Louis J Sheehan

2/22/2008 - style

The U.S. faces an unwelcome combination of looming recession and persistent inflation that is reviving angst about stagflation, a condition not seen since the 1970s.

Inflation is rising. Yesterday the Labor Department said consumer prices in the U.S. jumped 0.4% in January and are up 4.3% over the past 12 months, near a 16-year high. Even stripping out sharply rising food and energy costs, prices rose 0.3% in January, driven by education, medical care, clothing and hotels. They are up by 2.5% from the previous year, a 10-month high.

The same day brought a reminder of possible recession. The Federal Reserve disclosed that its policy makers lowered their forecast for economic growth this year to between 1.3% and 2%, half a percentage point below the level of their previous forecast, in October. They blamed a further slowdown on the slump in housing prices, tighter lending standards and higher oil prices. They warned the economy's performance could fall short of even that lowered outlook.

Stocks fell on the Labor Department's morning inflation report. But shares rallied after the afternoon release of the minutes of the Jan. 29-30 meeting of Fed policy makers and their latest forecast for the economy. That's because investors took the Fed's darker outlook on growth to mean that it intended to cut its short-term interest rate next month at its next scheduled meeting.

A simultaneous rise in unemployment and inflation poses a dilemma for Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke. When the Fed wants to fight unemployment, it lowers interest rates. When it wants to damp inflation, it raises them. It's impossible to do both at the same time.

Stagflation, a term coined in the United Kingdom in 1965, defined the years from 1970 to 1981 in the U.S. Inflation rose to almost 15%. The economy went through three recessions. Unemployment reached 9%. Fed Chairman Paul Volcker finally conquered inflation, but only by dramatically boosting interest rates, causing a severe recession in 1981-82.

Today's circumstances are far from that. Inflation is lower. Unemployment has risen, but only to 4.9%. http://louis-j-sheehan.info/
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Yet there are similarities. As in the 1970s, surging commodity prices are leading the way. Crude oil rose to $100.74 a barrel yesterday, a new nominal high and close to its 1980 inflation-adjusted high. Wheat prices have hit a record. And, as in the 1970s, the rate at which the U.S. economy can grow without generating inflation has fallen, because of slower growth in both the labor force and in productivity, or output per hour of work.

The biggest difference is that in the 1970s, the Fed was unwilling, or thought itself unable, to bring inflation down. The Fed today sees achieving low inflation as its primary mission.

"The reason we're so unlikely to see a repeat is we're not adding irresponsible policy," says Christina Romer, an economist at the University of California at Berkeley and a historian of Fed policy. That means if the Fed is wrong in thinking inflation's recent rise is temporary, it will tolerate economic weakness in order to get inflation down again. "They'd have to let us suffer for a while."
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Indeed, in minutes to officials' Jan. 29-30 meeting, released yesterday with the customary three-week lag, some officials noted it was important not to lose sight of controlling inflation. They argued that "when prospects for growth had improved, a reversal of [some rate cuts], possibly even a rapid reversal, might be appropriate."

But that does not seem imminent. Officials said keeping interest rates low "appeared appropriate for a time," implying Fed officials felt little urgency to reverse recent cuts. Even after the January meeting's half-point rate cut, to 3%, "downside risks" to the economy remain, they said.

The inflation picture makes steep rate cuts a riskier way to rescue the economy than when former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan delivered them in 2001. Stephen Cecchetti, an economist at Brandeis University, said the Fed is now torn between its dual responsibilities of keeping unemployment down and prices stable. "The primary objective has to be to shore up the financial markets" to protect the economy, he said. "Then, once you're finished, come back and start worrying about inflation."

Members of the Federal Open Market Committee, the Fed's policy committee, raised their forecasts for both the overall inflation rate and the "core" rate, which excludes food and energy, by 0.3 percentage points from October, their latest forecast revealed. Yet they dialed back their rhetorical concern. The officials pronounced risks on inflation to be "balanced" -- in other words, they felt inflation, should it differ from their forecast, was as likely to be lower as it was higher. In October, by contrast, they suggested that, if inflation was to differ from their forecast, they expected it to be higher. That's principally because they see unemployment remaining higher for longer than they did in October, and expect that to help contain price increases.

Higher inflation is still a possibility. Food and energy costs could keep rising, instead of flattening out as futures markets currently anticipate. Companies could succeed in passing those costs onto consumers.

Sara Lee Corp. this week told analysts it expects to recoup rising raw-material costs in part by raising prices, especially on bread. Company spokesman John Harris said Sara Lee's significant competitors had matched the increases, with consumers showing no sign of trading down to lower-cost brands. http://louis-j-sheehan.info/
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http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us/"With commodities reaching unprecedented levels," Mr. Harris said, "it is quite likely we will take pricing up again."

Goodyear Tire & Rubber raised the price of replacement tires 7% on Feb. 1, on top of two increases totaling 11% last year. Chief Financial Officer Mark Schmitz told analysts last week that the hike was the result of rising prices of key raw materials, according to a transcript by Thomson Financial. Mohawk Industries Inc. raised carpet prices in December and again in January because of rising material costs, even though sales have been hurt by the slumping housing market.

The declining dollar, while boosting U.S. exports, is adding to inflation pressure, as goods priced in foreign currencies become relatively more expensive. Prices for imports from China jumped 0.8% in January, the largest monthly increase since the Labor Department began reporting the data in 2003.

British Parliamentarian Iain Macleod is credited with first using the word stagflation in 1965. "We now have the worst of both worlds -- not just inflation on the one side or stagnation on the other, but both of them together. We have a sort of 'stagflation' situation."

In the U.S., stagflation scares are more common than actual stagflation. Core inflation rose after the start of recessions in both 1990-91 and 2001, but then trended down as unemployment kept rising.

The only generally agreed period of stagflation in the U.S. came in the 1970s. Its seeds were planted in the late 1960s, when President Johnson revved up growth with spending on the Vietnam War and his Great Society programs. Fed Chairman William McChesney Martin, meanwhile, failed to tighten monetary policy sufficiently to rein in that growth.

