Not Getting the Issue

Click for full size

---

Sub Quietness

Both the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), and Robert Farley at Information Dissemination make a very big deal about about the U.S. Navy’s Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) report that notes that current Chinese SSBNs are noisier than their Soviet equivalents from 30 years ago.

The ONI report notes that the submarines are easily detected, the sortie rate for patrol missions is low, and that the range of the missiles is low, and so the FAS concludes:

The ONI report concludes that the Jin SSBN with the JL-2 SLBM gives the PLA Navy its first credible second-strike nuclear capability. The authors must mean in principle, because in a war such noisy submarines would presumably be highly vulnerable to U.S. or Japanese anti-submarine warfare forces. (The noise level of China’s most modern diesel-electric submarines is another matter; ONI says some are comparable to Russian diesel-electric submarines).

That does raise an interesting question about the Chinese SSBN program: if Chinese leaders are so concerned about the vulnerability of their nuclear deterrent, why base a significant portion of it on a few noisy platforms and send them out to sea where they can be sunk by U.S. attack submarines in a war? And if Chinese planners know that the sea-based deterrent is much more vulnerable than its land-based deterrent, why do they waste money on the SSBN program?

The answer is probably a combination of national prestige and scenarios involving India or Russia that have less capable anti-submarine forces.

And Mr. Farley concurs.

I disagree. The purpose of building a credible SSBN force is to deter the United States.

Submarines, SSNs specifically, dominate the conflict at seas, as shown by the General Belgrano's sinking by the HMS Conqueror, but they do not create prestige as such.

Unlike surface combatants like carriers, LPDs, or other vessels carrying naval artillery, they cannot control control coastal regions effectively. Even a relatively small gunboat can interdict a coastal road for an extended period of time.

What a Submarine can do is sink all those surface combatants with relative impunity, maintain a difficult to detect 2^nd strike with nuclear weapons, or launch a surprise surgical strike ("cruise missile diplomacy").

I think that the Chinese have always taken the longer view on these sorts of issues, going back to well before the creation of the PRC, and realize that in order to a more effective submarine force, they need to advance incrementally, and learn how to build, maintain, and crew better boats over time.

They are familiar with Soviet weapons, and they know the disasters that resulted from pushing the envelope.

Additionally, their horrific history regarding Mao's Great Leap Forward is a relatively history, and so they are taking measured steps.

Simply put, the Chinese do not feel the level of paranoia that the Soviets did regarding an attack by western forces, and as such, they are taking their time, rather than rushing new systems into service when doing so would entail a large amount of risk.

Toto, I Don't Think that We're In Kansas Any More

Alan Grayson on Dylan Ratigan (2:24)

Crooks and Liars has a very illuminating clip on just what Alan Grayson expects to find in an audit of the Fed.

While I love Grayson's line that, "Well we are in Emerald City right now. We’ve arrived in Emerald City. Toto has just run underneath the curtain…," the important quote, and the important question is the more significant quote, "Well what I think is favoritism towards selected big banks that have failed and led us to the brink of national bankruptcy."

What is clear is that for a long time, at least since Alan "Bubbles" Greenspan became Fed Chairman, was that the "Greenspan Put", which Wiki calls:

The Fed's pattern of providing ample liquidity resulted in the investor perception of put protection on asset prices. Investors increasingly believed that when things go bad, the Fed would step in and inject liquidity until the problem got better. Invariably, the Fed did so each time, and the perception became firmly embedded in asset pricing in the form of higher valuation, narrower credit spreads, and excess risk taking. It has been criticized as a form of privatizing profits and socializing losses, and as inflating a speculative bubble in the lead-up to the 2008 financial crisis.

(emphasis mine)

Has been a factor of life.

Basically, if you were big enough, and f$#@ed up badly enough, the United States Fedral Reserve System would bail you out.

I think that there are a number of reasons, the first being that in doing so, you can make yourself look good, and I also believe that in the Ayn Rand addled mind of Greenspan, speculators are Rand's noble capitalists, and as such need to be coddled and protected.

The best example of this is probably the collapse of Long Term Capital Management (LTCM), where Greenspan set up a bailout that competed with a much more severe haircut for the investors, to see this, but it happened over, and over, and over, and over again.

The only reason that Greenspan could get away with this, and be called a genius for getting away with this, was because he concealed, and in some cases flat out lied, about what he was doing.

That needs to end.

It is corrosive to democracy, it is corrosive to society, and it is corrosive to finance.

Calls for Timmy to be Fired.

Click for full size

---

Congressman Peter DeFasio Calls for "Timmy" Geithner to be fired.


