Most taxes go to the DoD. Drop one less bomb and free bike lights for everyone.

And for no greater purpose than the government's coming obesity program: MOVE...OR DIE.

>> ^bobknight33:

Someday one of these will be running after you. It will be mounted with a gun and such and controlled by a drone by a guy sitting in a air condition room 5000 miles away and will be home for dinner. You on the other hand will be dead.

>> ^Buck:

Humans just keep on building them with no thought of when they take over the world.


Don't be silly. You just have to jump off the treadmill.

To continue this lesson, it is important to note that most bomb technology doesn't use enriched uranium alone. The other key material compound is plutonium. For all intents and purposes, all plutonium is man made (with only traces of 244 found in nature, of which is completely unsuitable for weapons..Pu244). Plutonium is usually needed in a bomb because of its much lower critical mass. This lower mass makes bomb fabrication easier, but that creation of plutonium is by no means trivial.

You need huge facilities, dedicated to the sole purpose of uranium exposure. Like the video mentions, normal uranium is mostly U238, this junk gains value in the creation of plutonium. Weapons grade plutonium is a special isotope of plutonium, Pu239. This need is very specific, the different isotopes of Pu can have so very serious implications for bombs. Lets go over them as we as we go over how uranium is exposed to make this very special isotope

First, we start off with U238...the fuel stock. This isotope is bombarded with neutrons. These neutrons are occasionally absorbed by the uranium, turning it into U239. U239 is highly unstable, and quickly decays (in 23.45 minutes) to neptunium 239. This will in turn, decay into Pu239 (in about 2.3 days). Sounds easy, right? Not exactly, neutron absorption isn't something you can control with ease. What I mean is, there is little to stop our Neptunium or Plutonium from absorbing neutrons any more or less than the Uranium (in fact, their absorption cross sections are typically much larger...they are more hungry of neutrons than uranium in other words). When this undesired absorption happens, the neptunium and plutonium eventually becomes Pu240...and that is a big problem.

Plutonium Pu240 is HIGHLY undesirable in a bomb. Pu240 is a medium lived isotope of Plutonium, meaning it decays pretty quick, but it is HOW it decays that is the problem. Pu240 often decays by spontaneous fission. Having spontaneous fission in your fission bomb is just as undesirable as it sounds. Firstly, all even number isotopes are poor fission candidates, so for every even number isotope in your bomb, that lowers the bombs over all yield (because they prefer to fission themselves, and for very little return energy). This is further complicated by high densities of Pu240 causing your bomb to prematurely detonate, ya...bad news. The levels of Pu240 represent yet another challenge in the level of heat they generate from their rather quick decay, though, considering the previous 2 issues, this one is less problematic, though still troublesome. And lastly, there is nothing stopping our Pu240 from absorbing yet another neutron causing yet another isotope of plutonium to arises, namely Pu241.

Pu241, being an odd numbered isotope heavier than lead makes it a rather good subject to undergo fission. It doesn't have the same set of problems as Pu241, but it rapidly decays (14 years) into Americium 241, which is not fissile, and has a halflife of 432 years. These factors add large amounts of heat to the bomb, and reduce overall yield, as well as detract from critical mass.

The solution for this is a very low tech, time consuming, laborious process with produces tons of waste and very little plutonium. One has to expose small blocks of uranium to neutrons under a very brief window. The brief window decreases the chances of undesired neutron absorption and negates much (but not all!) of the heavier forms of plutonium being created. After exposure, they are left to decay, then after a few months, are chemically processed to remove any plutonium and other undesirables (this is also very very hard, and I won't even go into how this is done), then re-exposed. This yields gram(s) at a time. To make a weapons, you need 10 killos, at least...for one bomb...if everything went great. This means you need HUGE facilities, HUGE staff, and HUGE uranium resources. Your facility would be obvious and serve no other purpose, use tons of energy, and pile up radioactive waste of the kind no one wants, heavier than uranium wastes...the worse of the worst. No such facility could exist alongside some traditional uranium facility and not be noticed, period, end of story, done.

