So I’m picking up some groceries at the local Wegmans, and I’m waiting in line, and then I see it…The cover of OK Magazine, and it’s got Kathy Griffin in a bikini!!!! (click image for full size…if you dare)
Tekeli Li!!!!!
Tekeli Li!!!!!
Tekeli Li!!!!!
Tekeli Li!!!!!
You can read his speech, but here is the nickel tour:
Additions:
Reductions:
Surprise, he’s saying that Dick Cheney’s brainchild when he was Bush I’s Sec Def, using the Department of Defense as a way to reward political contributions privatizing functions and expanding the number of contractors, does not work.
Kills:
I love his money quote:
Sixth, and finally, we will significantly restructure the Army’s Future Combat Systems (FCS) program. We will retain and accelerate the initial increment of the program to spin out technology enhancements to all combat brigades. However, I have concluded that there are significant unanswered questions concerning the FCS vehicle design strategy. I am also concerned that, despite some adjustments, the FCS vehicles – where lower weight, higher fuel efficiency, and greater informational awareness are expected to compensate for less armor – do not adequately reflect the lessons of counterinsurgency and close quarters combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. The current vehicle program, developed nine years ago, does not include a role for our recent $25 billion investment in the MRAP vehicles being used to good effect in today’s conflicts.
Further, I am troubled by the terms of the current contract, particularly its very unattractive fee structure that gives the government little leverage to promote cost efficiency. Because the vehicle part of the FCS program is currently estimated to cost over $87 billion, I believe we must have more confidence in the program strategy, requirements, and maturity of the technologies before proceeding further.
(emphasis mine)
This translates to, “They are not worth much in a counter-insurgency scenario, and once again the Lead System Integrator (LSI) model of procurement has given us an overpriced piece of crap.”
*Full disclosure, I worked on the Future Recovery and Maintenance Vehicle, FRMV, “wrecker” variant of the FCS-MGV† from 2003-2006 at United Defense (later BAE Systems after the Carlyle Group sold me to buy Dunkin Donuts).
†Future Combat Systems-Manned Ground Vehicle. These are the ones that are the tanks and APCs. As opposed to the various unnmanned vehicles, networking technologies, etc. that form the full FCS along with the MGVs.‡
‡Yes, I have worked everywhere. Maybe I can’t hold down a job, but more likely this has been my role as “technical hit man”, where you are parachuted in to take care of a specific need.
One of the things that concerns me the most is Obama’s comfort in continuing to support Bush’s assault on basic procedural civil rights because they serve to reinforce the power of what is now his office.
Case in point, the Pentagon’s “privilege review team”, which is now considering charges against a victim of the torture protocols created by the Bush Administration.
What they posted was a cover sheet naming the case, and quoting unclassified portions of a UK court ruling saying that it was up to the US to release it, followed by a version redacted by said privilege review team”, which blacked out everything but the title of their report, which is clearly stamped “unclassified”:
The privilege team argue that by releasing the redacted memo Reprieve has breached the rules that govern Guantánamo lawyers and have made a complaint to the court of “unprofessional conduct”.
Stafford Smith described their actions as intimidation, saying the complaint “doesn’t even specify the rule supposedly breached”.
So, according to someone at the Pentagon, by sending an unclassified document to the president of the United States of America, they are in violation of regulations, and could face as much as 6 months in jail.
Courtesy of The Big Picture“
In fact, let’s learn from history. The only times we have ever seen the stock market surge close to this much in such a short time frame were:
- December 1929
- June 1931
- August 1932
- May 1933
- July 1938
- September 1982
Only in September 1982 and in May 1933 was the equity market embarking on a new bull phase.
Oh Belgium!
Dead Cat Bounce.
Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) raised in excess of $2.3 million since her Senate appointment.
I think that she is doing this to fend off/scare off a primary challenge from Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (D-NY-04), who is now polling ahead of her 33%-29% in the latest polls, though she is still below the magic 50% safe number for incumbents against Peter King, leading 40%-28% in the general too.
I think that Gillibrand will end up moving to the left over the next few months in order to fend of McCarthy, but time will tell.
Truth be told, I never ended mine, and have used alternate sources for stories where ever possible.
In any case, I try to post a link and a summary, and perhaps a sentence or two, which should fall under fair use.
The article, though is rather odd, as it keeps mentioning Google News and Yahoo, which runs no ads, and is a search service, which would generally be construed as fair use, and Huffington post, which licenses what it publishes from the AP.
Brown backs Blair for EU president job
‘Nuff said.
It looks like the New York Times is now covering the sweetheart deal he got working for a hedge fund, and we now know that not only was it a part time job that got him paid $5.2 million, but he worked there just 1 day a week!
Truth be told, he may have done more work, as he, “routinely made himself available for private consultations with Shaw’s clients, an attractive perk for investing with the firm, as one client put it.”
What this really means is that in 2008, it was clear that he would be a senior official if either Obama or Clinton became President, and clients were attracted by the potential of that access, and he got special treatment as a result:
When investors rushed en masse to withdraw their money from hedge funds last year, Shaw asserted its right to block redemptions from its fund. An exception was made for Mr. Summers, however, because the White House job he was taking required him to divest.