Also coming from right wing 'Phant Kevin Brady

Representative Peter DeFasio (D-OR-4) has now explicitly called for Barack Obama to fire Timothy Geithner, though you will note in the video (top) that he calls him "Timmy" (at about 1:35), which I think is a very deliberate slight.

And, according to The Hill, that removing him, as well as Larry Summers, is now the consensus position for the Congressional Populist Caucus (CPC).

We are also seeing similar calls from the right wingers in the Republican Party too, note the calls made to Geithner's face by Texas whack-doodle Kevin Brady (R-TX-8).

Of note, it appears that Brady's accusation actually got under Geither's skin (bottom video).

When Brady brought up his performance as President of the New York Bank of the Federal Reserve, and suggested that his performance there was sub-par, it's clear that Geithner was irate at this suggestion.

Another Dumbass Move by Governor Paterson

Appointing Kristen Gillibrand to the US Senate, where she now trails Rudy Giuliani by a 54%-40% margin.

Paterson appointed Gillibrand because....Hell....No one knows, but my guess is that it was yet another case of him tacking right, as he did with taxes, until forces by the rest of the New York Democratic party.

Healthcare, The 1st Cloture Motion Passes, 60-39

FDL has the liveblog.

That and £3.00 will get you a Starbucks.

Some notes:

• It now requires 60 votes to accept an amendment to strip out the public option.
• This was just a vote to go to debate so there will be more cloture votes.
• The bill is pretty sucky.

Negotiate … Negotiate … Negotiate …

Today, Brussels, tomorrow, the world!
Bwahahaha!!!!

Paul Krugman has discovered that EU foreign minister Catherine Ashton has a full size replica of a dalek in her sitting room. She received it as a present from her husband.

I'm not certain if I am amused or alarmed....

Supreme Court to Hearing Business Method Patent Case

This is big. Basically, the Supreme Court is reviewing a patent on a business method, specifically a way to hedge against inclement weather (I sh$# you not, someone patented betting on a cloudy day), and it could effect the future of much genetic and software algorithm patents, which, after all, are more discoveries than inventions.

I am with the anti-patent side, whose basic argument is here:

Eben Moglen, director of the Software Freedom Law Centre is emphatic that business process patents should never have been allowed in the first place. Patent law, he says, cannot award ownership of facts of nature, or mere mental activities, or algorithms because the Supreme Court has been unambiguous on that point for more than 150 years. However, for the last 20 years, the USPTO and its supervising appellate court have been liberal with patents for inventions consisting of software or business methods enabled by software.

But I would actually go further: While I understand the need to update patent law to apply to new technologies, I believe that the standard should be a clear showing that a lack of significant innovation is resulting from the lack of protection.

After all, the basic reason for IP, Patent and Copyright specifically is to encourage innovation by limiting the rights of other people to use that expression or invention^*, as it says in Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution of the United States:

The Congress shall have power to .....

To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;

(emphasis mine)

It's about public benefit, not property rights: a temporary exclusive license is granted to an individual in order to help society as a whole.

While some solutions have been offered to deal with this problem, most notably crowd sourcing patent review, the real solution is to go back to where we were in 1985, when neither genes, species, nor software algorithms were patentable. We got innovations in those areas without those protections.

It should be noted that the Supreme Court only takes the cases that it wants to, and lately when it takes up patent cases, it does so to slap down the USPTO and/or the Federal Patent Court, both of whom tend to be like a man with only a hammer, and see everything like a nail.

In arguments, the court, except for Clarence Thomas, who never talks, appeared to be somewhat disparaging of the arguments of the plaintiffs:

Huge legal expenses and 13 years later, the two men behind the case, Bernard Bilski and Rand Warsaw, had their day in the U.S. Supreme Court on Nov. 9. Most legal experts though, agreed that the duo had no chance of victory. "I don't think anyone other than Bilski thinks that Bilski deserves a patent," says Mark Lemley, a professor of law at Stanford University. (See the 50 best inventions of 2009.)

The bench seemed to reflect this view, and several Justices suggested somewhat humorously that if the Bilski argument were to proceed, a number of other ludicrous patents could be issued. Justice Antonin Scalia asked if under Bilski's argument, methods of horse-training could be patented, while the court's newest member, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, asked if a "method of speed-dating" was patentable.

The interesting thing here is that most of the business community, excluding patent trolls and their close relatives, realize that the current system is completely out of control, which is obvious when the Wall Street Journal has an OP/ED that describes the case as, "The Supreme Court v. Patent Absurdity - WSJ.com".

