Month: November 2006

Schools look for ways to dispose of radioactive materials:

School labs have used low-level radioactive materials safely for decades; experts say they’re critical in teaching physics and chemistry. Sealed samples — often leftovers from past experiments — frequently are saved in closets and storerooms.

But as teachers retire and containers get shoved aside to make way for new samples, it’s easy for schools to lose track of what they’ve got, or to store them incorrectly, said Dr. Sandra West, an associate biology professor at Southwest Texas State University in San Marcos.

No doubt this story has put our high schools at risk, once Al-Qaeda gets finished ransacking antiques stores for lumeniscient clock faces, dumps for old smoke detectors, and garage sales for twenty year old microwave ovens.

State Senate passes $7.50 hourly rate:

Amid warnings that it could cost jobs in border areas such as the Metro East, the Illinois Senate on Wednesday approved a $1 minimum wage increase that would keep the state’s pay scale above Missouri’s and ahead of a proposed federal increase.

Rate freeze plan clears committee:

A proposal meant to spare consumers from double-digit electricity rate hikes next year easily cleared an Illinois House committee Tuesday, but its prospects of becoming law are uncertain.

Now that the Illinois state government has helped raise costs and hold prices down, making businesses’ decisions easy by removing them, the only question the legislators are leaving to its entrepreneur class is: To what state should I move?

Stem cell injections fight muscular dystrophy in dogs:

Stem cell injections worked remarkably well at easing symptoms of muscular dystrophy in a group of golden retrievers, a result that experts call a significant step toward treating people.

Fortunately, with the passage of Amendment 2 in Missouri, our canines will have access to these treatments and our biotech companies will have access to the sweet, sweet taxpayer cash to solve dogs’ problems.

But note:

The study was published online Wednesday by the journal Nature. It used stem cells taken from the affected dogs or other dogs, rather than from embryos. For human use, the idea of using such “adult” stem cells from humans would avoid the controversial method of destroying human embryos to obtain stem cells.

So another lifesaving cure for an animal that doesn’t require embryonic stem cells? Good thing we spent so much time and government effort in embryonic stem cell research!

Maybe I am reading too much into unrelated events, but these two things could indicate the beginning of an escalating arms race and tensions between two non-governmental entities.

1: Dam plans jeopardize Amazon, experts say.

2: Private Texas spaceport launches test rocket:

A remote West Texas spaceport being built and bankrolled by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos launched a test rocket Monday for the first time.

So you have a dam threatening Amazon, and Amazon’s founder bankrolling a rocket program. Only a fool would miss the obvious.

Tobacco tax defeat smacks hospitals:

Missouri’s hospitals weren’t running for office last week, but they ended up among the losers.

Voters rejected a proposed constitutional amendment that would have increased cigarette taxes by 80 cents a pack.

Most of the money raised — about $289 million of the forecast $350 million — would have gone to Missouri’s hospitals to help pay for the care of the state’s lowest-income patients.

The Missouri Hospital Association, the major supporter of the failed amendment, says it’s not giving up.

That’s the spirit, Missouri Hospital Association, you continue finding ways to have the taxpayers chip in to bolster your and your members’ bottom lines. Don’t give up.

Oh, I know, you’re saying, “There goes MfBJN, attacking the poor again,” but note, fellows, that any wide-ranging industry serves the poor. Just because it’s health care doesn’t mean it’s exempt from my free market-loving scorn.

I mean, how many poor people could be served with the money spent in the Missouri Hospital Association’s budget? Plenty, I would guess, but no doubt that capital is doing more good paying salaries and expenses for lobbyists who are self-selected to do the work for the poor.

Well, why aren’t the climate experts making that claim? Because the bad storms are happening on Saturn:

NASA says its Cassini spacecraft has found a hurricane-like storm at Saturn’s South Pole, nearly 5,000 miles across — or two-thirds Earth’s diameter.

“It looks like a hurricane, but it doesn’t behave like a hurricane,” said Andrew Ingersoll, a member of Cassini’s imaging team at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif. “Whatever it is, we’re going to focus on the eye of this storm and find out why it’s there.”

Maybe it’s an ozone hole or something on account of all the CFCs.

In a startling turn of events, when the price of something goes up, consumers buy less of it. This holds true of labor, where the St. Louis Post-Dispatch has performed some hard-hitting post-election journalism to discover that businesses will hire fewer employees at minimum wage now that the state’s citizens have ordered businesses to do so:

26 percent increase in Missouri’s minimum wage to $6.50 an hour will hit urban and rural workers hardest because some may lose their jobs or not be hired as businesses adjust to hold down costs, some business owners and analysts say.

So Missourians have elected to lessen customer service to themselves and to promote the use of illegal immigrants whereever possible (it’s not that they do jobs Americans don’t want, but they do take pay that Americans cannot).

Meanwhile, in Illinois, the re-elected Governor Rod Blagojevich cannot wait to impose an additional hiring freeze in his state:

Two days after his re-election, Gov. Rod Blagojevich wasted no time spending some political capital on what had been one of his biggest campaign promises: raising the minimum wage, again.

Such a campaign pledge had helped Blagojevich win his first term in 2002 and it became a pledge he made good on when he signed a $1.35-an-hour hike above the federal level in the summer of 2003.

On Thursday, he called his proposed $1 hike, which would raise the minimum wage to $7.50 an hour, his “first order of business” as the legislature returns for its fall session next week.

Meanwhile, in the bowels of the Power-to-the-People headquarters in Missouri, the master tacticians have begun their planning for agitation for the next attempt to raise the minimum wage in Missouri or select parts thereof to a “living wage” because the electoral victory on Tuesday was only the latest victory in a struggle to make the job market equal. In which half the people make a living wage of some sort or another, and the other half are unemployed.

I voted. Now, I am going to drink a little wine and read a bit of classical literature.

Because, gentle reader, this Republic will go on beyond tonight, beyond the tallies, beyond tomorrow.

Regardless of what the panting pamphleteers of pixels say tonight.