Month: August 2007

Nukes in South Asia

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Some more updates on how the Bush administration is making what is currently the worst threat to global security even worse by helping India increase its arsenal, with the obvious consequence of the almost failed state of Pakistan following suit.

First, it turns out that Pakistan is going with mobile launch systems, which are more likely to fall into terrorist hands, and India is working on technologies to take out buried facilities.

Lovely arms race there, and Bush is fanning the flames so that American nuclear companies can make a few bucks.

Nuke Worries?

Then we have a “a broad spectrum of political parties calls on the government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to scrap the deal, saying it limits the country’s sovereignty in energy and foreign policy matters“.

Basically, Bush is winking at India’s nuclear weapons program, but it’s not enough for the more bellicose and nationalistic members of India’s body politic.

Delightful.

It’s the Moral Hazard, Stupid

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CNN has an article on the mess that Bear Stearns has Found themselves*.

They go into a number of reasons, but at its core, Bear Stearns*, and the rest of Wall Street have fallen victim to one of the favorite bogeymen of the right wing, moral hazard.

The right wing insists that things like minimum wage laws make us lazy, and public health care delivery makes us hypochondriacs.

While it is certain that minimum wage laws raise the cost of low value employees, and that there would be more use of the healthcare system if it were sane, the most extreme case illustrating the risks moral hazard is in the financial markets.

It turns out that Alan “Bubbles” Greenspan did the same with financial markets: There was never a market failure that he would not bail out over the past. As a result, people have become far more accepting of risk in the pursuit of greater return.

Whether it be the bailout of LTCM, or the floodgates being opened after the crash of 1987, or the dotbombs, Alan Greenspan has insulated people from the consequences of their decisions, and so we have people loaning dogs money to buy a house.

FWIW, I do not think that this serves as a good argument against socialized healthcare, which I support (I support a NHS over a single payer), but it is a good argument against socialized capitalism.

*Just to remind you, I have predicted that Bear Stearns cease to exist as an independent entity sometime before August 2, 2008.

And the Winner in the “So Stupid They Can’t Cut Thier Own Meat” Category

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Rich Karlgaard, who thinks that comparing a Democratic candidate with Franklin Delano Roosevelt is somehow a slur.

It isn’t, not in the general election, and particularly not in the Democratic primary.

It’s easy to see why he’s so profoundly misinformed, as he tells us with self assurance that only comes from being an economic knuckle dragger, who are in no short supply at Fortune magazine, that the investment class “went on strike” in 1937*.

I guess that would explain the soaring mattress sales at the beginning of that year, they had to put their money somewhere.

While it is clear that criminals bury their money in low return investment when the heat is on, most investors are law abiding and moral individuals, who continue to invest. Tax and regulatory policy can determine where they invest, but not how much.

*In reality based economics, what happened was that Roosevelt thought that the depression was over and he backed off the new deal, for example cutting the WPA funding by half.

Bulava Missile Not Ready For Mass Production : Missiles and Bombs : Defense News Air Force Army Navy News

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I think that there is some misunderstanding about Russian weapons development, as shown by the following story about the failures in the Bulava-MLBM.

The missile has failed 4 of its first 6 test flights, but this means something very different than it would in a US missile development program.

Simply put, the Soviets, and later the Russians, use missile tests to find design flaws and verify performance, while the western nations typically use tests to verify theoretical analysis.

While the testing protocol is different from previous Russian SLBMs, there have been no ground tests, as it is an adaptation of a ground based system, the test-fail-fix strategy continues.

India launches contest for 126 new fighters with RFP release

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India just released it’s request for proposal for 126 fighters to replace part of it’s aging MiG-21 fleet.

A list of likely bidders are, with what I see as pros and cons are below, with my guesses as to the outcome after that:

  • Boeing F/A-18E/F Super Horne
    • Pros:
      • Interoperability with Western weapons
      • Good payload/range (Probably best of the lot)
      • Highly capable radar/avionics. (maybe the best of the lot)
    • Cons
      • Relatively low agility (probably worst of the lot)
      • Expensive.
      • Largest plane in competition.
      • Subject to US sanctions.
  • Dassault Rafale
    • Pros
      • Interoperability with Western weapons Highly capable radar/avionics. Might be adapted to use Indian Kaveri engine. Dassault already has aircraft in the Indian fleet (Mirage 2000s) Cons Would be 1st foreign adopter of system, may cause support issues.
      • Somewhat expensive.
  • Eurofighter Typhoon
    • Pros
      • Interoperability with Western weapons
      • Good payload/range
      • Highly capable radar/avionics.
      • Very high performance (supercruise at Mach 1.4+ in air to air configuration)
    • Cons
      • Air to ground capabilities still in development.
      • Expensive.
  • Lockheed Martin F-16
    • Pros:
      • Interoperability with Western weapons
      • Good payload/range
      • Capable radar/avionics.
      • Good agility.
      • Lower lifetime costs (because it is single engined).
    • Cons
      • Expensive.
      • Subject to US sanctions.
  • RSK MiG-35
    • Pros:
      • Interoperability with Russian weapons, which they already have in service.
      • Operations and maintenance should be most similar to those of the MiG-21s being replaced.
      • This is a member of the MiG-29 family, which the Indians already have in service.
      • Probably the lowest purchase price of any of the competitors.
    • Cons
      • Avionics are likely the least capable of the lot.
      • Payload/range is likely 2nd least of the lot.
  • Saab Gripen.
    • Pros:
      • Interoperability with Western weapons
      • Highly capable radar/avionics.
      • Lowest life cycle costs (based on the fact that it is the smallest and lightest of the lot.
      • Superb short/rough runway performance.
      • Might be adapted to use Indian Kaveri engine.
    • Cons
      • Probably the least payload/range (but more than the MiG-21)
      • Somewhat subject to US sanctions.

