Global Warming caused Mississippi floods

At least that's what NPR was pushing this afternoon. This isn't true, the Mississippi has been flooding in springtime since the end of the last ice age. This one river drains the entire center of North America, of course it's going to flood from the spring snowmelt. This year's floods are much worse than usual, about as bad as 1937. The floods work terrible hardships upon the people living along the river.
I find it distasteful to hear NPR pundits using this disaster to push their narrow political agenda. After blaming global warming they moved on to blame federal funding cuts, something about a single weather satellite not getting replaced on schedule. Talk about single issue politics.

Are we back on the air?

And, my last, terrible witty post seems to have vanished, at least for now.

The OBL raid according to Aviation Week

The helicopter that crashed was a previously undisclosed stealth chopper, a heavily modified Sikorsky H-60 Blackhawk. The one chopper to crash was brought down by a miscalculation of air temperature in and outside the compound. The Blackhawk ran into lift trouble due to a 15F difference inside the courtyard said Rep. Buck McKeon(R-Calif). "They couldn't hold the hover."
Two Blackhawks and two Chinooks carried the raiding party in. Four choppers is plenty of lift for only 40 raiders. Even after the loss of a chopper they had plenty of seats to get everyone out.

Cats of War

This one is funny.

That $4 billion oil industry tax break

Obama has been running around and running his mouth about a $4 billion tax break for the oil industry. Unfortunately Obama never actually says just what this tax break might be. Some net surfing suggests that he might be talking about Section 119, the Domestic Manufacturing deduction. This is a deal that allows all companies (and individuals too) to deduct 9% of their earning from domestic (US based) manufacturing, construction, movie production, and a few other opaque things, one of which apparently is drilling for oil.
This is a fairly general US income tax loop hole drilled back in 2004. Reading the opaque language of the statute hints that the intent of the statute was to give a tax break to domestic manufacturing to encourage investment at home, rather than in China. Just about every kinda company is eligible, it's by no means an oil industry tax break. It must have been buried pretty deep in the 2004 tax cut law, I never heard of it before.
Obama gives no indication of what he wants to do, close the loophole (raise taxes) for every one, or just oil companies.
At a time when cutting spending is the serious problem, why is Obama touting a chicken feed tax hike on the oil industry? Does he think the voters can be distracted from their quest for spending cuts by promising tax hikes on unpopular industries?

Egypt to go Islamist

Apparently Egypt is going the way everyone, yours truly included, predicted. The Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist extremist group older than, more extreme than, and just as violent as, Al Quada, is going to control the Egyptian parliament. This comes from an Egyptian who is likely to become president, which means he has a fairly good idea of what's going down. The Muslim Brotherhood has been around since the 1920's when it worked to drive the British out of Egypt. It has survived severe prosecution by Nasser, Sadat, and Mubarik. They are the group responsible for the assassination of Anwar Sadat. They are survivors, and they are the only organized political party in Egypt. There is nobody to resist them.
Once in power, the Muslim Brotherhood will make trouble for Israel, impose Sharia law on the population, prosecute the Christians (10% of the population) and team up with Iran to cause trouble for the United States.
Egypt is important. It is the center of the Arab world. Cairo has the same prestige in the Arab world as New York City has in the real world. Egypt sets the tone, writes the books, makes the movies, prints the newspapers that go all over the Arab world.
Aren't you so glad that Obama called for Mubarik's ouster?

Soldering Iron

I needed a real soldering iron (150 Watts) to do some brass bar stock. These are pretty much obsolete, no store up here carries them anymore. You can get soldering guns in that wattage, but the biggest irons are little 30 watters intended for semiconductor work.
So, what do you do when it is not sold in stores? Simple, E-bay. Some one on the Bay had a carton of cheap ass 150 Watt irons from China. Couple a bucks for the iron, $9 shipping and handling. So I ordered one. It came in after a week.
It's Chinese, and it's cheap ass. The packaging has some amusing Chinglish on it.
"It's normal for heating elements to have a slight fever with smoke after the first electricity, they'll disappear after 10 minutes." "Thermo elements and iron head are strictly prohibited to be demolished or replaced when iron is in electricity." "Mada in China."