Author: Matthew G. Saroff

Russians Adapt Cruise Missile to Conventional Warhead

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AS-18 Kazoo variant


AS-15 Kent Variant

We now have evidence that the Russians are modifying their cruise missiles to accommodate conventional warheads. (paid subscription required)

You can notice on both the Kazoo (top) and the Kent, forward surfaces have been added, probably to accommodate a center of gravity that has moved forward due to a heaver conventional warhead replacing the previous nuclear payload.

Additionally, the Kazoo appears to have some electro-optical sensors, which are likely used to improve terminal accuracy, reported to be 2-5 meters.

Considering their experience in Georgia, where they aircraft to anti-aircraft systems that they had designed, the renewed focus on stand off weaponry is not a surprise.

If It’s In The Weekly Standard, They Are Either Liars of Incompetent

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Well, the good folks at Defense Tech flag an article by John Noonan at The Weekly Standard suggesting that Iran’s new solid fuel multi-stage missile represents a quantum leap in missile capabilities:

I’m a little late coming in on the latest Iranian missile salvo, but there a few salient points still worth mentioning. First, the Sajjil-2 is a solid fuel rocket. That’s the type of power source that we use in our own Minuteman III rockets, as solid fuel is stable in flight and requires no preparation time ahead of a launch. Liquid fuel, which powers the Iranian Shahab-3 fleet, is highly corrosive and sloshes around in a rocket’s downstage, destabilizing flight and degrading accuracy. It’s so toxic that the fuel eats away at a missile’s internal tanks, and thus needs to be inserted right before launch. That prep time is important, as it gives us a little extra warning prior to a hostile missile launch, which could be used to kill Iranian birds before they fly. With this new Sajjil-2 system, Iran has the ability to keep their missiles hot and ready for execution, killing any chance of an advanced warning or neutralization actions prior to a launch.

………

(emphasis mine)

I understand that John Noonan, like most of the staff of The Weekly Standard, wants to bomb Iran, and wants Iran bombed, but this does not justify his not telling the truth, and in the two areas that I’ve highlighted, he’s not telling the truth:

  • The need to load the fuel immediately before launch.
    • Simply not true. The US and Russia started using storable liquid propellants, nitrogen tetroxide oxidiser and a hydrazine UDMH mix propellant in the both the Titan II, and SS-18, and had them in ready for immediate launch for years, perhaps 15 seconds from when the button is pushed until the missile exits the silo.
  • Fuel sloshing
    • Fuel tanks have baffles to prevent sloshing. The tanks are specifically designed to avoid this issues, and while it may be “rocket science”, it’s a problem that has been solved for years.
    • The numbers accuracy for both the Titan (900m), and the SS-18 (250m) show that these missiles accuracy, much like their solid fuel counterparts, is a function of the guidance system, not any fictional sloshing.

Let’s be clear, for ICBM’s, solid fuel is better. There are a whole bunch of problems, as exemplified by the Titan II silo explosion that resulted from a workman dropping a socket that punctured a tank.

Additionally, if you want to go with a mobile launcher, it’s somewhere between insane and impossible to transport a loaded liquid fueled rocket.

Additionally, the operational costs of a liquid fueled system are higher, with, for example routine replacement of seals and X-Rays of the tanks to verify fuel levels.

So, a solid fueled ICBM, or IRBM is marginally more capable, and much simpler to operate, but running around with your head on fire about it indicates that one is either incompetent, or dishonest.

What Does Matthew G. Saroff Look Like?

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Original Courtesy of Quentin Tarantino, with typography by mdaisey

What?

What country are you from?

What, what?

What ain’t no country that I ever heard of. They speak English in what?

What?

English, muthahf%$#er, do you speak it?

Yes.

Then you know that I’m saying!

Yes.

Describe what Matthew G. Saroff looks like!

What?

Say what again! Say what again! I dare you! I double dare you muthahf%$#er! Say what one more God Damned time!

