In the House, it has been introduced as a bill by Rep. John B. Larson (D-Conn.).

In the Senate, the bill has been introduced by Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.).

Neither bill has attracted any co-sponsors.

And, earlier this week, Reid said that the Senate would not take up the bill when it returns from a short recess. Instead, it would first take up a measure to punish China and other nations for currency ma­nipu­la­tion. That bill, in keeping with the Democrats’ strategy, is meant to help several individual senators in manufacturing states, where competition from China is blamed for local job losses.

What about the jobs bill? “We’ll get to that,” Reid told reporters.

Despite early and regular pleas from the White House, Senate Democrats say they will not move immediately to take up President Obama’s jobs bill when they return next week from a short recess.

“We’ll get to that,” Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) said Monday night when asked if the likely passage of a temporary spending bill to keep the government functioning meant the Senate could now consider the president’s package.

...

“There is work to be done,” Obama said. “There are workers ready to do it. So let’s tell Congress: Pass this jobs bill right away.”

Given his urgency, Reid’s position has Republicans chortling that it is congressional Democrats who appear to be standing in the way of a quick vote on the president’s plan.

h/t to Rich K

Posted by Drew458     on 10/02/2011 at 03:14 PM   
Filed Under: • Democrats-Liberals-Moonbat Leftists • Economics • Obama, The One •  
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In My Inbox

What you may not know about Herman Cain who is running for president....
He’s not a career politician (in fact he has never held political office). He’s known as a pizza guy, but there’s a lot more to him. He’s also a computer guy, a banker guy, and a rocket scientist guy.
Here’s his bio:

* Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics.
* Master’s degree in Computer Science.
* Mathematician for the Navy, where he worked on missile ballistics (making him a rocket scientist).
* Computer systems analyst for Coca-Cola.
* VP of Corporate Data Systems and Services for Pillsbury (this is the top of the ladder in the computer world, being in charge of information systems for a major corporation).

All achieved before reaching the age of 35. Since he reached the top of the information systems world, he changed careers!

* Business Manager. Took charge of Pillsbury’s 400 Burger King restaurants in the Philadelphia area, which were the company’s poorest performers in the country. Spent the first nine months learning the business from the ground up, cooking hamburger and yes, cleaning toilets. After three years he had turned them into the company’s best performers.
* Godfather’s Pizza CEO. Was asked by Pillsbury to take charge of their Godfather’s Pizza chain (which was on the verge of bankruptcy). He made it profitable in 14 months.
* In 1988 he led a buyout of the Godfather’s Pizza chain from Pillsbury. He was now the owner of a restaurant chain. Again he reached the top of the ladder of another industry.
* He was also chairman of the National Restaurant Association during this time. This is a group that interacts with government on behalf of the restaurant industry, and it gave him political experience from the non-politician side.

Having reached the top of a second industry, he changed careers again!

* Adviser to the Federal Reserve System. Herman Cain went to work for the Federal Reserve Banking System advising them on how monetary policy changes would affect American businesses.
* Chairman of the Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank. He worked his way up to the chairmanship of a regional Federal Reserve bank. This is only one step below the chairmanship of the entire Federal Reserve System (the top banking position in the country). This position allowed him to see how monetary policy is made from the inside, and understand the political forces that impact the monetary system.

After reaching the top of the banking industry, he changed careers for a fourth time!

* Writer and public speaker. He then started to write and speak on leadership. His books include Speak as a Leader, CEO of Self, Leadership is Common Sense, and They Think You’re Stupid.
* Radio Host. Around 2007—after a remarkable 40 year career—he started hosting a radio show on WSB in Atlanta (the largest talk radio station in the country).

He did all this starting from rock bottom (his father was a chauffeur and his mother was a maid). When you add up his accomplishments in his life—including reaching the top of three unrelated industries: information systems, business management, and banking—

STACK THAT UP AGAINST THE ‘COMMUNITY ORGANIZER’....

Herman Cain may have the most impressive resume of anyone that has run for the presidency in the last half century.

I have not paid enough attention to this guy yet, but I intend to do so. If this email is factually correct - and I remind everyone to Trust but verify - then my guess he has a pretty darn good head for business. And being a core IT guy with a rocket science background, you know he is no dope. The banking experience probably can’t hurt either. I don’t know his views on every issue yet, but I am a realist and can not expect him to agree with me on everything. What America needs is a leader who can get the country back into the business of business first. All the rest is icing on the cake that can be debated and modified as needed.

I haven’t even watched any of the “debates” yet; my feeling is that at this early point they are all pretty much a waste of time. But Mr. Cain may be worth looking into.

