It appears that French boats have gotten a LOT quieter in the past decade, because a decade ago, on Usenet, I heard many comments from former submariners who said that they were loud.
Background here.
Month: February 2009
A Hipster???? I’m a Mechanical Engineer, for God’s sake!
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot????
I think that there are still a few bugs in this test.
My Liberal Identity:
You are a New Left Hipster, also known as a MoveOn.org liberal, a Netroots activist, or a Daily Show fanatic. You believe that if we really want to defend American values, conservatives must be exposed, mocked, and assailed for every fanatical, puritanical, warmongering, Constitution-shredding ideal for which they stand.
Take the quiz at www.FightConservatives.com
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot? Harold Ford?
It appears that someone in the Obama Administration is floating Harold Ford’s name as the next Secretary of Commerce Nominee.
Admittedly, he didn’t go as far as Lieberman in slamming Obama in the general, but he certainly came close, probably because he thought that he could be president one day.
He’s where he is because he is a member of a corrupt political dynasty, and he’s a political opportunists even by the standards of Washington, DC.
This would be asking for a knife in the back.
When You Give a Child a Loaded Gun
Let me be clear here, the metaphor implies no adult supervision, I am not making a comment on children and their parents going to the shooting range, or enrolling a kid in a gun safety class, or going hunting with the kids.
In this case, the metaphor refers to California, where a juxtaposition of heavily gerrymandered districts, term limits, and a requirement for a 2/3 super-majority to pass any taxes, have handed a loaded revolver to the most wingnutty of ‘Phants.
Seriously, when you combine the unbalanced districts with the super-majority, and then throw in a dash of “no respect for the legislature as an institution,” because they are limited to 6 years in the statehouse, and 8 years in the state senate, and you have a heady brew.
The Dems, and Ahnuld Schwartzenegger, need to have a club to beat Republicans around the head and shoulders, I would suggest an out of cycle redistricting.
To avoid the appearance of impropriety, have as a requirement, “The length of the borders shall be the minimum practical,” which means that the districts will be mathematically as contiguous as is possible.
Chavez’s Finally Gets Unlimited Terms
The referrenda results are not surprising.
The depressing thing here is not that Chavez is a slightly loopy man with no respect for Democracy.
The depressing thing is that even with that, he is still miles ahead of what were the ruling classes in Venezuela.
Have You Heard the One About the Executive Compensation in the Stimulus Bill?
Well, it appears that the final version of the stimulus bill has restrictions on executive compensation, no “compensation incentives that encourage senior managers ‘to take unnecessary and excessive risks that threaten the value of a company, no golden parachutes for senior management, “claw back” provisions to get money back from executives when they enrich themselves at taxpayer expense, and require (nonbinding) “say on pay” votes of the shareholders.
Sounds good, but it turns out that Congress gave the Treasury a year to draw up the regulations, and I’m sure that former Federal Reserve Bank of New York President, and general Wall Street butt boy, Timothy Geithner (as well as Larry Summers) will make absolutely sure to take the full 365 days, all the while lobbying for a relaxation of the law.
Oh to live in the UK, where the Conservative Party is calling for a bonus limit of £2,000 (about $2800) for all bank employees.
Yep, the Tories….The party of Margaret Thatcher….Is calling for bonus limits.
Schadenfreude
It appears that George W. Bush is having problems raising money for his presidential library, and has asked Karl Rove and his dad, George H.W. Bush to help get the necessary 5500 million to start construction.
…$500 million….For the two books that he’s read in his life?????
Whiskey tango foxtrot?
Economics Update
Japan’s economy contracted at an annual rate of 12.7% in the Q4 of 2008. Those are numbers more than a recession, they are near implosion, so I would take the Confederation of British Industry’s prediction that the UK economy will shrink 3.3% in 2009 with a grain of salt.
The UK is far more dependent on banking and investment than Japan is in its economy, the Japanese actually make stuff and sell it to people.
A further indicator of the likelihood of a brutal downturn is that the companies in the S&P 500 just turned their first ever aggregate quarterly loss ever, with something like 400 of the 500 companies declaring a loss.
However, today was not without good news, as junk bond sales hit a 6 month high, which implies that people are no longer fleeing so strongly to safe havens like US treasuries, though there is still enough uncertainty to push the dollar and the Yen higher.
Still, demand concerns are driving oil down, even as retail gasoline prices continue their march back towards $2.00 a gallon.
