Author: Matthew G. Saroff

It’s Jobless Thursday

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And the numbers suck, but as with the past few weeks, there are computer/reporting issues, so the accuracy is suspect:

Claims for U.S. jobless benefits jumped last week to the highest level in six months, providing the first statistical warning that the damage from the partial federal shutdown is starting to ripple through the economy.

 While half the increase came from California as the state worked through a backlog following a switch in computer systems, another 15,000 reflected the furlough of non-federal workers from employers losing government business, a Labor Department spokesman said as the data was released to the press. Applications (INJCJC) for unemployment insurance benefits surged by 66,000 in the week ended Oct. 5 to 374,000, the most since late March, figures from the Labor Department showed today in Washington.

Hopefully, we will start seeing some “normal” numbers in the next few weeks.

Linkage

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And here is the Who on the Smothers Brothers Show:

Proving, Once Again, that Barack Obama can be Trusted to Do the Right Thing, If He Has No Alternative

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He is going to nominate Janet Yellen to the next Chairman of the Federal Reserve:

President Barack Obama will nominate Janet Yellen as chairman of the Federal Reserve, which would put the world’s most powerful central bank in the hands of a key architect of its unprecedented stimulus program and the first female leader in its 100-year history.

Obama will announce the nomination at 3 p.m. today in Washington, a White House official said in an e-mailed statement. Yellen, 67, would succeed Ben S. Bernanke, whose term expires on Jan. 31.

Obama turned to Yellen, vice chairman of the Fed since 2010, after the other leading candidate, former Treasury secretary and White House economic adviser Lawrence Summers, withdrew from consideration amid mounting opposition from Democrats on the Senate Banking Committee.

“She’s an excellent choice, and I believe she’ll be confirmed by a wide margin,” Charles Schumer of New York, the Senate’s No. 3 Democrat, said in a statement. Senate Banking Committee Chairman Tim Johnson, a South Dakota Democrat, pledged to work “to move her nomination forward in a timely manner,” saying her depth of experience is unmatched.

U.S. index futures climbed, signaling stocks may rebound from the biggest loss since August, and Treasuries rose after the announcement. Standard & Poor’s 500 Index futures added 0.3 percent as of 11:03 a.m. in London, after the U.S. benchmark gauge lost more than 2 percent over the past two days. Five-year Treasury yields fell two basis points.

He REALLY wanted Larry Summers, so I don’t expect to see much expenditure of political capital if the Republicans decide to hold up the process.

That being said, I think that the major difference between her and either Bernanke or Summers will be on the regulatory end of things, not the monetary policy end of things.

There is only so far that you can push a string.

So, Now We Know What Makes Andrea Mitchell Go Postal………

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It was former “Real World” cast member and current Congressman Sean Duffy, who was arguing that Obamacare is to blame the Republicans holding military death benefits hostage: (at about 11:20 in the vid)

With all due respect, this is about military death benefits to kids, 19-year-old kids who died in Afghanistan and who are not returning home, this is about what their families are entitled to by law and what they are not getting.

This is not about what you want in Obamacare and not about what the president wants on the debt ceiling.

And yes, for Andrea Mitchell, this is going postal.

Also, how did this guy get elected when he is too stupid to cut his own meat?

He keeps going back to the his belief that Jon Stewart gave a puff interview to Kathleen Sebelius, head of HHS as evidence that journalists are biased.

Hello, Jon Stewart is a f%$#ing commedian. Jeebus.

Why Yes, they Are Psychopaths, Why Do You Ask?

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Where do they find these sick f%$#s?

Brian Kilmeade of (who else) Fox News calls Navy Seals a bunch of wusses for calling off a mission when they realize that the target is chock full of kids.

I do understand where he is coming from. 

After all it’s not like they were white children that Mr. Kilmeade wanted to throw into the middle of a firefight.

Great googly moogly.  Why do they let him out in public?

Break Even Fusion at National Ignition Facility, Livermore

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This is a major milestone:

But to be viable, fusion power plants would have to produce more energy than they consume, which has proven elusive.

Now, a breakthrough by scientists at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) could boost hopes of scaling up fusion.

NIF, based at Livermore in California, uses 192 beams from the world’s most powerful laser to heat and compress a small pellet of hydrogen fuel to the point where nuclear fusion reactions take place.

This is known as “inertial confinement”. Basically heat and pressure is created because the concentrated lasers heat up the pellet so rapidly that it creates intense heats and pressures.

