As a consequence of Bush’s policies, the military is increasingly broken. To use just one metric, the number of incoming soldiers with prior felony arrests or convictions has more than tripled in the past five years.
A number of these are gang bangers who be bringing back their training to the streets when they get out.
I came across a very interesting red/blue voting map.
Each pixel is 2500 votes for Bush, Kerry, or Nader.
Suddenly, those state by state maps that the wingers use don’t seem to make as much sense, do they?
You don’t have to be delusional to work for bush, but it helps….A LOT!!!!!
This craziness starts at the top here, where Bush and his evil minions™ see missile defense as an unadulterated good, even if it is incapable of stopping a single missile.
The technology for creating penetration aids can be purchased at your average party supply store (mylar balloons with a shiny aluminum coating), it seems that testing should be done before deployment.
It appears that there has been a spate of fraudulently labeled whiskey in Korea. The solution is to place RFID on premium bottles of booze that can be quizzed by mobile phone handsets.
Neat trick, but considering the fact that RFID chips cost about $0.15, with prices dropping, it should not be too tough for the bootleggers to copy them too.
It appears that Universal Media Group has been cheating its employees out of overtime pay.
Luckily for them, this has occurred in California, because, “the employees will receive 25 per cent of fines rewarded”.
The department permits these exemptions for computer systems analysts, computer programmers, software engineers, and other similarly-skilled workers in the computer field. Under California regulations, an exempt IT employee must primarily perform work that is “intellectual or creative and requires the exercise of discretion and independent judgment.” In addition, the employee must earn over $41 per hour.
The UMG workers, who are employed as “IT Support Engineers,” claim the company has illegally classified them as exempt to skip out of paying overtime. The employees are seeking back wages and civil penalties under California’s Private Attorney Act. Under the Private Attorney Act, employees can sue an employer for fines based on labor law on behalf of the state of California. If successful, the employees will receive 25 per cent of fines rewarded, while California will receive the rest.
Note that this is a private lawsuit. Here’s why:
The Law Offices of Michael Tracy, the firm representing the employees….. said the employees had previously filed the overtime complaint with California’s Labor & Workforce Development Agency, but the organization refused to investigate. In response, the employees are suing for the labor fines.
My guess is that Arnold was the reason that they refused to investigate.
Well, it looks like the lobbiests slipped a provision in the Senate’s energy bill allowing for the taxpayer to cover billions in loan guarantees for the Nuclear industry.
As before, the Department of Energy would be allowed to guarantee 100 percent of the loans and up to 80 percent of the total cost to build a reactor.
But the bill essentially allows the department to approve as many loan guarantees as it wants for both new reactors and plants that use other “clean” technologies.
That is a big change. Under current law, the government is only allowed to guarantee a volume of loans authorized each year by Congress. Last year, Congress limited the government to awarding just $4 billion in loan guarantees for clean energy projects during the 2007 fiscal year.
It’s a big sloppy kiss for the Nuclear Industry.
Mr. Bingaman, the bill’s primary architect, said that he was aware of the provision but believed that it would apply only to reactors with fundamentally new technology.
“I would be amazed if this generic loan program applied to most of the plants that are being proposed, either for the nuclear industry or coal industry,” Mr. Bingaman said Monday night. “The idea of this is not just to help an industry build plants. It’s to demonstrate new technology that meets the nation’s energy needs.”
But industry officials say the measure would directly affect the reactors on the drawing board
Somehow, even if the law is written in the manner that Sen. Bingaman says, I think that the Bush Admin is going to engage in an orgy of loan guarantees, to ensure that 20 or 30 (at least) of these expensive white elephants are issued, on the theory that it guarantees profits for their friends, and consulting gigs for themselves after 2009.
Well, it appears that the Australian government is using secrecy as an excuse for covering up their own incompetence:.
As an American, let me say to the Australian general public that I feel your pain. I am rather familiar with corrupt politicans screaming “terrorism” for political gain, and screaming “secrecy” to cover up their screw ups.
Secret material used to cancel the visa of an Indian doctor falsely accused of terrorism cannot be released as it may jeopardize investigations, Australia’s immigration minister said Tuesday.
Kevin Andrews said he wanted to release the “protected material” to demonstrate why he cancelled Mohamed Haneef’s working visa but the Australian Federal Police had advised him against it.
