SeniorJunior

[As perhaps you can tell, I don't vent about the Iraq war very often, but this just steamed me up to venting pressure.] With the inevitable stay-the-course message coming in the "General Petraeus" (NOT!) September report, we should all ingest and digest this news : Dang! With over two million Iraqis already displaced by the war, the "Surge" is making things worser faster . And there's all the news about the inability of the current Iraq government to ever heal the sectarian hatred... Well, just add a bunch of salt to the coming news of "progress."

Heartfelt letter: Representative Heather Wilson U.S. Congress, House of Representatives Washington, DC Dear Rep. Wilson This is from the Wall Street Journal 9.14.07. I hope you are one of the lawmakers working on this. We have to close all the loopholes in paying taxes, for the good of the country. • The Situation: U.S. lawmakers are examining a tax perk enjoyed by hedge funds. • Background: Many of these funds lend money like banks but, unlike traditional lenders, often don't pay taxes on the profits. • Consensus? While some tax lawyers say these transactions are proper, others argue that many variants are legally dubious. Hedge funds, which control liquid pools of capital with little regulatory oversight, are a growing presence in the lending business. They increasingly take part in lending syndicates with traditional banks, often indirectly, and also make direct loans, frequently to riskier or smaller companies that may have difficulty obtai...

[UPDATE AT END] My Suspicious, eh? button was pressed when I heard such good corporate citizens as Dow, Bayer and Hexion Specialty Chemicals were fighting to suppress government regulations on one of their very profitable chemicals. They just might succeed, since their lobbyists are making sure the government (Health & Human Services) sees mostly industry-funded research. The stuff is BPA and is rife in plastic baby bottles, plastic-lined cans of food and lots of other plastic products like toys and sippy cups. In the studies not funded by the chemical companies, BPA is shown to have mucho bad impact on test animals; stuff like diabetes, ovarian cancer, prostate cancer, male reproductive problems, obesity, and behavioral changes stemming from imbalances in the endocrine systems. Its worst effects are on babies in the womb and those recently emerged therefrom. And - surprise! - " Other studies – mostly funded by the chemical industry – have claimed little or no effect of BPA...

I notice there are only two arguments from opponents to universal health care in the U.S. 1. There are long waiting lines for medical service in countries that have it. 2. We can't afford it. Both are mostly wrong. "Long wait" is a relative thing. How long do all those people in the U.S. have to wait if they have no coverage? They might wait until they are deathly ill and have to go to the emergency room. Talk about expensive care, and we all have to pay for it. "Afford it?" We who spend more money on health care than any other people on earth? And what do we get for all that money? 37th rank in the world in public health, that's what. I firmly disagree with the well-worn politicians' statement: “There is no single prescription to solving our nation’s serious uninsured problem”. There is a prescription that’s working quite well in many first world countries, which I am sure all those Senators, Congressmen and Administration types know all about. Let me...

Food and Fuel Should Not be in Competition OK, you know where I stand. Corn is not a very good feedstock for making ethanol. There is still a net negative energy exchange in manufacturing ethanol from Corn. Sugar cane and sugar beets are a lot better and they have a net positive energy balance. Look it up . And, weirdly, the whole grow-convert-use corn ethanol cycle is as bad for the environment as gasoline use. But the worst thing in the corn/ethanol equation is that corn is an important food . It's in hundreds of things we eat. Whole food chains are dependent on corn. The meat industry, including chickens, requires a lot of corn. Not only beef cattle, but dairy cows need corn. Corn being diverted to our new passion for ethanol (said passion involving a federal subsidy) is already raising food costs all over. Check out this rant . And it's worse than just higher prices in our supermarkets. It will likely mean starvation for those on the low end of the money pole. By our corn-c...

An article in yesterday's (6.25.07) Wall Street Journal (my favorite newspaper) suddenly jelled with several other things I have read in the last few days. The Headline: French Firm Vaults Ahead In Civilian Rocket Market . There was a launch last month of Arianspace's Arian 5 from France's spaceport in French Guiana. The Administrator of NASA - our guy Michael Griffin - was there and is quoted as saying the huge (20 stories tall) Ariane 5 is "probably the best in the world, very smooth and very impressive." ArianeSpace has "powered past" Boeing and Lockheed Martin. Tellingly, our guys "scoffed" at some of ArianeSpace's technology until they saw it work. That's one. That clicked with another story out today (6.26.07) about China taking a big step toward finishing the "longest sea bridge in the world." It's over 22 miles long and also has " the longest cable-stayed structure of its kind" as the center piece. T...

