But, if giving the “Job Creators” a tax break is going to create jobs, where are the jobs? The richest people in our country have been enjoying this tax break since shortly after Bush took office. If this is what gives us a secure and healthy economy, how come we just had a big meltdown? And, weren’t a lot of the “Job Creators” involved in that meltdown?

I’ve always felt that I made a mistake, that there were opportunities I missed because I didn’t finish my education, and for years I’ve been meaning to do something about it. So I recently picked up some books on the math courses I didn’t take and started tinkering with electronics. I went online to find courses on electronics at at www.opencircuits.com found a link to the MIT OpenCourseWare electrical engineering curriculum. I watched the first video for the course 6.002 Circuits and Electronics. It left me intrigued, as a good lecture should, and I’m now slowly working my way through the course materials.

So far, the course is excellent. I figured most of it would be review, but I’m learning all kinds of interesting things, and, best of all, it’s helping pull together a lot of tidbits of knowledge I had, showing me how they are related to one another.

MIT has done the whole world a huge solid by posting this material. Anyone who understands English and has access to the Internet, who’s willing to put in the time and effort, can take advantage of this material and educate themselves using the resources of one of the greatest engineering schools in the world. Teachers can use this material to help them structure their own courses.

The material consists of a syllabus, calendar, video lectures, lecture notes, readings, homework, assignments, labs, and exams. Tools available for this course include WebSim, http://euryale.csail.mit.edu/, a site where you can experiment with the circuits discussed in the course.

If you’re interested in learning more about engineering MIT’s OpenCourseWare is a great place to start.

One of the biggest changes is in combat. It’s faster paced than before, too fast to really follow, and has more of an arcade feel to it. The Boss fights are too much like what you’d expect to find in more action oriented titles. The plethora of effects from spells and special abilities sometimes fills the screen with so many particle effects it is difficult to figure out what’s happening. Which is a shame, because there are many interesting new abilities and a slower combat pace would give the player a better chance to explore them. It would have been nice if Bioware had given an option to slow down combat, other than constantly hitting the space bar to pause it.

Inventory management is greatly improved, with a five-star rating system that helps you determine what items are best suited for your character at any given level. Anyone who played Dragon Age will appreciate that change. My one complaint is that when you are viewing items in the market, the items you are thinking of buying have a rating, but the items you have equipped do not. This seems like a pretty silly feature to have over looked.

The story in Dragon Age II is well founded in the mythos of Thedas, the world of Dragon Age. It revolves around the tensions between the various groups, all of which seem to be magnified in the city of Kirkwall where most of the story takes place. As in most Bioware titles, this is where the game truly shines. The writing and voice acting are excellent.

If you played Dragon Age, you’ll be happy to know that several of the characters from the first game have found their way into this story.

As in Dragon Age I, there is quite a bit of replayability in this game. You can choose to be one of three different classes: warrior, mage, or rogue, and you can choose your gender, but you can’t choose your race. While this might seem limiting, it’s clear right away that it was a good idea on the part of Bioware, at least for this story.

The easiest class if Warrior, then Rogue, and finally Mage, as you’d expect.

As other reviewers have pointed out, it was probably a mistake for Bioware to have downloadable content ready to go when the game was released. It’s kind of like saying, “For $60, you get everything except for …”

Still, it’s a great game. I give it 4.5 out of 5 stars.

The reason this always happens is that the Constitution reserves the power to declare war for Congress. The thought is that the country should not go to war unless the majority of the citizens are convinced it’s a good idea.

James Madison believed that war was one of the greatest enemies of liberty, because wars beget armies, and armies beget debt and taxes, which he says are two of the most powerful instruments by which the few gain power over the many.

While it takes Congress to declare war, you can’t run a military as a democracy. You need a definite chain-of-command, so the President is given the job of Commander-in-Chief.

This worked just fine in the 1700′s and 1800′s when communication was ponderously slow, there were no aircraft other than balloons, and cannons were pulled to the battle by horses.

But even back then, Congress had to acknowledge that the President needed to have the ability to respond quickly to acts of aggression. And now things happen a bit more quickly, and sometimes, the President has to act just as quickly in order to prevent loss of life.

In this case, Libyan forces were advancing on a major rebel city and it was quite likely that thousands, or even tens of thousands of Libyan citizens would be killed.

I agree with many of Obama’s critics that once military action was begun, it was the Administration’s responsibility to report to Congress and seek authorization for further action. But I think calls for impeachment are just self-serving political nonsense.

As for those who are screaming about the cost of this action, I find it interesting that they are strangely silent about the billions misplaced by the Bush administration in Iraq, or the enormous quantities of money being paid to “contractors” in Afghanistan, who turn out to be al-Quida supporters.