Note that “Break Even” does have a qualifier though:

This is a step short of the lab’s stated goal of “ignition”, where nuclear fusion generates as much energy as the lasers supply. This is because known “inefficiencies” in different parts of the system mean not all the energy supplied through the laser is delivered to the fuel.

But the latest achievement has been described as the single most meaningful step for fusion in recent years, and demonstrates NIF is well on its way towards the coveted target of ignition and self-sustaining fusion.

Interestingly, inertial confinement, which has gotten far less funding and attention than magnetic confinement, most notably the Tokomak and Stellerator configurations, but they have not progressed as far.

Inertial containment is a lot simpler, both from a physics and an engineering standpoint, but making it economically viable appears appears rather more difficult than for magnetic confinement, because inertial confinement is by its nature an intermittent process.

Latest Republican Innovation: Minorities Only Get 3/5 of a Vote

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It appears that Kansas and Arizona are using a rather twisted interpretation of the Supreme Court’s ruling to prevent people from voting in state and local elections:

Remember this phrase: two-tier voting. You may be hearing more about it.

Officials in Arizona and Kansas are making preparations for elections with two categories of voters. There will be those who provided proof of citizenship when they registered to vote, and will therefore be able to vote in all local, state, and federal elections. And then there will be those who did not provide proof of citizenship when they registered. Those people will only be able to vote in federal contests — if at all.

In both states, the preparations underway are reactions to the Supreme Court’s June ruling in Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council, the legal battle over Arizona’s 2004 voter identification law, known as Proposition 200. While the headlines in June painted the ruling as a blow to Proposition 200, officials in both Arizona and Kansas have chosen to focus on the leeway the Supreme Court left them. Kansas State Election Director Brad Bryant laid out the argument in an email he sent to county election officers at the end of July.

“As the Supreme Court made clear, its decision applies only to ‘federal registration forms’ and covers only federal elections,” Bryant wrote, according to a copy of the email provided to TPM. “States remain free to require proof of citizenship from voters who seek to also vote in state elections.”

Using that logic, both states have made moves toward two-tier systems.

In Kansas, whose Secretary of State, Kris Kobach (R), has been at the forefront of the voter ID movement, that system is already up and running.

One of the things that is necessary for democracy to function is for both sides to accept the idea that there are limits in the pursuit of political power.

I don’t know how you make this sh%$ stop, but I am open to suggestions.

All I got is a return of the Fairness Doctrine.

It is a Myth that US Forces Lost No Battles in the Vietnam War

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That quote from the recently deceased General Vo Nguyen Giap is false, but we still find people claiming that neither the Viet Cong or the (then North) Vietnamese army ever won a battle.

David Petraeus was one of these people. He wrote that, “Military leaders recall US units never lost a battle,” in 1986.

This is something that you will hear said from members of the US Military all the time.

It it might be legitimately through provoking if it weren’t complete humbug.  A cursory examination reveals 70 lost battles in the Vietnam War.

Given that General Giap died a few days ago at the age of 102 (!), it behooves us to examine what happened in Vietnam, and Cambodia, and Laos, and ask how General Giap, and the people of Indochina beat us.

The military, as been asking a slightly different question, “How did we lose,” and so blame the American public.

The NSA’s War on Privacy Continues

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It looks the NSA and its British poodles are going after the TOR network:

The National Security Agency has made repeated attempts to develop attacks against people using Tor, a popular tool designed to protect online anonymity, despite the fact the software is primarily funded and promoted by the US government itself.

Top-secret NSA documents, disclosed by whistleblower Edward Snowden, reveal that the agency’s current successes against Tor rely on identifying users and then attacking vulnerable software on their computers. One technique developed by the agency targeted the Firefox web browser used with Tor, giving the agency full control over targets’ computers, including access to files, all keystrokes and all online activity.

But the documents suggest that the fundamental security of the Tor service remains intact. One top-secret presentation, titled ‘Tor Stinks’, states: “We will never be able to de-anonymize all Tor users all the time.” It continues: “With manual analysis we can de-anonymize a very small fraction of Tor users,” and says the agency has had “no success de-anonymizing a user in response” to a specific request.

Another top-secret presentation calls Tor “the king of high-secure, low-latency internet anonymity”.

Tor – which stands for The Onion Router – is an open-source public project that bounces its users’ internet traffic through several other computers, which it calls “relays” or “nodes”, to keep it anonymous and avoid online censorship tools.

It is relied upon by journalists, activists and campaigners in the US and Europe as well as in China, Iran and Syria, to maintain the privacy of their communications and avoid reprisals from government. To this end, it receives around 60% of its funding from the US government, primarily the State Department and the Department of Defense – which houses the NSA.