Posted by Drew458     on 10/02/2011 at 02:12 PM   
Filed Under: • Politics •  
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   Saturday - October 01, 2011

Terry Prachett tribute!

This guy sent me an email. He likes my Big Bang Theory that I posted on YouTube about a year ago. I like his post, so let me show you it.

Posted by Christopher     on 10/01/2011 at 02:29 PM   
Filed Under: • Celebrities • Literature •  
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One For The Birds

Maori legend of man-eating bird is true
Creature that features in New Zealand folklore really existed, scientists say

A Maori legend about a giant, man-eating bird has been confirmed by scientists. Te Hokioi was a huge black-and-white predator with a red crest and yellow-green tinged wingtips, in an account given to Sir George Gray, an early governor of New Zealand. It was said to be named after its cry and to have “raced the hawk to the heavens”. Scientists now think the stories handed down by word of mouth and depicted in rock drawings refer to Haast’s eagle, a raptor that became extinct just 500 years ago, shows their study in The Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

Haast’s eagle (Harpagornis moorei) was discovered in swamp deposits by Sir Julius von Haast in the 1870s. But it was at first thought to be a scavenger because its bill was similar to a vulture’s with hoods over its nostrils to stop flesh blocking its air passages as it rooted around inside carcasses.

But a re-examination of skeletons using modern technology, including CAT scans, by researchers at Canterbury Museum in Christchurch and the University of New South Wales in Australia showed it had a strong enough pelvis to support a killing blow as it dived at speeds of up to 80kph.

With a wingspan of up to three metres and weighing 18kg, the female was twice as big as the largest living eagle, the Steller’s sea eagle. And the bird’s talons were as big as a tiger’s claws. “It was certainly capable of swooping down and taking a child,” said Paul Scofield, the curator of vertebrate zoology at the Canterbury Museum. “They had the ability to not only strike with their talons but to close the talons and put them through quite solid objects such as a pelvis. It was designed as a killing machine.”

Its main prey would have been moa, flightless birds which grew to as much as 250kg and 2.5 metres tall. “In some fossil sites, moa bones have been found with signs of eagle predation,” Dr Scofield said.

New Zealand has no native land mammals because it became isolated from other continents in the Cretaceous, more than 65 million years ago. As a result, birds filled niches usually populated by large mammals such as deer and cattle. “Haast’s eagle wasn’t just the equivalent of a giant predatory bird,” said Dr Scofield. “It was the equivalent of a lion.”

In a blink of geologic time an eagle the weight of a squirrel evolved into a giant predator that fed on animals twice as big as humans. It grew so large it approached the physical limits of flight, a new study suggests. Before man arrived in New Zealand 700 years ago the land was dominated by birds. With no land mammals, the more than 250 avian species created an isolated and unique ecology.

Amidst this remote laboratory the Haast’s eagle was 40 percent larger than today’s record holder, the Harpy eagle, and topped the local food chain. The eagle fed largely on the moa, an extinct flightless bird somewhat like an ostrich. Bones from moa as large as 440 pounds (200 kilograms) bear the marks of the Haast’s talons. The eagle held its victim by its pelvis and killed it with a strike to the throat or head, researchers say.

In the new study, scientists examined DNA from 2,000-year-old fossilized bones of a Haast’s eagle and compared it to older specimens that at first glance seem utterly unrelated.

The Haast’s ancestors, it turns out, were the little eagle and the booted eagle. They were only about 2.2 pounds (1 kilogram) when they crossed the waters from Australia to New Zealand. Within about a million years the predators evolved to as much as 33 pounds (15 kilograms) with a wing span of almost 10 feet (3 meters). For comparison, larger bald eagles today are close to 14 pounds (6.4 kilograms) and have a wing span around 6 feet (1.8 meters).

“We estimate that their common ancestor lived less than a million years ago. It means an eagle arrived in New Zealand and increased in weight by 10-15 times over this period,” Michael Bunce of McMaster University in Canada said Monday. “Such rapid size change is unprecedented in terrestrial vertebrates.”

Richard N. Holdaway, an extinction biologist and another member of the research team, explained that when the first ancestor of the Haast’s eagle arrived in New Zealand there was no competition for big meals like the moa. The larger the eagle the more offspring it could support because food was abundant if you were big enough to kill it. This became an avenue for survival that the once-small eagle employed to become sizeable quickly.

“With the largest individuals that could kill the largest prey being most successful at producing young, which themselves would be large birds by inheritance from their parents, the change in size within the species was probably rapid in geological time,” Holdaway told LiveScience.

The eagles grew so large in fact that they butted up against the limits of how much weight a bird can carry into the air.

“There is a body mass above which normal flapping flight becomes physically impossible,” said Holdaway, “Various studies have suggested that that occurs at a body mass of about 15 kilograms,” which is the estimated weight of the Haast’s eagle.

