Month: December 2016

Here Is an Interesting Historical Tidbit That I Was Unaware Of

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It appears that the contemporaneous record shows that the deindustrialization of the United States was a deliberate policy. It’s goal was to create prosperity in China, so as to create a more friendly relationship and move the “Middle Kingdom” to a more democratic and pluralistic society.

One of the things left unsaid here, because it makes the promulgators of such a policy look like blithering idiots, is that many of the foreign policy and defense “experts” favored this because they had not, and still have not, adjusted their thinking about a need for China to counterweight the USSR.

he argues that te destruction of US manufacturing to aid China was a deliberate policy.

I have been puzzling over this from Paul Krugman:

Donald Trump won the electoral college at least in part by promising to bring coal jobs back to Appalachia and manufacturing jobs back to the Rust Belt. Neither promise can be honored – for the most part we’re talking about jobs lost, not to unfair foreign competition, but to technological change. But a funny thing happens when people like me try to point that out: we get enraged responses from economists who feel an affinity for the working people of the afflicted regions – responses that assume that trying to do the numbers must reflect contempt for regional cultures, or something.


Is this the right narrative? I am no longer comfortable with this line:

…for the most part we’re talking about jobs lost, not to unfair foreign competition, but to technological change.

Try to place that line in context with this from Noah Smith:

Then, in the 1990s and 2000s, the U.S opened its markets to Chinese goods, first with Most Favored Nation trading status, and then by supporting China’s accession to the WTO. The resulting competition from cheap Chinese goods contributed to vast inequality in the United States, reversing many of the employment gains of the 1990s and holding down U.S. wages. But this sacrifice on the part of 90% of the American populace enabled China to lift its enormous population out of abject poverty and become a middle-income country.

Was this “fair” trade? I think not. Let me suggest this narrative: Sometime during the Clinton Administration, it was decided that an economically strong China was good for both the globe and the U.S. Fair enough. To enable that outcome, U.S. policy deliberately sacrificed manufacturing workers on the theory that a.) the marginal global benefit from the job gain to a Chinese worker exceeded the marginal global cost from a lost US manufacturing job, b.) the U.S. was shifting toward a service sector economy anyway and needed to reposition its workforce accordingly and c.) the transition costs of shifting workers across sectors in the U.S. were minimal.

As a consequence – and through a succession of administrations – the US tolerated implicit subsidies of Chinese industries, including national industrial policy designed to strip production from the US.

It’s a straight path from these policies to Donald Trump, particularly as Mr. Duy observes, the transition costs were not minimal, they were huge.

Thanks, Bill.

Rick Perry to Head Department of ……… Errr ……… Ummm ……… Oops

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What can I say, I know that this is a cheap shot, but when someone throws me a slow pitch in the middle of the strike zone, I will take a swing at it:

President-elect Donald Trump picked Rick Perry to head the Energy Department on Wednesday, seeking to put the former Texas governor in control of an agency whose name he forgot during a presidential debate even as he vowed to abolish it.

Perry, who ran for president in the past two election cycles, is likely to shift the department away from renewable energy and toward fossil fuels, whose production he championed while serving as governor for 14 years.

His nomination — announced officially by Trump’s transition team a day after sources leaked the decision — stirred further alarm from environmental groups and others worried that the Trump administration will roll back efforts to expand renewable energy and give a powerful platform for officials questioning the scientific consensus on climate change.

The Energy Department was central to the 2011 gaffe that helped end his first presidential bid. Declaring that he wanted to eliminate three federal agencies during a primary debate in Michigan, Perry then froze after mentioning the Commerce and Education departments. “The third one, I can’t. Sorry. Oops.”

I would also note that the big jobs of the DoE are nuclear power and nuclear weapons, not fossil fuels, so Perry is even less qualified than he sounds, which kind of buggers the mind.

No Person or Company Here Should Ever Be Employed by the Democratic Party Ever Again

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In 2010, Martha Coakley was running for Senate in a special election, and she was asked by a reporter why it appeared that she was taking it easy after the primary.

Her response is a fail for the ages, “As opposed to standing outside Fenway Park? In the cold? Shaking hands?”

She lost the election ………

For what was Teddy Kennedy’s seat ………

In Massachusetts, the only state to go for McGovern in 1972 ………

Against a Republican.

Well, it appears that every single senior official in the Clinton campaign decided to do exactly what Martha Coakley did:

Everybody could see Hillary Clinton was cooked in Iowa. So when, a week-and-a-half out, the Service Employees International Union started hearing anxiety out of Michigan, union officials decided to reroute their volunteers, giving a desperate team on the ground around Detroit some hope.

 They started prepping meals and organizing hotel rooms.

 SEIU — which had wanted to go to Michigan from the beginning, but been ordered not to — dialed Clinton’s top campaign aides to tell them about the new plan. According to several people familiar with the call, Brooklyn was furious.

