After doing something stupid, sue

Something called "FairPoint Creditor's Trust" is suing Verizon to recover the purchase price Fairpoint paid Verizon for the privilege of going broke. For those of you that tuned in late, some years ago Verizon decided that operating telephone lines in rural New England was a money loser. Few paying customers, spread over a wide area means lots of wire to maintain and few bill payers to fund the thing. So Verizon found a bigger sucker. Small backwoods phone company from down south somewhere , name of Fairpoint, thought they could make money running land line phone service in New England. Verizon wasn't making any money off a fully paid for physical plant. Fairpoint was going to borrow a zillion dollars at 12 percent, give the money to Verizon, and then make enough money to operate the system and pay off the debt. Right.
Not only did Fairpoint fall for this scam, the public utility commissions of all the affected state bought into the scheme. And some bankers somewhere (Wall Street?) were dumb enough to loan out the money.
Things happened as any idiot could have predicted. Fairpoint couldn't make money, couldn't service the debt, and declared bankruptcy a few years ago. I haven't been following this closely, but I hope all the idiots who participated in this stupidity lost a lot of money.
Anyhow, the suckers, after getting thoroughly plucked, hired some lawyers to try a get some money back from Verizon. Let's hope it doesn't work. Far as I am concerned anyone who got mixed up in the Fairpoint scheme was too stupid to be allowed outdoors without a keeper.

Obama's Jobs plan

Kill the XL pipeline. That will create a lot of jobs. Although he claims merely to be delaying approval until AFTER the election, in the real world putting a one year delay on a big project often kills it dead. The oil producers in Canada need to market their oil. There are plenty of countries in the world who need oil and have money. China for instance.
So kiss the jobs, and the oil goodby.
That's really good for the country.

Yet another Republican debate

This one was televised on a channel that Time Warner Cable carries up here. It had the usual semicircle of podiums on a stage, a candidate behind each podium, and NO name tags on the podiums. Which is OK for a political junkie like me who knows the candidates faces, but for a more casual viewer, not OK.
The studio audience cheered many of the candidates when they made a good sound byte. Romney and Cain did especially well on applause. They booed the newsie moderators for asking Cain about the sexual harassment thing. Makes you wonder how that studio audience was selected. Just passer's bye off the street? By invitation only? Each candidate given a block of tickets? Who knows. Anyhow they cheered for the candidates and booed the newsies.
And Rick Perry suffered an embarrassing brain fart on stage. He declared he would eliminate three federal agencies, named two, and then couldn't think of the third.

Rick Perry

So I emailed an old college buddy who has been living in Texas for better than 20 years. What do you think of Rick Perry I asked.
The answer came back "Not much".
The friend pointed out that Texas's economic success during Perry's governorship is mostly due to vast deposits of oil and gas in Texas, rather than any particular cleverness on Perry's part.
The Texas housing market is in trouble due to crazy mortgage lending. The cost of home owner's insurance is thru the roof.
The state budget is out of balance and they have been cutting school funding despite a massive untapped rainy day fund.
There was a case called "Willingham" in which a probably innocent man has been convicted of arson and executed. Perry fired the review board.
"Perry looks good, has good hair, but a whiny wife."
He is close to the religious right, he is OK with creationism.

I've known this guy for 50 years. He is pretty level headed and an astute observer. With a recommendation like this, I don't think a wanta go with Perry.
His final comment was, "Republicans can do better."

Close encounters of the Asteroid kind

Front page of the Wall St Journal has a big drawing of asteroid 2005 YU55, which crosses earth's orbit and came within 201,000 miles of earth (inside the Moon's orbit) Pretty science fictiony for the staid old Wall St Journal.
This one missed.
Question: what should we do when we detect one that's gonna hit us? The only thing that might do some good, it to nuke it. Good big nuke, close up, might blow it into gravel. Or it might break it up into a dozen pieces. But the pieces keep coming. What causes more damage, one really big hit, or a dozen smaller hits?
Do any of those ICBM's have the oomph to boost a big nuke up that high? These asteroids are small and dark and hard to see, so they will be real close before we spot them. No time to build a special rocket, we would have to use something off the shelf. That's an ICBM that's been standing silo alert for decades. Or possibly a satellite launcher from Space-X.
If we have enough delta-V to do a rendezvous and land on the thing (heh, works in the movies) we could set a big nuke on one side of it it. Set it off, and that rock is gonna move. Trouble is, it may not move all that fast, which means we gotta nuke it when it's far out there, to give it time to move far enough to miss the earth.
Do we have any rockets with that sort of delta-V?

What do you lead with?

Tonight and last night The Newshour led with the Herman Cain sexual harassment story. Where as Fox News, put the story on "page 2", after other lead stories. Looks like the Newshour wants to torpedo Herman more than Fox does.

Internet censorship bill in Congress

US rep Lamar Smith (r -Texas) is supporting a bill to allow the Dept of Justice to shut down any website it wants to. No trial, no nothing, if DOJ wants the site off the internet, bang, it's gone.
This measure is the darling of Hollywood, 'cause they want to use it to "prevent piracy".
Rep Smith has accepted a few hundred thou from the entertainment industry.
What does it cost to buy a US congressman? Not much apparently.