Month: July 2015

I Am Shocked That This Is Not Florida

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You know the saying, don’t mess with Alligators


And the inevitable Taiwanese computer animation

I asked a number of people about this, and they all guessed that it was Florida, but instead it was Texas where a man shouted f%$# that alligator and jumped in an infested lake, where he was promptly killed by an alligator:

The man in question, 28 year old Tommie Woodward, mocked warning signs cautioning against getting in the water because of the alligator before jumping in and meeting a grizzly end.

Alligators had been spotted around the marina previously, with plenty of notices being placed around to warn people not to get too close to the water, let alone jump in and go swimming.

Woodward and an unidentified woman decided to ignore said warnings and get in the water, and while Woodward was tragically killed by the animal, the woman was thankfully unharmed.

The first gator death in Texas in about 180 years.

It’s been 8 years since a Florida gator death.

Also, Florida is cray cray, so it is not surprising that we all jumped to this conclusion.

If True, Then the Germans Are up to Their Old Tricks, but One Must Consider the Source

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Somehow or Other, this got deleted from my blog, and so I am reposting:

Andrew Ross Sorkin (of all people) teases an interesting tidbit out of Timothy Geithners self-serving and factually challenged memoir, Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises, specifically that in discussions with German FM Wolfgang Schäuble, Angela Merkel’s go to guy on finance had as his goal maximizing pain for the Greeks with the hope that they would be compelled to leave the Euro:

In July 2012, Timothy F. Geithner, the United States Treasury secretary at the time, traveled to Sylt, an island off Germany in the North Sea.

 Mr. Geithner was there for a meeting with Wolfgang Schäuble, Germany’s finance minister, who would spend his summers at his vacation home on the tiny island.

 The topic was Greece.

 In the home’s library, the two men spoke about Greece’s prospects and begun discussing ways for the European Union to keep the country in the eurozone.

 To Mr. Geithner’s dismay, however, Mr. Schäuble took the conversation in a different direction.

 “He told me there were many in Europe who still thought kicking the Greeks out of the eurozone was a plausible — even desirable — strategy,” Mr. Geithner later recounted in his memoir, “Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises.” “The idea was that with Greece out, Germany would be more likely to provide the financial support the eurozone needed because the German people would no longer perceive aid to Europe as a bailout for the Greeks,” he says in the memoir.

 “At the same time, a Grexit would be traumatic enough that it would help scare the rest of Europe into giving up more sovereignty to a stronger banking and fiscal union,” Mr. Geithner wrote. “The argument was that letting Greece burn would make it easier to build a stronger Europe with a more credible firewall.”

 Fast-forward three years. What Mr. Schäuble articulated that summer afternoon to Mr. Geithner is finally taking shape.

 ………

 A crucial decision made over the weekend had largely gone unremarked upon but is telling. The European Central Bank decided to halt an expansion of its emergency lending facility to Greek banks. That facility could have allowed the banks to continue operating without as much panic and helped avoid some of the capital controls by providing additional liquidity.

 ………

 By closing the cash spigot, the E.C.B. managed to instill additional fear and panic into the day-to-day lives of the Greek people, ahead of the vote on the referendum.

 That panic could cut two ways. The Greeks could look at the lines around the banks as a warning of what’s about to come, which would undoubtedly be worse in the short term, and vote in favor of the latest bailout agreement.

 Of course, they could also view the lines as further evidence of their subjugation to the eurozone and the continued austerity they would experience under the bailout, pushing them to vote against it.

 The E.C.B.’s decision also has another important purpose outside of Greece: It might be a warning to countries like Spain and Italy, should they ever consider following Greece out of the eurozone — if that comes to pass.

 It may seem counterintuitive, but rather than make a Greece exit easy and seamless to avoid dislocations in financial markets, the E.C.B. has the perverse incentive to make it messy and difficult to deter others.

 None of this is to suggest that the E.C.B. is the source of Greece’s problems. They were largely self-inflicted. Regardless of whether you think that the creation of the euro was a terrible mistake, Europe has severely mishandled the situation in Greece.

 “The economics behind the program that the ‘troika’ (the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund) foisted on Greece five years ago has been abysmal, resulting in a 25 percent decline in the country’s G.D.P.,” Joseph Stiglitz, an economist and professor at Columbia University, wrote on Monday. “I can think of no depression, ever, that has been so deliberate.”

 In his book, Mr. Geithner reflected on his conversations with European leaders about the measures they sought to take. “The desire to impose losses on reckless borrowers and lenders is completely understandable, but it is terribly counterproductive in a financial crisis,” Mr. Geithner said.

 At one point, he told Mr. Schäuble: “You know you sound a bit like Herbert Hoover in the 1930s. You need to be thinking about growth.”

(emphasis mine)
If this report is true, and note that I do not consider Geithner’s memoir to be much more than an exercise in self-hagiography, then much of the pain of the that Greece has experienced over the past 6 years has largely been an exercise in sadism for its own sake by the Germans.

