New Mexico helps protect moon artifacts A4 Wednesday, July 25, 2012
SANTA FE — It was bound to happen. Public officials already are making plans for what to do about sticky-fingered tourists picking up stuff left by our lunar astronauts. Yes, our astronauts were litter bugs. Big time. They wanted to make their load as light as possible so they left 106 items lying around their landing area at Tranquility Base, the sight of the first moon landing. And some day tourists are going to go see them. How soon will that be? Encouraging signs abound. Last month Space X, belonging to Pay Pal founder Elon Musk, successfully docked at the International Space station, taking supplies and retrieving garbage. The impetus for some sort of protection came from the 26 participants in Google’s Lunar X Prize competition. These 26 companies agreed to abide by NASA’s Recommendations to Space-Faring Entities about how to protect and pre-
EDITORIAL
OPINION
JAY MILLER
INSIDE THE CAPITOL
serve artifacts left on the moon. Isn’t it a little early to be worrying about space tourists? These 26 companies have until the end of 2015 to land on the moon with a robot that will travel 500 meters and send video, images and data back to Earth. The prize is $30 million. The first X Prize was won by SpaceshipOne for flying to the edge of space twice within a three-day period. The company that won $10 million for that feat is building SpaceshipTwo for Virgin Galactic to start flying passengers next year. A problem exists with NASA’s
Roswell Daily Record
recommendations, however. They can’t be enforced. That must come through the National Historic Preservation Act. And New Mexico is helping make that happen. In April 2010, New Mexico became the second state to officially designate the articles left behind at Tranquility Base on the moon in its official registry of historic properties. Leadership in this effort was taken by Dr. Beth O’Leary, an anthropology professor at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces and students in a graduate level class. O’Leary is now working with Dr. Lisa Westwood of Chico State University in California, which was the first state to list the moon artifacts in its registry of historical properties, to prepare congressional legislation to make T ranquility Base a national historic landmark. The next step is to get the moon artifacts listed on the UNESCO World Heritage list.
That is the closest to global protection that is possible. Treaties prevent any nation from claiming any part of the sur face of the moon but NASA does own all its artifacts. Why don’t Texas and Florida claim the moon artifacts on their lists of historic properties? Texas, at least, cannot claim any property that is not in the state. New Mexico and California laws permit them to list sites that have some connection to the state. New Mexico felt it had a strong connection to space exploration through rocket pioneer Robert Goddard and the V-2 testing at what is now White Sands Missile Range. Our early astronauts also spent considerable time in New Mexico enduring physical tests under the direction of Dr. Randy Lovelace. They also learned the geology of the moon by training in areas of our state that looked much like the surface of the moon. They
were under the tutelage of New Mexico astronaut Harrison Schmitt, a Ph.D. geologist. If you are one of those doubters who think the astronauts didn’t go to the moon but camped out on earth, don’t let the fact that some of New Mexico looks like the moon make you believe we didn’t go to the moon. NASA has pictures. Sir Richard Branson, in a joke posting on his Virgin Galactic website, makes a claim that not only defies science but also some of those international space treaties we mentioned earlier. Branson is such a big-time wheeler -dealer that it might be easy for some to believe it when he says he has bought Pluto and plans to restore its planetary status by dragging in neighboring moons. (Write to Jay Miller at 3 La Tusa, Santa Fe, NM 87505; by fax at 984-0982; or by e-mail at insidethecapitol@hotmail.com)
Postal Service woes
Now it’s the U.S. Postal Service that’s basically bankrupt. It lost $3.2 billion in the second quarter of this year. It’s unable to make a $5.5 billion payment Aug. 1 for its retiree health account for 2011 and could miss another $5.5 billion payment Sept. 30 to cover 2012. Missing the 2011 payment “wouldn’t directly affect service or (USPS’) ability to pay employees and suppliers,” reported the Wall Street Journal. So, junk mail still will choke your mailbox. The problems with the USPS are obvious. The primary business, delivering first-class mail, has largely been superseded by email. Package delivery largely was taken over by Federal Express and UPS, two private firms that do a better job even though they have to pay taxes, unlike the USPS, a nonprofit independent government agency. A third problem is that the USPS still operates, like many government agencies at all levels, on a “defined benefit” retirement model. Retired employees get pension and medical benefits, no matter the cost, with taxpayers supposed to pick up any unexpected expenses. By contrast, in the private sector, almost every business has switched to “defined contribution” plans, in which employees pay into a 401(k) or similar retirement fund or a medical savings account. The employee invests the contributions, and the benefit depends on how well the investments perform. The company (which can opt to match employee contributions) — and taxpayers, for governments that have adopted definedcontribution plans — are not on the hook. “I operate on the assumption that the federal government can do whatever it wants with the Postal Service,” Tad DeHaven told us; he’s a budget analyst with the libertarian Cato Institute and has written extensively on the USPS. “It’s the federal government’s business — literally. There are no good options here.” As the Journal article noted, in April, the U.S. Senate passed a bill “that largely shores up the agency’s finances by returning an estimated $10.9 billion overpayment made into the federal employee pension system,” separate from the retiree health plan. The U.S. House of Representatives isn’t expected to work on reform until it returns from recess in September — that is, after the Aug. 1 retiree health-plan payment is missed. According to the Journal, the House reform “would require the agency to operate more like a business, in part by setting up a panel to reduce the network of post offices.” But rural representatives are worried about local post office closures. DeHaven said, “They’re just tinkering and kicking the can down the road.” The obvious solution is privatization, which actually was advanced in the final months of the Reagan administration in 1988. Subsequent administrations have had no interest in privatization. Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, hasn’t talked about it — although it has been advanced by one of his economic advisers, Kevin Hassett. It looks like this is another problem that won’t be “solved” except by Congress mailing the bill to taxpayers. Guest Editorial The Orange County Register
DEAR DOCTOR K: For years I’ve endured stomach pain after every meal. My doctor finally diagnosed me with intestinal angina. I’ve never even heard of this. DEAR READER: You’ve probably heard of cardiac angina. That’s when cholesterol-filled plaque in the heart’s arteries limits blood flow to a part of your heart muscle. Typically, cardiac angina occurs when a person starts to exert himself, not at rest. Halfway up several flights of stairs, a squeezing pain may start in the middle of your chest. It goes away when you stop climbing the stairs. The cardiac angina occurs with exertion because the heart is working harder and isn’t getting the blood supply it needs.