Personally, I’ll be reserving judgement on what we’re doing in Libya for a while. My hope is that our military involvement is brief and that it helps bring about a peaceful transition of power.

Here’s hoping.

Recently, some less than reputable companies have started repackaging and distributing Blender under different names, so they can charge people for a product that can be downloaded for free. They’ve also been stealing graphics done by members of the Blender community and using them in their advertising without any compensation being paid to the artists.

While it’s perfectly legal for anyone to redistribute Blender and even charge a price for doing so, these companies are doing it in a way that is misleading to their customers. Since the customers might not even know they are actually using Blender, they never know about the great user community and tutorial videos that are available.

3DMagic and IllusionMage are the worst offenders.

You can read more about this at the following link:
3DMagix, 3DMagixPro, IllusionMage, scam

To be sure, there are alternatives, such as online schools, that offer ways for working adults to finish degrees or go on to higher degrees, but I believe all colleges and universities should provide programs that allow students to earn degrees at whatever pace that student can handle.

Getting a degree is one of the best ways to improve your economic situation. But if you’re already trying to support a family by working two or three jobs, adding school to the mix just isn’t possible. Not everyone is a super man or woman. Most of us a mere mortals with busy schedules and ordinary limitations in time and energy.

We need all the education we can get in this country. We face very difficult problems in the years ahead and we need every bit of wisdom and creativity we can muster to see our way through.

http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2010/20101001_SummerTemperatures.pdf

This is a paper prepared by James Hansen, one of the first climatologists to start talking about global warming and the effects it’s expected to have. In this paper he explains how they compare data from various sources when trying to determine whether one year is warmer than another. It’s a lot more complicated than you think. Factors like the variations in solar output and weather cycles like El Nino/La Nina all play a part.

This year, 2010, may prove to be the warmest on record. That means, the warmest year in 131 years of record keeping. It’s going to be a close call between this year and 2005. It also looks likely we’ll see new heat records set in 2012, since that will be an El Nino year, the sun will be coming out of the solar minimum, and the overall world temperature continues to rise.

I think his concluding paragraphs are the most important. In them he explains how the way scientists answer questions can be misleading. For instance, if you ask if a particular heat wave was caused by global warming, the standard answer is that you can’t blame a specific event on global warming. To the general public, that translates to “no.” But, if you posed the question differently, by asking if the same event would have happened if CO2 had remained at the pre-industrial level of 280ppm (parts per million), the answer would most likely be “almost certainly not.” That answer translates as: “yes, humans have some responsibility for that extreme event.”

The part that most people don’t understand is that extreme events are, in statistical terms, on the tail of the probability distribution, meaning that they are unlikely. But they are also the events that change most in frequency of occurrence as the distribution is shifted by global warming.

To put it another way, the “hundred year flood” was something you usually knew about, but you didn’t really worry about being very likely to happen. You could get reasonably priced flood insurance to guard against it. But it doesn’t take a big shift in frequency distribution (translate as increase in average temperature) for a 100-year event to be happening several times a century with a good chance of a 500-year event every hundred years.

The telecom companies want to change that. They want to be able to charge different customers different prices. Think of Internet service as an apple. They want to sell that apple for one price to Bob and another to Sam, and yet a third to Betty.

But the Internet isn’t an apple, it’s a lot more important. The Internet has become one of the most important technological achievements in human history, up there with the invention of language, the printing press, and the computer itself. The Internet isn’t simply a commodity, it’s a communications medium.

When I say I favor Net Neutrality, I’m saying that I believe we should all have the same access to the Internet. I’m saying that the First Amendment doesn’t just give you freedom of speech, it also gives you the right to expect that you will have access to common communication channels so your speech can be heard.

The Internet has become the new public commons. If we do not defend net neutrality, then we have abandoned the idea that all voices should be equal and that everyone has a right not only to speak, but to be heard.

I’ve been able to get some relief using a drug called ProVigil. I’ve been taking it for years, and under BlueCross/BlueShield I never had a problem getting my prescription filled.

Recently my wife’s company got new insurance with United Healthcare. Since then, I’ve been unable to get the medication because UHC demands prior authorization and apparently automatically rejects all prior authorization requests for this drug. I’ve lost track of how many times my doctors have tried to get the authorization through.

Without this drug, there are some days, like today, where I sleep nearly the whole day. On other days I might do reasonably well, but it is always the question in the back of my mind, ‘how long do I have, today?’

There are no generic or alternative drugs that I’m aware of or that any pharmacist has been able to steer me towards. UHC has simply decided that they will not pay for this expensive drug, because their accountants know better than my doctors.

