The walls come tumbling down. Jericho on the Potomac

The marble walls are falling off the East Building in Washington DC. The ultra modern windowless building, constructed in 1971, houses paintings of the National Gallery of Art. The marble slabs are 2 * 5 feet and weight 438 pounds. Enough to really smart should one fall on some unlucky person. The Gallery is planning to spend $85 million to redo all the marble in 2013. Until then they plan to use hedges, rope barriers and the like to keep people away from the walls.
I.M. Pei was the architect. Pei is a man who has trouble keeping the walls on his buildings. His masterpiece, the John Hancock skyscraper in Boston, suffered from falling windows. The Hancock was completely covered in plate glass, 5 * 11 foot panes weighting 500 pounds. As soon as the building was closed in, a pane fell into the street. A few days later another pane fell. Falling glass continued, they had to close the street on windy days. Eventually after a vast exercise in finger pointing, all the glass was replaced with thicker glass. While the new glass was on back order, the old glass was removed and replaced with plywood, yielding the world's tallest plywood skyscraper.
I checked Pei's Wikipedia page just to see if he was still alive. He is, although at age 92 he is retired.
Anyhow, looks like I.M. "Windy" Pei never did learn how to keep the walls on his buildings.

Where have all the jobs gone? Part II

Yesterday the EPA claimed the right to regulate CO2 emissions. The Supremes backed them up on this. So, we now face regulations on damn near everything in the country, cars, trains, planes, chain saws, outboard motors, building codes, power generation, barbecue grills, power mowers, lighting, oil refining, farming, logging, home construction, all manufacturing. And more. Nearly every human activity uses energy and hence become subject to regulation.
Wanna bet EPA regulation raises costs?
Wanna bet business reacts by moving even more business off shore? Make the US sufficiently unattractive, and business, investment, and money will flee.

And if it doesn't use energy it's probably health care. Between the two, Obama is bidding for total control of all aspects of life in the US.

Bode Miller flies again

Watching the FIS ski race in Colorado. Bode Miller, local Franconia boy, is in first by 0.39 sec after a wild run. He fell/nearly fell on a tough turn, but somehow he recovered and finished. The stop action shows Bode falling with both skis off the snow, but somehow he righted himself and pressed on.
There are a lot of racers yet to run, so Bode's time may not hold up, but moving into first is good sign.

Maybe Bin Ladin is dead?

Defense Secretary Gates says there has been no good intelligence on Bin Ladin in years. Either his security is air tight, or he is dead.

Snow has started

Doesn't amount to much, just started a couple of minutes ago. But maybe, hope, we get enough to open Cannon next weekend.

Air Pressure 14.7 lb/sqft

Suck It in.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v99/smallestminority/Train_tanker_implosion.gif

You will enjoy this video.

Where have all the jobs gone?

Would you believe to overseas producers? Take a walk thru Walmart. Nearly all the product on the shelves, the clothing, the shoes, the plumbing parts, the house wares, the consumer electronics, the hand and power tools, the auto parts, is made in China. When I was in high school, the product on the shelves in Sears (Walmart hadn't been invented then) was all made in USA.
Why is everything made in China? We all know, it's cheaper. Chinese workers get paid little to nothing, they don't unionize, and there is plenty more of them wanting to take a job.
We need to do something to reduce the cost of manufacturing stuff here in America. Start with the cost of labor. For every dollar paid to the worker, another dollar is paid for "overhead". The overhead doubles the cost of labor and the extra money doesn't go to the workers. It goes for health care and retirement and workman's comp and the union, and a lot of other places. We need to reduce that overhead. Maybe not to zero, but surely we can do better than the 100% markup we suffer from now.
Then we have regulations and taxes and unions and tax collection duties and Sarbanes Oxley and licensing and featherbedding and city inspectors and mafia protection shakedowns and high interest rates and scarce bank loans and pollution regulations, all of which make it harder to start a business or to survive in business.
We need to remember that business men create jobs. The government ought to be making things easier for business men if it wants to create more jobs.
Democrats are all in favor of employment, it's employers that they can't stand.