I am a Bad Person

Natalie has an audition for a magnet program this morning, and I suggested that she keep the bling to a minimum, so that she does not distract from her performance.

Then I qualified my statement, saying, "Then again, I am an engineer giving fashion advice, which is a lot like Jared Loughner giving gun safety advice."

I am not a good person.

W00t!!!!

The new router has arrived, and after a couple of hours on tech support for my daughter's laptop (a conflict between the Dell supplied software and the router), we are all connected again.

W00t!!!!

Yes

Jack Balkin asks, with the regard to the clearly illegal and punitive pretrial detention of Bradley Manning, "Is the Obama Administration countenancing torture of a US serviceman?"

This has been another episode of simple answers to simple questions.

On a more substantive note, read Glen Greenwald's essay on how our government, both the Bush and Obama administrations have created an environment of fear to silence dissent:

At the time, I dismissed those concerns as both ill-founded and even slightly paranoid. From a strictly legal standpoint, those concerns were and are ill-founded: WikiLeaks has never even been charged with, let alone convicted of, any crime, nor does it do anything different than what major newspapers around the world routinely do, nor has it been formally designated a Terrorist organization, nor -- I believed at the time -- could it ever be so designated. There is not -- and cannot remotely be -- anything illegal about donating to it. Any efforts to retroactively criminalize such donations would be a classic case of an "ex post facto" law unquestionably barred by the Constitution. But from a political perspective, the crux of the fear was probably more prescient than paranoid: within a matter of months, leading right-wing figures were equating WikiLeaks to Al Qaeda, while the Vice President of the U.S. went on Meet the Press and disgustingly called Julian Assange a "terrorist."

But more significant than the legal soundness of this fear was what the fear itself signified. Most of those expressing these concerns were perfectly rational, smart, well-informed American citizens. And yet they were petrified that merely donating money to a non-violent political and journalistic group whose goals they supported would subject them to invasive government scrutiny or, worse, turn them into criminals. A government can guarantee all the political liberties in the world on paper (free speech, free assembly, freedom of association), but if it succeeds in frightening the citizenry out of exercising those rights, they become meaningless.

So much of what the U.S. Government has done over the last decade has been devoted to creating and strengthening this climate of fear. Attacking Iraq under the terrorizing banner of "shock and awe"; disappearing people to secret prisons; abducting them and shipping them to what Newsweek's Jonathan Alter (when advocating this) euphemistically called "our less squeamish allies"; throwing them in cages for years without charges, dressed in orange jumpsuits and shackles; creating a worldwide torture regime; spying on Americans without warrants and asserting the power to arrest them on U.S. soil without charges: all of this had one overarching objective. It was designed to create a climate of repression and intimidation by signaling to the world -- and its own citizens -- that the U.S. was unconstrained by law, by conventions, by morality, or by anything else: the government would do whatever it wanted to anyone it wanted, and those thinking about opposing the U.S. in any way, through means legitimate or illegitimate, should (and would) thus think twice, at least.

We need to remember that the vast bulk of the citizenry in Saddam Hussein's Iraq had no worry of arrest and torture, nor is there that fear in the even more brutal regime in Burma/Myanmar.  These were terror regimes, but the terror was directed at those who challenged the state, and it is now the deliberate policy of our government to do the same, it's just a bit more subtle about it.

Jon Stewart on Tucson

Not funny, but a hell of a lot more thoughtful, and wise, than anything else that I have seen:

Suspected Israeli Spy Released By Saudi Government

The suspect spy was a vulture.

Really, I mean that literally.

It appears that an Israeli academic tagged some vultures with tracking tags, and the Saudis were worried about their potential threat to state security:

A Saudi Arabian prince has announced that a tagged Israeli vulture captured last week and accused of being a Mossad agent will be released, according to ABC News.

The bird was reportedly captured last week by Saudi officials and accused by local media of being part of a "Zionist plot" after it was discovered wearing a GPS tracker labeled Tel Aviv University.