This is deeply corrupt, if not in law, then in fact.
He didn’t “have” to divest. He could have placed it in a blind trust.
The first bit of news is kind of “inside Baseball,” with
the central banks of the US, UK, EU, and Switzerland agreeing to currency swaps totaling $285 billion with each other.
Basically this means the banks can borrow that amount from each other in various currencies and then use it to stabilize their currencies.
Truth be told, I have no clue as to what it means, except that there have been rumblings that the Swiss are near a deflationary spiral, and might want to depress the CHF to forestall that.
Since it looks like commodities prices are down significantly, most notably copper and oil over the past 6 months or so, the worries about deflation are not just an abstract concept here.
It also looks like Canada is moving toward quantitative easing (printing money) which is pushing the Loonie down, and the dollar rose against other currencies as well, as people moved into a perceived safe haven.
So, North Korea made another attempt at orbiting a satellite, and it ended up in the drink again, the first stage fell in the Sea of Japan, as intended, but the second stage and payload flew over Japan and then landed in the Pacific Ocean….OOPS!!!
*What can I say, I make sure to watch all the shows that my kids do, so I know the show…..I actually find it amusing.
It appears that Obama selection of Robert Groves as director of the US Census has gotten Republicans worried:
Republicans expressed alarm because of one of Mr. Groves’s specialties, statistical sampling — roughly speaking, the process of extrapolating from the numbers of people actually counted to arrive at estimates of those uncounted and, presumably, arriving at a realistic total.
If minorities, immigrants, the poor and the homeless are those most likely to be missed in an actual head count, and if political stereotypes hold true, then statistical sampling would presumably benefit the Democrats.
First, let me note here that the reporter does not have a clue: As a matter of settled law, the Supreme Court ruled that you cannot use a statistical sampling, but instead must use an actual count in Department of Commerce v. U.S. House of Representatives in 1999, so this is a non-issue.
What is not a non issue is that statistical sampling can find people and places that have been under-sampled, and can so create a more accurate census, and a more accurate census is probably a bad thing™ for Republicans, because white males tend to be the easy folks to count.
The ‘Phants don’t oppose him because he will, “Politicize the Census,” they oppose him because he will do the best job possible within his power.
They don’t want someone to do a good job, they want someone to do a piss poor job.
In this case, it’s 401(k) plans that they destroyed, by issuing regulations on automatically subscribed employees that directed them to riskier investments:
Shortly before the first signs of the stock market collapse, the Bush administration made a crucial decision that has propelled an estimated one to two million workers into stock-heavy retirement funds.
Many of the funds in which workers were automatically enrolled dropped more than 25 percent last year, while a more conservative investment strategy rejected by the Bush administration would have resulted in a gain of 4.7 percent.
The administration’s decisions came in response to a congressional mandate to encourage more workers to participate in company-sponsored retirement savings plans. The Bush administration came up with a rule that enabled businesses to automatically enroll their workers in tax-free 401(k) retirement plans.
If the workers failed to specify how they wanted their money invested, the company would be required by law to place their retirement money in investment funds that, for the most part, relied heavily on stocks. The administration specifically rejected calls for a more conservative investment option.
You know, even a stopped clock is right twice a day, but that’s better than George Walker Bush.
Truth be told, they had a reason for this: They were desperately trying to get money to the stock market, in order to prop up prices in preparation for the election, so it’s more corrupt than stupid.
You know, for some time, it seems that any time someone complains that Obama’s economic team is too close to the banks, the answer is that we are seeing some sort of chess game, and it’s just that the White House is 3 steps ahead of everyone else.
I don’t buy it. I think that Larry Summers just jumped the shark into accepting bribes, as this Wall Street Journal analysis of his 2008 disclosure forms shows.
Among other things, he got $5.2 million from hedge fund D.E. Shaw for his thoroughly part time (he was a full time professor at Harvard) position, and he got $2.7 million for speaking, with his fees ranging from, “$10,000 for a Yale University speech to $135,000 for an appearance paid for by Goldman Sachs & Co.”
So we know that the market rate for his speeches is about $10K, but Wall Street investment firms were paying more than 10 times that in a year in which the Democrats were favored, and he was likely to be on the team of either Democratic nominee.
A Tiny Revolution went through his disclosure form (PDF) and came up with the following, with Merrill-Lynch being a week after the election, and Charles River Ventures being the day before:
It should be noted that the Hudson institute is a very right wing “think” tank which has consistently been dogged by accusations of racism and Islamophobia, and it’s at the same “market rate” as Yale.
I can’t see this as anything but bribe taking, with the various financial institutions paying forward to get favorable treatment.
What sort of treatment were the looking for? Well, there was probably not a specific request, a quid pro quo, if you will, but something like the White House coming up with phony entities to act as intermediaries in order to skirt Congressional limitations on executive compensation:
The Obama administration is engineering its new bailout initiatives in a way that it believes will allow firms benefiting from the programs to avoid restrictions imposed by Congress, including limits on lavish executive pay, according to government officials.
