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I was thinking that the "perfect" solar cell already existed....

Even if the machine shop is getting electricity. This isn't detailed in TFA but is well documented elsewhere. Take this article where they explain:

The consequences of a transformer failure are catastrophic, as there is a lack of manufacturing capacity for extra high-voltage transformers in the U.S.A. and worldwide. According to a study by the Metatech Corporation, commissioned under Executive Order 13407 for assessment of vulnerability to geomagnetic storms, manufacturers presently have a backlog of nearly three years for all extra high-voltage transformers (230 kilovolts and above). Only one plant exists in the U.S.A. capable of manufacturing a transformer up to 345 kV. There is no manufacturing capability in the U.S.A. for 500 kV and 765 kV transformers, which represent the largest group of at-risk transformers in the U.S. power grid. The 500 and 765 kV transformers are the backbone of the grid that extends into regions that contain nearly 80 percent of the U.S. population, according to John Kappenman of Storm Analysis Consultants and Metatech Corp.

A further example to make it more obvious that khallow doesn't actually understand what the problem is.

I guess we would all get off the grid, and those of us lucky to get solar panels or windmills would be OK. No use thinking about gasoline or diesel powered generators -- the refineries would be as stuck without power, as would everyone else

Even if the machine shop is getting electricity. This isn't detailed in TFA but is well documented elsewhere. Take this article where they explain:

The consequences of a transformer failure are catastrophic, as there is a lack of manufacturing capacity for extra high-voltage transformers in the U.S.A. and worldwide. According to a study by the Metatech Corporation, commissioned under Executive Order 13407 for assessment of vulnerability to geomagnetic storms, manufacturers presently have a backlog of nearly three years for all extra high-voltage transformers (230 kilovolts and above). Only one plant exists in the U.S.A. capable of manufacturing a transformer up to 345 kV. There is no manufacturing capability in the U.S.A. for 500 kV and 765 kV transformers, which represent the largest group of at-risk transformers in the U.S. power grid. The 500 and 765 kV transformers are the backbone of the grid that extends into regions that contain nearly 80 percent of the U.S. population, according to John Kappenman of Storm Analysis Consultants and Metatech Corp.

A further example to make it more obvious that khallow doesn't actually understand what the problem is.

If you're worried about waste, then you need not worry.

Based on your link, it appears we still need to worry about waste, since although it is possible to reprocess it, we currently are not, and there does not seem to be any plans to do so.

What waste?

Here are a few hits from the 1st page of a Google search...
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Nuclear-Fuel-Cycle/Introduction/Nuclear-Fuel-Cycle-Overview/#.UVsb1FeOCF8
http://www.nei.org/keyissues/nuclearwastedisposal/recyclingusednuclearfuel/
http://inhabitat.com/china-finds-way-to-reuse-nuclear-fuel-60-times-longer/
http://larouchepac.com/node/14720

If you're worried about accidents, then you're worried about deaths and and sickness. But fossil fuels are worse.

If you're worried about weaponisation, then you're worried about deaths. The cat's out of the bag, and not using nuclear power stations won't stop people from making bombs.

If you're worried about waste, then you need not worry.

So what are you more worried about than deaths?

From the sound of it, it was just 10-15 students they all accused of the same thing

I haven't seen a report saying that they are students. But, regardless, how do we actually know they are innocent? There have been numerous targeted bombings and assassinations of Iranian scientists and academics. Some organised "terrorist" group has murdered these people, and others have supplied that group with information, weapons, money, safehouses etc. If this were happening in the U.S. - if American scientists and academics were being murdered by a foreign terrorist group - then Americans would be demanding justice, including assasinations and detention without trial. Maybe this man is innocent, but this dirty war is not. There are spies operating in Iran, and they will obviously claim that they are innocent if they get caught.

Zahiri's accusation is contact with Mojahedin-e Khalgh Organization (completely unrelated to the Mossad).

Mossad Caught Running MEK Assassinations of Iranian Scientists
Mossad hit-squads behind Iran scientists' murders - US official
Israel teams with terror group to kill Iran's nuclear scientists, U.S. officials tell NBC News

It doesn't help the "we're innocent" argument when U.S. officials have openly called for MEK to not be classified as a terrorist group, and the U.S. military has allegedly provided MEK with material assistance and special forces training.

