March 2015 archive

Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover  we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:30am (ET) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.

Breakfast Tune:Mean Mary playing fast banjo

Today in History

Highlights of this day in history: Julius and Ethel Rosenberg convicted of Cold War espionage; Lt. William Calley, Jr. convicted in the Vietnam War’s My Lai massacre; U.S. troops leave South Vietnam; Attorney Johnnie Cochran dies. (March 29)

Breakfast News & Blogs Below

It’s not so bad, it could be raining.  Oh wait, it is.

Bernie Ecclestone’s Formula One empire is hanging by a thread and really the best thing he could do for the sport right now is pack up his office (under the scrutiny of a Security Officer of course) and head for the parking lot.

Don’t let the door hit you.

First of all Germany is off.  Nürburgring is having financial trouble and can’t meet Bernie’s fees.  Hockenheimring is unwilling to do so because Formula One is unprofitable for them and only drew 52,000 spectators last year (of a potential 120,000).  Bernie is tearing up the contract for the German Grand Prix (or wants to, we’ll see) and ominously threatens that Monza is next.

There goes his vaunted 20 race season, just like his 20 car field, but don’t worry- Bernie is sure it will all pass over.  I’m sure he’ll find another Petro-Emirate with more bucks than brains to fill in.

What it does mean is that Formula One’s reservoir of goodwill in Europe, its traditional heartland and the base of all of its teams, is thin indeed and Bernie’s senile delusions of challenging Football (the kind you play with your feet) are just that.  And, since it would be irresponsible not to speculate, what will it mean for the Fiat (Ferrari) commitment to Formula One going forward to lose its home track or for that matter Mercedes (which has lost it) without whom most cars would be nothing but sculptures?

The Red Bull/Renault dispute continues.  Red Bull’s Team Manager has had some very unflattering things to say and thoughts being bandied about include Red Bull buying out Renault (at least the Formula One Engine part), Renault buying out Red Bull in whole or in part (Toro Rosso), or Red Bull and/or Renault leaving Formula One entirely.

I give the money edge to Renault, They are after all a multi-Billion dollar automotive firm and Red Bull?  Well, it’s a soft drink company.

Why is this important to Bernie?  Because Red Bull puts 4 cars on the track- 20% of the entire field.  Without them you start the math at 16 when counting down to Bernie’s minimum contractual obligation of 14.  Oh, and don’t think Australia isn’t pissed he could only track 18 and finish 11 at Albert Part.

And what about Sauber?  Giedo van der Garde has settled out of court after winning in it, but he got a pot of money for doing so-

There has been a lot of speculation in the media over the past week, so I want to set out clearly that my sponsors paid the sponsorship fee related to the 2015 season in its entirety to Sauber in the first half of 2014.

This was simply in good faith and to help the team deal with its cash problems at the time. Effectively, it was my sponsor’s advanced payments that helped the team survive in 2014.

Sauber’s financial decision-making in this case is bizarre and makes no sense to me. I am not at liberty to discuss details, but Sauber paid significant compensation to avoid honouring the contract they had with me. Only in that respect can I be satisfied that my rights have finally been recognised and that at least some justice has been done.

Monisha Kaltenborn is making the same kind of ‘move along, nothing to see here’ noises Bernie does, but Sauber was a team on the edge financially last year and “there is continued speculation that Colin Kolles, the former principal of Caterham and HRT, wants to take over the team.”

Supposedly ChemChina’s takeover of Pirelli leaves their Formula One commitment “unchanged”, but in this case “unchanged” means that they have a contract through 2016 that they intend to honor and no longer term deal has been reached yet.

Oh BTW, Hards and Mediums.  Three stop strategy unless it rains.  Did I mention rain?  Caused a half hour delay in Qualifying.

Speaking of contracts, Hamilton is looking to ink a long term one with Mercedes.

Speaking of Drivers, Alonso is back but he didn’t get to Q3 by a long shot and doesn’t look the same.  Also he’s in a big dispute with McLaren over whether a ‘gust of wind’ caused his accident or his steering failed.

Speaking of mechanical failure, Hamilton missed two practice sessions because his engine telemetry failed (there may be more to it than that).

All in all it’s shaping up to be another fine season in Formula One because everything is always fine in Formula One.

John Watson: ‘F1 has a major problem but is putting its head in the sand’

by Paul Weaver, The Guardian

Tuesday 24 March 2015 10.01 EDT

“Formula One has a major problem but the sport is putting its head in the sand,” he said. “Two thirds of the grid are struggling, and barely able to make it to the race. Right now F1 needs to have a good look at itself and decide what it is trying to achieve. The product is in need of a massive kickstart.

“What’s going on? Bernie Ecclestone has done a phenomenal job for [owners] CVC but somebody needs to step in because of the dire state the middle and bottom of the grid is in. You can’t have a race with just four big teams. I’m unhappy with the governance from the FIA.”

…

“And then, in the race, there were so many cars and drivers missing. Australia values what the race brings to Melbourne and Victoria. They love their sport there but they will make their views known about that event, and it was not a good grand prix.”

