News Roundup

• From the "It's a Major Award" Department - Time magazine has announced that their "Person of the Year" award is going to the "Protester" this year.  Time seems to feel that the protest movements in the the mid-east, along with the "Occupy" movement here in the U.S., deserve to be singled out because of their impact to society.  I don't agree with this decision.  To me, if you're going to put an amorphous, difficult-to-define group as the "Person of the Year", I say you recognize all of the nameless people who had to clean up all of the crap, both literal and figurative, that the Occupy movement has left on the streets and parks of America, but that's just me.
• From the "Bad Idea" department - The Navy has relieved a commander for using his sailors to set up static displays of equipment for his family reunion and letting his relatives drive naval equipment and take rides on landing craft.  Not sure how prevelent this is in the Navy, but it used to be career suicide for an Army officer to use soldiers as personal servants or to forget that it was the Army's truck, not their personal pick-up.
• From the "Drop in the Bucket" Department - The city of Chicago has agreed to pay out millions of dollars to settle lawsuits related to police misconduct over the past few years.  While I'm glad to see that the city is taking responsibility for the actions of its employees, since the settlement will be paid out of taxpayer funds and the officers in question won't be impacted by this at all financially, this is more of a symbolic gesture than anything else.  Think about this:  Most of the victims here are citizens of Chicago, and will have to pay federal, state, and local taxes on their portions of the settlement, so at least some of the money they receive will go straight back into the cities budget.
• From the "Never Happen" Department - Researchers are predicting that the future of nuclear power in the United States is in small reactors rather than the huge complexes we currently have.  While I agree that it would be cost effective and safer to have smaller reactors with a common design cranked out on an industrial scale and then installed as needed, I doubt I'll ever see one.  Every time you say "nuclear power" in this country, the 'environmentalists' come out of the woodwork, start hooting about Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, and spook the politicians and regulators.  It's not like we have a government agency with a decades long history of maintaining and operating small nuclear reactors without any major accidents or anything.