Gingrich, campaign promises, space program, okay, with you so far... wait... did you just link to larouchepac.com? As in Lyndon LaRouche? You're kidding me right? Are you even pretending to be editors anymore? You might as well link to timecube.com. Holy crap.

I could not find the cite with a casual look, but historically US food reserves are about 60-90 days, but this time down around 30 days and at the time it was falling further. I am not sure what the cause is. However, we might observe that (Obama) opposes food reserves in less developed nations. Here is a cite http://www.larouchepac.com/node/18377 that in turns reference a french newspaper reporting on G-20 ag stuff about July of this year. I think the Larouche analysis, and reasonably the Chinese analysis, is that this is to put pressure on sovereign nations to NOT hoard food if the world goes into famine. And since in the G-20 context, all G-20 knew how to do a few months ago, was to encourage speculation everywhere, this all holds together. As best as I can see, that is almost all they still know. The additional thing some of them know is that bill has come due. And the US taxpayer is the only source of liquidity to prop up the speculators, largely in this case, big investment banks, for another month or two.

If GWB or Obama had waged war on Britain or Canada without extremely good cause, for example, it simply would not have worked. The collective establishment would have been like "WTF?"

So, starting war against the whole world wouldn't work. Which is effectively what would happen if you openly invaded Canada or Europe. So there are limits to what one nutcase can do. (But they can do things like starting a land war in Asia, or going up against a Sicilian when death is on the line. ) Or murdering their own citizens without even charging them with anything. You know you are a bad man when Dick Cheney is sticking up for you.

There was the Russian General who refused to launch his missiles when his system told him WW3 had started, and the Czar who let World War I start after he was begged to stop and think--though IIRC, he delayed it for a day or two.

Every schoolboy knows (or used to) that WWI was started by an assasniation

I am quite positive that connally, treasury secretary under nixon, had us off the gold standard in August 1971. And the people I was playing with then knew today was coming and in real time cited this even as the tolling of the bell.. Hmm, that is true, but not quite to the point. They knew 1986 was coming, but they did not realize how crazed the monetarists are. So we get wonder walls of money and everything you have come to hate. And now there are no more scams and looting and austerity that will give value to a couple quadrillion in worthless unpayable debt. And you start to get concerned new reporting in your local papers.

I have an idea-- put glass-steagall back in. Multiple bills with significant backing to do that are in Congress right now. This would take out most of the political leadership and most of the banks internationally. But it is challenging for me to believe they are not going soon. We should chose to keep ourselves standing. G-S, put in in the 1930's and fully repealed in 1999 separates out commercial banking assets from investment banking assets--that is, speculative "value" has to stand on its own.. Think of it this way: We need to keep commercial banks going. We do not need to keep speculators and their assets around. So, the speculators need to go grow roses or something useful. Their paper assets really do not exist. And we realize this by the simple and moderate tactic of *not* supporting the fictitious values of the assets, as with your tax dollars, etc. Hey, this is why we have bankruptcy courts.

HB 1489?comes to mind. I am pleased that my rep defazio introduced a similar and useful bill. Where is your rep on this?. I look for a link:
http://www.larouchepac.com/node/18182

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c112:H.R.1489:

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c112:H.R.2451:

enjoy

I hear we again have debtor's prison in the USA. I hear that in some places, if you owe money, the creditor goes to court and when you fail to show gets a default judgment. Somewhere in there the judge puts you in jail and levies a fine...that is exactly what you owe. So you end up paying.... and the fine is turned over to the creditor. Maybe this needs a cite.

http://www.schr.org/poor
http://mostlywater.org/us_debtors_prisons

ah, here it is: http://www.larouchepac.com/node/15243

and it reference a newspaper article which is in turn referenced by many articles, but the *original* is simply not showing up in google. However, playing through the links, we get this,

http://www.walletpop.com/blog/2010/07/15/americas-new-debtor-prison-jail-time-being-given-to-those-who/

and this seems to directly quote the article and is in direct support of the larouche cite.