Prince Bandar bin Saud Al Saud dismissed the accusations on Sunday: "These systems are fitted to birds and animals, including marine animals. Most countries use these system, including Saudi Arabia. We have taken delivery of this bird, but we will set it free again after we [have] verified its systems."

When a member of the House of Saud is the voice of sanity, you are doing something very wrong.

God Bless the Rude Pundit

Dear Right-Wingers: You Are All Muslims Now

Just go read this bit of brutal brilliance.

H/t Cthulhuu^* at by invitation only Stellar Parthenon BBS.

*Yes, I know the spelling.  It's a private joke.

OK, I Don't Have Much to Add on the Assassination and Shooting Spree

Click for full size

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These are on the days preceding the shooting

But Brad Delong finds a rather alarming data point.

Here are two members of Congress, both Democrats, from the same state, but in the 4 days before the shooting, Gifford's hits on her wiki page skyrocketed.

There are a number of caveats here:

• Even with the delta, the number is pretty small, under 400 hits peak over a 4 day period.
• This could have been triggered by something as innocent as a mass email to constituents.
• It could be one person, obsessively visiting the page.

It could also be:

• The result of some obscure right wing media figure calling her out.
• The result of a small group of people involved in a conspiracy. (Unlikely, this seems to be the archetypal Lone Gunman).

Anyone aware of any event that might support some the more prosaic explanations?

Delay Sentenced to 3 Years in the Slam

Schadenfreude, sweet schadenfreude!

And 10 years probation on money laundering and conspiracy charges.

The only cloud to this silver lining is that his active work on behalf of human traffickers in the Northern Marianas, creating what was for all intents and purpose a consequence free zone for slavery and forced prostitution, is not a part of this sentence.

I may be a bad person for doing a happy dance about this, but then I am a bad person, because I am doing a happy dance.

The desire for retributive justice is something that is a nearly universal human characteristic, and it is only through conquering our baser animal instincts through the application of higher order thought, and empathy, but I guess that I am simply not so evolved.

Needless to say, the fact that I am unevolved will come as no surprise to those who know me well.

Light Posting Through Tuesday, at Least

Events in Meatspace are involved.

Oh My God

I just heard about the shooting in Arizona.

A federal judge murderer, and a Congresswoman in critical condition with a bullet wound to the head.

All I will say right now is don't jump to conclusions yet.

Posted via mobile.

ADP Got it Wrong

Employment in the US rose by just 103,000, and private payrolls rose by just 113,000, with unemployment falling to 9.4%, though over ⅔ of that is because of people becoming discouraged and leaving the workforce.

Obama Wants to Nuke the Whales

MAnother Wikileaks gem, it appears that the Obama administration was preparing to go after the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society's tax status to placate the Japanese and their whaling obsession:

Japan and the US proposed to investigate and act against international anti-whaling activists from the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society as part of a political deal to reduce whaling in Antarctic waters.

Four confidential cables from the US embassy in Tokyo and the state department in Washington, released by WikiLeaks, show US and Japanese diplomats secretly negotiating a compromise agreement ahead of a key meeting last year of the International Whaling Commission, the body that regulates international whaling.

The American proposal would have forced Japan to reduce the number of whales that Japan killed each year in the Antarctic whale sanctuary in return for the legal right to hunt other whales off its own coasts. In addition, the US proposed to ratify laws that would "guarantee security in the seas" – a reference to acting against groups such as Sea Shepherd that have tried to physically stop whaling.

The US proposal was eventually shot down by Britain and the EU in June 2010, but the cables show that the Sea Shepherd group had become a political embarrassment to Japan after stopping its whaling fleet reaching its annual quota of whale killed for several years.

It simply buggers my mind. What next? Are they going to be biting the heads off of kittens?

Seriously, for all the low expectations that I had for Barack Obama, I didn't expect that they would stun and amaze the way that Bush and His Evil Minions^™ did on a regular basis, but here I am, staring at the screen with an expression on my face resembling that of a cow that just stepped on its own udder.

