“We believe that 25% of the people who go through our jail systems can afford to pay for their jail stay. If we just grab 25% of those, that would save the county or the city$6.7 million.”-Jeff Stone, County Supervisor
Riverside County, in California, has decided to charge prisoners $142.42 per day. The county says it’s an effort to “save” money, but it looks more like a way for the county to make a profit. When they say they could save $6.7 million, that’s actually how much money they’d take in from prisoners.
The problem is that once they start making big money from charging prisoners, the county government will get addicted to that form of revenue and start making up reasons to put people in prison. Don’t laugh, it’s happened before, and is going on right now with Corporate America operated for profit prisons.
The ACLU is concerned: “Programs like this certainly do raise very serious Constitutional questions. We’re seeing it increasingly in jurisdictions around the country.”-Will Matthews, American Civil Liberties Union
Attorney’s for the county said there is nothing illegal about charging prisoners for their stay. But they warned officials that not all prisoners can afford to pay for their keep: “In order to be reimbursed, the court must determine that the defendant has the ability to pay all or a portion of these costs. Many defendants who are incarcerated lack the financial means, after the payments of fines and penalties, to reimburse these costs.”-Pamela Walls, county attorney
The Idaho Division of Financial Management reported that October tax revenues were $1.6 million short of what was needed.
State officials were hoping for $210.6 million. So far for the fiscal year 2012, overall tax revenues are $10.8 million below what’s hoped for! Amazingly officials still think they’ll finish the 2012 fiscal year with a surplus!?
The biggest drop was seen in sales tax revenues, to the tune of $4.1 million! So far Idaho sales tax revenues are short by $14 million! Sales taxes are a good way to gauge how well your economy is doing, and it doesn’t look too good.
Not only are many of the biggest corporations reporting big profits, they’re paying small taxes. The official tax rate for corporations is supposed to be 35%, but the latest study shows the average effective tax paid is about 18.5%.
Some corporations pay no taxes, and a handful actually have negative taxes!
280 companies in the Fortune 500, that were profitable for all three years between 2008 and 2010, were studied.
111 companies paid effective tax rates of less than 17.5% over the three-year period. 98 paid a rate between 17.5% and 30%.
The average rate is 18.5%. But wait, there’s more. Some companies paid zero taxes! 30 actually owed less than nothing over the three years!
Two of those corporations are Pepco Holdings and General Electric. Over the 2008 to 2010 period Pepco made $882 million in profits, but had a tax rate of -57.6% (yes, put a negative sign in front of that)! But here’s a bigger shocker: GE earned $10.5 billion, with a tax rate of –45.3%! How do you make big corporate profits, and then effectively have the government owe you money?
Lobbyists hired by Corporate America convince your elected lawmakers to create more corporate tax breaks.
The study was done by Citizens for Tax Justice, and the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.
On 02 November 2011, Tokyo Electric Power Company said Reactor 2 at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant was in melt down, again. Now they changed their mind!
TEPCo now says the level of xenon radiation they detected is too low to be from spontaneous fission. Can these guys get anything right?
02 November 2011, Tokyo Electric Power Company announced that melt down has re-started in Fukushima Daiichi Reactor 2.
TEPCo detected radioactive xenon-133 and xenon-135, in the reactor’s containment vessel on 02 November. They are produced during nuclear fission. TEPCo poured a boric acid solution into Reactor 2 to suppress the nuclear fission (melt down).
Analysts are speculating that the other reactors at Fukushima Daiichi could also go critical. Professor Okamoto Koji, of the University of Tokyo Graduate School, says the presence of xenon in the reactors leaves open the possibility that localized and temporary fission could still occur.
TEPCo claims that using the boric acid has cooled down the reactor.
Don’t throw out that 40 year old Heller kit just because it has raised surface detail. You can always use the wheels, landing gear doors and speed brake doors.
The fuselage of the Heller kit has a better shape, but it doesn’t come with the fuel dump (fixed easily), and the area where the elevators attach is the wrong shape (it’s too straight). The vertical tail/rudders on the Fujimi and Hobbycraft kits are bigger in area, and taller than the Heller kit. Fujimi and Hobbycraft have subtle recessed surface details.
The F-30 wings are about the same size in all three kits. With Hobbycraft (now issued by Academy?) you get the added benefit of separately molded slats.