^*Trademark protection is really about protecting the consumer by ensuring that what they buy is what they thought that they were buying.

The Death of Stealth

Click for full size

---

The shape of anti-stealth

The USAF is expanding a massively parallel supercomputer. It is made from 2,200 Sony PlayStation 3 game consoles, and its purpose is deriving more resolution from radar imagery:

The U.S. Air Force is looking to buy 2,200 Sony PlayStation 3 game consoles to built out a research supercomputer, according to an document posted on the federal government's procurement Web site.

The PlayStation 3s will be used at the Air Force Research Laboratory's information directorate in Rome, N.Y., where they will be added to an existing cluster of 336 PlayStation 3s being used to conduct supercomputing research.

The Air Force will use the system to "to determine the best fit for implementation of various applications," including commercial and internally developed software specific to the PS3's Cell Broadband Engine processor architecture. The research will help the Air Force decide where Cell Broadband Engine processor-derived hardware and software could be used in military systems.

The Air Force has used the cluster to test a method of processing multiple radar images into higher resolution composite images (known as synthetic aperture radar image formation), high-def video processing, and "neuromorphic computing," or building computers with brain-like properties.

The thing to note is that the PS/3 costs about $250 online, so the cost of buying all these boxes is under ½ a million dollars.

That's less than most missiles out there, and by fusing the data, you can get a much more accurate picture of position and heading, probably close enough for a targeting solution.

If you assume that each one of the data centers costs about $1 million, even a relatively poor nation could deploy dozens of centers around the country, and use them to detect stealthy attack.

Heck, with a size of 12.8"(W) x 3.8"(H) x 10.8"(L), 0.304 you could fit 2200 PS3s in a box 8¾ feet on a side, so, if you assume that putting them and a rack and cabling them together increases the required volume by a factor of 5, you can fit the system on about 4 flatracks (picture).

If you were just to buy the boxes, and extract the electronics, you might be able to fit this in one flatrack, though at that point, power and cooling get iffy.

Still, the technology for ganging the PS3's cell processors into a massively parallel supercomputer is very much public knowledge, with most of the requisite software being GPLed open source.

Stupid

So, the crew of the HMS Scimitar decided to do target practice on a buoy, which should be no big deal, only before opening fire, they adorned their target the Spanish Flag, and the ambassador to Spain has been forced to apologize:

The Royal Navy was accused yesterday of using a Spanish flag as a machine-gun target.

Giles Paxman, the UK's new ambassador in Madrid, was forced to apologise after sailors fired at a red-and-yellow flag affixed to a buoy while patrolling off Gibraltar.

He was summoned to the Spanish Foreign Ministry for a dressing down and officials said he had conceded there had been an 'error of judgement'.

I'm not entirely sure why the crew did this, it was not for any historical purposes, as the anniversary of the battle of the Spanish Armada was August 8.

My guess is that this has something to do with the 300 year long dispute over Gibraltar, but even so, I think that one ship captain is facing early retirement in Her Majesty's Navy.

Harry Reid Disses David Broder

So it appears that Harry Reid is telling the "Dean of the Washington Press Corps" to go Cheney Himself:

"In tomorrow's Washington Post, David Broder, their distinguished senior columnist, certainly not a political conservative, expresses his reservation as a citizen about the steps that we could be about to take," McConnell said.

Reid couldn't have been less impressed. "To focus on a man who has been retired for many years and writes a column once in a while is not where we should be."

(emphasis mine)

David Broder has been highly respected for his writing columns calling liberals DFHs^* and giving a tongue bath to the conservative establishment since the 1960s.

Actually, it's been the same article, written over and over again.

Nice to see that Harry Reid is calling him irrelevant. One wishes that this statement had been made decades ago by hundreds of more people.

Of course Broder is a conservative. He has been a spokesman for the status quo for over 40 years, though his real constituency is the Washington, DC cocktail party circuit.

^*Dirty F$#@ing Hippies.

My Congratulations to Speaker Boehner, Majority Leader McConnell, and President Palin

You know, we all thought that we elected FDR or JFK in 2008, but it appears that we elected Herbert Hoover instead:

This recession has taught us that we can’t return to a situation where America’s economic growth is fueled by consumers who take on more and more debt. In order to keep growing, we need to spend less, save more, and get our federal deficit under control. We also need to place a greater emphasis on exports that we can build, produce, and sell to other nations – exports that can help create new jobs at home and raise living standards throughout the world.

