Kind of a big watch!
Should have used someone dressed like Dick Tracy
Shades of Dick Tracy with the LG GD910 Watch Phone, which does video calls, and has a Bluetooth headset.
It was for the “Beer Summit“:
OSLO (The Borowitz Report) – As the world responded with a mixture of surprise and amazement to the announcement of President Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize, Nobel insiders revealed that the President’s “beer summit” at the White House put him over the top.
“The committee was definitely split down the middle right up until the end,” said Agot Valle, a Norwegian politician and member of the five-person Nobel committee. “Some of them were still quite upset about that nasty business with the Somali pirates.”
As Dotcommie at the Stellar Parthenon BBS noted:
Getting the Israelis and the Egyptians to talk was WAY easier than a Boston Cop and a Black Man.
Troof.
Looks like the Son of MLRS
Krauss-Maffei Wegmann (KMW) is showing its Donar 155 mm howitzer at the AUSA convention.
Based on a cursory read of Bill Sweetman’s blog post, and my knowledge of MLRS, I spent some time crawling over the vehicles when I was at Lockheed-Martin Missiles & Fire Control* in Grand Prairie, TX, it looks to me an awful lot like they modified the platform and chassis of the M270 MLRS, replacing the turret for the rockets with a (one would assume significantly beefed up to handle recoil) howitzer turret.
Of note, since the automated turret and loading systems are completely removed from the crewed area, there appears to be a significant reduction in weight, since the turret does not need the same level of armor if it is not in crewed space.
Additionally, there should be some cost savings involved in using an existing platform.
On the downside, as compared to the now defunct NLOS-C, this is never going to fit in a C-130, though it KMW is claiming that it will fit in an EADS A-400.
*Yeah, I worked there too. I didn’t work on MLRS, but on a British derivative, the LIMAWS-R, which required me to look at the vehicles regularly.
It appears that elections make a difference, so a desperate Gordon Brown is allow investigations to proceed regarding potential bribery in, “Tanzania, South Africa, Romania and the Czech Republic,” but nothing involving Saudi Prince Bandar and the House of Saud, whose bribery levels are probably 10 times higher than the other 4 nations combined.
It would be nice if the west stopped coddling the House of Saud, which is a cesspool of corruption, greed, and terrorism.
Aermacchi’s M-346
Korea Aerospace Industries T-50
First, we have South Korea selecting the Israel Aerospace Industries/Elta Systems EL/M-2032 radar for its combat version of its A/T-50 trainer, and now Israel eyes has the T-50 on its short list, along with the M-346, as a replacement for its A-4 Skyhawk advanced trainer.
Funny how that works out.
If I were a betting man, I’d put my money on the T-50.
In either case, I feel a great affection for the A-4 “Scooter.”
Alan Grayson this time.
The shot
The camera set up
The camera, with busted lens
The photographer, Ben Cooper, won the 2008 Aviation Week & Space Technology Photo Contest in the space category for this photo of of the Delta 4 heavy/DSP-23 launch.
The payload, a missile early warning system, failed about a year later though.
Playboy Turning Japanese?Seriously, no joke, they are putting Marge Simpsonon the cover of Playboy’s November issue:
Marge is about to do something Homer might not approve of.
Playboy magazine is turning over its cover to the matriarch of Springfield’s first family: Marge Simpson.
It’s a first for the magazine, which has had everyone from Marilyn Monroe to Cindy Crawford to the Girls of Hooters and even the likes of Jerry Seinfeld on the cover. But it’s never had a cartoon character before.
Life is stranger than fiction.
Some swears, but very funny.
It appears that the US Government is claiming that torture is in the normal scope of employment, which gives a new meaning to the term, “Banality of Evil,” which was coined to describe the actions of Adolph Eichmann and his motivations.
Citing the Westfall Act, [Barack Obama appointee Assistant Attorney General] Tony West wrote that “the type of activities alleged against the individual defendants were ‘foreseeable’ and were ‘a direct outgrowth’ of their responsibility to detain and gather intelligence from suspected enemy combatants.” In defending the government’s position, West cited case law stating that “genocide, torture, forced relocation, and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment by individual defendants employed by Department of Defense and State Department were within scope of employment” and similar cases justifying CIA torture as part of official duty.
“It is essentially saying torture is all in a day’s work when it comes to holding people in military detention,” says Shane Kadidal, who heads the Guantánamo project at CCR. In that case, the issue was not whether Rumsfeld and the others were “employees” but whether they were doing official business. Blackwater’s argument is a tougher sell, says Morrison. “Does it hold water?” he asks. “It holds Blackwater.”
Great Googly Moogly, within the scope of employment?
Houston, we have a problem.
And job recoveries are progressively slower too
This is kind of a wonky bit about employment statistics in the US, and how a statistical tool, the birth death adjustment, may not be a reasonable way of looking at employment in the United states, and now New York Times columnist Floyd Norris is taking note of the fact that job losses in 2008 are now understood to be far greater than originally reported at the time:
It now appears that during the first half of 2008, when the recession was getting under way, job losses averaged 146,000 per month. That is nearly three times the average of 49,000 jobs shown in the initial estimates.
