Author: Matthew G. Saroff

Yes, a 60 Year Old Engine is NASA’s Future

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I appreciate the contributions that Wernher von Braun, but the fact that NASA is looking at using the F-1 engine as the core of its future heavy lifter (paid subscription required) makes me wonder what the hell NASA has been doing since the Apollo program:

The powerful rocket engine developed in the 1960s to launch the first men to the Moon could be reprised in the 2020s as the powerplant for strap-on boosters that NASA hopes to use in heavy-lift human missions to Mars. Under a new NASA risk-reduction project, Dynetics Inc., a relative newcomer to space launch, will explore the idea for the U.S. agency in partnership with Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne.

Rocketdyne built the 1.5-million-lb.-thrust F-1 engine for NASA , which mounted five of the kerosene-fueled behemoths in the Saturn V first stage to propel the massive Saturn/Apollo stack off the launch pad.The F-1—19 ft. tall, with a nozzle 12.5 ft. across—epitomized the scale of the flight hardware and ground infrastructure NASA used to beat the Soviet Union to the Moon. If NASA decides to fly it again, it probably will be tested in the same stands built for the F-1 at the agency’s Marshall and Stennis field centers, stacked in the same 40-story Vehicle Assembly Building at the Kennedy Space Center used for Apollo and the space shuttle, and launched from one of the pads built for the Moon program.

Dynetics scored big in a $200 million NASA effort to reduce the risk on advanced boosters for the planned Space Launch System (SLS) that Congress ordered as a government-owned deep-space alternative to the commercial vehicles the agency wants to use for transport to the International Space Station. Last week NASA selected the company to negotiate for three of six 30-month study contracts designed to reduce risk on the twin boosters that will be needed to raise the SLS capability from an initial 70 metric tons to the 130 metric tons the agency believes will be needed for human missions beyond low Earth orbit.

………

If the Dynetics proposal to use the F-1 in the boosters is accepted, all of the engines on the SLS will have heritage in earlier human spaceflight missions, and all will already have been used for decades when deep-space human missions begin. The F-1 ran a full 2.5-min. test at Edwards AFB, Calif., in 1960 (see photo), before the A-1 and A-2 test stands at Stennis were built for it. NASA and Rocketdyne are testing the uprated J-2X variant of the Saturn V J-2 engine to power the SLS upper stage . And the main SLS engine will be a throw-away version of the reusable RS-25D space shuttle main engine, also built by Rocketdyne , once the 15 surplus shuttle engines are used up. Developed in the 1970s, it will be the newest basic engine design for what may one day be NASA ‘s newest human launchers.

This is f%$#ing depressing.

I’m Dubious that an Indian Probe Will Reach Mars This Decade

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Yes, I am aware that the Indians have put satellites in orbit, but their plans for a mars probe seem to be to be over-ambitious🙁pdid subscription required)

Indian space officials expect the country’s first mission to Mars to receive final government approval soon, with a launch planned for November 2013.

“The project has reached the last phase of approval. Many studies relating to the mission have been completed, and an announcement can be expected soon,” Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) Chairman K. Radhakrishnan says.

The U.S. government is expected to give its final approval after NASA ‘s Mars Science Laboratory lands there on Aug. 6 (EDT), though India’s orbiter mission will not be on the same scale as that undertaken by NASA ‘s car-sized rover.

India’s Mars orbiter is expected to be launched from Sriharikota in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh. The project received a boost in the federal budget for the current fiscal year, which ends March 31, with the government allocating 1.25 billion rupees ($22.6 million).

Not enough money, and not enough time.  I would believe it if they added at least 5 years, and at least 500 million dollars, I’d believe it.

I am Getting Old

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I was watching the video of Michelle Jenneke running the women’s 100m hurdles, it’s gone viral over the past few days, and what I notice is her hurdles form.

Her bouncing around and dancing as she gets ready for the race, but what struck me was the fact that she could have balanced a soup bowl on the top of her head and delivered it at the finish line without spilling a drop.

No wasted motion.

It’s Bank Failure ……… What the F%$#?

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What the hell is going on with this ADHD bank failure sh%$?

There are five failures this week, tied for the most this year.

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

  1. The Royal Palm Bank of Florida, Naples, FL
  2. Georgia Trust Bank, Buford, GA
  3. First Cherokee State Bank, Woodstock, GA
  4. Heartland Bank, Leawood KS
  5. Second Federal Savings and Loan Association of Chicago, Chicago, IL

The FDIC has been wicked busy.