What the Hell is Going On?
* Seriously, first an Iridium and a Cosmos satellite collide in orbit spewing debris all around the immediate vicinity, and now French and British boomers (SSBNs) have collided.
This is just weird.The HMS Vanguard and Le Triomphant, each carrying 16 missiles, and an indeterminate number of warhead struck each other in the middle of nowhere:
Not only did it occur in the open ocean, as opposed to a choke point like a port or the Straights of Gibralter, but it was two SSBNs.
If one had been an attack submarine, I could see it, because you would have a “friendly” tracking exercise, but this is not the task of the SSBN.
Yes, I know about the story of the Leningrad elephant, but it’s just weird.
*Tin foil hat image swiped from Attytood.
Not This Sh&% Again
Yes, it’s the gifts that keep on giving, courtesy of Roland Burris and Rod Blagojevich, and not it appears taht Burris “forgot” to mention that Blago’s brother hit him up for a donation before his appointment:
Senator Roland W. Burris of Illinois acknowledged in documents made public Saturday that the brother of former Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich sought campaign fund-raising help from him in the weeks and months before his appointment to succeed Barack Obama as the state’s junior senator.
Mr. Burris said he provided no money to Governor Blagojevich’s campaign in response to the brother’s request.
The disclosure was different from Mr. Burris’s earlier descriptions, including one under oath, of his conversations with those closest to the former governor. It raised new questions about events that preceded Mr. Burris’s unusual appointment in late December and prompted some Republican lawmakers in Illinois to immediately demand an inquiry into whether Mr. Burris committed perjury.
Please, just make it stop.
If Burris had any illusion about running for office in 2010, this needs to stop right now.
On a more personal level, please, just make it stop.
The Rational Man is Dead
David Ignatius nails it, that the idea that the markets, unlike the human beings who participate, are somehow rational actors is wrong.
Actually, he’s quoting Nouriel Roubini, who suggests that rationality from markets which are composed of irrational actors is actually irrational:
“The rational man theory of economics has not worked,” Roubini said last month at a session of the World Economic Forum at Davos. That’s why he and other prominent economists are paying more attention to behavioral economics, which starts from the premise that economic decisions, like other aspects of human behavior, are influenced by irrational psychological factors.
The most compelling rebuttal of the rational model, paradoxically, was delivered by the ultimate rationalist, Alan Greenspan. “I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders,” the former Fed chairman told Congress last October.
That’s why Greenspan didn’t see it coming, argues Daniel Kahneman, a Princeton professor who is often described as the father of behavioral economics. His rational-actor model wouldn’t let him.
The people who have suggested that the market is not self governing and self correcting, and so real regulation from industry, as Ignatius notes, this includes Keynes, are right.
Bush Set Up Rape Rooms as a Part of the Torture Program
Just when I thought that this group of criminals have gotten me so jaded about their venality and corruption that they can no longer shock me, it now appears that they instituted rape as a part of their torture regime:
By Scott Horton
Army Private Brandon Neely served as a prison guard at Guantánamo in the first years the facility was in operation. With the Bush Administration, and thus the threat of retaliation against him, now gone, Neely decided to step forward and tell his story. “The stuff I did and the stuff I saw was just wrong,” he told the Associated Press. Neely describes the arrival of detainees in full sensory-deprivation garb, he details their sexual abuse by medical personnel, torture by other medical personnel, brutal beatings out of frustration, fear, and retribution, the first hunger strike and its causes, torturous shackling, positional torture, interference with religious practices and beliefs, verbal abuse, restriction of recreation, the behavior of mentally ill detainees, an isolation regime that was put in place for child-detainees, and his conversations with prisoners David Hicks and Rhuhel Ahmed. It makes for fascinating reading.
…
Third, the Nelly account shows that health professionals are right in the thick of the torture and abuse of the prisoners—suggesting a systematic collapse of professional ethics driven by the Pentagon itself. He describes body searches undertaken for no legitimate security purpose, simply to sexually invade and humiliate the prisoners. This was a standardized Bush Administration tactic–the importance of which became apparent to me when I participated in some Capitol Hill negotiations with White House representatives relating to legislation creating criminal law accountability for contractors. The Bush White House vehemently objected to provisions of the law dealing with rape by instrumentality. When House negotiators pressed to know why, they were met first with silence and then an embarrassed acknowledgment that a key part of the Bush program included invasion of the bodies of prisoners in a way that might be deemed rape by instrumentality under existing federal and state criminal statutes. While these techniques have long been known, the role of health care professionals in implementing them is shocking.