If there is a flaw at the heart of the European Union, it is Germany hegemony, which allows them to enforce their chauvinism on the other members.

Anti-Vaxxers Can Go Cheney Themselves

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We just had the first measles death in the U.S. in a dozen years:

Well, anti-vaxxers Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey should really feel like sh%$ right now.

For 12 years, not a single American has died because of the measles virus. But because of the anti-vaxxer movement, death by measles is once again a stark reality in the United States.

On Thursday, the Washington State Department of Health confirmed that a woman succumbed to the disease after discovering the cause of death via an autopsy.

In a statement released by the agency, the woman apparently contracted the disease unknowingly while at a hospital during a measles outbreak in the spring. And she was even more vulnerable to the disease because the medication she had been taking weakened her immune system.

………

The woman who died caught a disease that should have remained wiped out within our shores and it would have remained that way had it not been for anti-vaccination nut jobs who refuse to vaccinate their kids out of some ridiculous notion that the MMR vaccine causes autism. This death was preventable and shows why it is time to require vaccinations by law and eliminate the exemptions that allowed the measles to have a comeback in the first place.

It gets even worse, because this woman had been vaccinated for the disease:

A woman who became the first person to die of the measles in the U.S. in 12 years had been vaccinated against the disease, it has been revealed.

Health officials said she had the injection as a child but succumbed because she had a compromised immune system.

Dr. Jeanette Stehr-Green, the Clallam County health officer, told KOMO-TV the woman had been vaccinated as a child, but because she had other health problems and was taking medications that interfered with her response to an infection ‘she was not protected.’

The anti-vaxxers are morally responsible for the death of this woman.

Their actions are unsupported by the facts, selfish, and evil, and I am pleased as punch that California has tightened up its vaccination criteria.

Óχι!*

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Not only did the no vote win the referendum vote on further austerity for Greece, it absolutely crushed:

Greek voters gave their government a desperately needed victory Sunday in its showdown with European creditors as the country decisively rejected a bailout proposal that officials here had scorned as “blackmail.”

 With nearly all of the votes counted, “no” had won a landslide 61 percent — a bigger figure than nearly anyone had predicted. The result sent thousands of government supporters streaming into central Athens’s Syntagma Square to wave blue-and-white Greek flags, dance to traditional folk songs, and revel in their collective defiance of dire European warnings.

 But even as they celebrated, an angry reaction from European officials suggested that Greece’s profound economic struggles may be only beginning. With Greek banks on the verge of in­solvency, analysts immediately raised the odds that Greece will be ejected from the euro zone. Government opponents despaired that the country may have taken a dark turn.

 ………

 Several top European officials suggested that there would be no new leeway for Greece, and that in fact the vote had made a deal less likely.

 Germany’s deputy chancellor, Sigmar Gabriel, said Greece had “destroyed the last bridges across which Europe and Greece could have moved toward a compromise.”

 “Tsipras and his government are leading the Greek people onto a path of bitter sacrifice and hopelessness,” he told the Berlin daily Der Tagesspiegel.

 Julia Klöckner, deputy chairwoman of Germany’s ruling party, tweeted: “The E.U. is not a make-a-wish club in which a single member sets the rules and the others pay the bill.”

Nice words from the Krauts, but it is also a bald faced and pernicious lie, as the latest IMF report has revealed that the Troika has been negotiating in bad faith:

On July 2, the IMF released its analysis of whether Greek debt was sustainable or not. The report said that Greek debt was not sustainable and deep debt relief along with substantial new financing were needed to stabilize Greece. In reaching this new assessment, the IMF stated it had learned many lessons. Among them: Greeks would not take adequate structural reforms to spur growth, they would not sell enough of their assets to repay their debt, and they were unable to undertake sufficient fiscal austerity. That left no choice but to grant Greece greater debt relief and to provide new financing to tide Greece over till it could stand on its own feet. The relief, the IMF, says must be provided by European creditors while the IMF is repaid in whole.

The IMF’s report is important because it reveals that the creditors negotiated with Greece in bad faith. For months, a haze was allowed to settle over the question of Greek debt sustainability. The timing of the report’s release—on the eve of a historic Greek referendum, well after the technical negotiations have broken down—suggests that there was no intention to allow a sober analysis of the Greek debt burden. Paul Taylor of Reuters tells us that the European authorities worked hard to suppress it and Landon Thomas of the New York Times reports that, until a few days ago, the IMF had played along.

As a result, the entire burden of adjustment was to fall on the Greeks before any debt reduction could even be contemplated. This conclusion was based on indefensible economic logic and the absence of the IMF’s debt sustainability analysis intentionally biased the negotiations.

As an international organization responsible for global financial stability, it is the IMF’s role to explain clearly and honestly the economic parameters of a bailout negotiation. The Greeks, many said, benefited from low interest rates and repayments stretched out over many years. Therefore, no debt relief was needed. But, of course, as the IMF now makes clear, if a country has to repay about 4 percent of its income each year over the next 40 years and that country has poor growth prospects precisely because repaying that debt will lower growth, then debt is not sustainable. If this report had been made public earlier, the tone of the public debate and the media’s boorish stereotyping of Greeks and its government would have been balanced by greater clarity on the Greek position.