Here’s another of my fav issues, the stupidity of the ethanol craze. This from the Christian Science Monitor , one of my favorite newspapers. ATLANTA and BOSTON - A gallon of milk in Birmingham, Ala., is expected to cost $4.50 this summer, perhaps more. At Wetzel's Market in Glen Rock, Pa., the New York strip steaks that were on sale for $4.99 a pound last Fourth of July will be $6.99 this year. In Boston, some shoppers report checkout prices on certain items that are 30 percent higher now than last summer. "Prices are incredible," says Suzanna Wyman, shopping Monday at Shaw's Supermarket in Boston's Back Bay. "Milk, I heard, is going up even more.... I love fresh peppers and vegetables, but they're too much. Cereal is very expensive compared to what you used to be able to get it for." The reason people are smarting: Inflation in grocery aisles is up by more in the first six months of 2007 than in all of 2006. That means food co...

Never Give Up (Another Airedale Story) Gwyneth is a small female Airedale with an powerfully elevated sense of anxiety, painfully shy and, by the way, just beautiful. After months of foster care by a caring Rescue volunteer couple, Gwyneth came to us as a very difficult case. Even after another month of intense work by the maven of Airedale Rescue, good wife Dr. Duff (Dorothy, the classic earth mother and psychologist to troubled ‘Dales), Gwyneth was still very much on edge. Any sudden noise would send her into orbit, then diving for a hiding place. People – especially men – seemed to be threatening ogres to her. When she went into our big back yard, it was always a task just to get her to come back in; she was afraid of the door. She would hide under bushes when we went out for her. Her shyness was exclusively toward humans. She loved other dogs. Her favorite playmate was our biggest, rowdiest ‘Dale, the appropriately named Rocket. They scampered like puppies ...

GWB is at it again. Since Russia has been raising heck about the StarWars installations planned in ex-Soviet countries in Eastern Europe since February (see my blog "Cold War Redux" in the February archives), the Bushies have hardly commented on it until the heat was turned up by Vlad Putin prior to the important G-8 meetings. Now the brouhaha is so hot that it will probably overshadow the really important issues like global warming at the G-8 conference. But wait! The Prez has a plan to defuse the Russian complaints and their threat to "target Europeans" in response to the missiles in their back yard. Mr. Bush plans to deliver this convincing message at the upcoming mini-summit in Kennebunkport: "And my message will be, Vladimir - I call him Vladimir - that you shouldn't fear a missile defense system." That's a quote from GW yesterday in Prague. He will instruct Defense Secretary Gates to invite Russian generals and scientists to come to the U.S. ...

Old roads are frequently abandoned for new ones. The old ones sometimes just sit there, aging, cracking and succumbing to weeds. Grass and trees take decades or more to reclaim the ground. On the old Duffstead, we just finished dealing with a new-road-for-old situation. Driveways, actually, but same same. The new one has better drainage and gives us a better shot of getting up a steep hill when it snows. The old driveway cut across a corner of our land, isolating a good quarter of an acre from the rest of the meadow. So we decided to recycle the dern thing. (We are committed recyclers of metals, paper, glass, etc.). First we contributed the gravel and basecoat of the old drive to the new one. The road builder scraped it down to the dirt, moving all the rock to the new drive. Then we disc-ed the old roadbed with our mighty tractor. Then we cut the seed heads – a big grocery sack full – from several of our wild grasses just as they were releasing their spring seeds. And we bought 10 poun...

The Creative Director of the ad agency GG&C (Grabbem, Goadem & Closem) addresses the partners’ committee of the employee rights law firm LL&C (Litigious, Litigiouser & Cohercer) with PowerPoint on one screen and digital video on the other. “This is it, gentlemen and ladies, the new era!” exaltes the Creative Director. The PowerPoint screen flashes a print headline in the unmistakable italicized font of The Wall Street Journal: “High Court Limits Time For Filing Bias Lawsuits.” Then another graphic replaces the headline. It is lifted from the text of the story: “Yesterday’s Supreme Court decision is good news for corporations…..” The Creative Director chortles. “And hot damn good news for us! Here’s the rough of our first commercial.” He turned to the digital video screen. Woman in cubicle at computer terminal: She casts a clearly suspicious glare at a man in the cubicle across the aisle working at an identical terminal. Woman’s Voice Over: “I hear they pay him 8% more...

Uh Oh, Another Unintended Consequence The lead story headline in the May 12 Science News magazine reads like this: Risk Factor Throat cancer linked to virus spread by sex The virus is the very same HPV (human papillomavirus) that causes cervical cancer and about which there's so much controversy concerning the new HPV vaccine Merck has been pushing for young girls. The article says throat cancer patients were "more apt to have engaged in oral sex with multiple partners over past years..." And there is more research showing it's because of HPV. Granted, people of all ages engage in promiscuous oral sex, but the big scary thing is all the new info about how teens who have committed to Abstinence Until Marriage don't consider oral sex to be a violation of their pledge and treat it as just "making out" or "messing around." If those same teens got their sex education in the "abstinence only" mode, they have been spared the truth abou...