Sort of peculiar how the original article is not there and almost all the references to the article do not mention the turning over of the fines to the creditor. I think what is happening here is that the original is getting updated, has a new update date, and has dropped the really nasty parts of the original.

I liked your take on the gap to the stars. The usual argument goes more along the lines if we get to the next star system and colonize, then make some reasonable assumptions on how easy is would be to recurse and maybe we own the galaxy in 10meg years.

As far as space vs planet, your point has virtue for those who are silly, but you know darn well that we will do both. Who leaves habitat unused? Even the Sahara, which is really sort of an example of the failure so far of whatever ,life oriented deity you like, gets some life and includes humans. To me, it seems quite reasonable to "terraform" local deserts, so why not local planets?

Here is a sort of terraforming project that has been kicking around since the middle of last century. No interesting tech requirements, just no willpower So. as part of it, you need some new science work, but not new hardware tech. Like most things, getting the concepts right is the hard part.

http://www.larouchepac.com/node/15992

Wrong!??? Maybe not. Test mode vs operational mode?

http://www.larouchepac.com/node/15928

My personal view is that an operational speed, actually in production and use, is really the defining number. I am not quite sure how to classify this number, but it looks more interesting. The reason is largely societal. The French apparently built some good gizmos, but were not really committed enough to make them "real". The Chinese on the other hand likely think of rail as a key strategic element, not just in economic development, but in national security.

China seems to be the world expert on rail in arctic environments and depending on your definition of high speed, has the most high speed rail. Although the Russians, with Chinese help, are going high speed rail with a vengeance. Hah, if we had a President that was actual planning on having a positively functioning US economy, we might have already gone with the Russian intentions for a Bering strait rail tunnel, and I suspect we would classify the rail there as high-speed. And the Chinese would want this tunnel too.

Ah well. Some countries are willing to invest in infrastructure. The US prefers to loot its infrastructure.

http://www.larouchepac.com/ ?

Best I can tell the people actually doing the nation building in afghanistan are the Chinese.

http://www.larouchepac.com/node/14136

So this is coverage of a December new york times artice and the LPAC article was in April, kind of late. Doing a search on larouchepac.com on china and afghanistan give a number of hits this year. Now the way things work, everyone important has known about the mineral deposits for a while. So, if you feel like saying something interesting, try speculating on how this might be driving a lot of recent moves in the area.

Don't like LaRouche? In this case, you might try to remember top spook types in the 80's characterized his organization as "the best private intelligence organization in the world". Ah well. I am sure MSM meets all your information needs. Anyway, the recession is over and Obama is doing a wonderful job, for someone.

the good people at larouchepac have compiled nice laundry list of crimes they've committed floating around out there... this is compiled from state and federal testimony.

http://larouchepac.com/node/14171

I suppose that some places I post do not do urls and so I tend to cut and paste unless it is video. While me "making up" this much seems unlikely, I do not really know where all you visit. On the other hand, I expect this googles easily and the web site is there in what I put in as my "home" web site. Not mine, but still.

the destruction of nasa

http://www.larouchepac.com/lpactv?nid=13392

us soldiers. malaria, haiti

http://larouchepac.com/node/13703

i like the dilbert refenc

best i know, bolton talked about how he thought he could biuild this and that, but when pressed he said he had to check with OMB.

this slash and burn is an OMB controlled thing

the merits are irrelevant here

but the personally suspect the negative merits are what ultimately drive this

figure the goal is to close down any real manned space exploration

and people talked about how private enterprise can do a better job on all this. people need to realize that private capital does not do big tech risks. accounting just does not support putting money into long term projects. benefits 50 years out simply cannot exist in a business plan. you might talk about r&d, but on one hand all the r&d is pretty much supported by the feds, and on the other, when the ceo speaks of innovation, they are talking about something marketing phbs do, not einstein. ah well, I guess it was a rant.

here re a few highlights from the hearings and maybe there is going to be a big demo at the cape

http://larouchepac.com/node/13674

specific statute based legality is in question on what you call the spending freeze

http://larouchepac.com/node/13675

hmm, you seem like a good enough guy, but the conversation is "odd". oops, there i go again!

