The "space rock" .

Just think . Today February 15th , 2013. would have been a bang! At least for Russia , they got all the fireworks .The dramatic fireball that exploded over Russia today (Feb. 15) was apparently the biggest such blast in more than a century, scientists say. The object that caused the Russian fireball, which damaged hundreds of buildings and wounded perhaps 1,000 people in the Chelyabinsk region, was originally probably about 50 feet (15 meters) in diameter and weighed roughly 7,000 tons, said Peter Brown, director of the Center for Planetary Science and Exploration at the University of Western Ontario in Canada. A 150-foot asteroid hurtled through Earth's backyard Friday, coming within an incredible 17,150 miles and making the closest known flyby for a rock of its size. In a chilling coincidence, a meteor exploded above Russia's Ural Mountains just hours before the asteroid zoomed past the planet. Scientists the world over, along with NASA, insisted the meteor had nothing to do with the asteroid since they appeared to be traveling in opposite directions. The asteroid is a much more immense object and delighted astronomers in Australia and elsewhere who watched it zip harmlessly through a clear night sky. Asteroid 2012 DA14, as it's called, came closer to Earth than many communication and weather satellites orbiting 22,300 miles up. Scientists insisted these, too, would be spared, and they were right. The asteroid was too small to see with the naked eye even at its closest approach around 2:25 p.m. EST, over the Indian Ocean near Sumatra. Prof. Alan Fitzsimmons, an astronomer at the Astrophysics Research Centre at Queen’s University Belfast, told the BBC that 2012 Da14 approached Earth from the south, while the meteor struck the Earth’s atmosphere in the northern hemisphere, indicating that the objects were traveling in different directions. “This is literally a cosmic coincidence, although a spectacular one,” he said. It was tragic that people got hurt from this 10-ton meteorite but the raw video footage was very interesting to watch. It seems that more meteorites find their way through the atmosphere to Russia. The Asteroid DA14 was traveling one way and the meteorite was moving in an opposite direction. I’m thinking there wasn’t any connection but I’m not a astrophysicist .The energy released when the meteorite entered the atmosphere was equivalent to a few kilotons, the power of a small atomic weapon exploding.No deaths were reported but 20,000 rescue and clean-up workers were sent to the region to assist. The early-morning blast and ensuing shock wave blew out windows buckled some shop fronts, rattled apartment buildings and blew out windows.Experts drew comparisons with an event in 1908, when a meteorite is thought to have devastated an area of more than 1,250 miles in Siberia, breaking windows as far as 125 miles from the point of impact. NASA for many years has run the Near Earth Object Program (http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov) that monitors all near-earth objects (i.e. asteroids, meteors) and calculates their trajectory and probability of hitting the earth. Given enough warning, we may be in a position in the future to deflect these large objects and avoid a major, planetary-scale disaster. This is a good, long-term investment that US taxpayers should support.

