The Men Guarding Our Nuclear Arsenal Are High and Dumb as F**k

The Air Force announced this afternoon that 37 nuclear missile officers have been implicated in academic cheating scandals and drug rings, and the ongoing investigation may turn up more misdeeds soon.

So far, 11 Air Force on six different bases have been implicated in the drug ring. Three of them are missile launch officers at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota and Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana, according to the Washington Post. Those are two of the three U.S. bases that house America's 450 intercontinental ballistic missiles.

In addition, nearly 20 percent of all the launch officers in charge of ICBMs at Malmstrom cheated or allowed cheating on a job-related certification test, the investigation showed. An estimated 200 officers have had their certifications yanked and will be forced to retake the exam, though it isn't clear how many officers might lose their jobs.

The Air Force insists that the integrity of its nuclear arsenal has not been compromised, though the service's chief of staff, Gen. Mark Welsh III, told reporters that Malmstrom had failed an August nuclear readiness test, according to Military.com editor Michael Hoffman. (The base later passed another nuke test in October.)

The rest: http://gawker.com/the-men-guarding-our-nuclear-arsenal-are-high-and-dumb-1502128337

Meet Rob McCord, Pennsylvania State Treasurer running for PA Governor

Statement on Koch Brothers’ Union Busting in Pennsylvania

About that "safe" water: Pregnant Women Warned Against Drinking Water In W.Va. Area

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is urging pregnant women who live in the areas of West Virginia where a toxic chemical leaked into the water supply last week to drink bottled water, even in places where the no-use ban has been lifted. The move comes "out of an abundance of caution," the CDC and the state's Bureau of Public Health say.

The federal agency said Wednesday that pregnant women should stick to bottled water "until there are no longer detectable levels of MCHM in the water distribution system," referring to the coal-treatment chemical that sparked a ban on use of tap water for some 300,000 people in nine counties around Charleston, W.Va.

The water ban has been lifted for parts of that area in recent days (a West Virginia American Water map can show you the latest data). But as some residents tell NPR's Hansi Lo Wang, they're still not trusting it, even if their water has been declared safe.

The rest: http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/01/15/262901860/pregnant-women-warned-against-drinking-water-in-w-va-area

12 Horror Stories Show Why Wednesday's Big Supreme Court Abortion Case Matters

Liam Lowney does not talk about his sister, Shannon Elizabeth Lowney, without first gushing about her personality. She was bright and intelligent, a talented student and passionate musician with an "infectious smile," he says. Only then will he discuss how she died: On December 30, 1994, as she worked the front desk at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Brookline, Massachusetts, a man named John C. Salvi entered and riddled her face with bullets.

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in McCullen v. Coakley, a case in which anti-abortion-rights activists are challenging a Massachusetts law—passed partially in response to Lowney's murder—that bans protests within 35 feet of an entrance to an abortion clinic. The petitioners claim the law violates their First Amendment rights. Eleanor McCullen, the lead challenger, is a septuagenarian grandmother whose refrigerator is barely visible beneath all the baby photos that she says were sent to her by women she encountered outside clinics and persuaded not to proceed with an abortion.

But Massachusetts's buffer zone was not created in response to peaceful protesters like those waged by McCullen and others. It was written in response to people like Salvi and those protesters who have used physical force to block women from obtaining abortions. Even after Republican Gov. Paul Cellucci signed a modest buffer zone into law in 2000, Massachusetts's abortion clinics were swamped by protesters who physically barred women from entering. Yet lawyers for McCullen aren't merely asking the court to strike down the extended 35-foot buffer zone, which Massachusetts established in 2007; they are asking the justices to ban all buffer zones outside abortion clinics.

Attorneys for the ACLU, which filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the case, concede that buffer zones do impinge on free speech, but they contend this is necessary to protect the competing constitutional right to obtain an abortion. To prove that point, the ACLU compiled police reports, oral testimonies, and written statements that describe how difficult it had become in Massachusetts to obtain or provide an abortion before the 35-foot buffer zone was implemented in 2007. The following excerpts offer a glimpse of the pandemonium that often reigned outside Massachusetts's clinics before this law was enacted.

The rest: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/01/abortion-horror-stories-supreme-court-massachusetts-mccullen-coakley

No buffer zones = war zones. I think these buffer zones strike the right balance between free speech and protecting the constitutional rights of women.

The Conservative's Guide To Debate

Scientists Can Levitate Objects Using Sound

As the video points out at the beginning, levitation of objects using sound has been around for a few years. If you’ve ever stood in front of a large speaker you’ll know that they can pump out what feels like quite a forceful blast of air as they vibrate—but, somewhat deceptively, that’s not quite the whole story.

Rather than physically push air out from the speaker, what you’re experiencing is a wave of compression moving through the air. The speaker compresses a packet of air, which then “rolls” through the room, with the size of the compressed air corresponding the wavelength of the sound wave. And, just like sound waves, waves that overlap each other create new waves.

To levitate something just requires creating a standing wave. Think of it like this - if you’re watching a sound wave plotted out on a graph, it’ll be rolling along, going up and down as it oscillates. A standing wave occurs when two or more waves combine to create a new wave where, as the wave oscillates, there are points where there’s no movement. They’re called nodes.

If a speaker outputs a standing wave, in the most basic sense it means that it won’t feel like the areas of compression - those blasts of air - are moving. The gaps between those blasts of air will be positions of neutral force, with air pressure pushing in on it from both directions. If you stick an object in there that’s light enough, and smaller that the size the gap (which will be the sound’s wavelength), the force of the air should keep it floating in a stable position.

Video:

Freedom Industries, West Virginia chemical spill company was exempt from EPA inspections.

More than 300,000 people in 9 counties near Charleston, W.Va., remain without safe tap water four days after a chemical spill from Freedom Industries overflowed into the Elk River. The company responsible for spilling approximately 7,500 gallons of toxic 4-methylcyclohexene methanol Thursday, was not subject to any permits or inspections.

The New York Times reported, “According to Department of Environmental Protection officials, Freedom Industries, which owns the chemical tank that ruptured, is exempt from Department of Environmental Protection inspections and permitting since it stores chemicals, and does not produce them.”

Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin has since vowed to “look into tighter regulation of chemical storage facilities.” But looking into additional regulations is not the same as actually implementing them.

The current political climate has been dominated by Republicans pushing to eliminate the Environmental Protection Agency and rollbacks on government regulations for businesses.

Additionally, the chemical spilled was used to wash coal before it’s sent to market and the coal industry has a powerful deregulation lobby.

The rest: http://www.allvoices.com/contributed-news/16321999-west-virginia-chemical-spill-company-was-exempt-from-epa-inspections

Hypothetical question regarding intentional traffic jams.

If say you or I led a massive protest across a bridge causing intentional traffic jams for 4 days that impeded the welfare of children, interstate commerce, emergency responders, & homeland security, would we be facing criminal charges?

What's good for the goose...

Tomorrow's NY Daily News Cover

REMINDER: According to the fRightWing media...

Chris Christie can't possibly know or control everything his OWN small staff does, but Pres.Obama was personally involved with Benghazi and those IRS offices.