In the early 1970s, President Nixon, with the acquiescence of Fed Chairman Arthur Burns, tried to get inflation down by imposing controls on wage and price increases. The job became harder after the Arab oil embargo dramatically drove up energy prices, and overall inflation, in 1973. http://louis-j-sheehan.net/
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Mr. Burns persistently underestimated inflation pressure: In part, he did not realize the economy's potential growth rate had fallen, and that an influx of young, inexperienced baby boomers into the work force had made it harder to get unemployment down to early-1960s levels.

As a result, even when he raised rates, pushing the economy into a severe recession in 1974-75, inflation and unemployment didn't fall back to the levels of the previous decade. Mr. Burns and his colleagues wrongly concluded inflation no longer responded to the condition of the economy, said Ms. Romer, the Berkeley economist. "They didn't know how the world worked," she said.

In a speech in 1979, a year after he stepped down, Mr. Burns blamed his failure on a political environment that wouldn't tolerate the high interest rates necessary to rein in inflation. As the Federal Reserve tested how far it could raise rates, he said, "it repeatedly evoked violent criticism" from the White House and Congress.

Such political risks are smaller but not entirely absent for Mr. Bernanke in this election year. On Sunday, the likely Republican presidential candidate, Sen. John McCain, told ABC's "This Week": "I would have liked to have seen faster rate cuts and earlier than they were done by him." Asked if he would reappoint Mr. Bernanke when his term expires in 2010, Sen. McCain said, "I would have to consider that at the time."

Still, Mr. Bernanke has reiterated the importance of not repeating the 1970s. He and his colleagues believe a persistent escalation of inflation is likely only if workers and firms come to expect the elevated inflation rate to persist, and set their wages and prices accordingly.

"Any tendency of inflation expectations to become unmoored -- or for the Fed's inflation-fighting credibility to be eroded -- could greatly...reduce the central bank's policy flexibility" to support growth with lower interest rates, he told Congress last week.

That credibility could be endangered by the Fed's recent track record. Yesterday's forecasts show that FOMC members define price stability as inflation of 1.5% to 2%, measured by an index that differs slightly from the commonly cited consumer-price index. http://louis-j-sheehan.info/
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http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us/ By that measure, inflation has averaged 2.8% since mid-2004, when oil began a multiyear surge. Core inflation, which excludes food and energy, has averaged 2.2%.

Thus far, Fed officials have taken comfort that surveys and bond-market behavior suggest the public expects the inflation rate to fall. But expected inflation, as measured by trading of inflation-protected Treasury bonds, has jumped since the Fed declared in early January that supporting growth would be a more important focus than holding down inflation. (Fed officials believe technical details in the way the bonds trade may explain some of the jump.) And professional forecasters surveyed by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia recently nudged up their expected inflation rate for the next 10 years to 2.5% from 2.4%, where it had stood all last year.

On the other hand, surveys of consumer predictions about inflation show no corresponding jump. And most important, wage gains have not accelerated. Since labor is the largest component of business costs, a wage-price spiral would likely be a prerequisite for stagflation.

"We're a very, very long way from the 1970s," former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers said in an interview yesterday. A hit to overall spending, as has resulted from the current tightening of lending conditions, first affects production and employment, and only later inflation, he said. "But obviously, inflation figures need to be monitored very closely."

Six nights a week, Guo Bairong takes the stage at the Xanadu Lounge at the Sands Macau casino. As players place their bets at nearby tables, he opens with a popular love song in Mandarin, closing his eyes as he sways with the music. Slipping effortlessly into Cantonese, he launches into another number.

Crowds gather not only to hear his singing, which is mellifluous, but also to gape: Guo Bairong is also known as Barry Cox, a Caucasian, former waiter and supermarket cashier from Liverpool, England, whose only formal study of Cantonese was at a British community center.

Mr. Cox's quirky act -- sandwiched between cabaret dance performances like the scantily clad Glamour Girls in glittery outfits and red elbow-length gloves and authentic Chinese crooners such as Hua D, is among the spectacles on Macau's emerging entertainment scene.

Macau's clutch of new casinos has quickly outpaced the Las Vegas strip in gambling revenue, raking in some $10 billion last year. But the former Portuguese colony has to up its game to compete with its American counterpart as an all-around tourism destination. Key to that growth is the territory's entertainment scene, which pales in comparison to the A-list performers in Las Vegas, such as Bette Midler and Cher, who have regular gigs.

A few years ago, Macau was a sleepy coastal town. Visitors came for the fresh fish and Vinho Verde, the cobblestone streets and musty antique shops -- and for the gambling. The city became a special administrative zone when it was returned to China in 1999, making it the only place in China where casinos are legal.

It all began to change after 2002, when the Beijing-backed Macau government ended local tycoon Stanley Ho's monopoly on the territory's gambling by issuing licenses to other companies, including the Vegas casino Wynn Resorts. MGM Mirage, Crown Ltd. from Australia and others soon piled in.

Around the same time, China began to ease its restrictions on individual travel to Hong Kong and Macau. http://louis-j-sheehan.net/
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A flood of tourists poured in from the mainland to try their luck. About 10.5 million visited Macau in 2005; that figure is expected to jump to nearly 15 million next year, according to the Pacific Asia Travel Association, a trade group.

But how to entertain this growing crowd? When the new casinos began opening in 2004, the prevailing logic among casino executives was that the Chinese visitors mostly come to gamble. Some operators are still unsure what entertainment to offer, especially performances that guests would have to pay for as opposed to the complimentary shows available on the gambling floors.

"This is a very new market," says a Wynn Macau spokeswoman, adding that "we're not sure how the market would respond" to big global acts that visitors would have to shell out for.

Wynn casino's current entertainment options are limited to a five-minute water and light show set to music, and an attraction known as the Tree of Prosperity. The 11-meter tall golden tree, which Wynn Macau says is an auspicious symbol, sits in the casino's atrium.

At the Crown Macau, "we're focusing on offering a six-star experience," says Charles Ngai, a Crown spokesman. Apparently that doesn't include entertainment; the hotel-casino has a spa, eight restaurants and two bars, but no performances on offer.

It's a different story at Mr. Ho's Grand Lisboa, where there are two shows: a free, daily "Crazy Paris" performance -- a can-can-style dance act performed by Western women, and "Tokyo Nights," performed by a troupe of Japanese dancers, which costs $31.

