Author: Matthew G. Saroff

Because It’s Not a War on Islam

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Well, they have just discovered that sniper scopes purchased for the Marine Corps contain verses from the Christian bible:

Following an ABC News report that thousands of gun sights used by the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan are inscribed with secret Bible references, a spokesperson for the Marine Corps said the Corps is ‘concerned’ and will discuss the matter with the weapons manufacturer.

“We are aware of the issue and are concerned with how this may be perceived,” Capt. Geraldine Carey, a spokesperson for the Marine Corps, said in a statement to ABC News. “We will meet with the vendor to discuss future sight procurements.” Carey said that when the initial deal was made in 2005 it was the only product that met the Corps needs.

However, a spokesperson for CentCom, the U.S. military’s overall command in Iraq and Aghanistan, said he did not understand why the issue was any different from U.S. money with religious inscriptions on it.

(emphasis mine)

Ummm………Because inscribing Christian verses on weapons that you kill Muslims with will make it that much more difficult for US troops to train with Muslim troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, and because it’s likely to inspire more violence against American troops, because it is another piece of evidence that Islamic radicals will use to show that this is a war against Islam?

That kind of fits the definition of, “Contrary to good order and discipline,” doesn’t it.

The Marines get it, the US Army doesn’t.

Interestingly enough, it’s the the Army, along with the US Air Force in which the bulk of complaints about discrimination by aggressive Evangelicals have been reported.

It appears that this has been common knowledge among gun enthusiasts for about 4 years, but the military never noticed what the Trijicon corporation was doing.

41

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The Boston Globe calls it for Scott Brown, so he will be the 41st Republican in the Senate.

I was right with my prediction, and that sucks. Normally I’m wrong.

For the optimists, refer to my earlier take on potential positives of Coakley losing, (the bullet points toward the end of the post) but for me, this just sucks.

Two words: Budget Reconciliation.

Jon Stewart captures the essence of what is wrong with both candidate Coakley (first 5½ minutes), and the Democratic Party (after).

Not Enough Bullets

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It looks like the fat cat Wall Street Bankers are looking at a legal challenge to Obama’s proposed bank tax:

Wall Street’s main lobbying arm has hired a top Supreme Court litigator to study a possible legal battle against a bank tax proposed by the Obama administration, on the theory that it would be unconstitutional, according to three industry officials briefed on the matter.

Ummm ……… Despite the fact that these guys destroy £7 of wealth for each dollar that they are paid, and the fact that this is intended to collect money to replace those spent under the TARP law, which required such a levy, they still believe themselves to be the masters of the universe, and they are outraged at that Obama has unveiled a modest tax on their liabilities and spoken about them with less than glowing terms.

It’s really kind of whiny, since the tax is modest, and largely geared toward forestalling more punitive measures floating around Congress.

The tax is nominally 15 basis points (0.15%) on liabilities over $50 billion, and it appears to weigh more heavily on investment banks than depositor banks, though the legal distinction was erased when the brokers all became bank holding companies. (See the FAQ from the Treasury Department)

What’s more the tax is profoundly weak tea, as the effective tax is halved, yielding a tax of 7½ basis points, which is well under the 78 basis point advantage in cost of funds that the “too big to fail banks” have over their smaller brethren.

Note also that this only covers the $117 billion or so of the TARP, but when other bailouts are considered, we are approaching $30 trillion in money handed to banks, without a thought of clawing that back.

So they are getting a sweetheart deal, and they are screaming like stuck pigs.

They do not realize how angry people are, and they won’t until people literally start burning down their houses with torches.

There is a Point Where Obama Moves Beyond “Looking Ahead,” and Becomes a Co-Conspirator

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Scott Horton at Harper’s Magazine looks at the deaths of three detainees in detention at Guantánamo, and concludes that it is likely that they were tortured to death, and almost certain that there is a pervasive and ongoing coverup of the details of their deaths:

……… Furthermore, new evidence now emerging may entangle Obama’s young administration with crimes that occurred during the George W. Bush presidency, evidence that suggests the current administration failed to investigate seriously—and may even have continued—a cover-up of the possible homicides of three prisoners at Guantánamo in 2006.