 Turn that bus around, the Clinton team ordered SEIU. Those volunteers needed to stay in Iowa to fool Donald Trump into competing there, not drive to Michigan, where the Democrat’s models projected a 5-point win through the morning of Election Day.

 Michigan organizers were shocked. It was the latest case of Brooklyn ignoring on-the-ground intel and pleas for help in a race that they felt slipping away at the end.

 “They believed they were more experienced, which they were. They believed they were smarter, which they weren’t,” said Donnie Fowler, who was consulting for the Democratic National Committee during the final months of the campaign. “They believed they had better information, which they didn’t.”

………

Nor did Brooklyn ask for help from some people who’d been expecting the call. Sanders threw himself into campaign appearances for Clinton throughout the fall, but familiar sources say the campaign never asked the Vermont senator’s campaign aides for help thinking through Michigan, Wisconsin or anywhere else where he had run strong. It was already November when the campaign finally reached out to the White House to get President Barack Obama into Michigan, a state that he’d worked hard and won by large margins in 2008 and 2012. On the Monday before Election Day, Obama added a stop in Ann Arbor, but that final weekend, the president had played golf on Saturday and made one stop in Orlando on Sunday, not having been asked to do anything else. Michigan senior adviser Steve Neuman had been asking for months to get Obama and the first lady on the ground there. People who asked for Vice President Joe Biden to come in were told that top Clinton aides weren’t clearing those trips.

………

When top aides to the Trump campaign mapped out the best-case scenarios for election night, they always fell short of 270, and Michigan was always the state that they couldn’t see a way through.

Trump’s last stop of the election was a massive rally in Michigan that went on past midnight, his campaign homing in on Trump’s chances there largely from nervousness it sensed coming out of Brooklyn.

Walking out at the end, Trump turned to his running mate, Mike Pence, almost confused: “This doesn’t feel like second place,” he said, according to a person familiar with the conversation.

The party establishment gave Coakley a 2nd chance, and she lost the governor’s race ………

In Massachusetts, the only state to go for McGovern in 1972 ………

Against a Republican.

The Democratic Party establishment did the same thing when Clinton snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in 2008 in the primary, when she just could not bring herself to apologize for voting for Bush’s war in Iraq, and they gave her another chance.

And she lost to an inverted traffic cone, aided and abetted by a Clintonite political machine that was too outlandishly incompetent to be the model for a Rowan Atkinson Britcom.

Fire them all ……… Out of a cannon ……… And into the sun.

Well, He Is Batsh%$ Insane, Even by Their Standards

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It looks like Republicans have some serious concerns about the nomination of John Bolton as Deputy Secretary of State.

President-elect Donald J. Trump’s extended deliberations over assembling a team to run the State Department are reviving some of the same debates that consumed the years of war and strife in the administration of George W. Bush. And in some cases, the cast of rivals is even the same.

 The conflict has come to a head over choosing a deputy to serve under Rex W. Tillerson, the Exxon Mobil chief executive whom Mr. Trump selected this week to be secretary of state. Mr. Trump is weighing whether to choose John R. Bolton, a combative and strident advocate for an expansive American foreign policy who was closely aligned with Vice President Dick Cheney in the Bush administration.

 Mr. Bolton’s nomination as deputy secretary of state would be subject to a vote in the Senate, and it is not clear whether he would survive his confirmation hearing. Senator Bob Corker, Republican of Tennessee, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, has said privately that he has misgivings, according to a person who has spoken with him. And Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, another Republican on the committee, has promised to block the nomination.

 “There is something to be said,” Mr. Paul said Wednesday, “for one of the top diplomats in the country being diplomatic.”

My guess here is that he was always put out there as a sacrificial lamb:  It’s been an awfully long time since an incoming president’s nominations have all gone through the Senate, and Trump gets points from the lunatic fringe of the Republican foreign policy establishment for nominating him, and the Senate gets to kill the nomination, creating the illusion of due diligence on their part.

You have to remember the stories about this guy, when he did things like pound on the door of a woman and scream at a woman that he had a policy argument with at all hours of the day, and we also have the fact that Bill “Wrong on everything, always” Kristol loves the choice:

“I like John Bolton and hope he gets a senior position,” said William Kristol, the editor of the conservative Weekly Standard and a Trump critic. “But the Trump people shouldn’t kid themselves that any selection as deputy would erase the deep concerns about Tillerson of those of us who believe we can’t afford to continue Obama’s policy of supineness to Putin.”

 Though Mr. Bolton, 68, is admired by conservatives like Mr. Kristol who agreed with the Bush administration that American military intervention was a necessary force for promoting stability throughout the world, there are also many Republicans who want to leave the Bush years in the past.

This guy is completely toxic, and I think that Trump cannot have missed this:  Toxicity is Trump’s mutant power.*

I think that Trump is playing to lose on this appointment.

*Well, toxicity and the hair thing.