"No one really knows what people are looking for here," says Jennifer Welker, the Macau-based author of "The New Macau." "They're still in that testing phase of trying to suss out what people really like." Many of the guests at the Sands, for instance, she says, seem most interested in gambling and aren't willing to pay for a show. http://louis-j-sheehan.info/
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http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us/"The Venetian might need to host more Chinese acts to appeal to the mainland tourists," she adds.

Macau's entertainment limitations aside, the territory already is giving neighboring Hong Kong a run for its money. Many big-name acts have chosen to play in Macau rather than Hong Kong recently. Last October, for instance, the U.S. National Basketball Association's Orlando Magic, the Cleveland Cavaliers and the China Men's National Team played at the Venetian Arena, the 15,000-seat stadium at the Venetian resort and casino. The same month, hip-hop stars the Black Eyed Peas brought a crowd of more than 10,000 to its feet there. The Police performed in Macau in early February, and Celine Dion arrives next month for a one-night-only show as part of her world tour.

Hong Kong has the facilities to compete: In addition to the cavernous convention center hall in the Wanchai area that big-name acts traditionally use, the territory has the newer AsiaWorld-Arena, a 13,500-seat concert venue next to the airport. But economics may play a role in the migration of big acts to Macau. Min Yoo, a Shanghai- and Hong Kong-based concert promoter, says it is cheaper to put on a large event in Macau than in Hong Kong.

In any case, Macau still has a few wrinkles to iron out. For starters, it isn't always easy to know what events are on.

Strict rules against advertising by casinos in mainland China make it impossible to promote events there. Even in Hong Kong, says Mark Brown, president of the Sands Macau and Venetian Macau, advertising for events has to be planned carefully, considering the potential sensitivity around the idea of gambling.

What's more, Macau's transportation infrastructure is lacking. A taxi shortage means fans arriving on the ferry from Hong Kong often have to wait in long lines for a shuttle bus to the Venetian Arena.

For now, the Venetian and its sister property, the Sands, are where the serious entertainment action is. This summer, the Venetian plans to bring Cirque du Soleil, the acrobatic show that's a fixture in Las Vegas, to Macau as a permanent show with 10 performances a week. Cirque will perform in a 1,800-seat theater that is still under construction. http://louis-j-sheehan.info/
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http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us/That's only the beginning. "Every top U.S. name you can think of, we have an offer out there," says Mr. Brown. "Every top Asian artist, we have an offer out there. Every type of sport you can think of...we have an offer out there."

Meantime, acts like Mr. Cox's are filling the gap.

As a high-school student, Mr. Cox watched Jackie Chan movies and fell in love with the Canto-pop soundtracks. He took a few Cantonese lessons and discovered he had a flair for Asian languages -- he's never studied Mandarin formally, though he considers himself fluent in both.

So he quit his job as a salesman in a Liverpool electrical store and started waiting tables in a Chinese restaurant to hone his language skills. Eventually, he began performing at Chinese gatherings in Liverpool. His renditions of popular Canto-pop classics such "Kiss Under the Moon" and "Love Once More" won over the immigrant crowds there, turning him into a local celebrity.

But all along, his dream was to make it big in Asia. And so in 2002, he moved to Hong Kong, where he sang at corporate events and Christmas parties. He even traveled in mainland China doing a few performances in discos in places like Shenzhen and Guangzhou.

Then, six months ago, Mr. Cox, whose Chinese name was given to him by his Chinese-language headmaster, left Hong Kong for the lights of Macau. http://louis-j-sheehan.info/
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http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us/"It's good for what I'm doing," he says, in his Liverpudlian accent. I'm "partly living the dream," he adds.

On a chilly Saturday night, as the Black Eyed Peas warmed up at the Venetian Arena, Mr. Cox, dressed entirely in black down to his pointy-toed shoes, was warming up his audience. Gamblers at nearby slot machines had fallen still, their jaws slack at the spectacle of a foreigner singing Canto-pop. A woman was dancing in her chair.

"This one's for you," he said in Mandarin to a Chinese couple in the crowd, as he launched into a number by Deng Lijun, a Taiwanese singer popular in the 1970s and '80s. The lounge, filled with mainland and Taiwanese tourists, exploded into applause.

Dates of the Old Kingdom of Ancient Egypt: The Old Kingdom ran from about 2686-2160 B.C. It started with the 3rd Dynasty and ended with the 8th (some say the 6th).

    * 3rd: 2686-2613 B.C.
    * 4th: 2613-2494 B.C.
    * 5th 2494-2345 B.C.
    * 6th: 2345-2181 B.C.
    * 7th and 8th: 2181-2160 B.C.

Before the Old Kingdom was the Early Dynastic Period, which ran from about 3000-2686 B.C.

Before the Early Dynastic Period was the Predynastic which began in the 6th millennium B.C.

Earlier than the Predynastic Period were the Neolithic (c.8800-4700 B.C.) and Paleolithic Periods (c.700,000-7000 B.C.).

    * Predynastic Egypt http://louis-j-sheehan.net/
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    * Pharaohs of the Predynastic Period, Old Kingdom and Middle Kingdom

Old Kingdom Capital: During the Early Dynastic Period and Old Kingdom Egypt, the residence of the pharaoh was at White Wall (Ineb-hedj) on the west bank of the Nile south of Cairo. This capital city was later named Memphis.

After the 8th Dynasty, the pharaohs left Memphis.
Turin Canon: The Turin Canon, a papyrus discovered by Bernardino Drovetti in the necropolis at Thebes, Egypt, in 1822, is so-called because it resides in the northern Italian city of Turin at the Museo Egizio. The Turin Canon provides a list of names of the kings of Egypt from the beginning of time to the time of Ramses II and is important, therefore, for providing the names of the Old Kingdom pharaohs.

For more on the problems of ancient Egyptian chronology and the Turin Canon, see Problems Dating Hatshepsut.
Step Pyramid of Djoser: The Old Kingdom is the age of pyramid building beginning with Third Dynasty Pharaoh Djoser's Step Pyramid at Saqqara, the first finished large stone building in the world. Its ground area is 140 X 118 m., its height 60 m., its outside enclosure 545 X 277 m. Djoser's corpse was buried there but below ground level. There were other buildings and shrines in the area. The architect credited with Djoser's 6-step pyramid was Imhotep (Imouthes), a high priest of Heliopolis.