<Facepalm>

I Knew This in 1968

It has been announced a new study has shown that male circumcision reduces cervical cancer risks for their partners:

Circumcising men can reduce cervical cancer risk in women, a new study shows.

The study involved more than 1,200 HIV-negative, heterosexual couples living in Uganda, where circumcision of male adults is increasingly encouraged as a means of slowing the spread of HIV/AIDS.

Half the men received the surgical procedure at enrollment and the other half were scheduled for circumcision after their participation in the trial ended.

Two years later, the female partners of the men who remained uncircumcised were more likely than the partners of the circumcised men to be infected with human papilloma virus (HPV) types most often associated with cervical cancer.

When I was about 6 years old, I remember discussing the correlation between uncircumcised partners and cervical cancer, though that was prior to the understanding of the correlation between HPV and cervical cancer.

This has been known for something like 100 years.

Jenny McCarthy Can Kiss My Shiny Metal Ass*

Steven Wakefield's now discredited paper in Lancet claiming a tie between autism and vaccines is now more than just a zealot doing bad science.

Brian Deer of the British Medical Journal reveals that it was outright fraud:

In the first part of a special BMJ series, Brian Deer exposes the bogus data behind claims that launched a worldwide scare over the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine, and reveals how the appearance of a link with autism was manufactured at a London medical school.

………

Unknown to Mr 11, Wakefield was working on a lawsuit, for which he sought a bowel-brain “syndrome” as its centrepiece. Claiming an undisclosed £150 (€180, $230) an hour through a Norfolk solicitor named Richard Barr, he had been confidentially 8 put on the payroll two years before the paper was published, eventually grossing him £435 643, plus expenses.

(emphasis original)

Now the question is when he goes to jail for fraud, though if I were the prosecutor, I would add felony murder to the bill of indictment as well.

^*Jenny McCarthy is a big antivaxxer.

If Jews Run the Media,They Are Not Competent

Specifically, they report the story of an Agunah (Literally "Chained Woman) and the resulting protests directed at the ex-husband of a woman who refuses to grant here a religious divorce, a "Get", which under Jewish law means that they are still married:

This should have been a good New Year’s for Aharon Friedman, a 34-year-old tax counsel for the Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee. He spent time with his 3-year-old daughter, and could have been thinking about the influence he will have starting Wednesday, when his boss, Representative Dave Camp of Michigan, becomes chairman of the powerful tax-writing committee.

Instead, Mr. Friedman, an Orthodox Jew, finds himself scrutinized in the Jewish press, condemned by important rabbis, and attacked in a YouTube video showing about 200 people protesting outside his Silver Spring, Md., apartment on Dec. 19. They were angered by Mr. Friedman’s refusal to give his wife, Tamar Epstein, 27, a Jewish decree of divorce, known as a get.

What a surprise, a Republican is being a selfish asshole.

While I do understand that he has issues with the custody arrangement, using the get as a way to extract concessions is beneath contempt.

That being said, I am aware of a number of these cases, and while I strongly object to these enforcement of these medieval (actually pre-medieval) religious statutes, I am aware that this happens dozens, if not hundreds of times a year.

What got to me was this paragraph:

Mr. Friedman and Ms. Epstein have been civilly divorced since April and share custody of their daughter, but they are still married according to Jewish law. And without a get neither he nor Ms. Epstein can remarry within the faith. She is considered an agunah, or chained woman.

(emphasis mine)

If the Jews run the New York Times, they are incompetent, because it misses two points:

• First, if Mr. Reiedman gets civilly remarried, and has a child, a likely thing for a 34 year old Orthodox Jew, the child will not be a mamzer, who would be forbidden from marrying other Jews, while any child that Ms. Epstein has will be a mamzer. (3500 year old religious law is such a joy, huh?)
• Second, it is possible for Mr. Friedman to get a rabbinical ruling allowing him to take a 2nd wife, while Ms. Epstein cannot.
• This has been done in some cases where a wife is in a persistent vegetative state, or completely delusional, since a get cannot be granted under those conditions, it requires the knowing receipt of the get by the wife, so permission for a "2^nd" wife has been given with the the "1^st" wife continue to be financially supported by the husband.
• In this case though, a rabbi approving a 2^nd marriage is basically zero.
  

