Obamacare website is fixed when they say it is

Obama administration is claiming that all will be fixed on the website by the end of the month.  Yeah right.  So what do we mean by "fixed"?   That it can process five individuals at once without crashing more than once a day?   Or that it stays up for days at a time while processing 100,000 individuals at once?  Wanna bet, no matter how flaky the website is, the Obamanauts will declare it fixed? 

Newsies cannot count

NHPR was giving yesterday's election results this morning.  They reported on NH, VA, NYC, CO, WA elctions.  Not once did they give a vote count.  Win by a landslide, win by a hair, it's all the same to NHPR.  Or, their staff has difficulty with numbers too large to count on their fingers. 
   Then, to distract us from the Obamacare meltdown, they offered a couple of blue meat stories.  You know, you throw out red meat to excite conservatives, and blue meat to excite liberals. First was a hassle in upstate New York over opening town meeting with a prayer.  Really important story there. 
   Then they had an election finance story.  Some activist was urging the IRS to be even more difficult about granting tax exempt status to 501(c) yadda-yadda organizations lest they use the money for politicking.  Real people are all ready outraged about IRS harassment of conservative organizations, and this idiot wants more of the same.  

Congress fiddles while the country burns

Bring out more violins.  Congress has failed to pass any appropriations bills, we have NSA angering the entire world, they failed to deal with the debt limit, Iran is getting nukes, the Middle East is burning down. Obamacare has paralyzed the economy.
So what does Congress do?
  They pass a special interest bill for gays and lesbians.  I'm sure it will gain the members a few gay and lesbian votes, but really, we have have plenty of non-discrimination laws on the books, we don't really need another. 
   Congress critters ought to spend their time on things  that benefit the entire nation, not dealing out favors to special interest groups. 

It's Halloween for taxpayers.

The US House just gave the banks a big green rustling handshake.  It passed the "Swaps Regulatory Improvement Act"  HR 992 on 30 October this year by a vote of 292 to 122.  A Halloween special.  All Republicans and 70 Democrats, including my Democratic rep Annie Kuster, voted for passage.
   What's going on here?  First we have to understand what "swaps" are.  Swaps are a high stakes gambling vehicle which crashed Wall St back in 2008 and  kicked off Great Depression 2.0.  A "swap" is a deal between two banks, or a bank and a brokerage house, or an insurance company and  a brokerage house, or any mix.  Only two can play.  the deal goes thus. "If  certain bonds that you hold default, I will pay them off for you.  You are relieved of all risk.  In return you pay me a modest fee, in advance."   It amounts to bond insurance against default.  In 2008, big insurance company AIG sold credit default swaps on a whole bunch of shaky bonds.  When the market crashed, all the AIG swapped bonds defaulted.  AIG, big as it was, didn't have the money to pay off on the swaps.  It went broke and we the taxpayers paid off all of AIG's $140 billion worth of swaps.  The resulting market turmoil crashed Bear Sterns, Lehman Brothers, and others, and kicked off Great Depression 2.0, which is still with us, five years later.
   Clearly "swaps" are dangerous.  And, "swaps" do not promote any kind of economic development.  All the money goes back and forth between Wall St players, none it goes to building new factories, buying airliners, financing inventory, or other useful purposes, it all stays on the Street.  Swaps are a high stakes gambling deal.
    Anyone in their right mind wants to forbid the sale of swaps, 'cause they are so dangerous, and they don't do anything worthwhile.  Anyone, except a banker who enjoys playing bet-the-company games.  And so, the Dodd Frank Act tried to limit swaps playing by forbidding the use of  Federally guaranteed (FDIC) funds to play the swaps market.   Which is a good idea.  A better idea would be to outlaw swaps completely, but they didn't go that far.
    And so, banks and bankers, who really enjoy playing bet-the-company games,  introduced a bill to repeal all the Dodd Frank restrictions on "swaps".  Spin the roulette wheel, the casino is open.  And the House passed it last Wednesday.  One of the Republicans finest hours.   
   And another triumph for the media.  They concealed the existence of this odious bill until four days after passage. 