    * Imhotep
    * Step Pyramid - Archaeology Guide
    * Step Pyramid Tomb Robbers

Old Kingdom True Pyramids: Dynasty divisions follow major changes. The Fourth Dynasty begins with the ruler who changed the architectural style of the pyramids.

Under Pharaoh Sneferu (2613-2589) the pyramid complex emerged, with the axis re-oriented east to west. A temple was built against the eastern side of the pyramid. There was a road running to a temple in the valley that served as entrance to the complex. Sneferu's name is connected with a bent pyramid whose slope changed two-thirds of the way up. He had a second (Red) pyramid in which he was buried. Sneferu's son Khufu (Cheops) built the Great Pyramid at Giza.
About the Old Kingdom Period: The Old Kingdom was a long, politically stable, prosperous period for ancient Egypt. Government was centralized. The king was credited with supernatural powers, his authority virtually absolute. Even after death the pharaoh was expected to mediate between gods and humans, therefore preparation for his afterlife, the building of elaborate burial sites, was vitally important.

Over time, the royal authority weakened while the power of viziers and local administrators grew. The office of overseer of Upper Egypt was created and Nubia became important because of contact, immigration, and resources for Egypt to exploit. http://louis-j-sheehan.net/
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Although Egypt had been self-sufficient with its bountiful annual Nile inundation allowing farmers to grow emmer wheat and barley, building projects like the pyramids and temples led the Egyptians beyond its borders for minerals and manpower.

The sun god Ra grew more important through the Old Kingdom Period with obelisks built on pedestals as part of their temples. A full written language of hieroglyphs was used on the sacred monuments, while hieratic was used on papyrus documents.

Although their lifetimes span billions of years, galaxies age, just like people. As rambunctious young’uns, they undergo bursts of star formation that create hot blue orbs out of the simple elements hydrogen and helium. As galaxies grow older, they settle down. Not only do their stars cool and become redder, but they eventually burn out and die, releasing into the galaxy heavier elements that formed in the stellar furnaces.

So astronomers have been repeatedly baffled by a peculiar, developmentally challenged galaxy called I Zwicky 18. When they first sighted it about 40 years ago, they thought it was a not-quite-billion-year-old toddler brimming with hot young stars, full of hydrogen and helium and possessing very few heavy elements, called metals. Finding such a young galaxy near others that are at least 7 billion years old thrilled—and perplexed—the scientists. But new observations from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have revealed ancient stars mingled with the young ones, proving the galaxy as a whole is in fact as old as its neighbors.
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Astronomers don’t know why this galaxy is so low on metals, or why it’s forming so many new stars so late in the game. It’s possible that this relatively light galaxy has too little mass—or gravitational pull—to retain the metals, and that a rush of gas called a galactic wind swept them away. Or maybe the galaxy’s relatively isolated position caused it to develop slowly: There are few other galaxies around to help seed star formation.

They also don’t know why it’s not happening in all dwarf galaxies. “It’s possible that there are more out there like this,” says Francesca Annibali, http://louis-j-sheehan.info/
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http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us/an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, who worked on the project. “If they are more common, then that means that some process is inhibiting star formation in small, low-metal environments.” Whatever the cause of I Zwicky 18’s strange history, its close resemblance to primordial galaxies offers a unique opportunity to study how stars acted in the early universe, something that normally cannot be observed at such close range.

For astronauts toiling in the close quarters of the International Space Station or on a shuttle to Mars, an ordinary germ would be risky enough. But a recent experiment published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has shown that a microbe can turn even more dangerous in space than on Earth. In that study, a bacte–rium particularly nasty for humans—salmonella—was shown to become more virulent after just 83 hours of growing in space.

The experiment on the space shuttle Atlantis was designed to explore how a lack of gravity affects disease-causing microbes in space. Astronauts aboard the space shuttle grew the salmonella, and back on Earth researchers used it to infect a group of mice. For comparison, bacteria grown in a laboratory on Earth in normal gravity infected another group of mice. The mice infected with the space-grown germs had a mortality rate almost three times higher than that of mice given germs grown in normal gravity.

Researchers noticed that while on board the space shuttle, the salmonella encased themselves in a biofilm, a protective coating that is notoriously resistant to anti–biotics. Several follow-up experiments on space http://louis-j-sheehan.info/
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http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us/shuttle flights over the next few years will look to see whether other bacteria undergo similar changes in virulence in microgravity.

By now you’ve probably heard about the lunar eclipse tomorrow night. Lunar eclipses are great; they last a long time, so there’s no hurry, you don’t need crystal clear skies (the clearer the better, of course), and you don’t need a telescope! Just your eyes will do, though having binoculars is better. I actually prefer them over using a telescope.

The event will be visible pretty much everywhere in the US, Canada, South America, and western Africa and Europe. Orbiting Frog has a ton of info, including a nice animation of what to expect. Sky and Telescope has info as well (including a diagram with times listed for the west coast of the US, if that helps). But here’s the rundown:
The show starts for real around 01:43 Universal Time (CAREFUL HERE! That’s 1:43 a.m. on Thursday morning in England, but that’s Wednesday night for the United States. Check to see what your local offset is from Universal Time; for example, in Boulder we are UT - 7, so the eclipse starts here at 1:43 a.m. UT - 7 hours = 6:43 p.m. local time Wednesday night. http://louis-j-sheehan.net/
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But don’t trust me– do this math for yourself!).
You may read that the eclipse starts an hour or so before that, but if you look you probably won’t see anything. Earth casts a dark shadow surrounded by a much lighter one, called the umbra and penumbra, respectively. When the Moon enters the penumbra you’ll hardly notice, but when it enters the umbra at 01:43 it’ll look like a bite is taken out of it.
1 hour 20 minutes later (03:00 UT) the Moon will be totally engulfed in the Earth’s shadow. It may take on a brown or reddish appearance, depending on various factors like pollution in our atmosphere. Sometimes the Moon turns blood red, and it’s really amazing. I have found that the Moon appears to really be a globe when this happens; I assume it’s an illusion of some kind but the effect can be overwhelming.
The totality phase of the eclipse will last for about 51 minutes, and then it will start to leave the umbra, and you’ll see a bright crescent begin to form. By 05:10 UT it’ll all be over, and the Moon will look normal again.
I plan on being at The Little Astronomer’s school, since they’re hosting a party in the parking lot to see it. There are no doubt viewings all over the place, so call your local astronomy club, museum, or even news station to see what’s going on in your area.
This is the last total lunar eclipse for the US until very late in 2010, so I hope you get a chance to see it!