First, note that this will not be India’stop of the line fighter. That will be the SU-27 family variants that it is already flying, or has already bought, so absolute top end performance is not crucial.

India, by virtue of it’s non-aligned status, has a highly heterogeneous air fleet, which makes for a complex supply chain and support. This would suggest that they will buy the MiG, and that’s my call at this point, though there are issues with the Russians, such as the much delayed carrier delivery, and currency issues (the Russians want to start pricing in Euros).

However, the Russians are no doubt aware of this, and might push too hard.

If you go for lowest life cycle costs, the Rafale wins, with the F-16 being close behind.

The Indians have experience with Dassault as a supplier, which might give them a leg up too.

I think that the F-18 and Typhoon are pretty much out of the running.This is a competition for a lightweight or medium fighter aircraft, and both are well above this weight class.

Comments? Thoughts? Aspersions to my heritage?

And In The Realm of the Truly Silly

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It seems that the wizards at the Pentagon have come up with a concept called Heavy Air Lift Seabasing Ship (HALSS). It’s basically a ship, with a trimaran hull form and built to commercial ship standards, that would carry 6 C-130s, and then use these aircraft to ferry cargo to shore.

The idea is to use this to fill in the “last mile” gap of some of the newer basing schemes for American forces associated with the “systems of systems” concept and equipment by flying it all in on a C-130.

It won’t work.

A C-130 can take off and land from a carrier deck, this was shown in the 1960s, and the ship is technically possible, though the one concept has it using nuclear power (!).

The concept is flawed.

What is suggested here is that a unit of action (the new name that they have for a brigade) would be flown to an airfield in that last mile.

As strange as this might sound, will be many times slower than using a port or landing craft to deliver the men and materiel: the manned ground vehicles in the FCS family will have to be stripped down to fly on a C-130 (normal max payload is about 19 tons). You will basically have to make 3 C-130 flights to deliver two vehicles, and they will have to be basically reassembled on the other side, with the armor and other systems removed to make transport weight.

Additionally, this does not really allow for significant inland transport, as the C-130 is at maximum weight, and so it’s range is rather short, particularly to locations where it might be “hot”, and so it would have to carry fuel for a return trip.

Additionally, someone had to be smoking something special if they think that the Air Force’s Air Mobility Command would ever allow the Navy to get any sort of authority over their aircraft, which would be required for such a scheme.

Nice Take Down of the National Sales Tax

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And it’s in the WSJ of all places. This editorial shows how the numbers are bogus, and deliberately so.
Bruce Bartlett’s basic points:

  • This idea originally sprung from the head of Scientology, because of their clashes with the IRS¹.
  • It assumes growth rates in the US economy that appear to come from the planet Skaro.
  • They use very bad math to misquote the percentage of tax².
  • It has the federal government paying the tax to artificially inflate revenues.
  • It applies the tax to everything, including education and health care.
  • It creates a de facto national welfare program.³
  • It understates the rate needed to balance the budget.

It should be noted that this Mr. Bartlett was senior economic staff under Bush I, this is no Democratic partisan here.

¹Basically they claim that a 30% tax is a 23% tax by figuring it backward. If you take $1.00 and add 30%, you have $1.30, but $0.30 is only 23% of 1.30.
²The required tax rate for this to replace revenues 57%, it goes up to 64% if it exempts things like food, education, and health care, and 89% if there are problems with evasion.
³It creates a transfer payment system in which people get money back on a weekly basis depending on wages.

David S. Broder Please Retire Now

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Well, it looks like “the Dean” is at it again. He writes about how he longs for 3rd party candidates for president, specifically a Hagel-Bloomberg ticket.

The idea is that the American public longs for “post partisan” politics.

He thinks that candidates who differ on abortion, gun laws, gay rights, taxes, public schools, and role of religion in the public sphere, can somehow find common ground. This is like the bite of a dog into a stone, it is a stupidity.

What he derides as “partisan” politics is actually the legitimate give and take of differences in policy, but sitting where he does, living in the continuous cocktail party known as Sally Quinn’s Washington, it’s all too inconvenient.

These differences get in the way of a pleasant party, and the policies have very little effect on him, being paid to pontificate being one of the lifestyles least effected by significant policy decision.