Live in obedient fear, citizen.

How Restaurant Management Explains the Republican Party

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The New York Times has a rather interesting article on restaurants moving away from tips in 2008.

I don’t mean a service charge with an option to tip, I mean a full service restaurant that has a service charge, but does not accept tips at all, the Linkery, which operated for 8 years* in the San Diego.

Its proprietor closed up shop and moved to the Bay Area this Summer, he’s starting a new restaurant shortly, and he penned took the free time to pen a fascinating series on his experiences with his experiment. (It’s a long read that I highly recommend but the nickel tour is that he sees it as an unalloyed success.)

What is interesting about all this is his observation that there are some (mostly unlamentedly former) customers who were in an absolute rage about the fact that they no longer can tip. (Part 5 of his series)

This is where it gets interesting to me:

“This isn’t about money,” the man would say.  [Almost always a man — MGS]

 He’d be the one person in a thousand, or in ten thousand, who’d get angry about our fixed service charge. Angry about his lack of control over the price, angry about not being the final arbiter of our service. You could count on him being male, at least when we’re talking about public scenes. (I’ve heard of a few women who got pretty mad about it in private.)

 And his go-to line was so predictable, we would wait for it, anticipate it. “I always tip way more than twenty percent!”

 If that was the case, why were these guys so mad about paying only 18%, far less than they otherwise would? What was it about not choosing the amount they tipped, that infuriated them, even when they were getting a discount?

 It had to be at least partially about lack of control. Or, more accurately, lack of imagined control. This guy thought that, in a tipped environment, his server would perform better in order to get more of his money. That idea is false, as shown both by repeated studies and common sense, but that was irrelevant. His anger could not be redeemed by mere facts.

 Then what was this rage so primal that no exposure to reality could relieve it?

It turns out, rather unsurprisingly, that there is a certain sort of person who demands control in the restaurant relationship.

In postscript 1†, we have a restaurant reviewer who got a wet behind the ears waiter, and decides to call the waiter out by name:

What blew my mind was that she called him out using his real name (which I’ve redacted here), even though she was writing from behind a shield of anonymity. It was, in my opinion, bad enough for the worker to have made a mistake at his job; even worse that he has to find out his mistake was to a reviewer; but now he’s been ridiculed by name in the paper, in an attempt to have his parents, siblings and friends all shame him, as well.

Of course, the server was a really great guy, a college student with minimal serving background, who we were trying to train on the job. He was doing his best, and whatever errors he made were my fault, for putting him a difficult position without giving him the tools for success. I knew that, and I expected that a professional reviewer would have, too.

I emailed the writer.

I wrote something along the lines of, hey, I get that you had a bad experience, but that was out of line to call the server out by his real name. You could have easily made the same point while using a different name for him.

She wrote back along the lines of, I write my experiences; just because you have good intentions I’m not going to hold back my criticism. It’s your fault for not having trained him properly.

I responded, I agree that the bad service is my fault. I’m saying you should have ripped on me and not him. I’ve apologized to him for putting him in that position, but it is still not right of you, writing under a pseudonym, to publicly embarrass him using his actual name.

And she came back with the clincher: Well, with your fixed service charge you didn’t give my any choice. I couldn’t give him a lower tip. How else could I punish him for his mistakes?

That made it all clear. She, like some other patrons, felt the burden of having to reward good behavior and punish bad behavior. Obviously, some people like that role, and some people don’t, but at the very least our culture has trained diners that it is their job. When you go to restaurants, you are responsible for rewarding and punishing your server.

(emphasis original)

From a cultural perspective, it is fascinating, but it also says a lot more about our society and our politics, asaimai at No More Mister Nice Blog observes that this explains Republicans as well:

Why are Federal Workers a special case and a problem for Republicans?  In the case of Federal Workers I’d argue that its not merely that  they are workers (who are always despised) its because they are workers who for the most part don’t conform to Republican ideas of the right boundaries for workers. The right boundaries for workers are that they know their place, that they can be fired capriciously, and that they exist primarily to make the employer feel good about himself  and, further, that like waiters in a restaurant and prostitutes with their johns their job is also to make the employer believe that he is receiving an extra good form of treatment not accorded to others diners or johns.