The Code of Hammurabi is one of the earliest known law codes and was probably compiled at the start of the reign of the Babylonian king Hammurabi (1792–1750 B.C.). The Code of Hammurabi is famous for demanding punishment to fit the crime (the lex talionis, or an eye for an eye) with different treatment for each social class. The Code is thought to be Sumerian in spirit but with a Babylonian inspired harshness. Its laws cover land tenure, rent, the position of women, marriage, divorce, inheritance, contracts, control of public order, administration of justice, wages, and labor conditions. (See LOC article on Iraq.) The prologue of the Code give a glimpse of the relationship between the Babylonian gods and kings.

A 2.3 m high diorite or basalt stele of the Code of Hammurabi was found at Susa, Iran, in 1901. At the top is a bas relief image. The text of laws is written in cuneiform. This stele of the Code of Hammurabi is at the Louvre.

Source: James A. Armstrong "Mesopotamia" The Oxford Companion to Archaeology. Brian M. Fagan, ed., Oxford University Press 1996. Oxford Reference Online.

Go to Other Ancient / Classical History Glossary pages beginning with the letterSilbury Hill, a 4,400-year-old, 130-foot-high mound of chalk and dirt about 80 miles west of London, has finally yielded its ancient secrets. It is not the tomb of the long-forgotten King Sil nor the resting place of a golden knight. And it is not, despite the folklore, a dumping ground for the devil’s dirt, forced to drop there by the magic of priests. The story behind the mysterious hill is much less colorful. http://louis-j-sheehan.info/
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http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us/Silbury Hill is a shrine filled with rocks that, for Stone Age Britons, probably represented the spirits of ancient ancestors.

The physical excavation (video) of Silbury Hill, along with studies using ground-penetrating radar and seismic sonar equipment, has shown that there is not a single human bone in the mound. Instead, dozens of sarsen stones, a type of sandstone that is also used for Neolithic stone circles like Stonehenge, are buried there.

Local geologists think that during the Stone Age, the landscape around Silbury Hill contained hundreds of thousands of sarsen stones. Because the area is made mainly of chalk, prehistoric people would have seen no apparent natural origin for the stones. Archaeologists think the locals endowed these rocks with a spiritual importance that Silbury Hill still embodies. The area itself is considered sacred by modern pagans, who still make offerings at a nearby spring. Due to conservation laws, the prehistoric holy hill is out-of-bounds to pagans and tourists alike.

Kosovo won the recognition of the United States and its biggest Western European allies Monday, while earning rebukes and rejections from Serbia, Russia and a disparate mix of states the world over who face their own separatist movements at home.

One day after the tiny Balkan province declared its independence, the world had its chance to choose sides. While some countries had made their decisions months in advance, that did not diminish the drama of whether a newly birthed nation would be welcomed into the fold or rejected.

Major European powers, including France, Germany and Britain, along with the United States, officially recognized Kosovo, even as officials took pains to point out that it should not serve as an invitation or precedent for other groups hoping to declare independence. That is because one of the biggest unknowns remains whether Kosovo’s declaration could rekindle conflicts elsewhere, including in ethnically divided Bosnia.

As a result, the reverberations were felt from Russian-backed enclaves in Georgia to the Taiwan Strait. Spain, a member of the European Union and one of the countries with soldiers in the NATO force in Kosovo, refused its recognition. Yet Turkey, despite its history of conflict with Kurdish separatists, chose to support Kosovo’s independence.

In a letter to Kosovo’s president, Fatmir Sejdiu, President Bush wrote: “On behalf of the American people, I hereby recognize Kosovo as an independent and sovereign state. I congratulate you and Kosovo’s citizens for having taken this important step in your democratic and national development.”

In an apparent conciliatory gesture, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said in her own statement, “The United States takes this opportunity to reaffirm our friendship with Serbia, an ally during two world wars.”

But Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica of Serbia, which has regarded Kosovo as its heartland since medieval times, vowed that Serbia would never recognize the “false state.” http://louis-j-sheehan.net/
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Mr. Kostunica recalled Serbia’s ambassador to Washington, wire services reported. The State Department had no comment on those reports on Monday evening.

At the United Nations, Boris Tadic, Serbia’s president, told the Security Council that the declaration of independence “annuls international law, tramples upon justice and enthrones injustice.” He asked that Secretary General Ban Ki-moon direct the United Nations mission chief in Kosovo to declare the action “null and void” and to dissolve the Kosovo Assembly, which adopted the declaration on Sunday.

Addressing the Council before Mr. Tadic spoke, Mr. Ban said the United http://louis-j-sheehan.info/
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http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us/Nations administration, approved by the Council in 1999, would continue to run Kosovo until a formal transition could be arranged.

European foreign ministers meeting in Brussels appeared to reach a minimal common position, acknowledging that Kosovo had declared independence and allowing those nations that wanted to recognize it formally to do so.

Bernard Kouchner, France’s foreign minister, said the declaration was “a victory for common sense,” and pointed to what he hoped would be future reconciliation between Serbia and Kosovo. “I don’t know at what date, in which year, but Kosovo and Serbia will be together in the European Union,” he said.

However, the foreign minister of Spain, Miguel Ángel Moratinos, told reporters that the declaration did not respect international law and that Spain would not recognize Kosovo. “The government of Spain will not recognize the unilateral act proclaimed yesterday by the Assembly of Kosovo,” Reuters quoted him as saying.

Among European Union members, Cyprus, Romania and Slovakia have also been reluctant to recognize Kosovo.

Diplomatic recognition is more than just a popularity contest for Kosovo, a desperately poor, predominantly Muslim landlocked territory of two million. It needs the help and support of international institutions if it expects to improve its dire economic condition. A United Nations protectorate since 1999, it is policed by 16,000 NATO troops and has an unemployment rate of around 60 percent and an average monthly wage of $250.

“We will be working with the government to try to help it politically as well as economically,” said R. Nicholas Burns, the under secretary of state for political affairs, in a conference call with reporters on Monday, pointing out that the United States gave $77 million in aid to Kosovo in 2007 and would raise that amount to roughly $335 million in 2008.

