Tuesday, February 13, 2018

Car Show Basics

Car Show -Photo: Wikimedia
Have you ever wondered what the point of a car show is?  After all, what could possibly be so much fun about accumulating so many cars in a single area?  Most people do not realize, but car shows are about so much more than simply lining up a bunch of beautiful cars for people to admire.  There are typically contests that are involved in the shows as well with awards handed out in several categories including Best Overall, and often Best Restoration and other similar categories.

For those who are bringing cars to the show, it is a chance to show off the handiwork that they have put into the car, and also a chance to see how others feel about their work.  Of course, some people are lucky and walk away from almost every show they enter with a prize, but generally, this does not happen.  Most people put months and even years of work into a car before they leave a show with a prize.  

This can translate into thousands of dollars worth of work often.  Dog shows are for dog lovers, and car shows are the equivalent but based around cars.  Because of this, the competition can sometimes be quite stiff, but in general terms, they are still a ton of fun to watch.  There is hardly ever a time when someone is unable to find something to do at a car show that does not interest them. 

From the dozens to hundreds of cars that are entered there are only a small handful that will leave with a prize or a place as one of the top cars.  The fun of looking around and seeing who wins, combined with seeing the beautiful cars, and also participating in some of the other activities that are going on making it a great way to spend the weekend.  There are many people who spend all of their weekends looking around for a car show to attend.

Not everyone who is dedicated to attending car shows actually have cars.  Some of the people who enjoy car shows the most do not have a car, and may not even have an interested in getting a car that would be able to enter the car show.  Deciding if you are interested in attending the car show is often dependent on your personality but realizing that there is much more to the car show than simply walking the rows and rows of cars is often enough to catch many people’s interest.



While car shows are not always considered a sport, they often help to foster great sportsmanship amongst competitors and can be a great way to share experiences and learn plenty about cars.  If you are interested in getting involved in the car shows then sometimes attending a few shows before you enter can be a great way to learn as much as possible about what the judges are typically looking for so that you can improve your vehicle to improve your overall chances of walking away as a winner.

Just think of a single location there are so many gorgeous cars that are all beautifully restored and you can spend all of the time you want looking and dreaming about each one.  There are so many people to meet as well that you can have a lot of fun and you may discover that car shows are your favorite weekend activity that you never knew about.


Saturday, February 10, 2018

Hosting the Winter Olympic Games

2010 Vancouver - Photo: Wikimedia
Hosting the Winter Olympic Games is something that is a tremendous honor, but there is quite an investment that has to take place on the behalf of the host city. This is why Denver, Colorado declined to host the 1976 Winter Olympic Games. The voters of the city decided not to approve a $5 million bond in order to pay for updates, improvements, and promotions for the Winter Olympic Games. 

Yet the initial investment for getting ready to host the Winter Olympic Games is something that many areas are willing to do. The amount of revenue they reap during the Olympic Games as well as after that due to the publicity for their city more than pays for the initial cost to get ready for the event. A large portion of the money they earn comes from the television rights to air the Olympic events from their city.

Those cities that want to host the Winter Olympic Games have to place a bid for it. The committee will then review each bid and narrow the options down to three or four. From there a full evaluation of the city will be conducted in order to determine where the best possible location will be. 

It is very common for cities that want to host the Winter Olympic Games to submit a bid each time they are open until they are awarded the honor of hosting the event. If they aren’t accepted because they don’t have the facilities to successfully host the games then they continue working on constructing them and having them in place before the next bidding session. 

Allowing the Winter Olympic Games to take place in various locations around the world offers more of a universal theme to the concept of the Olympic Games. Since it doesn’t always take place in the same country it doesn’t seem to belong to any one of them but to all of them collectively. It is a great experience though to have the Winter Olympic Games hosted close to where you live. This allows you to go to many of the events and see them live rather than just on TV.

