Author: Matthew G. Saroff

It’s Not Just the B Model F-35

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Yes, the F-35B, the STOVL variant has been placed on probation, but the entire program is encountering difficulties.

Most recently it has been revealed that there are problems with the aerodynamics and propulsion for all the models:

Flight testing so far has revealed problems with handling in the transonic and medium angle-of-attack regimes, [reportedly problems with wing drop/sideslip akin to those discovered in flight test for the F/A-18 E/F] and a problem with screech – destructive high-frequency combustion instability in the F135 afterburner – which is preventing the aircraft from achieving maximum power. [Which produces shockwaves, think the “snapping” on a an improperly lit Bunsen burner, writ large]

You know, that alternate engine for the F-35 is starting to look a lot better, huh.

Additionally, there are very real continuing problems with software, with the advanced helmet mounted displays and the vaunted 360° sensor fusiuon for the pilot not working properly.

As to the B model, weight problems is literally a killer.

With conventional and carrier launched variants, weight gain cuts into performance, payload, and range, but with STOVL aircraft, it means that they are simply unable to perform their basic functions:

Gates said that solving the unspecified technical issues now afflicting the aircraft “could” add cost and weight; the program office says that it “will”, and that it will take two years to “engineer solutions … and assess their impact.”

………

Vertical landing is a nonvariable requirement. The required airspeed is zero and can’t be adjusted by a few knots to compensate for extra weight. The JSF key performance parameter for bring-back load – corresponding to two 1,000-pound JDAMs and two Amraams – was set early on at a minimal level.

One reason that Lockheed Martin’s shaft-driven lift fan (SDLF) concept was a winner in 1996 and 2001 was that it seemed to offer thrust margin for vertical landing. At the start of SDD, the F-35B was projected to have an empty weight of 29,700 pounds – not a bad place to be in with (then) almost 40,000 pounds of vertical thrust. But, in the weight crisis of 2004, engineers found that the jet had ballooned to a far higher figure (never actually published) at which it could not land vertically with normal fuel reserves, let alone weapons.

………

Still, the redesign left a fundamental problem: the bring-back load (around 3,000 pounds) was only 8 percent of the landing weight. The result is that the F-35B couldn’t tolerate any OEW growth or thrust shortfall. The engine and transmission are maxed: that’s the issue underlying the repeated delays in powered-lift testing, chronicled here and here.

This is a mess, and much of it is driven by unrealistic requirements for commonality, and placing too much emphasis on the STOVL version, which wastes weight on the A and C variants.

When I worked on the now FCS, it was clear to everyone working on the program that the commonality requirements made the systems more expensive and less combat effective, and the same thing is happening with the F-35.

It’s Bank Failure Friday!!!!

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

  1. Enterprise Banking Company, McDonough, GA
  2. CommunitySouth Bank & Trust, Easley, SC
  3. The Bank of Asheville, Asheville, NC
  4. United Western Bank, Denver, Co

Full FDIC list

4 banks this week, as Atrios would say, “Eated.”  The FDIC is hungry.

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

And since it’s early in the year, here is a detail of the first few weeks:

Sharon* Is a Saint

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Otherwise, she would have bludgeoned me to death with my own left arm years ago.

Case in point: I was going to bed last night, and my wife smelled something on my breath, and asked, “What were you just eating?”

I replied, “Dulche De Leche Girl Scout cookies ……… but you know something? I don’t think that they taste like they are made with real Girl Scouts.”

She glanced up, and asked, “Have you ever eaten a girl scout?”†

My response was, “I’ve earned my share of Brownie points.“

If I had married a sane woman, I would be dead now, and no jury in the world would convict her.

*Love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife.
†Bless her soul, but double entendres were never her long or her strong suit.

Eric Arthur Blair* is Spinning in His Grave

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Barack “The Worst Constitutional Law Professor Ever” Obama and Eric “Place” Holder have drawn up new guidelines on Miranda warnings when terrorism is involved, and they are declaring them secret:

The Obama administration has issued new guidance on use of the Miranda warning in interrogations of terrorism suspects, potentially chipping away at the rule that bars the government from using information in court if it was gathered before a suspect was informed of his right to remain silent and to an attorney.

But the Department of Justice is refusing to publicly release the guidance, with a spokesman describing it in an interview as an “internal document.” So we don’t know the administration’s exact interpretation of Miranda, even though it may have significantly reshaped the way terrorism interrogations are conducted.