Mr. Burns, who said he had consulted by phone with European counterparts after the meeting of European Union foreign ministers, said there would be a donor conference in Europe in the coming months to encourage additional aid, and hoped there could be debt relief for Kosovo as well as strong regional trade opportunities.

Russia, which opposes Kosovo’s independence, demanded an emergency meeting of the United Nations Security Council on Sunday to proclaim the declaration “null and void,” but the meeting produced no http://louis-j-sheehan.info/
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http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us/ resolution. The Security Council agreed to a request by Russia and Serbia to hold the open meeting on Monday that Mr. Tadic addressed.

Mr. Burns said he did not foresee trouble with Russia. “I do not expect any kind of crisis with Russia over this,” he said. “I expect Russia to be supportive of stability in this region.”

But in Moscow, the upper and lower houses of Parliament on Monday released a joint statement signaling an intention to recognize at least two Russian-backed separatist areas in the former Soviet Union — Abkhazia and South Ossetia, both in Georgia.

Abkhazia and South Ossetia have announced their intention to seek recognition as independent states. Russia has already granted citizenship to most residents of both enclaves and had hinted that it might recognize their independence if Western countries recognized Kosovo.

“The right of nations to self-determination cannot justify recognition of Kosovo’s independence along with the simultaneous refusal to discuss similar acts by other self-proclaimed states, which have obtained de facto independence exclusively by themselves,” the Russian Parliament’s statement read.

Georgia disputes the claim that the regions have obtained independence by themselves. The areas broke from Georgia after brief wars in the 1990s, and have survived with Russian support.

Eduard Kokoity, the Ossetian president, said Monday that the two breakaway regions would submit a request for recognition to Russia’s Parliament by the end of the month, the Interfax news agency reported.

But experts and officials said they did not expect simmering conflicts to break out into significant violence as a result of Kosovo’s declaration. “These are emotional reactions that I think are transitory and can be contained,” said Peter Semneby, the European Union’s special representative for the South Caucasus, in a telephone interview from Georgia. “It’s very much in the interest of major actors to try to contain them.”

On the other side of the world, China, Indonesia and Sri Lanka also criticized Kosovo’s http://louis-j-sheehan.info/
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The Beijing government, which has threatened military action if Taiwan declares formal independence, voiced “grave concern” over Kosovo’s action.

“China is deeply worried about its severe and negative impact on peace and stability of the Balkan region and the goal of establishing a multiethnic society in Kosovo,” said Liu Jianchao, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman.

The province of Kosovo declared independence from Serbia on Sunday, sending tens of thousands of ethnic Albanians streaming through the streets to celebrate what they hoped was the end of a long and bloody struggle for national self-determination.

Kosovo’s bid to be recognized as Europe’s newest country — after a civil war that killed 10,000 people a decade ago and then years of limbo under United Nations rule — was the latest episode in the dismemberment of the former Yugoslavia, 17 years after its dissolution began.

It brings to a climax a showdown between the West, which argues that Serbia’s brutal subjugation of Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian majority cost it any right to rule the territory, and the Serbian government and its allies in the Kremlin. http://louis-j-sheehan.net/
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They counter that Kosovo’s independence is a reckless breach of international law that will spur other secessionist movements across the world.

As Albanians danced in the streets and fired guns in the air in the capital, Pristina, international reaction was sharply divided, suggesting that the clash between the principles of sovereignty and self-determination was far from resolved.

Britain, France and Germany were expected to be the first to recognize the new nation as early as Monday, while other nations, fearing separatist movements within their own borders, have said they will refuse. Russia demanded an emergency meeting of the United Nations Security Council to proclaim the declaration “null and void,” but the meeting produced no resolution.

The United States and additional European Union member states were expected to recognize Kosovo’s independence in the coming days.

President Bush, speaking in Tanzania, said the United States would continue to work to prevent violence in Kosovo, while reaching out to Serbia. He said that resolving the conflict in Kosovo was essential to stability in the Balkans and that “the Serbian people can know that they have a friend in America.”

In declaring independence, Kosovo’s prime minister, Hashim Thaci, a former leader of the guerrilla force that just over 10 years ago began an armed rebellion against Serbian domination, struck a note of reconciliation. Addressing Parliament in both Albanian and Serbian, he pledged to protect the rights of Kosovo’s Serbian minority. “I feel the heartbeat of our ancestors,” he said. “We, the leaders of our people, democratically elected, through this declaration proclaim Kosovo an independent and sovereign state.”

Kosovo, a desperately poor, predominantly Muslim landlocked territory of two million, has been a United Nations protectorate since 1999, policed http://louis-j-sheehan.info/
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http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us/by 16,000 NATO troops. Its unemployment rate is about 60 percent and average monthly wage is $250.

Electricity is so undependable that lights go out in the capital several times a day. Corruption is rife and human trafficking threatens to entrench a lawless state on Europe’s doorstep.

Ethnic Albanians from as far away as the United States poured into Pristina over the weekend, braving freezing temperatures and heavy snow to dance in frenzied jubilation. Beating drums, waving Albanian flags and throwing firecrackers, they chanted: “Independence! Independence! We are free at last!”

A 100-foot-long birthday cake was installed on Pristina’s main boulevard.

In an outpouring of adulation for the United States, the architect of NATO’s 1999 bombing campaign against Serbian forces under President Slobodan Milosevic, revelers unfurled giant American flags, carried posters of former President Bill Clinton and chanted, “Thank you, U.S.A.” and “God bless America.”

Hundreds of people, many waving Albanian flags, celebrated in Times Square. Revelers in cars drove in circles around the area, leading chants whenever they passed the crowds gathered on the sidewalks.

That spirit of exaltation contrasted sharply with the despair, anger and disbelief that gripped Serbia and the Serbian enclaves of northern Kosovo. In Belgrade, http://louis-j-sheehan.net/
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Serbia’s capital, as many as 2,000 angry Serbs converged on the United States Embassy, hurling stones and smashing windows.

In the Kosovo Serb stronghold of Mitrovica, a grenade was thrown at a United Nations building, the police said. No one was injured.

Vojislav Kostunica, the prime minister of Serbia, which has regarded Kosovo as its heartland since medieval times, vowed that Serbia would never recognize the “false state.”

In an address on national television on Sunday, he said Kosovo was propped up unlawfully by the United States and called the declaration a “humiliation” for the European Union. The Serbian government has ruled out using military force in response, but was expected to downgrade diplomatic ties with any government that recognized Kosovo.

