Month: June 2010
OK, This is Weird
I just got a call from Caterpillar regarding whether I got my proxy statement, and how I would be voting on the measures their annual meeting, which is tomorrow.
It appears from reading the proxy statement, that they are worried about push-back on their executive compensation/bonus package, though it might be that they want to beat back a change to their board election procedures: It’s currently triennial, and there is a motion to make it annual, or a shareholder proposal for an independent Charmain of the Board.
I’ve gotten snail mail on such things before, but getting a phone call is a new one for me.
Moron
Notwithstanding the nobility, and moral necessity of his actions, the person who leaked the helecopter “collateral murder” video, the leaker is a f%$#ing moron.
You see, he revealed that he was the leaker to some random guy online, and now has been arrested:
Federal officials have arrested an Army intelligence analyst who boasted of giving classified U.S. combat video and hundreds of thousands of classified State Department records to whistleblower site Wikileaks, Wired.com has learned.
SPC Bradley Manning, 22, of Potomac, Maryland, was stationed at Forward Operating Base Hammer, 40 miles east of Baghdad, where he was arrested nearly two weeks ago by the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division. A family member says he’s being held in custody in Kuwait, and has not been formally charged.
Manning was turned in late last month by a former computer hacker with whom he spoke online. In the course of their chats, Manning took credit for leaking a headline-making video of a helicopter attack that Wikileaks posted online in April. The video showed a deadly 2007 U.S. helicopter air strike in Baghdad that claimed the lives of several innocent civilians.
Admitting to the leak to some random guy online, particularly given Obama’s, and his Department of Justice’s, jihad on leakers, is Palin-level stupid and arrogant.
It’s even stupider when you realize that he outed himself to Adrian Lamo.
I think that he did the right thing, because the coverups that the military engages in on such matters are simply not acceptable in a democracy, but in blithely telling someone that he did, and then doing something this mind-bogglingly stupid, and getting caught as a result, he dissuades future whistle-blowers, which is a blow to keeping our military, and our government honest.
He’s also completely screwed, because while he might be able to prevail on a civilian jury to see that the whistle-blowing served the public good, there is no way that a group of officers is going to show any mercy to an SPC (Specialiats) who does not even qualify as an NCO.
If there has been anything consistent about the progress of military justice since 911, whether it be torture at Gitmo and Abu Ghraib, the death, and subsequent cover-up of the details of Pat Tillman, etc. it is that the military will go to extremes to cover-up the truth, and if forced to prosecute, it will go after enlisted men, as a first step.
I Suppose that I Must Comment on This
Helen Thomas has resigned as a columnist for Hearst Newspapers.
In an interview, she said:
Thomas remarked in video posted to RabbiLive.com that Jews in Israel should “get the hell out of Palestine” and “go back home to Poland, Germany, America and everywhere else.”
Thomas has never made a secret of her Lebanese-American background, and I think that anyone with a bit of skin in this game, myself included, can be a bit nuts, but the statement here is wrong on a number of levels:
- It appears to be a call for ethnic cleansing.
- About 60% of the Jews in Israel came from the Arab world, Iran, India, Etc.*
Needless to say, while I respect Thomas’ contributions to journalism, I do not appreciate when anyone sounds like Meir Kahane.†
I’ll miss her at press conferences
The tragedy is that Pat Buchanan still has a job.
(on edit)
I think that a refreshing bit of perspective comes from [url=http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/06/helen-thomas-affair]Kevin Drum[/url]:
Helen Thomas is retiring. Thank God. On a substantive level, this is a good thing. Her remarks about Israel were obviously odious and she’s doing everyone a favor by stepping down. Equally important, though, maybe this means we don’t have to spend the next week listening to every windbag in the country rant on about Thomas’s remarks, using them as an excuse to grind every axe ever invented and suck media attention away from actually important stories. Of which, you might have noticed, we have quite a few these days.
Say what you will about Thomas, she really was never a part of the pundit class.
* They are generally referred to as Sephardic, but this is a misnomer, as Sephardic Jews trace their origins back to the Iberian peninsula. Jews from Iran, Iraq, Yemen, India, etc. are more accurately referred to as “oriental” Jews.
†Let me google that for you.