This makes the conditions of the Agunah unjust and unfair to the woman in the conflict. It is not, nor has it ever been, an equal imposition on both spouses, and a small amount of research should have made this unfortunate state of affairs quite clear.

Clearly, I need to contact the local president of my ZOG chapter and pass my complaint up the chain.

J-20 Video Pr0n

What is with those huge landing gear doors?

Yep, someone got some (remarkably high quality) video of the J-20 doing taxi tests.

As an aside, the recent outpouring of "surreptitiously" snapped photos and videos of the new Chinese fighter prototype indicate that this is something that they really want us to see.

Well, If I Had Been Ignored for 2 Years, I'd Quit Too

Paul Volcker, arguably the person in the administration most strongly for enhanced regulation of financial institution, is leaving the administration:

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker plans to leave his role as head of a panel of experts advising President Barack Obama on the economy, sources familiar with the decision said on Wednesday.

The departure of Volcker, 83, from the President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board is among a series of changes Obama is planning to announce soon.

The decision to leave the board was Volcker's.…

Seeing as how he was generally ignored, and his initiatives, like the Volcker rule were, at best, used as political talking points, it's no wonder.

If I weren't someone with my tongue so far up the banks' rectums that I tasted tonsils (see Summers, Lawrence and Geithner, Timothy), and I were an economic adviser to the Obama administration, I wouldn't have made it past 2 months, much less 2 years.

It's Jobless Thursday

Initial unemployment claims rose by 18,000 to 409,000 last week, though the 4-week moving average fell by 3,500 to 410,750, with continuing claims fell by 47K to 4.103 million, and I can't seem to find the data on extended claims.

In related, and rather surprising news, payroll processor ADP is predicting that private employment increased by 297,000 last month.(!)

If true, this is good news, though I'll wait for the official data tomorrow.

Facebook to Buy Time-Warner in a Multibillion Dollar Stock Deal

Not really, but the obvious parallels between the dot-bomb mania of the late 1990s, and this bit of Vampire Squid^* inspired pump and dump, Goldman Sachs is investing money in, and creating a (completely fictitious) market cap for Facebook of around $50 billion.

Karl Denninger says that it's a scam, and that whoever invests in after Goldman will be left holding the bag, while William Cohan at the New York Times runs the numbers:

Despite the high price of its investment, Goldman sees in Facebook a business bonanza, a nearly perfect nugget of investment-banking opportunities. First, Goldman’s cost of capital is close to zero — as a bank holding company, it can borrow from the Federal Reserve at negligible interest rates — so any capital gain it makes on its venture in Facebook will be sheer profit. Second, Goldman has almost certainly locked up the role of lead manager of the inevitable Facebook initial public offering.

Fees for underwriting public offerings are generally about 7 percent of the value of the stock sold. Facebook could easily sell $2 billion of stock or more, generating fees to Goldman and the other underwriters of at least $140 million. The other benefit for Goldman in leading the public offering — aside from major bragging rights — is that it can use its marketing, sales and distribution muscle to make sure the value of Facebook at the time of the offering exceeds the $50 billion valuation at which Goldman invested.

Goldman has also won from Facebook the right to offer an additional $1.5 billion of the company’s stock to its private-wealth clients. According to The Times, Goldman will be creating a “special purpose vehicle” to sell the stock to its wealthy clients and then will charge them a 4 percent initial fee plus 5 percent of any profits. While on paper it seems that these high rollers would be foolish to invest in Facebook at such a lofty valuation, they will still most certainly feel increased loyalty to Goldman for making such an exclusive opportunity available to them. On top of it all, there is the increased likelihood that Goldman will get to manage a good portion of the $12 billion fortune belonging to Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder, for yet more fees.