You have the right to remain silent, only, we won’t tell you if and when that applies.

The Bush/Cheney constitutional Alice in Wonderland games are now made legitimate, bipartisan and routine by the Obama administration.

Alan Grayson for President in 2012.

*George Orwell.

Republicans Are So F%$#ing Classy

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Wouldn’t you know it, “Jesse Kelly, the ex-Marine Tea Partyer who challenged Gabrielle Giffords,” is looking into the possibility of gearing up for a special election:

Kelly, if you don’t already know, has been taking heat since Giffords’ shooting for sponsoring a campaign event last year in which supporters joined him in shooting a “fully automatic M-16.” “Get on target for November. Help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office,” the event’s announcement read.

It’s true that the M-16 event had no direct connection with Giffords’ shooting, and claims that it indirectly helped create a “climate” conducive to the shooting are dubious at best. Still, to many people, Kelly is now best known as the guy who encouraged supporters to shoot M-16s in the name of defeating a member of Congress who was, several months later, nearly shot to death. Politically, the association is toxic, and Kelly faces a formidable — maybe impossible — task in repairing the damage.

Thus, stories about him quietly looking into whether there might soon be a special election for Giffords’ seat are particularly damaging for him. Sure, the inquiry his campaign apparently made wasn’t actually that unreasonable. There were, after all, reports earlier this week that Arizona state law requires that Giffords’ seat be declared vacant if she’s incapacitated for more than 90 days. All Kelly may have done is make a discreet inquiry about whether this is true. (It isn’t; only the House itself can declare a seat vacant.) But, especially in the wake of the M-16 controversy, it looks terrible for Kelly to be seen making political calculations right now.

Actually, it doesn’t look terrible.

It’s par for the course for the ‘Phants.  It took them about 12 hours to politicize 911, after all.

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Cindy Gertz, the US Treasury official responsible for trying to prevent foreclosures, just praised the mortgage servicers for their efforts at preventing forecolsures:

An Obama administration housing official on Wednesday defended mortgage servicing companies, just one day after Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said the industry needs an overhaul.

Cindy Gertz, director of operations at the Treasury Department’s Homeownership Preservation Office, said mortgage servicers–firms which collect loan payments–have hired tens of thousands of extra staff to work with a crush of struggling borrowers who are trying to renegotiate the terms of their mortgages.

“I think tremendous progress has been made,” Gertz told a group of bankers at a conference organized by the Mortgage Bankers Association. Gertz, a former executive at mortgage finance giant Freddie Mac, did acknowledge that the process is not complete.

This is kind of like saying that IV drug users who share needles have been helpful in the fights against AIDS.

The only explanation for the fact that a Google News search of the name does not reveal the phrase, “Spending more time with her family,” is that this is what her boss, Tim “Eddie Haskell” Geithner, and his boss, Barack Obama, actually believe that loan servicers acting in bad faith are a necessary to protect our banking system.

My Bad……

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I’ve had a busy month, just look at my posting volume, so I missed the first two bank failure Fridays.

There were two bank failures on the 7th, and one on the 14th, and there have been no credit union failures this far

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

  1. First Commercial Bank of Florida, Orlando, FL
  2. Legacy Bank, Scottsdale, AZ
  3. Oglethorpe Bank, Brunswick, GA

Full FDIC list

So, here is the my new, improved graph pr0n with trendline (FDIC only).

I’ve dropped the trend line, and replaced it with two line graphs, for 2010 & 2011, so we can see how they compare.

And since it’s early in the year, here is a detail of the first few weeks:

Note that we are seeing a calendar artifact here. The first Friday of 2011 was January 1, when the banks were all closed, and the FDIC would not be closing anyone, while the first Friday of 2011 was the 7th, and so very much a business day for the FDIC.

We should see a better comparison of activity by early February, when trends become more visible.

It’s Jobless Thursday

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Initial claims for unemployment benefits fell to 404,000 last week, better than forecast, but still about 25K more than what is needed for the start of a meaningful recovery, and the less volatile 4-week moving average dropped 4,000 to 411,750, with continuing claims dropping 26K to 3.86 million, though the total number of people getting benefits, despite the fact that the “99ers” have run out of benefits, rose by more than 400K to 9.61 million.

In related news, manufacturing employment grew for the first time in more than a decade.