(emphasis mine)

Unemployment is, 10.2%, 17½% if you use U6, which the metric that most closely matches the numbers used to arrive at the 24.9% level during the Great Depression, and he thinks that it's time to cut the deficit.

It's the wrong prescription, and notwithstanding polls, people don't vote on the deficit, they vote on the economy, and except for little Timmy Geithner's friends in wall street, the economy has consistently gotten worse, and it will continue to get worse as Obama plays to Wall street, and not Main Street.

H/t the artist formerly known as Armando

The Political Cartoonists Get It

Click for full size

---

Too True

At least David Horsey at the Seattle PI.

Note, however, that the "Very Serious People" inside the beltway don't.

Finally

Click for full size

---

Up and Running

But no time to remove the flag?

They have finally got all the Europrop International TP400-D6 engines running on the EADS A400M military transport a the same time.

If you look closely (bottom pic), you will notice that they have so busy, that they still have the South African flag on the fuselage, even though that nation canceled their contract.

What can I say, this is a day for death spirals.

New F-35 Maneuver : The Death Spiral

Click for full size

---

Compare and Contrast

Well, we have yet another report that the F-35 well over budget and behind schedule:

Reports prepared by the Defense Contract Management Agency for Defense Department officials show that Lockheed and other contractors are months late on deliveries of test airplanes and components for future production aircraft.

The program is even farther behind on testing, and the reports say Lockheed could exhaust its development budget within a year.

Problems cited in the documents, obtained by the Star-Telegram under the Freedom of Information Act, support a recent Pentagon assessment that F-35 development will require two more years and billions of additional dollars.

That's not the death spiral part. The death spiral part is that many of the partners are looking at deferring or canceling purchases on the basis of the schedule slips and price increases:

In a long-awaited decision, cabinet's national security committee was due to sign off on the $16 billion purchase before Christmas.

But defence budget pressures and Defence Department concerns about Australia becoming the lead foreign customer for the initial production models of the F-35 fighter are expected to force a postponement until the new year of a government green light for the acquisition.

As the budget numbers come out, you will see reductions or orders, which will drive unit price up, which will lead to reductions of orders, rinse, lather, repeat.

Pictures: Kliper Space Module

Click for full size

---

Models at the Paris Airshow


With an associated "space tug"


Escape tower system


Orbital module separation


Full size mockup


Lifting body configuration


Configuration:
1-Reentry capsule; 2-Docking section; 3-Docking port; 4-Service module

Mat Rodina, aka Stanislav Mishin, generally posts on issues of Russian diplomacy and economics, with a generally nationalist bent.

I find it a good read, because I think that helps one understand some of the Russian concerns out there, though I frequently disagree.

Well, this Tuesday, he went looked at space technology, and posted about eh Kliper spacecraft, which has been proposed to replace the Soyuz. (see also the wiki)

Given the experience of the space shuttle, where the juxtaposition of solid boosters and a cryogenic fuel tank in parallel to the vehicle have led to disaster, the fact that the configuration sits atop, as opposed to astride, the tankage, much like the Dyna-Soar concept is probably a good thing.

On the other hand, the fact that it also has a cargo capacity of roughly 1000 kg is to my mind a mistake. The shuttle showed that mixing manned and payload functions in a single launch is uneconomical.

It's propulsion includes a service module which is not returned from orbit, much like the current Soyuz or the Apollo capsules.

The Kliper has had a number of different concepts over the years, winged, lifting body, and something called a "hybrid version", according to Buran-Energia.

Pictures are from the Wiki, or Buran-Energia.

Nice to Know that the Bizarre Music Video Lives

Sort of NSFW, there are nekked butts.

I will never think about the phrase, "Naked Furniture," the same way again.

The band is Valley Lodge, the song, All of My Loving.

I Don't Like Billboards

But I'll make an exception for these 11.

Cool.

For the "Kill Bill" movies


Benjamin Moore paints











My favorite, Bubble Gum


The Economist

It's Bank Failure Friday!!!!

And here they are, ordered, and numbered for the year so far.

124. Commerce Bank of Southwest Florida, Fort Meyers, Fl
     

Full FDIC list

Caturday

Video h/t Know Your Meme, and technically Caturday is Saturday, but I always do my cat blogging on Friday.

Deep Thought

H/t driftglass.

Update on the Fed Audit

Alan Grayson on the Bill

On Tuesday, we were getting reports from there was a conspiracy afoot to emasculate the bill in the dead of night, using an amendment put forward by Representative Mel Watt (D-NC) wherein the GAO could "audit" the Fed, but could not actually get detailed information. It actually made the Federal Reserve less transparent.

