To Big to Fail oughta meet Anti Trust

Great Depression 2.0, still ongoing, was triggered by foolish actions by a handful of big Wall Street operations. When a brain dead executive has control of massive amounts of cash, he can do a lot more damage than a similar executive at a smaller firm. When big outfits like Fannie Mae or AIG go belly up, Uncle Sam bails them out lest their failure throw the economy into a tail spin. This time Uncle spent carloads of cash bailing them out and the economy still tanked. Effective use of taxpayer funds that.
And, when us customers are shopping, we get a better deal if we have a lot competing companies to buy from. If a super biggie is the only game in town, we are going to get robbed.
So, for all these reasons, super big companies are a bad idea. We used to have a Sherman Anti Trust Act, enforced by the US justice department. Back in the good old days they broke up Standard Oil and the telephone company, and tried to break up IBM. Used to be, the Anti Trust division of Justice could put the kibosh on mergers if they deemed the merged company would be too big.
Far as I know, Sherman Anti Trust Act is still on the books, but the Justice department hasn't enforced it for 20 years or more. Which is why we have AIG and Microsoft out crashing the economy and abusing customers.
Let's bring back the Anti Trust lawyers and sic 'em on any company that controls more than 50% of any market.

Russians bid on the USAF tanker replacement

This is a little hard to believe, but according to Aviation Week, Antonov, the Russian airliner builder, is submitting their AN-70 jetliner for the KC-X tanker competition. The Air Force is hassling Antonov about timely bid submission. Bids were due at 2:00 PM, 9 July at Wright Patterson AFB. Antonov's bid got there but was stamped with a 2:05 PM arrival time, five minutes late. The Air Force is attempting to throw out the Antonov bid on this technicality.
I wish the Air Force luck. They have been bungling this needed tanker acquisition for nearly 10 years now. No matter how they play it, they will get sued on this one. Antonov will sue if their bid is rejected, Boeing and Airbus will sue if it is considered.
The thought of USAF flying Russian built aircraft boggles the mind.

Immigration Reform

Service in the US armed forces ought to grant US citizenship. Anyone who serves a hitch, especially in wartime, and especially a hitch in a combat zone, is a plenty good enough citizen for me. An honorable discharge ought to be good for the soldier, and his wife and kids to become citizens.
Why? The armed services attract the very best people. And they are loyal to the country. The men I served with in the US Air Force were all the best people you could ever want to see. Far as this veteran can tell, the current crop of service men is every bit as good. We strengthen the United States by admitting people like that to citizenship.

No singing at the Lincoln Memorial

For your daily dose of outrage, read this.

Oil Floats

Not to deny that the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is a terrible disaster. But, all this talk about "underwater plumes of oil" sounds suspicious to me. Oil floats on water, and I expect underwater oil to float to the surface in a day or two. I think we have enough real oil damage that we can fore go inventing imaginary damage.

Home Hobby Shop overkill

I have an aging favorite chef's knife, of the sort with wood handgrips secured with brass rivets. Over 40 odd years of dishwashering the wood had crumbled and was held in place with tape. To replace the simple wood handgrips seemed as easy job.
But it gets complicated. I special ordered the brass rivets from Lee Valley, $8 a pack. Right there I'm behind the power curve, the knife only cost $3.50 back in 1966. I needed the services of my radial arm saw, my jointer, my bandsaw, my drillpress, and my pad sander by the time the job was done. A lot of power tools to shape a couple of three inch long bits of poplar. Dunno how those colonial cabinet makers turned out high boys with nothing but hand tools.
But the rehandled knife looks fine.

What is the purpose of NASA today?

NASA was created to get Americans into space, and then to the Moon. It succeeded brilliantly in those two missions. Then it became the Shuttle operator and science investigator, launching planetary probes and Hubble space telescope. Now that the shuttle is going away, what is NASA supposed to be doing?
How about building and launching a bigger and better space telescope? Hubble is 20 years old. Sooner or later it's going to die. And with the Shuttle gone, we won't be able to fix it. With 20 years of technical progress we should be able to build a bigger and better one. Right now NASA is getting $19 billion a year of taxpayer money. I'd kinda like that money to get us something worthwhile rather than just paying a bunch of salaries.
A new Space Telescope is easily fundable. A manned mission to Mars is not. Back of the envelope calculations show a Mars trip would cost $1 trillion and up. That's more than the US defense budget and is politically impossible. A lot of voters think we need a space program, but few of them are willing to pay for that size of space program. More do able, would be setting up a manned Moon base, a worthy goal, but when you consider the success of Hubble, I think a bigger and better Hubble follow on would be just as successful, giving us a view of the entire universe, where as a Moon base would only be able to do Lunar geology and seismology. Seeing back to the Big Bang is more exciting than categorizing Lunar rocks. Cheaper too.