in passing, it is a little flakey to talk about professionalism, pre 1820. that is about when, hmm, harvard, implemented the concept around lawyers. a professionals praxis is positivism. and for engineers the idea is the scientist figure things out and the engineers apply it, and that is hard to do with out a quantative science base. you might think of a professional as someone with a certain attitude of responsibility to his client. but that does not have much with how I think of professional. and I vaguely have an engineering degress, MSE.

sometimes i use words in a deeper way than you do, sometime i try to be a bit funny, and then sometimes the words are intentional ambiguous, which is part of humor,and I expect sometime I am flakey.

as far as awg and genocide, hmm, that is easy to give an example of someone who says it and from a nice official position. at copenhagen, the sudan guy was repping over 120 nations. there was an offer of money to the countries he represented. He quipped " it is not enough money to pay for the coffins" so it looked like to him the awg policies would kill a lot of people

otherwise here is an overview of some of the population "control" proposals that surfaced around early copenhagen as the solution to awg

http://www.larouchepac.com/node/12768

figure that bush and obama figured bailing our the speculators was much more important than manufacturing capability. So they spent 23.4? trillion dollars bailing out the banks. I think we could have managed to get a nuclear power plant or two built somehow with that money. and destroying people like goldman sucks helps just about everyone.

Here is an agitational document on how to start doing something useful.

http://larouchepac.com/node/13385

what is the status. congress critters are breaking with obama over nasa. one ex type calls for impeachment. one current says he is open to the idea. labor union leader types are hearing it from their members and calling in to get info. But the real deal will be the houston dem primary in about three weeks. we shall see.

Hmm, the right candidate is a young black lady named rogers. give her some money.

http://keshaforcongress.com/

It is useful to recognize we are in a mass strike period.

yah, the private banks do so well at giving us a future.

to go where ever we want, we need high-energy "rockets". Otherwise serious colonization does not work. In the 70s we were ready to go with nuclear drives. Now the russians are going to finally do it. I do not see a lot of private investment in anything really different. Pooh, we now all hear about the virtues of innovation, and as far as I can tell, this is something marketing is especially good at.

if you are a conservative type, something to consider is that India will be in LEO with men in 2012 and on rhe moon, with people, in 2020. oh, India is involved deeply with the russians on the nuclear drive.

on a more earthly thing, China currently has 64 high speed rail projects. 1000's of miles. The usa has 64 miles of medium high speed rail. Some people talk about high speed rail in the usa as capable of causing a 15% overall productivity increase.

and last I looked, 54 nuclear power plants were being built, almost all in asia. the usa has one, an old mothballed tva plant being brought up.

so who has the potential for a future?

anyway, here is a video entitled "the destruction of nasa" which is supposed to be very good

http://larouchepac.com/lpactv?nid=13392

Yah, I agree about the sleazy summary.

But we got to kill any idea of real progress, technical or economic. anyway, we are in the terminal phase of a malthusian collapse and we need to just suck it up. After all, there is no difference between humans and animals.

funny how quickly a techie oriented slashdot goes luddite. I suspect something like astroturfing.

I seem to recall that the the over-schedule part of constellation was directly traceable to underfunding with respect to promised money.

here are two slugs on yesterday's press conferences

http://larouchepac.com/node/13540
http://larouchepac.com/node/13539

there are a couple relevant videos, but too much flash

Yah, I agree about the sleazy summary.

But we got to kill any idea of real progress, technical or economic. anyway, we are in the terminal phase of a malthusian collapse and we need to just suck it up. After all, there is no difference between humans and animals.

funny how quickly a techie oriented slashdot goes luddite. I suspect something like astroturfing.

I seem to recall that the the over-schedule part of constellation was directly traceable to underfunding with respect to promised money.

here are two slugs on yesterday's press conferences

http://larouchepac.com/node/13540
http://larouchepac.com/node/13539

there are a couple relevant videos, but too much flash

Mike Griffin ex nasa admin on the cuts

http://larouchepac.com/node/13326