Yves Smith rather colorfully, and very accurately described the amendment as, "Tantamount to saying you are permitted to operate a strip club as long as the patrons are prohibited from looking at un or underclad bodies." (heh)

What followed was a bit of theater, where the opponents of the audit, rolled out economists who argued that the audit proposal was destructive, but neglected to mention their own financial ties to the Federal Reserve:

But far from a broad cross-section, the "prominent economists" lobbying on behalf of the Watt bill are in fact deeply involved with the Federal Reserve. Seven of the eight are either currently on the Fed's payroll or have been in the past.

The Fed connections are not outlined in the letter sent around to committee members on Wednesday, but are publicly discernible through a review of their resumes, which are all posted online.

It should also be noted that the publishing staff of almost every significant economic academic journal has similar conflicts of interest with regard to the Federal reserve.

Well, despite the best efforts of the Federal Reserve, and Barney Frank, and Mel Watt, the Paul/Grayson audit bill was passed by the House Finance Committee by a vote of 43-26, 15 Dems voted for it, in addition to all the Republicans.

Hopefully, this will progress further, but my guess is that the knives will be coming out on this.

Major props to Ryan Grim of HuffPo, he's the author of the HuffPo links here, who has been on this like white on Rice.

Bye-Bye Ukraine

Both Sweden and Finland signed on to the new northern natural gas pipeline from Russia to Europe, meaning that in 2012, Ukraine will no longer be the only way for Russian gas to make it to Europe.

This means that gas transit fees to the Ukraine, and the price of natural gas sold to the Ukraine, as well as the gas that is "lost in transmission" (stolen) are all likely to decrease.

In the short term, it means that the Russians want to make sure not to honk off anyone with short term gas disruptions, hence the recent agreement between the two government to waive penalties for Ukraine buying less gas than agreed to in their contract, because they don't need to when they are an IMF economic disaster zone.

I think that the new pipeline may be why the Azeris are talking about selling their gas to Asia, particularly the Chinese, rather than Europe right now too.

They realize that the Ukrainian pipeline is likely decreasing utility in the future, and they can hook into the Russian system in fairly quickly once the northern pipeline is completed, so having the option to selling to Asian markets is a plus.

More Ass Covering by the Fed

Once again, the Fed discovers consumers in order to forestall an audit, and the Consumer Financial Protection Agency taking over their purview.

This time, the Fed is going after fees on gift cards.

Seriously, is there anyone with two brain cells to rub together who does not understand that the Federal Reserve was hostile to the idea of actually enforcing consumer protections until Congress started about auditing it and taking away some of its enforcement power.

Deep Thought

If the credit crisis is over, and the recession is coming to an end, why are "Citigroup Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. are hoarding cash as if another crisis were on the way?"

Methinks that something wicked this way lurks in off balance sheet entities.

Blue Dog Walking

Rep. Allen Boyd (FL-02), a prominent Blue Dog who voted against the Stimulus and the Healthcare Bill, is trailing state Senate Minority Leader Al Lawson in the primary, with Lawson leading 35%-31%.

Understand that the rule of thumb is that undecideds currently break about 2:1 for the challenger, and Boyd knows this, so he is already running ads in the district.

To be fair, this is not a Blue Dog in a solidly Democratic district, McCain got 54%, but it's been a Democratic seat for decades (there was a guy who switched mid-term, and he got defeated the next election), and the congressional seat went Democratic by over 20 points.

I think that the district, and the nation, can be better served by someone less inclined to be reflexively right wing.

Of Course It's Rahm

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

The House Hispanic Caucus is blaming Rahm Emanuel for the efforts to completely exclude illegal aliens from the health care system.

While I understand the argument that illegals should not get taxpayer money, to the degree that they participate in the plan, it lowers the cost for the rest of us, so this is literally cutting off one's nose to spite one's face.

Rahm Emanuel, and the Obama White House, are shocked (see pic), shocked, to find that there are people accusing them of race baiting on this bill.

Well, it's not surprising, Emanuel has been demagoguing the immigration issue, with the help of his DINO friend, and clay headed quarterback Heath Shuler for years.

It took a revolt of the House Hispanic Caucus to stop him last time.

Rahm Emanuel's modus operandi has always been to sh%$ on Democratic core constituencies wherever possible, and this has Rahm's fingerprints all over it.

What's more, looking at a time-line of his career, it's pretty clear that if Rahm wants it, it's bad for the Democrats.

Wrong!