Remember Always that the Cossacks Work for the Czar

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Go to the very gifted cartoonist’s website for a full size image, and buy some of his stuff

So when a political appointee of Barack Obama’s decides to use the King holiday to say that Martin Luther King, Jr. would have supported the never-ending war in Afghanistan, because it is somehow or other a “just war”:

Jeh C. Johnson, the Defense Department’s general counsel, posed that question at today’s Pentagon commemoration of King’s legacy.

In the final year of his life, King became an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War, Johnson told a packed auditorium. However, he added, today’s wars are not out of line with the iconic Nobel Peace Prize winner’s teachings.

“I believe that if Dr. King were alive today, he would recognize that we live in a complicated world, and that our nation’s military should not and cannot lay down its arms and leave the American people vulnerable to terrorist attack,” he said.

I understand that Mr. Johnson knew Dr. King, and went to school with his son, but seriously, using Dr. King to pimp the war in Afghanistan is so deeply appalling that it buggers the mind.

It is absolutely ludicrous when juxtaposed with the before and after pictures of Tarok Kolache.

Winning Hearts and Minds…

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This is your village

This is your village after the US military “saves it”

Any questions?

Because of activities by the Taliban in Tarok Kolache in Afghanistan, they basically occupied it, the US obliterated it with over 25 tons of munitions, but that’s OK, because it’s not like the Afghans are people deserving of consideration:

As [Petraeus Hagiographer and all-around toady Paula] Broadwell tells it, the villagers understood that the United States needed to destroy their homes — except when they don’t. One villager “in a fit of theatrics had accused Flynn of ruining his life after the demolition.”

An adviser to Hamid Karzai said that the 1-320th “caused unreasonable damage to homes and orchards and displaced a number of people.” Flynn has held “reconstruction shuras” with the villagers and begun compensating villagers for their property losses, but so far the reconstruction has barely begun, three months after the destruction.
“Sure they are pissed about the loss of their mud huts,” Broadwell wrote on Facebook, “but that is why the BUILD story is important here.”

Seriously, they live in mud huts, why should we care what the f%$# they think?

More seriously, this is the endgame of a failed colonial adventure, and I think that anyone with half a brain, including David “I want that 5th Star, Bitches” Petraeus, and Barack Obama, but the general is too interested in his career, and the President is too afraid of the Republicans calling him names, so the insanity continues.

The Vampire Squid Has Conquered Time Itself

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As if nearly destroying the world wasn’t enough, when Goldman Sachs became a bank holding company, allowing it to get billions in Federal Reserve bailouts, it moved its fiscal year from starting on December 1 to January 1, as regulations required, and then it disappeared the missing month of December, 2008, and loaded the “orphan month” with huge losses as well as huge bonuses to its employees that basically went down the memory hole”

As a result, some great information gets missed, and is that much harder for the rest of us to find. For instance, the main news in the story is this:

Nearly 36 million stock options were granted to employees in December 2008 — 10 times the amount issued the previous year — when the stock was trading at $78.78. Since those uncertain days, Goldman’s business has roared back and its share price has more than doubled, closing on Tuesday at nearly $175.

The story goes on to detail the dates at which the options can be exercised. But there’s much more to be said on this matter. For one thing, the monster option grant took place during Goldman’s notorious orphan month, meaning that it would never appear in an annual report. And for another thing, it was very expensive even at the time.

……

Remember that December 2008, when Goldman made these grants, was the worst month in the company’s history: it lost $1.3 billion, and was mired in the depths of the financial crisis. Yet many partners will have received stock and options awards that month which are worth hefty eight-figure sums today. Not bad for a month’s work.

(emphasis mine)

I cannot see this as anything but a deliberate attempt to loot the company at the expense of the share holders.

Why these ratf%$#s aren’t under criminal investigation is beyond me.

Alan Grayson for President in 2012

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If you don’t believe it now, just wait until Obama tries to sell gutting Social Security and Medicare in his State of the Union speech.

I could be wrong, and if I am, I will issue a correction, but I think that it is clear that embracing right wing talking points is more important to Barack Obama than is good policy, and driving the “first stake through the heart of Social Security” is clearly seen as a big plum by Obama and most of his administration.

We will know one way or the other in 5½ days.

