Monday February 18, 2013 Interesting Items 2/18 - Howdy all, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy – In this issue: 1. Bolide 2. Sequester 3. Norks 4. ObamaCare 5. DHS 6. CIA 7. STFU 8. Obama Ed Note: Alex has recd extensive training in this field compliments of the NASA/USAF. 1. Bolide. A relatively large body entered the atmosphere Friday morning over central Russia and exploded high overhead the city of Chelyabinsk shattering windows over a wide area and injuring over 1,100 people with flying glass. There are multiple videos of the object streaking across the sky and flashing when it exploded. The body is estimated to be around 17 meters in diameter, with a mass of around 10,000 tons, at a velocity of around 35 kilometers / second, a shallow inbound angle of 20 degrees, with an energy of 500 kilotons, most of which was expended when it exploded and blew out the windows. The citizens of Chelyabinsk got lucky as the body exploded over 20 miles over the city. One of the things you see in the various videos of the event is the incredible bright flash at the time of the explosion. Videos also show the significant delay between the bright flash and the shock wave of the blast reaching the ground, blowing the windows (like counting the seconds between the lightning bolt and hearing the thunderclap). There is video of the pressure wave associated with the shock wave blowing off doors and window coverings. The old training for nuclear attacks that most of us suffered during the late 1950s and early 1960s still is important: If you see a bright flash of light, duck and cover. You can hear the shattered glass falling for a long time after the shock wave hit on several of the videos. Russians have been looking for remains of the object and have found several small fragments, including a 20’ wide hole in the ice of a lake. To add to the confusion, a few hours later on Friday was the near miss of an object about three times the diameter, 50 meters. The asteroid, 2012 DA14 passed very close, well inside the ring of geosynchronous satellites. A number of people suggested that the two events were related. They were not, as they were in completely different orbits. So what do we do about these gifts from God? There is a government funded Spacewatch program underway to characterize the orbital element of everything we can find that crosses the orbit of earth. It has found the larger Near Earth Objects (NEOs) in similar orbits. Cometary bodies coming in well outside the plane of the ecliptic are more difficult to find, as there is a lot more sky to survey and they are a lot faster. There is a non-profit called the B612 Foundation that has taken up the task of finding these bodies. There are two commercial businesses, Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries, founded over the last couple of years to visit and mine these bodies. The most valuable thing to mine would be water ice. These commercial companies are the start of a planetary defense against inbound bodies. http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ lookout/footage-russia-meteor- highlights-chaos-confusion- 151744816.html 2. Sequester. As of today, it appears that the spending sequester will actually take place. Final decision needs to take place before the end of the month, and as we get closer, we see hysteria build from democrats in the senate, the WH and their lackeys in the media. As the week went by, we were fed stories of all manner of doom, gloom, nuclear winter arising out of a miniscule budget cut – in actual dollars – of around $50 billion. In a year with $1.6 trillion of spending above revenues, this sort of budget cut while nice, is a drop in the bucket, and will not end the world as we know it. Some on the right have observed that the real reason for the hysteria on the left is that the cuts will take place and nobody outside DoD will notice it. Harry Reid’s senate democrats have proposed an alternate package of budget cuts along with tax increases to make up the difference. The House Republican majority, having been beat about the head and shoulders for the last two years, is in no mood to engage in any more unproductive, bad faith negotiations. This is going to happen. Bring popcorn. 3. Norks. The Norks popped their third underground nuclear test a week ago. This one appeared to actually work, and was apparently small enough to fit on the top of one of their rockets. Great. At least we here in Alaska have anti-missile missiles in the ground at Fort Wainwright. For his part, Obama made no mention of the test during his STFU speech Tuesday night. He was apparently too busy calling for an increase in the minimum wage and bashing congressional Republicans. Also likely in attendance at the test were Iranian and Pakistani nuclear scientists. It appears that the Axis of Evil has managed to build themselves a distributed nuclear weapons / ICBM industry, in Iran, Pakistan and North Korea, that is until someone drops something on them. The Iranians have had a bit of trouble over the last few weeks, with at least three “accidents”, explosions at their research facilities. The Norks are going to continue down this path and they are going to sell whatever they come up with to whoever is willing to write the check. 4. ObamaCare. As the big wheels keep turning toward the final rollout of ObamaCare, it becomes more apparent that its impact will be everything we on the right have been predicting for years since it was jammed down our collective throats. Things have even gotten to the point where congressional democrats are starting to worry. The natural reaction to ObamaCare by small employers has been to reduce the number of full time workers in their businesses, cutting people back to just under the 30 hour limit that requires medical coverage. The thing coming up this year will be for the vast majority of all businesses here in the US, along with governments at the state and local levels to eliminate offering health care coverage altogether. And when that health care coverage goes away and those kicked off their current coverage and into ObamaCare exchanges figure it out, there will be Hell to pay. And there will be nowhere for the democrats to hide. We will end up with worse coverage at more dollars and fewer choices. 