Full FDIC list

So, here is the graph pr0n with last years numbers for comparison (FDIC only):

I Gotta Read This Book

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Neil Barkofsky’s book on his experiences monitoring the TARP, Bailout: An Inside Account of How Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing Wall Street, and the Bush administration comes off better than the Obama administration:

The Huffington Post described a scene in a forthcoming book by Neil Barofsky, the former Special Inspector General of TARP, where Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner delivered a string of F-bombs during a discussion about transparency. I’ve read the book, and while that’s an amusing diversion, it’s nowhere near the headline story.

The important moment in the book for me comes conveniently after Barofsky recounts this FDL News item, one of my HAMP horror stories. Barofsky shows how HAMP’s faulty design led to all sorts of problems like this, with trapped borrowers, extended trial payments, no-doc modifications, and eventually unnecessary foreclosures. Barofsky mused that Treasury didn’t care about the suffering of borrowers under HAMP, and the issue came up in a meeting with the Treasury Secretary, which was also attended by Elizabeth Warren, then the head of the Congressional Oversight Panel, another TARP watchdog.

Warren asked Geithner repeatedly about HAMP. After several evasions, Geithner said about the banks, “We estimate that they can handle ten million foreclosures, over time… this program will help foam the runway for them.”

This is a revelatory moment for Barofsky in the book, and should be for everyone reading. Geithner’s concern, first of all, was with how the banks would respond to the program, not how homeowners would respond to it. In fact, homeowners are quite besides the point. Regardless of their situation, they will be one of the 10 million foreclosures, in Geithner’s construction. His goal was merely to space out the foreclosures and give the banks time to earn their way back to health, mostly through the other parts of the bailout, that enabled them to earn profits.

I will note that the Cossacks work for the Czar, and notwithstanding all the turnover on the economic side of his cabinet, Geithner has been a constant.

This is going on because this is what Obama wants.

Racist Diatribes from SB 1070 Sponsor

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In the challenges to Arizona’s immigration law, one of the claims made is that it was motivated by bigotry.

Well, the plaintiffs now have sponsor’s, former state senate majority leader Russell Pearce’s, emails, and we have the smoking gun:

The American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona has released thousands of e-mails that it says proves Arizona’s controversial immigration law was racially motivated.

The e-mails, acquired through a public records request to the state Legislature, are to and from former senator Russell Pearce, who authored Senate Bill 1070.

The ACLU included dozens of those e-mails as part of a legal filing this week, asking U.S. District Court Judge Susan Bolton to prevent a key part of SB 1070 from going into effect.

The e-mails from Pearce in the court documents include statements like, “Can we maintain our social fabric as a nation with Spanish fighting English for dominance … It’s like importing leper colonies and hope we don’t catch leprosy. It’s like importing thousands of Islamic jihadists and hope they adapt to the American Dream.”

They include statistics such as “9,000 people killed every year by illegal aliens,” and “the illegal aliens in the United States have a crime rate that’s two-and-a-half times that of non-illegal aliens.”

Some quotes:

“Battles commence as Mexican nationalists struggle to infuse their men into American government and strengthen control over their strongholds. One look at Los Angeles with its Mexican-American mayor shows you Vincente Fox’s general Varigossa commanding an American city.”

“They create enclaves of separate groups that shall balkanize our nation into fractured nightmares of social unrest and poverty.”

I am not surprised at all that this guy is a bigoted ratf%$#, though I am surprised that he was stupid enough to reveal it on email.

Crap

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Benjamin Netanyahu sandbagged his coalition partners on plans to make all Israelis serve in the military, and they have left the coalition, which effectively ends the best chance in Israel’s history to stop coddling the Heredi schnorrers (ultra orthodox moochers):

The broadest unity coalition Israel has seen in many years broke apart Tuesday evening, rent by irreconcilable differences over how to integrate ultra-Orthodox men and Arab citizens into the military and civilian service, a fundamental question for the future of the Jewish democracy.

After stunning the political establishment with a secret, late-night deal in May, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Shaul Mofaz, the leader of the centrist Kadima Party, failed to achieve their top priority and agreed to part ways. While Mr. Netanyahu retains power with his original, narrower majority in Parliament, analysts said the split weakened both leaders and was likely to hasten elections.