Obama is a Dick Cheney Wet Dream

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Sorry for the mental image, but Dick Cheney is now saying that he likes Obama’s policies on war, illegal wiretaps, and torture:

In the early months of Obama’s presidency, the American Right did to him what they do to every Democratic politician: they accused him of being soft on defense (specifically “soft on Terror”) and leaving the nation weak and vulnerable to attack. But that tactic quickly became untenable as everyone (other than his hardest-core followers) was forced to acknowledge that Obama was embracing and even expanding — rather than reversing — the core Bush/Cheney approach to Terrorism. As a result, leading right-wing figures began lavishing Obama with praise — and claiming vindication — based on Obama’s switch from harsh critic of those policies (as a candidate) to their leading advocate (once in power).

So the overbearing security state, in which the President or his designees, can detain you forever without trial and torture you, while tapping all of our phones, is now the new normal, and Cheney and his ilk are ecstatic, because they now know that there will be no prosecutions.

Thanks a lot, Barry.  You must have been the worst constitutional law professor ever.

Bishop John Shelby Spong Is Right…

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He asks the question, “Has religion in general and Christianity in particular degenerated to the level that it has become little more than a veil under which anger can be legitimatized?” (See here)

My answer is “yes”, and that you could also add bigotry to that list, as evidenced by the Governor of (where else) Alabama, who, while declaring that he was colorblind, said that, “So anybody here today who has not accepted Jesus Christ as their savior, I’m telling you, you’re not my brother and you’re not my sister,” though to be fair, he Robert Bentley has since apologized, though with the classic, “I’m sorry if I offended anyone,” apology, which actually puts the onus on those who object.

There are people who use religion to fulfill a basic spiritual need, but I think that there are a lot more people who find it useful way to feel better than other people.

Why a Carbon Tax is Superior to Cap and Trade

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In either case, the consumer pays for it, but a carbon tax can go to things like government programs (Or, if you are of that ilk, per person rebates that favor the less well off), while carbon trading enriches polluters, the Vampire Squids of the world, and people who game the system for personal profit:

The European Commission suspended trading in greenhouse gas emissions permits on Wednesday for at least a week after the theft of permits worth millions of euros via online attacks.

The Emissions Trading System was a target of “recurring security breaches” over the last two months, the commission, the executive agency of the European Union, announced on its Web site Wednesday.

The commission said it needed to shut the system down until at least Jan. 26 because “incidents over the last weeks have underlined the urgent need” for enhanced security measures.

The attacks raised new questions about the viability of Europe’s main tool to combat a rise in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

The stolen permits are part of Europe’s effort to cap the amount of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, that companies may emit each year. Europe’s system is the world’s largest market for greenhouse gas emissions credits.

The only advantage to carbon trading is that it gives politicians the ability to give another revenue stream to their classmates from Ivy League/Oxbridge/Sorbonne/Etc. who work in investment banks.

It’s a giveaway to the investment banker, and an invitation to fraud, the case of hydroelectric plants in China without transmission lines to accumulate credits being just one such example.

Don’t Let the Door Hit Your Ass on the Way Out, Joey

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Joe Lieberman makes his retirement official:

Referring to Mr. Lieberman’s plan to forgo re-election, Bill Curry, a prominent Democrat who served with Mr. Lieberman in the State Senate, said, “It’s the first thing he’s done in 10 years to make Connecticut Democrats completely happy.”

I don’t really have much to add to this, except for the fact that Ezra Klein has clearly been assimilated by the Beltway Borg™, and has become yet another thought free spewer of conventional DC wisdom, since he is wondering if Joe Lieberman is some sort of Democratic Hero:

That [Obama’s disgraceful lobbying on behalf of Lieberman to keep his seat and seniority] kept Lieberman in the fold, and after Arlen Specter switched parties and Al Franken won his election, gave Democrats the 60 votes they needed to break a Republican filibuster against health-care reform. Lieberman’s behavior during the debate was often erratic and seemingly unprincipled. Among other things, he skipped the meetings where Democrats were trying to work out a compromise on the public option, and then he killed the Medicare buy-in proposal they’d developed — despite endorsing that exact proposal months before. In doing so, he doomed a great piece of policy, and by doing it at the last minute, endangered the rest of the bill, too. But the reality is that the legislation simply wouldn’t have passed without his vote. And after extracting his pound of flesh, he voted “aye.”

This ignores the fact that the Democrats really had 60 votes for only a few weeks, because Ted Kennedy was busy dying, and the displays of narcissism, petulance, self importance, and wounded pride that made Lieberman determined to inflict as much damage as possible while keeping his committee chairmanship.

If Lieberman could have found a way to vote “No”, and keep his position, he would have, because he was all about petty vengeance.