The Thing Keeping The USA Together? Pork Barrels.

Oh my:

… Earlier this year, lawmakers set aside $436 million for the construction and maintenance of the mighty M-1 Abrams tank, of which the Army currently has more than 2,300—with another 3,000 in storage.

That might sound like enough tanks for the American military, and sure enough the Army agrees. “If we had our choice, we would use that money in a different way,” Gen. Ray Odierno, the Army’s chief of staff, told the Associated Press in April.

So why build more tanks? General Dynamics, the tank’s manufacturer, has aggressively lobbied to keep the M-1 in production. There’s also just one factory in the whole country that manufactures the Abrams: the Lima Army Tank Plant in Ohio. Such a seemingly precious facility is sure to inspire a fierce defense by backers against any attempt to shut it down. …

Once the money stream to "defence" contractors and to the banks from the state starts to dry up, you will see "interesting times".

In other news: CIA claims release of "Bay of Pigs" files would "confuse the public"

What Andy Warhol got wrong about “Campbell's Soup Cans”

I recently read a Salon.com piece titled:
What Stanley Kubrick got wrong about “The Shining”.

O.o

Oh, Kubrick got The Shining somehow wrong?

Quite interesting assertion. Maybe akin to the assertion that Andy Warhol got the "Campbell's Soup Cans" wrong, when he painted them in false colors.

(And no, I am not going to dignify such a piece of click-bait with an link. Go use a internet search engine, if you must.)

Bruce Hoglund: Why Don't We Use Nuclear Waste?

Bruce Hoglund shows us how to take spent nuclear fuel (aka "nuclear waste"), store it, store it safely, and at the same time produce energy:

Digging a hole in the ground and bearing your spent fuel seems a bit stupid now, does it?

Nuclear? What Type Of Nuclear?

Hypothetically, there are 900 types of nuclear reactors:

The enormous difficulty of choosing a proper path for reactor development is easily seen by estimating the number of conceivable reactor types. With  

• 3 fissionable fuels [²³³U, ²³⁵U, ²³⁹Pu], 
• 2 fertile materials [²³²Th & ²³⁸U],  
• 3 neutron energy ranges [slow or thermal, epithermal or resonance, & fast], 
• at least 5 coolant types [2 waters {light & heavy}, sodium, CO₂, He, & air], 
• 5 moderators [light & heavy water, graphite, beryllium, & beryllium oxide], 
• and 2 general categories of geometrical arrangement (heterogeneous and homogeneous), 

there are 900 possible combinations! [3 x 2 x 3 x 5 x 5 x 2 = 900]

Of course not all of these are sensible; for example a fast reactor could hardly be cooled with H₂O. Even so, there are probably at least 100 combinations which are not obviously unfeasible.

Plus there are liquid salt and liquid lead as possible coolants of the future. Which raises the hypothetical 900 to hypothetical 1260. At least.

Say It Ain't True

The Day Mandela Was Arrested, With A Little Help From the CIA – Newsweek

"McIntyre’s Razor has a Stihl edge."

Best comment ever.