He’s white! He’s bald! …… He could stand to lose 40 pounds!

Does he look like a bitch!

What?

(Bang! screaming)

Does … he … look … like … a … bitch!?!?!

Nooooo!!!!!

Then why are you trying to f%$# him like a bitch David?

Axelrod promises to push for drug re-importation after healthcare reform
By Kevin Bogardus – 12/20/09 09:59 AM ET

A senior White House adviser said Sunday that the Obama administration will push forward on safe re-importation of pharmaceutical drugs after the healthcare reform bill is finished.

As a candidate in 2008, President Barack Obama promised to allow cheaper drugs to be re-imported into the United States from Canada and other countries. He also co-sponsored legislation that would allow re-importation as an Illinois senator. The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, a key White House ally in the healthcare reform push, has lobbied heavily against re-importation, though, and would likely not support the final bill if it was included in the package.

Speaking on CNN’s “State of the Union,” David Axelrod, Obama’s top political aide, said the White House still favors drug re-importation and wants to move forward on it.

Do I look like an idiot? After fighting tooth and nail to keep drug re-importation out of the healthcare bills, you are going to fight to bring it back, like you promised during the campaign, just like you promised to repeal “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell”, promote marriage equality, and to go after people who broke the law in the Bush administration?

Barack Obama and His Evil Minions™ are trying to f%$# anyone who wants to improve healthcare, and that means that they are trying to f%$# Matthew G. Saroff, and Matthew G. Saroff don’t like to be f%$#ed by anyone except Mrs. Saroff.

Not Enough Bullets: Credit Card Companies Edition

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In particular First Premier Bank Credit Cards, which is charging 79.9% interest:

Here’s something you don’t see every day: A credit card with a $75 dollar annual fee, a $300 limit, a $29 penalty for being late or over limit… and an interest rate of 79.9 percent? Welcome to First Premier Bank, a sub-prime credit card issuer.

First Premier is just following the new regulations found in the Credit Card Reform Bill passed by Congress and signed by our President this past year. Apparently, Congress set out to curb the abuse that has become all-too-common in the credit card industry… you know, like exorbitant fees and interest rates from 20-40%… so they asked the banking lobby to come up with something acceptable and this is the result. So, there should be no one surprised when other credit card issuers follow suit as expected.

You know, it’s this kind of crap makes cynicism rule in politics.

Why the Naked CDS Should Be Banned: Part McCMLXXVII

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Yes, once again we have Goldman Sachs that great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity,* using naked Credit Default Swaps, (CDS) which are basically insurance policies, with the crucial differenc being that you can insure your neighbor’s home, and collect when you burn it down, something forbidden in other insurance products since 1746.

You see Goldman Sachs bought naked CDS, and then interfered in its reorganizing its debt so that it could collect:

International Brotherhood of Teamsters President James Hoffa said Goldman Sachs Group Inc. is creating derivatives trades that would profit from the bankruptcy of YRC Worldwide Inc., the trucking company trying to avert failure with a debt exchange.

The most profitable securities firm in Wall Street history “is actively soliciting bond trades for clients and underwriting credit-default swaps to benefit from a failed exchange and resulting bankruptcy,” Hoffa, the union leader, wrote in a letter dated yesterday to Goldman Sachs Chief Executive Officer Lloyd Blankfein.

YRC, the biggest U.S. trucker by sales, is extending the exchange offer deadline to Dec. 23, after investors holding 75 percent of its debt initially agreed to the exchange, below the 95 percent required by bank lenders. As of 5 p.m. in New York yesterday, participation fell to 57 percent, the Overland Park, Kansas-based company said in a statement. The company said it believes some bondholders have withdrawn because they want to tender their notes only on the expiration date.

The company has faced opposition to its plan to exchange $536.8 million of notes for equity from bondholders who also own derivatives that pay out in a default, according to people familiar with the matter. The Teamsters’ pressure comes as Goldman Sachs is under fire from other labor groups over its role in the subprime mortgage crisis.