Well, They Would Say That, Wouldn’t They?*

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The Democratic National Committee has hired cyber experts to look into their security, and they say that it was the Russians:

As Donald Trump and his surrogates continue to engage in dangerous denial of Russia’s interference in our election and the intelligence community as a whole, one expert who knows of what he speaks made an appearance on Wolf Blitzer’s show yesterday to knock a huge hole in Trump’s arguments.

 Trump has long dismissed the reports of Russian interference as ridiculous, going so far as to say it was maybe China or some 400-pound creepy guy in his mother’s basement. Anything he can do to distract from Russia’s interference, he’s done.

 But Dmitri Alperovitch, employed by Crowdstrike, the security firm hired by the DNC and Clinton campaign to come in and deal with the hack, begs to differ, and he’s got the goods to prove it.

 Right out of the gate, Alperovitch tells Wolf Blitzer that his firm “did catch the Russians in the act when the DNC hired us back in May.”

It’s remarkably convenient for Crowd Strike to echo the narratives of the people who are paying for them.

Also in declaring it the operation of a state actor, it excuses the ineptitude of the DNC, the Clinton Campaign, and (particularly) John “Nigerian Prince” Podesta.

Craig Murry calls this is 6 pounds of sh%$ in a 5 pound bag, because the report alleges that the Russians acted in a manner that appears to be deliberately calculated to point the accusing fingers at themselves:

I am about twenty four hours behind on debunking the “evidence” of Russian hacking of the DNC because I have only just stopped laughing. I was sent last night the “crowdstrike” report, paid for by the Democratic National Committee, which is supposed to convince us. The New York Times today made this “evidence” its front page story.

 It appears from this document that, despite himself being a former extremely competent KGB chief, Vladimir Putin has put Inspector Clouseau in charge of Russian security and left him to get on with it. The Russian Bear has been the symbol of the country since the 16th century. So we have to believe that the Russian security services set up top secret hacking groups identifying themselves as “Cozy Bear” and “Fancy Bear”. Whereas no doubt the NSA fronts its hacking operations by a group brilliantly disguised as “The Flaming Bald Eagles”, GCHQ doubtless hides behind “Three Lions on a Keyboard” and the French use “Marianne Snoops”.

 What is more, the Russian disguised hackers work Moscow hours and are directly traceable to Moscow IP addresses. This is plain and obvious nonsense. If crowdstrike were tracing me just now they would think I am in Denmark. Yesterday it was the Netherlands. I use Tunnel Bear, one of scores of easily available VPN’s and believe me, the Russian FSB have much better resources. We are also supposed to believe that Russia’s hidden hacking operation uses the name of the famous founder of the Communist Cheka, Felix Dzerzhinsky, as a marker and an identify of “Guccifer2” (get the references – Russian oligarchs and their Gucci bling and Lucifer) – to post pointless and vainglorious boasts about its hacking operations, and in doing so accidentally leave bits of Russian language script to be found.

Additionally, he has said that he picked up the emails from a contact in a Washington, DC park:

A Wikileaks envoy today claims he personally received Clinton campaign emails in Washington D.C. after they were leaked by ‘disgusted’ whisteblowers – and not hacked by Russia.

 Craig Murray, former British ambassador to Uzbekistan and a close associate of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, told Dailymail.com that he flew to Washington, D.C. for a clandestine hand-off with one of the email sources in September.

 ‘Neither of [the leaks] came from the Russians,’ said Murray in an interview with Dailymail.com on Tuesday. ‘The source had legal access to the information. The documents came from inside leaks, not hacks.’

 His account contradicts directly the version of how thousands of Democratic emails were published before the election being advanced by U.S. intelligence.

………

 ‘Neither of [the leaks] came from the Russians,’ Murray said. ‘The source had legal access to the information. The documents came from inside leaks, not hacks.’

 He said the leakers were motivated by ‘disgust at the corruption of the Clinton Foundation and the tilting of the primary election playing field against Bernie Sanders.’

 Murray said he retrieved the package from a source during a clandestine meeting in a wooded area near American University, in northwest D.C. He said the individual he met with was not the original person who obtained the information, but an intermediary.

There are a number of things going on right now:

  • Numerous members of the Democratic Party establishment are flailing about trying to excuse their abject failure during the elections.
  • The “War with Russia” crowd have their casus belli.
  • It’s like catnip for journalists.
  • Despite never denying the veracity of the materials, the accusations serve to draw attention away from the actual contents of the emails.

We know that the Democratic campaign was incompetent, and we know that their IT security protocols were ignored by senior officials, particularly John Podesta, who was phished using techniques that a script kiddie would sneer at.

Was there Russian involvement?  I don’t know.

Certainly the Russians were monitoring the election, as were the French, the British, the Chinese, the Japanese, etc. because it’s a big deal to them too.

What I do know is that the CIA and the FBI disagree, and that the DNI has remained silent, so it’s not a “Slam Dunk”.