2013. State of the Union?

2013 .With Tuesday's State of the Union  President Obama  . More or less my political opinion of it is in just these simple terms . Mr. Obama is up against the wall . His first term in office was occupied with his  push for Health Care , saving the Banks with stimulus money . Frankly ignoring the rest of the 99 %.  The President will as usual present that all is well. All because Wall Street DOW average hit 14,000 , or that 100,000 new jobs were added .President Obama has to get to work and end "gridlock" .He’ll pay lip service to bipartisanship, but don’t expect anything like the call for peaceful collaboration that defined his first address to a joint session of Congress in 2009 .Reviving his populist re-election message, President Barack Obama will press a politically-divided Congress to approve more tax increases and fewer spending cuts during a State of the Union address focused on stabilizing the middle class and repairing the still-wobbly economy.White House spokesman Jay Carney said Obama would outline "his plan to create jobs and grow the middle class" as the nation struggles with persistently high unemployment.He declined to get into specifics, but said the speech will focus on "proposals that are necessary to help the middle class grow and to help the economy grow." I have to ask . Is the President's plan going to lift the poor out of poverty towards a path that will enable them to join the middle class? ## You all should know that anyone making over 100,000 a year is considered "middle class" in the American capitalist system .Some of Obama's job ideas will be repackaged versions of proposals he made during his first term, though aides say there will be some new initiatives, too. All of the economic proposals are expected to echo themes from Obama's re-election campaign, which focused on using increased spending to generate jobs, protecting programs to help the middle class, and bringing down the deficit in part by culling more tax revenue from the wealthiest Americans. Obama previewed his priorities in the Inaugural Address given January 21, 2013. He presented a vision repeating the Declaration of Independence phrase, "We, the People." He outlined seven areas which will probably be fleshed out in the SOTU. First, Obama will continue to press for infrastructure repair, which also is a good tool for job creation. Although he only mentioned it briefly in the Address, immigration law reform is a second top priority. Obama said he will present legislation in 2013. This will probably be easier to pass politically than in the past. Why? The 2012 Presidential Election showed Republicans the growing power of Hispanic voters. But the deficit and the economy are unavoidable centerpieces for any Obama speech. Despite a seemingly slow-and-steady recovery in jobs, in the stock market and other indicators, the unemployment rate ticked back up again last month. And a Commerce Department report showed the economy shrank by .1 percent in the last quarter of 2012. Meanwhile, Obama and Congress are scrambling to find a way to avoid automatic spending cuts poised to hit March 1 unless a deal is reached to replace them. Obama, to the chagrin of Republicans, wants to replace those cuts with a blend of tax hikes and separate cuts. Republicans, citing the tax-hike concessions they gave during the fiscal crisis talks, are averse to more tax increases - even if this time, those increases do not come in the form of rate hikes. Meanwhile, the White House said Sunday the president is due for more campaign-type activities, starting with a Wednesday kickoff on a public relations push on “strengthening the economy for the middle class and those striving to get there,” The Daily Caller reports.How in the hell could he possibly squeeze in any more campaigning? That's all he's done for the last 4 years. He probably forgot what his job REALLY is or maybe he knows and he's just in it for the perks and the applause from all the low information, low intelligence people that support him. He's got to love flying around in his own private jet at taxpayer's expense of $182,000/hour. 

NOTES AND COMMENTS:

 ## The New York Times reports:

Mr. Obama will insist that only “a thriving middle class” can stimulate long-term growth and that Americans must be given the tools to succeed, according to the officials, who discussed the speech on the condition of anonymity. His call for new government investments—many of which Republicans successfully blocked in his first term—is an effort to shift the emphasis away from simply reducing the deficit. . ."

Sequester'd Defense

The  United States of America out spends Russia , China  on
military defense. Has more military bases than any
nation combined world wide. Is it a sign of militarism ?

For the most of part debt ceiling has the nation pandering as usual .  Just were to cut . In simple terms . ## Our nation can not sustain the same spending as it did in the last decade . The part of the problem is that America has been crippled  for the most part by it's massive military spending . Two wars and  two occupations have made the nations government on the verge of collapse. Former president Dwight Eisenhower warned his fellow Americans of the potential for the military industrial complex growing out of control.  His fear was it becoming too strong a political force in America such that it would indulge in maintaining its size and influence at the expense of other needs of society. . Now  lawmakers in the U.S. Congress will be at each other’s throats again as they continue playing a favorite Washington parlor game: governing by crisis. This time around, though, it is the military and the safety of the nation that will be at the forefront of those decisions, as sequestration -- the capital's buzzword for automatic spending cuts -- is due to begin taking effect March 1. Last Year the nation face similar circumstances . On November 14, 2011, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta wrote a letter to Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham explaining the ramifications of the full sequestration defense cuts. Should these cuts take place over the next 10 years, he said, the United States would be left with its smallest ground force since World War II; the smallest Navy since 1915; the smallest fighter force in the history of the Air Force; and the smallest civilian work force in the Defense Department's history. Big spending , and over spending in the American military has not been this extravagant  even in President Reagan's time  20 years, and saw non-discretionary spending, i.e. personnel, health care and maintenance and operations, swallowing up the entire budget. Traditionally, the Defense Department spent 32 percent of its budget on modernization What's even more comical is that this whole sequestration business was the republican's condition for raising the debt ceiling.  They got what they bargained for, with a credit downgrade to top it off.   And now they are bitterly regretting, and all of a sudden it's the president's problem. We've been decimating Al Qaeda leadership for the last 3 years without endangering a single pilot or billion dollar aircraft. Despite all this, people like Bennett and Cheney insist that we need the same kind of military that we had during the Cold War. Why? Defense Secretary Leon Panetta warned Thursday.The United States is at risk of becoming a second-rate power if automatic budget cuts go into effect, plunging the U.S. armed forces into the most significant readiness crisis they’ve faced in more than a decade . At a ceremony honoring departing Defense Secretary Leon Panetta today, President Obama said there is "no reason" we cannot avoid the automatic defense cuts contained in the so-called sequester, cuts that he said will have a "severe impact on our military preparedness."  The president called on Democrats and Republicans "to come together" to avert the cuts "for the sake of our prosperity." Nevertheless, sequestration is poised to strike. Stripped of $492 billion, or nearly 10 percent of its budget, over fiscal years 2013–2021, the already reduced defense budget would be hit disproportionately. Meanwhile, entitlement programs—the greatest drivers of spending and future deficits—would be virtually left off limits.