Federal workers violate those central principles because they can’t be fired directly by “the employer” because the individual Republican tax payer isn’t the direct employer. They also can’t be humiliated and made to feel vulnerable because of civil service protections and unionization. And in the matter of interactions, one on one, the taxpayer can’t command good treatment by offering money (bribes) and thus often feels vulnerable and weak because there is no way to play the “do you know who I am” card which (like tipping) is an attempt to force a generic servant to give non generic attention and service to one class of people. So Federal Employees create an extra level of status anxiety for Republicans when they come in contact with these “employees” who can’t be fired or rewarded and therefore are not obligated to be extra nice to the individual Republican.

Of course there are lots of kinds of Federal Employees, some more obvious than others, and many of whom don’t come into contact with ordinary citizens very often (Scientists at the CDC vs. Park Rangers, for example). I’d argue that the antipathy I’ve described goes for both the kinds of Federal Employees that ordinary citizens encounter–and this is at the root of the really quite bizarre attacks by Republican Congressmen on individual Federal Employees like the now infamous attack on the the Park Ranger by the Texas Congressman. He explicitly challenges her and accuses her of failing to give special consideration to (some) clients (tourists/vets) when she is, of course, contractually obligated to treat all persons identically and has been ordered to shut down the monument. We’ve also seen this hostility directed by individual Republican Congressmen at high level Federal Employees during committee hearings. These attempts to create a hierarchical relationship which puts the “employee” below the “employer” even when the employee has specialized knowledge and skills that the employer does not are too numerous to mention.

I’d even argue that Reince Priebus’s absurd “offer” to pay for a few employees to keep the military site open for the honor flight vets was an example of a perfectly logical extension of the tipping principle: that people with money should get better treatment than ordinary customers. That the government’s attempt to treat everyone uniformly in both the Sequester and the Shut Down is, to the Republican way of thinking, a greater affront than almost anything else. It flies in the face of the “do you know who I am?” principle which underlies Republican thinking about the nature of the world.

So what can we do about this? Nothing, alas. Republicans will continue to see the Government, and experiences of Government work and workers, as a drama in which the employer must punish the employed in order to enjoy his superior status, and the rest of us will have to suffer as they choose to act out their petty desires by shutting down the government and refusing to “tip” our Federal Workers by, you know, actually paying them for work performed. ………

(emphasis original)

This explains a lot.

The only question is how corrosive this is to society as a whole, and how we minimize the impact of these attitudes on the rest of us.

*It’s like 80 years in restaurant years, as most restaurants do not make it 2 years.
†Like I said, not a short read, but well worth it.

Why You Should Not Listen to the United States Air Force, Part 29

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Because, once again, they are trying to kill the A-10 again. (Paid Subscription Requited)

The USAF has been trying to kill the A-10 since they first entered service, since “real pilots” don’t fly dedicated close air support platforms.

Thankfully, a bunch of people who have not drunk too much of the Wild Blue Yonder juice are pushing back:

Now that the Air Force has placed the A-10 Thunderbolt II under consideration for cuts in a worst-case budget scenario, a grassroots movement is building to keep the aircraft, flying since 1977, around longer.

The A-10 is not one of those programs, like the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter or the KC-46A tanker, that the service wants to protect. In fact, a chart from Air Combat Command shows the entire fleet of close-air support aircraft may be divested by 2015.

The A-10, affectionately known as the Warthog, does have a following. The lumbering aircraft was designed to loiter over the battlefield until it unleashes firepower that can shred through tanks. Originally made by Fairchild Republic, it carries a 30 mm Gatling gun that can fire up to 3,900 rounds per minute. The service’s A-10s can carry all kinds of bombs, including laser-guided ones, joint direct attack munitions, and the AIM-9 Sidewinder. Ground troops love it.

They are not alone. From a Save-the-A-10 Facebook page with 2,722 likes, to the back room of a military base bar and even on Capitol Hill, the proposal to scrap the aircraft is meeting resistance.

………

Coram himself recently published a column on the Project on Government Oversight’s website articulating the case: “No $160 million F-35 is going to get down in the weeds where a single bullet can take it out. A host of small arms fire hitting an A-10 can be fixed with what amounts to duct tape,” Coram writes. “No F-35 can maneuver under an 800-foot ceiling with two-mile visibility as can an A-10. No F-35 has more than three combat trigger pulls before running out of ammo. The A-10 has twenty. No F-35 has the battlefield survivability of the A-10.”

Whether the efforts will make a difference within the Pentagon remains to be seen as high-level budget politics on Capitol Hill and in the Obama administration are sorted out.

But lawmakers have been working to maintain the A-10 fleet, at least in the short term.

Last year the Air Force recommended carving out nearly a third of the A-10 fleet, much of it from the Air National Guard. Congress slowed that suggestion by creating the National Commission on the Structure of the Air Force.