Demonstrations were planned for Monday in Serbian enclaves across Kosovo. Serbs said they were under orders from Belgrade to ignore the independence declaration and remain in Kosovo to keep the northern part of the territory under de facto Serbian control, raising questions about Serbia’s long-term aims.

At the Security Council, Russia argued that the proclamation violated the 1999 resolution that established the United Nations mission in Kosovo. “Our position is that the declaration should be disregarded by the international community and declared null and void,” said Vitaly I. Churkin, Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations.

But Alejandro D. Wolff, the deputy American ambassador, said, “In our view, this declaration is logical and consistent and completely in line with” the 1999 measure.

Secretary General Ban Ki-moon pleaded with all parties “to refrain from any actions or statements that could endanger peace, incite violence or jeopardize security in Kosovo or the region.”

The Security Council agreed to a request by Russia and Serbia to hold an open meeting on Monday that will be addressed by the Serbian president, Boris Tadic.

Kosovo’s declaration followed nearly two years of United Nations-sponsored negotiations between it and Serbia. Those talks failed, as did a Security Council effort in December to resolve Kosovo’s future.

The European Commission, the European Union’s executive branch, appealed for calm, while NATO’s secretary general, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, said the alliance would respond “swiftly and firmly against anyone who might resort to violence.”

Kosovo’s sovereignty remains severely circumscribed, making it reliant on the international community. NATO still provides international security, while the European Union has agreed to send an 1,800-strong http://louis-j-sheehan.info/
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http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us/ police and judicial mission to help run the territory after the United Nations leaves.

Ulrich Wilhelm, the spokesman for the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, said Germany would decide what to do on Monday.

Kosovo played a central role in the collapse of the Yugoslav federation built by the Communist strongman Josip Broz Tito, who died in 1980. Albanian nationalism erupted in Kosovo in 1981, leading to bloody clashes.

In the 1980s, Mr. Milosevic used Serbs’ enormous sense of grievance that their ancestral heartland was now dominated by Muslim Albanians to come to power in Serbia. By 1989, he had abolished Kosovo’s autonomy, fired tens of thousands of Albanians from their jobs, suppressed Albanian language education and controlled the territory with a heavy police presence.

Ten years ago, Mr. Milosevic’s forces moved against the rebel Kosovo Liberation Army, killing a guerrilla leader and his family at their compound. As violence escalated, NATO intervened in a 1999 bombing campaign, causing hundreds of thousands of Albanians and Serbs to flee.

An estimated 10,000 civilians were killed in the 1998-99 conflict, many of them Albanians, while 1,500 Serbs died in revenge killings that followed.

For the ethnic Albanians who make up 95 percent of Kosovo’s population, independence marks a new beginning.

“Independence is a catharsis,” said Antoneta Kastrati, 26, an Albanian from Peja, who said her mother and older sister were killed by their Serbian neighbors in 1999. “Things won’t change overnight and we cannot forget the past, but maybe I will feel safe now and my nightmares will finally go away.”

In Mitrovica, a 70-year-old Serbian engineer who would give only his first name, Svetozar, said: “I will stay here forever. This will always be Serbia.”

Kosovo’s declaration created immediate ripples in the former Soviet Union, where small, Russian-backed separatist areas — one in Moldova and two in the republic of Georgia — have existed since the early 1990s. http://louis-j-sheehan.info/
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http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us/Two of them — Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia — announced their intention to seek recognition as independent states.

Conversely, several of the European Union’s 27 member states — including Spain, Greece, Cyprus, Slovakia and Romania — oppose recognizing Kosovo because they fear encouraging secessionist movements within their own borders.

In Brussels, officials were drafting a statement for a foreign ministers’ meeting on Monday. Senior European Union officials said they expected it to acknowledge Kosovo’s independence declaration without http://louis-j-sheehan.info/
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http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us/explicitly endorsing it.

The declaration of independence raises the prospects of a new constitution and emblems of nationhood, including a new flag bearing a map of Kosovo topped by six stars.

But in a sign of how hard it will be to forge the kind of multiethnic, secular identity that foreign powers have urged, the distinctive two-headed eagle of the red and black Albanian flag, reviled by Serbs, was everywhere Sunday, held by revelers, draped on horses, flapping out of car windows and hanging outside homes and storefronts across the territory.

Warren Hoge contributed reporting from the United Nations, C. J. Chivers from Moscow and Nicholas Kulish from Berlin.

It’s a rare political race where particle physics might come up, but IL-14, Denny Hastert’s former seat, is just such a delightful intersection. And Bill Foster is that Heinlein-esque synthesis; a businessman who started the firm that revolutionized theatre lighting and invented the Source 4 ellipsoidal reflector spotlight, turned award winning physicist, and now candidate.

To appreciate what kind of congressman Foster might become, it’s worth considering what kind of primary campaign he ran: he provides the option of healthcare insurance to all his paid staff; he ran a clean, non negative primary campaign stressing his positions on issues; Foster opposes the war in Iraq, champions legitimate, unfettered science and research, and supports stem cell research, just to name a few. http://louis-j-sheehan.net/
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To appreciate the scientific side of Dr Bill Foster, follow me below to examine one of the most fascinating, spectacular light-shows our universe can serve up.

Stars that blow themselves to smithereens often produce magnificent sights before, during, and especially after an official supernova explosion. The enigmatic Eta Carinae, below left, is thought to contain a highly unstable star on the precipice of a hypernova. The lacy remains of a supernova observed in 1054 AD is now the Crab Nebula, a tiny, rapidly rotating neutron star lurks noisily inside.



The three schematics below courtesy of graphic artist Karen Wehrstein illustrate the basics of what is thought to happen deep inside a massive, aging star near the end of its life, during a classic kind of Supernova called a Type ll. After burning successively heavier elements, the star eventually begins producing iron at its center. It's a stellar dead end. The iron core grows, robbing the star of energy due to the idiosyncrasies (See comment) of atomic physics, and soon reaches a critical threshold; a massive ball of iron thousands of kilometers in diameter suddenly collapses dramatically, like a soap bubble, into an unimaginably dense remnant a few kilometers wide. Overlying superheated plasma, compressed so much it weighs way more than lead -- quickly falls in to fill the gaping void. When it slams in to the surface of the degenerate core it begans fusing furiously. Short version: Star Go Ka-BOOM!