NOTES AND COMMENTS:

 ## Below is an infographic courtesy of militaryeducation.org in showing what this cost meant as an opportunity cost to American society.  

Romney accused Obama of allowing the military to be cut to historically low levels through $1 trillion in cuts set to occur over the next decade because of last year’s Budget Control Act and sequestration.“Our Navy is smaller now than any time since 1916,” Romney said. “The Navy said it needed 313 ships, now it’s down to 285, and it’s headed down to the low 200s if we go through sequestration. That’s unacceptable to me.”

Obama responded by saying that sequestration happened because of Congress, not through his administration, and that it would not happen."First of all, the sequester is not something that I've proposed. It is something that Congress has proposed. It will not happen," Obama said.  Sequester was something created by Boehner and Obama to avoid the default..  Boehner demanding domestic cuts and Obama demanded Military cuts.  Ofcourse, it was voted and approved by the congress and signed by our President.

The President's Drones.

The President's new weapon .

Remember when Pres. Bush was clamored over his preemptive strike philosophy when waging the war against terrorism . Pres. Bush received an array of legal blistering from the far left including what Obama once totted when he was a Senator. According to the recent document that was leaked, and Press Secretary Jay Carney, it is OK for the president to use drones to kill U.S. citizens abroad, without using any kind of "enhanced techniques," or even a trial, for that matter. The White House and Justice Department on Tuesday adamantly defended the administration's authority to use unmanned drones to kill terror operatives -- even if those operatives are U.S. citizens -- following the release of a controversial memo on the program. This is disturbing, not so much the act but the process and justification. It's encouraging, however, to see that the Left isn't giving Obama a free ride on this one, much like the Right was wiling to do for George II. The pressure on John Brennan, Barack Obama's nominee for CIAdirector and the architect of the White House strategy on drones, intensified on Wednesday amid revelations of a secret CIA drone base in Saudi Arabia.The Obama administration and Saudi Arabia were silent over reports on Wednesday that the CIA is secretly using an air base in Saudi Arabia to conduct its controversial drone assassination campaign inneighbouring Yemen. The reports revealed that the drones that killed the US-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki and his son in September 2011, and Said al-Shehri, a senior al-Qaida commander who died from his injuries last month, were launched from the unnamed base. The drone issue is sensitive in Saudi Arabia because of the unpopularity of US military bases, which were thought to have been largely removed after the 2003 invasion of Iraq.Saudi Arabia is home to the Islamic holy cities of Mecca and Medina, and the continued presence of US troops after the 1991 Gulf war was one of the stated motivations behind al-Qaida's 9/11 terrorist attacks and the Khobar Towers bombing five years earlier.The Islamic world is sensitive about Saudi Arabia--the holy land--being used by infidels to wage war against Muslims. Osama bin Laden used that as justification for the attacks on the embassies in Africa, and implied that it triggered the Sept. 11 attacks. Obama personally holds the reins on this expansive drone war, and he holds them tightly. But whatever internal processes he has created could be dismantled by his successors. According to leaks, Obama personally makes the hardest moral calls — whether to conduct strikes that will kill not just the targeted individuals but also women and children. Top administration lawyers vet the drone kill lists and vigorously debate the legality and morality of expanding strikes. No law requires this abundant caution. Whoever eventually inherits the drone war — Republican or Democrat. The drone war needs to be restrained because the technology is too tempting, appearing to offer a low-cost alternative to bloody counterinsurgencies. In the near-future, drone strikes might be deployed to new regions, to meet new threats, based on a belief in their precision and success.The rules for drone wars are still being written. The Bush White House spent eight years writing and revising the rules for a new kind of war against al-Qaida and other terrorist groups. It created novel detention and interrogation policies.

