Columns

You’re standing in the grocery store “10 items or less” line and the person in front of you clearly has more than 10 items in his or her basket. Do you:
•Mumble under your breath about the injustice of it all?
• Love them unconditionally?
•Think, “What the *@##! They’ve got 21 items in their basket. Can’t they count?” and recognize that our public school systems are responsible for dumbing down our math skills?
•Feel guilty about placing the blame on math teachers and realize the problem is the failure of reading teachers?
•Set your basket down and leave?

As I begin my new position as the executive director of the New Mexico Spaceport Authority, I anticipate an exciting time ahead for New Mexico as the commercial space industry grows by leaps and bounds.
My vision for Spaceport America is to create the world’s premier commercial space-launch facility, providing first-class customer service and attracting visitors from around the world.
We view Spaceport America as an engine to help stimulate New Mexico’s economy by creating new jobs and to motivate and inspire our students to achieve greatness in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

In Japan’s recent devastating earthquake and tsunami, the Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant structures remarkably survived the 9.0 quake intact, but suffered major damage when the tsunami destroyed external electrical transmission.
It also topped the seawall and inundated the backup diesel generators that power pumps for cooling water to the cores and adjacent spent fuel storage pools.
It is a severe loss of coolant event. The frantic reporting is reminiscent of Three Mile Island – inflated and misinterpreted.
It is hard to separate the facts from the assertions and the media are not helping, but with each passing day more information relevant to the outcome emerges and the hand wringing of previous days lessens.

On Sept. 11, 2001, some radical Islamists stole airplanes with which to attack the U.S.  The overwhelming majority of these murderers were Saudi Arabians and had been educated in the intolerant version of Sunni Islam, called Wahhabi Islam, in the government schools and mosques of Saudi Arabia.
These inspired Saudis felt that attacking the U.S., or for that matter Shia Islam or any other belief system, was doing Allah’s work. Apparently none had a connection with Saddam Husein or Iraq.
We couldn’t invade Saudi Arabia because we needed their oil.  Therefore, we invaded Iraq, against the wishes of the U.N. and most of our allies.