The coalition had given Mr. Netanyahu a supermajority of 94 of the Parliament’s 120 members and a new nickname, “King of Israel,” and with that unprecedented authority to take on complex issues like the stalemated peace process with the Palestinians and the national responsibilities of Israel’s growing minorities. Instead, when it came to the draft and expanding settlements in the West Bank, he chose to solidify his alliance with right-wing and religious factions.“I don’t think there are any winners, except maybe the Orthodox parties — they’re off the hook for the foreseeable future,” said Yossi Verter, political correspondent for the newspaper Haaretz. “The losers are, of course, Netanyahu and Mofaz. When the leaders of the two big parties in Israel sit and decide to form a unity government and after 70 days it collapses, they don’t look like serious men. It’s like a joke.”

The surprise partnership between the prime minister and the former leader of the opposition had come a day after Mr. Netanyahu called for early elections because of cracks in his original coalition. The two men vowed to leverage the huge new majority to enact legislation ensuring that all citizens share the burden of military and civilian service, in the wake of a Supreme Court ruling invalidating a law that granted draft exemptions to thousands of yeshiva students.

The issue had broad resonance in a society increasingly torn between secular and religious Jews: some 20,000 people took to the Tel Aviv street this month to demand a broader draft and the ouster of politicians who opposed it.

But talks broke down over the details. Kadima set a goal of enlisting 80 percent of the ultra-Orthodox within four years, with stiff financial penalties for dodgers. Under pressure from religious parties long aligned with his Likud faction, Mr. Netanyahu proffered a more incremental solution, which Mr. Mofaz rejected as a cop-out.

It was a cop-out, and as long as these mendicants are allowed to shirk their duty, it will remain a cancer on Israeli governance.

Republican Family Values

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It appears that a Utah Republican activist, Greg Peterson dabbles in serial date rape as a hobby:

News that a Utah Republican activist is accused of raping four women — two of whom say they were taken to the Heber cabin where the man hosted major political events — caused ripples of unease Thursday throughout the GOP.

Gregory Nathan Peterson has hobnobbed with the likes of Sens. Orrin Hatch and Mike Lee, Gov. Gary Herbert, U.S. Rep. Jason Chaffetz, and candidates such as 4th District congressional contender Mia Love. [Ed Note: 

But for the past 14 months, the 37-year-old Orem man allegedly has led a double life as a serial date-rapist.

Peterson was charged Wednesday in 3rd District Court in Salt Lake City with 23 felony counts, including rape and kidnapping, and two misdemeanors. A jail log indicates U.S. marshals arrested Peterson in his home in Heber and booked him into the Salt Lake County jail. He remained there Thursday in lieu of $750,000 bail.

Charging documents allege sexual assaults against four women Peterson met in Salt Lake County beginning March 26, 2011. In the first case, the documents allege, he met a woman at a church function and she agreed to go to a movie with him.

But instead of going to a theater, the documents allege, Peterson told the woman he had a gun and took her to his five-bedroom, five-bathroom, 3,000-square-foot cabin in Heber. The documents allege he sexually assaulted the woman and hit her when she did not do as he wished. Peterson drove the woman back to her vehicle the next morning.

Peterson’s Heber cabin is where he has held annual Republican barbecues and gatherings.

The charges allege Peterson met another woman online and she agreed to go to a movie with him July 2, 2011. But this time Peterson threatened to expose the woman’s expired immigration visa and drove her to the Heber cabin, documents allege. Peterson raped and assaulted the woman there, court papers say, then drove her to his mother’s Lewiston residence in Cache County. Peterson and the woman stayed there until July 5. The documents say Peterson took the woman to her home July 8.

On Dec. 11, 2011, Peterson met a West Jordan woman for a lunch date, the documents allege, and at her home he pushed her on a couch and sexually assaulted her.

It’s amazing how fast his former BFFs are falling all over themselves pretending not to know him.

It’s Jobless Thursday

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And yes, last weeks good numbers were an artifact of a flawed seasonal adjustment:

More Americans than forecast filed first-time claims for unemployment insurance payments last week as the volatility induced by the annual auto-plant retooling period wore off.

Applications for jobless benefits increased by 34,000 to 386,000 in the week ended July 14, Labor Department figures showed today. Economists forecast 365,000 claims, according to the median estimate in a Bloomberg News survey. The volatility in the numbers was due to a change in the timing of annual automobile plant layoffs, a Labor Department spokesman said as the data were released.