The law, both US and international, is clear here: covering up a war crime is a war crime.

Late in the evening on June 9 that year, three prisoners at Guantánamo died suddenly and violently. Salah Ahmed Al-Salami, from Yemen, was thirty-seven. Mani Shaman Al-Utaybi, from Saudi Arabia, was thirty. Yasser Talal Al-Zahrani, also from Saudi Arabia, was twenty-two, and had been imprisoned at Guantánamo since he was captured at the age of seventeen. None of the men had been charged with a crime, though all three had been engaged in hunger strikes to protest the conditions of their imprisonment. They were being held in a cell block, known as Alpha Block, reserved for particularly troublesome or high-value prisoners.

As news of the deaths emerged the following day, the camp quickly went into lockdown. The authorities ordered nearly all the reporters at Guantánamo to leave and those en route to turn back. The commander at Guantánamo, Rear Admiral Harry Harris, then declared the deaths “suicides.” In an unusual move, he also used the announcement to attack the dead men. “I believe this was not an act of desperation,” he said, “but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us.” Reporters accepted the official account, and even lawyers for the prisoners appeared to believe that they had killed themselves. Only the prisoners’ families in Saudi Arabia and Yemen rejected the notion.

Two years later, the U.S. Naval Criminal Investigative Service, which has primary investigative jurisdiction within the naval base, issued a report supporting the account originally advanced by Harris, now a vice-admiral in command of the Sixth Fleet. The Pentagon declined to make the NCIS report public, and only when pressed with Freedom of Information Act demands did it disclose parts of the report, some 1,700 pages of documents so heavily redacted as to be nearly incomprehensible. The NCIS report was carefully cross-referenced and deciphered by students and faculty at the law school of Seton Hall University in New Jersey, and their findings, released in November 2009, made clear why the Pentagon had been unwilling to make its conclusions public. The official story of the prisoners’ deaths was full of unacknowledged contradictions, and the centerpiece of the report—a reconstruction of the events—was simply unbelievable.

According to the NCIS, each prisoner had fashioned a noose from torn sheets and T-shirts and tied it to the top of his cell’s eight-foot-high steel-mesh wall. Each prisoner was able somehow to bind his own hands, and, in at least one case, his own feet, then stuff more rags deep down into his own throat. We are then asked to believe that each prisoner, even as he was choking on those rags, climbed up on his washbasin, slipped his head through the noose, tightened it, and leapt from the washbasin to hang until he asphyxiated. The NCIS report also proposes that the three prisoners, who were held in non-adjoining cells, carried out each of these actions almost simultaneously.

(emphasis mine)

This is well into the territory of the SNL phony news report that anti-Apartheid activist Stephen Biko had died in custody as the result of his hunger strike, and please ignore the skull fracture, which was a result of a good faith effort by the authorities attempt to force feed him roast beef through his skull.

It is clear that there is a pervasive and ongoing cover-up of this affair within the military. It’s also clear that it is large enough that political appointees within the Department of Defense have to be giving their tacit approval of a continuing deception.

Whoever this individual is, they are, as I noted earlier, guilty of war crimes.

With the appearance of Horton’s story on the web, and Keith Olbermann’s show, everyone in the military and civilian chains of command at the Pentagon and the White House has to be aware of these issues.

If immediate action, by which I mean an independent investigation, is not taken to uncover the facts, and then these individuals, including Barack Obama, are war criminals.

I understand that the Obama administration finds investigating what appears to be a multiple cases of torturing people to death to be politically inconvenient, but political inconvenience does not excuse law breaking.

More Ass Covering by the Fed

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It’s clear that Bernanke does not want the rock turned over to see what slimy things live underneath, and so we have some more measures taken by the Federal Reserve to try to mute calls for an audit, and perhaps a re-evaluation of the role and powers of the institution.

They have implemented more consumer friendly credit card rules (also here and here), and now Bernanke is saying that the central bank would welcome an audit of their dealings with AIG by the GAO.