Nancy Pelosi is now saying that any financial transaction tax must be internationally agreed on:

Any tax imposed on financial transactions would have to take effect internationally to keep Wall Street jobs and related business from moving overseas, U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi said on Thursday.

"It would have to be an international rule, not just a U.S. rule," Pelosi said at a news conference. "We couldn't do it alone, we'd have to do it as an international initiative."

This is wrong on a number of levels:

• There is already such a tax in the UK, and it has been there for years, and London's "The Street" still rivals Wall Street.
• The US had a tax on stock purchases well into the 1960s, and it did not chase investors over seas.
• The idea that much of the financial industry would go elsewhere is a bad thing is simply misguided. Above a certain proportion of GDP, it becomes a source of parasitic loss, and detracts from our economic well-being.
  
• If we wait for international consensus, it will never happen.

I'm just saying.

Zimbabwe Update

The big news is the political fight over a bill to reform the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe, which after much conflict, was finally passed by Parliament.

What likely led to this meeting of the minds was evidence that the incompetent and corrupt management of RBZ Director Gideon Gono was driving away potential donors and foreign investors.

That being said, I do not think that the RBZ bill was why China has signed an $8 billion investment deal.

In any case, Gono was last seen attempting to strong-arm banks into lending to expropriated farms, which is not surprising as the ZANU-PF is stepping up its farm seizures for corrupt bureaucrats program.

In any case, the unity government is holding cabinet meetings again, which is a good sign, I guess.

Of more significance is the fact that Botswana President Ian Khama is calling for new elections and explicitly blaming the ZANU-PF for the lack of progress.

It's nice that someone involved the SADC "Enable Mugabe Program" is pushing back.

Additionally, we are starting to see protests in Europe against the SADC's support of Mugabe: Zimbabwe Vigil has petitioned the EU to suspend all aid to members of the SADC, which is a start.

More significant, though may be the fact that PM Morgan Tsvangirai is to meet with Libyan President Muammar Gaddafi, current chairman of the AU.

This is a positive development for a number of reasons:

• Gadaffi won't run like a scared kitten at Mugabe's accusations of being a "neocolonialist stooge", because, after all, Ronald Reagan tried to kill him, and he blew up Pan Am flight 103.
• As head of the AU, he words have a lot of influence.
• As an oil exporter, his dollars have a lot of influence.
• Gadaffi is very interested in getting credibility on the world stage, and by taking on Mugabe aggressively, he gets that credibility with almost no risk involved.
  

So, after massive smuggling, murders by the authorities, and forced labor, the Kimberley Process decides against suspending Zimbabwe's certification as a being not "conflict diamonds", despite a
report from their own investigators saying that they should be suspended.

This reveals the Kimberly process a complete and utter joke, and on queue, once the threat of suspension is lifted, the New Reclamation Group Ltd. mining company sweeps in with a contract.

There is a promise by the Zimbabwe government not to export diamonds until measures are in place to prevent abuse, but I don't trust this very much, if it comes from the Prime Minister's office, then it means nothing, and if it comes from Mugabe, it's a flat out lie.

Of note, The Rapaport Group and the RapNet Diamond Trading Network have announced that they are "implementing an immediate trading ban on all diamonds from Zimbabwe due to severe human rights violations in Marange," and Leber Jeweler Inc. has announced the same.

Meanwhile, outside of the diamond trade, things continue apace, with Mugabe and the ZANU-PF planning to introduce a law which would require that foreign owned companies be majority black owned. Note: not even the majority locally owned, this is determined by the pigmentation of the equity holders.

ZANU-PF has become the party of Apartheid in Zimbabwe.

We also have continued use of the state security apparatus to intimidate the opposition, with the head of the national trade union being arrested on trumped up charges, as well as the increasingly bizarre trial of deputy agriculture minister-designate Roy Bennett.

What do we have on the case of Bennett, we have a judge who made statements at the trial of the chief witness against Bennett that indicate bias. This is important because this witness, Peter Hitschmann, has recanted his testimony and alleged that it was extracted by torture.

We also have the police presenting weapons that were not seized from Bennett's house as evidence, and that the Defence is has a request to have the police log books on this matter made available to them, and the police, as well as the attorney general, are vociferously fighting this.

The Crazy Will Not End

A 52% Of Republicans believe that ACORN stole the election for Barack Obama in 2008.

This is not going to end well. These people are even stronger than the folks who claimed that Ross Perot stole the election for Clinton in 1992.

One needs to understand the difference between the opposition and the enemy, and understand that you cannot negotiate with the former.

Unfortunately, you can count the former in without running out of fingers.