Administration officials have concluded that this approach is vital for persuading firms to participate in programs funded by the $700 billion financial rescue package.
You know, the threat of being frog marched out of their workplace in handcuffs would work better.
The administration believes it can sidestep the rules because, in many cases, it has decided not to provide federal aid directly to financial companies, the sources said. Instead, the government has set up special entities that act as middlemen, channeling the bailout funds to the firms and, via this two-step process, stripping away the requirement that the restrictions be imposed, according to officials.
Although some experts are questioning the legality of this strategy, the officials said it gives them latitude to determine whether firms should be subject to the congressional restrictions, which would require recipients to turn over ownership stakes to the government, as well as curb executive pay.
The administration has decided that the conditions should not apply in at least three of the five initiatives funded by the rescue package.
…
Enough is enough.
This is more than being too close to the financial sector, this is corruption, and it pervades Obama’s economic team.
Larry Summers, and possibly Timothy Geithner, need to spend more time with their families.
Alliant Techsystems (ATK) isworking on getting its Thermally Throated Ramjet (TTRJ) onto the X-51B hypersonic demonstrator (paid subscription required) that is due to succeed the X-51A demonstrator (2nd pic down) that will be conducting flights later this year.
The flight weight engine is now in test (see inlet diffuser and combustor combination, top pic), and as opposed to using the rather exotic, and difficult to ignite JP-7 that was used for the SR-71, it uses the more common JP-10 missile fuel, with the fuel cooling the combustor walls and being vaporized prior to ignition.
It’s interesting in that the boundary between subsonic and supersonic flow inside the engine is controlled thermally, rather than through inlet geometry, with the heat of forward (subsonic) combustion taking the stream to supersonic speed.
In the meantime, the X-51A scramjet demonstrator appears ti be continuing on both budget and schedule, (paid subscription required) largely because the development team has limited requirement creep and “bleeding edge” technology wherever possible, with a first flight in October of this year.
There are a number of potential technical breakthroughs, a hydrocarbon fuel cooled scramjet, unstable aerodynamics, and long powered flight time (300s as vs NASA’s 10s for its X-43-A), but structurally, it’s simple, with a tungsten nose cone, aluminum structure, and an old fashioned ablative coating for much of its thermal protection.
Additionally, the 4 planned flight tests are designed to be identical, in order to provide redundancy.
While it’s not an issue for the relatively slow (!) Mach 5-6 X-51A, future hypersonic vehicles, which can be expected to exceed Mach 10, will have issues with communication, as the speeds create an ionized sheath around the vehicle that will cause a communications blackout, which makes getting telemetry out of a vehicle problematic.
The potential solutions are interesting, ranging from using lasers or magnets to poke holes in the plasma, dropping capsules with the telemetry as the flight progresses, using the plasma to generate a signal, magnetic fields, etc.
So the count remains at 21.
Kind of cool.
H/t Galrahn.
France and the UK are set to qualify a new 40mm case telescoped ammunition cannon for their armored vehicles, and they are looking to be at System Readiness Level 8 (“Actual System Completed and Qualified Through Test and Demonstration”) by year’s end, with the cannon and ammunition qualified some time in 2012.
When I looked at this system last year, it looked promising, with a much simplified ammunition feed, no need to eject cases, and more punch in the same volume.
CTA International (CTAI), a “joint venture of BAE Systems and Nexter” say that this is compact enough to be a drop in replacement for the Bradley’s 25mm Bushmaster cannon, but that it will pack the punch of a 50mm cannon.
The Future Combat System Manned Ground Vehicles (FCS MGV)* are on the chopping block, though it still looks like the howitzer version, the NLOS-C (shown) will still be procured.
The program is over budget and behind schedule, and the vehicles, originally in the 17 ton class (stripped for transport) and C-130 transportable, and now a 27 ton concept requiring larger transports, so this is not unforeseen.
The supporters of the program are claiming that :The development of the FCS network is linked to the development of FCS Manned Ground Vehicles. Each MGV acts as a node in the ground based aspect of the network. So cutting MGVs reduces the viability of the network,” but truth be told, if the communications suite can be developed, it can be retrofitted to the legacy fleet and give the desired situational awareness.
There are really only 2 downsides that I see, that the troop carrier FCS MGV, the ICV, carries more troops than the Bradley, which has always been light in that department, and the legacy systems require more fuel and maintenance (the specs for the FCS MGV on maintenance are pretty amazing).
Canceling the MGVs would also serve to put the Pentagon, and the defense industry, on notice about cost and schedule creep, which is desperately needed because the weapons system development process is completely broken.
*Full disclosure, I worked on the Future Recovery and Maintenance Vehicle, FRMV, “wrecker” variant of the FCS-MGV† from 2003-2006 at United Defense (later BAE Systems after the Carlyle Group sold me to buy Dunkin Donuts).
†Yes, I have worked everywhere. Maybe I can’t hold down a job, but more likely this has been my role as “technical hit man”, where you are parachuted in to take care of a specific need.
Man, I just love The Onion – America’s Finest News Source
