Grumpy Editor

Sequestration triggers reports of wasted taxpayer funds

With the sequester in place, Washington Times and Wall Street Journal writers are among those pointing out some ridiculous happenings on where taxpayer money is dumped, notes Grumpy Editor.

On the day sequestration went into effect, the Washington Times’ Stephen Dinan tallies more than 400 jobs posted by federal agencies via ads.

Among them:  The U.S. Forest Service seeks a few good men and women to work as recreation aides this summer, the Internal Revenue Service is searching for an office secretary in Maryland, the U.S. Mint wants 24 people to help press coins, and the Agriculture is searching for three insect production workers to help grow bollworms in Phoenix. 

Citing waste of taxpayers’ money as the sequester rolls in, Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberley A. Strassel lists some “absurdities in government spending.” 

They include the Environmental Protection Agency giving $141,000 for a Chinese study of swine manure, part of a $325,000 National Science Foundation outlay for building a robotic squirrel, a $27 million project to help fund pottery classes in Morocco, and most noteworthy --- “feds last year held 894 conferences that each cost more than $100,000 --- $340 million altogether.” 

Meanwhile, shutting White House tours in the wake of the sequester is kicking up some dust. 

ABC News' Jonathan Karl, for one, questions the White House's claim that $84 million in cuts, out of a $1.6 billion budget for the Secret Service, caused the end of the tours.  Karl claims, “Tours are open 20 hours a week and use 30 uniformed Secret Service officers at about $30 an hour. Total saved? Approximately $18,000 a week." 

 

‘Snow day’ in D.C. shelves ‘warming’ hearing 

Prediction of a major snowstorm smacking Washington, D.C., led to cancellation of a global warming (aka climate change) hearing slated for the House Science, Space and Technology Committee.  

Most of nation’s capital was shut down for a “snow day” in which federal workers stay home with full pay.  Although the Wednesday storm did not materialize and snowflakes were scant, there was no indication that workers would make up for the lost time in the now budget-conscious Washington. 

The Washington event --- underscoring weather predictions often are fuzzy despite heavy use of large-scale computers and specialized software with input from hundreds of daily observations from land, sea and air --- was followed by a widely covered Friday story emphasizing the planet will be warmer in 2100 than it has been for 11,300 years. 

In the study, published in the journal Science, researchers claim that after a cooling trend that lasted about 5,000 years, about two centuries ago temperatures began to rise and that projections indicate a continued uptrend. 

The National Weather Service, known as the Weather Bureau when established in 1890 (when Ulysses S. Grant was president), is staying out of the discussion which relies on paleoclimatology that reconstructs climate based on geological evidence that includes glacial deposits, fossils, sediments plus rock and ice cores.

 

Washington Post boots indie ombudsman 

The Washington Post is eliminating its independent (non-staffer) ombudsman who fields readers' complaints, investigates, and then writes about them.  The Post created the position in 1970. 

Publisher Katharine Weymouth says she and the Post "remain faithful to the mission" of the ombudsman and added the newspaper planned to appoint "a reader representative (a Post employee) shortly to address our readers' concerns and questions." 

The staffer will not write a weekly column but will “write online and/or in the newspaper from time to time to address reader concerns, with responses from editors, reporters or business executives as appropriate,” adds Weymouth."

 

In case you missed these… 

Rasmussen Reports 56 percent of voters regard news reported by the media as at least somewhat trustworthy, but that includes only six percent who think it is very trustworthy…Toronto Star reporters withheld their bylines from the Wednesday edition in a show of protest against upcoming layoffs and restructuring…The buzz around Hollywood, via “two high-level industry sources” reported in the Hollywood Reporter is that NBC is moving toward a May announcement that the 2013-2014 television season will be the last for Jay Leno as host of the long-running The Tonight Show…TV reports on an abundance of sharks in waters off the Florida coast gained wide coverage in the past few days despite the fact sightings of the toothy marine fish, most of them small and ignoring humans, are normal for this time of year…Time Warner Inc. has decided to spin off its Time Inc. publishing business into a separate company…Redesigned Redbook, one of the Hearst Corp.’s magazines, turns its focus on fashion, beauty and shopping starting with the April issue…The Salt Lake Tribune trims Monday editions to two sections from five in an effort to reduce costs.

