Interesting Items, Sep 22 Come visit us at our new web site: www.interestingitems.org Leave your thoughts, comments and opinions. We look forward to hearing from you. Interesting Items Alex Gimarc [email protected] Monday Sep 22, 2011 Howdy all, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy – In this issue: 1. Churches 2. LightSquared 3. Gardasil 4. Darden 5. Highway 1. Churches. A ballot initiative goes to the voters early October in the Lake and Peninsula Borough in the Bristol Bay region of Alaska . This is the latest move by long time anti-Pebble Mine NIMBY Bob Gilliam. The ballot initiative prohibits any permitting of an activity over 640 acres that will negatively impact any stream with salmon in them. Essentially they intrude on the ability of the State of Alaska to control resource development on state land. Funding for the initiatives appears to come exclusively from Bob Gilliam. The local fishwrapper reports that there are just under 1,200 total registered voters in the borough with less than 400 of them voting in the last election. Throw several hundred thousands of dollars at that few voters in a hard-fought election campaign, and you very quickly cross the line between advocacy to simply buying votes. There have been hundreds of thousands of dollars spent in the campaign since February. In the article, Gillam has managed to corrupt local clergy to weigh in and support the initiative with promises of building new churches in local village(s). Sooner or later, this sort of leftist By Any Means Necessary stuff needs to stop. And clergy who would kill new, high paying jobs and development in one of the poorest parts of the state in return for new buildings need to reconsider who and what they are serving – Bob Gilliam’s filthy lucre or the Lord and Savior. I wrote an extended article about the latest round of Pebble in Red County . You can find it here: http://www.redcounty.com/content/messenger-shooting 2. LightSquared. The latest round of crony capitalism, democrat donors and the Obama administration comes via the CINC of USSPACECOM who walked into a classified briefing on Capitol Hill last week and told lawmakers he was pressured to change his testimony to favor a large Obama donor involved with a high tech company, LightSquared. USSPACECOM is concerned that LightSquared, which owns a broadband service that owns part of the frequency spectrum that sits right next to frequencies used by GPS will interfere with the military’s ability to use GPS. The WH tried to get the William Shelton to change his testimony so that the concerns were soft pedaled. LightSquared intends to provide wireless broadband service. They really screwed up in their initial system design and business plan. Their initial system design had the entire service satellite based, with relatively low powered signals to and from space. Once they got the first satellite in orbit, they ran some numbers and discovered that their business model, like the ill-fated Iridium space based communications system, was fundamentally flawed. Apparently they would not have sufficient bandwidth to properly service their customers. They restructured to a primarily ground-based system with a small satellite component. Unfortunately, the high power signal from the ground based system sits close enough on the frequency spectrum that signal sidelobes interfere with GPS signals, posing a very real concern to military planners and users. But the military is not the only GPS user out there, as there is a huge and rapidly growing commercial GPS user base. While the military can mitigate interference with a variety of signal protection, filters and frequency management techniques, none of the handheld or vehicle mounted GPS users can. Bottom line here is that if LightSquared is allowed to proceed, it is likely that the typical civilian GPS user will wake up one morning with his several hundred dollar GPS receiver being completely unusable. The Obama administration is perfectly willing to allow their donors to blow up an entire industrywithout mitigating the problem beforehand. Interference between multiple signals among wireless users will be a way of life as we proceed into the future. But there are far better ways to keeping competing services from stepping on the toes of one another’s customers than ignoring it until the new services flips the switch to on. 3. Gardasil. Michelle Bachmann (R, MN) went after Governor Rick Perry hammer and tong in the Republican Presidential debate last Monday. Her topic of choice was an Executive Order to require Gardasil vaccinations for HPV in Texas public schools. She and Rick Santorum beat Perry around the head and shoulders with great vigor for the Executive Order. At the time, there was a concern that HPV was running rampant among young women and would lead to cervical cancer. Perry was sufficiently convinced to take immediate action. The legislature took up the mandate and repealed it. To the best of my knowledge, nobody was inoculated. Perry in retrospect said that the Executive Order was a mistake and he should have gone through the legislature first. Bachmann refused to let it go and hammered away with increasing hysteria, coming across at the end of the debate as an anti-vaccination whacko. This story demonstrates the difference between someone in the legislature and someone in the executive. Legislators craft legislation, make deals, take tradeoffs and cast votes. If something goes wrong, they can always blame someone or something else; typically the executive who has to execute the law passed, or change it in future legislation. Executives on the other hand, have to make real time decisions with the best available information. Perry did this. In retrospect, it was the wrong decision and was reversed. He also took responsibility for the decision. In my mind, the system worked as designed. Anti-inoculation carping and hysteria by Bachmann and Santorum only serves to turn the discussion in this campaign away from the very real problem of reviving the economy, removing and repealing everything the Obama administration and Reid-Pelosi congresses have passed since January 2007, and putting this nation back to work again. If you want to have an argument about inoculations that argument needs to take place at the state and local levels of government rather than the national one. 4. Darden. In yet another example of the fascist nature of this regime, Darden Restaurants, Inc. agreed to cut calories and sodium in its meals by 20% over the course of the next decade. They succumbed to bullying by Michelle Obama and the WH. Among the changes agreed to was no fries for children unless the adult asks for them; low fat milk, and a fruit or vegetable side dish on children’s meals. The Obama WH is literally telling us what we can eat and telling a chain of 1,800 restaurants that include the Olive Garden, Red Lobster, and LongHorn Steakhouse what they can and cannot serve to children. And bullying will not stop with the restaurants. It will flow downhill to the customers as the restaurant ownership inflicts the latest diktat from Michelle and her troupe of social engineers. This is fascism – private ownership but public control. Welcome to Hope and Change. Big Lizards, Thurs. 5. Highway. Local NIMBYs and greens in Juneau have managed to delay a proposed 50-mile road from Juneau north to a ferry terminal near Haines and Skagway another few years via action in the Ninth Circus. Opponents argued that the Environmental Impact Statement needed more work. Both the presiding idiot and the appellate courts agreed, holding that more throw weight of paper was always better than less. Greens did not want a new road cut through the “pristine” Tongass National Forest and demanded the State of Alaska more properly weigh the tradeoffs between building a road and beefing up ferry service. We have a real problem here in this state as the greens, their public interest lawyers, the federal bureaucracy and the courts have set up a gauntlet sufficient to block all new roads, bridges, mines, wells, railroad spurs, tunnels – literally any and all development via the death of a thousand regulatory cuts. There is always a new study, a new permit, some new permission necessary to start or proceed to the next step. And the more paper one is required to produce to get something built, the greater possibility that there will be something wrong with that paperwork. Juneau should be ashamed of itself with supporting this action. The sooner we can move the capitol of this state out of southeast, the better. ADN, Thurs.
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