We haven't even covered bomb making problems, of which killed some of our top minds in our own bomb program. A set of incidents revolving around a specific bomb type, after taking 2 lives, was dubbed the Demon core. These are the reasons over half the budget of the DOD gets soaked up in nuclear weapons, and we haven't even covered some of the more important aspects (like delivery systems, one simply doesn't walk into Mordor). Nuclear weapons are hugely expensive, hugely conspicuous, require massive facilities and require a level of sophistication that is completely absent from the training of reactor nuclear scientists.

Reactor research and materials are orders of magnitude different from weapons grade materials and research. No bomb in history has EVER been made from reactor grade plutonium because the levels of Pu240 and Pu241 (and we haven't even covered Pu238!) are blisteringly high, way to high for weapons. Isotopic separation for Pu would be even more costly than uranium because of their mass similarities (compared to U235 and U238) and need a different set of enrichment facilities specially tailored to plutonium enrichment, of which all the people who knew something about that are Russian and American, and most likely dead or work classified to the highest degree.

The problem of nuclear weapons via reactor development is all a game to ratchet up the fear machine to get a particular end. It isn't a technical problem, it is a political problem. In the end, though, emerging technology could make enrichment easier anyway, so many of the issues I mentioned might eventually fall to the wayside (not within the next 10 years I imagine; for interested parties, google laser enrichment...coming to a world near you, but not exactly tomorrow, it's awesome stuff though). Eventually, the US is going to have to get used to the idea of more and more nations owning the bomb...but that issue is completely unrelated to reactor design and research. Reactors and nuclear weapons share about as much in common as cars and space shuttles...trying to link them as a dual proliferation argument is a political game and doesn't map on to them technologically.



I should note that I am not yet a nuclear engineer, but I did stay at a holiday inn express.

i admire ron paul for voting what he espouses.he is fairly consistent and i can respect that BUT he is also a devout ayn rand fan and that should give anyone pause.
a unrestricted free market will not produce the pseudo financial utopia the chicago economists like friedman espouse,no matter how much they may wish it.
in fact,it will produce the exact opposite and there are many examples that people who believe in unrestricted markets seem to ignore.

in my opinion a few small but powerful changes could make a difference:
1.get rid of citizens united and make it so no private money can fund public elections.
2.put a cork on the ability of the congress and senate to profit from insider trading AND the ability to turn their political influence into a lucrative career as a lobbyist.make the job about public service and not pure enrichment at the detriment of those you were elected to represent.
3.re-instate glass steagall and other measures to separate commercial from investment banks.
4.return the phrase "for the public good" (removed in the early 70's) from the corporate charter and allow civil and class action suits against corporations who are discovered abusing communities by what ever means.and allow AG's to dissolve a corporation for gross un-compliance.if they are going to be deemed a "person" then they should be held to the same standard of community as the rest of us.

these are just some of the points ron paul does not address and i feel they are so vitally important and are a few reasons i cant support him.
his stance on military intervention and recinding the gross over-powering of the executive branch i totally agree with.
i also am not against his end-the-fed and other useless federal government agencies.either make them more effective or give that power to the states and some (DOD comes to mind) are so bloated and cumbersome that they have taken on an eerie "too big to fail" kind of character.

there is one thing that i find curious.
since ron paul is a free market prophet,why arent the corporations backing this man up with all their money and influence?
gingrich,romney and obama are getting all the wall street campaign money and media exposure.while ron paul is being marginalized.
maybe i am just being cynical but it seems to me that ron pauls "free market" talk may be perceived as a de-rigging of the game and our corporate masters cant have that.they paid big money to keep your business in the shitter.

if thats the case...well..good on him but i have to admit not being an expert on corporations nor economics.so i could be way off the mark.

The point is not that there wasn't policy. The point is policy is harder to push when needed without a Department of Education.

The entire question of whether we should have a Dept. of Edu should not have a thing to do with specific policy debates. If the Dept. of Edu. is pushing bad policy, then change the policy it's pushing; abolishing it completely is ridiculous. It would be like abolishing DoD after the Vietnam War.

The Dept of Edu serves many functions beyond just pushing policy. It provides an apparatus for data collecting, analysis, correlating, etc. dedicated to education. It provides a national mechanism to help enact educational policies that are national in nature. It's common sense that if education is important, and if there are national tendencies, trends, data worth investigating that could/should drive national education policy, then we should have a Dept. of Edu. What policies should be pushed, as I said before, is an entirely different issue.

