Succinct and to the point.
The problem with gun nuts with vigilante fantasies is that they think that shooting an unarmed man is the pinnacle of bravery, when in fact they’re just extreme cowards.
Neither shooting a senile octogenarian on your porch, nor a kid in a hoodie wielding a bag of skittles are heroic, and the people who do it are not heros.
Ever,
As a FYI, I have worked on autonomous vehicles, and I think that using aerial vehicles is unlikely, but juxtaposing this with Google’s self driving cars might be possible.
Well, the French Doctors have finished their autopsy of Yassir Arafat, no Polonium, cause of death inconclusive, so I guess the next question is how did that exotic radioactive element end up in his personal effects, if it did at all:
French investigators studying the remains of Yasir Arafat have concluded that the Palestinian leader most likely did not die of radiation poisoning, Mr. Arafat’s widow, Suha, said here Tuesday. She noted, however, that the investigators did find unusually elevated levels of radioactivity in and around his body.
The results partly contradict and partly confirm those of Swiss scientists who last month reported finding abnormal levels of radioactive polonium-210 in Mr. Arafat’s remains. In contrast to the French, however, they concluded that their findings “moderately support the proposition” that Mr. Arafat, who was 75 at his death in 2004, died of radiation poisoning.
The French investigators concluded that the remains had been irradiated post-mortem by the air and soil surrounding his body and “dismiss the hypothesis of poisoning by polonium-210,” Ms. Arafat said.
………
Mr. Arafat’s body was exhumed in Ramallah, in the West Bank, last year. Body, air and soil samples were taken by French judicial investigators and by the Swiss scientists, who were commissioned by Ms. Arafat, her lawyers said, and by Russian scientists contracted by the Palestinian Authority, whose relations with Ms. Arafat are known to be hostile.
The French report was delivered on Tuesday but has not been made public, as it is part of a continuing judicial inquiry. As a complainant in the case, however, Ms. Arafat is legally authorized to describe its contents.
In contrast with French and Swiss scientists, the Russians have reported finding no abnormal levels of radioactive polonium in Mr. Arafat’s remains, said Saad Djebbar, a lawyer who represents Ms. Arafat. But Mr. Djebbar characterized those findings as unserious and incomplete.
I’m beginning to think that someone is trying to ratf%$# (frame) someone here.
The only question now is who is trying to ratf%$# whom.
Wheels within wheels.
*I last took French in 1979, and got a “C”, so cut me some slack.
Yes, Limbaugh is calling the Pope a Marxist, and I do not mean Groucho, Chico, Harp, Zeppo, or Gummo:
Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh last week called Pope Francis’ economic views laid out in his Vatican mission statement “pure marxism.”
“I have been numerous times to the Vatican. It wouldn’t exist without tons of money,” Limbaugh said in a show titled “It’s Sad How Wrong Pope Francis Is (Unless It’s a Deliberate Mistranslation By Leftists).” “But regardless, what this is, somebody has either written this for him or gotten to him. This is just pure Marxism coming out of the mouth of the Pope.”
Stay classy, at least when you are not doing sex tourism in the Dominican Republic.
It appears that while they were publicly treating it as crazy talk, internally, they were seriously looking at the depositing a trillion dollar coin at the Federal Reserve:
The Obama administration was serious enough about manufacturing a high-value platinum coin to avert a congressional fight over the debt ceiling that it had its top lawyers draw up a memo laying out the legal case for such a move, The Huffington Post learned last week.
The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which functions as a sort of law firm for the president and provides him and executive branch agencies with authoritative legal advice, formally weighed in on the platinum coin option sometime since Obama took office, according to OLC’s recent response to HuffPost’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. While the letter acknowledged the existence of memos on the platinum coin option, OLC officials determined they were “not appropriate for discretionary release.”