Determining whether the labor market is improving or deteriorating has been more difficult in recent weeks because a reduction in the number of auto-plant layoffs typical at this point of the year has thrown the Labor Department’s seasonal adjustment process out of line. It may take weeks to judge whether the labor market is making substantial progress.

Not good numbers this week.

When Ed F%$#ing Rollins Finds a Republican’s Political Statement Beyond the Pale…

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Click for full size


C. Megalodon*

You have not just jumped the shark, you have jumped C. Megalodon, on a unicycle, while wear nothing but piercings and a rose between your teeth.

It appears that Michelle Bachmann has managed to cross this event horizon:

Rep. Michele Bachmann’s former campaign manager has joined the bipartisan chorus criticizing the Minnesota Republican for questioning the loyalty of State Department aide Huma Abedin and alleging she has ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.

“I have been a practitioner of tough politics for many decades,” Ed Rollins wrote in an op-ed for FOX News. “There is little that amazes me and even less that shocks me. I have to say that Congresswoman Michele Bachmann’s outrageous and false charges against a top aide to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Huma Abedin reaches that threshold.
………
“Having worked for Congressman Bachman’s campaign for president, I am fully aware that she sometimes has difficulty with her facts, but this is downright vicious and reaches the late Senator Joe McCarthy level,” he wrote.

Generally, Republicans are busy saying that Joe McCarthy has been given an unfair rap by pinko historians, so this boggles the mind.

The real question is whether the Beltway gasbags  will start treating her like that crazy guy in a bath robe on the soapbox in the park.

*The largest shark, and likely largest predator fish ever. It died out some 1.5 million years ago. The Genus is still in dispute, between either Carcharodon (Great White) or Carcharocles (broad toothed Mako). But in either case, you are jumping C. Megalodon, you have jumped the biggest shark ever.

CFPB Draws First Blood

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They just fined Capital One $210 million for misleading consumers on credit protection and protection monitoring programs:

Capital One Financial agreed to pay $210 million to resolve charges by banking regulators that its call-center representatives misled consumers into paying for extra credit card products.

The enforcement action, announced on Wednesday, is the first by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which said it unearthed the activities through an examination of the bank.

The CFPB was created by the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law and is nearing its one-year anniversary.

The government said $150 million of the sanctions will go to reimburse affected customers, while the remaining penalty will be split between the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which fined the bank $35 million, and the CFPB, which will collect $25 million.

“We are putting companies on notice that these deceptive practices are against the law and will not be tolerated,” said CFPB Director Richard Cordray.

The regulators alleged that employees at call centers used by Capital One pressured and misled consumers into paying for “add-on products” such as payment protection and credit monitoring when they activated their credit cards.

In a briefing with reporters, Cordray said he anticipated actions against other banks over similar tactics but declined to name any targets.

“We know these deceptive tactics are not unique to a single institution … we expect announcements about other institutions as our ongoing work continues to unfold,” Cordray said.

In a statement, the president of Capital One’s credit card business, Ryan Schneider, apologized to customers who were affected and said the bank is committed to “making it right.”

What’s in your wallet?

The Stoopid, It Burns US!!!!

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This is a week for the stupid.

Case in point, this exchange between award winning journalist and columnist Connie Schultz and an unnamed conservative blogger:

Email from conservative blogger, dated July 9, 2012:

Dear Ms. Shultz,
We are doing an expose on journalists in the elite media who socialize with elected officials they are assigned to cover. We have found numerous photos of you with Sen. Sherrod Brown. In one of them, you appear to be hugging him.
Care to comment?

———————–

Response, dated July 10, 2012:

Dear Mr. [Name Deleted]:

I am surprised you did not find a photo of me kissing U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown so hard he passes out from lack of oxygen. He’s really cute.

He’s also my husband.

You know that, right?

Connie Schultz.

————————
July 17: Waiting, I’m waiting….

(emphasis mine)

Great googly moogly.

I guess Republicans live by the old Dave Sim adage,  “I firmly believe that if you can’t fool all of the people all of the time, you should start breeding them for stupidity.”

Thatcherism: The Belief That Things Will Get Better if You Make Your Modern State More Like An Arab Dictatorshiop

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It is therefore no surprise that an Israeli has set fire to himself to protest the continued right wing tilt of Israeli society:

TEL AVIV — As doctors struggled on Monday to save the life of Moshe Silman, an Israeli man who set himself on fire at a protest for social justice in this Mediterranean city two days earlier, a grim mood had already replaced the mostly blithe atmosphere that characterized Israel’s popular movement for social change last summer.