The Haast’s Eagle had relatively small wings for a bird with this body size, up to about 10 feet, making it less suited to endless soaring and better at living in the forests that covered the islands at that time.

Posted by Drew458     on 10/01/2011 at 12:44 PM   
Filed Under: • Animals •  
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I’m Melting, Melting, Meeeelting

Old ice is much better than new ice apparently, so when a bit of the old goes away it becomes news. We see this story, or one very much like it, every fall, because that’s when the summer melt in the Arctic is at it’s greatest. In another 5 or 6 weeks things will freeze solid once again.

Canadian Arctic nearly loses entire ice shelf

Two ice shelves that existed before Canada was settled by Europeans diminished significantly this summer, one nearly disappearing altogether, Canadian scientists say in new research.
...
Luke Copland is an associate professor in the geography department at the University of Ottawa who co-authored the research. He said the Serson Ice Shelf shrank from 79.15 square miles (205 square kilometers) to two remnant sections three years ago, and was further diminished this past summer.

Copland said the shelf went from a 16-square-mile (42-square-kilometer) floating glacier tongue to 9.65 square miles (25 square kilometers), and the second section from 13.51 square miles (35 square kilometers) to 2 square miles (7 square kilometers), off Ellesmere Island’s northern coastline.

This past summer, Ward Hunt Ice Shelf’s central area disintegrated into drifting ice masses, leaving two separate ice shelves measuring 87.65 and 28.75 square miles (227 and 74 square kilometers) respectively, reduced from 131.7 square miles (340 square kilometers) the previous year.

“It has dramatically broken apart in two separate areas and there’s nothing in between now but water,” said Copland.
...
Ice shelves, which began forming at least 4,500 years ago, are much thicker than sea ice, which is typically less than a few feet (meters) thick and survives up to several years.

Canada has the most extensive ice shelves in the Arctic along the northern coast of Ellesmere Island. These floating ice masses are typically 131 feet (40 meters) thick (equivalent to a 10-story building), but can be as much as 328 feet (100 meters) thick. They thickened over time via snow and sea ice accumulation, along with glacier inflow in certain places.

The northern coast of Ellesmere Island contains the last remaining ice shelves in Canada, with an estimated area of 217 square miles (563 square kilometers), Mueller said.

Between 1906 and 1982, there has been a 90 percent reduction in the areal extent of ice shelves along the entire coastline, according to data published by W.F. Vincent at Quebec’s Laval University. The former extensive “Ellesmere Island Ice Sheet” was reduced to six smaller, separate ice shelves: Serson, Petersen, Milne, Ayles, Ward Hunt and Markham. In 2005, the Ayles Ice Shelf whittled almost completely away, as did the Markham Ice Shelf in 2008 and the Serson this year.

In 2008 satellites saw that the Northwest Passage and the Northern Sea Route were open simultaneously for the first time since satellite measurements began in the 1970s – and now it has happened again. 

While the Northern Sea Route above Russia (also known as the Northeast Passage) has been open to shipping traffic since mid-August, recent satellite data show that the most direct course in the Northwest Passage now appears to be navigable as well.
...
Weather patterns have been different this year, but the early opening of the passages indicates that we could be about to hit a new record low in ice cover.

“The minimum ice extent is still three to four weeks away, and a lot depends on the weather conditions over the Arctic during those weeks,” says Leif Toudal Pedersen, a senior scientist at the Danish Meteorological Institute.
...
During the last 30 years, satellites observing the Arctic have witnessed reductions in the minimum ice extent at the end of summer from around 8 million sq km in the early 1980s to the historic minimum of less than 4.24 million sq km in 2007.

Before the advent of satellites, obtaining measurements of sea ice was difficult: the Arctic is both inaccessible and prone to long periods of bad weather and extended darkness.

I’d say it’s time to start working this annual opening into our plans, and maybe hurry up and lay some trenched seabed oil pipelines from Alaska across to the St. Lawrence Seaway.

Meanwhile, the whales are stealing a march on the humans, and happily swimming across the top of the world looking for new flavors of tasty krill and some hot whale nookie action.

For the first time, scientists have documented bowhead whales traveling from opposite sides of the Canadian High Arctic and mingling in the Northwest Passage, a usually ice-clogged route connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

There have been other hints that geographically separate populations of these air-breathing mammals traversed the Arctic when the ice cover shrinks, including signs of genetic mixing between populations and 19th-century reports of harpoon heads of Atlantic origin showing up in whales on the western side of the Arctic.
...
“Given recent rates of sea ice loss, climate change may eliminate geographical divisions between stocks of bowhead whales and open new areas that have not been inhabited by bowhead whales for millennia,”

Right, because that thing with the harpoons - a mere 160 years ago - hasn’t happened for millennia - thousands of years. See the above quote about life before satellites: we really have no frickin’ idea how often and how fully these passages have opened up in the past.