Fugly Picture
A New Facebook Group I Endorse
Look Who I Ran Into
Click for full size
His hair looks better in person
My wife and I had finished dropping the kids off at school following Natalie’s Bat Mitzvah rehearsal, the ceremony is this Saturday, and we stopped at Java Mamas.*
As we pulled up, there were people getting out of a couple of black SUVs, and I looked over, and said something like, “Would you look at that!”
It was former Maryland governor, and current candidate for governor, Bob Ehrlich.
My wife replied, “Matthew, behave!“
I behaved, but I snapped the shot. He’s the one in the shades.
They weren’t politicking, they were just getting coffee, and I didn’t say anything.
It’s not a great pic, though I think that it’s about as good a photo as I am likely to take with my cell phone.
He’s a little bit grayer than I recall from his last official photo, but that was almost 4 years ago.
I did not stay around, my wife and I had errands, so I cannot speak to tipping, though they did queue up politely and wait their turns.
I don’t approve of his politics, but I do approve of his taste in coffee.
*Good coffee and light fare like sandwiches and salad at Java Mama’s, 324 Main Street Reisterstown, MD 21136-1951 (410)833-8100.
This is Brilliant!
Setting the Beatles to the DK’s California Über Alles:
Finally, Someone in Arizona Stands Up to Bigots
In Prescott, Arizona, the administrators at commissioned a mural depicting current students at the school:
Faces in the mural were drawn from photographs of children enrolled at Miller Valley, a K-5 school with 380 students and the highest ethnic mix of any school in Prescott. Wall said thousands of town residents volunteered or donated to the project, the fourth in a series of community murals painted by a group of artists known as the “Mural Mice.”
Unfortunately, since some of these actual students at the school were black and Hispanic, Steve Blair, a City Councilman and right wing talk show host on KYCA-AM, threw a hissy fit over the description of darkly complected students.
The weasels school administrators responded to this by ordering the artists to lighten the children’s faces:
A group of artists has been asked to lighten the faces of children depicted in a giant public mural at a Prescott school.
The project’s leader says he was ordered to lighten the skin tone after complaints about the children’s ethnicity. But the school’s principal says the request was only to fix shading and had nothing to do with political pressure.
It’s gotten a lot of coverage, and as a result, Steve Blair has been fired by the radio station, so apparently there are limits to racism in Arizona.
Here’s hoping that the voters will do so in the next election, but my guess is that they will elect him mayor.
SpaceX Falcon Nine Makes Successful Launch
Click for full size
Falcon 9 on Pad
Dragon Manned Variant
Unmanned Variant
In Orbit with Solar Arrays Deployed
Engineering Model
It is actually rather rare for a rocket to have a successful launch on the first flight, but everything appears to be nominal, with, “Nominal shutdown and orbit was almost exactly 250km. Telemetry showed essentially a bullseye: ~0.2% on perigee and ~1% on apogee.”
So it appears that the NASA/SpaceX public-private partnership is bearing fruit.
This is a verification of the launcher, not a verification of their Dragon reusable spacecraft, which is supposed to function as both a cargo and a crew transport and return module.
Generally, this is all around good news, so I am waiting for NASA to find a way to screw this up.
In any case, here is some picture pr0n.
Employment/Economic Update
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Still grim, and grimmer still Ex-Census Hiring
H/t Calculated Risk, link has more grim graph pr0n
So, the “very serious people” in Washington and other capitals around the world have decided that we need to reduce deficits, because the financial crisis is over.
Well the employment data seems to show otherwise.
Total payrolls rose by 431,000 last month, but most of that was temporary census employment, the increase in private sector workforce was only 41,000, and you need to create some 100K-125K new jobs each month in order to keep up with natural growth in the labor force.
Add to this the fact that even with improvements, the unemployment claims numbers still suck wet farts from dead pigeons, and I am fairly certain that the “very serious people” are “very seriously wrong people”.
It’s Bank Failure Friday!!!! (on Saturday)
And here they are, ordered, and numbered for the year so far.
- First National Bank, Rosedale, MS
- Arcola Homestead Savings Bank, Arcola, IL
- TierOne Bank, Lincoln, NE
So, here is the graph pr0n with trendline (FDIC only):
Last year at this time, the question was whether or not there would be more than 100 bank failures. (It hit 140)
The question this year is whether it breaks 200.