    This does two things: it sets up a huge rebound, sending the outer layers of the star back out, and also releases a vast number of neutrinos .. The gas from the outer layers absorbs these neutrinos, which is like lighting a match in a fireworks factory. The outer layers explode upwards, and several solar masses of doomed star tear outwards at speeds of several thousand kilometers per second.

Under normal conditions, neutrinos are ghostly little particles that overwhelmingly zip through ordinary matter, even a million miles of solid lead, like it was so much hard vacuum. They dwell in an incomprehensible universe seething with subatomic wraiths, not quite pure energy, not entirely solid matter, but a whiff of both. These are not ‘ordinary’ objects. The neutrino represented as a little dot or arrow racing around is an avatar of sorts; a symbolic construct of a hazy particulate property from the surreal world of high energy http://louis-j-sheehan.info/
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http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us/physics that our large, clunky macro-minds can latch on to. They’re sleeting through you by the trillions as you read this. No need for alarm though: fortunately for us, they don’t interact with the matter in our body!

But every now and then, one in uncounted zillions will cause a sub-atomic change which can in turn produce a tiny flash of light. So, with a giant tank of a clear substance, shielded from as much radiation as possible, surrounded by sensitive photo detectors, every now and then a lone of neutrino can be confirmed. Since these little guys whip through ordinary matter effortlessly, they’re a potential window deep into high energy places we cannot directly observe, like the fusing core of a star. And since a single light ray can take up to a million years to stagger drunkenly out of a stellar core, while neutrinos simply slip through the outer layers of plasma, neutrinos also uniquely offer current information about the state of affairs in places we can’t otherwise observe in real time.

On February 23, 1987, three separate neutrino detectors recorded a spike lasting just a few seconds. This was a strong indication that somewhere in the universe, something really, really big and no doubt violent beyond imagination had happened.

The next day several astronomers, amateur and professional, reported a small but bright point in a nearby dwarf galaxy called the Large Magellanic Cloud. Within a few hours of that report pretty much every telescope in the southern hemisphere had swung to the anomaly. The source was a star estimated to be twenty times heavier than our sun. Except now it was gone, and in its place was the blazing Supernova 1987A. Right: Several frames taken over the course of a decade by the Hubble Space Telescope, and after the initial supernova faded, show the effects of secondary spasms of invisible gas expelled at extreme velocity smacking into a ring of previously ejected material.

One of the instruments that recorded a spike was the Irving-Michigan-Brookhaven proton decay detector. The futuristic chamber of ultra pure water surrounded by two-thousand photodetectors is shown left (The source of the bubbles is a diver inspecting the equipment). Bill Foster played a significant role in the development of the IMB. When the neutrinos set off alarm bells in 1987, Foster had moved on to Fermilab. But because of his involvement with the IMB detector and the subsequent neutrino detection from SN1987A, Foster and his team shared in the 1989 Rossi Prize in high energy physics.

If anything like SN1987A happened too near our planet, the earth would evaporate faster than a snowflake in a bonfire. And yet we may owe our existence to these violent events. The shock wave from SN 1987A will travel outward, essentially forever. Along the way it will combine with other blast fronts, forming waves of compactions and rarefactions in the medium of thin interstellar gas. Simultaneously it will salt those vast clouds of buoyant hydrogen and helium with heavier substances, volatile gases, ices, and metals. The immense waves will diffract causing nodes, small pockets will condense here and there. Gravity will take hold, and the knots of gas will shrink under their own weight, they will begin to glow with dozens of individual sparks, each lighting up the infant stellar nursery from inside. In the center of each spark, pressure and temperature will grow so high that hydrogen will begin to fuse: this is the birth of stars, this is how our own solar system may have arisen five billion years ago.

Speaking purely for myself, as an interesting side note about SN1987A: That primary ring allows astronomers to calculate the distance between us and SN1987A using simple trigonometry. That distance is about 168,000 light-years, meaning the proginator star blew up about 160,000 years before young earth creationists believe the universe began. In addition, short lived isotopes can be seen decaying in the spectra from SN1987A. That is a direct, empirical observation that radio decay rates in the past were the same as predicted by atomic theory and observed in labs today.

Thus, SN1987A is like a Wrecking Ball of Reality to two basic tenets in Young Earth Creationist apologetics: The age of the universe and the validity of radiometric dating. http://louis-j-sheehan.net/
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Doesn't it seem fitting then, in some cosmic way, that the candidate who contributed to our elegant understanding of the universe should prevail over the other fellow, who hails from a party where antiscientific concepts like climate change denial and creationism are badges of honor?

The polling in what should be an easy GOP victory shows Foster in a dead heat with Republican opponent Jim Oberweis. Republicans are intersted in holding the seat (John McCain is reportedly going to hold an Oberweis fundraiser with a goal of 200,000 dollars). So, if that poll is close to accurate, it is a blinking red warning that this campaign needs every vote, every volunteer, and every dollar it can muster to succeed.

Given the obvious difference between these two candidates, it seems a no brainer that the residents of IL-14 would be best served by Oberwies staying in town, and focusing on improving his already scrumptious home-made ice cream. Whereas voters in IL-14 would be far better represented by a Congressman with Bill Foster’s intellect and accomplishments serving their collective interests in Washington, DC.

If Foster manages to pull this off, it will send a powerful message about what may be in store for other 'safe GOP seats' in 2008 -- a progressive message that incidentally embraces science and reason -- well beyond the confines of Illinois' fourteenth district, and into every nook and cranny in this nation. So if I didn't convince you up there, I hope I've provided you some reason to give Bill Foster's qualifications a second look down here.

      Was awfully as tempting to make a pun about Oberweis being served there at the end ... I mean to say, If it’s Sunday, it’s Sunday Kos!

            It's not an idio whatever of physics.

            Fusion reactions release energy up to a point where the nucleus is most energetically stable - the lowest energy configuration. The Iron nucleus is that configuration.

            Heavier elements than iron are built in most cases by neutron adsorption, not fusion reactions.

            "It's the planet, stupid."

                  This was a really cool candidate endorsement, DS, and well written for a pop audience. However, the gravitational collapse of the iron core is just too amazing to brush over.


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