He is not effected when other people’s children die in Iraq, or when other people’s children lack medical care and die because Bush and His Evil Minions™ believe that it’s worse to provide government funded health care to one relatively well off kid than it is for 1000 poor children to to have no access to health care.

He is the personification of what is wrong with the culture of Washington, DC.

Iraq is Not their Catastrophe, Iraq is their Utopia

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Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone cuts to the heart of the matter in their article, “The Great Iraq Swindle“.

It is a must read expose of the corruption in the contracting in Iraq, but it answers a bigger question, why did the Neocons want to go there in the first place?

Here is the money quote:

Operation Iraqi Freedom, it turns out, was never a war against Saddam ­Hussein’s Iraq. It was an invasion of the federal budget, and no occupying force in history has ever been this efficient. George W. Bush’s war in the Mesopotamian desert was an experiment of sorts, a crude first take at his vision of a fully privatized American government. In Iraq the lines between essential government services and for-profit enterprises have been blurred to the point of absurdity — to the point where wounded soldiers have to pay retail prices for fresh underwear, where modern-day chattel are imported from the Third World at slave wages to peel the potatoes we once assigned to grunts in KP, where private companies are guaranteed huge profits no matter how badly they f%$# things up.

And just maybe, reviewing this appalling history of invoicing orgies and million-dollar boondoggles, it’s not so far-fetched to think that this is the way someone up there would like things run all over — not just in Iraq but in Iowa, too, with the state police working for Corrections Corporation of America, and DHL with the contract to deliver every Christmas card. And why not? What the Bush administration has created in Iraq is a sort of paradise of perverted capitalism, where revenues are forcibly extracted from the customer by the state, and obscene profits are handed out not by the market but by an unaccountable government bureauc­racy. This is the triumphant culmination of two centuries of flawed white-people thinking, a preposterous mix of authoritarian socialism and laissez-faire profit­eering, with all the worst aspects of both ideologies rolled up into one pointless, supremely idiotic military adventure — American men and women dying by the thousands, so that Karl Marx and Adam Smith can blow each other in a Middle Eastern glory hole.

They could not do this in Afghanistan, there simply is not the money there, but Iraq, with its immense oil reserves served as the laboratory for their twisted vision of society.

Simply put, it’s scarier than you think. Iraq is not their catastrophe, Iraq is their utopia

Ted Nugent Wets His Pants to Avoid Combat

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Facing a draft, Nugent bravely wet his pants
Rocker is all talk as he calls Obama, Hillary vile names

August 27, 2007
BY RICHARD ROEPER Sun-Times Columnist
So Ted Nugent roams a concert stage while toting automatic weapons, calls Barack Obama “a piece of —–” and says he told Obama to suck on one of his machine-guns. He also calls Hillary Clinton a “worthless bitch” and Dianne Feinstein a “worthless whore.”

That Nugent, he’s a man’s man. He talks the talk and walks the walk, right?

Except when it was time to register for the draft during the Vietnam era. By his own admission, Nugent stopped all forms of personal hygiene for a month and showed up for his draft board physical in pants caked with his own urine and feces, winning a deferment. Creative!

…

I can’t speak to what I would have done in that situation, but I’m not advocating sending someone else’s children off to war. When he had the chance to be a stand up guy, he did not stand up.

To quote Keith Olbermann, Ted Nugent is today’s worst person in the world.

Moslem Extremist Imam in US Prays for Death of “Allah’s Enemies”

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OOPS!!!!

Me bad…It’s not an Imam, Rev. Wiley S. Drake, pastor of the First Baptist Church of Buena Park, California, who is calling for his parishioners to pray for vengeance and misfortune against his enemies.

Well, where is the outrage in the right wing blogosphere? What about public condemnations from the faces of the religious right? Their silence is clearly assent.

Well, that’s what the right wing pundits would say if it had been an Imam.

Under the heading, “HOW TO PRAY,” he listed all 31 verses of Psalm 109, in which King David appeals to divine justice. Drake provided his congregation the King James Version of the psalm, including Verse 9, which says: “Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow.”

On the advice of his attorneys, Drake has declined to be interviewed.

Your Mouth to God’s Ear

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This was from the comments section.

TPMmuckraker August 27, 2007 2:42 PM:
Now that the Justice department is finished with it’s house cleaning, The rest of the deal Bush made to spare himself impeachment will begin. The Cheney resignation will be forth coming within the time frame I estimated last week. There are three weeks left on that clock. If you look through obscure posts from three weeks ago until last week, you will see my original predictions about Rove (perfectly timed) and Gonzales (also one week prior as stated) Deny my accuracy and attribute it to coincedence or guessing if you like, but within three weeks from this day the dark one falls. The deal has been made and the substance of it is out. I am not a mystic and do not own a crystal ball. I do however own many devices that are able to communicate messages through the air. These have been put to great use.. Cheney is next, and you heard it here first. AS I STATED WITH MY OTHER POSTS MARK THIS ONE! Do not talk of it, Just mark it! It will be a great remebrance!

Me, I’m not such an optimist.