Volume 1 Issue 15
December 3, 2002
Funny Money
Important Bush policy developments, strippers making more than me, and what to do with Nevada?
Wow...big bunch of stuff today, I had to take a nap after putting it together! Guess the world is still waking up from Thanksgiving...
Apparently, coffee really gets this group riled up, got a bunch of responses to the trivia for yesterday...see answers below. A reminder we're voting this week on names for the rag...please vote among these 4:
1. The view from the Gadren
2. Gadrening Tips
3. From the Swamp
4. The World According to Greg
Perhaps the most important public policy development of the next 2 years: In the most disturbing political development of recent note, Conservatives have begun to speak of a new concept: that the poor pay too little in taxes. Thankfully this isn't on the front burner yet, but its making waves nonetheless -
Part 1: http://slate.msn.com/?id=2074593
Part 2: http://slate.msn.com/?id=2074630
Part 3: http://slate.msn.com/?id=2074666
Part 4: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/03/opinion/03KRUG.html
Robert Redford is attacking the Bush Administration on energy in a LA Times op-ed -http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-redford2dec02,0,6094063.story?coll=la%2Dnews%2Dcomment%2Dopinions
Look Who's Running For President: That's right folks, the man who made G.W. Bush president may run again! Ralph Nader better watch out, I think some dems may go after him this time -
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,71942,00.html
Look Who's Running For President 2: And Chris Dodd is apparently getting ready to join the fray as well -
http://www.ctnow.com/news/politics/hc-dodd1201.artdec01,0,3673524.story?coll=hc%2Dheadlines%2Dpolitics
Look Who's Running For President 3: People reeeealy don't seem to like John Kerry -
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A2551-2002Dec3.html
If anyone is looking for a good summary of the affirmative action issue that will be decided by the Supreme Court next year, the Times had a good synopsis today -
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/03/politics/03AFFI.html
Slate has also premiered a new item, the "Saddameter" judging the current odds of an invasion of Iraq. I believe it updates daily. -
http://slate.msn.com/?id=2074739
We present this program in living Color!: They changed it once in 75 years. Now, for the second time in 10, the US is going to issue new currency, this time with more color -
http://www.msnbc.com/news/841864.asp
Rant of the day: Nevada has filed another legal brief about why Yucca Mountain should not be the nation's nuclear waste depository (you mean storing enough nuclear material to kill everyone on earth less than an hour from Las Vegas isn't a good idea?!). What gets me is the discussion is based on whether the facility will be able to contain the waste for only 1,000 years, or for the legally mandated 10,000 years. OK, look, nothing we build can really last 10,000 years on its own...I mean stuff rusts, breaks, needs to be maintained. Hell, the oldest suspension bridges in the US are less than 100 years old, and they regularly undergo massive reconstruction. But, hasn't anyone thought to say, "Well, this should hold for about 1,000-2,000 years or so...AND BY THEN PERHAPS PEOPLE WILL HAVE COME UP WITH A BETTER USE FOR THIS CRAP! LIKE GAS FOR CARS, OR AT LEAST A BETTER WAY TO STORE IT!!!! Think about it...where was human technology 1,000 years ago? 2,000? 10,000? Hell, 10,000 years ago were will still living in caves!!! This project also has an aspect that is trying to figure out how to put signs on the depository so that future civilizations will know its dangerous. So, therefore this project assumes that somehow civilization as we know it will soon end, making these signs necessary. This isn't a space probe (which regularly have signs explaining our planet, some even with sound recordings) that could conceivably one day millions of years down the line be recovered by aliens. This is our planet, in our nation...and we're really planning on not being around?!?!?! And, if by some reason we do get wiped out by nature or our own hubris, SCREW whoever is around later! If they're settling in the middle of the damned desert they should know better. Of course, with global warming, Nevada may be beachfront property by then.