Obama pretty much washed his hands of those policies.

NOTES AND COMMENTS:

The White House on Wednesday directed the Justice Department to release classified documents discussing the legal justification for the use of drones in targeting American citizens abroad who are considered terrorist to the two Congressional intelligence committees, according to an administration official.No President should have the authority to order the execution of an American citizen without due process and any lawyer offering such an opinion is unfit for government service or admission to the Bar. And the Times in an editorial today observes that while the Obama drone kill policy outlined in the memo was not exactly a surprise “it was disturbing to see the twisted logic of the administration’s lawyers laid out in black and white. It had the air of a legal justification written after the fact for a policy decision that had already been made, and it brought back unwelcome memories of memos written for President George W. Bush to justify illegal wiretapping, indefinite detention, kidnapping, abuse and torture.”

' The rich get richer' gleamed true this week.

Wall Street is doing fine this year @ 14,000 greed is
still the norm .

The phrase ' The rich get richer' gleamed true this week .If you look at the 2008 election... what swung Obama... what gave him the election was primarily financial institutions contributions - they preferred him to McCain. They expected to be paid back, and they were. And the next one will be even worse... Noam Chomsky said. The "fiscal cliff" compromise, even with all its chaos, controversy and unresolved questions, was enough to ignite the stock market on Wednesday, the first trading day of the new year.The Dow Jones industrial average careened more than 300 points higher, its biggest gain since December 2011. It's now just 5 percent below its record high close reached in October 2007. The Russell 2000, an index that tracks smaller companies, shot up to 873.42, the highest close in its history.When it comes to big, round numbers with major investment significance, 14,000 is as big as it gets for the Dow Jones industrial average.Higher tax rates on the rich Obviously the market is saying this is bad for industry. Well, maybe it will some day in the future.  Meanwhile, let's just sit back and ride it.So, seeing as the stock market has managed to reach record highs and the income of the richest 1% of the 1% is at all time highs, having grown by double digit percentages every year for years now, at the same time that huge numbers of ordinary Americans are still economically suffering, may we look forward to the complete and total denunciation of the insanity called "supply side economics" since it obviously doesn't work?The stock market is more a representation of how traders are feeling about the economy than the economy's underlying fundamentals. And many investors don't even think the Dow is the best way to track the market: They prefer the much bigger Standard & Poor's benchmark index, which follows 500 companies, because they think it represents a more accurate view of the economy.The last time the Dow was at 14000, gold was at $750. Now gold is at $1700 because of Federal Reserve inflationary monetary policies. For the Dow to have a comparable increase in valuation, it would need to be at over 33000. So why is everyone excited about 14000. It is still in the toilet compared to its all time high. Simple economics but the sheep will believe everything the media tells them.The supposed victimization of America's financial elite in the last few years has been almost entirely self-imagined. Sure, the Occupy movement sparked a national conversation about income inequality and spooked rich people into putting extra deadbolts on their beach houses. Sure, the one percent had been attacked in the media and targeted by politicians, including Obama, who wanted to raise their taxes.But besides hurt feelings and vague threats, the actual political and financial damage done to the Wall Street elite during Obama's first term was approximately nil. On the contrary, banker bonuses remained high, the Dow Jones Industrial Average nearly doubled, and corporations saw their profits grow an astounding 77.9 percent a year. Obama continued the Bush-era bailout plans for big banks, and rich people were still the beneficiaries of a friendly tax code, thanks in part to a carried-interest loophole that Obama never got around to rolling back. Their grip on the legislative branch was still strong, thanks to an army of paid lobbyists who were chipping away at Dodd-Frank and other regulation on Capitol Hill. No doubt despite popular perception Odummy and the Dems spend more time on their knees servicing Wall Street than anyone. The market could really take off if the economy would actually recover given all the money being held on the sidelines and overseas that may be tempted back in in such a scenario. Looks kind of like the 1930's somewhat with dopey gummint policies locking in an economic downturn and the dummies thinking that's ok because they have "programs" "helping" them. .

