While most of the media are fixated on Benghazi, the IRS abuses, and the
DOJ’s interest in reporters’ phone calls, the biggest scandal of all
may be Kathleen Sebelius’ shakedown of health care companies to pay for activities Congress has refused to fund.
It is illegal for government officials to solicit money from companies they regulate, according to Sarah Kliff from TheWashington Post....
Their story was posted May 23, 2013. Mine was initially posted May 20, 2013.
Of course, Ms Sibelius will escape any repercussions, but fortunately for the internet and a few good reporters, the story was reported, and the activity will stop (hopefully).
“But here is the bottom line — the media shield law, which I am prepared
to support, and I know Sen. Graham supports, still leaves an unanswered
question, which I have raised many times: What is a journalist today in
2013? We know it’s someone that works for Fox or AP, but does it
include a blogger? Does it include someone who is tweeting? Are these
people journalists and entitled to constitutional protection? We need to
ask 21st century questions about a provision that was written over 200 years ago.”
So, according to the senator, free speech applies only to "journalists"? That seems a bit unusual. Call me crazy, but it seems to be getting more and more difficult to be an apologist for this administration.
Dani Reichenberger, franchisee of the restaurant, said Buffalo Wild
Wings will open to the public at 11 a.m. Monday. And she is excited to
get going with the restaurant she said will be a perfect fit for
Williston.
“What doesn’t make it a good fit?” she asked with
a smile. “Buffalo Wild Wings is an extremely community-connected
business, a community oriented business.”
The restaurant chain is known nationwide for its wings and sports. Both will be on display in Williston.
“We have all sports packages,” she said. “We show
boxing, UFC, NFL, NCAA, baseball, basketball. We have 63 big-screen TVs
and can show 13 games at one time.”
Construction on the Buffalo Wild Wings building that was
originally scheduled to open in February has been somewhat delayed due
to the winter weather, according to Dani Reichenberger, director of
operations for Wings of Minot, LLC.
Ground was officially broken Sept. 4 to kick off construction
for Williston’s first BWW located at 417 Reiger Drive, just south of the
Herman Oil convenience store.
Employees? 200 who have just completed a week of training. 200 employees! Williston is changing faster than one can keep up. Google maps cannot yet locate "Reiger Drive."
In the housing crunched Bakken region, workforce housing companies in
one oil field town are attempting to market themselves differently to
get a piece of a shrinking pie.
Gene Veeder, economic development
director for Watford City, said he is seeing a shift in the market from
temporary housing to permanent, which is causing more competition among
providers of single person, efficiency facilities.
One site that
markets itself as a combination commercial and residential space and
another that has made privacy a priority are just two examples.
Bakken
Residence Suites sits about three miles south of Watford City. The
complex’s one-bedroom studio-type rooms and two-bedroom cabins provide
an alternative to man camp living in the area.
I prefer the earlier version, but the more recent video is incredible. I served a tour in England, northeast of London, 1986 - 1989. I enjoyed it, but had not yet fallen in love with the country.
But then, over the course of four memorable years from 2001 to 2004, I returned to northern England (Yorkshire) and fell in love with that country. The Brits march to their own drummer. Watching the Brits wave their flag brought back bittersweet memories, and yes, tears. Playing it loud, very loud, helps drown out some of the bittersweet memories.
[Spanish guitar / operatic interpretation / Tijuana brass not as powerful as the original version, in my mind.]
Bell field has been updated. Whiting is very, very active at the moment in Bell field. In addition to the Pronghorn middle Bakken/Pronghorn sand formation, the Tyler formation looks promising in this area.
From the linked update:
Some Tyler wells, still producing, have passed the 500,000 bbl
milestone for total oil produced and are still producing. One example
is:
9706, 571, New Millennium Resources (orig CENEX), Decker 1-32, Bell field, Tyler, 750K bbls as of 3/13; still producing 2,000 bbls/month; spudded 1982; 31 years of production
Israel's trailblazing electric car company Better Place announced
Sunday that it is shutting down, less than six years after unveiling an
ambitious plan that promised to revolutionize the auto industry by
reducing the world's dependency on oil.
Better Place was perhaps Israel's best known clean-tech company and a
leading symbol of its "startup" nation status. Israel, along with
Denmark, was the company's test market for developing nationwide
networks of charging and battery-swapping stations that it hoped would
eventually spread globally. But the company experienced repeated delays
in getting off the ground and experienced weak demand for its cars after
burning through millions of dollars.
The announcement that the company was filing for liquidation comes
less than eight months after company founder Shai Agassi was forced out.
The project won the support of Israeli President Shimon Peres, received
generous financial incentives from the Israeli government and made
Agassi a dynamic celebrity CEO.
Another reminder how incredibly the technology must be to get the "right" battery.
The interesting thing: Israel is so tiny, "range" for the battery-car should not have been an issue. And with all the natural gas Israel is finding, they will have no trouble producing electricity. If the Israelis can't make EVs work, it just begs the question...
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A Note to the Granddaughters
I guess I'm still in my Los Alamos / quantum mechanics reading phase. While visiting Tucson, my niece(s) introduced me to Louise Gilder's book, c. 2008,The Age of Enganglement: When Quantum Physics Was Reborn. My review of the book at Amazon. com should be up by the end of the week.
The author was 25 years old when she wrote this book, her first book.
Some years ago, I was unable to find the answer to the question: how and when was "quantum mechanics" invented? In high school and college, the atomic theory and quantum mechanics was presented in such a way that to those unfamiliar with how scientific discoveries were made (including me at the time) that it seemed like it "just happened."
Louise Gilder really does an outstanding job tracing the development of quantum mechanics. It will be interesting to see how quantum mechanics plays out over the next fifty years. It will be most interesting to see if what you lean in college (in about 10 years) is all that different than what I learned in college in 1972.
The book is just full of bits of trivia we all know, or should know, but have forgotten or never learned.
For example. back in 1927, one one atomic particle had ever been successfully predicted: Einstine's photon. The photon was one of only three particles even known at that time, and the other two had been found experimentally: the electron and the proton.
Feynmann, I believe, has said no one understands, and no one can understand quantum mechanics, and yet, with the development of QM, theorists predicted dozens of atomic and sub-atomic particles which have gone on to be experimentally confirmed. It's almost a metaphysics, I suppose.
And then this, in the golden years of physics (the five years after the 1927 Solvay Congress), "they" split the atom." A 25-year-old Gamow predicted that the proton, as a WAVE, could burrown into the nucleus and split it, but as a PARTICLE, the proton could not split the nucleus. Is that not bizarre? On April 13 or April 14, "they split the atom." [The exact date is open to question: two of the physicists dated their logs on this momentous day, but one dated it April 13th, one April 14th.]
This is a hard book to read; my review at Amazon, when it goes live, expands on this.