Watson says F1’s efforts to cut costs have created problems of their own. “The regulations do not allow you to produce an entirely new engine this year, so the teams have to make the most of their development token. But that means that Mercedes, who have got everything spot on, are now enjoying complete domination. Another problem has been the reduction in testing time, again to cut costs. And this season teams have only four engines instead of five. So no one wants to do mileage because of the meagre engine allowance. Yet these hybrid engines are so complicated that everybody needs track time. Half the problem is bloody procedures. It’s nuts, total nuts.”

Watson, like many people in Formula One, wants CVC to readdress the amount of money it is taking out of a sport with an annual turnover of £1.5bn, while the majority of the teams struggle for survival. “That’s an area that must be revisited to keep the sport worthy of the money people are paying to watch it, either at the track or on TV.”

Watson also took a sideswipe at Red Bull’s team principal, Christian Horner, who in Australia was outspokenly critical of the Renault engine. “What Christian said about Renault was outrageous,” Watson said. “Has the bloke lost the plot? There were some unnecessarily blunt comments about the Renault power unit. You should keep those remarks for meetings behind closed doors.

“Renault are spending a fortune supporting the technology and the hardware to enable Red Bull to continue the success they have enjoyed. If I was Renault I would feel pissed off that Christian has bit off the hand that’s feeding him. The relationship seems to be disintegrating very rapidly. The public sniping is inappropriate and counterproductive.”

Watson, 68, was also critical of McLaren when he said: “They’ve had two bad years with the Mercedes engine. It’s hard to understand why they didn’t do better when you see how well Williams, Force India and of course Mercedes themselves did.”

And finally, because Bernie is always sooo ready to pamper his pets-

Bernie Ecclestone backs Red Bull’s call to rein in Mercedes’s F1 dominance

Reuters

Monday 16 March 2015 09.07 EDT

Formula One’s commercial supremo Bernie Ecclestone has backed Red Bull’s call for action to rein in Mercedes’s engine advantage and make races more competitive after a one-sided start to the season.

…

“They are absolutely 100% right,” Ecclestone said when asked about the Red Bull principal Christian Horner’s statement that the FIA should apply an “equalisation mechanism” to narrow the gap.

…

Ecclestone said it was not a case of doing everything possible to stop Mercedes but simply to allow other manufacturers more flexibility.

“What we should have done was frozen the Mercedes engine and leave everybody else to do what they want so they could have caught up,” he said. “We should support the FIA to make changes.”

And you think Professional Wrestling is fixed.

Pikachu puts on a suit, hopes hiring managers will choose him as a business formal plushie

Casey Baseel

Despite his cherubic good looks and smooth, unlined face, Pikachu isn’t as young as he used to be. The first Pokémon video game was released in Japan in 1996, and considering that the franchise’s most famous pocket monster was ready to go into battle right away, theoretically he must have already been a few years old by that time.

What we’re saying is, Pikachu isn’t a kid anymore. It’s time he entered the workforce and became an economically self-sufficient member of society, which is just what he’s poised to do in his new, suit-wearing plushie form.

While Japan, like most western countries, celebrates the solar new year in January, spring is really considered to be the start of most people’s annual lifestyle cycles. It’s when the school year begins, and also when the vast majority of Japanese companies have their new employees start working.

Yesterday’s Results-

Go Spartans!

Tonight’s Matchups-

Welcome to the Stars Hollow Gazette‘s Health and Fitness News weekly diary. It will publish on Saturday afternoon and be open for discussion about health related issues including diet, exercise, health and health care issues, as well as, tips on what you can do when there is a medical emergency. Also an opportunity to share and exchange your favorite healthy recipes.

Questions are encouraged and I will answer to the best of my ability. If I can’t, I will try to steer you in the right direction. Naturally, I cannot give individual medical advice for personal health issues. I can give you information about medical conditions and the current treatments available.

You can now find past Health and Fitness News diaries here and on the right hand side of the Front Page.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

The Passover meal is one of the most meaningful gatherings in Judaism, symbolizing the Jews’ flight from slavery in Egypt. As the cookbook author Joan Nathan writes, the annual event gives her “chills, knowing that I’m following what was written in the Bible more than 2,500 years ago.” [..]

But thousands of years of tradition doesn’t mean you can’t still find moments of creativity and color in your Passover meal. We have collected some of our favorite Martha Rose Shulman recipes to help you set a delicious and meaningful Passover table.

~ Tara Parker-Pope ~

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Trevor Timm: The FBI used to recommend encryption. Now they want to ban it

The FBI wants to make us all less safe. At least that’s the implication from FBI director Jim Comey’s push to ban unbreakable encryption and deliberately weaken everyone’s security. And it’s past time that the White House makes its position clear once and for all.

Comey was back before Congress this week – this time in front of the House Appropriations Committee – imploring Congressmen to pass a law that would force tech companies to create a backdoor in any phone or communications tool that uses encryption. [..]

The idea that all of a sudden the FBI is “going dark” and won’t be able to investigate criminals anymore thanks to a tiny improvement of cell phone security is patently absurd. Even if the phone itself is protected by a passphrase that encrypts the device, the FBI can still go to telecom companies to get all the phone metadata they want. They can also still track anyone they choose by getting a cell phone’s location information 24 hours a day, and of course they can still wiretap the calls themselves. Let’s not forget that with a four digit passcode – like iPhones come with by default – can easily broken into by the FBI without anyone’s help anyways. So a vast majority of this debate is already moot.