Bad Day at the Office
Not certain as to the cause, but my guess is that it is a write off.
H/t The DEW Line.
Glenn Beck Must Hate Jon Stewart
Jon Stewart takes the Beckster to task using MSNBC, CNN, and Univision* to demolish Beck’s claim that no one else showed the blockade conflict video in showing the Free Gaza protestors used clubs.
Brutal.
*I think that the use of Children’s Television Workshop might be a trick.
Sanity in the Ukraine
Ukraine is formally withdrawing its application to join NATO. It’s parliament passed a law making joining the organization illegal.
Ukraine’s aspirations, much like Georgia’s were clearly motivated more by hostility towards Russia than about the real needs of the Ukrainian people, and this should serve to reduce tensions in the region.
Of course, what can be made through legislation can be unmade through legislation, but at the very least, it should reduce the drama from the Black Sea region for a while.
I Can Haz Prosecushuns?
So, now George W. Bush has explicitly stated that he authorized torture:
George W. Bush’s casual acknowledgment Wednesday that he had Khalid Sheikh Mohammed waterboarded — and would do it again — has horrified some former military and intelligence officials who argue that the former president doesn’t seem to understand the gravity of what he is admitting.
Waterboarding, a form of controlled drowning, is “unequivocably torture”, said retired Brigadier General David R. Irvine, a former strategic intelligence officer who taught prisoner of war interrogation and military law for 18 years.
“As a nation, we have historically prosecuted it as such, going back to the time of the Spanish-American War,” Irvine said. “Moreover, it cannot be demonstrated that any use of waterboarding by U.S. personnel in recent years has saved a single American life.”
Irvine told the Huffington Post that Bush doesn’t appreciate how much harm his countenancing of torture has done to his country.
Here’s a baseball metaphor to President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder: You are the umpires, Bush and Cheney are calling you a c*cks*ck*r.
You have no credibility when the worst of the criminals proclaim their crimes, and you do nothing.
This isn’t, “looking forward, not backward,” it’s moral cowardice, it’s being a criminal yourself, because by being an accessory to the cover-up you are an accessory to the crime.
What’s more, much like Ford’s pardon of Nixon, your insistence on denying the rule of law will encourage further law-breaking in the future.
In the Annals of the Unsurprising
Tony Perkins Christo-Fascist Family Research Council lobbied Congress in support of Uganda’s “Kill the Gays” bill.
Insert Godwin’s Law comment here.
Anyone here surprised?
Joe.My.God is right when he says, “It’s time for the Southern Poverty Law Center to reclassify the Family Research Council as an official hate group.”
Another Domino Tips
And now we have Hungary experiencing debt problems:
Credit-default swaps on sovereign bonds surged to a record on speculation Europe’s debt crisis is worsening after Hungary said it’s in a “very grave situation” because a previous government lied about the economy.
The problem is that the Euro was set up with unrealistic conditions, and people who joined were encouraged to lie.
People Who Piss Me Off
Got a telemarketer calling on a pre-recorded message, with no caller ID, saying “Press 1” for an operator to refinance my house.
I talked to this guy, who refused to tell me the name of the company and contact information, but said that the loan officer could once I gave him information.
Eventually, I threw out bogus numbers, got to the loan officer, asked him questions, explaining that giving him financial information to someone required that.
While I was doing this, I was filling out the FTC’s complaint form, and when I got his phone and url, I had all I needed.
I confirmed that we had no prior business relationship, and he said that my number might have expired from the FTC’s Do Not Call List, which, was a lie, since the number never expire.
Here’s hoping that the rat bastard gets cited and fined.
Quote of the Day
I think Woodward’s capitulation to interviewing people in limousines, as opposed to people on the subway, is something I feel is partly responsible for the fact that we ended up in Iraq. Because so many reporters, Judith Miller is the most egregious of them, spoke to Scooter Libby and some other higher officials, and never spoke to intelligence people on the ground. They swallowed wholesale Colin Powell at the U.N., and [ultimately] their limousine reporting meant that 100,000 Iraqis lost their lives. I don’t think anything can be so neatly drawn, but I think in this case it can be neatly drawn.
—Novelist, and former Washington Post reporter Lorraine Adams on her former colleague Bob Woodward
(emphasis mine)
A very succinct indictment of what is wrong with the Washington DC press corps.