Month: February 2013

Just When You Thought that the JSF Could Not Get Any More f%$#ed………

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We now find out that they bought into Lithium Ion batteries for the fighter, the technology that has grounded the 787:

The Pentagon said it plans to continue using lithium-ion batteries on the new F-35 fighter jet despite problems with similar batteries that have grounded Boeing Co’s new 787 airliner and are causing Airbus to rethink their use on its A350 jet.

Joe DellaVedova, spokesman for the Pentagon’s $396 billion F-35 program office, said on Tuesday that the lithium-ion batteries used on the new radar-evading fighter were made by different manufacturers than those used on the 787, and the jet’s battery systems had been rigorously tested.

“The bottom line is the lithium-ion batteries used on the F-35s have been through extensive tests and have redundant systems to protect the aircraft and battery compartments; they are considered safe,” DellaVedova said.

DellaVedova said there had been some irregularities with the lithium-ion batteries not starting properly in cold temperatures that were being addressed, but no issues affecting flight safety had come up during years of testing.

All 50 Boeing Dreamliners in commercial service were grounded worldwide on January 16 after a series of battery-related incidents, including a fire on board a parked 787 at Boston’s Logan International Airport and an in-flight problem on another airplane in Japan.

The groundings have cost airlines tens of millions of dollars, with no solution yet in sight, and have sparked growing concerns among aerospace industry executives about whether the powerful but delicate backup energy systems are technically “mature”, or predictable.

Why am I not surprised?

When you cross reference “advance technology”, “unproven”, and “risky”, the Venn diagram of the intersection is the JSF.

Un-Dirtyword Believable

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OK, I get the fact that the military needs for some sort of citation for excellence in playing video games operating drones, but the idea that such a citation would outrank a bronze star, which is awarded for personal courage on the battlefield, is beyond stupid:

The Pentagon is creating a new high-level military medal that will recognize drone pilots and, in a controversial twist, giving it added clout by placing it above some traditional combat valor medals in the military’s “order of precedence.”

The Distinguished Warfare Medal will be awarded to pilots of unmanned aircraft, offensive cyber war experts or others who are directly involved in combat operations but who are not physically in theater and facing the physical risks that warfare historically entails.

The new medal will rank just below the Distinguished Flying Cross. It will have precedence over — and be worn on a uniform above — the Bronze Star with Valor device, a medal awarded to troops for specific heroic acts performed under fire in combat.

………

The new medal will be awarded for specific acts, such as the successful targeting of a particular individual at a critical time.

“Our military reserves its highest decorations obviously for those who display gallantry and valor in actions when their lives are on the line and we will continue to do so,” Panetta said.

This is screamingly stupid.

It speaks to a culture in the Pentagon that sees itself as an officer corps that increasingly resembles strutting peacocks.

Moving in the Wrong Direction

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So, the recession lowered the salaries of the 99%, and raised them for the 1%:

Incomes rose more than 11 percent for the top 1 percent of earners during the economic recovery, but not at all for everybody else, according to new data.

The numbers, produced by Emmanuel Saez, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, show overall income growing by just 1.7 percent over the period. But there was a wide gap between the top 1 percent, whose earnings rose by 11.2 percent, and the other 99 percent, whose earnings declined by 0.4 percent.

Mr. Saez, a winner of the John Bates Clark Medal, an economic laurel considered second only to the Nobel, concluded that “the Great Recession has only depressed top income shares temporarily and will not undo any of the dramatic increase in top income shares that has taken place since the 1970s.”

We need to raise the minimum wage, raise taxes on the rich, and reign in the financial industry, and we need to do that right now.

Or maybe guillotines.  I could go for  then too,

Stay Classy, Teabaggers

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Yes, the fine folks at Freedomworks, produced a video with two female staffers playing Hillary Clinton and a Panda having sex:

An internal investigation of FreedomWorks—the prominent conservative advocacy group and super-PAC—has focused on president Matt Kibbe’s management of the organization, his use of its resources, and a controversial book deal he signed, according to former FreedomWorks officials who have met with the private lawyers conducting the probe. One potential topic for the inquiry is a promotional video produced last year under the supervision of Adam Brandon, executive vice president of the group and a Kibbe loyalist. The video included a scene in which a female intern wearing a panda suit simulates performing oral sex on Hillary Clinton. [Author’s note: The previous sentence contains no typos.]

………

 In one segment of the film, according to a former official who saw it, Brandon is seen waking from a nap at his desk. In what appears to be a dream or a nightmare, he wanders down a hallway and spots a giant panda on its knees with its head in the lap of a seated Hillary Clinton and apparently performing oral sex on the then-secretary of state. Two female interns at FreedomWorks were recruited to play the panda and Clinton. One intern wore a Hillary Clinton mask. The other wore a giant panda suit that FreedomWorks had used at protests to denounce progressives as panderers. (See here, here, and here.) Placing the panda in the video, a former FreedomWorks staffer says, was “an inside joke.”