………

The creditors’ serial errors are well documented, including by the staff of the IMF. Continuing deliberately to suppress past errors is an act of bad faith but continuing to repeat those errors in making future projections of the Greek debt burden is a willful abuse of the trust that the international community has placed in an organization set up to serve the best interests of all nations. If the IMF’s latest numbers are properly reconstructed, the Greek debt burden is much greater than portrayed—and the policy measures proposed to reduce that burden will make matters worse.

………

Here is how this principle applies today to Greece. Recall that prices in Greece have been falling for about two years now. Since debt repayment obligations do not change when businesses sell at lower prices or when wages fall, businesses and households struggle to repay their debt in that deflationary environment. Investment and consumption are held back, the government receives less revenue, making its debt repayment harder. If fiscal austerity is imposed in such a deflationary setting, prices and wages are forced down faster, making debt repayment even harder. This is Fisher’s debt-deflation cycle. Greece is in a debt-deflation cycle. It is the medical equivalent of a trauma patient: the blood flow does not stop on its own and, in such a condition, austerity is like asking the patient to run around the block to demonstrate good faith.

The IMF’s latest numbers bear out this diagnosis. In November 2012, the IMF tentatively concluded that Greek debt was borderline sustainable if it would undertake austerity to reduce its debt burden and structural reforms to spur growth. The primary surplus (the budget surplus without interest payments) was to rise from -1½ percent in 2012 to 4½ by 2016—an extraordinary additional austerity on top of the extraordinary austerity that had already been undertaken since 2010. The Greek government actually delivered on the austerity through 2014, bringing the primary budget in balance, as per the proposed timeline.

But look what happened along the way—and this is the debt deflation cycle. In 2012, prices were expected to be broadly stable over the coming years. Instead, prices fell by over 5 percent just in 2013 and 2014. True, it is important for Greek wages and prices to eventually fall. But because of the Irving Fisher theorem, when prices fall, the debt burden increases. To reduce the debt burden, Fisher says, not only must austerity stop, but the economy must be “reflated.” He emphasizes that it was President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s policy of reflation that ultimately stopped the Great Depression. In an analogy similar to the trauma patient, Fisher says that when tipped beyond a point, the boat continues to tilt further until it has capsized. In a deflationary economy, the bankruptcies and distress can go on in a vicious spiral for years.

………

We may not like the conclusion, but it is quite simple. Greece has not grown and prices have fallen because that was to be expected when persistent austerity is laid on top of an unsustainable debt. The debt-deflation spiral always outpaces the returns from structural reforms. As certainly as these things can be predicted, on the path set out by the creditors, the stakes will continue to be escalated: the debt-to-GDP ratio will continue to rise, the calls for more austerity will grow, and, as the pattern repeats, more debt relief will needed.

The IMF report is very specific, it says that Greece needs billions in debt forgiveness or the debt will remain unsustainable: (See also here)

The International Monetary Fund, a big Greek creditor, conceded a point on Thursday that the Athens government has long been making: Without some reduction in the country’s staggering debt load, Greece has little hope of a sustained economic recovery.

 It was a significant acknowledgment, and an indication that if or when bailout negotiations resume, Greece might win some relief from its debt of 300 billion euros, or about $330 billion. It just might not be relief granted to the leftist government of Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras.

It should be noted that the EU bureaucracy aggressively tried to suppress this report:

Euro zone countries tried in vain to stop the IMF publishing a gloomy analysis of Greece’s debt burden which the leftist government says vindicates its call to voters to reject bailout terms, sources familiar with the situation said on Friday.

 The document released in Washington on Thursday said Greece’s public finances will not be sustainable without substantial debt relief, possibly including write-offs by European partners of loans guaranteed by taxpayers.

 It also said Greece will need at least 50 billion euros in additional aid over the next three years to keep itself afloat.

 Publication of the draft Debt Sustainability Analysis laid bare a dispute between Brussels and the Washington-based global lender that has been simmering behind closed doors for months.

This may be the reason for the lopsided vote: Any Greek voter who understood these dynamics could help but conclude that the Troika have no interest in Greece beyond making an example of the country.

My guess is that Germany, with the acquiescence of the EU bureaucracy, will attempt to expel Greece from the Euro Zone, since the alternative is to rip the mask off their attempt at regime change, but Greece could tie this up in legal proceedings for months, if not years:

“The Greek government will make use of all our legal rights,” proclaimed the finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis, according to The Daily Telegraph.

We are taking advice and will certainly consider an injunction at the European Court of Justice. The EU treaties make no provision for euro exit and we refuse to accept it. Our membership is not negotiable.

But, can a hypothetical Grexit decision adopted by the EU institutions be legally challenged?

