Warning: Expect air travel delays if budget cuts hit

by Bart Jansen
USA TODAY
February 20, 2013

WASHINGTON — The travel industry is bracing for significant disruptions starting March 1, if automatic federal spending cuts reduce staffing of air-traffic controllers and checkpoint security officers as scheduled.

"This truly could become a nightmare for travel," Geoff Freeman, chief operating officer of the U.S. Travel Association, says of anticipated flight delays, longer security lines before flights and customs lines after arriving from abroad.

He says the threatened cuts appear likely because Congress is out of session this week and the deadline fast approaching for $85 billion in across-the-board spending cuts. A compromise remains elusive as congressional Republicans criticize President Obama for proposing to avert the automatic cuts by mixing spending cuts with closing tax loopholes.

"This is an enormous concern to those of us in the travel industry and should be a concern across the country," Freeman says.

More: http://www.usatoday.com/story/todayinthesky/2013/02/19/aviation-spending-cuts/1930967/

Tiger Woods: Obama Has 'Amazing Touch' on Golf Course

When Tiger Woods is your teammate, it's hard to lose. Still, President Obama has a pretty good game, according to the world's second-ranked golfer.

President Obama and Woods played golf over Presidents' Day weekend, and Woods divulged on Tuesday that they teamed up to beat the other players in their foursome, U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk and Houston Astros owner Jim Crane.

"He was my partner, and as I said, we won," Woods told reporters at a press conference after a practice round at the WGC-Accenture Matchplay Championship in Arizona.

"He hit the ball well, and he's got an amazing touch. He can certainly chip and putt," Woods said of Obama. "If he ... spends more time playing the game of golf, I'm sure he can get to where he's got pretty good stick" -- golf-aficionados' terminology for a talented game.

More: http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/OTUS/tiger-woods-obama-amazing-touch/story?id=18540795

Aliens, Death Rays And Sci-Fi Missile Shields Litter Russian Meteor Conspiracy Theories

The meteor that exploded over Russia Friday was actually one of the country’s satellites shot down by the U.S. in a fit of Cold War-era aggression, or so goes one of the various conspiracy theories surrounding the Earth’s most recent and noteworthy encounter with an extraterrestrial object.

Despite broad scientific consensus, including among NASA and its Russian equivalent, Roscosmos, that the meteor was, in fact, a meteor and exploded under intense physical pressures after entering our planet’s atmosphere at a speed of at least 33,000 mph, wild theories about what happened continue to circulate.

The simplest narrative is that the meteor was really a meteor but that the Russian government used an unbelievably advanced air defense system to shoot it down.

The fastest missiles in development are designed to travel at nearly 3,800 mph, already beyond the interceptive capabilities of current air defense systems.

More: http://www.ibtimes.com/aliens-death-rays-sci-fi-missile-shields-litter-russian-meteor-conspiracy-theories-1091828

Why are only 9/11 posts allowed in Creative Speculation?

The host of that forum gets angry when any other conspiracy theories are referred there by other hosts. It worked. It's now the 9/11 Truther forum with a handful of UFO posts.

Permission to Engage: Victims' families and an ex-US soldier unpick Wikileaks film showing slaughter

MSNBC Live Stream (for those who don't have cable)

Has Dark Matter Finally Been Found? Big News Coming Soon

BOSTON — Big news in the search for dark matter may be coming in about two weeks, the leader of a space-based particle physics experiment said today (Feb. 17) here at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

That's when the first paper of results from the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, a particle collector mounted on the outside of the International Space Station, will be submitted to a scientific journal, said MIT physicist Samuel Ting, AMS principle investigator.

Though Ting was coy about just what, exactly, the experiment has found, he said the results bear on the mystery of dark matter, the invisible stuff thought to outnumber regular matter in the universe by a factor of about six to one.

"It will not be a minor paper," Ting said, hinting that the findings were important enough that the scientists rewrote the paper 30 times before they were satisfied with it. Still, he said, it represents a "small step" in figuring out what dark matter is, and perhaps not the final answer.

More: http://www.space.com/19845-dark-matter-found-nasa-experiment.html

Bowman v. Monsanto: Is It A Crime to Plant A Seed?

Vernon “Hugh” Bowman, a 75-year-old farmer from rural Indiana, did something that got him sued. He planted soybean seeds. But Monsanto, the agra-giant, insists that it has a patent on the kind of genetically-modified seed Bowman used —and that the patent continues to all of the progeny of those seeds.