Another FreedomWorks staffer who worked there at the time confirms that “Yes, this video was created.”

Seriously, these guys are showing less maturity than your average 13 year old boys in a locker room in a farting contest.

WE NED MOAR GUNS CUZ OV TEH BLAHS*

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I am of course referring to National Rifle Association CEO Wayne LaPierre’s OP/ED on the right wing cesspool known as The Daily Caller, where he said that we all need more guns because of scary dark people:

Following President Obama’s call for a vote on proposed gun safety legislation in his State of the Union speech, Wayne LaPierre, CEO of the National Rifle Association, on Wednesday issued a call-to-action for gun owners to prepare for post-apocolyptic-style scenarios and rally against the gun control movement.

 ………

“Latin American drug gangs”:

Latin American drug gangs have invaded every city of significant size in the United States. Phoenix is already one of the kidnapping capitals of the world, and though the states on the U.S./Mexico border may be the first places in the nation to suffer from cartel violence, by no means are they the last.

(Emphasis Original)

Seriously, does the radical right do anything but find exciting new ways to scream the “N-Word”.

*This refers to an iundident with Rick Santorum said that, “I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money.,” and then claimed that he had said “blah people.”

I’m Conflicted about Christopher Dorner

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Basically, I’m inclined to believe his accusations about his firing, you are rarely going to go wrong by overestimating the venality and corruption of the Los Angeles police force*, but his victims were innocent, and at best only vaguely rated related to the specifics of his complaint, and he was f%$#ing murdering people.

I will leave you with the conclusion of Ta-Nehisi Coates:

I don’t really know how anyone, with any sort of coherence, adopts Christopher Dorner as a symbol in the fight against police brutality, given how he brutalized those two human beings. I cannot understand, except to say that sometimes our own anger, our pain, becomes so blinding that we fail to see the pain of others. This is the seed of inhumanity, and inhumanity is the seed of the very police brutality which we all deplore.

 In my time here I have blogged relentlessly about police brutality. It’s an important and legit issue. When cops brutalize innocent black people, they erode the contract between citizen and country. But the case against police brutality enjoys more eloquent, and more moral, voices than a coward who ambushes innocent people in a parking garage. We don’t need a Jesse James. No one needs a Jesse James.

I’m still hoping that there will be an independent investigation of the circumstances of his firing though.

If there is any truth to his accusations, it is an indication of deep and systematic problems with the LAPD.

*The LAPD of Jack Webb never really existed.

Surrender Your Privacy for the Good of the State Comrade

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The good folks at the Orwellian named Department of Homeland security has decided that they can seize and search your electronics without cause:

The Department of Homeland Security’s civil rights watchdog has concluded that travelers along the nation’s borders may have their electronics seized and the contents of those devices examined for any reason whatsoever — all in the name of national security.

The DHS, which secures the nation’s border, in 2009 announced that it would conduct a “Civil Liberties Impact Assessment” of its suspicionless search-and-seizure policy pertaining to electronic devices “within 120 days.” More than three years later, the DHS office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties published a two-page executive summary of its findings.

“We also conclude that imposing a requirement that officers have reasonable suspicion in order to conduct a border search of an electronic device would be operationally harmful without concomitant civil rights/civil liberties benefits,” the executive summary said.

The memo highlights the friction between today’s reality that electronic devices have become virtual extensions of ourselves housing everything from e-mail to instant-message chats to photos and our papers and effects — juxtaposed against the government’s stated quest for national security.

Civil rights? How September 10th of you.

I do not like what our country is becoming.

Unsurprising

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Click for full size


This screen shot is from 2002!

Someone took a look at the record, and confirmed that the Tea Party was created by the Koch brothers and big tobacco:

A new academic study confirms that front groups with longstanding ties to the tobacco industry and the billionaire Koch brothers planned the formation of the Tea Party movement more than a decade before it exploded onto the U.S. political scene.

Far from a genuine grassroots uprising, this astroturf effort was curated by wealthy industrialists years in advance. Many of the anti-science operatives who defended cigarettes are currently deploying their tobacco-inspired playbook internationally to evade accountability for the fossil fuel industry’s role in driving climate disruption.

The study, funded by the National Cancer Institute of the National Institute of Health, traces the roots of the Tea Party’s anti-tax movement back to the early 1980s when tobacco companies began to invest in third party groups to fight excise taxes on cigarettes, as well as health studies finding a link between cancer and secondhand cigarette smoke.

You can see a link to the old web page at the Wayback machine, but I don’t recommend it. It’s flash hell.

So the Teabaggers are both Koch suckers, and stooges for big tobacco.

