Our Economy is tanking!

What has happened to our economy here in the great United States of America? Seems like the sky is falling and only getting worse. Over the last couple weeks Wall Street has been going through extraordinary changes that it has not seen the likes of in, I don't know, a REALLY long time. Huge banks, savings and loans, and insurance companies are going under. Our economy is trembling.

Washington Mutual, that I have some stock in, is going under. AIG just started cracking, Bank of America bought Merrill Lynch, new home sales are the lowest in 17 years, home values are still falling, oil is still way to expensive and going up, gasoline shortages, Fannie and Freddie were just bailed out, job loss is rising, loans are increasingly difficult to get (especially for those with fair to decent credit), and to top it off, the market for mortgage backed securities and interbank loans disappeared last week.

This last one prompted the Federal Government to freak out and launch this 700 billion dollar bail out plan and this started to make me think. I mean, doesn't the government have a ton of safe guards in place to keep the economy from tanking already? What about the lessons learned from the Great Depression like a limit on how much the market can lose in one day or the FDIC or Fannie and Freddie? All of these things are supposed to keep our financial system from tanking. Fannie and Freddie guarantee a trillion dollars in mortgages, the FDIC insures the assets held by banks that collectively have a total of 13.4 trillion in assets. Now, on top of all this, the government is so freaked out that it is proposing more, 700 billion more, to stop the economy from crashing by essentially privatizing the gains and socializing the losses to prop up the economy. To put 700 billion in perspective, the total amount of credit card debt held by Americans is about 850 billion. The total cost of the Iraq war from 2003 - 2008 was been about 700 billion dollars.

That has to make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside concerning the state of our economy. Personally, I think I'm starting to see the writing on the wall. For the last year, I've noticed that the optimists are now starting to talk about "tough" times ahead and the cynics have changed their tones from "tough" times to economic Armageddon.

We shall see...as for me, I'm going to try to eliminate as much debt as possible and put my finances in order to prepare for whatever is coming.

Size Comparison

I love seeing the actual sizes of planets and moons in our solar system compared side-by-side to each other. Maybe that's just one of those really nerdy things about myself, nonetheless, it is there.

So, here is a cool image that shows the size comparisons of Mars, Ganymede, Mercury, and The Moon. Now, in case you are wondering (and I know you are), "What is Ganymede?" Ganymede is the largest moon in our solar system and it orbits Jupiter. Everything is bigger at Jupiter. Ganymede is actually bigger than the planet Mercury and almost as big as Mars! And if you also happened to be wondering, the only other moon larger than Mercury is Saturn's moon Titan.


Mars' diameter is 4222 miles
Ganymede's diameter is 3270 miles
Mercury's diameter is 3033 miles
The Moon's diameter is 2160 miles

Now, the official name of The Moon really is The Moon. Weird right? I mean all the other moons in the solar system have names like Ganymede, Callisto, Titan, Ariel, etc. But our moon is just called The Moon. Wow...really? So that leaves us with no other option than to refer to ancient mythologies for names for the Moon. The Romans called it Luna and the Greeks called it Selene.

Since there's so much talk about the Moon, here's an image to the right of the side you never get to see *yawn* Yeah, our side is much more interesting.

Anyway, Selene sounds too girly, unless you're into the whole "mother" earth thing. I prefer to call it Luna (or Lua in Portuguese). Besides, most of the planets are named after Roman gods anyways.

Ceres, the coolest asteroid

Ceres is by far the coolest asteroid in our solar system. It's huge, it's round, and could have tons of water.

How big is it? Well, let's put it this way, if you took the combined mass of all the known asteroids Ceres' mass makes up more than 1/3 of that total.

That's big enough to take on a spherical shape apparently. If you want to know the exact size, it's 578 miles in diameter.

The picture on the left is from Hubble and is the best picture we have of Ceres. However, in 2007 a spacecraft was launched to visit Ceres by 2015. The spacecraft is called Dawn and will pass by Vesta first, which could be the second largest asteroid in the solar system with an irregular diameter that averages around 500 miles.

Ceres is icy like Jupiter's moons Callisto and Europa, but Vesta is all rock.

On the right is a picture comparing Ceres size to Earth.

John Faulk For Congress: Texas District 18

www.faulkforcongress.org/

For all of you out there that are in Texas District 18, vote for John Faulk so we can oust career liberal politician Sheila Jackson Lee. She is part of the reason Congress' approval rating is 9%.