It’s also not an act of war, as some are eager to suggest.  It’s just a computer hack, or a leak.

The Cuban Missile Crisis this ain’t.

*Mandy Rice-Davies Applies (MRDA). The Profumo affair. Learn your history.

The Eskimo Word is Oosic

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Most mammals, though not humans, a penis bone.

These range in size from tiny to “heroic” in size, with the aforementioned “Oosic” coming from an Walrus, and being rather large.

There is now some question as to why humans do not have this bone, even though some of our closer relatives, like the Chimpanzee, do:

The baculum, also called the os penis or penis bone, is a puzzling thing. It sits in the tip of the organ, not connected to any larger skeletal structure. Your pet cat has one if it is a he, as does your male dog. Many male mammals do — chimpanzees, gorillas, weasels and bears. The walrus has a particularly impressive baculum, up to 22 inches in length. The bone was even larger in the past. A fossilized, 4.5-foot os penis of an extinct walrus species fetched $8,000 at auction in 2007.

But humans, curiously, do not have penis bones. One reading of Genesis offered an explanation for the disappearing bone by way of creation myth. It was the penis bone, not a rib bone, a pair of biblical scholars argued in 2015, that God removed to fashion Eve from Adam. (This interpretation went over about as well as one might expect.)

As to why humans lack the bones, a study published on Wednesday in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B offered a possible explanation. By the standards of primate reproduction, humans do not need to do the deed for a long enough time to warrant an os penis. Plus, our breeding habits are, in the context of our great ape cousins, fairly low-pressure.

A pair of researchers at the University College London examined several sexual characteristics of primates and mammal carnivores, including features like polygamy, testes mass, seasonal mating and intromission time (how long an act of penetration lasts). For primates, the best predictor for whether the male had a penis bone was if intromission lasted three minutes or longer. There was also a correlation between long intromission and length of the bone for both primates and carnivores.

Study author Matilda Brindle wrote at the Conversation that “humans don’t quite make it into the ‘prolonged intromission’ category. The average duration from penetration to ejaculation for human males is less than two minutes.” These long bouts of primate intromission are not exactly romantic. The end goal is gestation, not gesture. They are insurance to a male mammal, Brindle pointed out, that a female does not mate “with anyone else before his sperm have had a chance to work their magic.”

Less than 2 minutes for humans? Seriously?

Damn! I barely have her shoes untied in 2 minutes.*

As an aside, if you Google Oosic, the almost all first links are for knife handles made from Walrus baculi.

*It’s not that I don’t know how to untie shoes, it’s that I am not using my hands.

F%$# Me. I Agree with the Inverted Traffic Cone Again………

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Obviously, the devil is in the details, but Trump’s proposal for a lifetime ban on defense contractors hiring Pentagon contracting officials is a pretty good idea, though a lifetime ban is likely to be unenforceable, based on my knowledge of non-compete clauses, though I must offer the caveat that I am an engineer, not an employment attorney, dammit!*

President-elect Donald Trump has put forth the idea of banning the defense industry from hiring former Pentagon contracting officials, just days after creating a stir in the defense industry by saying Boeing’s contract for an Air Force One replacement should be cancelled.

According to a Reuters news service report, Trump told a rally in Baton Rouge, Louisiana that “I think anybody that gives out these big contracts should never ever, during their lifetime, be allowed to work for a defense company, for a company that makes that product.”

He added he would “check this out” before making any final decisions, but went on to slam the F-35 joint strike fighter program as “totally, totally, like, uncontrollably over budget.”

I think that this is in response to Northrop Grumman hiring a former USAF Chief of Staff, one who was in charge when N-G was selected as the won the B-21 bomber contract, was named to their board of directors.

Also: the devil is in the details:

  • What about subcontractors?
  • What is to prevent companies from swapping their appointments?
  • What is a big contract?
  • Does this just apply to the uniform military, or civilian Pentagon employees as well?
  • At what level does this apply?

Also, as I noted at the beginning, the legal issues are a complete hairball, and would likely end up in the courts.

*I love it when I get to go all Dr. McCoy!

Garrison Keillor Should Have Been Drowned at Birth

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I’ve never found Keillor funny, or amusing, or even particularly interesting.

He has made a career out of sounding like what a not particularly sharp pseudo-intellectual thinks that they should laugh at.

Over the years, he has gotten even more eccentrically uninteresting, and it has culminated in an OP/ED in (where else) The Washington Post, where among other things, he lambastes the Democratic Party for even considering making a Muslim black man DNC chair: (No direct link, as a statement of my disapproval)

In a recent editorial for the Washington Post, Keillor expounds on his general loss of faith in the American electorate, from the Republicans who protest-voted for a heart attack-inducing whoopee cushion of a president, to the Democrats wandering lost in the woods.

It’s the written equivalent of a temper tantrum, and specifically saves a few clumsy jabs for Minnesota’s own Keith Ellison.