The 2010 Winter Olympic Games will be held in Vancouver, Canada. This will make the third time that Canada has had the honor of hosting the Olympics and the second round for the Winter Olympic Games. It is estimated that it will cost Canada approximately $1.4 billion to host this event. $200 million of this budget will be directly spent on security measures for the 2010 Winter Olympic Games.

Processing is already underway for the 2014 Winter Olympic Games as well which will be held in Sochi, Russia. This is an amazing feat when you consider only 20 years ago Russia was considered to be a very isolated and different form of government than others around the world. 

Yet Russia has plenty to do before the 2014 Winter Olympic Games. More than $580 million will be spent on construction, to lay more than 2,000 miles of fiber optics for communication, and building four hydropower stations in order to ensure there is sufficient electricity for the event. Expansions of the railway and various airports are also part of the construction process to ensure they can handle the capacity of people coming in for the event. 



America's Second Civil War


Reprinted with permission from:

"The Second Civil War in the USA and its Aftermath" by Sam Vaknin (second, revised impression, 2029)

Summary of Chapter 83

"The polities of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries swung between extremes of nationalism and polyethnic multiculturalism. Following the Great War (1914-8), the disintegration of most of the continental empires - notably the Habsburg and Ottoman - led to a resurgence of a particularly virulent strain of the former, dressed as Fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism. 

The aftermath of the Second World War brought on a predictable backlash in the West against all manner of nationalism and racism. The USSR, Yugoslavia, the Czech Republic, the EU (European Union, the European Community), the Commonwealth led by the United Kingdom, and the prominent USA epitomized the eventual triumph of multiculturalism, multi-ethnic states, and, in the Western democracies, pluralism.

Africa and Asia, just emerging from a phase of brutal colonialism, were out of synch with these developments in Europe and North America and began to espouse their own brands of jingoistic patriotism. Attempts to impose liberal-democratic, multi-cultural, tolerant, pluralistic, and multi-ethnic principles on these emergent entities were largely perceived and vehemently rejected by them as disguised neo-colonialism.

The disintegration, during the second half of the twentieth century, of the organizing principles of international affairs - most crucially Empire in the 1960s and Communism in the 1980s - led to the re-eruption of exclusionary, intolerant, and militant nationalism. The Balkan secession wars of the 1990s served as a stark reminder that historical forces and ideologies never vanish - they merely lie dormant.

Polyethnic multiculturalism came under attack elsewhere and everywhere - from Canada to Belgium. Straining to contain this worrisome throwback to its tainted history, Europeans implemented various models. In the United Kingdom, regions, such as Scotland and Northern Ireland were granted greater autonomy. The EU's "ever closer union", reified by its unfortunate draft constitution, was intermittently rejected and resented by increasingly xenophobic and alienated constituencies. 

This time around, between 1980 and 2020, nationalism copulated with militant religiosity to produce particularly nasty offspring in Muslim terrorism, Christian fundamentalist (American) thuggish unilateralism, Hindu supremacy, and Jewish messianism. Scholars, such as Huntington, spoke of a "clash of civilizations".

Ironically, the much-heralded conflict took place not between the USA and its enemies without - but within the United States, in a second and devastating Civil War.

Americans long mistook the institutional stability of their political system, guaranteed by the Constitution, for a national consensus. They actually believed that the former guarantees the latter - that institutional firmness and durability ARE the national consensuses. The reverse, as we know, is true: it takes a national consensus to yield stable institutions. No social structure - no matter how venerable and veteran - can resist the winds of change in public sentiment.

In hindsight, the watershed obtained during the Bush-Cheney presidency (2001-2009). The social and political concord frayed and then disintegrated with each successive blow: the war in Iraq (2003-7), the botched evacuation and rescue efforts in the wake of Hurricane Katrina (2005), the failed assassination attempt on the President's life (2006), the further restrictions placed on civil and human rights in Patriot Acts III and IV (2008), and, finally, the nuclear terrorist attack on Houston in the closing days of this divisive reign.