Seriously, we bailed out those contemptible f%$#s for this?!?!?

By way of perspective, DC at the by invitation only Stellar Parthenon BBS noted:

• Facebook is worth more than, Starbucks ($25 billion market cap)
• Facebook is worth more than United, American, Delta, JetBlue, and Southwest Airlines combined (About $32 billion combined market cap)
• Facebook is worth about 25 times more than the New York Times Company
• Facebook is bigger than Target's market cap ($43 billion)
• Facebook is worth about twice as much as Dell ($26.5 billion market cap)
• Facebook is worth more than Viacom, which owns MTV and Comedy Central ($28 billion market cap)
• Facebook is worth more than Campbell Soup and General Mills combined ($34.4 billion combined market cap)
• Facebook is worth more than Boeing ($48.7 billion market cap)
• Facebook is worth five times more than Netflix, the stock darling of 2010 ($9.3 billion market cap)
• Facebook is worth more than Nokia, the world's biggest cellphone company ($39.5 billion market cap)

All this for a company that doesn't really sell anything, and has a revenue stream that is rather opaque.

Facebook is still privately held, which implies that they really don't want people to look under the hood until someone really stupid hands them a lot of money.

^*Alas, I cannot claim credit for the bon mot describing Goldman Sachs as a, "great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money." This was coined by the great Matt Taibbi, in his article on the massive criminal conspiracy investment firm, The Great American Bubble Machine.

I Love The Onion

Nuclear Bomb Detonates During Rehearsal For 'Spider-Man' Musical

Light Blogging for a While

Our router gave up the ghost, and right now I'm tethering with my cell phone, which means that in about 15 minutes, I will be able to use my phone to iron my shirts.

Verizon is dispatching us a new one.

Damn.

Still, it's good to be home.

When Does Antonin Scalia Start to Wear a White Robe?

He is now saying that absent legislation, there is a private right to discriminate against women:

The equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution does not protect against discrimination on the basis of gender or sexual orientation, according to Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

In a newly published interview in the legal magazine California Lawyer, Scalia said that while the Constitution does not disallow the passage of legislation outlawing such discrimination, it doesn't itself outlaw that behavior:

Seriously, when then Assistant Attorney General wrote that William Renquist wrote that "A judge who is a "strict constructionist" in constitutional matters will generally not be favorably inclined toward claims of either criminal defendants or civil rights plaintiffs," he wasn't kidding.

A strict constructionist is a judge who prejudges cases to benefit the powerful and corrupt.  They are results based jurists, and the depressing thing is that Scalia is arguably only the 4^th most insane member of the court right now, after Roberts, Alito, and Thomas.

1:40:24 Well Spent

First, an admission: While I saw the first 3 Star Wars movies, that is episode 4, 5, and 6, I only saw Revenge of the Sith among the prequels.

I was visiting my 'Rents in 2007, and as a family thing, we all watched episode 3, and my reaction was a big Meh.

I actually found it a bit more disappointing than Return of the Jedi, which was surprising, since I've seen about 15 minutes of The Phantom Menace in dribs and drabs, the dialogue drives me to change the channel after about 45 seconds.

In any case it gives me the opportunity to review the review of the movie on Red Letter Media, and "Harvey Plinkett" is a genius.

There is some profoundly disturbing humor in the review (3 parts, at link), but this is a cogent and truly intelligent review of The Revenge of the Sith as cinema, and arguably packs more in it's a bit more than an hour and a half than your average college level film course.

This is someone who loves cinema, and can use Citizen Kane (Which he admits is unfair) as well as the first three Star Wars Movies (I call that fair) to show just how poorly done and pedestrian  SW III is.

It is entertaining, even though it is over half as long as the movie being critiques (100 min vs 140 min).