Posted by Drew458     on 10/01/2011 at 10:28 AM   
Filed Under: • Climate-Weather •  
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Today’s Chess Problem 10/01/11

Solution to the last problem will have to wait. Wes said he solved it, but was holding off to let others weigh in. Wes, post your solution.

Today’s problem:

1. … ?

Black to move. White’s back rank is weak.

graphics courtesy of ExaChess. Problems from Combination Challenge by Lou Hayes and John Hall.

Posted by Christopher     on 10/01/2011 at 11:26 AM   
Filed Under: • CHESS •  
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Triple Play For CIA

Two US officials say the drone strike in Yemen that killed Anward al-Awlaki appears to have also killed al-Qaida’s top Saudi bomb-maker.

Officials say intelligence indicates Ibrahim al-Asiri also died in the attack. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the death has not been officially confirmed.

Al-Asiri is the bomb-maker believed to have made the explosives used in the foiled Christmas Day airline attack in 2009 and last year’s attempted cargo plane bombing.

Al-Asiri’s death would make the attack perhaps the most successful single drone strike ever.

And fellow American citizen, proud traitor, and terrorist recruiter Samir Khan

A Saudi-born American of Pakistani heritage who was raised in Queens, N.Y., was reportedly among those killed in a U.S. drone strike targeting radical cleric and fellow U.S. citizen Anwar al-Aulaqi.
...
“I am proud to be a traitor to America,” wrote Khan, 25, in an article in the second issue of the online magazine, published in fall last year. He described his life as working in the “jihadi media sector” in North Carolina, before his beliefs turned him into a “rebel of Washington’s imperialism.”

So it’s a buy 1 get 2 free deal so far. Who else was in those car(s)? This can only get better.

Why isn’t the video of the strike all over the US news?

All three of these wankers worked at the online terrorist monthly magazine Inspire

Al Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen did not manage an attack on the 10th anniversary of Sept. 11, 2001, but it apparently still is hoping for a propaganda victory — in the form of commemorative issue of its magazine, Inspire.

This seventh issue of the magazine departs from its usual mix of interviews and tips on bomb making in favor of remembrances of what Inspire’s editors call “The Greatest Special Operation of All Time,” according to a copy posted Tuesday by the Site Intelligence Group, which monitors jihadi Web sites. The magazine appears only online.
...
The magazines’s main article, “The Media Conflict,” was written by Samir Khan, a former North Carolina resident, who ran several jihadi Web sites from his parents’ home before moving to Yemen in 2010 to study Arabic and become an editor and writer for Inspire magazine.
...
hints of what’s planned for Inspire’s future issues, including an essay by Yemeni cleric and American citizen Anwar Al Aulaqi titled “Targeting the Populations of Countries that are at War with the Muslims.”

I’m waiting for the loony left to start screaming about the CIA is repressing freedom of speech!!! Which is just plain silly ... because we all know that the drone strike was payback for the magazine making fun on Anthony Weiner. 

Posted by Drew458     on 10/01/2011 at 09:13 AM   
Filed Under: • War On Terror •  
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What are the odds of this happening?

CANBERRA, Australia – An ultra-light plane crashed into a Ferris wheel at a rural festival in eastern Australia on Saturday, trapping two children on the ride and two people in the aircraft for hours. There were no serious injuries.

The Cheetah S200 carrying two men did not topple the Ferris wheel when it hit the frame near the top on the first morning of an annual three-day festival at Old Bar, a coastal village 220 miles (350 kilometers) north of Sydney, New South Wales Rural Fire Service spokesman Ben Shepherd said.

Two children—a 9-year-old boy and a 13-year-old girl—where trapped in a carriage at the top of the wheel near the wrecked plane for 90 minutes, a police statement said.

The 52-year-old pilot and his 32-year-old passenger were trapped inside the mangled aircraft more than 30 feet (10 meters) above the ground for almost three hours, police said.

Shepherd said rescuers used a crane to free the four.

“Thankfully, everyone was taken down and were able to walk away from it,” Shepherd said.

The pilot, Paul Cox, said he did not see the Ferris wheel before his plane hit it.

The Ferris wheel only had 5 children aboard because it was about to rain. No one was injured. The rural fair in Taree, New South Wales is an annual “happening” that attracts droves of kombi van (restored VW camper buses) enthusiasts.

Posted by Drew458     on 10/01/2011 at 07:48 AM   
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