Posts from — April 2010

Hobys Rosette Nebula

ESA’s Herschel space observatory collects the infrared light given out by dust. This image is a combination of three infrared wavelengths, colour-coded blue, green and red in the image, though in reality the wavelengths are invisible to our eyes. It was created using observations from Herschel’s Photoconductor Array Camera and Spectrometer (PACS) and the Spectral and Photometric Imaging Receiver (SPIRE).

I needed a break from the depressing news, including the loss of another local military aircraft.

Update: Ms Fernald lost, but she got over one-third of the votes in a rushed election, with almost no money to spend. She didn’t have a single sign that I’ve seen in Okaloosa County but over 5,500 people turned out to vote for her. Normally Republicans win with around 75% of the vote in this county, so this was a very good showing.

We have a special election tomorrow to fill the seat left vacant when our local Florida house rep got caught with his hand in the “cookie jar” of the state budget to the tune of several million dollars.

We actually seem to have a person who is a self-declared Democrat running, Jan Fernald. Despite her late start, she seems serious about this, and, surprise of all surprises, the Democratic Party of Florida is actually helping out with telephone banks.

She even has a website with an issues page, but she hasn’t used the blog that her host provided with the site.

I will vote, and I will vote for her, not because she is running as a Democrat, but because she: opposes off-shore drilling [for the right reasons, which she clearly states]; supports public education; and thinks the best way to balance the budget is to stop all of the corporate hand-outs.

Her opponent raised more than 80 times as much money as she did, but three-quarters of his money came from outside of the district, while hers all came from local friends and family.

It’s a long shot, but Republicans are so used to the primary being the only election, Ms Fernald could pull off an upset.

During the most of the 1960s the Republican leader of the Senate was Everett McKinley Dirksen of Illinois, and he was worth watching whenever he was on television. “Ev” was good for a quote. When he was in the House he had said “When a member of the House moves over to the Senate, he raises the IQ of both bodies.”

He was a conservative Republican. He supported Joe McCarthy, tried to get a school prayer Constitutional amendment passed, backed the Vietnam War etc., but he also worked to pass the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

The thing is, he wasn’t mean spirited. A fiscal conservative people remember a reported aside: “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.” I remember it as “million”, not “billion”, because in the days of the 15¢ hamburger, a million dollars was “real money”.

I don’t think Senator Dirksen would be pleased with what has been going on in the Republican Party of Florida.

The local paper carries the St. Petersburg Times/Miami Herald story: Sansom staffer rang up $1.3 million on credit card

ST. PETERSBURG — She was a 25-year-old junior staffer when the Florida Republican Party gave her an American Express card.

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The local paper reports that:

Maj. Randell D. Voas and Senior Master Sgt. James B. Lackey, both from the 8th Special Operations Squadron, died when a CV-22 Osprey carrying U.S. forces crashed about seven miles west of Qalat, the capital of Zabul province, according to an Air Force Special Operations Command press release.

Major Voas and SMS Lackey were the squadron’s flight evaluation team, rating pilots and flight engineers on their job performance. They were the primary instructors at the squadron for flight crews. It takes years for people to attain their proficiency.

While the BBC, as usual, has a lot of information in its article, Polish President Lech Kaczynski dies in plane crash, the most complete coverage can be found on Wikipedia.

First off, the passenger list showed 89 passengers, but one didn’t make the flight. There were also 8 crew members, which is why the Russians reported 97 people lost.

All of the senior members of the Polish Defense Ministry, except the Defense Minister, died in the crash, i.e. the President, their Chairman of their Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Chiefs of Staff of military services. [The Wiki article has a more complete listing than I’ve seen elsewhere.]

The aircraft was one of two Tu-154Ms, used by the Polish Air Force’s 36th Special Aviation Regiment for VIP flights. The aircraft is very similar to the Boeing 727.

Initial reports indicate that the aircraft hit trees short of the runway at Smolensk in heavy fog. The Russians said that they recommended that the aircraft divert to Moscow or Minsk because of the fog, but the pilot chose to make the attempt.

While I’m sure the crash will probably be listed as pilot error, this isn’t that simple. President Kaczynski had earlier threatened to dismiss the pilot on a flight to Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, for not wanting to land because of the hostilities between Georgian and Russian forces. The pilot in the crash would know about that.

[Read more →]

The local paper reported that a CV- 22 Osprey went down in Afghanistan with four dead:

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan — A CV-22 Osprey from Hurlburt Field crashed in southeastern Afghanistan Thursday night, killing three service members and one government contractor.

The Osprey, an Air Force tilt-rotor aircraft that can take off and land as a helicopter, went down about 7 miles from Qalat, the capital of Zabul province, a NATO news release said. It was carrying U.S. forces.

“Numerous other service members” were injured and were taken to a nearby military base for treatment, NATO said.

The aircraft was assigned to the 8th Special Operations Squadron, so the names that will be released tomorrow will probably be of some of my neighbors. The area was getting hyped for the big air show that is part of the Eglin celebration, and now the missing man formation will be inserted.

Gargoyle Job Action

No sun, no work!

[Editor: Normally Ringo would be peering over the edge of the roof like a proper gargoyle, but she is hoping for the clouds to open up in the West.]

Friday Ark

I remembered reading a story that reported that half of US households don’t owe any income taxes, but I couldn’t remember which blog it was on, so I hit the search engines and found something a bit more interesting.

Sean Paul at the Agonist wrote the post I remembered and linked to an AP story on Yahoo Finance that is credited to Stephen Ohlemacher, Associated Press Writer, for Wednesday April 7, 2010, 5:38 pm EDT.