New York's Top Court Says that Public Institutions Can Recognize Out-of State Same Sex Marriages

Good.

Up Yours Tony Blair

So says the EU, who picked Belgium Prime Minister Herman Van Rompuy as the new European Union President.

Blair was trying hard to get that position, but my guess is that the whole "War Crime/Bush's Poodle" thing did him in.

This is a Good Idea

Once again, Sheila Bair shows that she, a George W. Bush holdover, is the only one in this administration who gets it.

She is proposing that the FDIC require that the rates paid underwriters and ratings agencies be determined by the performance of the instruments that they handle:

he Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. may force underwriters and raters of asset-backed securities created by banks to be compensated based on the bonds’ performance, an agency official said.

Such a requirement may be part of new rules for bank securitizations that the FDIC staff proposes at an agency board meeting next month, Michael Krimminger, special adviser for policy to FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair, said today in a telephone interview.

I'm sure that Timothy "Eddie Haskell" Geithner hates this idea, because it makes his Wall Street peeps responsible for their actions, but that's how he rolls.

Unfortunately, the scope is limited, because the FDIC's rules only apply to banks, and not their parent companies, but this is an idea that should be implemented industry wide.

It would cost Wall Street a lot of money, but f$#@ them, they have a lot of our money to begin with.

God Bless the Onion

Area Man Passionate Defender Of What He Imagines Constitution To Be:

.....

"Right there in the preamble, the authors make their priorities clear: 'one nation under God,'" said Mortensen, attributing to the Constitution a line from the Pledge of Allegiance, which itself did not include any reference to a deity until 1954. "Well, there's a reason they put that right at the top."

"Men like Madison and Jefferson were moved by the ideals of Christianity, and wanted the United States to reflect those values as a Christian nation," continued Mortensen, referring to the "Father of the Constitution," James Madison, considered by many historians to be an atheist, and Thomas Jefferson, an Enlightenment-era thinker who rejected the divinity of Christ and was in France at the time the document was written. "The words on the page speak for themselves."

.....

Brilliant.

OK, this is Scary

Remember yesterday, when I said that 1 in 16 (6.25%) homes was delinquent or in foreclosure?

That number counted only those people who were more than 60 days delinquent, and it counted all homeowners.

If you count all delinquent mortgages, not just 60+ days, and do so as a percentage of the mortgages, not homeowners, then 14.41% of all mortgages were either behind a payment or in foreclosure, the highest number recorded since this statistic started being collected by the Mortgage Bankers' Association in 1972.

That's 1 in 7 mortgages.

We are unbelievably screwed.

Economics Update

Click for full size

---

The Number Needs to be Under 400,000
H/t Calculated Risk

The Index of Leading Economic Indicators rose for the 7^th straight month, indicating that a recovery is underway, as does the Philadelphia Bank of the Federal Reserve's survey of manufacturing hitting 16.7, the highest level since June, 2007.

Unemployment though, is not cooperating, with initial unemployment claims unchanged from last week, they are still 505,000, unemployed is still on a pace to increase.

Basically, if it is above 400K, it still sucks, and this applies to the 4 week moving average too, which fell to 514,000, down 6,500

The continuing claims numbers are better, down 39,000 to 5.61 million, but still pretty grim too.

I would note that the continuing claims number does not count people who have moved to extended benefits, and that jumped 119,000 to 4.16 million.

You do the math 39,000 on the up side, 119,000 on the down side, gives us 80,000 of ugly.

In any case, concerns about continued growth, which I think were driven by the lack of improvement in first time claims, has people fleeing to safety again, with yields on 3-month Treasury Bill maturing in January going negative for the first time since December of last year, because people are willing to pay to keep their money safe for the next month or so..

Additionally, we have the Bank of Japan sending out signals that it will be keeping rates low, because it is concerned about deflation.

These concerns have driven oil down and the dollar and yen up.

This is What You Get When You Go For Bipartisanship

Not only were there bogus tax cuts in the unemployment extension, in order to pick up a few Republican votes, it now appears that the extended benefits will expire at year's end, because they were paying attention to the end of the year when they passed this bill just 2 weeks ago.

If the Republicans want to stop a bill like this, one that has a huge majority supporting it, they should be made to express their opposition on the floor. Spending a few months cajoling them is counter productive.

Stewart on Palin

When he says:

When you peel back the pretty, shooty layers of the Palin onion, there's no onion. It's just a conservative boiler plate mad lib: 'Freedom is good and taxes are--ooh I need an adjective--how about, I don't know, silly?' And the worst part it's a mad lib delivered as though it were the hard-earned wisdom of a life well lived.

