Inside the Capitol

Sunday, July 29, 2012

8-3 Roswell scores based on history

80312 etc

SANTA FE – Why was Roswell, New Mexico chosen for the ultimate sky dive? In case you hadn't noticed, "Fearless Felix" Baumgartner, an Austrian adventurer, has found a way to legitimize his stunts.
Very soon now, he will ride a gas balloon to 23 miles above Roswell and jump. If successful, he will establish records for greatest height, longest free fall and the fastest descent without being in an aircraft.
Within 34 seconds of jumping, Baumgartner will be traveling at an estimated speed of 790 miles an hour. That is faster than the speed of sound. No one knows what happens when a human body breaks the sound barrier. It scares me to think about it. This is an extremely dangerous undertaking.
Baumgartner and his Red Bull Stratos sponsor are now pioneering scientific advances in areas such as spacesuit design, physiology and suborbital bailouts. The Stratos team includes scientists, engineers and M.D.s.
News reports have treated Baumgartner's next jump as an attempt to set new records. But it also is an attempt to further research begun over 50 years ago to test the limits of human endurance in space travel.
Those tests involved Air Force Col. Joseph Kittenger. It is his records Baumgartner will be attempting to break. Kittenger is a chief advisor on this project.
So why did they come to Roswell? It wasn't because of flying space aliens. It has to do with good weather and miles of flat, uninhabited terrain on which to land. It also has to do with top aviation facilities, which Roswell has maintained since the closing of Walker Air Force Base 50 years ago.
But the main reason, according to Stratos technical director Art Thompson, is the space technology begun in Roswell by Dr. Robert Goddard in the 1930s. The Stratos team is proud to be part of that history.
It is also worth noting that Goddard was looking for the same location benefits as Stratos – good weather and flat uninhabited land. His chief scout in that search was none other than Charles Lindberg of aircraft pioneering fame.
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From a city steeped in science, we go to a city that ignores science. Our trendy little capital city of Santa Fe, home of New Mexico's left wing, appears ready to quit adding fluoride to the community's water.
At its last meeting, the city council suddenly, and without notice, voted to quit fluoridating our water. George Johnson, editor of The Santa Fe Review, tells us that fluoridation of municipal drinking water is counted by the Centers of Disease Control as one of the 10 great public health achievements of the 20th century.
Not everyone agreed, however. In the 1960s, the John Birch Society denounced fluoridation as a communist plot to pollute our precious bodily fluids.
More recently, the Tea Party persuaded one of Florida's largest counties to stop fluoridation because the globalists want to keep people stupid. I can't disagree with the stupid part.
Now The Left has made this a bipartisan issue. The Santa Fe City Council has to go back and do it over again because of the "without notice" problem. Since fluoridation hasn't stopped here yet, we can assume our city councilors haven't gotten any smarter so the vote is unlikely to change.
The City Council hasn't let us know, at this point, whether we should be on the lookout for communists, globalists or stupidity.
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In a recent column on freedom of speech, I mentioned that the only limits courts have ever placed on the right were in the cases of obscenity, libel and "fighting words." I said to my knowledge the court never has ruled on the oft-heard warning about yelling fire in a crowded theater.
My constitutional advisor, Dave Clary, reminds us that former Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes used that example while explaining his vote on an unrelated subject. And since Holmes said it, that's good enough to make it law.

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