Sexy, pesky fruit flies get 'buzz' with alcohol-laced chow

One of the year’s strangest stories --- and space chewers --- to make some front pages over the weekend dealt with (ready for this?) sex life of fruit flies, observed Grumpy Editor. 

It also indicated how University of California, San Francisco, researchers are spending valuable tax dollars in a financially-smacked state. 

Fruit flies normally are attracted to ripened or fermenting fruits and vegetables.  And spotting them shake up produce inspectors, especially in California. 

Associated Press writer Malcolm Ritter gobbled up information based on material in Science magazine that involved a study of fruit flies that could shed light “on the biology of alcohol abuse.” 

The story detailed how fruit flies were studied after being put into containers with a just-mated female.  Then the rejected insects were placed in vials and given a choice of regular food or alcohol-laced chow.  “They consistently went for the alcohol more than did the male flies that had just mated,” Ritter reported. 

The story also cited researchers paired thousands of other male flies with dead virgin females, “so they didn’t experience rejection but didn’t have sex either.” 

Wow! 

With newspapers' editorial space getting tighter and considering readers’ increasing interest in the shaky economy, job creation, the conflict in Afghanistan, taxes being pushed, growing use of Air Force One for fund raising, the upcoming election and weird weather appearing around the country, how fruit flies made front pages --- or even the funny pages --- was simply weird.

 

Passing asteroid grabs space while NPP gets snubbed

Receiving much print and broadcast attention was a 1,200-foot-wide asteroid that zipped pass Earth yesterday, affecting no one, while last month’s launch of a NASA satellite for climate research and improved weather forecasting --- with output affecting millions in the U.S. alone --- received scant coverage, notes Grumpy Editor.

With the asteroid, editors, naturally, are always interested in objects (this one the size of a city block) hurtling through the atmosphere, even though this chunk passed Earth 201,700 miles away while traveling about 29,000 miles per hour. 

Meanwhile, the Oct. 28 California launch of a $1.5 billion Earth-observing satellite, the size of a minivan, with new technology to beef up weather forecasting and climate research receives limited coverage. 

For newspapers, maybe it's because the lengthy nine-word identification --- National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System Preparatory Project --- is difficult to fit into a headline. 

Labeled NPP for short, it carries five instruments to study temperature and water in the atmosphere, how clouds and aerosols affect temperature, and how plants on land and in the ocean respond to environmental changes.

NPP’s daily observations transmit about four terabytes of data.  That’s equivalent to about 800 DVDs. 

Expected to operate at least to the end of 2016, NPP is one of 14 Earth observation missions managed by NASA. 

 

As dead bird reports grow, will ‘bird editor’ title emerge?

Looks like newspapers may have to add a new (although temporary) position --- bird editor --- as editorial content in the past 12 days has been heavy with coverage of  dead birds falling from the sky or found along roadways, notes Grumpy Editor.

Latest on the bird watch:  more than 100 dead birds were found just off Highway 101 yesterday in Geyserville, Calif., about 60 miles north of San Francisco.

California wildlife officials were puzzled as to their species, describing them only as small with brown and black feathers.  (For those without a bird book, that fits the description of common house sparrows, formerly called English sparrows.)

This followed reports over the past few days of other strange happenings involving dead birds around the nation --- and the world.

Leading off the dead bird mysteries this month were 3,000 to 5,000 dead ones dropping from the sky on New Year’s Day near Beebe, Ark.

That soon was followed by 500 deceased birds falling to the ground in Louisiana.

Then Kentucky reported more birds crash landing.

Most of the casualties in the three states involved blackbirds.

Overseas, more than 700 birds, described as turtle doves, fell from the sky near Faenza, Italy.

Sweden also reported dozens of feathered fatalities.