Surprisingly Fujimi does not make a distinction on its packaging regarding the type of wings their kits come with. In their “JASDF” issue you get an F-86F-40 with the extended span, slated wing. In their “Mig Mad Marine” issue you get the F-86F-30 with the in Korean War theater hard fenced wing conversion. Fujimi’s boxes just say “F-86F” (at least on the kits I have).
The old Heller kit has the best detailed main wheels. The Fujimi main wheel tires are the biggest in diameter, followed by Hobbycraft. Photos indicate that the Fujimi tires might be the correct diameter, but the Heller wheel definitely has the best detail. All three kits have similar nose wheels. The real F-86 used at least three types of nose wheels: Two types of spoked wheels, and a solid wheel. Most of the pictures I’ve seen of the solid nose wheel is of South Korean and West German Sabres.
The Heller and Hobbycraft kits have a short intake trunk. The Hobbycraft kit has the nose wheel bay and cockpit floor molded onto the trunk. The Fujimi intake trunking also has the nose wheel bay and cockpit floor molded on, but is much deeper and actually goes somewhere.
That somewhere is an incorrectly faced engine. The fan blades should be set back more (there should be a section of venturi before the blades), and the nose cone should be larger, but who’s gonna really notice once it’s assembled?
The wheel bay doors, and speed brake doors are much better, and accurately detailed on the old Heller kit.
Hobbycraft has screwed up its nose gear door. They’ve put the locator stubs on the wrong side. Their instructions give a vague indication of placement on the correct side of the wheel bay, but if your not paying attention and simply go with the locator stubs you’ll end up with the door on the wrong side (it should be on the pilot’s left side).
All three kits have issues with their elevators. The Hobbycraft kit has the shortest, with the least angle of sweep, and rounded tips. The Fujimi and Heller elevators have the same angle of sweep, but with different shaped tips. The Heller elevator is the longest of the three. From three view drawings of F-86F-30s it doesn’t look like any of the three kit makers got it right, although Heller’s looks the closest to being correct. The Fujimi and Hobbycraft elevators look more like earlier F-86A/E elevators (according to three view drawings).
Other notes: The cockpit details on the Heller kit are worthless. Fujimi has a nice looking instrument panel (not necessarily accurate, but it looks good), and it looks like Hobbycraft has copied the Fujimi panel. The detail on the side consoles, in all three kits, is spurious at best. All three kits have similar looking seats. All three kits have canopies that can be posed open. The Heller and Hobbycraft kits come with external fuel tanks, while the Fujimi kit comes with Sidewinder missiles as well as external fuel tanks.
You can improve the Fujimi and Hobbycraft kits with some of the parts from the Heller kit, but you’d still need aftermarket photo etch, or resin parts to improve the wheel bays and cockpits (or scratch build your own).
A note on references: In one book I have (no names/titles mentioned) there is a color photo of a South Korean F-86, with the -40 extended slat wing (and solid nose wheel). At the back of the book is a color profile of the same aircraft, except it shows the -30 hard fenced wing. It’s just an example to show that you can’t trust a profile, instead use photos of the real thing.
Shiitake mushrooms used in school lunches have tested positive for 350 becquerels per kilogram of radioactive cesium. That’s below the government limit of 500 becquerels, but Yokohama school officials are getting rid of them anyway.
Yokohama is about 250 kilometers (155 miles) from the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.
At a Ibaraki Prefecture mushroom farm, 830 becquerels per kilogram of radioactive cesium were found on the mushrooms there. The farm is about 170 km (106 miles) from the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.
Earlier in the week mushrooms in Chiba Prefecture were found to be contaminated with cesium, higher then the government safe limits. Clearly, after almost seven months, radiation is still spreading from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.
Yokohama City officials are testing their soil for strontium, after a private testing firm said they found high levels of strontium on some roof tops.
The company said they detected 195 becquerels of strontium per kilogram, more than six times the government safety limit. Yokohama has already suffered cesium levels at 80 times the government limits.
Yokohama is about 250 kilometers (155 miles) from the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.
Researchers from eight countries are reporting that the hole in the ozone layer above the North Pole is now as big as the hole over the South Pole.