………

So, what decision would Greece be challenging? It would be a decision adopted by the EU institutions and the Eurogroup finance ministers to force a Greek exit of the eurozone due to its default on fulfilling the obligations attached to its participation in the monetary union (criteria laid down in Article 140.1 of the Treaty of the Function of the European Union) and the conditions attached to Greece’s bailout program.

Greece would then still be an EU member state but it will have to revert to the drachma or adopt a new currency. Nevertheless, as mentioned, there is no explicit legal basis for such a decision. One can argue that the failure to fulfil the eurozone commitments would amount to a serious violation of the founding treaties, and that it is possible to adopt the decision based on the principles embodied in the treaties. But the fact is that the treaties would need to be amended in order to provide for this.

I would note that throughout all of this, someone is spreading a rumor that the Greek government is working on a program of depositor bail-ins, where depositor accounts would be raided to pay off the EU lenders, as happened in Cyprus.  (My money is that these rumors are coming from Brussels)

One hopes that the confluence of all these events will result in something other than the moral and economic bankruptcy that we have seen from the EU, IMF, and Germany, but I doubt it.

*Greek for no.

America, F%$# Yeah!

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For July 4th I give you this bit of true Americana from muuuuuuuuuuuuuuuurdock:

haters can say what they want about the 4th of july but i just witnessed two dudes- one dressed as abe lincoln and the other as benjamin franklin- passionately making out on the balcony while fireworks went off behind them and half of the party, for some reason, gathered around them and chanted “USA! USA!” for like five solid minutes

god bless america

(All capitalization original)

This is awesome!

The Stupidest Analysis of the Greek Crisis so Far………

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Over at the Washington Post Max Ehrenfreund proceeds to think himself into a circle to such a degree that that his head is actually fully up his ass:

Suppose senior government officials in Greece had concluded that the euro was a failed experiment, that the rest of the continent would never extend reasonable terms to their country and would instead doom it to perpetual recession, and that the only way to save Greece from disaster — and Europe, too — was to begin the process of unwinding the common currency.

 They’d have encountered a major obstacle to leaving the euro: Greeks really like it. To get rid of it, the country’s leaders would have had just one option: sabotage negotiations with the creditors, blame them for being unreasonable, and then eventually tell voters that Greece has no choice but to go back to the drachma.

Seriously?

Greece has none of the infrastructure to even print Drachmas, because the Greeks were literally forced to smash their printing presses when they joined the Euro:

With speculation swirling that Greece might be forced out of the euro and have to print its own money after a weekend referendum, its finance minister on Thursday said the country no longer had the presses to make drachmas.

“We don’t have the capacity,” Yanis Varoufakis told Australian public radio network ABC.

In 2000, the year before Greece joined the eurozone, “one of the things we had to do was get rid of all our printing presses” as part of the bloc’s assertion that “this monetary union is irreversible,” he said.

“We smashed the printing presses — we have no printing presses,” Varoufakis said.

This is widely known, and it was a policy that was across the Euro Zone.

While it might be possible to get some currency printed up by a 3rd party (North Korea comes to mind) but they appear not to have taken any of the requisite steps to reintroducing the currency.

I am sick to death of this “too clever by half” contrarian bullsh%$.

It’s a cheap trick to make stupid pundits appear smart.

The Middle East is F%$#ed Up and Sh%$

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It appears that ISIS is threatening to make war on Hamas in Gaza.

While it is clear that this is a bad thing for the ordinary folks, the complexity of the situation leaves me profoundly puzzled:

One bomb hit a Hamas security checkpoint in northern Gaza. A few days later, another exploded in a trash can. Another blew up next to a Gaza City high-rise, and a small one targeted a chicken store owned by a Hamas intelligence official, Saber Siyam.

The four attacks in May — among at least a dozen this year, documented by a local human rights group — were aimed not at infidels, collaborators or criminals but at the ruling Islamist group, Hamas. The suspected perpetrators were Hamas’s emerging rivals: extremist Islamist groups that see Hamas as insufficiently pious, and that vow loyalty to the Islamic State.

While the extremists are unlikely to challenge Hamas’s firm grip on the Gaza Strip in the foreseeable future, they complicate matters by occasionally shooting rockets into Israel that could touch off a wider conflagration, if the rockets kill or maim Israeli citizens.

They could also seek to join forces with the far more dangerous, deadly branch of the Islamic State in neighboring Egypt’s Sinai Desert, possibly derailing the slowly improving relations between Hamas and Egyptian authorities that have recently led to the Egypt-Gaza border crossing’s being opened for brief moments for the first time in years.

“We will stay like a thorn in the throat of Hamas, and a thorn in the throat of Israel,” said Abu al-Ayna al-Ansari, the spokesman for the groups supporting the Islamic State, using a nom de guerre for security reasons.

Gaza has always had pockets of Islamists considered extreme even by the deeply conservative version of Islam practiced in much of the coastal enclave. Those extremists — known regionally as salafi-jihadis — have sparred with Hamas in the past, most notably in 2009 when a militant preacher declared an Islamic state from his mosque. More than 20 people were killed in the ensuing confrontation.