If you're not in Texas District 18, then find out which district you are in. In fact, find out who all of your Federal and State representatives are and which district you are in. One great place to do this is to go to www.congress.org and enter your zip code. You may have to enter your complete address to narrow it down enough. This site also lets you send letters and emails to your representatives.

Another great site for finding your district is www.nationalatlas.gov

What is involved in getting an oil/gas lease?

There is a lot involved in getting a lease from the BLM or private owner for oil and gas. You have to determine who the owner is of the surface rights, mineral rights, depth rights, water rights, etc. All of which could have different owners. Then you have to agree to all the terms of the lease, how long until it expires, royalty fees, rental fees, permission to build, road access, can you sell it to someone else, etc.

So if you're an oil company:

A lease must be obtained to explore for oil and gas using geophysical technologies such as reflection and refraction seismic, magnetic surveys, geologic surveys, etc. Once a location is deemed as having potential, a permit must be obtained, if not already included in the exploration lease, to do exploratory drilling. Drilling can cost millions, so you don't want to drill a dry hole. If oil is found, then you can obtain another permit to build a production facility to pump out the oil.

Now, the United States has already seen extensive onshore exploration and the big easy oil fields have already been found. The millions of acres of leases Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats talk about are for small pockets of possible oil that dot the landscape. This is risky because your chances of drilling lots of dry wells looking for the oil is high. Spending all that money is not attractive to oil businesses big or small, especially with no guarantee of a good return. Offshore is a different story. Much of it remains unexplored as the government currently will not give permits or leases for anyone to explore for oil and gas offshore since the ban, not to mention drilling. There are some big finds offshore that were found back in the heyday of oil exploration, but technology did not allow for deep water drilling.

The technology does exist today though and is used in the Gulf of Mexico, off of Southern California, Russia, off of Nigeria, and all over Europe. Why the Europeans have no issue with drilling offshore and we do is a mystery to me. We should lift the ban on offshore drilling and start developing it for production. That way we have access to our resources and can free ourselves completely from foreign oil.

Mysterious Saturn

Here's a really cool mystery to think about. Where do you find naturally occurring atmospheric hexagons? Why, Saturn of course!

This image is incredible and baffles scientists as they have no idea what could be causing this hurricane-like storm on Saturn's north pole to look like a hexagon.

"This is a very strange feature, lying in a precise geometric fashion with six nearly equally straight sides," said Kevin Baines, atmospheric expert and member of Cassini's visual and infrared mapping spectrometer team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "We've never seen anything like this on any other planet. Indeed, Saturn's thick atmosphere, where circularly-shaped waves and convective cells dominate, is perhaps the last place you'd expect to see such a six-sided geometric figure, yet there it is."

The hexagon is nearly 15,000 miles (25,000 kilometers) across. Nearly four Earths could fit inside it. The thermal imagery shows the hexagon extends about 60 miles (100 kilometers) down into the clouds.

Another interesting mystery our universe continues to surprise us with.

Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed

I saw this documentary a month or so ago and just wanted to recommend it to everyone. Here are some insights of mine on it:

I may be mistaken, but I believe that the basis of the movie "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed" is that the scientific community is not as objective as it should be on hot button issues. The Theory of Evolution is used as an example of how science has been transformed into a battlefield for a war between theists and atheists. Pride, politics, preconceptions, and political correctness have all turned the scientific community into a "hostile and subjective" environment for theories that go against mainstream thinking.

Even though this may be true to a certain extent, I believe that those that view science as attacking religion and vice versa are missing the larger point, "Truth goes beyond established facts." All our scientific knowledge is only a small piece of the complete "truth" of the universe, despite the fact that many scientists and atheists consider the scientific method the end all of epistemological methods. There are many other places where knowledge and truth can be found, such as in philosophy or the arts, and do I dare say it, the one true religion.

Finally, as far as ID goes, it fails as a scientific theory largely because people view it as another attempt by creationists to teach religion in our schools (as implied in the movie). It also fails as a scientific theory because it is not falsifiable, another curiosity of science that limits its ability to think outside the box and constrains it to truth in "observable reality" (which is only as good as the instruments we use). If it cannot be observed then it does not exist according to science and that is why science will never discover all truth.