>> ^BansheeX:

The department of education helps no one but those in the education industry, it's a really bad deal for students. Education is a noble profession, but all services can be overpriced. Federal loans allow colleges to jack up rates every year knowing that the government will borrow more to pay for this supposed "sacred service that is the key to everything no matter the cost". Politicians have no fear of loss, the money is coming from future taxpayers that don't exist to vote it down. It's no coincidence that prices have accelerated far faster than unsubsidized products and services. If the government were to declare laptop ownership a social protocol and issue $1000 vouchers to everyone, the price of laptops would go up $1000 overnight. They do the same to education as they've been doing with housing.
My stepfather graduated from college in 1967. He paid 4k total for 4 years, that includes room and board. His first accountant job paid 10k a year. He is actually fairly liberal and is shocked to see how many people naively think that college didn't exist or wasn't any good prior to the DoE. He's old enough to know it's the total opposite.

I read the wiki article you posted, it says the opposite of what you suggest. That pre-1980, they had no ability to generate policy...they just gathered information. Do you have a link to something that talks about the freemarkety nature in the 80s?, because that link doesn't have it. Unless you are just talking about Regan doing free market stuff on the whole affecting education somehow indirectly, but the link clearly says he made it a federal government responsibility to create educational policy in the 80s. In that, I don't know that your argument fully answers @Grimm's claim that educational stardards have gone down since federal policy making has been done. We aren't talking about free markets here, even at the state level. We are talking about who makes better policies affecting children's education; federal or state. It has also been of my opinion that for important things, eggs in one basket methodologies are dangerous. Best to have a billion little educational experiments boiling around the country, cooking up information that the rest of them can turn around and use. Waiting for a federal mandate to adopt a policy can be rather tedious.

I have some friends that are educators, I will have to ask them how they feel about this. It is easy for us to have an opinion based on raw idealism of our core beliefs, but I would be interested to see what certain teachers have to say. I met a real interesting person at my friends bachelor party. He came from a union state, and moved down here to Texas, we have teachers unions and things, but they aren't as powerful as the north. He experienced a complete change in himself. He found that his own involvement in his union happened in such a way where he basically held the kids education hostage over wages. He said that is was basically the accepted role of teachers to risk children's education over pay. I am not talking about just normal pay, but he was making 50k as a grade school teacher in the early 90s. Not suggesting this is normal, but it is something we don't copy here in Texas. As for his own mind, he knows he would never teach in that area of the country again, and would never suggest anyone move their that values their children's education.

What would be interesting to me is if the absence of the DOE would break down some of the red tape and allow schools to "get creative" with programs a federal political body might not want to take a risk on. Education is to important to fail on, and applying "to big to fail" kind of logic to a failing system of education is to much politics to play for me. Empower teachers and schools, and try to avoid paying as many non-educators as possible would be one way to improve things I would wager. What aspect of the DOE do you think is successful that we need to keep exactly? I mean, I can tell you I don't like that the DOD is so huge and powerful, but I know nuclear subs and aircraft carriers can't operate themselves. What necessarily component of the DOE do you see as necessarily, beyond just talking point of either party line stance of it? I mean, the Department of Energy's main goal was to get us off foreign oil, like a long time ago, that is pretty failed as much as the DOE. Different approach needed, or a massive rethinking of the current one. You don't usually get massive rethinking nationally of any coherent nature, which is why I think a local strategy might be a good way to go here. Perhaps then, you could have that initial part of the DOE before it became the DOE of providing information to schools about what works from other schools kick in again.