So they are claiming that they had a reason to kick him out of the country, but not enough to hold him, even though, as a result of his initial detention, he has detailed knowledge of Australian interrogation techniques.
Prime Minister John Howard this week ruled out an apology and Andrews dismissed calls for a judicial review of the case, which was the first time tough counter-terrorism laws introduced after 9/11 had been put to the test.Andrews had faced heavy criticism in Australia over his decision to exercise a little-used discretionary power to cancel Haneef’s visa then refuse to reinstate it when the terrorism case against the doctor collapsed last week.
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Haneef was charged with recklessly supporting a terrorist organisation but returned home at the weekend after more than three weeks in custody when the case against him collapsed due to lack of evidence and bungles by prosecutors.
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Prime Minister John Howard this week ruled out an apology and Andrews dismissed calls for a judicial review of the case, which was the first time tough counter-terrorism laws introduced after 9/11 had been put to the test.
And is desparately trying to avoid showing that they failed, and theat they are the threat to basic human rights that its critics have always said.
There is a report that Iran will be buying a significant number of Sukhoi Su-30 multi role jets in the Jerusalem Post.
The specific report says that they will be buying 250 fighters, they will be purchasing aerial refueling tankers.
I call bull s$%#.
Let’s look at the points:
I think that this got leaked to a friendly source (the J. Post) in the sort ot PR campaign that we swa before the invasion of Iraq.
Oxford researchers have uncovered a gene for left handedness.
It appears that this gene is also associated with brain symmetry, and there is small a correlation to schizophrenia and other mental illness.
That explains why my left-handed wife married me.
You don’t have to be crazy to marry a Saroff, but it helps.
The Law Lords are a committee of the House of Lords in the UK, and they function as the court of last appeal there.
While I have little affection for McKinnon, who, the law under which he is to be extradited is a farce. It requires no showing of proof, and no guarantees of due process, so he could be sent directly to Gitmo.
The law Lords agreed to hear arguments that US authorities acted in an “oppressive” and “arbitrary” manner during plea bargaining negotiations, for example by allegedly threatening McKinnon over the loss of rights to serve part of his sentence in the UK unless he submitted to voluntary extradition.
This is the problem with this US-UK agreement. It’s being misused.
It’s intended for terrorists, but its first use was for a group of bankers engaging in white collar crime, and now it’s being used to attempt a plea bargain.
This is why you have limits prosecutorial power.
That being said, one thing is certain, McKinnon is not the biggest idiot involved in all of this:
The 41-year-old has said he gained access to military networks – using a Perl script to search for default passwords – but describes himself as a bumbling amateur motivated by curiosity about evidence of UFOs rather than a cyberterrorist.
The people, hopefully now unemployed, who did not change their default passwords probably need help cutting their steak.
It’s a statistical certainty. When looking at the current “thwarted terrorist attacks”, it’s apparrent that what our state security apparatus is catching are not hardened trained terrorists, but rather fanboy terrorist wannabees.
Even so, if we were to have a competent anti-terrorist effort, another successful attack is inevitable. No defense is one hundred percent.
This is the question that Marty Kaplan asks:
But no more than King Canute could stop the tide, no more than a Big One in California can be prevented, no more than the hundred thousand people who will die in accidents this year will evade their untimely ends, an act of domestic terrorism is inevitable. What counts is how we think about it right now, how we prepare today for when it happens tomorrow, and how we handle it — politically, emotionally, morally — when, as it must, it occurs.
Is there any doubt that the Bush administration, and its dead-ender allies in the Republican Party and the media, will use an act of domestic terrorism as a fresh opportunity to further demonize their political opponents and further compromise the Constitution? Will they truly be able to resist the temptations of martial law, emergency powers, and the phony prerogatives of the unitary executive in wartime? In Britain, in Israel, in Spain, in Ireland, we have seen political leaders decline the invitation to demagoguery that domestic terrorism has offered, and instead to put violence in perspective, to refuse to compromise reason and democracy, to summon their citizens to remain themselves rather than become their enemies. When the unthinkable happens to us again, will the politicians who pissed away the unity following 9/11 in the sands of Iraq have the moral wherewithal to remind us that no matter how grief-stricken we may be, the sky has not fallen and the republic has not failed?