In the latter quote, the pertinent quote is this:

The invitation does not represent any procedural changes, as GAO could have reviewed the issue without such an invitation. But the does letter highlight the Fed’s sensitivity to mounting criticism to the events leading up to the bailout.

So, if the Federal Reserve has no choice, then they will write a nice letter saying, “Okily dokily, neighbor.”

I expect that if the GAO conducts an audit, it will take crowbars and explosives to actually extract any meaningful information though.

Bad Day for Lowbrow Literature

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Robert B. Parker, author of the Spencer detective novels, and Erich Segal, author of Love Story have both died.

I don’t mean to imply that they were bad authors, I rather enjoyed reading the Spencer books, and I have never read Segal, and so cannot comment on his work at all, but rather I am saying that their books were decidedly mass market, as opposed to the more erudite stuff that you see reviewed in gushing tones on NPR.

Received via Email

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Specifically, this was received by Dutchie on the Short Skool Buss BBS:

So after landing my new job as a Wal-Mart greeter, a good find for many retirees, I lasted less than a day……

About two hours into my first day on the job a very loud, unattractive, mean-acting woman walked into the store with her two kids, yelling obscenities at them all the way through the entrance. As I had been instructed, I said pleasantly, ‘Good morning and welcome to Wal-Mart. Nice children you have there. Are they twins?’

The ugly woman stopped yelling long enough to say, ‘Hell no, they ain’t twins. The oldest one’s 9, and the other one’s 7. Why the hell would you think they’re twins? Are you blind, or just stupid?’ So I replied, ‘I’m neither blind nor stupid, Ma’am, It’s just hard to believe that you got laid twice. Have a good day and thank you for shopping at Wal-Mart.’

My supervisor said I probably wasn’t cut out for this line of work.

Brilliant.

Buh Bye New York Times

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One of the dirty secret of the newspaper business is that people do not pay for the news.

People pay a portion of the cost of setting ink to paper, but the remainder of the cost of producing a physical copy, as well as the cost of producing the content is covered by advertising.

The problem is that the most lucrative part of advertising is the classified. at about $55 for 3 lines, it generates a lot of revenue.

Unfortunately, Craigslist is better and cheaper, so newspapers find their classified revenue shrinking.

Additionally, after years of playing the Wall Street game of cutting costs, meaning reporters and in depth stories, and quality in general, their product is less attractive.

In the case of the New York Times, this has been further complicated by the fact that they plunked down a huge amount of cash for their brand new narcissistic monument to the New York Times office building, so they find themselves with a cash flow problem.

It appears that they are looking at setting up a pay wall around the newspaper to generate the desired revenue.

They have forgotten the disaster that was Times Select, which shut down after 2 years, when they generated very little revenue, and their opinion pieces largely dropped of the map on the Internet.

People pay for the Wall Street Journal because it provides breaking financial news, which is something that people have traditionally been willing to pay for.

General news, probably not, and so I’ll probably find other sources to link to.

Holy Crap! I’m Not in Boston Today!

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Note: I’m post dating this to keep it on the top of the post for the weekend. Scroll down for new posts.

In February 1985, I went to my first science fiction convention. In October, I ran a fiction convention, NotJustAnother1 Con (NJAC). I did it again in 1986, and then started Arisia, Inc. and ran the first two conventions 1990 and 1991.

About 4 years ago, I realized something important: I don’t like science fiction conventions.

When I go to a con, I don’t go to program items, I either work the con, or I self medicate.*

What’s more, my involvement with running a con completely subsumes my life, and I have a family now, and, quite honestly, it’s a destructive addiction thing to me, and no one wants to work with a self-destructive addict, and I don’t want to be one.

It only took me 20 years to realize that I hated my hobby/obsession, and, honestly, I’ve always found the community rather unremarkable.†

So I cut my losses, and following a remarkably unpleasant exchange with Arisia, Incorporated and the for-profit database vendor to whom they have outsourced their attendance and mailing list management, I had my information, and that of my wife and children, expunged from the Arisia database.‡

Maybe, the next time I think about calling someone “#@&ing stupid”, perhaps this experience will make me a bit kinder.§

In any case, I was driving to pick up my Son, and his drum kit, from school today, and there was an announcement for a Martin Luther King day symposium, and I realised, “MLK’s Birthday? Is it Arisia again?”