This is precisely why the Marine Insurance Act of 1746 was passed, and why the writing of new naked CDS instruments should be banned, and existing naked CDS contracts should be rendered unenforceable.

There is a difference between making money off of someone else’s misfortune, and making money by causing someone else’s misfortune.

*Alas, I cannot claim credit for this bon mot, it was coined by the great Matt Taibbi, in his article on the massive criminal conspiracy investment firm, The Great American Bubble Machine.

60……Until Leiberman Knifes Everyone Again……

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We now have reports that Reid and Obama have managed to cajole Senator Ben Nelson into not filibustering the helathcare bill:

Senate Democratic leaders achieved a breakthrough Saturday in the drive for health overhaul legislation, securing the 60 votes needed to ensure passage after a late-night deal on abortion coverage locked in the support of Nebraska Sen. Ben Nelson.

The bill is at best marginally better than what we have now, it might be a bit worse, since the mandate in a monopoly situation is a disaster, and the abortion language allows states to forbid insurance companies to cover abortions.

Let’s be clear, insurance companies don’t customize their plans unless forced to, and over the next few years, this will have the effect of eliminating abortion from insurance coverage, as NOW notes:

Statement of Terry O’Neill, NOW President

December 19, 2009

The so-called health care reform bill now before the Senate, with the addition of Majority Leader Harry Reid’s Manager’s Amendment, amounts to a health insurance bill for half the population and a sweeping anti-abortion law for the rest of us. And by the way, it’s the rest of us who voted the current leadership into both houses of Congress.

The National Organization for Women is outraged that Senate leadership would cave in to Sen. Ben Nelson, offering a compromise that amounts to a Stupak-like ban on insurance coverage for abortion care. Right-wing ideologues like Nelson and the Catholic Bishops may not understand this, but abortion is health care. And health care reform is not true reform if it denies women coverage for the full range of reproductive health services.

We call on all senators who consider themselves friends of women’s rights to reject the Manager’s Amendment, and if it remains, to defeat this cruelly over-compromised legislation.

###

I’ll still be calling my Senators, and asking them to vote against the bill and against cloture.

Likely Record Snow Today

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Apologies for the crappy cell phone camera pic

Well, we’re getting a lot of snow here, it’s still coming down, and the estimate is that it will be in the range of 18-24 inches when all is said and done should beat the December record of 11½ inches in a single day and 14 inches in a 2-day storm, and may actually break the all-time record set in February 2003 in the North American blizzard of 2003 of 28.2 inches if it exceeds what the weatherman are reporting by a bit.

We still have not seen a snow plow on my street, though it has seen the more heavily traveled streets in the area.

Snow is expected to continue until tapering off sometime tomorrow.

[on edit]Not a big deal for me, but with 1 week left to go before American Greed and Conspicuous Consumption day, it looks like this will hammer retailers, because for much of the Eastern seaboard, this weekend is done, and there may still be a lot of closings, etc. on Monday.

Raytheon Looks to Adapt AIM-9X for Air to Ground Applications

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They have conducted tests, and have successfully intercepted a high-speed “cigarette boat”, which simulates a drug running boat.

The idea here is that if an aircraft encounters a ground target while only armed for air-to-air, it could use the Sidewinder to take out the target.

Me, I’m wondering why they don’t just use the cannon.

One interesting bit here is that the F-22 crash 9 months ago might have been a part of this test, as it was reported that the smaller side bay doors were open at the time of the incident.

And the Tanker Saga Continues………

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[On Edit] Here is some Airbus Tanker Pr0n

OK, we are in a period of some uncertainty in terms of the much delayed US Air Force tanker contract.

Basically, it all comes down to how the USAF will evaluate the bids.