Yet more evidence that the independent Air Force does not serve our defense needs.

Air power is essential in modern warfare, but I do not think that the pilots are up to running their own branch of the service.

Buh Bye Silvio

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A special committee of the Italian Senate has voted to eject Silvio Berulusconi:

A special panel of the Italian Senate on Friday voted to strip Silvio Berlusconi of his current seat, a humiliating blow for a man who has dominated Italy for the past two decades but whose political career is now very much in jeopardy.

The expulsion vote against Mr. Berlusconi, based on his recent tax fraud conviction, was his second setback of the week, after his failed attempt to bring down the country’s fragile coalition government. The full Senate will probably decide by the end of the month whether to expel Mr. Berlusconi, though a vote against him is now considered very likely.

Mr. Berlusconi, 77, a former prime minister and billionaire media mogul, who once wielded power with a swagger, had fought for weeks to prevent the expulsion vote. Many analysts say his effort to topple the government was partly intended to interrupt or delay the proceedings against him in the Senate. But a mutiny of his center-right supporters forced him to make a public reversal and support the government in a parliamentary confidence vote.

The underlying problem is that Berlusconi controls pretty much all the private TV stations in Italy, and he used this media domination to prosecute his electoral success.

LINKAGE

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This is too funny for words:

Live In Obedient Fear, Citizen

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Ibragim Todashev, who may or may not have been tied to something that alleged Boston Marathon Bomber Tamerlan, and who was shot by the FBI under circumstances that are still unclear.

Well, he had a girlfriend, and she has been slated for deportation and held in solitary confinement because she gave an interview to Boston Magazine:

Tatiana Gruzdeva, the girlfriend of Ibragim Todashev—the man shot by the FBI just after allegedly implicating himself and marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev in a 2011 triple murder in Waltham—has been arrested in Florida by Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. In a collect call from Glades County Jail, where she said she is being held in solitary confinement, Tatiana Gruzdeva said that immigration officers told her she was being deported because of her interviews with Boston magazine.

The Glades County Sheriff’s Office confirmed that Gruzdeva is being held in the county jail.

Gruzdeva, 19, said she had gone to sign work papers at the local immigrations office at 11 p.m. Tuesday. She had been waiting for weeks for the work authorization form that would allow her to earn a living. Instead, she said, she was taken aside and arrested. “They said it’s because of interview,” she said. “I’m in the room by myself,” she said repeatedly, crying.

Whoever ordered this is a bad, bad, person.

Wendy Davis is Running for Texas Governor

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After her bursting on the national political scene, she has announced that she is running for Governor:

Wendy Davis walked across the stage at the Wiley G. Thomas Coliseum more than 30 years ago to accept her diploma from Richland High School.

On Thursday, she returned to that stage to kick off her bid to become Texas’ 48th governor.

“This is a campaign not just for governor, but for the very future of our state,” the 50-year-old Democratic state senator from Fort Worth said. “Thirty-two years ago, I started my own journey in this room.

“Today, we start a new journey – together,” she said. “It’s a journey that won’t end on Election Day and it won’t end in Austin. As long as we can make our great state even greater, we will keep going.”

Davis gained national fame — and notoriety — from a June filibuster geared to prevent a comprehensive abortion bill from passing, which prompted Democrats throughout the state to encourage her to try to reclaim for their party the governor’s mansion which hasn’t housed a Democrat since Ann Richards left in 1995.

I think that she is facing long odds, but at least she will be competitive, and we won’t have a freak show like the 2006 election, which had Carole Keeton Insertlastnamehere and Kinky Friedman running as independents and scoring in the double digits.

It’s good for the Texas Democratic Party, even if she does not win.

It’s Jobless Thursday

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The numbers look pretty good:

The number of Americans filing new claims for jobless benefits edged higher last week but remained at pre-recession levels, a signal of growing strength in the labor market.

Initial claims for state unemployment benefits rose 1,000 to a seasonally adjusted 308,000, the Labor Department said on Thursday.

The data could provide some of the strongest guidance this week on the health of the U.S. economy as a partial government shutdown delays the release of economic data, including the monthly employment report which was scheduled to be released on Friday.

In related news, we won’t get last month’s figures on Friday, because there literally three people left working at the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

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Initial reports are that a woman rammed some of the stanchions at the White House, and then led police on a high speed chase toward Congress before being shot to death.

There was a child in a car seat in the car when this was going on.

No further information right now, just a lot of speculation in the media.