds received by this from bloggers is minuscule.  It is really is about curtailing, through licenses, fees and taxes, free speech.

This is clearly a violation of the First Amendment.  Reporters and media talking heads aren’t required to have a license to write or perform. Neither should bloggers.

Remember, when the libs get cornered, they’ll attack.

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Another of the lib’s favorite programs has more proof that it failed. Remember Cash for Clunkers? Well, it now seems that “some” of the vehicles traded in weren’t destroyed after all.  Some of the paper trail is missing and auditors now believe that the trade-ins were stripped and shipped overseas as parts and some even intact.

The government is investigating at least 20 car dealerships it claims violated the rules of last year’s cash-for-clunkers program. — The Heritage Foundation Morning Bell, August 23, 2010, USA Today.

A bigger burearacy means bigger screwups!

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Even the libs are turning against Obama and his Obamabots. Some democrat Senate candidates are distancing themselves from him.

…across the country, leftist Senate candidates in Missouri, Kentucky and Indiana have all come out against President Obama’s impending trillion dollar tax hike, due in January. — The Heritage Foundation Morning Bell, August 23, 2010. 

Even Screamer, former democrat chairman Howard Dean is warning his fellow progressives about being out-of-touch with Americans.

Howard Dean, former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said Sunday that President Obama’s political advisers are out of touch with average Americans and need to “spend some time outside Washington.”

Wherever they go, the dems are in trouble and every word out of Washington makes their prospects worse. Even their prime example of a Socialist paradise in this hemisphere, Venezuela, has a death rate higher than that of Iraq. 

In Iraq, a country with about the same population as Venezuela, there were 4,644 civilian deaths from violence in 2009, according to Iraq Body Count; in Venezuela that year, the number of murders climbed above 16,000.

Even Mexico’s infamous drug war has claimed fewer lives.

Venezuelans have absorbed such grim statistics for years. Those with means have hidden their homes behind walls and hired foreign security experts to advise them on how to avoid kidnappings and killings. And rich and poor alike have resigned themselves to living with a murder rate that the opposition says remains low on the list of the government’s priorities.

Socialist governments are not interested in the welfare of their constituents. They are interested in maintaining their own power and privileges. The ironic thing about Venezuela is that the poor are the ones who put Chavez back into power when the Army threw him out. And now they are the ones most oppressed and ignored by him and his Cuban advisers.

The poor were dupes in Venezuela.  There are just as many democrat dupes here in the U.S