As near as I can figure, the net result of these developments is that Hamas and Iran are likely to join forces with Israel to fight ISIS.

This is so screwed up.

And the Presidential Clown Car Gets a 2nd* Democrat

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And now Jim Webb throws his hat into the ring:

Jim Webb, a former Virginia senator and Reagan-era secretary of the Navy, announced his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination on Thursday, bringing his antiwar credentials to the field in what many consider a long-shot campaign for the presidency.

Mr. Webb’s announcement caught some political observers by surprise. He was the first from either party to form a presidential exploratory committee but has been barely visible since.

“I understand the odds, particularly in today’s political climate, where fair debate is so often drowned out by huge sums of money,” Mr. Webb, 69, wrote in an announcement that was posted on his website.

………

Just over a week ago, Mr. Webb staked out ground expressing some support of the Confederate flag after nine people were killed at an African-American church in Charleston, S.C. A white man has been charged in the attack.

“This is an emotional time and we all need to think through these issues with a care that recognizes the need for change but also respects the complicated history of the Civil War,” Mr. Webb said in a statement at the time, standing in contrast to both Republicans and Democrats who said the flag was an outdated symbol that needed to be retired.

Seriously?

I’m not quite sure who among the Democrats thinks that the party needs a former Reagan administration official to right of Hillary Clinton, but they need to get their head out of their ass.

*Lincoln Chaffee is the first “Democrat” in the Presidential clown car. I can discern no sane reason as to why the former Republican Senator from Rhode Island entered the race.

The Tears of the Cuban Emigre Dead Enders Will Flavor My Cocktail

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The US and Cuba are opening up embassies in their respective capitals:

President Barack Obama announced Wednesday that the U.S. and Cuba have struck a deal to open embassies in each other’s capitals and re-establish diplomatic relations for the first time in half a century.

“The progress we make today is another demonstration we don’t have to be imprisoned by the past,” Obama said.

Obama emphasized that the U.S. and Cuba have some shared interests, such as strong anti-terrorism policies and disaster response. But he acknowledged that the two nations still have “very serious differences” on issues like free speech.

“We won’t hesitate to speak out when we see contradiction to those values,” the president said.

According to a statement from the Cuban government, officials are aiming to reopen their embassy on or after July 20. White House deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes told MSNBC that the U.S. will open its embassy in Cuba “shortly after” July 20.

55 years of mean spirited and counter-productive (the Castros still run the place after 55 years of isolation) foreign policy has ended.

The real pity is that it took so long.

I’m looking forward the import of the revolutionary Cuban lung cancer vaccine into the United States.

I So Hope that Cuomo is Toast

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Bill De Blasio, the mayor of the world’s greatest city, has had enough, and he has accused Governor Andrew Cuomo of prosecuting a vendetta against him at the expense of the City of New York:

Mayor Bill de Blasio, in candid and searing words rarely employed by elected officials of his stature, accused Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo on Tuesday of stymieing New York City’s legislative goals out of personal pettiness, “game-playing” and a desire for “revenge.”

In an extraordinary interview, Mr. de Blasio, appearing to unburden himself of months’ worth of frustrations, said that Mr. Cuomo — who, like the mayor, is a Democrat — “did not act in the interests” of New Yorkers by blocking measures like reforming rent laws and the mayor’s long-term ability to control the city’s public schools.

“I started a year and a half ago with a hope of a very strong partnership,” Mr. de Blasio said of the governor, whom he has known for two decades. “I have been disappointed at every turn.”

Mr. Cuomo, the mayor said, had acted vindictively toward the city, citing cuts in state financing for public housing and what he called an abrupt ramp-up of state inspections of city homeless shelters “with a vigor we had never seen before.”

“That was clearly politically motivated,” Mr. de Blasio said, “and that was revenge for some perceived slight.”

The mayor added: “It’s not about policy. It’s not about substance. It’s certainly not about the millions of people affected.”

………

There is a long history of bitterness between mayors and governors of New York, even those from the same party. But Mr. de Blasio, speaking calmly and deliberatively, indicated that his relationship with the governor had deteriorated to a historic low.

The mayor summoned journalists to his City Hall office for a pair of interviews on Tuesday afternoon, only hours before he was to leave New York for a weeklong family vacation to the Southwest. He said he had finally run out of patience with Mr. Cuomo, who has been widely viewed as being an obstacle to the mayor’s agenda since Mr. de Blasio took office in 2014.

“We will not play these games,” Mr. de Blasio said, adding that Mr. Cuomo’s behavior was “not anything like acceptable government practice, and I think people all over the state are coming to the same conclusion.”

………

Some mayoral aides suggested that Mr. de Blasio might be able to convince city liberals and Democrats that Mr. Cuomo was no longer representing their interests, threatening the support for a governor who was defeated outside New York City in last year’s campaign.