Heady brew.

Dick Cheney Pissed off Jon Stewart………

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Daym!

Recently, Dick Cheney was interviewed, and Jon Stewart and his writers had the stomache to listen to listen to him go on and on about how Barack Obama has weakened America.

I now know what that sound I heard earlier, it was the staff of The Daily Show licking their chops.

He notes that Cheney was a sh%$#y vice president, and he was wrong on everything, and followed this by a video medley Grand Moff Cheney’s greatest hits, like, “We’ll be welcomed as liberators”, “There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction,” and the ever popular favorite “I think that they are in the last throes of the insurgency.”

Even if Obama wanted to take our standing in the world down a peg, he couldn’t, ’cause the Bush-Cheney administration left him with no peg room… the previous administration had left us in a bit of a cash crunch, and by ‘previous administration,’ I mean these motherf%$#ers.

Ouch.

No, I Did Not Watch the State of the Union

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I just don’t like listening to him, so I read the official transcript.

Rather unsurprisingly, he wants to throw mama from the train put forward “entitlement reform”, and he is patting himself on the back about the successes Obamacare (time will tell, but I doubt it), and killing bin Laden.

He also waxes eloquent over lowering the deficit, because austerity has worked so well where it has been tried. (Not)

He also proposed infrastructure repair, but that’s not going to go anywhere.

I think that the most substantive proposal he made was to raise the minimum wage to $9.00/hour in stages through 2015.

As compared to his promise from the 2008 campaign, raising the minimum wage to $9.50 by 2011, this barely keeps up with inflation.

At least he is proposing an automatic inflation adjustment.

The real problem is that the minimum wage has plummeted relative to median and mean wages over the past 40 years

Source of data.

Based on this chart, it would appear that the minimum wage needs to increase by about 20% immediately to hit the trend (mid to upper 40% range), but the reality is that boosting the minimum wage has a big effect on boosting the lower half of the wage scale, so it probably needs to go up by about 40% to return to trend in the longer term.

Note also how the lines for median (50th percentile) and mean (average) have diverged.  This is an artifact of the increasingly inequality in our society.

I call this the “Bill Gates walked into the room, so we are now all millionaires” effect.  It makes the mean and the median diverge.

Setting the minimum wage to slowly, and automatically, converge to 45% of the minimum wage over the next half decade or so would serve to do a lot to reverse the income inequality .

Facepalm

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In its infinite wisdom, the International Olympic Committee has dropped wrestling from its sports:

For wrestling, this may have been the ultimate body slam: getting tossed out of the Olympic rings.

The vote Tuesday by the IOC’s executive board stunned the world’s wrestlers, who see their sport as popular in many countries and steeped in history as old as the Olympics themselves.

While wrestling will be included at the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, it was cut from the games in 2020, which have yet to be awarded to a host city.

Wrestling has been a part of the Olympics since the Greeks held the original ones starting in 776 BCE.

So, they will keep Dressage (horse dancing) and beach volleyball but they will dump wrestling.

Boom

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The DPRK conducts a 3rd nuclear weapons test:

At the United Nations, the desire to impose ever harsher sanctions on North Korea to try to curb its development of nuclear arms and ballistic missiles has long stalled in the face of Chinese opposition — the standard chain of events playing out here again on Tuesday after North Korea said it had carried out its third nuclear test.

Security Council diplomats and the experts who track sanctions enforcement are quick to tick off the contents of a deeper toolbox that could be used to try to corral Pyongyang’s nuclear ambitions.

They include banning specific, high-tech items used in the nuclear program like epoxy paste for centrifuges; limiting or outlawing some banking transactions; and a far more stringent inspection of ships bound to and from North Korea.

But the sanctions in place are almost exclusively focused on nuclear and ballistic missile activity.

The problem is that we have way too much posturing on both side.

They need to stop setting off nukes, and we need to make a formal exchange of ambassadors.

Least Surprising Study Discovery Ever

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I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on here!

The Project on Government Oversight (POGO) has completed a study that shows that the revolving door at the SEC may have short circuited effective regulation:

Former U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission staffers who now work in the private sector may have helped derail last year’s effort to reform the $2.6 trillion money market fund industry, according to a report released on Monday.

The case study on money market fund lobbying is part of a 60-page report by the Project on Government Oversight (POGO). It is one example within a broader review by the non-profit government watchdog that examines in detail how the “revolving door” at the SEC may have impacted policy and enforcement decisions over a 10-year period.

The publication of the report comes a few weeks after President Barack Obama nominated Mary Jo White, a former prosecutor and high-profile white collar defense lawyer, to lead the SEC.

While White’s nomination has generated little controversy so far, some have questioned whether her past defense of Wall Street executives could impact how she does on the job.