But we should be in an upswing in the business cycle now especially with cheap energy. This occurs in spite of policy of course. They may kill the Golden Goose of the American economy but haven't quite managed it yet.

Fahrenheit 451, Revisited.

The I -pad and Kindle are slowly replacing books and "printed"
material . You should be concerned, 

Fahrenheit 451 is a dystopian novel by Ray Bradbury. The novel presents a future American society where books are outlawed and firemen burn any house that contains them.^{[1] It may NOT be fiction. Is there some kind of "conspiracy" to do away with all printed material ?  . MAYBE NOT but in the digital age anything can be at risk . Recently}  Newsweek, one of the most internationally recognized magazine brands in the world, will ceased publishing a print edition after nearly 80 years. The term Ceased may be just a step into oblivion . I had a subscription to the magazine for years . I was irate with the decision because I feel that the Printed word in it's original form constitutes  a way better method in reaching people . Conversion to digital means that people working the presses at Newsweek would be laid off . The Editor of Newsweek may have kicked the can for the end of "Printed Material" .All this is going to do is make Newsweek much easier to ignore. If they were losing readers before, just wait until the only people who can read it are those with computers or tablets.Once it disappears from newsstands, people will simply assume it went out of business They won't bother looking it up online. They'll just shrug and buy Time instead.Wondered where US News and World Report had gone . Now, with this one missing, what in the world shall we read at the dentist or doctors offices? Already, it appears that cooking, race car, or movie/tv star magazines have taken over there. Its a shame that print is disappearing. Are the doctors going to provide us with a tablet in their office?  The crazy thing about this that converting printed material into digital has something to do with 'environmentalism' .  I am sure that it's part of going green , and replacing books . It's also a vary cheap way of communicating with out copyright safety guards on electronic printed material . What digital conversions do in effect they make objects printed on paper become vary expensive if not a rarity .The really sad thing about this is that 20 years from now are we still going to have access to the "copies" we purchased?  Will we be able to download them and keep them for posterity?  There's something about holding a physical magazine or book in your hands, flipping through the pages back and forth - ripping out pages with recipes or interesting articles.  I've been known to hold on to copies of magazines for YEARS so I could flip through at any time.  I'm not going to waste money on a magazine if I can't "keep" a "copy" of it. 

NOTES AND COMMENTS:

Next Month Social Security checks will also go 'digital' in a way replacing the mailed check for seniors , yes it's called an electronic transfer . Easy said , they want to get rid of paper so the government would save a lot of trees . As curious as I am . I believe that soon the American Dollar will vanish because of environmental concerns . After all the government prints lots of money .

Another odd ball thing about the digitization of books, magazines . Public Schools are now pushing for electronic pads to replace books . For generations, school meant books -- lots of books. But not anymore. Around the country, from high school to grad school, textbooks are getting harder to find. Technology has made the library something that can fit into the palm of your hand.Unlike the tentative, incremental steps of digital initiatives at many schools nationwide, The transformation, which cost $1.1 million for infrastructure, involved rewiring not just classrooms but also the mindset of students, teachers and parents. When teachers started hearing that “the server ate my homework,” they knew a new era had begun.“This isn’t stressing out students,” said a teacher . “It’s stressing out teachers because of some of the technological problems, and parents who are wondering why their kids are on the computer so much.”

Oakland's shame.

Oakland's shame is the nation's folly.

