momusradar

From the AP article covering the newly built USS New York now underway and heading to New York City:

Brian Corcoran, a mechanical contractor, brought his four children, who range in age from 12 to 5. He figured they might be a bit late for school but was OK with that, given the importance of the occasion.

“Hopefully, it’s going overseas to do damage to them like it did to us,” he said.

Brian is a belligerent idiot.

Bill Wolfe was surprised to read the New Jersey Environmental Federation endorsed Republican candidate Chris Christie for Governor:

So to get a little understanding, I just went to the Christie website, watched the 1½ minute Christie video, and read his “entire plan” –

At a fundamental level, Christie feels that DEP has become “too intertwined with business life” in NJ (his words) and needs to shrink and disengage on the regulatory front. This language should set off all sorts of alarm bells for those who follow environmental affairs – it represents a sort of kinder and gentler (yet actually more conservative) “Open for Business” mantra.

This endorsement by New Jersey’s largest environmental group may be an asset for Christie. But as Wolfe outlines in his post, Christie’s policy declarations are seriously flawed. Combine this with the concern regarding his insubstantial plans for the state’s finances and it seems pretty clear that Christie is a poor choice for Governor.

Jacob Weisberg raises the question:

Why are Republicans trying to kill America’s old people? After all, senior citizens are more likely to vote for the GOP than for Democrats. They were the only substantial demographic segment John McCain won in 2008. You’d think Republicans would want them to hang on as long as possible. The problem is that because of the Democratic programs Social Security and Medicare, the aged are expensive for government to keep around. Some years ago, my former colleague Jodie T. Allen suggested a reason for what she called the GOP’s “pro-death” policies: Faced with an unpalatable choice between cutting benefits and raising taxes to pay for the growing costs of entitlement programs, Republicans gravitated toward a third alternative—restraining growth in life expectancy. If you want lower taxes and aren’t willing to risk cutting spending, you need fewer beneficiaries.

From Senator Kennedy’s obituary at the Boston Globe:

He taught us to persevere and carry on in the face of loss and adversity,’’ [Chairman of the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation, Paul G.] Kirk added. “And we owe it to him to do the same at this time.’’

More perplexing than the theory behind the knife are the slew of comments about said knife. Such as:

Tell me, please… what will you do when a criminal breaks into your house and points an illegal gun at your child’s head?—Carrie, Virginia, USA

Really? Are there hordes of armed criminals entering homes in Virginia & taking children hostage of which I am unaware? Assuming she has planned for such an event, what exactly would Carrie do in that situation?

The real problem is the cost of living is so high that people have to work so much they don’t have time to raise their children, who grow up without values and commit crimes.
Fix the real problem not the symptoms.—Mahhn, Nonevyourbiznes, usa

One could write a sociology thesis based on this comment.

Yesterday the citizens of Venezuela passed a referendum to remove presidential term limits with a margin of about 8%. President Chávez said of the result:

It is a clear victory for the people.

Although back in 2007, during the broadcast of episode 291 of Chávez weekly television serial, Aló Presidente, Chávez showed his self-serving bias when he pressed Rory Carroll of the Guardian for a question. Carroll, who was in attendance with other members of the international press, did not have one primed; so he asked why the president wanted the right to be elected indefinitely, while not granting the same rights to the 23 state governors.
After bloviating for some hour and a half, Chávez returned to Carroll’s query with two simple statements:

That is how I conceive it. It’s a political conception.

Chávez lost that referendum by less than 2 percent and two days later stated:

There is nothing to celebrate. We have not lost anything. And get ready because a new offensive is on its way for the proposed reform, this one transformed, simplified. But I am sure- For me, it’s not a defeat, it’s another [Por ahora] for now.

The revised referendum passed this year also allows Venezuela’s mayors and governors to run indefinitely.

From the New Scientist article regarding the possibility that the GEO600 gravitational wave detector is detecting a holographic projection of grainy space-time:

For many months, the GEO600 team-members had been scratching their heads over inexplicable noise that is plaguing their giant detector. Then, out of the blue, a researcher approached them with an explanation. In fact, he had even predicted the noise before he knew they were detecting it. According to Craig Hogan, a physicist at the Fermilab particle physics lab in Batavia, Illinois, GEO600 has stumbled upon the fundamental limit of space-time – the point where space-time stops behaving like the smooth continuum Einstein described and instead dissolves into “grains”, just as a newspaper photograph dissolves into dots as you zoom in. “It looks like GEO600 is being buffeted by the microscopic quantum convulsions of space-time,” says Hogan.

I immediately think of the closing scene from the film Le fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain where the narrator states:

September 28, 1997. It is exactly 11 AM. At the fun fair near the ghost train, the marshmallow twister’s twisting, while in Villette Park, Félix Lerbier learns there are more links in his brain than atoms in the universe. At the Sacré Coeur the Cardinals are practicing their backhands. The temperatur is 24 degrees Celcius. Humidity 70%. Atmospheric pressure 999 millibars.

I can’t help but empathize with Monsieur Lerbier.

This is truly awe-inspiring:

What distinguishes this outcome as teleportation, rather than any other form of communication, is that no information pertaining to the original memory actually passes between ion A and ion B. Instead, the information disappears when ion A is measured and reappears when the microwave pulse is applied to ion B.

From the Washington Post article Staff Finds White House in the Technological Dark Ages:

Two years after launching the most technologically savvy presidential campaign in history, Obama officials ran smack into the constraints of the federal bureaucracy yesterday, encountering a jumble of disconnected phone lines, old computer software, and security regulations forbidding outside e-mail accounts.

And:

The team members, accustomed to working on Macintoshes, found computers outfitted with six-year-old versions of Microsoft software.

As you know, you transition with the White House you have. Not the White House you might want or wish to have at a later time.

The last news post I recieved from the Bush administration via Google Reader was time stamped for today, Jan. 20, at 12:06PM.

Clicking the link to view the full post page resulted in this:

Page Not Found

The page you requested wasn’t found at this location. The Obama Administration has created a brand new White House website, and it’s possible that the page you were looking for has been moved.

Change has come to WhiteHouse.gov & it is like 43 never existed.