"Some aliens abducted me. / I had a shark attack. / A pirate swiped my homework / and refused to give it back."---Poet Kenn Nesbitt the next "Children's Poet Laureate," from his poem "All My Great Excuses"
The owners of two nuclear stations in California announced that they would close more than 2,000 megawatts of nuclear generation that supplied about 10% of the power of California. The plants have been crippled by massive repair problems; already $700 million have been lost in a vain effort to fix them.
Aside from the economics, this has some major implications. The nukes are being replaced by mainly new natural gas plants and some renewable energy capacity. This trade puts another 8 million tons annually of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, an amount equal to adding 1.6 million cars to the road. More, it is likely these changes will not be reversed or supplanted for 20 more years. So the nuclear plant closings will raise carbon emissions by a massive 160 million tons over the next 20 years, compared to what would have happened had the plants remained open. U.S. solar capacity exceeds now 8,000 megawatts or about enough power for 1.3 to 1.6 million homes. Still, all the solar systems today in the US produce less power than the two closed California nuclear plants at San Onofre.
It could be worse; it could be replaced with coal.
The number of non-Hispanic white Americans who died in the year ended June 2012 exceeded the number who were born during that period by about 12,400, the first "natural decrease" for this group. Even during the great flu epidemic of 1918-19 which killed more than 600,000 Americans the white population grew. The fertility rate of U.S. women is about 1.9 births and a rate of 2.1 is necessary to keep the population constant
JFK was so angry with the decision of U.S. Steel to raise steel prices after what he thought was an agreement not to that he moved Defense buying to smaller steel companies and then threatened to outsource defense steel to foreign producers.
Stark: adjective:
1. extremely simple or severe: a stark interior.
2. sheer, utter, downright, or complete: stark madness.
3. harsh, grim, or desolate, as a view, place, etc.: a stark landscape
From the Proto-Indo-European root ster- meaning "stiff" or "rigid," stark entered English around the year 1000. It shares its root with the word stare.
Between 2004 and 2007, the median change in U.S. consumers' net worth was almost 18%, with the lower income households seeing the largest percentage wealth increase. Then low income, low net worth households, were encouraged to enter highly leveraged real estate transactions. A negative shock to housing prices destroyed household balance sheets, with inevitable spillover effects on the balance sheets of the lending institutions. Between 2007 and 2010, median consumer net worth declined by 39%, with low income households facing the greatest percentage decline.
Stressed, they took risks.
Is retirement reasonable? Are we hunter-gatherers and farmers who never really retire or are we victims of a more modern age who wear down with work? Keith Ambachtsheer from the University of Toronto traced the origin of retirement to the latter half of the 19th century, when it became apparent that railroad employees could not continue working until the day they died; the number of train accidents due to mistakes made by track operators, in their advanced years, were unacceptably high.
But the circumstances do not make the man.
George W. Bush’s approval rating has climbed to its highest level since 2005 and he is now seen more positively than President Barack Obama, with 49 percent of Americans viewing the former president favorably and 46 percent viewing him unfavorably.
A copy of Action Comics No. 1, the first comic book to feature Superman, was discovered in the insulation of a Minnesota home and sold for $175,000 in an online auction. David Gonzalez discovered the comic among newspapers stuffed into the wall of a home he was restoring in Hoffman, Minn. Before it was sold, the comic was torn in a very expensive argument between Gonzales and his wife's aunt, according to The Associated Press, which notes that a pristine copy of the comic sold for $2.16 million in 2011.
Who is...General Von Kluck?
The Hispanic vote came in at only 8.4 percent of the electorate. 10 percent more blacks voted in 2012 compared to 2008, even beating white voters, the usual turnout champions. Eligible black voters turned out at rate of 66.2 percent, compared to 64.1 percent of eligible white voters. Only 48 percent of all eligible Hispanic voters went to the polls. If Mitt Romney had won 70 percent of the Hispanic vote, he still would have lost. No Republican presidential candidate in at last 50 years has won even half of the Hispanic vote. All this makes the Republican hysteria over the Hispanic vote all the more strange.
The hydrogen bomb, first tested in 1952 at Eniwetok, yielded 10.4 megatons of explosive energy, 750 times more powerful and destructive than the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki just seven years earlier. President Truman had authorized the bomb's development because the Russians had successfully tested an atomic bomb and he wanted to keep ahead. Arms Race. Operation Castle Bravo, the subsequent and more powerful 1954 test made on the Bikini atoll in the Pacific Ocean, had been planned to yield five megatons but yielded fifteen. Interestingly many who saw the American or Russian explosion were horrified. Scientist swore they would never work on such a project again. The Soviet leader, Georgy Malenkov, rejected, for a time at least, the Marxist corollary that there had to be a war with the capitalist world. Looking at Bravo, the British concluded that eight such bombs would erase England from the earth.
Golden Oldie:
A little sidelight on the pros and cons of NSA spying: Project BioShield. Arestvyr (Tecovirimat) is one of the first novel drugs to be developed, procured and now delivered to the Strategic National Stockpile under the post-9/11 legislative authority known as Project BioShield. Developed to serve as a therapeutic drug for treatment of smallpox(!), whether resulting from a terrorist attack, biowarfare or a new natural outbreak, Arestvyr is an investigational new drug not yet approved or licensed as safe and effective by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The second delivery of nearly 200,000 courses of Arestvyr has been made. BARDA now has the first 500,000 courses of the 2,000,000 contracted-for courses of Arestvyr. Smallpox!
Clinton Global Initiative America (CGI America), founded by former President Bill Clinton focuses on global health and economies, and the environment.That organization is being renamed the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation.
Average reading and writing SAT scores for high school students declined to their lowest levels while math results stalled. For the class of 2012, the average critical reading score fell 1 point to 496 from a year earlier, the lowest since data became available in 1972, according to a report released today by the New York-based College Board, which administers the test. The average score for writing dropped 1 point to 488, the lowest since writing was added to the exam in 2006. Math results were unchanged at 514. The drop in scores reflect the fact that more lower-income students with less access to high-quality education are taking the test, the College Board said in a briefing. Minority students made up 45 percent of the test pool, the most diverse ever.
AAAnnnnnddddd.....a graph:
1 comment:
Re Bush and Obama,
The one question I ask is, are you better off under the latter than the former? I think there is no question that we are better off under Obama. It has taken all this time to recover from the Bush damage and as we recover we may forget how damaged we were individually and how damaged the country was under Bush leadership.
I also think that when the lead stories are the weather, spying, politics, and he said/he said, it is a sign that things are pretty good.
I spoke to a company last week, based in Europe, who told me that their investors don't want to invest in the United States because of their repugnance for the US. This despite the fact that there is virtually no growth opportunity any where else on the planet. This is a leftover of the Bush years, the bad taste left in everyone's mouth. It will take thirty years to get rid of it.
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