The Iranian government must understand that the world is watching. We mourn each and every innocent life that is lost. We call on the Iranian government to stop all violent and unjust actions against its own people. The universal rights to assembly and free speech must be respected, and the United States stands with all who seek to exercise those rights.Better but still a bit panty-waist from the Leader of the Free World.
The Johnson Thermo-Electrochemical Converter System, or JTEC, has no moving parts. “It uses temperature differences to create pressure gradients,” says Paul Werbos, program director at the National Science Foundation, which has provided funding for JTEC. “Instead of using those pressure gradients to move an axle or wheel, he’s using them to force ions through a membrane. It’s a totally new way of generating electricity from heat.”Somebody invest more into this man!
In the JTEC, hydrogen circulates between two fuel cell–like membrane-electrode assemblies. Unlike a fuel cell, however, the JTEC is a closed system—it doesn’t need new supplies of hydrogen. One assembly is coupled to a heat source (such as concentrated sunlight), and the other to a heat sink (ambient air).
Once the cycle is started by an electrical jolt, the unit starts producing a current. Heat in, electricity out. Johnson’s concept may take years to commercialize—but it has the potential to convert heat to electricity at double the efficiency of today’s best technology. The JTEC “could have widespread impact,” says Karl Littau, a materials chemist at the Palo Alto Research Center. “You look at it and say, ‘Wow, why didn’t someone think of this before?’"
In firing AmeriCorps Inspector General Gerald Walpin last week, President Obama probably thought he and his wife, Michelle, were the ones "sending the message."That's just the beginning. It goes on from there!
After all, dispensing petty political retribution on behalf of one's crooked friends is the "Chicago way," is it not? And the firing of Mr. Walpin would no doubt have lasting benefits for the Obamas, too, seeing as inspectors general throughout the federal government would get the message that "FOBAMs" - or "Friends of Barack and Michelle" - were not to be touched in the future.
What Mr. and Mrs. "Hope and Change" failed to take into account was that when you circumvent the law to protect political hoodlums, you have a way of becoming political hoodlums yourselves.
My dad would have made that patio dead level even if we'd lived in Florida. To him, doing work precisely and with care is an end in itself. He often told me about the men he grew up with, fellow machinists and mechanics. To them, doing a job well–better than it needed to be done–was a core ethical principal. He took pride in his craftsmanship. "The best thing you could say about a man," my dad often recalls, "is that he was a good mechanic." And that was all you needed to say. But my dad also taught me that craftsmanship isn't just about how you build things. He brought that quality to everything: working in the business world, writing books, raising kids, grilling steaks. Craftsmanship is the respect we pay to ourselves, to the people around us, and to the material world we try to shape and improve.I always mourn the destruction the Protestant Revolution had on Catholic churches and Cathedrals.
MARK TAPSCOTT: Why not just fix Medicare first? “President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors issued a report earlier this month estimating that as much as 30 percent of Medicare spending is unnecessary for improving health outcomes. Given such opportunities for easy savings within government, and Medicare’s weighty influence in the broader system (many private insurers set payments by adding a percentage to Medicare’s rates), it would make sense to reform Medicare first, see what works and what doesn’t, and then apply the lessons of that process later to any system-wide fix. Unfortunately, Obama and Democratic congressional leaders are hell bent on turning the system upside down with radical reforms that are sure to have vast and unexpected consequences.” I’m pretty sure that the drive for a national healthcare program doesn’t have much to do with saving money or improving health.Copied entirely from Instapundit because it was just that good a point made.
Obama’s timidity speaks to a guilty conscience. At some level, he buys the post-colonial critique of the West as the root of the developing world’s troubles, and thinks we lack the moral standing to judge non-Western governments that resent and envy us. Obama is perfectly capable of launching moralistic broadsides — just at his own country, especially under his predecessor. Who are we to condemn the abuse of peaceful demonstrators when we waterboarded three terrorists?
ObamaCare Sticker Shock
A $1.6 trillion deficit boost, and the uninsured will still be with us.
This was supposed to be a red-letter week for national health care, as Democrats started the process of hustling a quarter-baked bill through Congress to reorganize one-sixth of the economy on a partisan vote. Instead it was a fiasco.
Most of the devastation was wreaked by the Congressional Budget Office, which on Tuesday reported that draft legislation from the Senate Finance Committee would increase the federal deficit by more than $1.6 trillion over the next decade while only partly denting the population of the uninsured. The details haven't been made public, but the short version seems to be that President Obama's health boondoggle prescribes vast new spending without a coherent plan to pay for it even while failing to meet its own standards for social equity.
Finance Chairman Max Baucus postponed the health timeline, probably until after Congress's July 4 vacation. His team will try to scale down the middle-class insurance subsidies and make other cuts to hold the sticker shock under $1 trillion. (Oh, is that all?) Mr. Baucus also claims he's committed to a bipartisan consensus, yet most Republicans have been closed out of the negotiations, and industry lobbyists have been pre-emptively warned that even meeting with the GOP will invite retribution.
Useful to emphasize amid the mayhem is that CBO's number-crunching is almost always off -- predicting too much spending for market-based policies and far too little for new public programs, especially on health care. The CBO score for a new entitlement is only the teaser rate, given that the costs will inevitably balloon as the years pass and more people mob "free" or subsidized insurance.
"I'm not sure he really understands what we face in primary care," Scheiner says.OUCH.
Scheiner takes a few other shots too. Looking at Obama's team of health advisors, Scheiner doesn't see anyone who's actually in the trenches. "I have a suspicion they pick people from the top echelon of medicine, people who write about it but haven't been struggling in it," he says.
Scheiner is critical of Obama's pick for Health and Human Services secretary--Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, who used to work as the chief lobbyist for her state's trial lawyers association.
"He doesn't see all the pain, it's so tragic out here," he says. "Obama's wonderful, but on this one I'm not sure if he's getting the right input."
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