It's delivered in a sort of Ben Steinesque creepy monotone, but that contributes to the enjoyment.

<Facepalm>

Have you heard the latest thing that conservatives are seizing on to accuse Barack Obama of being a godless secret-Muslim socialist Negro?

Well it appears that Barack Obama's speaking positively of the Latin phrase E Pluribus Unum, on the seal of the United States since 1792, has given them a new reason to be shrill:

The culture wars have a new battlefield, thanks to a letter this week from the Congressional Prayer Caucus to President Obama. To the religious right, the motto "E Pluribus Unum," which has been part of the fabric of American democracy since it was emblazened on the national seal in 1782, has become a controversial, anti-God statement. See the Congressional Prayer Caucus letter:

http://forbes.house.gov/UploadedFiles/National_Motto_Letter_to_President.pdf

Obama referred, innocently enough, to the motto "E Pluribus Unum" in a recent speech, pointing out that the Latin phrase, first adopted by the Founders, means "out of many, one." This beautiful motto perfectly captures the spirit of pluralistic America, where one country is formed out of many states, and where one people - the American people - are formed from a melting pot of immigrants from all around the world.

Out of many, one. Indeed, the wisdom of the Founders, in enscribing "E Pluribus Unum" on the Great Seal of the United States, can't be questioned.

Or maybe it can. As the above letter shows, to Rep. Michele Bachmann and others on the Congressional Prayer Caucus, Obama's reference to "E Pluribus Unum" borders on unpatriotic. They say he should instead be promoting the motto "In God We Trust," which was adopted as the official national motto at the urging of religious conservatives in 1956, during the McCarthy era and at the height of the Cold War Red Scare.

Well, I get why they object to the phrase E Pluribus Unum. First, it's another hammer to use against a figure that they clearly see as an uppity (*insert epithet here*), and second, the basic idea of E Pluribus Unum is the acceptance is that people who are different from them, either in philosophy, theology, or pigmentation, are legitimate Americans, which fulfills them with horror.

They are really deeply repulsive human beings.

Gee, You Think?!?!?!

After it was revealed that something like ½ of the top flight academic economists have taken hundreds of thousands of dollars from Wall Street, and then enthusiastically endorsed the policies of deregulation and "financial innovation" which lined their patron's pockets, it now appears that the members of the American Economic Association are considering adopting a code of ethics.

Let's see

• Stanford Business Prof. Darrell Duffie wrote a book on Wall Street regulations without mentioning that is on the board of Moody’s
• Laura D’Andrea Tyson, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, business school UC Berkeley, is a director of Morgan Stanley.
• Richard H. Clarida, Columbia: executive vice president at the bond behemoth Pimco
• R. Glenn Hubbard, dean of Columbia Business School: director of MetLife
• Frederic S. Mishkin, Columbia Business School: high priced consultant to Wall Street Firms
• Martin S. Feldstein, George F. Baker Professor of Economics at Harvard University: former board member, American International Group
• Larry Summers
• Larry Summers
• Larry Summers
• Larry Summers

Why would anyone think that economists might need a small dose of ethics?

David Zurawik is the Dumbest Muthahf%$#er on the Face of the Earth

And considering the fact that he is the Baltimore Sun's TV critic, which means that he had to beat out other TV critics, this is a big hurdle to jump.

You see Zurawik was commenting on the fact that former CBS reporter, and former CNN anchor John Roberts, a generally well respected journalist, was moving from CNN to Fox, largely because Fox was willing to base him in the same town as his fiancee.

When all is said and done, I can agree that this was generally a net plus for Fox in terms of journalism, considering the fact that "Biff the Wonderdog" would be an improvement over the likes of Britt Hume, but then he unleashes this corker:

The channel doesn't need more ratings magnets -- it has all of them any cable channel needs right now. What Fox needs to do is continue to add journalistic strength and depth as it did in October with Juan Williams.