I’m not an English or Journalism professor so I won’t give an opinion in those areas, but it seems very similar to the CNN Money post, 47% will pay no federal income tax, credited to Jeanne Sahadi, CNNMoney.com senior writer, for October 3, 2009.

On the general point of half of US households not paying income taxes – with about 10% unemployed, and another 10% underemployed, and real wages falling, people below the median US income don’t make enough to pay income taxes. These people are paying payroll taxes, and the dozens of other taxes that are imposed by the Federal, state, and local governments, and their payroll taxes have been covering a significant portion of the deficit caused by the Hedgemony’s tax cuts.

As I keep saying: there was never an income tax surplus, nor has the income tax taken in enough to actually balance the Federal budget in decades. FICA tax excess payments were used to cover the deficit and FICA tax payment were all of the Clinton budget “surplus”. The only problem with Social Security is that the government has to pay back what it borrowed.

I’m a bit annoyed, as about 40 different types of aircraft have been flying overhead today in preparation for the 75^th birthday bash for Eglin Air Force Base, and the cloud cover has kept me from seeing them.

This evening the road paving crew are back with their noisy behemoth machines and irritating back-up beepers. They are a bit further away, but I have windows open because of the nice temperatures.

With that in mind I would like to point out to Dr. Krugman, that he is off the mark on his Birds and Bees blogging. He may take the holy writ of the priests at the National Bureau of Economic Research that the recession began in December of 2007, but if you look at the price of oil and the unemployment numbers for all of 2007, it was obvious to Main Street that things were turning bad. If the recession had started in December of 2007, Christmas sales figures wouldn’t have been as abysmal as they were.

Here’s a news flash for the econ types – the volatile energy and food segments of the inflation index are two of the largest segments of the household budgets for real people. When they spike, real people have a problem.

From PZ Myers: you know you are scrapping bottom when the Ku Klux Klan issues a statement disavowing any association, past, present, or future, with you. It must make Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church proud to know they are too offensive for the Klan.

From the CBC: Newly found fossils could link to human ancestor

Two fossil skeletons found in South Africa are members of a previously unknown species that fits in the transition between ancient “ape-men” and humans, scientists say.

The newly discovered species, named Australopithecus sediba, has characteristics of both primitive ape-like species and later humans, and the research team behind the find says it’s the best candidate yet found for a direct ancestor of the lineage of humans.

This is another step in the process of evolution. If what has been reported is accurate, this species was capable of surviving in both the trees and on the ground, and was developing many of the cranial features of the later Homo erectus.

We now have evidence that there was no dominant hominid species until fairly recently, and Homo sapiens was the surviving branch of many variants, i.e. there were options until recently, and modern man was the winner.

We beat nature, now we need to survive our own actions.

The first extended test of the Solar Impulse, a solar powered aircraft, has been completed. When all of the tests are completed a second, improved model will be constructed that Bertrand Piccard hopes to use to fly around the world, non-stop.

Bertrand Piccard was the first to fly a balloon non-stop around the world, and is the son of Jacques Piccard, the designer of the bathysphere, Trieste, in which he descended to the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench.

When Jacques made his descent, his father, August, held the altitude record for balloons, so the height and depth records were held by the same family.

Even small countries, like Switzerland, can do interesting things. Too bad that some big countries have given up trying.

The Pensacola News Journal notes that Santa Rosa is tops in pot. The next county to the West is once again the leader in the state in locating and eradicating people’s marijuana patches. [What a waste of time, money, and man hours.]

Released on Saturday, Apple announced today the first iPad work-arounds to deal with the problems people are having connecting to WiFi.

A Wisconsin DA tells teachers that the new sex education course could get them arrested for corrupting the morals of children [or some other bogus charge]. I assume everyone realizes that this District Attorney is a Republican.

Rupert Murdoch is going to limit Google and Microsoft, so that you can’t find any of his media outlets with a search engine. Rupert is going to charge people to view his AP feeds. If he thinks that the people who watch Fox News can afford to pay, he is in for a shock.

This Jim Morin cartoon on the current plans to regulate the financial industry is all too accurate.

It’s been about five years since the last “election” in Kyrgyzstan, called the Tulip Revolution, so it was time for a change. Kurmanbek Bakiyev replaced Askar Akayev for being a corrupt, power mad dictator, and some people are making the same charges against President Bakiyev, with a side order of nepotism.

The BBC article, Kyrgyzstan opposition sets up ‘people’s government’, is as good a place as any to get an overview of what outsiders think is going on,

Kyrgyzstan is important to the US because we have the main transit point for aerial resupply of the troops in Afghanistan at Manas Air Base in the country.

For more than you really want to know about the situation, you could start with my post, Creative Cartography II, which covers the “swirl” of the borders of Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. That is important because the current President, Bakiyev is a “lowland” Kyrgyz, which means he is probably an ethic Uzbek and is certainly resented by the “highland” Kyrgyz. Tribalism and nationalism are alive and as nasty as ever in Central Asia.

Bakiyev is probably just as bad as Akayev, but people would have ignored it if he was a member of the “right” tribe. He set things in motion when he started arresting opposition leaders, and their followers took to the streets. The violence, in part, is the result of those leaders being unavailable to control their followers.

Poisonous snakes, toads, and insects I can deal with. I know that dingos, water buffalo, and crocodiles have attitude problems. There is no doubt at all that Great White sharks are not your friend.

But getting mauled by a wombat is really too much. Next I expect to find out that the Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog, was actually from Canberra. 😉