Category Archives: Politics

GOP setting up for a repeat of 1994

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It is interesting to watch the GOP setting up a 2010 slam dunk like a bunch of beach vollyball players. After the House Dems served the bail-out bill across the political net, the House GOP tapped the ball vertically to give the Senate a chance to scramble under it and slam it in the face of president Obama who’s standing next to the net, doe-eyed with optimism.

While Obama is making nice with the GOP by trying to be cooperative, the House Dems load the bill with goodies like ravenous college students load their scuffed melamine plates at an all-you-can-eat salad bar. To the delight of the GOP, they now have a plausibly deniable excuse for being uncooperative with the Obama administration. And the Housed Dems have served it up on a garnished platter.

The GOP leadership exclaims with alligator tears dripping onto their tailored suits, “How can we possibly accept the imposition of such tremendous debt on future generations of Americans? We believe, like Ronald Reagan, that tax cuts are the best stimulus for America.” Harumph, grunt, snort.

The Dem world view is to embrace new ideas and use government as a lever for doing good. The GOP world view is that government is bad, except for defense of property, and the economic Darwinism of the market should determine how civilization is shaped. Liberals tend to be eclectic and less focused on tangible goals. Conservatives tend to be doctrinaire and acquisitive. Obviously, there are exceptions.

President Obama is foolishly assuming that GOPers are just like Dems at heart. If only they could sup together they could find common ground. What the Obama Dems have failed to grasp is that the GOP wants to annex that common ground for their own new subdivision.

The GOP is plainly setting up for a turnaround in the upcoming 2010 midterm election. They are priming their huddled supporters for a campaign of  Limbaugh bile and Hannity disaffection with the Obama administration, in the same manner that Gingrich did in 1994 to the Clinton Administration by riling up the bible-belt like a nest of hornets.

The truth is that the GOP does not share the aspirations annunciated by the Obama Dems. The GOP leadership are more like Mongolian horsemen and the Dems are like a bunch of sod farmers. The only hope the sod farmers have is that the Mongolians will fall off their horses again.

It’s too painful to watch.

Dark Spot

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Darkness as Metaphor

Darkness as Metaphor

The photo credit goes to Marc Imhoff, Project Scientist for NASA’s Terra satellite, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.  Shown at night are Japan and the Korean Penninsula.

Golly, I wonder what yawning chasm of darkness cries out for light? Hint: It is run by a shrimpy Latter Day Stalinist.

The House GOP. Hear Them Squeal!

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Poor GOP. The party of values, Tom DeLay, and Karl Rove. Now that they are the loyal opposition, they seem to have forgotten their time in the sun. Remember the good old days when Majority Leader Tom “The Exterminator” Delay ran roughshod over house Dems? The tide has turned and today they are whining vociferously about the lack of input into legislation.  Should they be surprised at like treatment? Actually, they are not getting like treatment. Boehner and party have been asked to participate in problem solving and, naturally, they have reverted to their rabid, atavistic reflex for eating the liver of any democrat within reach.

Russia to Produce More Aircraft Carriers

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Russian President Dmitri Medvedev announced recently, while on board the carrier Admiral Kuznetsov, that they will begin an aggressive campaign for the production of aircraft carriers in the next two years. In 2007, Admiral of the Fleet Vladimir Masorin, announced that within 20 to 30 years, Russia would have two carrier strike groups consisting of three carriers each. Russian style carriers are smaller than US carriers and have more defensive capability, reportedly giving them more maneuverability.

But to construct and service a major fleet, Russia needs a major port facility like Sevastopol, in the Ukraine, with its craggy coastline. Unfortunately for Russia (or more ominously, for the Ukrainians), a lease agreement with the Ukraine will expire in 2017. Reports suggest that the Ukraine is not interested in renewing this lease.

On the technical side, building a metal warship brings many kinds of problems that makers of fiberglass yachts and canoes don’t have to contend with. Testing for magnetic silencing and degaussing is one of them.

Fissile Molten Salt Reactors

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Like it or not, the world is fitted with a web of nuclear power infrastructure. And, like it or not, we have inherited the chore of managing nuclear materials and industries from preceding generations. The question that begs to be answered is, how should we go forward with this legacy of nuclear power technology? Do we plod along maintaining  the status quo? Do we replace aging nuclear plants with non-nuclear facilities? Or, do we ramp up with more nuclear plants?

On the pro-nuclear side, alternative reactor schemes are surfacing.  Reactor designs that have been proposed for years are showing up on the internet and into the daylight.

One intriguing design utilizes a fissile molten salt that is circulated through a moderator assembly and cycled through a heat exchanger. In this scheme, the fuel is also a working heat transfer fluid. It is called a liquid fluoride reactor.  Many kinds of molten salt compositions are possible, but one is composed of (72 LiF, 16 BeF2, 12 ThF4, 0.3 UF4).  The designs I’ve seen use continuous fuel processing to keep an optimal fuel composition in use. The reactor described in the previous reference has a negative temperature coefficient, meaning that the fuel becomes less reactive as the temperature rises. This is an important safety attribute.

There is no point in a recital of the technical details here. The reader can follow the links if interested.

A Constitution in Need of a Few Revisions

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An article in the Alantic Monthly by Garrett Epps entitled “The Founders Great Mistake” offers some observations on weaknesses in the US constitution regarding the Presidency.  In particular –

The most dangerous presidential malfunction might be called the “runaway presidency.” The Framers were fearful of making the president too dependent on Congress; short of impeachment—the atomic bomb of domestic politics—there are no means by which a president can be reined in politically during his term. Taking advantage of this deficiency, runaway presidents have at times committed the country to courses of action that the voters never approved—or ones they even rejected.