Beyond a few vague hypotheticals, Comey wouldn’t give any specific examples at the hearing about where this has tripped up the FBI before, but the last time the FBI did, what they said was immediately debunked as nonsense.

Eugene Robinson: The Mark of Terror

We don’t need to know the political or religious views of Germanwings copilot Andreas Gunter Lubitz to call his crashing of a crowded airliner into a mountainside an act of terrorism. And we don’t need any further evidence to recognize a cruel irony: Legitimate fear of potential terrorist attacks apparently made this tragedy possible. [..]

Terrorism is often defined as violence committed for a political or religious purpose, and no one can say yet what the pilot had in mind. But no one does something like this without intending to make a statement. We may not yet know what it means – and I suppose it’s possible that we may never know. Murder of this kind, on this scale and in this chilling manner is terrorism.

It’s possible, I suppose, that Lubitz was profoundly delusional. But if this were the case, how could he have passed the airline’s annual medical exams? How could he have worked in such close quarters with fellow pilots, flight attendants and other personnel, day after day, without anyone noticing behavior that suggested a problem?

It looks as if Lubitz wasn’t just trying to end his life because he was depressed. He apparently decided to end 149 other lives as well because he wanted to tell us something. Tragically, this is precisely the kind of thing that terrorists do.

Last Night’s Results-

Not a single upset.

Today’s Matchups-

This is your morning Open Thread. Pour your favorite beverage and review the past and comment on the future.

Find the past “On This Day in History” here.

March 28 is the 87th day of the year (88th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 278 days remaining until the end of the year.

On this day in 1979, the nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island overheats causing a partial meltdown. At 4 a.m. on March 28, 1979, the worst accident in the history of the U.S. nuclear power industry begins when a pressure valve in the Unit-2 reactor at Three Mile Island fails to close. Cooling water, contaminated with radiation, drained from the open valve into adjoining buildings, and the core began to dangerously overheat.

The Three Mile Island nuclear power plant was built in 1974 on a sandbar on Pennsylvania’s Susquehanna River, just 10 miles downstream from the state capitol in Harrisburg. In 1978, a second state-of-the-art reactor began operating on Three Mile Island, which was lauded for generating affordable and reliable energy in a time of energy crises.

Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station

The power plant was owned and operated by General Public Utilities and Metropolitan Edison (Met Ed). It was the most significant accident in the history of the USA commercial nuclear power generating industry, resulting in the release of up to 481 PBq (13 million curies) of radioactive gases, and less than 740 GBq (20 curies) of the particularly dangerous iodine-131.

The accident began at 4 a.m. on Wednesday, March 28, 1979, with failures in the non-nuclear secondary system, followed by a stuck-open pilot-operated relief valve (PORV) in the primary system, which allowed large amounts of nuclear reactor coolant to escape. The mechanical failures were compounded by the initial failure of plant operators to recognize the situation as a loss-of-coolant accident due to inadequate training and human factors, such as human-computer interaction design oversights relating to ambiguous control room indicators in the power plant’s user interface. In particular, a hidden indicator light led to an operator manually overriding the automatic emergency cooling system of the reactor because the operator mistakenly believed that there was too much coolant water present in the reactor and causing the steam pressure release. The scope and complexity of the accident became clear over the course of five days, as employees of Met Ed, Pennsylvania state officials, and members of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) tried to understand the problem, communicate the situation to the press and local community, decide whether the accident required an emergency evacuation, and ultimately end the crisis. The NRC’s authorization of the release of 40,000 gallons of radioactive waste water directly in the Susquehanna River led to a loss of credibility with the press and community.

In the end, the reactor was brought under control, although full details of the accident were not discovered until much later, following extensive investigations by both a presidential commission and the NRC. The Kemeny Commission Report concluded that “there will either be no case of cancer or the number of cases will be so small that it will never be possible to detect them. The same conclusion applies to the other possible health effects”. Several epidemiological studies in the years since the accident have supported the conclusion that radiation releases from the accident had no perceptible effect on cancer incidence in residents near the plant, though these findings are contested by one team of researchers.

Public reaction to the event was probably influenced by The China Syndrome, a movie which had recently been released and which depicts an accident at a nuclear reactor. Communications from officials during the initial phases of the accident were felt to be confusing. The accident crystallized anti-nuclear safety concerns among activists and the general public, resulted in new regulations for the nuclear industry, and has been cited as a contributor to the decline of new reactor construction that was already underway in the 1970s.

The incident was rated a five on the seven-point International Nuclear Event Scale: Accident With Wider Consequences.

Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover  we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:30am (ET) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.

Breakfast Tune: Dave Hum – Cold Frosty Morning

Today in History

An accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant; Former President Dwight Eisenhower dies; The Spanish Civil War ends; Maria von Trapp of ‘Sound of Music’ fame dies; Singer Reba McEntire born. (March 28)

Breakfast News & Blogs Below