Category: Points of Information

Very brief descriptions, with appropriate links, of current or recent news items.

A reporter finds out the uselessness of Obama’s advice to call the USDA for help

9:53 am

A reporter finds out the naive uselessness of Obama’s advice to “contact the USDA” for help and advice about its new agricultural regulations.

In less than 24 hours, the reporter talked to about a dozen different offices, all of which passed the buck. And here is the final answer the reporter got, from media relations:

Secretary Vilsack continues to work closely with members of the Cabinet to help them engage with the agricultural community to ensure that we are separating fact from fiction on regulations because the administration is committed to providing greater certainty for farmers and ranchers. Because the question that was posed did not fall within USDA jurisdiction, it does not provide a fair representation of USDA’s robust efforts to get the right information to our producers throughout the country.

In other words, PR mumbo-jumbo that says nothing. Read the whole thing, as it is hilarious, tragic, and very very familiar, as we have all had this kind of experience trying to get answers from the government.

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EPA arbitrarily declares a couple’s property a wetland

11:19 pm

We’re here to help you: The EPA arbitrarily declared a couple’s property a wetland and then threatened them with heavy fines if they didn’t restore the property to its pristine state.

The plot is not connected either to the lake or a nearby creek, though Mike Sackett, 45, says part of the land got “wet” at times in the spring. “We sued because we wanted our day in court to say, ‘This is not a wetland,’ ” he says.

The Sackett’s case is now before the Supreme Court.

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Archeologists reap treasures from a newly-discovered POW camp from the Civil War

8:58 pm

Archeologists reap treasures from a newly-discovered POW camp from the Civil War.

Camp Lawton’s obscurity helped it remain undisturbed all these years. Built about 50 miles south of Augusta, the Confederate camp imprisoned about 10,000 Union soldiers after it opened in October 1864 to replace the infamous Andersonville prison. But it lasted barely six weeks before Sherman’s army arrived and burned it during his march from Atlanta to Savannah.

Barely a footnote in the war’s history, Camp Lawton was a low priority among scholars. Its exact location was never verified. While known to be near Magnolia Springs State Park, archaeologists figured the camp was too short-lived to yield real historical treasures. That changed last year when Georgia Southern archaeology student Kevin Chapman seized on an offer by the state Department of Natural Resources to pursue his master’s thesis by looking for evidence of Camp Lawton’s stockade walls on the park grounds.

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Rats didn’t spread the Black Death

11:02 am

New research has shown that humans, not rats, spread the Black Death in the plague of 1348-1349. Also,

Sloane, who was previously a field archaeologist with the Museum of London, working on many medieval sites, is now attached to English Heritage. He has concluded that the spread of the 1348-49 plague, the worst to hit the capital, was far faster, with an impact far worse than had been estimated previously. While some suggest that half the city’s population of 60,000 died, he believes it could have been as high as two-thirds. Years later, in 1357, merchants were trying to get their tax bill cut on the grounds that a third of all property in the city was lying empty. [emphasis mine]

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Space Boat: A Nautical Mission to an Alien Sea

10:40 pm

The Titan Mare Explorer: A nautical mission to an alien sea.

If [NASA] green-lights the mission, the capsule will lift off in 2016. By 2023, TiME will be about 800 million miles away in Titan’s north-polar region, home to its biggest lakes and seas. The capsule will take photographs, collect meteorological data, measure depth, and analyze samples. TiME will have no means of propulsion once it is on Titan, so it will float, carried by breezes across the sea’s surface. Then, by the mid-2020s, it will enter a decade-long winter of darkness as the moon’s orbit takes it to the dark side of Saturn, away from the sun and communication. It won’t have a line of sight to Earth to beam back more data until 2035.

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American manned space: dependent on the Russians in more ways than you think

10:50 pm

American manned space: dependent on the Russians in more ways than you think.

As commentators from around the country gnash their teeth at U.S. dependence upon Russia to move cargo and astronauts to the mostly U.S. built/funded International Space Station (ISS), they’ve missed the bigger boat: With one exception, all the commercial spaceflight offerings currently in the works have Soviet or Russian engines as a key part of the rockets involved.

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