The Big Bust

All too soon after a beautiful beginning, during which all of its proton beams fired true, super-cooled substances have brought about our downfall once more, and it will be spring before the Large Hadron Collider gets turned on again. After a blown transformer caused a leak of liquid helium inside the world’s largest particle accelerator, it became clear that the problem, inside a part of the collider that runs so cold it will take weeks to return to room temperature, would not be fixed by the time the CERN staff leaves on it’s winter vacation in November. Stupid helium.

This means that dark matter, Higgs bosons or tiny black holes will be created by the LHC until the spring of 2009, leaving us all wondering, for at least a few months more, just what IS the nature of the universe?

But on the other hand, the thing didn’t implode the universe on activation, so for right now, it’s probably safe to call the situation a wash.

R.I.P. - Irony in Politics

After 26 year Washington veteran John McCain accused Barack Obama of being a beltway insider this week, you might have thought the campaign couldn't get any more ironical.

You would have been wrong.

Recently, Republicans in Fairfax County, Virginia asked themselves a question. "Who do we know who can really reach out to minority voters in our area?" And the resounding answer came back - Confederate Flag waving, noose displaying former Senator George "Macaca" Allen, who will be a featured speaker at a minority voter outreach event this weekend. This is really the absolute limit - it's so balls out stupid that it's just sad - right before it crosses back over to being funny again. That this is the person the GOP thinks represents their best chance of pleading their party's case to voters, then they're is in even bigger trouble than we thought.

Meanwhile, if the Grand Old Party is looking for someone to help get out the youth vote in Florida, can I make a reccomendation? Former state representive Mark Foley, who has demonstrated an unparalleled skill in connecting and developing dialogue with young males - albeit not quite those of voting age.

Making Your Money Work For... Someone, Somewhere, Presumably

Today saw markets around the globe soar, mostly on the happy thoughts of investors whose moods have been buoyed by a U.S. plan to rescue American financial markets from the consequences of a decade of fast and loose money management. The hope is that the plan, whose speculated cost runs somewehere in the trillions of dollars, will, like Homer Simpson's ample rump, "turn a potential Chernobyl into a mere Three Mile Island" of economic collapse.

So what will the plan to stem Wall Street's bleeding and keep the current kerfuffle from growing into a full fledged fiasco look like? We don't know yet. We do know that it will cost a lot of taxpayer money, without a guaranteed payback of said funds. We know that President Bush today called for the speedy passage of legislation "as quickly as possible without adding controversial provisions that could delay action," which one can assume means that the administration doesn't want to see any meaningful penal measures that would make investment banks think twice before doing anything like this again. Whatever the end plan is, it will involve borrowing more cash from China. We'll probably know exactly how much is going to be spent by early next week, as Bush assured the American public, like Fed Secerarary Paulson before him, that lawmakers will be working through the weekend to cleanup a mess it took them years of lax oversight to make. Which is admirable, even if you have to wish they'd stop acting like they deserve medals for coming into work on Saturday.

So, other than spending your money, what is the government doing about the financial crisis? They've also prohibited short selling of 799 financial stocks for the next two weeks. This move was lauded by investment banks like Morgan Stanley and Goldman, who in the past have made money for their clients (and thus themselves) by... you guessed it - short selling stocks. Naturally, when they do it, this is a good thing for the economy, but when it's done to them, the sky is falling. But taken together with banks that are soon going to be artificially propped up by government funds and false confidence, the facts that some of the best watchdogs for corporate malfeasance and dodgy accounting (keep in mind it was short sellers who brought about the falls of companies like Enron and Worldcom), and it may be a while before we really know what sort of damage has been done to the economy. and that means it will be even longer before we even start fixing it.

Ridiculous

A short list of things you should not, under any circumstances, do while texting:

- Cook a meal

- Order dinner from a server

- Drive your car

- Manage your finances

- Drive a goddamned train

Condolences to the families of everyone the 25 who passed away and the hundreds who were injured because this conductor couldn't wait ten minutes to find out "What R U doing 2nite?"

Now, if you'd asked me a couple of weeks ago whether we needed technology that made trains more or less capable of operating their own brakes, I would have told you no, it seems like STOPPING AT A RED LIGHT is something so basic, so throughly ingrained in our collective psyche, that people who have presumably been trained to operate commuter trains, or at least given a brochure one how to do so at some point, would be well capable of doing so. But apparently, as is so often the case, it appears that we must bring in robots to do jobs that we're too stupid to do safely and reliably.