From there, it went only downhill.

As opposed to the first Civil War (1860-5), the Second Civil War (2021-26) was fought within communities and across state boundaries. It was not territorial and classic - but total and guerilla-like. It cut across the country's geography and pitted one ideological camp against another.

It may be too soon to objectively analyze and evaluate this gargantuan conflict. It was preceded by a decade of violent demonstrations, home-grown urban terrorism, and numerous skirmishes involving the National Guard and even, in violation of the Constitution, the armed forces.

Some historians cast the whole period as a battle of the religious vs. the secular. It clearly was not. By 2021, most Americans professed to be deeply religious, in one manner or fashion. No one seriously disputed the importance of the Church - but many insisted on its separation from the state. 

Hence the protracted (and heated) confrontation between pro-life and pro-choice advocates when Wade vs. Roe was overturned by a politicized and weakened Supreme Court in 2007. Hence the drawn out (and violent) debates about the teaching of evolution theory in schools or the use of embryonic stem cells in medical research.

Nor was the Civil War fought between isolationists and interventionists. An ever more brazen brand of post-September 11 global terrorism and a growing dependence on international trade inexorably drove most Americans to accept their new role as an Empire. They actually learned to enjoy it, both emotionally and economically.

Thus, even erstwhile Jacksonian isolationists reluctantly acquiesced in their country's foreign exploits. But they insisted on blatant unilateralism and the projection of American might merely and only to protect American interests. They abhorred the missionary ideology of the neo-conservatives. Spreading values, such as democracy, should better be left to NGOs and charities - they thundered.

The Civil War was not about the preservation of East Coast liberalism, as some self-serving scholars would have it. America was never less racist and homophobic than in the years immediately preceding the conflagration. The debate, again, revolved around institutions. Should changing mores be enshrined in legislation and case law? Should the national ethos itself be rewritten? Should the very definition and quiddity of being an American (white, male, straight) be revisited?



Neo-Marxist chroniclers attribute the causes of the Second Civil War to the growing disparities of wealth between the haves and the have not. Presidents Bush and Cheney surely reversed L.B. Johnson's Great Society. They and their successors erased the numerous entitlements and aid programs that many of the economically disenfranchised came to depend upon and to regard as a birthright and as a cornerstone of the social contract. 

Turning the clock back on affirmative action and food stamps, for instance, indeed provoked widespread violence. But such outbursts can hardly be construed to have been the precursors of the giant flame that consumed the USA a few years hence.

Finally, the Civil War was not about free trade (beneficial to the service and manufacturing based economies of some states) versus protectionism (helpful to the agricultural belts and bowls of the hinterland and to the recovering Gulf Coast). America's economy was far too dependent on the outside world to reverse course. Its national debt was being financed by Asians, its products were being sold all over, its commodities and foods were coming from Africa and Latin America. The USA was in hock to a globalized and merciless economy. Protectionism was campaign posturing - not a cogent and coherent trade policy.

So, what were the roots and causes of the Second Civil War?

None of the above in isolation - and all of the above in confluence. For decades, the citizenry's trust in a packed and rigged Supreme Court declined. Politicians came to be regarded as a detached and heartless plutocracy. Americans felt orphaned, cheated, and robbed. The national consensus - the implicit agreement that together is better than alone - has thus evaporated. The outcome was the shots and explosions that rocked the United States (and the world in tow) on January 20, 2021."




Thursday, February 8, 2018

Some Traxxas RC Car Models

Traxxas RC Car - Photo: Wikimedia
If there's one thing that Traxxas RC cars are designed for, it would be speed. Each car is designed to dominate its category. You don't believe it? Here are some models:

1) Jato 3.3 RTR Nitro- This is one stadium truck that is sure to catch everyone's attention when it revives into action. This Traxxas RC car is able to take on any other RC car on the pavement and it doesn't stop there! When the pavement ends, some RC cars have trouble getting a good grip on other types of terrain but not his Traxxas RC car! This model features Anaconda tire treads, enabling it to maintain a good grip on off-road courses. This means that you can other RC cars can say bye-bye to this Traxxas RC car as it leaves a dust trail in their headlights.