Epps offers several examples of runaway presidency. The example of Andrew Johnson is particularly good-

Andrew Johnson was the next unelected runaway. Politically, he had been an afterthought. But after Lincoln’s assassination, Johnson adopted a pro-Southern Reconstruction policy. He treated the party that had nominated him with such scorn that many contemporaries came to believe he was preparing to use the Army to break up Congress by force. After Johnson rebuffed any attempt at compromise, the Republican House impeached him, but the Senate, by one vote, refused to remove him from office. His obduracy crippled Reconstruction; in fact, we still haven’t fully recovered from that crisis.

Epps, a law professor at the University of Baltimore, points out the origin of the mysterious electoral college-

The system that the Framers developed for electing the president was, unfortunately, as flawed as their design of the office itself. When Madison opened discussion on presidential election in Philadelphia, he opined that “the people at large” were the “fittest” electorate. But he immediately conceded that popular election would hurt the South, which had many slaves and few voters relative to the North. To get around this “difficulty,” he proposed using state electors. Electoral-vote strength was based on a state’s total population, not on its number of voters—and the South received representation for three-fifths of its slaves both in the House of Representatives and in the Electoral College.

The electoral college was merely a scheme to manipulate the weighting of ballots in states with a low fraction of voters among the population. In other words, it was a “duct tape and baling wire fix” to accomodate the slave states embarrassingly low fraction of voting adults. This antebellum artifact should be abandoned in favor of simple vote counting.

The citizens of the USA need to have a better mechanism with which to fire a President who is crooked or incompetent. The provision for impeachment carries a high threshold for activation. A president must engage in some kind of serious malfeasance to provoke the congress to vote for impeachment. But the application of this provision has been very nonlinear. Clinton was impeached for lying about consensual sex. Bush arguably lied or at least tolerated falsehoods leading to the invasion of Iraq and the resulting civil war with tens of thousands of deaths. Depending on the congress for an even application of its powers is a sketchy proposition.

The framers of the constitution did not anticipate the situation where an incompetent president might be elected by “low-information voters”.  A government that has usurped the consensus of the electorate and is allowed to remain in play because of a fixed period of tenure is a government that serves only itself.  This is wrong and we should not stand for it.

PbNN- Plumbum News Network

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Some folks get more than 15 minutes of fame. Case in point- Joe the Plumber.  The career arc of Joe “The Plumber” Wurzelbacher continues to cover new terrain, this time landing him a gig with Fox News as a correspondent specializing in media bias. Joe’s impeccable credentials as just plain folks and his compelling profile has caught the attention of the News Department at Fox. His brush with the McCain-Palin juggernaut was possibly helpful as well.

Joe has been sent abroad to investigate disturbing reports of liberal American media bias. News organizations covering the freedom crusade being waged in the middle east by George II have been less than forthcoming about our inherent righteousness.

This regular Joe has been imbedded in the field to faithfully report the unvarnished truth in a manner recognizable to the sensibilities of the Everyman. And since Fox News has a special knack for speaking truth, Joe was anointed by these Sons of Murdoch to follow the star of freedom eastward and bring back the truth to quench the thirst of a nation parched for hopeful news.

Alright. I’ve finished my lampoon. Joe has become a cartoon character but doesn’t seem to be aware of it yet. There must be some kind of PT Barnum character in Joe’s life who is milking the media’s tongue-in-cheek fascination with him.

I sincerely hope that something good might come from Joe’s expedition to Israel. But there seems to be little original analysis possible for the sad and tragic situation between Israeli Jews and the nascent Muslim caliphate. Each party claims a special relationship with the Diety and, accordingly, each has no option but to prevail.

Pro-Stalin Sentiment Rising in Russia

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The artless fools running our American federal government over the last 8 years have been substantially preoccupied with petropolitics and deconstruction of the goverment handed to them by the previous administration.  Leading up to the 8 Bush II years were 6 years of a conservative congress who paid more attention to the lurid and scandalous behaviour of Clinton/Lewinski than to the international scene.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990’s, the USA has been internally preoccupied with: a pageant of neoconservative social engineering proposals; privatization of nearly everything; political consolidation of dominionist megachurches; impeachment of a president for lying about sex; a buildup of militarism following the 9/11 attack; attacking the wrong country (arguably) in response to 9/11;  the re-election of a president who has proven to be considerably less than useless; a global financial trainwreck; and, finally, the handoff of a platter of shit sandwiches to the next administration. What a time it has been.

And since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the USA has squandered its substantial goodwill and failed to summon international leadership by Presidents 42 & 43 in the constructive engagement of new Russia. Magic moments in history have come and gone, unused. In the mean time, Russia has experimented with capitalism in their unique way. But the experiment has not been much of a success.  So, Russia did what Russia tends to do- it has advanced strongmen into power. And they are KGB alumni as well. Golly, what a surprise. 

It could be that Russia might have been refractory to whatever help we might have offered. But we didn’t really try much beyond helping them decommission nuclear warheads.

So, now we see that Russian sentiment is falling back nostalgically towards Joseph Stalin- Uncle Joe. The government is actually confiscating materials archiving the atrocities of Stalin. The rationale is that Stalin made them a superpower, so his indiscretions and sins can be overlooked. Putin and Medvedev- king and rook- are gradually consolidating power the old fashioned way- they’re taking it under the blustering pretense of security. It’s like a game of chess. You advance enough pawns to get control of the middle of the board. Then you castle your king (Putin) and begin the projection of power across the board.