“A lackluster black Muslim congressman from Minneapolis is a leading candidate for chair of the Democratic National Committee, the person who will need to connect with disaffected workers in Youngstown and Pittsburgh,” Keillor writes. “Why not a ballet dancer or a Buddhist monk?”

Why not indeed? As long as that hypothetical ballet-dancing monk isn’t a Wall Street puppet, a job-outsourcing trust fund-made billionaire, or anything else that old-school Rust Belt Democrats should actually be concerned about?

Ellison has been racking up powerful endorsements since announcing his bid for DNC chair last month, and notably owns the support of the AFL-CIO, which represents some 12 million union workers across the country.

Ellison’s record of working for working people is solid: He’s tried to make union organizing a civil right, introduced legislation to tax Wall Street financial transactions, and has steadily opposed the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

What Keillor really seems to be saying, with fly-by innuendo, is that the hardscrabble, socially conservative blue-collar Democrats so plentiful beyond the liberal oasis of Minneapolis won’t get behind Ellison for the simple reason that he’s black, and a Muslim.

No, Keillor is saying that HE. “Won’t get behind Ellison for the simple reason that HE’s black, and a Muslim.”

He’s also saying that he people who work with their hands, and on their feet, are stupid, and cannot see past the color of his skin and how he prays, despite the fact that they voted for a black guy with a Muslim first and middle name in 2012 and 2106.

Please Garrison, just shut the f%$# up.

Quote of the Day

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It strains credulity for the CIA to complain about a foreign intelligence operation undermining fair democratic elections; this has been their business around the world, from its early days helping throw elections in post-war Europe to Cold War campaigns in Central and South America. The CIA’s own history of electoral shenanigans makes them an untrustworthy character in this drama.

—David Price

He is correct.

Just as the FBI is the misbegotten offspring of J. Edgar Hoover, the CIA is very much the child of Allen and John Foster Dulles.

OK, This Has Completely Blown Up

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There has been poo flung all over the place over the past few days regarding allegations of efforts of the Russians to influence the US elections.

With the exception of Marcy Wheeler’s astute observation that the CIA is studiously avoiding the obvious, that this is blowback against US regime change efforts against Russia and its allies:

The most logical explanation for the parade of leaks since Friday about why Russia hacked the Democrats is that the CIA has been avoiding admitting — perhaps even considering — the conclusion that Russia hacked Hillary in retaliation for the covert actions the CIA itself has taken against Russian interests.

Based on WaPo’s big story Friday, I guessed that there was more disagreement about Russia’s hack than its sources — who seemed to be close to Senate Democrats — let on. I was right. Whereas on Friday WaPo reported that it was the consensus view that Russia hacked Hillary to get Trump elected, on Saturday the same journalists reported that CIA and FBI were giving dramatically different briefings to Intelligence Committees.

………

Remarkably, only secondary commenters (including me, in point 13 here) have suggested the most obvious explanation: The likelihood that Russia targeted the former Secretary of State for a series of covert actions, all impacting key Russian interests, that at least started while she was Secretary of State. Those are:

  • Misleadingly getting the UN to sanction the Libya intervention based off the claim that it was about protecting civilians as opposed to regime change
  • Generating protests targeting Putin in response to 2011 parliamentary elections
  • Sponsoring “moderate rebels” to defeat Bashar al-Assad
  • Removing Viktor Yanukovych to install a pro-NATO government

Importantly, the first three of these happened on Hillary’s watch, with her active involvement. And Putin blamed Hillary, personally, for the protests in 2011.

So, it’s pretty clear that IF Russia actively meddled in our election (and the operative word is if) it appears that their actions were fare less intrusive than what we did. in Libya, Syria, Russia, or the Ukraine, where we have supported jihadists and (not a term of art) fascists.

In determining the veracity of the CIA’s assertions there are a couple of articles to review.

First, an article from The Guardian that quotes Craig Murray, the former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan, and close associate of Assange:  (See also more extensive comments from Mr. Murray here.)

Craig Murray, the former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan, who is a close associate of Assange, called the CIA claims “bullsh%$”, adding: “They are absolutely making it up.”

“I know who leaked them,” Murray said. “I’ve met the person who leaked them, and they are certainly not Russian and it’s an insider. It’s a leak, not a hack; the two are different things.

“If what the CIA are saying is true, and the CIA’s statement refers to people who are known to be linked to the Russian state, they would have arrested someone if it was someone inside the United States.

“America has not been shy about arresting whistleblowers and it’s not been shy about extraditing hackers. They plainly have no knowledge whatsoever.”

(%$ mine)

Note that in ALL the articles, this is the only absolute claim that is made on the record.

Also note that FBI and CIA have given conflicting briefings to lawmakers: (Also see here.)

In a secure meeting room under the Capitol last week, lawmakers held in their hands a classified letter written by colleagues in the Senate summing up a secret, new CIA assessment of Russia’s role in the 2016 presidential election.