Likely causes, advanced by experts and others, ranged from reaction to fireworks, lightning, hail, disease, bad eyesight, secret weapons testing, alien interference and indigestion.

Results of some tests by wildlife officials were expected later this week.

 

 

 

 

Prediction: Look for a change in 'global warming'

Grumpy Editor predicts headline writers --- who relish short words and phrases --- won’t like this expanded identification being pushed by John Holdren, White House science adviser:  Use "global climate disruption" rather than the simpler and briefer "global warming.”

Holdren, who directs the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, feels the long-used global warming term (or alternate “climate change”) oversimplifies the atmospheric problem and makes it seem less dangerous.

He tells an audience in Oslo, Norway that global warming is a "dangerous misnomer" for something far more complicated than a rise in temperature.

Commenting on the newly-hatched phrase, Republican pollster Adam Geller says folks in Washington are “trying to come up with more politically palatable ways to sell some of this stuff."

Geller also notes Democrats refer to the Bush tax cuts as "middle-class tax cuts.”

Changing the reference to climate change likely derives from flagging public support for their bill to regulate emissions, says Geller, adding, "global warming" makes the cause easy to ridicule whenever there's a snowstorm.

The push for a three-word “warming” term isn’t new.

Three years ago, Holdren suggested an almost similar phrase, "global climatic disruption."

Well before that, early studies on humans vs. climate came up with the mouthful “inadvertent climate modification."

Federal agency seeks $1.3 million for cloud seeding

In these belt-tightening times, the Bureau of Reclamation is seeking $1.3 million for cloud seeding in efforts to produce more water from winter storms for Walker Lake, north of Hawthorne, Nev., notes Grumpy Editor.

The lake, on Highway 95 between Reno and Las Vegas, is 12 miles long, 5.2 miles wide and up to 78 feet deep.

Even with that depth there is concern --- for fish in the lake.

The recreational area is a haven for boating, water skiing, fishing, camping, hiking and bird watching.   And it’s a stopover for migrating waterfowl.

The cloud-seeding process attempts to modify the weather by dispersing substances into the air in hopes of yielding more precipitation from clouds.

It’s always a challenge in an arid area where clouds are few during most of the year.

Walker Lake’s water level has dropped about 145 feet.

But that’s in span of about 140 years.

The lake is fed by 50-mile long Walker River that also flows into Topaz Lake near the California border.  Along with normal evaporation, agriculture takes much of the water diversions. 

The Bureau of Reclamation would channel cloud-seeding funds to the Desert Research Institute, the nonprofit research campus of the Nevada System of Higher Education, which would handle the task.

Neil Armstrong calls Obama ‘poorly advised’ on space

The Washington Post and London’s Daily Telegraph ran reports in yesterday’s editions on the opposition --- voiced by the first and last Americans to walk on the moon --- to President Barack Obama’s plans for future human space flight but most U.S. newspapers gave little or no space to the veteran astronauts’ comments to a U.S. Senate committee, notes Grumpy Editor.

Neil Armstrong, first on the moon as Apollo 11 commander, and Eugene A. Cernan, Apollo 17 commander, appeared before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation.

Both astronauts dismissed plans advanced by the administration that will end most of NASA's Constellation program and rely on the commercial space industry to ferry future astronauts to the international space station.

"I have yet to find a person in NASA, the Defense Department, the Air Force, the National Academies, industry or academia that had any knowledge of the plan prior to its announcement," declared Armstrong , first to set foot on the lunar surface in 1969.

"A plan that was invisible to so many was likely contrived by a very small group in secret who persuaded the president that this was a unique opportunity to put his stamp on a new and innovative program," Armstrong added. "I believe the president was poorly advised."

Armstrong continued, “If the leadership we have acquired through our investment is allowed simply to fade away, other nations will surely step in where we have faltered. I do not believe that this would be in our best interests."

Added Cernan, "Nowhere do we find a commitment in dollars to support this national endeavor," adding "this budget proposal presents no challenges, has no focus and, in fact, is a blueprint for a mission to nowhere."