Yes, he said that the man who vehemently defended Clarence Thomas against accusations of sexual harassment while not revealing that he himself was accused of sexual harassment is a paragon of Journalist Strength and depth.

This is a guy who had an interview with George W. Bush, and said, on camera, that he prayed for him.

If this is what David Zurawik calls journalist strength and depth, I am Edward F%$#ing Murrow

Deep Thoughts, Lunch Edition

Two thoughts actually,

First, I will have to leave my cell phone in my car when at work, which makeds me feel kind of naked.

Second, one of the guys at the orientation session had the WORST comb over that I have EVER seen in my life.

Matt Taibbi Does it Again

He has a post on his Rolling Stone blog titled, "An Extremely Long Metaphor to Explain Mortgage Chaos."

It's really not long at all, but it concisely nails all the basic points.

Go read it now.

And Still No Prosecutions…

The robosigners at teh banks are currently stamping signatures of a woman who died in 1995 to legal documents.

This is not sloppy paperwork. This is criminal fraud.

We need to see prosecutions, but we won't, because we are committed to looking forward, and not backward, so we will see more fraud, reckless risk taking, and general corruption in our financial system for decades to come.

Thanks, Barry.

And the Insanity Continues

So after a ruinous recession, the economy shrunk by over a fifth, made worse by austerity programs that were intended to maintain a hard peg to the Euro, Estonia's government has finally achieved the desired result, and at the start of the year, Estonia joins the Euro Zone.

Truth be told, the Estonian government set it up such that there was no choice, since it maintained a hard peg to the Euro, and the Deutsch Mark before that, and almost all the loans outstanding are foreign denominated, so there really never was any sort of fiscal or economic sovereignty in the small Baltic Republic.

If anyone expects an improvement in the standards of living as a result of this though, they are very likely to be disappointed.

China Expected to Field First Carrier in 2011

Click for full size

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The Varyag is out of dry dock

It looks like the Chinese will be launching their first carrier this year.

It's made from the hull (no equipment or propulsion when bought as scrap) of the old unfinished Soviet STOBAR aircraft carrier Varyag, and while I doubt that it will ever serve in anything remotely resembling a combat capability, neither did the USS Langley, though it did see service as a seaplane tender.

What is important here is that it means that China will be developing equipment, doctrine, and training for a carrier borne air wing.

Missing the Point Completely

This article notes that Israel appears to have made significant discoveries in offshore natural gas, but that access to foreign markets will be difficult:

Israel can look forward to long-term energy security after the discovery of a huge off-shore natural gas field but obstacles lie ahead in exporting its output, experts said Thursday.

Israel will find it hard to secure foreign buyers as European gas consumption is weakening while competition is stiff in the expanding Asian market, they said.

Texas-based Noble Energy and its Israeli exploration partners described Wednesday the Leviathan prospect -- 130 km (80 miles) off the Mediterranean port of Haifa -- as the world's biggest gas find in the past decade

This misses the reality of the situation.

When one looks at oil exporting nations, with the exception of Norway, the truth is that it does not bring prosperity to the masses, nor does it make for a better society.

Simply put, Israel should not plan to export the gas in any significant quantity.

First, from a defense perspective, the natural gas serves as a way to achieve energy independence in the relatively short term, and exporting the gas diminishes this.

Secondly, natural gas is the raw material for much of the petrochemical industry, and this could be used to establish such an industry in Israel. A focus on exports would serve to subvert the development of this industry and the additional profits, and jobs, that they would create.

Too True

Much like in reality, the when the cops realize that he has stolen hundreds of millions of dollars, rather than a few thousand dollars, they realize that they cannot prosecute, just like in real life.

Click picture for full cartoon.

Not Enough Bullets … No Consequences for the Rich Edition

The New York Times has an article on real estate developers who repeatedly fail and default, but continue to attract other people's money to their schemes:

Larry Gluck, the apartment building king whose company defaulted on loans in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Washington, recently bought the Windermere Hotel in Manhattan and Tivoli Towers, a subsidized housing complex in Brooklyn.

