Blackmoor Vituperative

When I was in my late teens, dirt poor, and new to credit cards, I learned very quickly that I could get a cash advance on one card to pay the minimum amount due on another card. As the amount I owed spiraled upward along with the minimum payments, I realized that this strategy would have one inevitable outcome. So why is this simple economic lesson beyond the ken of the sages running our government?

After betting the farm, the Benz, the Rolex and the college fund, Congress is about to take another $800 billion economic stimulus gamble. But economists say it may be time for an intervention.

The federal budget deficit already is projected to reach an unheard of $1.2 trillion this fiscal year, and President-elect Barack Obama’s economic stimulus package, under review by lawmakers, would only add to the deficit.

That’s on top of a $700 billion financial rescue, a $17 billion auto bailout and the first $150 billion stimulus (that’s the one approved right before the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression).

So where does it end?

(from Economists Warn Against Feeding ‘Trillion-Dollar Deficits’, FOXNews.com)

Anyone over the age of 20 who has ever had a credit card knows where it ends. So why don’t our elected representatives?

From YouTube, we have more evidence that smoking is cool.

Any excuse to play with fire in public is cool in my book.

In the world of the TV sitcom “Seinfeld,” Festivus is a goofy, high-tension Christmas substitute dreamt up by George Costanza’s angry dad. Revelers gathered around an aluminum pole and couldn’t leave until someone pinned the head of the household to the floor.

Festivus is still good for a laugh among “Seinfeld” loyalists, even 11 years after the episode was first broadcast.

Funny, but nobody’s laughing much about the Festivus pole that popped up under the dome of the Illinois Capitol this week.

(from Festivus pole goes up in the Illinois Capitol, and the gripes begin, Pantagraph.com)

The T-Mobile G1 will receive a number of minor software improvements in January 2009, according to http://www.googleandblog.com.

(And no, the apostrophe is not a typo.)

Strange days ahead for NASA. They announced a while back that they were going to start relying more on the private sector, and now the Obama collective seem intent on dismantling the agency altogether.

President-elect Obama seems intent on burning down the house of cards that is NASA, presumably to replace it with an agency that can actually design worthwhile missions without wholesale wasting of taxpayer dollars. First, we learned that the transition team has been circling around NASA’s Constellation program.

Now, today I read that Obama is basically going to outsource a good bit of NASA engineering to the Defense Department. Bloomberg reports that Obama may force NASA to use DOD rockets, which will be cheaper and ready sooner than NASA’s planned Ares (right), which isn’t slated until 2015.

And this is all in the context of China’s rapidly advancing space program, which definitely has Pentagon eyebrows raised.

China’s military carried out a spacewalk in 2008, plans to land a robot on the moon in 2012 and a man on the moon thereafter. Meanwhile, the US will be hitching rides with Russia between 2010 when the shuttle is scrapped and 2015 (at the soonest) when Orion is to be launched.

It’s no secret Obama’s team wants to scrap NASA’s Ares rocket. The Pentagon’s Delta IV and Atlas V rockets are “basically developed,” says John Logsdon of the National Air and Space Museum. “You don’t have to build them from scratch.”

(from NASA craft may ride on Pentagon rockets, ZDNet)