HuffPost submitted the FOIA request when there was increased speculation about the use of the platinum coin option ahead of the debt ceiling crisis this fall. Under the compromise reached between the House and Senate following the government shutdown, the U.S. will hit the debt ceiling once again on Feb. 7, though the Treasury can use extraordinary measures to extend that deadline.
Supporters of the platinum coin option say that under a 1996 law allowing the Treasury Department to mint a platinum coin in any denomination, the president could order the manufacture of, say, a $1 trillion coin that would be deposited in the Federal Reserve. The Treasury Department would then use the platinum coin funds to meet government obligations without the need for Congress to grant any additional spending powers.
There are a number of reasons for the Obama administration to fight the FOIA request:
My money* is on a dumb ass secrecy fetish.
The idea that a legal opinion on monetary policy (seigniorage) is somehow, “not appropriate for discretionary release,” is completely ludicrous.
The only potential harm that can come from a release is insider trading from an unauthorized release.
*My money in this case is about 50 Zimbabwean dollars.
$500.00 per stitch?????
There are a number of reasons, but mostly, because they can.
In the, “This is not a surprise,” category, we discover that mergers do not create economies of scale, but rather that they commit pricing power, which give us ……… $500.00 per stitch.
This is an epic troll. I wish that it was my idea:
Recently, I have gotten a lot (for this blog, anyway) of spam comments on my blogs.
Hair extensions, office furniture, and tools.
Just to clarify my comments policy: I moderate ONLY for spam.
I have few enough readers as is.
The “tell” for spam is generic text, and a link to some sort of unrelated commercial activity.
If the link is germane, it’s OK, but this is almost never a link for a good or a service.
If you feel that you have been targeted unfairly, contact me.
If you want to post an ad on my blog, we can talk terms.
We have a leaked document from UN negotiations on how to deal with illegal drugs, and the United States has decided to advocate for the Military-Prison-Industrial complex instead of sanity:
Major international divisions over the global “war on drugs” have been revealed in a leaked draft of a UN document setting out the organisation’s long-term strategy for combating illicit narcotics.
The draft, written in September and seen by the Observer, shows there are serious and entrenched divisions over the longstanding US-led policy promoting prohibition as an exclusive solution to the problem.
Instead, a number of countries are pushing for the “war on drugs” to be seen in a different light, which places greater emphasis on treating drug consumption as a public health problem, rather than a criminal justice matter.
It is rare for such a document to leak. Normally only the final agreed version is published once all differences between UN member states have been removed.The divisions highlighted in the draft are potentially important. The document will form the basis of a joint “high-level” statement on drugs to be published in the spring, setting out the UN’s thinking. This will then pave the way for a general assembly review, an event that occurs every 10 years, and, in 2016, will confirm the UN’s position for the next decade. “The idea that there is a global consensus on drugs policy is fake,” said Damon Barrett, deputy director of the charity Harm Reduction International. “The differences have been there for a long time, but you rarely get to see them. It all gets whittled down to the lowest common denominator, when all you see is agreement. But it’s interesting to see now what they are arguing about.”
The current review, taking place in Vienna at the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs, comes after South American countries threw down the gauntlet to the US at this year’s Organization of American States summit meeting, when they argued that alternatives to prohibition must be considered.
The problem here is that the “war on drugs” has been demagogued in the United States for decades, and when juxtaposed with the aggressive lobbying of private prisons and the US Military (which gets a cut of the border protection action) have made it next to impossible.
Or at least it is impossible for politicians unwilling to take a political risk to do the right thing.
I normally do not make comments about the outcome of sporting events on this blog, and at 3-8 (now 3-9) their playoff chances before the game were about the same as John McCain christening the Gerald Ford class carrier Barack Obama.
However, there was the worst officiating error I have ever seen in the game.
It was worse than the scab referees that they brought in last year:
The NFL’s officiating director said Monday that the officials should have stopped the game during the final minutes of the Washington Redskins’ 24-17 loss Sunday night to the New York Giants to clear up confusion over what down it was during the Redskins’ last drive of the game.