 Sitting before the House Intelligence Committee was a senior FBI counterintelligence official. The question the Republicans and Democrats in attendance wanted answered was whether the bureau concurred with the conclusions the CIA had just shared with senators that Russia “quite” clearly intended to help Republican Donald Trump defeat Democrat Hillary Clinton and clinch the White House.

 For the Democrats in the room, the FBI’s response was frustrating — even shocking.

 During a similar Senate Intelligence Committee briefing held the previous week, the CIA’s statements, as reflected in the letter the lawmakers now held in their hands, were “direct and bald and unqualified” about Russia’s intentions to help Trump, according to one of the officials who attended the House briefing.

 The FBI official’s remarks to the lawmakers on the House Intelligence Committee were, in comparison, “fuzzy” and “ambiguous,” suggesting to those in the room that the bureau and the agency weren’t on the same page, the official said.

I’m with what Glenn Greenwald wrote for The Intercept, “Anonymous Leaks to the WashPost About the CIA’s Russia Beliefs Are No Substitute for Evidence.”

Though I would include the caveat/cliché that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

I would also note the following paragraph buried in the original Washington Post story, which relied entirely on anonymous sources:

The CIA presentation to senators about Russia’s intentions fell short of a formal U.S. assessment produced by all 17 intelligence agencies. A senior U.S. official said there were minor disagreements among intelligence officials about the agency’s assessment, in part because some questions remain unanswered.

(emphasis mine)

So, the actual facts of the matter are not clear, though people of different political bents are doing their best impression of blind men and an elephant.

Certainly, Russia has an interest in undermining faith in the Democratic process in the United States.

Additionally, Hillary Clinton’s record with Russia as Secretary of State was implacably and reflexively hostile to Russian concerns, so I could see how Russia might find the proverbial inverted traffic cone as a preferable alternative.

This means that the assertions are plausible, but by no means persuasive, particularly since the CIA appears to be flying solo with these assertions.

Additionally, the anonymous sourcing might imply that someone well into the “No f%$#s left give” category **cough** retiring Senator Harry Reid **cough* might simply be throwing some shade Donald Trump’s way.

I’m not sure what to believe, but even if all the allegations against Putin are true, they are far less aggressive than what the Obama administration, and the Hillary Clinton State Department were doing with Russia.

In any case, this all falls firmly in the “Sauce for the Gander” category for me.

An Inside Out Wankel

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The 4 Stroke Cycle for This Engine


An animation, including P-V curves

A company called LiquidPiston has a new take on rotary engine technology, they have basically turned a Wankel engine inside out, which appears to have solved the apex seal problem while improving fuel economy.

It still has ports, instead of valves, so it’s also pretty simple:

Military and other operators prefer using kerosene, rather than gasoline, across ground and air platforms, but lightweight, reliable heavy-fuel engines for unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) have proved challenging to develop.

 LiquidPiston, a startup developing a novel powerplant that is smaller and lighter than piston diesel engines and more efficient than gasoline engines, has been boosted by winning Sikorsky’s Entrepreneurial Challenge.

 Developing multifuel rotary combustion engines based on its high-efficiency hybrid thermodynamic cycle (HEHC), the Bloomfield, Connecticut-based company has won $25,000 and the opportunity to explore applications for its X-engine on Sikorsky products.

 “We are targeting our engine to be up to 10-15 times smaller and lighter than a piston diesel engine of similar power output, and up to 2-3 times more efficient than gasoline engines, especially at part-power,” says founder and CEO Alexander Shkolnik.

I think that the claims here are a bit much, but the shape of the combustion chamber is far less prone to the thermodynamic losses that bedevil the Wankel.

In a Wankel, apex seals on the triangular rotor move in and out at high speed during rotation. “The seals are impossible to lubricate, so they mix oil into the air, but 90% of the oil burns,” says Shkolnik. “In our engines, the seals are on the stationary housing and easier to lubricate.”

HEHC is a four-stroke cycle. The fuel/air mixture enters the X-engine through the rotor and is compressed and ignited. Constant-volume combustion increases efficiency. The combustion gases are then overexpanded before being exhausted through the rotor.

The overexpanded power stroke is similar to that used by the Atkinson Cycle engine used in the Prius to achieve higher fuel economy, though it appears that it does not share the rather low power density of the Prius engine (not an issue in a hybrid, as the electric motor supplies handles need for peak power).

Who Amongst Us Does Not Want to Torture Mitt Romney

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That explains this picture

Admittedly, it’s Roger Stone, and this man lies like most of us breath, but I am inclined to agree with his statement that Trump’s interview with Willard “Mitt” Romney was to f%$# with the 2012 GOP nominee:

Roger Stone, a longtime adviser to Donald Trump, says the president-elect interviewed Mitt Romney for the secretary of State position just to “torture him” for his former criticism.