………

“I’m not going to be surprised if these statements lead to some attempts at revenge,” Mr. de Blasio said, his voice even. “And we’ll just call them right out. Because we are just not going to play that way.”

If the 5 boroughs sit on their hands in the next gubernatorial election,  Andrew Cuomo loses.

In fact, there is a reasonable chance that if New York City works against him, he loses the primary.

After all, running as “inevitable” in 2014, Zephyr Teachout, who had next to no money, and started late, got 34% of the vote against a Democratic Party apparatus that was uniformly against her.

He is widely loathed by the party base, and he returns the feelings.

It’s also clear that he is still a person of interest in federal investigations of corruption in Albany.

I do not think that Cuomo gets it, but stick a fork in him. he’s done.

Disclaimer:  It is possible that I am projecting my own feelings into this matter.

The Clown Car Gets Bigger, a Lot Bigger

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Jabba the Governor, AKA Chris Christie, has announced his candidacy for the Presidency:

Gov. Chris Christie declared an uphill candidacy for president on Tuesday with New Jersey-style swagger, unconcealed disgust for Washington and a high regard for his own candor, vowing that “there is one thing you will know for sure: I say what I mean and I mean what I say.”

 Relying on his biggest, and perhaps his last, remaining advantage in a field of better-financed and better-liked rivals — his personality — Mr. Christie portrayed himself as the only candidate in the Republican field who is forthright and forceful enough to run the country.

 “We need strength and decision-making and authority back in the Oval Office,” he said.

 Pacing the stage without a prepared text and raising his voice to a shout at times, he vowed to campaign and govern as a colorful teller of difficult truths, even if “it makes you cringe every once in a while.”

The unfortunate part about his role as self-proclaimed truth teller, is that no one buys it any more:

After 14 years of watching Christie, a warning: He lies

 Tom Moran | Star-Ledger Editorial Board

 Most Americans don’t know Chris Christie like I do, so it’s only natural to wonder what testimony I might offer after covering his every move for the last 14 years.

 Is it his raw political talent? No, they can see that.

 Is it his measurable failure to fix the economy, solve the budget crisis or even repair the crumbling bridges? No, his opponents will cover that if he ever gets traction.

 My testimony amounts to a warning: Don’t believe a word the man says.

 If you have the stomach for it, this column offers some greatest hits in Christie’s catalog of lies.

 Don’t misunderstand me. They all lie, and I get that. But Christie does it with such audacity, and such frequency, that he stands out.

 He’s been lying on steroids lately, on core issues like Bridgegate, guns and that cozy personal friendship with his buddy, the King of Jordan. I’ll get to all that.

 But let’s start with my personal favorite. It dates back to the 2009 campaign, when the public workers unions asked him if he intended to cut their benefits.

 He told them their pensions were “sacred” to him.

 “The notion that I would eliminate, change, or alter your pension is not only a lie, but cannot be further from the truth,” he wrote them. “Your pension and benefits will be protected when I am elected governor.”

 He then proceeded to make cutting those benefits the centerpiece of his first year in office.

 This, we know now, was vintage Christie. Other lying politicians tend to waffle, to leave themselves some escape hatch. You can almost smell it.

 But Christie lies with conviction. His hands don’t shake, and his eyes don’t wander. I can hardly blame the union leaders who met with him for believing him.

 ………

 And that’s my warning to America. When Christie picks up the microphone, he speaks so clearly and forcefully that you assume genuine conviction is behind it.

 Be careful, though. It’s a kind of spell.

 He is a remarkable talent with a silver tongue. But if you look closely, you can see that it is forked like a serpent’s.

Admittedly, this is just The Largest Newspaper in the State of New Jersey saying this, and who reads the papers these days.

However, the New York Times, which is where the Sunday morning gasbags get their talking points, said the same thing, though they did not use the word “Lie” because they are such delicate flowers:

On his new website, Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey portrays himself as a guy who gets attacked for “telling it like it is,” but that’s what his mom told him to do from her deathbed.

It is part of the legend Mr. Christie has carefully cultivated for many years, with startling success. He is described as “brash” and “bold,” with a certain rough charisma that his political opponents just cannot handle. “I get accused a lot of times of being too blunt and too direct and saying what’s on my mind just a little bit too loudly,” he says in the first video for his presidential campaign, showing him with a selected group of adoring voters.

It’s fundamentally nonsense. There are lines between brash and belligerent, between open and obnoxious, and, most important, between “telling it like it is” and not telling the truth. Mr. Christie crosses those lines all the time, as Tom Moran, the editorial page editor of The Star-Ledger of Newark, documented in a blistering column about Mr. Christie’s “catalog of lies.”

………

Expect to see a lot of Mr. Christie at those phony “town hall” meetings, staged with selected supporters. You will hear a lot about his common touch, his “straight talk” and his love for Bruce Springsteen.

It’s a smoke screen. Look behind it at the governor whose own constituents say by an overwhelming majority that he has done a bad job, should not run for the White House and would make a bad president.