“In this situation where there is obvious confusion as to the status of the down, play should have been stopped prior to third down and the correct down communicated to both clubs,” Dean Blandino, the league’s vice president of officiating, said in a written statement released by the NFL. “This should have occurred regardless of the fact that Washington had no timeouts and it was inside two minutes.”
Blandino said the “ball was correctly spotted” by the officials and referee Jeff Triplette correctly “signaled third down” but the head linesman “incorrectly motioned for the chain crew to advance the chains, which caused the down boxes to read first down.
“Following a Washington incomplete pass, the chains were moved back and the down boxes correctly reset to fourth down,” Blandino said.
………
[Referee Jeff] Triplette told the pool reporter that the officials didn’t halt the game to sort out the confusion “because that would have given an unfair advantage,” apparently to the Redskins, in his view, by stopping the clock. Triplette said he couldn’t respond to Shanahan’s contention he’d been told by an official it was a first down because he was unaware of that situation.
No. If you have an unclear ruling on the field, you halt play, and Mr. Triplette needs not to work in the NFL any more.
Instead, the Redskins took a 1st down play, a long pass, on 3rd down.
It’s OK for refs to make a mistake. Sticking with the mistake, even though you are aware of it at the time, because of its effect on the game, means that you should not be a referee.
Of course, this will be handled through the a process agreed upon by the NFL and the Referees Association, so the consequences of Triplette’s decision are a part of a negotiated collective bargaining agreement, and I support this.
But if there is a way to keep this guy away from making on-field decisions, it would be appreciated.
And while you are at it, how about making the Referees full time employees, so they can train the whole year.
This whole part time thing ain’t working.
Krugman’s latest OP/ED calls for raising the minimum wage.
It’s well thought out, but the limited space of the Times OP/ED page has him leaving out an important point to make, that a low minimum wage is actually a taxpayer funded subsidy for bad employers, because many of these employees qualify for food stamps, welfare, Medicaid, or the EITC.
Walmart and McDonalds actually have a policy to help their employees register for the public dole, because it is cheaper (for them) to dump it all off on the taxpayers.
Raising the minimum wage would tend to be stimulative, because poorer people spend a greater proportion of their income more quickly, and it would lower the deficit, by increasing tax revenues, and decreasing safety net programs.
Of course, the so-called “Deficit Hawks” don’t care, because they don’t really care about the deficit. They just want to punish the poors.
Ratf%$#s.
It appears that someone pointed out to Dem Senators that some major abortion cases in courts dominated by Republican appointees., and the potential of crippling rulings girded the Democratic Caucus into action:
Within hours of each other, two federal appeals courts handed down separate decisions that affirmed sharp new limits on abortion and birth control. One on Oct. 31 forced abortion clinics across Texas to close. The other, on Nov. 1, compared contraception to “a grave moral wrong” and sided with businesses that refused to provide it in health care coverage.
“These are the kinds of decisions we are going to have to live with,” a blunt Senator Harry Reid, the Democratic majority leader, warned his caucus later as it weighed whether to make historic changes to Senate rules. Those changes would break a Republican filibuster of President Obama’s nominees and end the minority party’s ability to block a president’s choices to executive branch posts and federal courts except the Supreme Court.
The moment represented a turning point in what had been, until then, a cautious approach by Democrats to push back against Republicans who were preventing the White House from appointing liberal judges. All the more glaring, Democrats believed, was that they had allowed confirmation of the conservative judges now ruling in the abortion cases. Republicans were blocking any more appointments to the court of appeals in Washington, which issued the contraception decision.
Faced with the possibility that they might never be able to seat judges that they hoped would act as a counterweight to more conservative appointees confirmed when George W. Bush was president, all but three of the 55 members of the Senate Democratic caucus sided with Mr. Reid. The decision represented a recognition by Democrats that they had to risk a backlash in the Senate to head off what they saw as a far greater long-term threat to their priorities in the form of a judiciary tilted to the right.