“The revolving door is deeply embedded at the SEC and throughout the federal government,” the report said.

“The close linkage between the regulators and the regulated can influence the culture, the values and the mindset of the agency – not to mention its regulatory and enforcement policies.”

Well, duh.

But this is not an unfortunate linkage, it is bribery.  If you are a regulator, you know for a fact that when you leave public service, if you have played nicely with the finance industry, and haven’t murdered a prostitute, that you will get a job that would make you set for life in just a couple of years.

I’m not sure how to put an end to this, but a way needs to be found to stop this.

George F%$# ing Will??!?!?!!?

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George Will is not just a partisan hack. He’s the guy who prepped Ronald Reagan for the 1980s debate while knowingly using Jimmy Carter’s stolen briefing books.

So, it is with some surprise that I note that he is calling for a breakup of the big banks:

With his chronically gravelly voice and relentlessly liberal agenda, Sherrod Brown seems to have stepped out of “Les Miserables,” hoarse from singing revolutionary anthems at the barricades. Today, Ohio’s senior senator has a project worthy of Victor Hugo — and of conservatives’ support. He wants to break up the biggest banks.

 He would advocate this even if he thought such banks would never have a crisis sufficient to threaten the financial system. He believes they are unhealthy for the financial system even when they are healthy. This is because there is a silent subsidy — an unfair competitive advantage relative to community banks — inherent in being deemed by the government, implicitly but clearly, too big to fail.

 The Senate has unanimously passed a bill offered by Brown and Sen. David Vitter, a Louisiana Republican, directing the Government Accountability Office to study whether banks with more than $500 billion in assets acquire an “economic benefit” because of their dangerous scale. Is their debt priced favorably because, being TBTF, they are considered especially creditworthy? Brown believes the 20 largest banks pay less when borrowing — 50 to 80 basis points less — than community banks must pay.

 In a sense, TBTF began under Ronald Reagan with the 1984 rescue of Continental Illinois, then the seventh-largest bank. In 2011, the four biggest U.S. banks (JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup and Wells Fargo) had 40 percent of all federally insured deposits. Today, the 5,500 community banks have 12 percent of the banking industry’s assets. The 12 banks with $250 billion to $2.3 trillion in assets total 69 percent. The 20 largest banks’ assets total 84.5 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product.

 ………

 By breaking up the biggest banks, conservatives will not be putting asunder what the free market has joined together. Government nurtured these behemoths by weaving an improvident safety net and by practicing crony capitalism. Dismantling them would be a blow against government that has become too big not to fail. Aux barricades!

(Emphasis original)

This is not what I expect from Will, and there is a part of me that is wondering whether this is more of a political tactic than a recognition of reality.

If the Republicans want an effective line of attack, they could do a lot worse than saying that Obama is determined to protect and defend the too big to fail banks.

It is something that would undermine any populist cred that Obama might seek to achieve, and as a bonus, it’s true.

So, either Will is late to this game, or he’s the the first volley in a Republican attack.

If I were a betting man, I’d call it even money.

This is Your Moment of Schadenfreude

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For the past 7 years, fans of the libertarian icon Congressman Ron Paul have run RonPaul.com, and now the batsh%$ insane iconoclastic politico has decided that he wants the domain.

So, is he offering to buy the site?  Nope, he is appealing to the United Nations to seize the domain:

Ron Paul is feuding with his rabid fan base over the ownership of RonPaul.com. Paul wants it, but his fans own it. They’re willing to sell it to him… for a price Paul doesn’t agree with. So now he’s taken the dispute all the way to the United Nations.

………

 The proprietors of RonPaul.com say they reached out to the retired politicain and offered him RonPaul.org as a free gift, but if he “insisted” on owning RonPaul.com then they would sell it to him. There was a catch, though. It would be part of a “liberty package” with the site’s 170,000 person mailing list for… wait for it… $250,000. They think the price is totally worth it:

The value we put on the deal was $250k; we are getting our mailing list appraised right now but we are confident it is easily worth more than $250k all by itself. Claims that we tried to sell Ron Paul “his name” for $250k or even $800k are completely untrue, and there is little doubt that our mailing list would have enabled Ron Paul to raise several million dollars for the liberty movement this year. It would have been a win/win/win situation for everyone involved.

But Paul did not respond to their generous offer. Instead, he went to the United Nations’ World Intellectual Property Organization to file a 13 page complaint asking for control of both domains. Oops! Paul’s opting for legal action is notable because he’s spoken out against the U.N. in the past. They generally aren’t very popular among libertarians. They aren’t so bad now that he wants control of his own name’s website.

(Emphasis mine)

The United f%$#ing Nations????? Seriously?

I guess that it’s Libertarianism for thee, and not for me.

I think that Ron Paul has officially entered into the world of the “leeches”, as Ayn Rand would put it.