I don’t think that I’ve ever seen the New York Times editorial board gone after an American with such vehemence.

The media’s man crush on Chris Christie is over.

His brand of “straight talk” has gone from an asset to a joke line.

Sanity Wins in California

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California, in response to a measles outbreak in California, the state legislature passed , and now Governor Jerry Brown has singed into law, what is one of the most aggressive vaccine mandates in the nation:

Adopting one of the most far-reaching vaccination laws in the nation, California on Tuesday barred religious and other personal-belief exemptions for schoolchildren, a move that could affect tens of thousands of students and sets up a potential court battle with opponents of immunization.

California’s weakened public health defenses against measles and other preventable diseases led to the adoption of the measure, signed Tuesday by Gov. Jerry Brown, intended to stem the rising number of parents who opt not to inoculate their children.

Public health officials said a proliferation of waivers, many sought because of unfounded concerns about the safety of vaccines, helped fuel a measles outbreak that started at Disneyland in December and quickly spread across the West, infecting 150 people.

………

California joins Mississippi and West Virginia as the only states to ban vaccination waivers based on religion. All 50 states require immunization of children starting school, although about 20 allow exemptions based on personal beliefs.

Beginning with the 2016 school year, the new law could affect more than 80,000 California students who annually claim personal belief exemptions.

Only medical exceptions will be allowed for those entering day care and kindergarten. Children with physician-certified allergies and immune-system deficiencies, for example, will be exempted.

I will mix my victory toast with the tears of anti-vaxxers.

These anti-science ratf%$#s have a lot of blood on their hands.

The New Brewster Buffalo

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A test pilot with a wide range of fighter experience engaged in mock dogfights with an F-16, and the result was Not pretty:

A test pilot has some very, very bad news about the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. The pricey new stealth jet can’t turn or climb fast enough to hit an enemy plane during a dogfight or to dodge the enemy’s own gunfire, the pilot reported following a day of mock air battles back in January.

 “The F-35 was at a distinct energy disadvantage,” the unnamed pilot wrote in a scathing five-page brief that War Is Boring has obtained. The brief is unclassified but is labeled “for official use only.”

 The test pilot’s report is the latest evidence of fundamental problems with the design of the F-35 — which, at a total program cost of more than a trillion dollars, is history’s most expensive weapon.

 The U.S. Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps — not to mention the air forces and navies of more than a dozen U.S. allies — are counting on the Lockheed Martin-made JSF to replace many if not most of their current fighter jets.

 And that means that, within a few decades, American and allied aviators will fly into battle in an inferior fighter — one that could get them killed … and cost the United States control of the air.

 The fateful test took place on Jan. 14, 2015, apparently within the Sea Test Range over the Pacific Ocean near Edwards Air Force Base in California. The single-seat F-35A with the designation “AF-02” — one of the older JSFs in the Air Force — took off alongside a two-seat F-16D Block 40, one of the types of planes the F-35 is supposed to replace.

 The two jets would be playing the roles of opposing fighters in a pretend air battle, which the Air Force organized specifically to test out the F-35’s prowess as a close-range dogfighter in an air-to-air tangle involving high “angles of attack,” or AoA, and “aggressive stick/pedal inputs.”

 In other words, the F-35 pilot would fly his jet hard, turning and maneuvering in order to “shoot down” the F-16, whose pilot would be doing his own best to evade and kill the F-35.

 ………

 The F-35 was flying “clean,” with no weapons in its bomb bay or under its wings and fuselage. The F-16, by contrast, was hauling two bulky underwing drop tanks, putting the older jet at an aerodynamic disadvantage.

 But the JSF’s advantage didn’t actually help in the end. The stealth fighter proved too sluggish to reliably defeat the F-16, even with the F-16 lugging extra fuel tanks. “Even with the limited F-16 target configuration, the F-35A remained at a distinct energy disadvantage for every engagement,” the pilot reported.

 “Insufficient pitch rate.” “Energy deficit to the bandit would increase over time.” “The flying qualities in the blended region (20–26 degrees AoA) were not intuitive or favorable.”

 The F-35 jockey tried to target the F-16 with the stealth jet’s 25-millimeter cannon, but the smaller F-16 easily dodged. “Instead of catching the bandit off-guard by rapidly pull aft to achieve lead, the nose rate was slow, allowing him to easily time his jink prior to a gun solution,” the JSF pilot complained.

 ………

 And when the pilot of the F-16 turned the tables on the F-35, maneuvering to put the stealth plane in his own gunsight, the JSF jockey found he couldn’t maneuver out of the way, owing to a “lack of nose rate.”

 ………

And to add insult to injury, the JSF flier discovered he couldn’t even comfortably move his head inside the radar-evading jet’s cramped cockpit. “The helmet was too large for the space inside the canopy to adequately see behind the aircraft.” That allowed the F-16 to sneak up on him.