2) TMaxx 3.3 RTR Nitro- This is one monster RC truck that's truly a monster! This Traxxas RC car is able to go faster than 55 MPH! Isn't that amazing? This Traxxas RC car carries the well-known label of the Tmaxx to new levels of excellence. This is because this Traxxas RC car carries with it the same perfect combination of balance, size, speed, and power but the new TRX 3.3 engine brings this combination to new heights of power. People who know about real monster trucks know that bottom-end torque is the key to dominating every type of terrain. This is also the key to this Traxxas RC car's success in the field.

3) Spirit Truck- This Traxxas RC car embodies a "going back to the roots" of RC car driving. It is easy to drive, adventurous and most of all, it is fun! Many RC car models available today are too competitive. Drivers who used to relax through RC car racing experience even more stress when they compete. Why go for all of that? This Traxxas RC car reminds people of why RC car racing was established in the first place -because it's fun!

This Traxxas RC car also comes pre-assembled. So you don't have to do anything but take it out of the box and start driving. And before you start thinking that it's a toy-grade RC car, you should know that this Traxxas RC car is filled with technology specifically designed for hobby-class racing.



4) Nitro 4-tec 3.3- "Blink and you'll miss it" is the phrase used by enthusiasts to describe this Traxxas RC car. This is because it is designed for speed. The TRX- 3.3 engine is quite possibly the most powerful small block engine available today. With it, this Traxxas RC car can have speeds of up to 70 MPH! That's even faster than what some state laws allow! This Traxxas RC car is made for experienced players who have the reflexes necessary to drive at top speeds. A person using this Traxxas RC car is faced with the mental challenge of remaining in control while at speeds where you are nearly out of control. Can you handle the rush?

5) Bandit- This Traxxas RC car is what every enthusiast needs to fulfill his or her need for entertainment and speed at a very affordable price. First of all, this Traxxas RC car runs on electricity, which means you don't have to spend additional cash on fuel. It is also very durable, which means you can spend less time maintaining it and more time showing other RC car enthusiasts your dust trail.


Tuesday, February 6, 2018

Our Neighbors in Space

Crab Nebula - Photo: Wikipedia
We have a special feeling toward the other planets that circle our sun.  Maybe it’s all the science fiction stories about visiting the moon, Mars and other planets.  But we love to think about those planets that make up what we call “the solar system.” that do what our planet does but do it very differently indeed.  

The planets of our solar system have taken on personalities and mythical appeal in our literature and arts.  It is easy to find artists who render their vision of the planets that make up our society of planets near our sun.  The names of the planets, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune are all from our cultural past being gods from Greek and Roman mythology.  But the solar system is not just made up of these planets.  The solar system is a very busy place indeed.

In 2006, there was quite a bit of controversy as scholars and astronomers agreed to downgrade Pluto and remove its status as a planet.  So you have to wonder, what is it that makes something a planet and what happened to Pluto?  It didn’t just go away so it must still be out there.  A planet, by scientific definition, is any object in orbit around a sun, that has formed into some kind of round object is a planet as long as it has cleared away any other orbiting items around it.  By cleared away, that doesn’t mean it has destroyed all space debris etc.  For example, our planet has not “cleared away” the moon but it has captured it into its own orbit so we classify as a planet.  That’s a relief huh?

There are many objects floating around in our solar system other than the planets we know of.  It’s an interesting piece of trivia that in addition to the planets there are 165 moons orbiting around those nine planets.  Some of those moons are so advanced that some scientists have suspected that they might have supported life at some point.