Time Warner Internet Access Croaks, again

I was ready to make the preceding post a couple of hours ago, but Time Warner flaked out on me.  I could not connection with any web site at all.  They fixed what every it was a few minutes ago, but they are having maintenance problems.  For instance, TV channels 2 thru 12 have a severe herringbone interference pattern on screen.  Channels 15 and16 (Cspan) have been dead for months. 

HIgh Speed Rail for Merrie Old England.

The Brits call it  "HS2", a high speed rail line from London to Manchester and Leeds. For a mere $69 billion, a little less in Euro's.  Network Rail, which does the tracks thruout Britain loves the idea, and so does the Dept of Transport. 
  But, Manchester and Leeds are only 150 miles from London, closer than New York is to Boston.  Conventional rail can do 60 mph on decent track, and 100 mph with a little work on the track.  The New York Central was running passenger trains at 100 mph, under steam, way back in the late 1800's.  Properly operated conventional rail ought to make the London-Manchester run in three hours, fast enough to beat airline time.  To fly, you gotta get to the airport an hour before takeoff, and wait for ever to recover your bags after landing.  On the NYC-Boston run, Amtrak takes nearly four hours, running on conventional track laid 100 years ago,  but it's faster than flying.  Conventional British Rail ought to be able to beat airline time on the relatively short London-Manchester run. 
   So I wish our British brothers well, but I think they are pouring money down a black hole to do "high speed rail" over such a short distance. 
   P.S.  Good luck California. 

WIMPS and MACHOS

The Universe is not heavy enough.  This finding comes from watching galaxies rotate.  They are rotating faster than they ought to be.  Speed of rotation is something Newton worked out, and it's taught in sophomore physics.  Using Newton's math, one can observe the period and diameter of a satellite's orbit, and compute the mass of the primary quite exactly. The stronger the gravitational field, the faster an object has to move, to create enough centrifugal force to keep from falling. 
   They figured the mass of  galaxies by counting the stars in them on the assumption that the mass is all/mostly stars, which shine by their own light and can been seen at great distances.  Assume the astronomers took a few short cuts, like counting the stars in a tiny patch of galaxy and extrapolating the total number of stars in that galaxy. When they computed the mass required to account for the observed rotation speed, they came up short.  The needed mass was two, three, and more times the observed (luminous) mass of the galaxy.  And so, everyone, astronomers, physicists, science writers and so on, accept that there is a LOT of dark (non luminous) matter in the universe.  Like more dark matter than luminous matter. Most of the universe is dark matter.
   The obvious question " What is this dark matter?"  came up with two possibilities.  The universe could be rich in an as yet undiscovered particle. Something as hard to detect as a neutrino but with mass like a proton. These were dubbed Weakly Interacting Massive Particles" or WIMPS for short.  The physicists loved WIMPS,. It gave them a new particle to hunt for.  Now that the Higg's Boson  has been claimed, there are a lot of accelerators and accelerator physicists looking for something else to do.
  The other possibility is simply ordinary matter that is not stars.  Like the earth, or Jupiter.  Jupiter is an interesting case.  It is a near star, it's pure hydrogen, and it radiates more heat than it absorbs from the Sun.  Jupiter must be running low level nuclear fusion way down at its core.  If Jupiter had been a little larger, it would be a star and shine by its own light, and we would live in a binary solar system.  Binary systems are pretty common out there in the galaxy, say 10% or more.
   Stars are formed by a not yet well understood process of gravitational attraction.  Plenty of stars large enough to shine were formed.  You can see them in the night sky.  But, if the process can yield large stars, why can it not yield a lot of small ones like Jupiter? Ones too small to shine.
  This is the Massive Compact Halo Object, or MACHO.   And, this year, somebody detected one.  It turned up in the search for extraterrestrial planets.  It was a Jupiter sized object, way out in deep space, all by itself.
   Right now, WIMPS are ahead, at least they get a lot of good press, and MACHO's are not talked about much.  Me, I kinda like the MACHO idea.  It's perfectly plausible and it doesn't require new invisible and undetectable particles.