So I called up their web page, and yes, it is this weekend …… Though it’s technically in Cambridge, across the Charles River from Boston.

The first few years after I severed ties with the con, and the 501(c)3 corporation, I worried about it sucking me back in, but I hadn’t thought about the con in months, and only made the connection because the MLK birthday announcement triggered a connection.

I find this amazing, because just a year ago, I was contacted regarding a potential dispute with an artist, whose graphic art work is the official artist, and I found that it left me pissed off for a week.

If anyone from Arisia is reading this, I will paraphrase what I said about the time:

Please note that this is NOT intended to prohibit or discourage any individual to contact me personally in a purely social context, I just don’t want to discuss, or be involved with Arisia.

I would sooner give Dick Cheney a sponge bath than get sucked back in.

*Mammoth, some would say legendary, drunken binges.
†Which anyone who has ever discussed SF Fans with me knows.
‡What part of “remove me from the list” is so hard to understand? Needless to say, this Further justified my sense of ambivalence toward science fiction fans.
§NoT!!!. I’ll still judge them harshly. Let’s be honest here. I’m going to be calling people who do stupid things while I still have two brain cells left to rub together.

OK ……………… Weird

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Pyrofarmer, one of the regulars on the Shortskoolbus BBS had the following exchange:

My nearby farmer was asking me if I watched some Obermann segment the other night about health care?

‘No, but aren’t you going to loose your GOP membership for watching him?’

‘Have you tried to watch Beck or listened to Rush lately? They’re out of their f%$#ing minds!

(%$# mine)

You don’t have to be a Democratn to realize that Fox News resides in Bizarro World.

Japan Proposing Carbon Tax

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Well, it’s nice that that the conservative Liberal Democratic Party is not in power, because now the Japanese government is proposing a carbon levy on marine fuel:

Japan, one of the world’s top shipping operators, will submit details of its proposal for an international levy on marine fuel ahead of a meeting of the U.N.’s shipping agency in March, a government official said on Friday.

Under the proposal, which was first touted last year as an alternative to an idea supported by some European countries to introduce an emissions trading system in the sector, money raised would be used to help cut carbon dioxide emissions relating to shipping in developing countries.

Funds would be spent in areas including improving conditions at ship recycling yards, many of which are located in India and Bangladesh, the official said.

Ships that improve their fuel efficiency and new ships that exceed efficiency requirements would be offered partial refunds on the levy.

(emphasis mine)

Everyone wins, except, of course, the traders on Wall Street, the City, and the Nihombashi in Tokyo, because they don’t get to charge commissions on the fees for carbon trading, charge yet more fees for creating carbon based derivatives, and then get bailed out by the taxpayers when their house of cards collapses.

I can live with that.

It’s Put Up or Shut Up for Barack Obama

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David Bahati, author of the Ugandan “Kill the Gays” bill, and Ugandan Ethics and Integrity Minister James Nsaba Buturo are expected to come to the United States to attend the National Prayer Breakfast.

Let’s be clear: These people are proposing genocide against gays in Uganda.

They should not be granted a visa.

If Barack Obama does not want a diplomatic dispute over this, I think that he is wrong, but he then has another option: Be the first President since Dwight Eisenhower not to attend the breakfast, saying that he will not break bread with them.

If he does neither, he is immoral, and he is a coward, and he does not deserve the public trust.

It is possible that Obama will take steps to prevent this, such as pressuring “The Family”, the secretive Christo-Fascist group that has organized the prayer breakfasts, to dis-invite them.

But if he sits down to break bread with people who are this deeply evil, he is giving his personal imprimatur to genocide, and anyone who supports gay rights should not support him.

Missile Defense Agency Looks to Liquid Fuel for Land Based Standard Interceptor

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Because the MDA is looking at ground basing, where the interceptor does not face the naval prohibition against hypergolic (liquid propellants that ignite spontaneously in each others presence) propellants, they are looking to integrate liquid propellant into the next generation kill vehicle. (paid subscription required)

Because the motor is completely throttlable, it allows for extended range, since the vehicle can coast and reignite the motor for terminal maneuvers, and it can perform more effectively at shorter ranges, because it can have a higher thrust for a shorter flight.

