Skylar Torbett, also a junior, said administrators told him, “They said the candy canes are weapons because you can sharpen them with your mouth and stab people with them.” He said neither he nor any of their friend did that.
Next thing they knew, they were all being punished with detention and at least two hours of cleaning. Their disciplinary notices say nothing about malicious wounding but about littering and creating a disturbance.
“It was at 7 in the morning, before school even starts, so I don’t what we’d be really disrupting,” said Cameron Gleason, also a junior.
Price controls cause shortages — that is Econ 101, but this is a White House that has declared a War on (Social) Science, at least when it comes to fundamentals such as supply and demand, which it apparently believes are the invention of a right-wing think tank somewhere in Arlington. I have spent part of the morning debating people who are very upset that George W. Bush may have entertained heterodox views about evolution (I do not know that he did), but, given a choice, I will take the government that has insufficient appreciation for advanced biology over the government that has insufficient appreciation for fundamental economics.
…we have a real problem. Businesses are reluctant to hire due to two hard years behind and concern about the future policies of an ideologically driven government that is clearly not pro-business ahead. Business conditions in 2010 are a little better than 2009, but nowhere near the prior levels that might encourage a more aggressive view. The three major forces in policymaking, President Obama, Harry Reid, and Nancy Pelosi, continue to hold office and make no secret that they desire to advance their agenda with or without regard to the Constitution. They and their anti-business orientation will remain in place for at least two more years. On the other side of the aisle, most of the senior Republicans who were so ineffective over the past decade will retain the same ability to compromise away government restraint for the next two years. The November elections may have helped the situation, but the Republicans have a long, long way to go to prove they are up to the generational level change it will take to turn things around. Worse, it is becoming easier to accept the possibility that the corruption between all the special interests, including corporate, and government is just too firmly entrenched and too lucrative to break apart at all. If that is true, nothing changes until an ultimate collapse.
Jon Goff has a very interesting post about the potential for justifying the private development of a LEO tug.
This is a key element of a LEO (and cis-lunar) infrastructure that NASA has ignored ever since the ignominious end of the disastrous Orbital Maneuvering Vehicle (OMV) program in the early nineties (another wonder of management from Marshall). We should have had one decades ago, but it looks like the private sector is going to have to make it happen. Once in existence, it has a number of other useful (and money making) applications, if NASA can start to be a good customer.
Some legal thoughts. I don’t know if it would be constitutional, but I would condition a federal bailout on reversion of the state to territory status, with an opportunity to reenter the union after it gets its fiscal act together, possibly as multiple states. For instance, if some of the eastern and/or northern counties wanted to band together to form a new government independent of Sacramento (or even including Sacramento, but independent of the coastal megalopolises) they could do so and apply for readmission. Alternatively, they might want to apply to be annexed to (say) Nevada, or Oregon.
Same thing for Illinois and New York, though the impetus to break them up would be much less in those cases.