Missile Defense for the US.

My old man was a rocket scientist, for real. The last thing he told me before he started working on “black projects” was stuff wiped out by the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty. He loved telling this story of how the Joint Chiefs of Staff were flown into Burlington, NC (through GSO, now PTI) in the 1960s to view the prototype of the fastest computer in the world. Humming along at a blazing seven (7) kilohertz, it could execute some 7,000 instructions in one second. This machine, and others like it, were to be the brainpower of the ABM network designed to protect the US from Soviet missiles.

Now, my Droid™ phone has a gigahertz processor and manipulates data faster than all the computers NASA used to land Apollo 11 on the moon. And, we still don’t have a really good solution to incoming missiles better than simply watching them land. While Soviets are gone and the Russians are as capitalist as we are, the new bad guys are the Iranians and they have missiles too. Do we need to spend mountains of dough we don‘t have to counter a threat that doesn’t yet exist? The folks at National Review think so. If we should spend the money, where should it come from? Which cabinet department should go away? Taxing the rich isn’t the right answer. There isn’t enough money there.

Speaking of cutting Cabinet agencies.

Presidential hopeful Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) says he wants to get rid of the Dept. of the Interior, Dept. of Education, Dept. of Commerce, Dept of Housing and Urban Development, and Dept. of Energy. He says it would save more than $1 trillion (yes, that’s supposed to be a “t”) a year. He would also slash taxes. Paul famously hates The Fed and would move to devolve power away from Washington to The States. Maybe it’s something to think about.

Maybe we need to abolish something whether or not we deploy a missile shield.

Federal spending is up 5% this year.

Cain over Obama?

So Scott Rasmussen says. I guess it’s the bigotry of the Tea Party folks that have catapulted the plain speaking former business exec and head of The Kansas City Fed ahead of The Anointed One. What you think? Personally, practically anybody would be better than Obama.

An 11 year old in college.

Okay, I admit it; I’m a pig. I sometimes watch Jersey Shore in part, to feel better about myself. However, there are times when regardless of my erudition, I feel stoopid (note the two “o’s”). Lucas Kramer is 11, nearly finished with high school, and spends more time than not, at college. Maybe he’ll run for president.

Seriously, good luck with all that.

Dan Wheldon RIP

I know a person who raced against Dan Wheldon and he was crushed by the news that Dan died in a horrific crash in the Indy Car™ race from Las Vegas on Sunday.

I know all the bromides about how racers know that what they do is insanely dangerous and that’s what they get paid for and all that. But there is no reason on Earth to have cars that are that fast on tri-ovals. Formula 1 cars go every bit as fast in straight lines, the straights usually end in hairpins or esses or something to slow things down. On a big fast tri-oval with no chicanes or anything else, they just go faster and faster and faster until somebody dies.

This weekend, it was Dan Wheldon.

The people at Indy Car need to stop thinking that their racing is just like NASCAR™ only faster. It’s not. Cup cars are big and heavy and have roll cages built in. Indy Cars are more like F1 insofar as they are open-cockpit and open-wheeled. And when they crash into the fence like Dan Wheldon did, it’s a death sentence. Enough is enough.

Hitler was alive as late as 1962?

So claims a pair of British authors. Gerrard Williams and Simon Dunstan allege in their new book Grey Wolf, that Hitler actually left Nazi Germany in a submarine (aided by the evil Americans, ‘natch) in exchange for access to German weapons technology. Of course there is a film the works. I’ll go see it if it has zombies.

Now that’s a “G” string.

From the “can’t you just chill” file, a Thai Scrabble player demanded that his opponent perform a strip search after the letter “G” was missing:

Furious Chollapat Itthi-Aree, from Thailand, demanded officials take Ed Martin, an IT consultant from London, to the toilet and search him believing he had the missing tile about his person.

The judges were disinclined to agree and let the match proceed. Itthi-Aree went on to lose the match by one point to his male opponent.

Beavis and Butt-head are back

I’m not sure is this the first or last sign of the apocalypse.