(emphasis mine)
Oh my God.
Waterboarding is the least of it.
[ON EDIT: My bad, I left off the link]
About Fracking Time
I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on here!
I am not surprised that H1B visas are being used to undercut wages of citizens and green card holders, but I am shocked that we are seeing raids and indictments on employers who engage in this practice.
Even more surprising is the fact that the prosecutors appear to be unloading some big guns against these folks:
The arrests were carried out by federal, state and local agents working in Iowa, California, Massachusetts, Texas, Pennsylvania, Kentucky and New Jersey. The government’s action “is the result of an extensive, ongoing investigation into suspected H-1B visa fraud, mail fraud and conspiracy,” said Matthew Whitaker, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Iowa, in a statement. The investigation was dubbed Operation Pacific Vision.
(emphasis mine)
So we are seeing both arrests and felony indictments.
It appears that the investigation centers on the borker (temp firm) Vision Systems, who placed people in high cost areas like New Jersey, but used the prevailing wage of its headquarters in Iowa.
It’s a start. Better would be an H1B application fee high enough that it would remove the economic incentive.
Republican Thought Process
If the writers at Saturday Night Live have their fingers on the thought process of the Congressional Republicans, then they are spending so much times chasing their own tail that they remember a Kline Bottle.
If not, it’s still funny as hell.
Deployments Scrubbed from AF Promotions
In 2007, I suggested that perhaps we needed to abolish the USAF as an independent service, quoting the then Air Combat Command chief Ronald Keys:
The hardest wars we fight are not on the battlefield, but the wars we fight in the halls of Congress. They are fought in the Pentagon, they are fought in these programs, to make sure the money is paid and eventually the program is operating.
Well, it appears that the USAF continues to see its most important role as a K Street lobbyist, because they are now scrubbing combat deployments from the records used to determine if an officer or senior NCO gets a promotion, so there is no credit for combat duty, because it’s more important to lobby for bloated weapons systems.
Nothing but REMF’s here sir.
Stimulus Heads to Obama’s Desk
Thew had to hold the vote open in the Senate for 5 hours, because Sherrod Brown (D-OH) had to attend his mother’s wake, and none of the Republicans had the decency to make an accommodation.
Charming to the last.
Me Bad, I Checked the Failed Bank List Too Early
There are 2 more failed banks:
Pinnacle Bank of Oregon, Beaverton, OR
Corn Belt Bank and Trust Company, Pittsfield, IL
This is in addition to the Sherman County Bank, Loup City, Nebraska and the Riverside Bank of the Gulf Coast, Cape Coral, FL, who made the list before I closed down on Friday.
The trend is unsettling.
Essential for Any Parent
My Liary, “A journal to record all my fibs, white lies, and larger distortions of the truth.”
It is for recording those times when one stretches the truth, along with turn of the last century (c 1900) cartoons, which appeals to me, since I grew up with the original illustrations of A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh, and so they feel comforting.
I got a copy from a reader, and as a parent, it proves useful.
Between the tooth fairy and Keith Olbermann, I have to keep what I say to the kids straight.
It’s available for purchase at the link.
Pictures of interior below:
Commercial Plug
A friend of my game did this iPhone game called “Bailout Bonanza”.
Sweet
Hats off to Patrick Rosario, who was in his basement when two people broke into his home and started stealing his stuff.
They didn’t see him, he was in his basement, and so he called 911, and got out of the house, and then he noticed that the perp’s van was there, unattended, with the motor running, so he stole their getaway van:
Meanwhile, back at his home, a passing driver visiting an across-the-street neighbor saw the burglars exit the house. According to the detectives’ report, “the males looked back … and appeared startled.”
“I wish I could have seen the look on their faces,” Rosario said.
The two fled the house toward busy Southeast Newport Way, leaving a pile of flat-screen TVs by the door, along with Rosario’s laptop, game consoles and his wife’s jewelry box.
…
Even as detectives took Rosario’s report, the story apparently was making the rounds. Rosario said he received more than a few high-fives from other responding officers.
“Two pulled up, and they looked over at me and go, ‘You stole their car — way to go, dude. That’s awesome.’ Another told me that I just made her month.”
…
I am amused, but this was a really really stupid thing to do.
H/T Mithras.