Monthly Archives: July 2011

Thank You Boehner, McConnell; Let's Do Some More

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[Update:  I don’t know what Leader McConnell’s cockamamie scheme is supposed to accomplish, but for now I’ll simply assume it’s a delaying tactic, and on that basis not argue about it too much.]

GOOD SHOW, Speaker Boehner and Leader McConnell, in telling the President to find more revenues where the sun don’t shine!  I am officially off the war path of abandoned-by-my-party indignation (as promised), and I think that if you message this right, you can win back a lot of Tea Party support, so foolishly squandered in the Continuing Resolution debacle–bygones.  You’ve already done the hard work–now get the word out.  I’ll help.

[pullquote]Call the President’s bluff on the August second doomsday[/pullquote]

Here’s what else I’ll help with: Call the President’s bluff on the August second doomsday. … Continue reading →

Reagan. Reykjavik. Boehner.

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[Update: So far, so good.  Keep it up!  Speaker Boehner, if we make it to August 2nd without a deal, for what it’s worth I will be back on the GOP bandwagon, and I will encourage everybody I know to come along.  Good show so far; KEEP IT UP.  Thank you!]

Short and simple: Speaker Boehner has an opportunity to regain some trust from the Tea Party which put him in his chair.

The opportunity here is the same as that presented to President Reagan at Reykjavik. Like Reagan, he has been presented a choice between rapid defeat and slow defeat.  Reagan refused to play by the rules set forth in places like the defeatist, accommodationist New York Times.   He walked away, and far from being empty-handed, … Continue reading →

Honda CB900C

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I have finally found out exactly what that bike was I saw 20 years ago.

Honda’s American CB900 would not be so long of wheelbase, nor mechanically quite so interesting, if those who designed it had not chosen to use a maximum of existing hardware. Specifically, they opted to work with only lightly altered CB900 nee CB750F engine/transmission cases and the GL1100-CX500 final-drive assembly. This approach, like making the CB900 out of the CB750F, was shaped by manufacturing economics. They had to couple a left-side transmission output stub to a right-side final drive, and the twain could not be made to meet without taking complicated measures.

What Honda’s engineers did to resolve their right-to-left dilemma was to cobble together some transfer gears, a jack-shaft and right-angle bevel drive … Continue reading →

Time Magazine Debases Constitution

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“If the Constitution was intended to limit the federal government, it sure doesn’t say so.” — Richard Stengel, Managing Editor of Time Magazine, and former President and CEO of the National Constitution Center.

Please help share the linked article from which the following quote is taken.

The fourteen factual errors in the recent Time article are actually a big deal because the author of that awful piece, Richard Stengel, holds an incredibly influential position.

The author is not only the Managing Editor for Time, but he spent two years as President and CEO of the National Constitution Center. And even today, he works with the National Constitution Center’s Peter Jennings Project for Journalists and the Constitution, whose stated mission is “to help both professional journalists and students … Continue reading →

TEPCO Cover Story Now in Full Meltdown

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Fukushima has been another TEPCO cover-up of a radioactive disaster since before the tsunami hit, and their slow, incomplete notifications have enticed regulators and the government as a whole to go along with it. A price will be paid.

After the Japanese government forced TEPCO to release hundreds of pages of documents relating to the accident in May, Bloomberg reported on May 19 that a radiation alarm went off 1.5 kilometers from the number one reactor on March 11 at 3:29 p.m., minutes before the tsunami reached the plant.

via Meltdown: What Really Happened at Fukushima? – Global – The Atlantic Wire.

[This is an amazing story by Jake Adelstein whose ability to wring truth from stones in Japan is legendary, and David McNeill, of whom I … Continue reading →

Blaming Bush Achieves Low Earth Orbit

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I am shocked — SHOCKED to see Obama political appointees blaming their predecessors.

“We have a program. We have a budget. We have bipartisan support. We have a destination,” NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver said. “We are just putting finer points on the rocket design.”

But Garver and other administration officials are getting heat from some of the most famous astronauts on the planet, not to mention members of Congress and aerospace industry executives. Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon, and someone never known to be a rabble-rouser, recently co-wrote with fellow Apollo astronauts Jim Lovell and Gene Cernan an op-ed in USA Today declaring that the space policy of the Obama administration is in “substantial disarray.” The astronauts protested the decision to kill the … Continue reading →

Blame the Customers

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Here’s a stunningly inept analysis of Japan’s problems, by somebody from a company that markets chinese crap to welfare moms.

Another problem is that Japanese business people and companies are lacking in individuality. Too many people think that everyone must be the same. That’s a basic fault.

Finally, Japanese companies seem to have their eyes in the rearview mirror. They have become introspective. I think we should get back to something more like we were at the end of the war when Japan rose to prominence from a situation in which it had nothing. (It was during this period that Fast Retailing got started, in 1949.)

I do not intend to fisk this article, but it gets thick real fast. He complains that Japan looks in the rearview, … Continue reading →

The Japan Fan Club

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This is a good article on some of the electricity-conserving measures ravaging the lives of workers in Japan and the productivity thereby lost.  I have no criticism (shockah!), as this is a healthy response to an awful set of circumstances.  There a few good answers, and plenty of worse ones.  I think Japan’s approach is right on the mark with power-savings.

I worry a little about some of the numerical targets, in that a company which never gave a damn about saving power can easily generate a 15% reduction year-to-year for 2011, whereas a “green” plant will be hard pressed to improve what they were already doing.  I hope that penalties (which are expected to be fierce) will be assessed with an eye toward that fact, but as … Continue reading →

Already Gone

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Being President is just no fun when you have no talent and no friends. It must be even less fun joined with Richard Trumka through an interference fit.

I’ve been wondering how long it will take for him to crack up, and I now think it may have already happened. Just putting a marker out there. His speeches are described as combative, erratic, divisive, tough, mean, petty, and so forth. I have an adjective for that stack: paranoid. Fund-raisers are reportedly not going well. Mass defections from his team. God knows the economy has not helped him, and that in fact he is the problem. And his friends are all enemies, and our enemies are his friends.

His position is … Continue reading →

"Cut, Cap, Balance" A Bunch of Unicorn Poop

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[Update: 19JUL2011: Cut Cap and Balance is going for a vote as early as today, in the House. I support it fully. I am pleased with the fight so far shown by the Speaker and the Leader, and while I do not agree with everything, I can hardly make that my condition for support. We must offer support whenever possible, and be blunt about when we feel support is not possible. I sincerely think that efforts such as refusing to “sign any more damned pledges” makes for a more attentive GOP and a Republican presence worth defending and expanding in Washington. Who knows: they might even pull off the cut and the cap this time. I might justsign the next pledge, if they can manage not to … Continue reading →