It's just magical, and it starts at 3:40, though the first part is amusing too.

It's not as good as Stephen Colbert's takedown of her (scroll down). But it is very good.

The Senate Healthcare Bill is Out

And, no surprise, it is much weaker tea than the house version:

Here is how the merged Senate bill compares to the legislation passed in the House. The merged Senate legislation has lower affordability standards, covers less people, invests less in prevention, does not require all large employers to provide health insurance, and includes a weaker public option. But the bill goes further in controlling health care spending and reducing the deficit.

I still don't think that we will get a bill that will provide meaningful healthcare reform.

Too many people *cough* Barack Obama *cough* just want something that they can call healthcare reform.

Is Pop Musician Bryan Adams Being Investigated For His Involvement in a Child Prostitution Ring?

Of course not. The only crime of Bryan Adams is that he makes crappy music. From a quick look at the Wiki, it appears that he does charity, though I think that his support of PETA is misguided, and so I have no hostility to him, though if one of his song's comes on, I will change the station.

In perusing his Wiki page, I also discovered that he also does photography, and appears to be pretty good at this, having won some awards.

So, why do I post this? Because Lindsay Beyerstein, aka Majikthise, had a post on the Runners' World photos of Sarah Palin that ended up in Newsweek, and in her initial post, she named listed the prographer of record as Bryan Adams, when the photographer was actually Brian Adams.

It's not surprising that she got a complaint from Mr. Adams' representatives, after all that's their job, but their threats were over the top:

Maybe Palin didn't realize that the photographer, Brian Adams, was depicting her this way. If so, he totally fucked her over. But I think she was on board with the concept. If Palin had assailed Runner's World for making fun of her, I might now take her complaint about Newsweek seriously. She liked the Runner's World spread, though. She thought it was appropriate. [NB: In an earlier version of this post, I misspelled Brian Adams' name "Bryan Adams." Today, I got an email from a firm called Web Sheriff telling me that they'd take legal action if I didn't apologize to the rock star Bryan Adams and ACI for any injury I might have caused to his reputation. So, I sincerely apologize to Bryan Adams. I wouldn't want my name associated with these ridiculous pictures either.]

(emphasis original)

Take legal action? What the f$#@ is wrong with these folks?

Needless to say, when folks like this (Web Sheriff, not Mr. Adams) engage in dick swinging like this, they deserve all the satire that they receive.

As to Mr. Adams, I would suggest that you retain someone with a clue to protect your reputation on line, though the best way to improve your reputation would be to stop making record albums.

BTW, it appears that Web Sheriff is a British firm, and Britain's nutzo libel laws might very well be behind WS's attitude.

They Can't Even Get Arrested in This Town

I am referring, of course to the group of Christo-Fascist bigot whack-doodles who call themselves that Christian Anti-Defamation Commission, who protested the expansion to the hate crimes law outside Department of Justice headquarters.

It turns out that the law requires, that one explicitly plan, or actively incite violence against a protected group, so they could not get themselves arrested, though they did attract counter protesters, who quickly owned them:

No hands were cuffed. In fact, the few cops in attendance were paying no attention to the speakers, instead talking among themselves and checking their BlackBerrys.

The evangelical activists had been hoping to provoke arrest, because, as organizer Gary Cass of the Christian Anti-Defamation Commission put it, "we'd have standing to challenge the law." But their prayers were not answered. Nobody was arrested, which wasn't surprising: To run afoul of the new law, you need to "plan or prepare for an act of physical violence" or "incite an imminent act of physical violence."

Instead of getting arrested, the ministers got something else: A couple of dozen gay activists, surrounding them with rainbow flags and signs announcing "Gaga for Gay Rights" and "I Am a Love Warrior." By the end, the gay rights activists had taken over the lectern and the sound system and were holding their own news conference denouncing the ministers.

The kicker to all this:

Cass turned angrily to the AV guy. "We're not on the clock, are we?" He turned with equal anger to Valk. "You guys gonna help us pay for the microphones?"

The gay activist smiled. "God," he said, "works in mysterious ways."

In this case, God took the form of Chuck Fazio, from DC Podiums. Fazio was hired by the religious conservatives to provide the sound system for the event, but upon learning of their cause, he decided to donate his proceeds to the gay rights activists and to give them a chance at the microphone before shutting down the amplifiers. "I don't want bad karma," he explained, noting with some pride that the lectern they were using was the same one used by Borat on a recent Washington visit.

(emphasis mine)

Heh.

Stephen Colbert on Going Rouge Rogue

Brilliant