Here's the damn article -
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/03/politics/03YUCC.html
Not exactly minimum wage: Strippers at a club in San Francisco have gone on strike. There's a bad joke to be made here, but I'm not gonna do it. Though, I will note that they currently make $27 an hour. I make $18 an hour when you average out my salary. -
http://www.cnn.com/2002/US/West/12/03/offbeat.picketing.stri ppers.ap/index.html
When Animals Attack: An ape has injured 14 in Japan. Love the quote about avoiding eye contact with the ape -
http://mdn.mainichi.co.jp/news/20021202p2a00m0dm035000c.html
WARNING: Um...don't buy grapes. (btw, anyone else concerned this is the first we've heard of this? considering other nations have BANNED our grapes for years b/c of this?!?) -
http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/337/metro/In_Winthrop_alon g_came_a_spider+.shtml
More teenagers are apparently hitting the spa in need of stress relief. I can't wait until this becomes a work benefit in 15 years -
http://www.cnn.com/2002/HEALTH/parenting/12/03/spa.teens.ap/ index.html
Ted Koppel's new, temporary interview show on ABC is making waves quietly -
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/03/arts/television/03TRUD.htm l?8hpib
In Sports news, the Phillies continue to gloat over the largest MLB free agent signing this year. This also gives us the Quote of the Day, about what Thome should do for that $85 million: "He ought to jog up the Art Museum steps like Rocky Balboa. He ought to power-wash William Penn's statue. He ought to grill a few cheese steaks at Pat's and Geno's. Heck, he ought to play quarterback for the Eagles for a series or two. (Hell, everyone else has.)"
http://espn.go.com/mlb/columns/stark_jayson/1470176.html
Conspiracy Theory of the Day: From Greg's current favorite author, Gregg Easterbrook:
Fox Mulder, Call Your Office! The new Spielberg marathon mini-series "Taken" begins with allied fighter pilots glimpsing strange lights above Nazi Germany. This actually did happen, and is a reason why, Susan Adams reported last summer in Forbes magazine, the United States military has spent $4.8 million over the last two years researching ways to nullify gravity!
Apparently, some within the Air Force are haunted by the statements of allied pilots who swore they saw UFOs above Germany in the closing days of World War II. Since the concept of the UFO did not then exist in popular culture -- the first publicized UFO sighting was in 1947 -- the fact that several fliers independently reported similar-looking airborne craft without wings has long fueled conspiracy theories that the Nazis invented an antigravity device just before the war ended. (The sightings were not of the German Me262 jet, which allied pilots were trained to identify and attack first.) TMQ feels sure that if the Nazis did possess an antigravity device, it would have been sold to some government or used to barter the freedom of various war criminals, as became of all other leftover Third Reich technology. Unless ... the Nazis sold it to the aliens. Scully, are you listening?
An Air Force contractor told Adams, "We don't use the word antigravity, it would make us look like lunatics." The preferred term of art is "electrogravitics." But why apologize for antigravity research? TMQ would like to point out that an anti-gravity effect almost certainly exists!
During the 1990s, astronomers discovered that cosmic expansion is not slowing down, as the velocity of the Big Bang peters out; rather, the galaxies are racing outward at ever-increasing speed. This has caused current speculation (read a summary here or incredible detail from Cal Tech here that as much as 70 percent of the power of the universe exists as "dark energy" that repels rather than attracts matters.
Einstein anticipated this decades ago, saying that in order to prevent gravity from collapsing the cosmos back onto itself, there must be a " cosmological constant" that repels mass. Now it's looking like "dark energy" may be the opposite of gravity in every way. Not only repelling rather than attracting; gravity increases as distance declines, whereas "dark energy" seems to increase as distance increases. This may be why cosmic expansion is speeding up -- the galaxies keep receding farther apart, and the farther apart the they get, the stronger "dark energy" becomes.
TMQ loves the dark-energy idea, because it means physicists and cosmologists, with their impressive observatories and billion-dollar particle accelerators and multiple PhDs, nevertheless have no idea where 70 percent of the universe is. Modern high-tech physics can't find 70 percent of the universe! Anyway, dark energy sounds like an antigravity phenomenon to TMQ, and our descendants may consider this child's play.
(For reference, Gregg Easterbrook, a Brookings fellow and editor at the Atlantic Monthly currently writes the world's greatest column, which is supposedly a football column, but always contains tidbits like this one. Read it here - http://espn.go.com/page2/s/tmq/021203.html)
Trivia: Wow! Coffee really gets you people going, had more e-mail about the question yesterday than I got votes for the name! The answers by the way are:
- Coffee replaced beer as the most popular breakfast drink. (Note, this was only in NYCity, not the US as a whole...some of you pointed out that the nation at that time was too spread out and rural to really know for sure).
- And, the first official "coffee break" came from the Barco company (maker of the Barcolounger chair) in 1902 in Buffalo. Now, there is debate about this. Apparently a tobacco warehouse in Stoughton, WI also claims to have had the first coffee break, but this was not specifically a coffee break, just a break for women who worked at the factory to go home and cook lunch for their husbands and kids. They did happen to have coffee too, and the rest is history.
There were various answers, none of them right, but Ed DiMarzio of Arlington, VA was the closest, and will out of my benevolence receive a free latt=E9 at a time of his choosing.
Have a great afternoon!!!
Gregory S. Gadren