While activists said Mr. Silman’s desperate act reaffirmed the relevancy of a grass-roots struggle that had seemed to be floundering, they appeared traumatized as they searched for an appropriate response.

“We must never encourage such a thing,” Stav Shaffir, a prominent leader of the movement, said in a telephone interview. “On the other hand, it cannot be ignored. Moshe Silman cried the cry of a lot of people.”

At the peak of last summer’s rallies, at least 400,000 Israelis peacefully took to the streets in this city and others, in one of the largest protests in the nation’s history. In the past few weeks, though, efforts to revive those heady days have been met with a degree of public apathy.

Then on Saturday, thousands of demonstrators turned out to mark the anniversary of the start of last year’s protests, dividing up into clusters and gathering around small stages. One by one the protesters voiced a wide range of complaints, from limited resources for school psychologists to the lack of public housing for disadvantaged Russian-speaking immigrants. A few people danced nearby to a song by an Israeli rap group that boomed from large speakers.

Suddenly, a tower of flames shot up near one of the podiums.

Mr. Silman, in his 50s, a fixture at the street protests over the past year, came to Tel Aviv on Saturday night equipped with gasoline and a suicide note. He had once run his own truck delivery business, but he had gotten into debt and then suffered a stroke.

In a typed letter he had copied and distributed in advance, he complained that his pleas for help had been rejected by the courts, the Housing Ministry and the National Insurance Institute, and that he was about to become homeless.

“The state of Israel stole from me and robbed me,” he wrote. “They left me with nothing.”

He added, “And I will not be homeless and this is why I protest.”

One of the worst things that Netanyahu had done (and that’s saying a lot) was to shift political discussion in Israel completely away from any consideration of a just society.

This is some kind of Middle Eastern version of, “When you stare into the abyss the abyss stares back at you.”

Israel is now Tunisia.

More Bad Economic News

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June retail sales fell:

U.S. retail sales fell in June for the third straight month, the longest run of consecutive drops since 2008 when the country was mired in recession.

Sales slipped 0.5 percent, with declines across a wide swath of industries from electronics and cars to building supplies, the Commerce Department said on Monday. Analysts had expected a small increase.

“Evidence is increasingly clear that the U.S. economy is slowing,” said Jim Baird, an investment strategist at Plante Moran Financial Advisors in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

The report adds to a spate of soft economic data that is raising pressure on President Barack Obama ahead of his November re-election bid. Republican challenger Mitt Romney is focusing his campaign on the weak economy, which has plagued Obama’s presidency.

Obama should have asked for about ½ trillion more for his stimulus.

Kafka, Obama Style

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The prosecution in the Bradley Manning Wikileaks trial the claims to have proof that he was aiding the enemy, a crime that carries the death penalty, but is refusing to produce any evidence”

The US government claims to have proof that Bradley Manning, the WikiLeaks suspect, knowingly passed state secrets to a location where it was bound to be obtained by enemy groups, a military court in Maryland has heard.

Captain Joe Morrow, a member of the five-strong prosecution team assigned to the case, said that the government would show at court martial that Manning had knowingly “aided the enemy” – the most serious of the 22 charges facing the soldier that carries the death penalty. Morrow said the evidence would show that Manning sent the information to a “very definite place” that he knew was used by the enemy.

He did not mention al-Qaida, though the terrorist network has been explicity named by the prosecution in previous hearings.

The insistence by the US government that it can prove Manning had actual knowledge that the WikiLeaks dump would be used by enemy groups was instantly disputed by the lead defence lawyer, David Coombs. He demanded that the government produce the evidence to which it was alluding.

“We haven’t seen any evidence that the government has provided by discovery that supports any knowledge that the information would be obtained by the enemy,” he said.

Note that if the court accepts this, to quote the ACLU, “the threat of criminal prosecution hangs over any service member who gives an interview to a reporter, writes a letter to the editor, or posts a blog on the internet. In its zeal to throw the book at Manning, the government has so overreached that its ‘success’ would turn thousands of loyal soldiers into criminals.”

I believe that this is one of the goals of this prosecution.  When you define laws this broadly, every is a criminal, and so “troublemakers” can be dealt with.