** Oakland California might be the next big thing in American lawlessness . Finally there is a city that the criminal gangs had out gunned the Police , made the city Mayor look like a fool . Most of all 2 Police chiefs were driven out of office . There was even talk of calling in the National  Guard because of how dangerous the city had become. Oakland, Calif., has a long history of crime linked to drugs, gangs and poverty. But in the six weeks since the shooting in Newtown, Conn., the city has seen a large increase in gun violence. Crime blotters continue to report that this weekend , as 11 people were shot -- none fatally -- following Friday's carnage that left four dead in a period of six hours. The violence in Oakland is staggering to anyone you can ask. The cure for the murders in unclear. What seems to be clear though, is that it is easy to get a gun in “the city of dope.” Some folks in Oakland have lost their mind. Especially some of the under 30 year old fools. They are shooting into crowds, shooting in the daytime, and shooting at the night clubs. Anytime you go to a club, there will be fools there with guns or knives. Oakland now has to get realistic . It's so delusional . The Police are afraid to use their guns . They have legally hampered themselves into a corner because past misuse of authority . If an Oakland  police officer uses his gun , and shoots . It can be viewed by some as "excessive force" . If an Oakland officer shoots a African - American Male . Though defending himself  it's automatically viewed as "racial" lynching  . What Oakland's Police don't know is that the criminals love this . The Gangs like Bloods , and Crypts what ever name gang affiliations and call themselves, they use the Oakland Police departments weakness as a leverage to continue their crime sprees. 

Crime Fighter William Bratton . Will he succeed ?

With all the Gun spewing violence that Oakland has now been renowned for . There is a glimmer of hope  that has blistered in controversy .  Early Wednesday when it voted to hire William Bratton, the former police chief of New York City and Los Angeles, to consult on a plan to stem rising violent crime.The city council here bucked public protests. Opposition to appointing Mr. Bratton, who led the Los Angeles and New York departments during periods of sharp drops in crime, was sparked in part by his support in the past of so-called stop-and-frisk policies. Critics say the tactic, in which police stop and search people suspected of crimes, is aggressive and a threat to civil liberties.The possibility of stop and frisk being used in Oakland upset some community activists, including a group associated with the Occupy Oakland movement. More than 200 came to a Tuesday night city-council meeting to voice their opposition, said a spokesman for Oakland Mayor Jean Quan, pushing the vote back to about 2 a.m. Their main beef with Bratton is that he champions a policy allowing police to stop, question and, if necessary, frisk someone if there’s a suspicion that he’s engaged in or about to commit a crime. Commonly known as “stop-and-frisk,” the practice has allowed police in New York City, where Bratton pioneered the technique, to become proactive, deterring crime rather than simply responding after the fact. Some supporters say it really should be called “stop-question-and-frisk,” because questioning usually is enough. But some civil rights groups have criticized his reliance on "stop-and-frisk," in which officers detain individuals they deem to be suspicious and search them for guns, and which has been linked to racial profiling by critics. Some opponents of the consultancy also worry Bratton will push for anti-gang injunctions.

“Stop-and-frisk is not something that you can stop,” Bratton recently told the Wall Street Journal. “It is an absolutely basic tool of American policing. It would be like asking a doctor to give an examination to you without using his stethoscope.” And it’s been effective. There were more than 2,200 murders in New York City before Bratton took over as top cop in 1994. Two years later, murders had fallen by 39 percent, robbery 31 percent, burglary 25 percent and car theft 36 percent, according to the Journal. While Bratton may not be the silver bullet alone - a federal judge has yet to appoint a separate "compliance director" to oversee the Oakland Police Department - many are hopeful Bratton will make a difference."We don’t expect him to solve everything happening in Oakland," Oakland Police Chief Howard Jordan said at Thursday's news conference. "We’re on the right track. But when you are too close and you can't see the  forest through the trees, you need help."

NOTES AND COMMENTS:
**Oakland is the most dangerous large city in California and one of the most dangerous large cities in the nation. There were nearly 17 violent crimes per 1,000 Oakland residents in 2011, more than triple the rate in Los Angeles, according to the FBI. Violent crime increased 23 percent last year over 2011. Last year 126 people were murdered in Oakland compared to 103 murders in 2011, according to police. This year could be worse. Four people were shot to death in Oakland in the space of just six hours on Jan. 11.