In addition to the regular planets and moons, there are dwarf planets, asteroid belts and routine visits by comets that create a lot of traffic in our cosmic corner of the universe.  The two known dwarf planets that exist on the outer rim of our solar system are Eries and Ceres.  So when Pluto’s status was changed to be removed from the list of planets, it simply joined those two bodies as dwarf planets but still a solid citizen of the community of celestial bodies around our sun.

In addition to these larger bodies, there is an asteroid belt that exists between Mars and Jupiter that most of the asteroids that we see in our night sky come from.  There is another belt of large objects further out called the Kuiper belt as well as a “bubble” in space called a heliopause and there is a suspected additional belt outside the known solar system called the Oort belt that we think is the origin of a lot of large asteroids and comets that frequent our solar system and come to orbit our sun.

As fascinating as these many celestial bodies who are our neighbors in space is the origin of our solar system.  We have to break it down into simple terms to understand the terms but we know that the early history of the solar system and the universe was one of the great bodies of gas and clouds of matter eventually cooling and heating, exploding and spinning off stars and other massive space giants that became more stars, galaxies and solar systems.  It was from this erratic activity that our sun separated from the gasses and carried with it the material that became our solar system.  The gravity of the sun captured sufficient matter that it began to go through the process of forming, cooling, exploding and separating.  This is what happened as the planets all went through the same process eventually establishing stable orbits and small objects falling into orbit around them.

When you think of how powerful and out of control this process is, it’s amazing to step back and see the beauty of the organization of our solar system today.  The more detail you learn about the history of our solar system, the more you will enjoy your explorations of the planets with your telescope.  That discovery is part of the fun of astronomy.



Monday, February 5, 2018

Myths of the American Civil War

Civil War Balle Scene - Photo: Wikimedia
The Civil War (1861-5) has spawned numerous myths and falsities.

The Republicans did not intend to abolish slavery - just to "contain" it, i.e., limit it to the 15 states where it had already existed. Most of the Democrats accepted this solution. 

This led to a schism in the Democratic party. The "fire-eaters" left it and established their own pro-secession political organization. Growing constituencies in the south - such as urban immigrants and mountain farmers - opposed slavery as a form of unfair competition. Less than one-quarter of southern families owned slaves in 1861. Slave-based, mainly cotton raising, enterprises, was so profitable that slave prices almost doubled in the 1850s. This rendered slaves - as well as land - out of the reach of everyone but the wealthiest citizens.

Cotton represented three-fifths of all United States exports in 1860. Southerners, dependent on industrial imports as they were, supported free trade. Northerners were vehement trade protectionists. The federal government derived most of its income from customs duties. Income tax and corporate profit tax were yet to be invented.

The states seceded one by one, following secession conventions and state-wide votes. The Confederacy (Confederate States of America) was born only later. Not all the constituents of the Confederacy seceded at once. Seven - the "core" - seceded between December 20, 1860, and February 1, 1861. They were: South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas. 

Another four - Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas - joined them only after the attack on Fort Sumter in April 1861. Two - Kentucky and Missouri - seceded but were controlled by the Union's army throughout the war. Maryland and Delaware were slave states but did not succeed. 

President James Buchanan who preceded Abraham Lincoln made clear that the federal government would not use force to prevent secession. Secession was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court only in 1869 (in Texas vs. White) - four years after the Civil War ended. New England almost seceded in 1812, during the Anglo-American conflict, in order to protect its trade with Britain.

The constitution of the Confederacy prohibited African slave trade (buying slaves from Africa), though it allowed interstate trade in slaves. The first Confederate capital was in Montgomery, Alabama - not in Richmond, Virginia. The term of office of the Confederate president - Jefferson Davis was the first elected - was six years, not four as was the case in the Union.

Fort Sumter was not the first attack of the Confederacy on the Union. It was preceded by attacks on 11 forts and military installations on Confederate territory. 

Lincoln won only 40 percent of the popular vote in 1860. Hence the South's fierce resistance to his abolitionist agenda. In 1864, the Republicans became so unpopular, they had to change their name to the Union Party. Lincoln's vice-president, Johnson, actually was a Democrat and hailed from Tennessee, a seceding state.