Gee, you think?
Now is the time for the Senate to get the train rolling, and some liberal, and young, judges on the Federal Circuit Courts.
Following protests at the Port of Oakland, the Port set up a surveillance network on their facilities, law enforcement proceeded to expand the network to cover most of the city:
With this city repeatedly roiled by civil protests and the public’s attention sharply focused on government surveillance, local officials are pushing forward with a federally funded project to link surveillance cameras, license-plate readers, gunshot detectors, Twitter feeds, alarm notifications and other data into a unified “situational awareness” tool for law enforcement.
The Domain Awareness Center, a joint project between the Port of Oakland and city, started as a nationwide initiative to secure ports by networking sensors and cameras in and around the facilities. The busy port is one of seven U.S. maritime facilities that the Department of Homeland Security considers at highest risk of a terrorist attack.
Since its inception in 2009, the project has ballooned into a surveillance program for the entire city. Some officials already have proposed linking the center to a regional Department of Homeland Security intelligence-gathering operation or adding feeds from surveillance cameras around the Oakland stadium and arena complex.
As Digby pithily observes, “We just can’t have enough surveillance centers what with all the protests … er terrorists.”
If you build it, law enforcement will use in ways that it was not originally intended for.
Here is the trailer for Kidnapped for Christ:
You know if you told me that I would ever endorse a media effort by a member of ‘N Sync a few days ago, I would have said that you were nuts.
We live in strange times.
Mark Roe at Harvard has concluded that in addition to everything else, to big to fail (2B2F) is a petri dish for incompetent insulated management:
Corporate governance incentives at too-big-to-fail financial firms deserve systematic examination. For industrial conglomerates that have grown too large, internal and external corporate structural pressures push to re-size the firm. External activists press it to restructure to raise its stock market value. Inside the firm, boards and managers see that the too-big firm can be more efficient and more profitable if restructured via spin-offs and sales. But for large, too-big-to-fail financial firms (1) if the value captured by being too-big-to-fail lowers the firms’ financing costs enough and (2) if a resized firm or the spun-off entities would lose that funding benefit, then a major constraint on industrial firm over-expansion breaks down for too-big-to-fail finance.
His insight is two fold.
First is the point made by plenty of economists that 2B2F institutions are able to borrow money at lower rates, because, notwithstanding the law, if they implode, their creditors expect to be the beneficiary of a government bailout, because the consequences of not doing so are perceived to be catastrophic.
The second point is far more interesting, and original. He believes that one of the constraints on executive behavior is the potential takeover by any of the many vultures out there (Icahn, Pickens, etc.), and that they are too big to be taking:
These lower financing costs from the too-big-to-fail subsidy are a shadow poison pill — the corporate governance defense that managers and boards have used to ward of unwanted takeovers in the industrial sector. Worse, the shadow financial pill impedes restructurings more strongly than a conventional poison pill. It impedes not just outsiders, as does the conventional pill, but insiders as well — a controlling shareholder where there is one, the board of directors and the CEO where there is no controlling shareholder — even if restructuring the firm would be operationally wise.
James Kwak further expands on this by noting that a corporate takeover is effectively impossible at this scale:
Not so with too-big-to-fail banks. For one thing, TBTF banks are impossible to acquire in one piece: no other bank could absorb JPMorgan, even if there weren’t the rule against a banking conglomerate having more than 10 percent of all U.S. deposits. The other option is to engineer a breakup, which is what all manner of shareholder advocates have been arguing for. But, Roe argues, if being too big to fail is your competitive advantage, that would kill the golden goose. Therefore, the market for control doesn’t work properly, and these behemoths continue bumbling along their way—not just threatening the financial, but doing a lousy job at their job of providing credit to the economy.