In an appearance on InfoWars Sunday, Stone said Trump had been toying with Romney.

“Donald Trump was interviewing Mitt Romney for secretary of State in order to torture him,” Stone said on conspiracy theory website InfoWars. “To toy with him. And given the history, that’s completely understandable. Mitt Romney crossed a line. He didn’t just oppose Trump, which is his democratic right, he called him a phony and a fraud. And a con man. And that’s not the kind of man you want as Secretary of State.”

I am very amused.

I am also profoundly disturbed:  This is the 2nd time in as many hours that I am agreeing with President-elect inverted traffic cone.

A Fascinating Way to Deal with Failed Banks

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Gareth Thomas, head of Co-Operative Party in the UK, authorities turn Royal Bank of Scotland into a cooperative, where it would owned by its customers:

Every month there are new headlines about the Royal Bank of Scotland’s wrongdoing. The chief executive, Ross McEwan, puts the best spin on things, but his bank is still failing; most recently it failed the Bank of England’s stress test. Trying to privatise the bank hasn’t worked and state ownership hasn’t been a rip-roaring success either; but worse, its very size and dominance means together with the other big banks it is stifling competition. Now is the right moment for a different approach.

Together as taxpayers we saved the Royal Bank of Scotland – now we should each be allowed to own it. It should become a people’s bank, which every tax-paying British citizen would have the right to become a part-owner of.

The Royal Building Society of Scotland, with an iron lock on its assets, would be a final, decisive break with the Fred Goodwin era. It would conserve the strength and credibility of one of our major financial global players while injecting a much needed dose of competition and diversity into British banking.

More than £45bn of taxpayer funds have been injected into the Royal Bank of Scotland. This was the right thing to do, but neither keeping it as a state bank nor a fully privatised bank offer the same advantages as turning it into a mutual. Its sheer size means it risks being captured again by narrow shareholder interests or those of its senior executives, or both.

As an FYI to those who do not know what the Co-Operative Party is, it is a political party that is closely affiliated with Labour, their MPs are listed as “Labour Co-Operative“, and they and Labour do not field candidates against each other.

The party has as its goal supporting and creating cooperative enterprises, as opposed to Labour’s (nominal) focus of organized labor, so his proposal is certainly in accord with his party’s platform, but it has a lot of merit.

The alternative is to sell off the assets on the cheap, or sell them to another bank, which increases concentration and systemic risk, and neither of these alternatives come close to fixing the underlying problems.

More Stopped Clock News

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Some truth from Donald Trump’s Twitter, of all things:

The F-35 program and cost is out of control. Billions of dollars can and will be saved on military (and other) purchases after January 20th.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 12, 2016

Needless to say, defense contractors are freaking out:

Donald Trump left the collective defense community quaking in its boots last week after he threatened to cancel Boeing’s new Air Force one. Now he’s going after another massive aerospace firm, slamming Lockheed Martin’s F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) for “out of control” costs.

As much as I hate to admit it, Trump is right about project flying cluster f%$#.

Linkage

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Space Poop Challenge:

Both a Stopped Clock, and Boris Johnson, Are Right Twice a Day

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Boris Johnson, breaking with a decades long policy of abject sycophancy to the House of Saud, has called out the oil rich nation for their antediluvian and violent legacy:

Boris Johnson accused Saudi Arabia of abusing Islam and acting as a puppeteer in proxy wars throughout the Middle East, in remarks that flout a longstanding Foreign Office convention not to criticise the UK’s allies in public.

The foreign secretary told a conference in Rome last week that the behaviour of Saudi Arabia, and also Iran, was a tragedy, adding that there was an absence of visionary leadership in the region that was willing to reach out across the Sunni-Shia divide.

At the event, Johnson said: “There are politicians who are twisting and abusing religion and different strains of the same religion in order to further their own political objectives. That’s one of the biggest political problems in the whole region. And the tragedy for me – and that’s why you have these proxy wars being fought the whole time in that area – is that there is not strong enough leadership in the countries themselves.”

The foreign secretary then identified Saudi Arabia and Iran specifically, saying: “That’s why you’ve got the Saudis, Iran, everybody, moving in, and puppeteering and playing proxy wars.”

Needless to say, the usual suspects, industries dependent on Riyadh and old Middle East “experts”, have been squealing about this like stuck pigs.

In the words of Otto Maddox, “F%$# that.”

Remember When I Said that Big Pharma was Fueling the Opioid Epidemic?

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Fentanyl is an incredibly potent opioid painkiller; it acts quickly and powerfully, but doesn’t last as long as others, meaning its medical application is limited. So if you’re a drug company trying to boost sales of your new fentanyl spray, how do you sell more of a product that very few people have a real need for? You could bribe doctors with paid “speaking engagements,” take them out and show them the “best nights of their life,” all so they write prescriptions for patients who probably shouldn’t be getting your drug.