Ian Bruce Eichner, who lost two major New York skyscrapers to foreclosure in the early 1990s and defaulted on a $760 million loan for a Las Vegas casino resort in 2008, is working on a plan to rescue One Madison Park, a troubled 50-story condominium project.

Even Harry Macklowe, whose $7 billion gamble on seven Midtown skyscrapers at the top of the market almost cost him his entire empire, is out looking for new deals.

Industry lore has it that New York is one of the toughest, most unforgiving real estate markets in the world. The costs are so high, the unions so ornery, the politicians so demanding and the rivalries so fierce, that one false move invites financial disaster.

But the truth is that there have been surprisingly few career fatalities among New York developers, even though they have lost billions of investor dollars on overpriced real estate and have littered the city with unfinished apartment buildings. While a homeowner who lost a house to foreclosure would find it difficult to borrow for years, developers who defaulted on enormous loans have still been able to attract money.

The reasons, experts say, are that there is still plenty of money floating around and that the market has a very short memory.

“You can always find an investor who’ll put up equity with a guy, unless he’s Attila the Hun,” said Daniel Alpert, managing partner at Westwood Capital, a real estate investment bank.

………

This is the very definition of moral hazard, and when someone does this repeatedly, it is not incompetence, it is fraud.

Time to end the bailouts and start prosecuting.

U.S. Navy Splits the Baby on the LCS Contract

Both Lockheed-Martin's conventional design and Austal's Trimaran got contracts for 10 ships, at $538 million, without mission modules, which means not much in the way of meaningful sensors or weapons.

For a ship that weighs as much as a frigate, but is as lightly armed as a corvette, but has the advantage of being able to change tasks, by swapping out mission modules, going from anti-sub warfare, to anti-surface warfare, counter-min, ISR, etc. if it can find its way to suitably equipped port.

Yes, "It's a dessert topping AND a floor wax!"

Yeah, the idea sounds really stupid to me too.

This is a Classic Case of Deterrence

It appears that the Chinese DF-21 anti-ship ballistic missile is operational, a 900 mile range anti-ship missile, at least according to Admiral Robert Willard, Commander, U.S. Pacific Command.

It's intended to be a carrier killer, and while the capabilities, particularly the targeting, are unclear, but considering that the Pershing II's MARV (MAneuverable Reentry Vehicle) got a roughly 30 m CEP, it will certainly give a CVBG cause to pause.

Even the warhead is nothing more than 150kg of high strength steel descending at 1000 m/s, it will still completely ruing a carrier skipper's day.

There are 2 possibility two possibilities here, either this is an attempt by the Pentagon to hype the Chinese threat, or the Chinese are trying to create an effective no-go zone for the flat-tops by creating uncertainty steps to cut in the missile in an operational posture.

Then again, it might be both.

You Have Got to Love Live TV

A late night live TV ad from the 1970s.

I might actually buy the car, it certainly sounds like the guy is telling the truth.

NSFW.

It's Bank Failure Friday!!!!

As I expected, no bank closings New Year's eve, so the count remains at 157 with 17 credit union closing.

By way of comparison, there were 140 bank failures in 2009, and 25 in 2008.

Better than it looked mid-year, but still pretty horrible.

Oh My God

When did cooking become an exercise in meaningless artery plugging macho?

Not entirely SFW.

Yes, This is a Big Deal

Initial unemployment claims fell below 400,000 for the first time in over 2 years, hitting 388,000, down 34K, and the less volatile 4 week moving average fell by 12.5K to 414,000.

We are actually at a number that if sustained, might show a meager recovery in the unemployment rate.

The longer term numbers, continuing claims rose by 57K to 4.13 million, and extended benefits fell by 151.5K to 4.53 million.

I would expect the numbers to rise next week, the Christmas season is over, and this sort of move one week tends to have a rebound, but if somewhere around 375K is the new normal, then things are turning up a big.