I’ve had previous problems with UHC. They are supposed to be my insurance company for my disability through Verizon. Years ago the “lost” me and everyone I spoke to pointed the finger at someone else. I was never able to get my insurance restored. If not for my wife’s insurance, I would have only Medicare on which to depend.

This is why I get furious at the way in which so many Americans allowed themselves to be manipulated during the healthcare debate. Some of the more radical options, like a single payer system similar to what our Congress enjoys, might have made it more difficult for UHC and other companies to pull off stuff like this.

Some pharmacists I’ve talked to believe that the insurance companies are retaliating against us all for the healthcare legislation that did get passed. They are purposely reducing our access to healthcare in a callous attempt to influence elections.

I don’t know if this is true. I hope it’s not. If it is then it is an example of venality and greed that I hoped Americans had risen above.

Perhaps it’s time that some ambitious lawyer look into the way UHC and other companies are using prior authorizations to avoid paying for medications desperately needed by their customers.

I don’t really expect I’ll ever get UHC to come through with the benefits they’ve denied me for years, or even pay for the drugs I need. I can only hope that the executives who have been responsible for my problems and those of others find themselves in similar circumstances. Call it poetical correctness.

One this leak is stopped, most of you will go back to your lives and your chief worry will be about how much this disaster will affect oil prices and thus the price of a gallon of gas at the pump. And, of course, that’s the problem, the real reason that these things happen. Too few Americans feel any need to concern themselves about environmental issues, or about the other consequences of our addition to oil.

Every time you use some oil, whether it’s as gasoline in your car, plastics in consumer goods, electricity generated by oil burning plants, or even adding a can of lubricant to your car, you contribute to a host of problems that at first seem unrelated. But just for fun, lets consider them.
Here’s a brief list. It’s not comprehensive. When you use oil:

• Much of the money you spend goes to governments that are hostile to the U.S. The money behind 9/11 came from Saudi Arabia, a country that is supposed to be our ally, but also the country from which most of the funding for Islamic terrorists originates. We also get oil from several African countries run by brutal dictators.Most of the big oil companies are so coddled by our government that they pay little or no taxes. It makes you wonder why we allow such cozy relationships between the safety regulators and the oil companies when these companies put us at risk for catastrophic environmental damage but pay no taxes.
• You contribute to green house warming, now called Climate Change. Recent evidence indicates that the changes we’ve already triggered in our climate may take place far faster than anyone wants to believe. We could see sea levels start to rise rapidly and see a transition to much warmer temperatures in as little as fifty years. There is evidence of such rapid climate transitions in the stalagmites found in blue holes in the Bahamas.
• You help set the stage for ecological disasters like the Exxon Valdez and the Gulf spill. Like it or not, all of us who use gasoline are as much part of the problem as BP is. We’ve known for forty years that it is foolish to depend on fossil fuels and foreign governments for our energy, but we’ve done little or nothing to correct the problem.
• You use up a finite resource. Eventually, we’ll run out of oil. Long before that, it will become far too expensive to use for energy production.

There are tens of thousands of oil wells in the Gulf of Mexico. There is no reason to believe that any of those wells are run any more responsibly than this well was. That means we are at immediate risk for more spills just like this one or perhaps worse. In fact, it is inevitable. There is no way to predict and allow for every possible eventuality. Sometimes, you just have to make the decision that the cost to our environment has to be figured into these decisions and we have to say no.

Contrary to the right-wing alarmists, shifting away from oil isn’t going to cause some horrible catastrophic economic downturn. There’s no reason for that to happen at all. In fact, if we can simply start to reduce our dependence on oil by two to three percent per year, we can stave off much more expensive problems, and possibly even avoid the worst of the possible Climate Change scenarios.

There are two ways to reduce our dependance on oil. We can conserve, and we can use renewable sources of energy.
Conservation is much easier than it used to be. Simply getting everyone to shift to Compact Florescent bulbs will save lots of energy. If you want to do your part, that’s a great place to start. Getting a plug-in hybrid, pure electric, or even just a very efficient automobile will also help our nation make the transition. Recycling aluminum saves enormous amounts of energy. Extracting aluminum from ore is a very energy hungry process, while recycling uses only a tiny fraction of that energy.

There are many people who are terrified of change, or so heavily invested in the status quo, that they refuse to acknowledge what’s happening. They claim climate change is some kind of liberal conspiracy. But even if Climate Change were not an issue, oil is still a bad idea, because the supply is finite and because the oil industry bleeds money out of our pockets and puts it in the hands of people who have no loyalty and no love for us or our country.

It doesn’t take much on your part to make a difference. Recycle, Conserve, and let your elected representatives know that reducing our dependance on polluting fossil fuels is important to you.