Have we really gotten to the point that planting a seed can lead to a high-stakes Supreme Court patent lawsuit? We have, and that case is Bowman v. Monsanto, which is being argued on Tuesday. Monsanto’s critics have assailed the company for its “ruthless legal battles against small farmers,” and they are hoping that this will be the case that puts them in its place. They are also hoping that the court’s ruling will rein in patent law, which is increasingly being used to claim new life forms as private property.

Monsanto and its supporters, not surprisingly, see the case very differently. They argue that when a company like Monsanto goes to great expense to create a valuable new genetically modified seed it must be able to protect its property interests. If farmers like Bowman are able to use these seeds without paying the designated fee, they argue, it will remove the incentives for companies like Monsanto to innovate.

Bowman is a character out of a populist movie — a modern day Mr. Smith Goes to the Supreme Court. If he had bought the genetically modified Roundup Ready seeds directly from Monsanto, he would have been required to pay the company’s technology fee. But Bowman bought his seeds from a grain elevator, which sold him a mix usually used for livestock feed –a mix that happened to include seeds that were progeny of Monsanto’s patented Roundup Ready. Bowman argued that these progeny seed were not covered by Monsanto’s patent, so he had no duty to pay the company a fee.

More: http://ideas.time.com/2013/02/18/is-it-a-crime-to-plant-a-seed/

Bowman v. Monsanto: Is It A Crime to Plant A Seed?

Vernon “Hugh” Bowman, a 75-year-old farmer from rural Indiana, did something that got him sued. He planted soybean seeds. But Monsanto, the agra-giant, insists that it has a patent on the kind of genetically-modified seed Bowman used —and that the patent continues to all of the progeny of those seeds.

Have we really gotten to the point that planting a seed can lead to a high-stakes Supreme Court patent lawsuit? We have, and that case is Bowman v. Monsanto, which is being argued on Tuesday. Monsanto’s critics have assailed the company for its “ruthless legal battles against small farmers,” and they are hoping that this will be the case that puts them in its place. They are also hoping that the court’s ruling will rein in patent law, which is increasingly being used to claim new life forms as private property.

Monsanto and its supporters, not surprisingly, see the case very differently. They argue that when a company like Monsanto goes to great expense to create a valuable new genetically modified seed it must be able to protect its property interests. If farmers like Bowman are able to use these seeds without paying the designated fee, they argue, it will remove the incentives for companies like Monsanto to innovate.

Bowman is a character out of a populist movie — a modern day Mr. Smith Goes to the Supreme Court. If he had bought the genetically modified Roundup Ready seeds directly from Monsanto, he would have been required to pay the company’s technology fee. But Bowman bought his seeds from a grain elevator, which sold him a mix usually used for livestock feed –a mix that happened to include seeds that were progeny of Monsanto’s patented Roundup Ready. Bowman argued that these progeny seed were not covered by Monsanto’s patent, so he had no duty to pay the company a fee.

More: http://ideas.time.com/2013/02/18/is-it-a-crime-to-plant-a-seed/

Why Gender Equality Stalled

By STEPHANIE COONTZ
The New York Times
February 16, 2013

THIS week is the 50th anniversary of the publication of Betty Friedan’s international best seller, “The Feminine Mystique,” which has been widely credited with igniting the women’s movement of the 1960s. Readers who return to this feminist classic today are often puzzled by the absence of concrete political proposals to change the status of women. But “The Feminine Mystique” had the impact it did because it focused on transforming women’s personal consciousness.

In 1963, most Americans did not yet believe that gender equality was possible or even desirable. Conventional wisdom held that a woman could not pursue a career and still be a fulfilled wife or successful mother. Normal women, psychiatrists proclaimed, renounced all aspirations outside the home to meet their feminine need for dependence. In 1962, more than two-thirds of the women surveyed by University of Michigan researchers agreed that most important family decisions “should be made by the man of the house.”

It was in this context that Friedan set out to transform the attitudes of women. Arguing that “the personal is political,” feminists urged women to challenge the assumption, at work and at home, that women should always be the ones who make the coffee, watch over the children, pick up after men and serve the meals.

Over the next 30 years this emphasis on equalizing gender roles at home as well as at work produced a revolutionary transformation in Americans’ attitudes. It was not instant. As late as 1977, two-thirds of Americans believed that it was “much better for everyone involved if the man is the achiever outside the home and the woman takes care of the home and family.” By 1994, two-thirds of Americans rejected this notion.

More: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/17/opinion/sunday/why-gender-equality-stalled.html