The downside is cost, complexity, and issues with storing the fueled missiles and propellants.

China Makes Missile Defense Test

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China recently claimed to have successfully tested a mid-course ballistic missile defense system. (also here)

There are also murmurs of a sea based variant. (scroll down)

This raises a number of questions, most notably how the PLA defines “success”, my guess is that this means the interceptor passed within lethal distance of the target.

The technology could be hit to kill, but given the fact that the Chinese have successfully miniaturized nuclear warheads, my guess would be that it would armed with a nuclear warhead, either a sub kiloton neutron warhead, as was used in the Sprint, or a larger warhead as used on the Spartan (it was a 5 mt W71) that kills thermally, but I’m pulling these guesses out of my head, and they should be considered in no way authoritative.

Nuclear warheads make targeting easier, you do not have to get a as close, or pass off to a terminal seeker as you do in hit to kill, and they eliminate many of the problems with decoys, since they get everything within a fairly large radius, making decoys moot.

Moscow Russians Working on a Next Generation Bomber in 2025-2030 Time Frame

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Unlike some of the other Russian programs (*cough* PAK-FA *cough*) which seem to have overly aggressive time frames, this program has a realistic time frame, and the technical requirements are rather modest (paid subscription required) :

“At the end of the first stage, we selected four options [for the future bomber] out of an initial 47 for further consideration and analysis,” [head of the Special Aircraft Division, Alexander] Bobryshev said during a Dec. 23 meeting with Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. Bobryshev committed to the design being completed in 2011-12, with development of the aircraft to be finished by 2017. Funding needs were not disclosed.

[Strategic aviation commander Maj. Gen. Anatoly] Zhikharev says the new bomber will be low-observable, using advanced materials and other technologies. However, he notes that it cannot be made “invisible,” signaling Russia will not pursue the all-aspect, multi-signature stealth performance the U.S. is considering for its next-generation bomber project.

Part of this is, I think, the understanding that if they were to go up against a highly integrated ground bases air defense system, it would be based on their technology, where they would have intimate knowledge of the technology and capabilities, as NATO relies more heavily on aircraft for this sort of defense.

Additionally, they are no doubt aware how expensive the full up stealth is, and they know how improvements in processing and the combination of signals from various sensors have the promise of negating stealth to a significant degree in the next few years.

Also, the Russians do not have the need for the extremely long range power projection capabilities that the US does. They are primarily concerned about their “near abroad”, basically former Soviet Republics and Warsaw Pact nations, with a special focus on Georgia and Ukraine, where NATO membership is unlikely in the foreseeable future.

Weird

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I was going through the job boards, and came across an opening for an engineer for a non-line of sight weapons system to go on the US Navy’s Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) outside of DC.

Since it’s rather similar to work that I have done on the Future Combat Systems (FCS), I clicked through to apply, and it takes me to the jobs page of Ukpeaġvik Iñupiat Corporation.

So, I’m looking at the name, and saying, “Gee, it sounds like Inuit,” so after I fill out the application, I click the “about us” page, and get:

Ukpeaġvik Iñupiat Corporation (UIC) is headquartered out of Barrow, Alaska – the northernmost point of North America. Barrow is home to more than 4500 people, a majority of which are Iñupiat Eskimos.

As an Alaska Native Corporation, UIC provides social and economic resources to its 2,100 shareholders, and their descendents, who primarily reside in Barrow, Alaska. UIC is ranked 8th among Alaska Business Monthly’s 2008 survey of Alaskan-owned companies. UIC employs over 1,400 people worldwide, with over 750 in Alaska.

My first thought was, “How Odd.”

My 2nd thought was, “Was dad involved in some level in the early days of this corporation,” as he was on Governor Bill Egan’s cabinet as director of planning, but he said that the native corporations were created with the money from the oil revenues, which started to flow in after we left the state.

Still it’s kind of strange how these things tie together.