In the end, the F-35 — the only new fighter jet that America and most of its allies are developing — is demonstrably inferior in a dogfight with the F-16, which the U.S. Air Force first acquired in the late 1970s.

 The test pilot explained that he has also flown 1980s-vintage F-15E fighter-bombers and found the F-35 to be “substantially inferior” to the older plane when it comes to managing energy in a close battle.

This is what happens when you allow the USMC’s supposed need for a STO/VL airframe to dominate all other considerations with regard to basic airframe, which is the reason for poor rear vision, and hence the need for the humungous high tech helmet, with visor mounted display, which prevents adequate view to the rear.

I would note that the real problem here is not that our pilots might have inferior equipment, in WWII the F4F Wildcat achieved a 6:1 kill ratio, and the lamentable F2A Brewster Buffalo achieved a 26:1 kill ratio in Finnish service.

Achieving air superiority comes down to training and tactics, so even with an inferior platform, particularly when backed up by superior numbers and logistics.

If the US goes into combat with the F-35 it will not be a disaster.

The real disaster is that we are spending over a Trillion dollars on something that provides no advantages over existing aircraft.

We could buy homes for more than 4 million families, or provide health insurance for 10 million families for a decade, or fix around one third of our deferred infrastructure needs.

The opportunities that have been missed while we are spending money on a white elephant are the real disaster here.

Óχι* Euro?

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So Greece has now officially defaulted on its IMF loan:

Greece has officially missed its payment to the IMF.

Though this is not technically considered a “default” — the IMF now considers Greece “in arrears” — Greece has now officially not paid the 1.6 billion euros (or about $1.8 billion) it owed the IMF by Tuesday.

IMF managing director Christine Lagarde, however, said in June that she would consider Greece in default if it did not pay.

 This is the largest missed payment ever owed to the IMF.

Greece is now no longer in a bailout program for the first time since 2010.

 In a statement, the IMF confirmed that Greece missed the payment due on Tuesday and added that Greece requested an extension of its repayment, which the IMF’s executive board will consider “in due course.”

 Greek banks and the Athens stock exchange remain closed through this week ahead of a July 5 referendum to vote on the latest bailout proposal from Greece’s creditors.

This is a big deal, but I do not think that the Greek government was left with a choice.

It has become increasingly clear that the goal of the Troika has been regime change ever since Syriza won the last election, primarily because they are a bunch of moralistic† idiots, who do not realize that the alternative to Syriza is not a return to the center-left and center-right parties, but rather the rise of the fascist Golden Dawn party”.

This is why Greek PM Alexis Tsipras felt compelled to call a referendum.

The demands of the Troika have always been about a number of things, none of which have anything to do with the well being of the Greek people:

  • Protecting their own domestic banks from thrie exposureto Greek Debt.
  • Reinforcing German hegemony of the Euro Zone. (Berlin only on this one)
  • Making a public example of Greece as a warning to others.
  • Preventing other “leftist” (social democrat by the standards of the 1960s) parties, particularly Die Linke (The Left) in Germany, from coming to power.
  • Discrediting the modern social safety net.

It should be noted that I do not see any way to a happy ending here:

………

But a former deputy governor of Cyprus’s central bank, Spyros Stavrinakis, has warned that reopening the banks will be hard.

Stavrinakis lived through the 2013 Cyprus crisis, in which capital controls were imposed for almost two years.

He says:

Once you impose capital controls, you immediately send a message that there is something wrong with the banking sector.

It is very difficult to phase down and unwind capital controls, once they are imposed, Stavrinakis adds.

………

Most things in the European Union are designed to actively obfuscate reality. These are called deposit insurance schemes but that is a legal lie. In the United States the FDIC is Federal (its right in the name). The EU imposes a requirement that each country “insure” their deposits but it provides no financing for this. The last data I saw (which I can only verify from 3 years ago) is that the Greek deposit insurance fund has a paltry 3 billion dollars in it. In short there is no current backstop for Greek depositors. This is why they are talking about implementing a European wide deposit insurance union but that isn’t supposed to come until next year at the earliest and who knows if that will really happen and to what extent it will be universal among current Eurozone members. relevant links below.

………

Three-and-a-half billion euros. That is roughly how much cash Greece’s banks need to get through the week if each adult takes out the €60 ($67) they are allowed each day. It isn’t much for Greeks to live on, but it may be more than the banks have.

Also, in the realm of the absurd, there is a  crowdfunding project for the Greek Bailout Fund on  Indiegogo, with about €¾ million raised, out of the €1.6 billion needed raised so far.

The German insistence on Versailles Treaty economics, when juxtaposed with the Greek tradition financial profligacy and corruption, has produced a truly toxic mix, which will probably break up the Euro Zone, if not the whole European Union.

*Greek for no.
†The word for “debt” in German is “Schuld”. This is also the word for “guilt” or “blame”, which explains why the Germans are so fond of Sado-Monitarism. The Germans see this as a morality play, and the last time that Germans tried to enforce a morality on the rest of Europe, it was pretty unfortunate.