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Nightly Ramble Monday

Welcome back my friends, to the show that was on pause too long… the BitsBlog Nightly Ramble

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  • YEAH, I KNOW…. I let these Nightly Forays into political  and social commentary slide for a few nights. I’m still getting used to the new job.  I’ve been coming home each night well after 4pm, so tired so as to have enough to shower, eat dinner and go to bed.  I think I may end up running this thing on a different schedule, but we’ll see.
  • A VAT TAX? Fox News has an opinion piece by Olivier Garret [2] suggesting that the implications of any Value-Added Tax (VAT),  such as what is currently being floated by the Democrats, would be most harmful  to those who are least able to afford tax increases.  Funny thing; aren’t the Democrats supposed to be fighting for the poor, instead of the poor’s money?   Oh… and of course, it would fuel additional levels of  spending by government .  Obama taxing and spending in record amounts. Please spare me the pretense that you’re shocked by any of this.
  • HAWKING SAYS FORGET “CLOSE ENCOUNTERS” IN an artcile in the Times of London, Jonathan Leake reports:
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    Doctor Hawking

    THE aliens are out there and Earth had better watch out, at least according to Stephen Hawking. He has suggested that extraterrestrials are almost certain to exist — but that instead of seeking them out, humanity should be doing all it that can to avoid any contact.

    The suggestions come in a new documentary series in which Hawking, one of the world’s leading scientists, will set out his latest thinking on some of the universe’s greatest mysteries.

    Alien life, he will suggest, is almost certain to exist in many other parts of the universe: not just in planets, but perhaps in the centre of stars or even floating in interplanetary space.

    Hawking’s logic on aliens is, for him, unusually simple. The universe, he points out, has 100 billion galaxies, each containing hundreds of millions of stars. In such a big place, Earth is unlikely to be the only planet where life has evolved.

    [4]Fair enough so far. But why the fear of contact?

    “If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans.”

    Hmmm. A reasonable point.And that assumes that the species we contact will be friendly.  Columbus while hardly overtly hostile to the natives he found here, caused a health crisis as well as a cultural one. Add the 50/50 likelihood that anyone we do manage to contact won’t be nearly as warm and non-aggressive as our little friends here.

  • FANNIE AND FREDDIE AMNESIA: That’s the headline on this Wall Street Journal bit [5]from the other day.  Peter Wallison reminds us how we’ve gotten to the fix we’re in with both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and what the Obama administration wants to do to fix a problem he helped create five years ago. Of course the trouble is, as with every other fix Obama has ever applied, it’ll make the situation worse, not better.
  • WHAT WAS THE PROBLEM, AGAIN? Bio-Diesel is a cure for a problem that didn’t exist.  Now, we find out it’s worse than what it cured. [6]