How did the government get it so wrong?
(emphasis mine)
The answer is very simple, a statistical correction called the “birth-death adjustment”, which is about birth and death of new businesses, rather than the birth and death of people, and it, “factors in jobs assumed to have been created by employers who are too new to have been included in the survey, and subtracts jobs from employers assumed to have failed and therefore not responded to the latest survey”.
You see, under George W. Bush and His Evil Minions™, the birth-death adjustment was massively expanded, just in time to create for the 2004 election. So there are a number of reasons for this:
As the top graph shows, something is truly whack here.
Unfortunately, I don’t see this being fixed in the foreseeable future, becausethere is no advantage for Obama/Geithner/Summers to start using more accurate, and hence scarier, numbers.
H/t Barry Ritholtz.
Alan Grayson nails it.
We already know that there are widespread and credible allegations of vote fraud in Afghanistan, and Peter Galbraith, the UN’s deputy special representative for Afghanistan, just got fired for arguing that there needs to be a broader inquiry into this matter.
You know that old saying about rather having someone in the tent, pissing out, rather than being outside the tent, pissing in? Well, now that he’s been given the sack, Mr. Galbraith is arguing publicly what he had been arguing privately:
A former senior United Nations diplomat in Kabul has made a scathing attack on the UN’s handling of Afghanistan’s disputed elections, claiming that almost one in three of the votes cast for president Hamid Karzai were fraudulent.
Peter Galbraith, the former deputy head of the UN mission in Afghanistan, singled out his former chief, Kai Eide, for criticism, saying he had deliberately played down the level of cheating in an election where, in one region, “10 times as many votes were recorded as voters actually cast”.
Jon Boone on claims of election fraud in Afghanistan Link to this audioGalbraith was sacked last week, after his disagreements with Eide, a Norwegian diplomat in charge of the UN mission, about how to deal with electoral fraud became public. Galbraith said the extraordinary level of fraud in the August vote “has handed the Taliban its greatest strategic victory in eight years of fighting the United States and its Afghan partners”.
You can read his OP/Ed in the Washington Post here.
This is moment is analogous to Kennedy and Johnson’s moment following the assassination of Ngô Đình Diệm in Vietnam.
When they both signed off on the deed, they sealed the fate of South Vietnam, and made subsequent governments little more than widely detested US puppets.
Well, Barack Obama now has his Diệm moment, and it appears that he will fall as Kennedy and Johnson did.
We are now getting reports that, “Gulf Arabs are planning – along with China, Russia, Japan and France are planning to start trading oil using a basket of currencies,” rather than the US dollar, over the next decade.
The source is The Independent, which has a pretty good reputation as a newspaper, even if it publishes in tabloid (excuse me, “compact”), and it is cast as one involving much in the way of cloak and dagger secrecy, which is a bit much.
Additionally, they cast the invasion of Iraq as being driven by Saddam Hussein’s decision to Euro denominate his oil sales driving the invasion of Iraq, when this is clearly not the case.
There are any number of reasons for such a discussion to take place, most notably greater stability in oil prices for the rest of the world, though there might also be a desire to re-balance the unipolar world that allowed the United States to invade Iraq with impunity in the first place.
Seriously, Jon Stewart may be the only Journalist in the United States.
As he properly notes, “Democrats couldn’t get laid in a house whose sole purpose is for free sex with legislators on finance committees.”
H/t AMERICAblog
The case, which the Federal Reserve appealed, is about whether or not the central bank should release the names of non-banks that have borrowed from it.
The Fed wants the names kept secret, and lost in the lower court, and now Bloomberg wants the names released pending appeal:
Details about the borrowers and their collateral are “central to understanding and assessing the government’s response to the most cataclysmic financial crisis in America since the Great Depression,” attorneys for Bloomberg said in the suit.
The Freedom of Information Act obliges federal agencies to make government documents available to the public. The Bloomberg suit didn’t seek money damages.
The interesting bit here is that the Fed is appealing on the basis of damage, which means that they appear to be ceding their prior claim that they aren’t really a part of the government, and hence are subject to FOIA requests.
At least to the visible eye and amateur astronomers, there is still a possibility of good data from the mission, but that will be a few weeks down the road.
I’m done with Haloscan/JS-Kit.
Too many performance hits with the comments.
Unfortunately, Blogger comments don’t do trackback, and this means that a few months of old comments are gone, but enough is enough.
I’m not saying that Barack Obama won’t deserve the Nobel Peace Prize some day, but he certainly does not deserve his award of the prize today.
I dunno, maybe people like Morgan Tsvangirai, who accomplished something like reforms in Zimbabwe at significant personal risk and cost, were just busy flying that day, like Gary Kildall was with IBM.
BTW, I think that there should be a “Not George W. Bush” prize, and there is a better than even chance that Barack Obama deserves this, excluding the who Habeas, prosecuting torture, too big to fail stuff.
You know, this does remind me a lot of Ronald Reagan, in a good way, in that it appears that Obama could fall into a cesspool, and come out smelling like a lilac.
The only thing that I can figure is that the Nobel committee decided that this would be the best way for them to pressure Obama to get out of Iraq and Afghanistan.