He was the only senator from a seceded state to remain in the Senate. 

Reconstruction started long before the war ended, in Union-occupied Louisiana, Arkansas, and Tennessee. Slave tax was an important source of state revenue in the South (up to 60 percent in South Carolina). Emancipation led to near bankruptcy.

The Union states of Connecticut, Minnesota, and Wisconsin refused to pass constitutional amendments to confer suffrage on black males. The Union army consigned black labor gangs to work on the plantations of loyal Southerners and forcibly separated the black workers from their families.



Contrary to myth, nearly two-thirds of black families were headed by both parents. Slave marriages were legally meaningless in the antebellum South, though. But nearly 90 percent of slave households remained intact till death or forced separation. The average age of childbirth for women was 20.

Segregation was initiated by blacks. The freedmen lobbied hard and long for separate black churches and educational facilities. Nor was lynching confined to blacks. For instance, a white mob lynched, in September 1862, forty-four Union supporters in Gainesville, Texas. Similar events took place in Shelton Laurel, North Carolina. The Ku Klux Klan was the paramilitary arm of the Democratic party in the South, though never officially endorsed by it. It was used to "discipline" the workforce in the plantations - but also targeted Republicans.

The Democrats changed their name after the war to the Conservative Party. By 1877 they have regained power in all formerly Confederate states.




Friday, February 2, 2018

Various Tools Used For WOOD WORKING

Woodworking Tools - Photo: Pixabay
Woodworking is a laborious job; this is because the activities as processing wood, cutting, fitting, etc, are involved in woodworking. Therefore it is important to use right woodworking tools which help to reduce the required labor and make woodworking much more convenient.

The woodworking tools are simple woodworking supplies as a hammer, saw, etc, which are small and operated manually. However, apart from woodworking tools woodworking machines also are available for facilitating your projects. 

The difference between woodworking machines and woodworking tools is that woodworking tools are simple, small, and cheap. As they are small, they are usually portable and have to be operated by holding them in hands. They are used for simple woodworking operations jobs as cutting, fitting different pieces of wood in order to make any type of wood workpiece. On the other hand, the woodworking machines are large and are usually costly. They are used for the activities as the processing of wood and even creating new wooden artistic objects.

There are several woodworking tools used these days. The most commonly used among them is a saw. There are different types of saws such as Japanese saws, dovetail saws, cross cut saws, Tenon saws, bow saws, chainsaws, etc. They are used for cutting. However, before cutting the wood, it is to be marked with woodworking tools such as markers and majoring tools. 

The tools for measuring tapes, squares, rules, etc are required for measuring and the woodworking tools as marking gauges, knives awls, play a very crucial part in marking marks before cutting. Marking is very crucial part of woodworking. This is where the skills of the woodworkers come into the picture.

Then the third most common woodworking tools are hammers. The hammers are required to fix nails with which the different pieces of wood are fixed together to make the workpiece. Apart from nails, screws also are commonly used for fixing the different parts of the workpiece.  For using screws, we first need to drill holes in the wood. The drilling machines are the tools for this purpose.

Then the next important categories of woodworking tools are the chisels, scrapers and carving tools. They are required for a number of small activities involved in woodworking. 

The finishing of the wood workpieces also is an important part of woodworking. There are some woodworking tools used for finishing also. The wood planes are used for smoothening and regularizing the surface. Scrappers and polishers as sandpapers, steel wool, and other abrasives also are useful for smoothening of the surface.



For additional support for fixing the different parts, the workpiece together wax or adhesives are applied along with the nails and screws. The workpiece is also generally colored polished with varnishes, colors etc. therefore the woodworking tools like brushes or sprayers also are required.

These are only among some of the common woodworking tools that every woodworker should have. All the above-mentioned tools are cheap and therefore even the non-commercial woodworker too may have them in his collection of woodworking tools.