Jeb Bush Circles the Drain: Cuts Payroll and Spending for Campaign Staff

I guess Jeb is going down the drain fast and this certainly reflects that.

The moves will reduce the campaign's payroll by 40 percent, while also cutting travel costs by 20 percent and eliminating extraneous overhead spending. Most campaign officials were told of the cost-cutting on Friday.

The changes mark a significant setback for a campaign that spent months building a large operation, but there are no signs Bush is on the verge of withdrawing from the race.

He will wait until after a few more debates to do that. He really is floundering badly and this move shows that the big money guys are sending cash in some other direction.

Could this Star (KIC 8462852) have a Dyson Sphere or maybe a Dyson Screen In Front of It? #Aliens

Now this sounds like a very interesting star indeed.

This idea evolved into what’s called a Dyson Sphere, a gigantic sphere that completely encloses a star. It was popular back in the 1970s and 80s; there was even an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation about one. Dyson never really meant that we’d build an actual sphere; just lots of little panels that might mimic one.

But it raises an interesting possibility for detecting alien life. Such a sphere would be dark in visible light but emit a lot of infrared. People have looked for them, but we’ve never seen one (obviously).

Which brings us back to KIC 8462852. What if we caught an advanced alien civilization in the process of building such an artifact? Huge panels (or clusters of them) hundreds of thousands of kilometers across, and oddly-shaped, could produce the dips we see in that star’s light.

Actually I would think it might be something I would like to call a Dyson Screen. So that would be a huge solar panel that floats out in space that the aliens living in this star system use to power an entire planet. Maybe there are gigantic batteries along the back of the screen that massive star ships remove and take down to one of the inhabited planets. I'm thinking the planet is a huge manufactorum like Mars in Warhammer 40K that needs tons of power to function. Or maybe it a massive city miles thick that covers the planet like Coruscant. In any case it would be interesting to turn some radio telescopes toward this star system to see if they can get some radio transmissions from the aliens that might live there.

Yet another Reason Not to Fly American Airlines: Woman Kicked off Flight in Tears

Airline travel has become a terrible experience and American seems to make it even more terrible.

Outraged passengers booed flight attendants for booting a woman off a plane.

Their revolt unfolded just before takeoff on an American Airlines flight from Phoenix to Portland, Oregon, after a flight attendant asked a female passenger to find her seat.

She claims she didn't hear him - and the attendant ordered her out of the plane.

He told her: “I need to have you come off the aircraft.”

The passenger replied: “No, why are you guys, you're so mean to me. I didn't do anything.”

The passenger claimed that the she didn't even know that the attendant was talking to her.

The attendant told her: “If you don't come off, I’m going to have to call the officers.”

I guess this is why people fly Southwest and Hawaiian. Better service and flight attendants who are not itching to throw people off of flights.

Ben Carson is right: Do Not Comply with a Crazy Shooter. Fight for your Life

It is hard to second guess the victims of a shooting but Carson is saying what he would do if confronted with a crazy gunman.

“From the indications I got, they did not rush the shooter,” Carson said on "CBS This Morning" discussing the Oregon shooting. “The shooter can only shoot one person at a time, he cannot shoot a group of people.”

Carson suggested that the victims should have rushed the shooter to prevent more lives from being lost, telling ABC News yesterday that he would have confronted the gunman and would have instructed people to attack the gunman.

“I said what I would do. ... I would ask everyone to attack the gunman,” Carson told ABC News. “That way we wouldn’t all end up dead.”

It would be easy to freeze up in a situation like that or comply with the shooter. But that cannot be the case now because they will shoot you no matter what. So at least sell your life dearly and try to jump the shooter as best you can. Unfortunately not everyone is like those trained military guys that stopped the massacre on that French train. It is a sad sign of the times but maybe classes can be taught where people learn to react like those guys.