If I could manage to be smarter about risk than I usually am, I would worry less about the possibility of terrorism, and more about the probability that the same chickenhawks who exploited it before to sell us on war without end, will exploit it again to sing the virtues of temporary fascism.
We know that the Bush and his Evil Minions™ are incompetent, and that their code places power and personal loyalty above everything else.
Even if we grant them that they have some limits, and that they won’t let a terrorist attack happen for political gain, and I DON’T grant them the benefit of the doubt, we know that another attack will happen, and that they will use this as an excuse to consolidate political advantage.
How do we deal with this fact?
It appears that American Home Mortgage will shut down Today. It’s lenders have made margin calls, and it has no money left.
This is not a subprime lender. This is an Alt-A lender.
American Home specializes in Alt-A mortgages, an alternative for A-rated borrowers who can’t satisfy all the terms for a regular “prime” mortgage. Founded in 1988 by Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Michael Strauss, the company became the 20th- largest Alt-A lender by 2006, according to trade publication Inside Mortgage Finance. IndyMac Bancorp Inc. ranked first.
This is not the first lender to go under, you can see the accellerating rate of mortgage lender failures at the Mortgage Lender Implode-O-Meter.
History has shown that the adult entertainment industry leads the consumer electronics field in adopting new technologies.
It led the adoption of VCRs, it was probably the deciding factor in the VHS/Betamax format war, and popularized DVDs.
Well, it appears that, Blu-Ray is the format of choice for Japanese porn (HD-DVD is the format of choice in the US).
This is significant change of direction for Sony, who created Blu-Ray, as they have typically been very aggressively using licenses to keep erotica out of their formats.
They still don’t “get” it. The disks have to be produced in Taiwan, and reimported, but they appear to be having at least a bit of a clue now.
Still, despite the head start, HD DVD isn’t exactly taking the porn industry by storm. Several U.S. companies interviewed earlier this year have not made good on their plans to release titles in HD DVD, while Blu-ray Disc appears to be gaining ground with its new initiative to work with Japanese adult film makers. The result could be a shift in Blu-ray’s favor. U.S. adult film makers said they would use whatever makes sense, and only favored HD DVD early on because the format is less expensive to make movies with and they received extensive help from HD DVD backers.
A friendlier face from the Blu-ray Disc camp appears to be working with Japan’s porn industry. Perhaps it could work in the U.S. as well.
This article by Mohsin Hamid gives an excellent picture of the lack of concern in both the American policy apparatus and the American public to the tremendous damage that is done by American policies towards people and institutions who are NOT the target of these operations.
He is in a unique position to understand this, having spent his time from ages 6-9 in the US before moving back to Lahore, Pakistan, and then returning to the US for college.
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For another, growing up in Pakistan in the 1980s let me see firsthand the devastating effects that the best of U.S. intentions can have.
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But there is another major reason for anti-Americanism: the accreted residue of many years of U.S. foreign policies. These policies are unknown to most Americans.
They form only minor footnotes in U.S. history. But they are the chapter titles of the histories of other countries, where they have had enormous consequences.
America’s strength has made it a sort of Gulliver in world affairs: By wiggling its toes it can, often inadvertently, break the arm of a Lilliputian.
He moved back to Pakistan just as the civil war that Jimmy Carter and Zbigniew Brezinski bought* was ramping up, and he saw the effects:
He makes the very wise commnet, “Simply because America has — often for what seemed good reasons at the time — intervened to shape the destinies of other countries and then, as a nation, forgotten those interventions.”
The Taliban and al Queida are a result of both our policies in the Afghan civil war, and then our ignoring the mess that we made.
*It’s clear that the Afghan civil war was a product of American to create it. While there was always banditry in Afghan countryside, Brezinski, with Carter’s approval paid money to, and armed those bandits, with the hope of creating, and embroiling the Soviets in, a Vietnam Style civil war.
It worked all too well, and given that this was about half a decade from the fall of Saigon, they both had to know the suffering and death that this would create.
You know the deal. The missile’s unit cost has doubled from about $400K t about 800K, and it has a 42% failure rate. There are suggestions that it be replaced by equivalent european systems, like the the MBDA Storm Shadow or Taurus KEPD 350.
Congress and the military have not yet done this out of concern for pork and lucrative consulting gigs industrial base.
Well, now we have Boeing calling for it to get the opportunity to manufacture it, because they can do better than Lockheed.
It certainly would be hard for them to do worse.