Pundits use tragedy for personal agendas By now the script should be familiar. A bombing or a mass shooting occurs and the media immediately look for a simple cause. Invariably, they tur n to talk radio or some other conservative pit of “intolerance.” Within recent memory are tragedies like the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, the 1999 massacre at Columbine, the 2007 Virginia Tech shootings and the 2011 shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and others in Tucson. Some politicians and liberal interest groups have sought to link these and other violent incidents to the far right. There have also been
Doonesbury
ASK DR. K UNITED MEDIA SYNDICATE
It’s the same thing with intestinal angina. When you eat, your stomach and intestines stop resting and start to work. The wall of your intestines contains muscle that squeezes the food you’ve eaten and keeps it moving. If you have cholesterol-filled plaque in the arteries that supply blood to your intestine, the intestinal muscle — like the heart muscle
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THOMAS SYNDICATED COLUMNIST
incidents when some conservatives have tried to blame other tragedies on “liberals” “secularists” and abortion. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote on his blog that the “hate-mongers” Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck contributed to the Giffords shooting, despite later
— will start to “complain” that it isn’t getting enough blood to work harder. Your digestive system normally gets about one-quarter of the blood pumped out by your heart. After you eat, blood flow to the stomach and intestines almost doubles. In a healthy person, the digestive system handles this without missing a beat. It’s a dif ferent story when plaque causes severe narrowing in one or more of the major arteries supplying your gut. The mismatch in blood supply and demand can cause sharp abdominal pain after meals. It can also lead to diarrhea, nausea or vomiting after meals. These symptoms are the gut’s version of angina. Thus the name: intestinal angina.
reports that the shooter, Jared Lee Loughner, had never listened to their programs. The discovery that Loughner liked “The Communist Manifesto” and “Mein Kampf” forced media types to quickly abandon that smear, but not retract their comments. They’re running the same play again. Within hours of the massacre of 12 people and the wounding of dozens more in a movie theater in Aurora, Colo., Brian Ross, an “investigative reporter” for ABC News rushed on the air to say that he had found a name similar to that of the alleged
T reating intestinal angina requires restoring blood flow to the intestines. Many doctors do this with an angioplasty plus a stent, much as is done for narrowed arteries of the heart. Angioplasty enables doctors to open narrowed arteries with special instruments carrying inflatable balloons. Stents are tiny metal mesh tubes placed in the arteries to help keep them open. Not only can the gut, like the heart, have angina; it can also experience its own version of a heart attack. If blood flow through an intestinal artery becomes completely blocked, intestinal tissue downstream from the blockage becomes depleted of oxygen and begins to See DR. K, Page A5
shooter and that the Jim Holmes he had discovered with a quick Internet search was (gasp!) listed as a member of the tea party movement. In Ross’ mind, as well as that of other “journalists,” apparently, tea party equals guns, equals extremist, end of discussion. ABC and Ross later issued a limp apology, but the bias was exposed. Ross was not alone in his rush to misjudgment. The New York Times sought the opinion of film critic Roger Ebert, who predictably argued for more gun control laws
See THOMAS, Page A5
25 YEARS AGO
July 25, 1987
• The final day of the Eric Knight Polo Tournament is under way today at the San Patricio Polo Club located in the Hondo Valley community of San Patricio west of Roswell.
Competing teams are the Clovis team comprised of Brant Schafer, Barbara Blumenthal and Matt Garnett; the San Patrico team which includes Michael Hurd, Tim Collier and Jim Lockner; the Roswell team of Scott Blumenthal, Paul Ragsdale and Greg Alpers; and the Tulsa team whose members are Gil Brown, Kendall Joyce and Scott Goodpasture.