This is according on an indictment [PDF] filed yesterday by the Justice Department against the former CEO and five other employees of Insys Therapeutics, makers of the Subsys brand fentanyl spray, a fast-acting form of the drug that was primarily intended for cancer patients experiencing high levels of pain that couldn’t be managed through more traditional opioids.

The DOJ alleges that, starting in 2012, former Insys CEO Michael Babich and his fellow defendants bribed and provided illegal kickbacks to at least ten physicians — mostly operators of pain clinics — in ten different states.

Clearly. the problem is that our regulatory solution does not have enough free market.

I’d like to see a sh%$ load of prosecutions.

So Not a Surprise………

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Those “accidental” airstrikes on Syrian troops that sabotaged the cease fire negotiated between Russia and the United states in Syria was no mistake:

The summary report on an investigation into US and allied air strikes on Syrian government troops has revealed irregularities in decision-making consistent with a deliberate targeting of Syrian forces.

The report, released by US Central Command on 29 November, shows that senior US Air Force officers at the Combined Air Operations Center (CAOC) at al-Udeid Airbase in Qatar, who were responsible for the decision to carry out the September airstrike at Deir Ezzor:

  • misled the Russians about where the US intended to strike so Russia could not warn that it was targeting Syrian troops
  • ignored information and intelligence analysis warning that the positions to be struck were Syrian government rather than Islamic State
  • shifted abruptly from a deliberate targeting process to an immediate strike in violation of normal Air Force procedures

Last week Brig. Gen. Richard Coe, the lead US official on the investigating team, told reporters that US air strikes in Deir Ezzor on 17 September, which killed at least 62 – and possibly more than 100 – Syrian army troops, was the unintentional result of “human error”.

The report itself says that the investigators found “no evidence of misconduct” – but it is highly critical of the decision process and does not offer any explanations for that series of irregularities.

How the strikes killed off ceasefire deal

The strikes against two Syrian army positions were the pivotal event in the breakdown of the Syrian ceasefire agreement reached between the United States and Russia in September. Both Moscow and Damascus denounced the strikes as a deliberate move by the Obama administration to support the Islamic State group and cited the attacks as the reason for declaring an end to the ceasefire on 19 September.

I think that this shows very little doubt that the US military establishment, up to at least the commander in the theater, and probably up to the office of the Secretary of Defense, were actively sabotaging a decision of the President.

Heads should roll, but they won’t.

Word

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Over at Medium, Michael Tracey pithily observes that if fake news is a serious problem, then David Brock should be washing dishes for a living:

I can’t help but notice that the new Washington Post-certified “master list” of “fake news” outlets does not include any of the media organs overseen by David Brock, one of the leading propagandists of the modern era. Why is this? Virtually everything that David Brock does would qualify as “fake news” under any objective criteria. He runs a bunch of websites that may seem to the naked eye to be legitimate “news” sources, but in reality are just Democratic Party / Hillary agitprop conveyor belts. This is well known and accepted, even by Hillary’s inner-circle, many of whom view Brock with suspicion.

Bountiful “fake news” can be found at the propaganda outlet Media Matters, the premier Brock-connected entity (he founded it). To take just one example, Eric Boehlert, the main public face of Media Matters, relentlessly denied over the course of the 2016 presidential campaign that Hillary was under criminal investigation. He denounced this notion as “fictitious,” and launched a relentless “targeted harassment” campaign against the New York Times for reporting otherwise. It turned out that Boehlert was 100% wrong and the NYT was 100% right — Hillary really was under active felony criminal investigation, from July 10, 2015 to July 5, 2016 and then again from October 28, 2016 to November 6, 2016. Those facts are no longer in dispute. Hence, wasn’t Boehlert promoting “fake news”? He was putting false, distorted information out onto the internet, thereby actively misinforming readers. If that doesn’t qualify as “fake news” — what would? Please explain why the term “fake news” would not apply to Boehlert’s conduct.

………

Bear in mind that the Brock apparatus is also responsible for paying online trolls to propagandize social media on Hillary’s behalf. This led to a very strange dynamic whereby those who took the brunt of pro-Clinton trolling onslaughts (as I did) could never be quite sure whether they were dealing with a genuine interlocutor, or someone who was trolling on Brock’s dime. Ironically, this Brock-enforced tactic was the essence of “gaslighting” — it made people question the reality of what was going on before them, and bred paranoia. Brock knowingly sought to inflict stress, confusion, and misinformation upon people who dared criticize the Clintons on Twitter, reddit, or wherever else. That was his explicit tactic. Where does this fall on the “fake news” spectrum? They were promoting a ton of fakery for the purpose of pushing a partisan political agenda.

(emphasis original)

Brock has been a “Scum”, as Tracey describes him throughout his entire career, first for the fight, and then for the left, and he was embraced by the Clintons. which is yet another reason to hope that this Hillary Clinton’s disastrous run for the presidency will lead to their, and their allies, forcible exit from the Democratic party establishment.