This kind of talk of "Ron Paul addresses none of this" about something that isn't related exactly isn't really fair. It is like trying to talk about income tax issues and saying changing them doesn't address the issue of the military war machine...well of course not, it is a different issue. Did you see that recent Greewald video where he talks about the founders did think that massive inequality was not only permissible, but the idea...just as long as the rules were the same for everyone? What I mean to say is that there does need to be a measure of fairness, but that fairness needs to be the same for everyone, rich and poor. I still say the real problem lay in the government creating the monster first and the monster is now eating us. If legislators simply refused to accept the legitimacy of corporate entities and instead say that only individuals can deal on the behalf of themselves with the govenrment(the elimination of the corporate charter as it refers to its relationship to the government) things could get better in a day. But since the good ol USA thinks that non-people entities are people, well, I don't see much hope for restoration. Money is the new government, rule of law is dead. I liked the recent Greenwald input on this. Rant over Sorry, this is just kind of stream of consciousness here, didn't plan out an actual goal or endpoint of my ideas....just a huge, burdensome wall of text

>> ^dystopianfuturetoday:

The first incarnation of the department of education was actually created in 1876. Was our educational system unfucked before 1876? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_Education
1980 was a pivotal year, but it had nothing to do with the department of education. 1980 was the year that Reagan ushered in a large number of 'free market' reforms: Privatization, deregulation, tax cuts for those at the top, austerity for those at the bottom... basically the Milton Friedman Shock Doctrine as described in Naomi Klein's excellent book.
We've since seen the rise of the corporate state and a deterioration of the public sector. These market principles have seen our jobs exported to 3rd world slaves (and then asked us to compete with those slaves), have given the green light to mass pollution and global warming, have allowed big business to use our military as middle east mercenaries and have redistributed vast amounts of wealthy to a tiny fraction of the population (not to mention numerous scandals (Enron, Exxon, BofA, Countrywide, Halliburton, Blackwater, Savings and Loans, Mortgages, etc..)
Ron Paul addresses none of this. He has no solutions for jobs or inequality outside of his faith in invisible hands and invisible deities. He doesn't even seem aware that there is a problem. I don't think he's lying when he pretentiously states that his partisan political views are the very definition of liberty. I just think he is another out of touch conservative millionaire with a mind easily manipulated by self serving dogma (be it religious political or economic).

>> ^xxovercastxx:
"This" is this video. I'll give you one example of dishonesty/ignorance (I'm not sure if they're stupid or lying in this case). As they're showing the map of radar gaps they claim that the locations of the gaps are widely unknown, even to air traffic controllers. If that's true, how is some random dude from Youtube able to show us a map of them? Either the map is made up or he's full of shit about it being a big secret.


Here's the quote:
How should Mohammed Atta and his associates have known the most intimate details of military and civilian radar coverage in the U.S. - details, widely unknown even to air traffic controllers in charge on 9/11? And how should they have known by minute, when their individual plane had reached such a 'radar gap'? Finally: Why didn't the 9/11 Commission even mention this issue?

The video lists the map source in the bottom right hand corner. The map is based on images from a 2002 study at MIT Lincoln Laboratory. The study notes there is "no common integrated air picture" between the FAA and DoD and recommended actions to take to form a "seamless and common air picture".

pdf: http://i-cns.org/media/icns/2002/11/Session_E2-4_Bussolari.pdf
scribd: http://www.scribd.com/doc/18663172/T8-B16-Misc-Work-Papers-Fdr-5202-Briefing-Slides-Surveillance-Implications-of-911-MIT-Lincoln-Lab

If you honestly have questions like this, then you should ask them instead of forming opinions from true ignorance.

Got anything else?

"Their hacking or TCP/IP's!"

"Its impossible, the DoD encryption levels are over 9000!"

"... I've never seen such l33t code!"

Meg-gyne is the only polysilastic, DoD-dependent, fire retardant, Jehovahcrat Party mouthpiece keeping the airwaves saturated 'till bursting.

Mr./Mrs. Thomas have BOOM!... money in the bank.


... these are fun to write.

I want to think you aren't a dick, but to do so we need to get real here for a minute. Are you including the FICA tax in your numbers? Do you agree with the social security raiders? Is the real problem where the actual thresholds are? Because if your problem is with raising taxes on people in the 90k area, I'm on board with you. The question becomes, why is there no support to raise taxes on people that earn over a million a year? Why is there no support to raise estate taxes? Indeed, how does taking away the basic human right to organize and negotiate even have anything to do with a budget crisis, particularly when that group is already prepared to make the necessary fiscal concessions?