So, even if you believe that basic market forces serve to regulate corporate governance, (I don’t) the market breaks down at this scale, and government intervention is essential.
If you believe, as I do, that much of the cause of the lost decade(s) in Japan is deflation/disinflation, then the news of consumer prices rising in Japan is an unalloyed good:
Consumer prices in Japan rose at the fastest pace in five years in October, suggesting policymakers’ attempts to end years of deflation are working.
Consumer prices, excluding food, rose 0.9% from a year earlier. Prices have now risen for five months in a row.
Japan has been battling deflation, or falling prices, for best part of the past 20 years.
It is seen as a major drag on its economy and policymakers have unveiled a series of measures to end the cycle.
While falling prices may sound good to those experiencing inflation, they hold back economic growth as consumers and businesses tend to put off purchases in the hope of getting a cheaper deal later on, which hurts domestic demand.
………
Japan’s central bank has set a target of achieving an inflation rate of 2%.
I think that the central bank is being too timid. I think that their target, at least over the next 2-5 years, should be more, somewhere between 4% and 6%, but the admittedly anemic 0.9% rate is better that what has been the trend for a very long time.
China’s Second Aircraft Carrier under construction (China Defense Blog) Domestically manufactured, and it might have a catapult.
India Hits ‘Milestone’ with Launch of Own Aircraft Carrier (Defense News)
J-2X Hot-Fire-Tests First Additive-Manufactured Part (Aviation Week) 3-D printing of high temperature, high strength components. This is a big deal.
Caseless and case telescoped ammunition as a part of the Lightweight Small Arms Technologies (LSAT)
LSAT supporting materials:
You can see the 26 page PowerPoint for the program here, and a 2 page brochure here.
A couple in Utah was billed $3500.00 for a negative review of a vendor who never shipped what they ordered:
A Utah couple is facing an uphill legal battle after being slapped with a $3,500 fine by an online retailer for posting a negative review of the company years after it failed to ship the products they ordered.
CNN reported on Friday that John and Jen Palmer’s problems with Klear Gear began in 2008, when John canceled a purchase he made through the company after it failed to deliver his order within 30 days. The Palmers then panned the company in a review on the consumer-complaint site Ripoff Review, saying, in part, that it was impossible to reach someone at Klear Gear by phone.
But earlier this year, Klear Gear contacted the Palmers in writing, saying they violated the company’s “non-disparagement clause” and threatening them with the fine if they did not remove the negative review.
“This is fraud,” Jen Palmer told KUTV-TV. “They’re blackmailing us for telling the truth.”
KUTV also reported that the company’s terms of service stated, “To prevent the publishing of libelous content in any form, your acceptance of this sales contract prohibits you from taking any action that negatively impacts Kleargear.com, its reputation, products, services, management or employees.”
However, Yahoo News reported that the clause seemingly only went into effect this year, only for the language to be removed from the website.
When Ripoff Report refused to remove the review, Klear Gear contacted major credit agencies and listed the $3,500 fine as a “failure to pay,” hampering the couples’ credit rating. The company told KUTV via email that its request that the Palmers erase their negative comment was “a diligent effort to help them avoid the fine.”
So, first, the provision of the contract is illegal, second, it wasn’t in force at the time that they made an order, and all the private entities involved, Klear Gear, Ripoff Report (which demanded a large payment to pull the post), and the credit rating agencies (’nuff said), have decided to f%$# the customer.
This is what happens when the contracts achieve primacy over basic human rights.
My only suggestion to the Palmers would be four letters, RICO, but I am an engineer, not a lawyer, dammit!*
*I LOVE IT when I get to go all Doctor McCoy!!!
The Greatest Danger to Israel is the Stupidity of Its Leaders.
A corralary to this is that the 2nd greatest danger to Israel is the stupidity of some of its friends, Paul Wolfowits, Richard Pearle, and Doug “the dumbest f%$%#ing guy on the plane” Feith come to mind.