5. DHS. The latest intrusion on liberty comes not unexpectedly from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). They have a new policy that allows the confiscation and analysis of any electronic device – tablet, cell phone, laptop, etc. – from any individual within 100 miles of the border or a port of entry (read this as any airport with an international flight landing at). The ostensible reason is to search for terrorist supporting files, photos, propaganda, etc. The Fourth Amendment no longer applies to DHS. We also have reports that DHS has purchased 1.6 rounds of ammunition over the last several months, mostly 9 mm and .40 caliber. Mark Levin believes they are getting ready for the riots following a financial collapse. And he may not be too far off with that observation. 6. CIA. New book out about the CIA takedown of David Petraeus. The writers claim that he was ousted via palace coup by long time CIA insiders who leaked stories of his mistress to reporters. If true, this is yet another demonstration that the inmates are indeed running the asylum at the CIA. Remember that GW Bush reorganized the CIA following their treasonous obstruction of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. This culminated with the release of the CIA Intelligence Estimate that the Iranians did not have a nuclear program right at the point where Bush was going to put real military pressure on them. Congress reorganized the CIA in 2003 and Bush put former spook and CIA operative Porter Goss in charge to clean up the mess. Goss lasted less than two years, but did manage to run off several high ranking CIA weasels who leaked a bunch of information to the press undermining the war effort. Most of them were re-hired after Goss resigned. Time to shut down the CIA, as it like the Department of State, seemingly only exists these days to serve itself rather than the goals of the administration. 7. STFU. Obama gave a Castro-esque hour plus long State of the Union (SOTU) speech Tuesday night. It was the most ignored speech in over 20 years. Three SCOTUS Justices, Scalia, Thomas and Alito, chose to skip the speech rather than sit and get insulted to their face again. I choose to refer to it by the alternate acronym that I will leave it to the reader to figure out. Apologies, but it does nicely capture his view of the rest of us. The speech was devoid of substance. One reviewer was struck by Obama’s early use of the threat to write a blizzard of Executive Orders rather than go through the standard budget and agency process for getting things done. This reviewer notes that it paints a picture of the utter failure of this WH to even get all their own people on the same sheet of music, something that typically happens at the eighth SOTU rather than the fifth. I hope he is right. 8. Obama. A couple things noted about Obama that are problems in need of conservative solutions. Limbaugh for a few weeks has been nibbling around the edges of Obama’s popularity. Last week he managed to put it into some pretty good words. Obama only does two things: campaigns or gives speeches bashing Republicans. He never allows himself to be seen as governing. This allows him not to get any blame for current economic conditions from the uninformed voters. He is seen as someone who is working furiously to clean up the mess but being fought at every turn by mysterious Dark Forces. And since he spends most of the rest of his time bashing Republicans, who else would those Dark Forces be? Of course, the media supportive coverage helps him get away with this. The second observation comes out of one of the blogs. It’s that Obama understands implicitly something FDR only stumbled upon. It is the fact that when times are bad and the feds are shoveling money to people in terms of welfare as fast as they can print it, those people will not do anything to the politicians seen to control the money flow. This means that the 47 million on Feed Stamps are likely all newly minted Obama and democrat voters. The tens of millions on unemployment are all newly minted Obama and democrat voters. The student loan recipients who are in debt up to their ears are all newly minted Obama voters as soon as he allows their debts to disappear. This is also why he wants the immigration issue to stay around forever – to stir up the Latinos and manufacture new democrat voters. The only reaction to this is for conservatives to make the economic case for liberty, freedom and small, unobtrusive government – something that will make everyone far wealthier than mere government largess. It is the case that McCain, Romney and the losing Republican senate candidates in 2006, 2008, 2010 and 2012 failed to make. More later - - AG "If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen." - Samuel Adams, speech at the Philadelphia State House, August 1, 1776. Note: Interesting Items can be found at the following locations: Our Home Page http://interestingitems.org/ Archives can be found at http://home.gci.net/~agimarc Anchorage Daily Planet http://www. anchoragedailyplanet.com/ MatSu Valley News http://matsuvalleynews. blogspot.com/ Subscriber and supporter Elbert Collins at http://thatselbert.wordpress. com/ Rod Martin's The Vanguard site is also a long-time supporter of this column: http://www.thevanguard.org/ -- -- To join RichsRants, send email to: [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/richsrants?hl=en --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "RichsRants" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. 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