Here’s a joke that’s been going around the Intertubes — it was the Icelandic economy’s last wish that its ashes be scattered over the EU.
Speaking of which, here’s some cheery news. There may be a bigger eruption coming.
[Update a while later]
Here are some more. I liked this one:
Iceland goes bankrupt, then it manages to set itself on fire. This has insurance scam written all over it.
Heh.
Thoughts from David Harsanyi. The less trust we have in government, particularly the federal government, the better off we’ll be, so the latest polls are good news for those of us who want to restore it to constitutional principles. Barack Obama, with all of his lies, is doing the nation a favor. As are those who repeat the lies in his service.
[Update a couple minutes later]
“I don’t promote government failure — I expect it.” It’s certainly the way to bet.
I have a response to Robert Costa’s piece from last week, over at National Review Online.
This is pretty funny. I don’t watch the Morning Joe, but Mika made Joan Walsh look like an idiot. Not that that’s much of a challenge.
[Update a few minutes later]
It’s kind of inside baseball, but I’m assuming that the MSNBC suits have been telling Mika and Joe they’re not allowed to criticize Olbermann or Matthews. Hilarious.
Here’s the release from David Thompson in support of the new policy. Orbital was a loser, in that they were the subcontractor to Lockmart’s Orion contract for the Launch Abort System. If Orion isn’t going to carry crew into space (the new plan is for it to be a return vehicle only), then it doesn’t need one. I guess they’re just sucking it up and hoping that they’ll get a lot more cargo delivery business under the new plan.
DC voting rights is dead for this session.
The Washington Post’s Ben Pershing reports that House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer has announced that a D.C. voting rights bill will not come up this session, in part because of opposition to an amendment that would have eliminated most of the District’s gun-control laws.
“At this point in time I do not see the ability to move it in this session of Congress,” said Hoyer (D-Md.), who added that he was “extraordinarily disappointed.”
D.C. has long sought a vote in the House, but many city leaders have expressed concerns about the gun amendment, and Hoyer blamed the amendment for preventing the measure from advancing.
The bad news, of course, is that we’ll have to come up with some other way of giving DC residents their Second Amendment rights.
I’ve noted before the statists’ tactic of screwing things up with government action, then using it as an excuse for further government action. Here’s the latest example over at Instapundit:
“The retired officers are saying that school lunches have helped make the nation’s young people so fat that fewer of them can meet the military’s physical fitness standards, and recruitment is in jeopardy.” So the one meal where teenagers are fed directly by the government is a major source of obesity, but we keep being told that the solution to widespread obesity is . . . more government? Uh huh.
I can’t wait until November.
Lunar craters may be electrified:
The researchers created computer simulations to discover what happens when the solar wind flows over the rims of polar craters. They discovered that in some ways, the solar wind behaves like wind on Earth — flowing into deep polar valleys and crater floors. Unlike wind on Earth, the dual electron-ion composition of the solar wind may create an unusual electric charge on the side of the mountain or crater wall; that is, on the inside of the rim directly below the solar wind flow.
Since electrons are over 1,000 times lighter than ions, the lighter electrons in the solar wind rush into a lunar crater or valley ahead of the heavy ions, creating a negatively charged region inside the crater. The ions eventually catch up, but rain into the crater at consistently lower concentrations than that of the electrons. This imbalance in the crater makes the inside walls and floor acquire a negative electric charge. The calculations reveal that the electron/ion separation effect is most extreme on a crater’s leeward edge — along the inside crater wall and at the crater floor nearest the solar wind flow. Along this inner edge, the heavy ions have the greatest difficulty getting to the surface. Compared to the electrons, they act like a tractor-trailer struggling to follow a motorcycle; they just can’t make as sharp a turn over the mountain top as the electrons.
“The electrons build up an electron cloud on this leeward edge of the crater wall and floor, which can create an unusually large negative charge of a few hundred Volts relative to the dense solar wind flowing over the top,” says Farrell.
One more thing to worry about. Could it be discharged with a big aluminum mesh net? Lots of aluminum on the moon…
…for autism.
The mindless and anti-scientific antipathy to this is one of the great crimes of the federal government.
I’ve been suffering with a crummy DSL connection for months, since the move back to CA (I’ve had to reboot the modem often, because it seems to slow down and start dropping packets periodically, with multi-second delays on pings). But yesterday, Verizon fiber finally came to the house.
This is real broadband, for the first time at home. It’s like night and day, in terms of page loads and video.
[Update a few minutes later]
No, I don’t know why the date is wrong. I did the test today. Maybe I should try a different site.
[A couple minutes later]
Bandwidthplace says that it’s about 4 Mbps up and 15 down.