Courtesy of Tyler Durden and Geoffrey Batt of zero hedge: “
Of course, everyone knows the Fed does not care about inflation, or, it seems, the economy, unless of course Goldman Sachs recently changed its name to Inflation Economy, Inc.
(emphasis mine)
So, Senator Max Baucus (DINO-MT) submitted the name of his former state office director to be US Attorney in Montana to the President.
That’s not so bad, in fact, that’s what passes for normal.
What doesn’t pass for normal is that they are sleeping together, and have been since before both got divorced from their prior spouses. (see also here):
“Senator Baucus is currently in a mature and happy relationship with Melodee Hanes. They are both divorced, and in no way was their relationship the cause of their respective divorces,” Ty Matsdorf, a spokesperson for Baucus, said in a statement to Main Justice.
Yeah, and Larry Craig has a wide stance.
More significantly, they started “dating” in the summer of 2008, and she was working as Baucus’s state director and counsel until spring of this year, which means that he was Cheneying a subordinate, which is sexual harassment, even if the subordinate is willing, if you are not a Senator anyway.
In testimony before Congress, Ben Bernanke talked about the dual mandate [of the Fed], which is growth and inflation.
Of course, anyone who knows anything about the Federal reserve knows that this answer is only ½ true. The actual mandate is to control inflation and minimize unemployment.
Given that he has been Fed Chairman for 4 years, and that he has been on the Fed for 8 years, he knows this, and he also knows therefore that growth does not necessarily mean low unemployment (see Recovery, Jobless).
He made this statement, along with talking down more fiscal stimulus and likening social security to bank robbery, which are well outside of the purview of the Federal Reserve.
It’s pretty clear that Ben Bernanke does not give a damn about employment, or the social safety net, except to the degree that it influences Wall Street profits, and he’s the wrong man for the job.
I would also note, as I have before, the “rock star” Fed Chair is a bad thing, both for democracy, bad for the economy.
We have another resignation from the Obama Administration, Phil Carter, and it seems to flow from the same dynamics that had Greg Craig being forced to resign 2 weeks ago.
Mr. Carter was the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Detainee Affairs, which meant that he was in charge of trying detainees, and was a vociferous opponent of both Bush’s kangaroo courts, the use of evidence derived from torture, and has also been very leery of the military commissions, though he does support the use of courts martial through the UCMJ.
Carter is denying that he is leaving for policy differences, but considering the actions of the Obama administration, which has been to use military commissions to ensure convictions when they might be in doubt through tainted (tortured) evidence, I do not take his statement at face value.
And Natalie managed to dragoon Charlie into helping her with a snowman that they named “Todd.”
(click images for full size)
Charlie with another chunk of Todd
Natalie and her new friend.
Charlie giving bunny ears to an amused Todd.
Natalie and Charlie giving bunny ears to everyone.
Todd in all his majestic glory
A sort of 2nd best version is down below the first comments.
You will see, “Recent Comments,” which is blank, and will remain so until Blogger/Google fixes, and beneath it you will see, “Recent Comments (Temporary Version),” which has comments, but not with the formatting that I would like.
Maybe they could use the Amish …. Uhhhh … Never mind
Researchers, looking to “compare men who watch porn with those who haven’t encountered it,” have hit a snag.
They have been unable to find any men who haven’t sampled pr0n:
“We started our research seeking men in their 20s who had never consumed pornography,” the Telegraph reported Professor Simon Louis Lajeunesse as saying.
“[But] we couldn’t find any.“
I was thinking that they might want to contact members of the Amish community, and then I went to google images, and typed in “hot Amish chicks“. (NSFW)
Yep, here’s another example morality, or lack thereof, of the American “Entrepreneur with someone else’s Money,” usually abbreviated to MBA, class. While executives were running companies, like UAL, LTV, WestPoint Stevens, Polaroid, Reliance Insurance, and Pillowtex into the ground, they were taking hundreds of millions of dollars in salaries:
UAL Corp., US Airways Group Inc. and eight other companies paid executives $350 million in the five years before the U.S. was forced to take over their under-funded employee pension plans, a government report said.
One airline company missed $979 million in required pension contributions while its top three executives took $55.5 million in compensation, and another paid four executives $120.4 million amid two bankruptcies, a Government Accountability Office report today found. Data including dates of the pension terminations, stock awards and pay levels show the unnamed companies were UAL, the parent of United Airlines, and US Airways.
Benefits to retirees were cut in some cases by as much as two-thirds, as executives got salary increases, stock awards, retention bonuses and other pay, the GAO said in a report that studied pension takeovers from 2002 through 2005. Representative George Miller of California is considering legislation that will freeze executive compensation if a company’s rank-and-file pension plan becomes significantly under-funded.
The problem here is that the Federal Pension Guarantee Corporation (FPGC) had to take over their pensions, at what will eventually be a cost of billions to the taxpayers, in addition to cutting pensions of ordinary guys who played by the rules and did their jobs to the best of their abilities.
Here’s an idea: If the FPGC has to take over a pension, they get to claw back anything that senior executives got over the pay of the President of the US for the preceding 10 years.
Then maybe, just maybe, these guys won’t use the pension funds to juice the numbers for this year’s bonuses.