The North Pole hole now covers an area about 3,000 kilometers (1864.113 miles) long and 1,000 km (621.371 miles) wide.
Of course environmentalists are blaming it on man made pollution. Never mind all the volcanic activity, and record number of forest fires, in the past decade. Also, never mind the fact that the Earth’s magnetic field has being weakening, seemingly at the same time that the holes in the ozone layers have been forming.
It is a fact that the North and South Poles of the magnetic field have gotten much weaker. In fact, in 2003, PBS NOVA produced a newer program on the fact that the poles of our magnetic field are about to flip. You can go to the a PBS NOVA web site to use their interactive programs to see how they think our magnetic field works.
In 2009, famed physics professor Michio Kaku, warned that the solar flares, from the Sun’s expected 2012 pole flip, are going to be much worse than first thought, by a “factor of 20”. He called it a “tsunami of radiation”, which is not good when you realize our atmosphere and magnetic field has weakened.
I believe the real reason for the holes in the ozone layer is because of the weakening of Earth’s magnetic field. The magnetic field weakening and the intensity of the Sun’s solar flares, could be caused by extrasolar planetary encounters. There is an ancient story of another plant that experienced a similar “breaching” of their atmosphere. The story is thousands of years older than any other written stories found so far.
In the ancient story the founders of Earth’s human civilization notice changes to their planet, changes that we currently call “climate change”: “…the fields diminished their yields, fruits and grains lost abundance. From circuit to circuit [orbits], nearing the Sun heat grew stronger; in the faraway abode, coolness was more biting.”
Earth’s magnetic field is directly caused by the spinning molten core. The people of this ancient story noticed their atmosphere was thinning, and their volcanoes were growing dormant: “In the atmosphere a breaching [ozone hole] has occurred; that was their finding. Volcanoes, the atmosphere, forebear, less belching were spitting up! Nibiru’s air has thinner been made, the protective shield has been diminished!”
While most of these ancient alien people thought their volcanoes were the cause of the strength of their atmosphere, others pointed out a more astronomical cause: “It has happened before, some gave an answer: Nibiru in the past colder or warmer has grown. A destiny it is, in the Circuit [orbit] of Nibiru embedded!”
Eventually the ancients realized that their planet’s atmospheric depletion was the result of millennia of near impacts, and actual impacts, with the planets in a more stable orbit around the Sun. The most devastating impact created the Earth, and stopped the Moon’s progress to becoming a full blown planet itself. Later, a near impact slowed the spinning molten core of Mars, and stripped off the atmosphere.
This ancient planet, according to the translations done in the 1960s and 1970s, orbits against the grain of Earth and the other Solar bodies, and takes several hundreds of thousands of years to make one orbit (which is about the time line for major catastrophic events that take place on Earth).
The ancient planet (and its “companions”) approaches from our South Pole. In the past few decades, dozens of astronomical observatories have been established on Antarctica. Recently Japanese astronomers discovered at least ten large dense (with very strong magnetic fields) planets approaching from the south. They stated that the planets ‘lived’ independent of the Sun. They called them “floating planets”, I call them Ronin Planets.
Here’s a link to an OK (some grammatical & spelling errors) pdf posting of The Lost Book of Enki.
Under the guise of forcing people to eat “healthy”, the governments of Denmark and Hungary have imposed the world’s first taxes targeting specific foods. Of course those foods are the most affordable for the growing number of people with less and less income.
Hungary has imposed a potato chip snack tax. Snack chips (called crisps, in Europe) will be taxed at about U.S.$1 per kilogram (2.2 pounds), which could add 10 to 20 cents per bag of chips. The tax includes other items like sugary drinks, snack cakes, salty snacks, and even food flavorings!
Denmark has imposed a U.S.$3 per kilogram (2.2 pounds) tax on the saturated fat content of food. The main targets of the fat tax are milk, butter and cheese.
Here’s the problem with the logic of the governments’ reasons for taxing food that is fast becoming the only food people can afford: Putting a tax on food does not make people eat healthy! The taxes imposed by Denmark and Hungary are not enough to force people to buy much more expensive health food. In the case of Denmark, they’re taxing the main staples of European diets; milk,butter and cheese! Rather, I think those governments are trying to capitalize on the fact that more and more people will be buying the “less healthy” food, because they can’t afford anything else!