Well, first we have Steven Pearlstein’s (WaPo Business Columnist) comments about recent events.
It’s not just about subprime mortgages anymore.
The turmoil we’re witnessing in global financial markets is nothing less than the popping of an enormous credit bubble that built up over the past five years, artificially inflating the market prices of stocks, bonds and real estate. It created a bonanza for Wall Street investment houses and private-equity funds and fueled the longest and strongest period of global economic growth in modern history.
While this characterization is generally accurate, it is FAR too limited.
I would refer you to an analysis of Greenspan’s tenure in the European Tribune post which is in turned based on an editorial from the Financial Times (subscription, which I do not have, required) calling Greenspan a “a serial inflationist, willing to slash interest rates to bail out investors who should not need rescuing from themselves”, while doing his best to keep wages low.
Such is to be expected for one who was a confidant of Ayn Rand. For her, wage earners are weak people, and the indivicualist capitalists are all that is good in society.
This is where Mr. Pearlman is wrong. This has not been going on for 5 years, but closer to 20 years, since Alan Greenspan flooded the market with liquidity to bail out those who were caught in the 1987.
In fact, it’s deeper than that, as evidenced by his bailout of Long Term Capital Management, where a less lucrative market driven buyout was sabotaged.
Alan Greenspan was the most enthusiastic cheerleader of bailouts for investors, while aggressively working to knock the pins out from stability and protections of ordinary people.
If something big went wrong, he would open the money tsunami, and if something went smaller went wrong, he would arrange for private bailouts.
He has created an economy with very little risk, and the high liquidity has produced very in the way of reasonable returns for conventional financial instruments.
In so doing, he has created a situation where insane levels of risk have become ordinary, and so more people have taken these risks.
Needless there a number of other people bear responsibility, Jimmy Carter, who started the rollback of Depression era regulations, Reagan who accelerated it to alarming (savings and loan debacle) levels, and both Bush I and Clinton have been instrumental in deregulating the economy to a dangerous degree.
That being said, when the meltdown occurs in the next few years, it will be Greenspan, whose policies are most responsible for these problems, who gets the lions share of the blame.
Jonah Goldberg, the second most egregious example of hepotism taken to extremeshas an editorial in the Los Angeles Times in which he calls for a return to Jim Crow era voter qualification tests.
He asks, “Why not test people about the basic functions of government? Immigrants have to pass a test to vote; why not all citizens?”
Well, given that Fox News watchers are the least informed news consumers out there, this could benefit Democrats.
So let’s ask some basic questions of citizens:
Here re the answers: Senate, almost all of them (at least from the rulings from the Clinton days), that all rights in the constitution apply to the states too, Senate, Senate, Senate
The president does not appoint these folks, he nominates them, the senate appoints them.
Seriously the only person stupider than Goldberg is the idiot who suggest that he write OP/Eds for the LA Times.
It’s clear to me that Bear Stearns is complete toast.
They have just halted redemptions on a third hedge fund. This fund had less than “0.5 percent of its assets in securities linked to loans to subprime borrowers”.
People are losing confidence in the market, and in Bear Stearns in particular.
My prediction: in one year, Bear Stearns will cease to exist. It will either be forced to liquidate, or it will be bought out in a fire sale. I’ve already written a post dated blog post for August 1, 2008 (it’s a year short, but 2008 is a leap year, so it’s 365 days, and August 1 is a nice round date).
In staring at the rubble that was a bridge on CNN today, the question is “why?”
Speaking strictly as an engineer, I can say that there was either a point load, or a tensile load (the strength of ceramics over time in tension is zero) leading to a failure.
That misses the big picture.
The big picture is that at least since the 1970s, the United States has created prosperity, or the illusion of prosperity, through eating its seed corn.
Eating one’s seed corn is a metaphor. It refers to a farmer eating seed that is reserved for planting the next year. It feeds his belly now, but creates a disaster the next season.
Through the systematic dismantling of protections on things workers rights and speculative investments, along with literally running infrastructure constructed over 40 years ago into the ground, we have created a little pop.
Things seem fine, but at some point, the poper must be paid.
I came across this at Video Sphere, so go to his site, and click on his ads.
Needless to say, Time Warner will be on this like white on rice.
And no, I don’t know where one can find Youtube stream rippers. Use “the google” to download through “the tubes”.