At the Dubai air show, which finished up a few days before the Dubai meltdown, the developers of supersonic business jets were optimistic as to their prospects.
I’m inclined to disagree. One of the things that drove the adoption of the jet airliner, in addition to speed, was that, when you considered the reduction in crew cost per segment and the profoundly lower maintenance costs of jets versus pistons, they were cheaper to operate.
This is not the case of any form of SST, whether civil, or business/personal.
That’s why optimism by SSBJ companies like Aerion (shown) making comments like. “We are in active discussions with more than one OEM and should have an agreement concluded by the second half of next year if things don’t get any worse in the world economy,” are more an indication of delusion than of viability.
They have this real cool design, but no one willing to make it….
But the picture of the is cool.
So, the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS), the modular, whiz bank, high tech wonder that manages to cram all the weaponry of a corvette into a hull the size of a frigate*, is heading out to sea on its 1st deployment, and they had to add an additional 20 crew to the nominal compliment of 75, an increase of 27%, in order not to overwork the crew to the point of uselessness. (see also here and here):
Good said Freedom’s 20 extra sailors would sleep in two 12-rack berthing modules, about the size of shipping containers, which will ride in the ship’s multiuse mission spaces. While the 75 core crew members will stay in the ship’s integral berthing spaces — which include double-tall racks, rooms of no more than eight sailors, and a head and shower to each berthing area — the VBSS sailors’ lodging will be more like those of sailors on a destroyer, he said.
Note that these spaces will not have heads or showers, and that the multiuse mission spaces are intended for the addition of capabilities to the platform for modular upgrades.
It seems to me that we are seeing the US Navy’s fetish on getting the number of crew on ships down coming back to bite them in the ass, much as it did with the now-canceled Zumwalt class (an overview here).
In any case, this yet another example where, to paraphrase Commander Salamander, truth trumps PowerPoint slide thinking.
Not only does this show an increase in crew costs, it also reduces the “flexibility and modularity” which was supposed to be the primary justification for the program, because some of those “plug and play” spaces must now be occupied by additional crew.
These problems are in addition to the cost overruns and schedule slippage that the program is seeing, of course.
*A corvette is a lot smaller than a frigate.
It looks like they are looking at replacing/upgrading the M4 carbine again.
As a result of stoppages and other problems under very heavy use, they are looking at some mods:
Army weapons officials presented the proposed changes to Congress on Oct. 30. They are:
- Adding a heavier barrel for better performance during high rates of fire.
- Replacing the direct-impingement gas system with a piston gas system.
- Improving the trigger pull.
- Adding an improved rail system for increased strength.
- Adding ambidextrous controls.
- Adding a round counter to track the total number of bullets fired over the weapon’s lifetime.
I think that the gas tube operation has always been a problem, so going with a piston makes sense, and an improved trigger pull, making the weapon a bit more robust, and adding ambidextrous controls are all pretty common sense. The heavier barrel is a trade off, more weight vs better performance under heavy use, and I don’t have the data for that.
As to the round counter, it has to be designed such that if it fails, everything else works, because it add a lot of complexity.
To my mind, the real solution is to go with a Bullpup design, which would be shorter, but have a longer barrel, and you can incorporate improvements in a new weapon.
That being said, arguments over the M16 family, and 5.56mm rounds tend to be contentious.
This is the work of orgami master Won Park, there ar about a dozen other sculptures at the link.
I so need to show this to my son, who is into orgami.
And here they are, ordered, and numbered for the year so far.
6 Banks, the FDIC is hungry tonight.
Phil Hartman, back when SNL was still good.
H/t AMERICAblog
Because the Cake Wrecks thanksgiving turkey cake post is a masterpiece.
It forces Mercedes Benz to manufacture more cars in the United States.
The only people who benefit from an overvalued US dollar are the bankers, who get fees from foreigners who want to park their money here as a result.
Glenn Greenwald points us to a Pew Research Center survey that shows that the citizens of the United States are the most supportive of torture of any of the nationalities tested.
We are, therefore, a bunch of cowardly sadists, and maybe Liberace was right, and I should make aliyah to Israel.
I do know that I am thoroughly disgusted at this, and I think that people are missing something: When these reservists and national guardsman come home, some of them will be in law enforcement, and they will bring torture with them.
Expect your next traffic stop to come with stress positions.
This graph makes it appear that home prices have only fallen ¼ of the amount that they need to to return to trend.
Be afraid, be very, very afraid.
It turns out that when General Stanley McChrystal was looking for filling in the dots on his Afghanistan escalation plan, he turned to the think tank Washington, DC, and created a “strategic assessment group”, among the members of that group, Fred Kagan and his wife, Kimberly Kagan.
If there is a bright shining center of intellect in the universe, anyone in the Kagan clan are located in a dank corner where people still believe that leeches cure cancer.
They are always wrong. All you need to look at is their history on Iraq, Saddam, and WMD.
On a more substantive note, this sort of lobbying, because when you look at the names on the group, they are largely idiots who are respected by the “very serious people” inside the Beltway, should be something that members of the military should not be doing.
The group was not about getting answers, it was not aboug evaluating potential options, it was about Beltway street cred.