I'm currently being paid about 10% of what I could be making. I'm working in the basic science of retinal function on work that could lead to all sorts of advances that benefit you, or your children, or for that matter humanity in general. I could be making ten times as much as a machine vision expert building predator drones to kill people whom most often I have no beef with. That's what you get with your "only spend it on 'defense', and let me keep the rest" attitude about taxation. FWIW, that's where I'm coming from, and that's why it pisses me off when millionaires don't want to give up an extra Ferrari in order to better educate the (by no fault of their own) underprivileged youth. Then out of the other side of their mouth they won't shave the $78 billion from the defense budget the DoD doesn't even want.

Nobody is trying to legislate morality here. You can write off the money you already give back for a reason. We just need to pay for all the infrastructure your business needed to succeed somehow. You're paying less in taxes than at almost any time since WWII. Cut us a little slack. We're barely making ends meet.

>> ^ridesallyridenc:

Why would you want to punish the people that actually succeed? How would it help to take away an individual's incentive to get ahead by taking more than half of their earnings when they do?
In 2006, the top 20% of earners in the country brought in 66% of the revenue and paid 85% of federal income taxes. The bottom 40%, on the other hand /consumed/ 3.6% in tax credits and incentives. Cumulatively, the bottom 60% of earners in this country paid only 0.8% of the federal income tax.
So, if you're making over $91k / year (which, face it, isn't rich), you're considered "elite" and should be punished for your success?

Congratulations, qualifies for DOD grant for up to 5.1 million under CODE 23 of the US Military System.

>> ^Mandtis:

"Approximately 23,000 military and civilian employees[3] and about 3,000 non-defense support personnel work in the Pentagon."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pentagon
5200 out of about 26000...?? Not a chance I can believe that.


Well, every single word of the title is inaccurate or misleading. It's mind boggling really. The title is taken directly from MoxNews' post, so I don't blame gwiz. But let me try to make a clear list of everything wrong with the title.

1. "5200" - That was the complete number of names/e-mail addresses swept up under ICE project flicker. This was not an investigation into the DoD, but they came across several e-mail addresses that obviously belonged to the DoD. The Pentagon's investigative branch (DCIS) was informed of this and for some reason they checked only 3500 of those names, and of those 3500 found 264 DoD employees.

2. "Pentagon Employees" - No, they were investigating Department of Defense Employees and Contractors, the Pentagon is only one small part of the DoD. The DoD includes Departments of the Army, Navy, and Air Force, DARPA, DIA, NSA, ect. According to Wikipedia there were over 2 million DoD employees in 2009. Plus an unknown number of contractors who are not counted as employees. Coup mentions that Contractors were part of the DCIS investigation at 1:08. So if DCIS did cross check the names against all DoD employees and Contractors, we're talking about basically the entire US Military Industrial Complex. "Pentagon employees" might be 1% of that.

3. "PURCHASED Child Pornography!" - 264 are the number of suspects who were employees or contractors of the DoD. You cannot assume that every suspect is guilty until proven innocent. Coup mentioned that fewer than 20% of them were fully investigated (so less than 52 people). He goes on to say "fewer still were prosecuted", and doesn't mention the total number found guilty.

I agree it's an outrage that they stopped the investigation before looking at the entire list, or completely investigating all of the matches. And it's good to see CNN putting pressure on them to reopen the investigation. But this MoxNews fellow is either completely unscrupulous in spreading misinformation to get views, or just not very smart.

I appreciate posts like this. Thank you bmacs.

>> ^bmacs27:

>> ^Mandtis:
"Approximately 23,000 military and civilian employees[3] and about 3,000 non-defense support personnel work in the Pentagon."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pentagon
5200 out of about 26000...?? Not a chance I can believe that.

The title is wrong. There were 5200 people on the list provided by the sting operation. Only a few hundred of those could be tied to the pentagon/DoD. 1% I can buy.

>> ^Mandtis:

"Approximately 23,000 military and civilian employees[3] and about 3,000 non-defense support personnel work in the Pentagon."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pentagon
5200 out of about 26000...?? Not a chance I can believe that.


The title is wrong. There were 5200 people on the list provided by the sting operation. Only a few hundred of those could be tied to the pentagon/DoD. 1% I can buy.