If it simply says that that the cheapest plane that meets the specs wins, the the Boeing 767 wins, but if it includes total capability, basically dollars per pound of fuel offloaded at a giving distance from the airbase, then the Airbus A330 wins, because it is significantly larger and more capable, as well as being able to simultaneously carry cargo and fuel planes.

It appears that the request for proposals (RFP) is leaning in the former direction, because EADS/Northrop Grumman is threatening a no-bid, which would have Boeing doing the Air Force like a drunk Republican at a gay bar. (see also here)

EADS/Northrop Grumman has reportedly told the Pentagon that it does not intend to bid if the RFP remains the same as it did in the draft, though this seen as a ploy to pressure the USAF to change the requirements (paid subscription required), and Air Force Secretary Michael Donley has called their bluff, saying that there will be no major changes.

I think that there is a bit of a game of chicken going on, and Representative John Murtha, chairman of the House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee, is saying that the tanker bid “must” have a competition, implying that he may use the appropriations process to require multiple bidders which adds yet more drama to the entire process.

Fighting Terrorism With Lesbian Pr0n

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The Wall Street Journal has a bomb shell of s story.

It appears that insurgents in Afghanistan have hacked into the video feeds of US drones:

Militants in Iraq have used $26 off-the-shelf software to intercept live video feeds from U.S. Predator drones, potentially providing them with information they need to evade or monitor U.S. military operations.

Senior defense and intelligence officials said Iranian-backed insurgents intercepted the video feeds by taking advantage of an unprotected communications link in some of the remotely flown planes’ systems. Shiite fighters in Iraq used software programs such as SkyGrabber — available for as little as $25.95 on the Internet — to regularly capture drone video feeds, according to a person familiar with reports on the matter.

(link to SkyGrapper software mine)

I am surprised by this. Not so much by the idea that anyone in a situation to be surveilled and attacked by the US might attempt to use SIGINT to defend themselves, that it just basic common sense, but by the fact that the US military has been using an unencrypted feed to transmit data.

And, of course, we have the accusation that it was Iran who actually hacked the feeds, or developed the method to hack the feeds, because, much like in the case of the the Explosively Formed Penetrators (EFP) used by insurgents in Iraq, it is claimed that only the Iranians have the technical know-how to use such a system.

Of course, in the case of the EFPs, this accusation relied on a number of lies, in particular the idea that EFP construction was so technically challenging that only the Iranians could do it, despite the fact that the IRA was using EFPs in Ireland over 30 years ago, and that they actually discovered workshops where IEDs were manufactured…………It turns out all you need to make an EFP is a simple lathe and some copper.

The idea that once someone discovered the video feeds were unencrypted, and my guess would be that this has been known since the Kosovo campaign, because the Serbs were typically all over this kind of stuff.

In any case, the military is now claiming that this breach has been fixed, implying that encryption has been added.

I’m wondering what took so long. The satellite TV providers have been encrypting their signals with minimal computational overhead for decades.

Of course, I have an improvement on this idea, and it involves lesbian pr0n. (You were wondering when we would be getting to the pr0n, weren’t you)

In addition to using encryption, the video feed should use steganography to embed the signal inside an unencrypted non-tactical video feed.

The unencrypted video should be lesbian pr0n,* because the then the insurgents would in order to extract the true signal, be forced to watch nekkid women (Oh my God, tits!) deriving sexual satisfaction (Oh my God, female orgasm!) without benefit of a penis (Oh my God…………You get the idea), and it just screws with their heads (both upper and lower).

One of the reasons for the pr0n,† is because any relatively competent state actor would be able to decrypt a video feed in a relatively short period of time by gang tackling the signal with a video game based massively parallel super-computer.

*It was actually Bill Volk who made the suggestion.
†Beside the fact that I am a smart ass.

Cool Proto Punk

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Picture

Video

The band is Death, it was the Hackney brothers Bobby,Hackney, and Dannis.

I’m particularly surprised because I saw early punk as a pretty lily white phenomenon, and these guys are black from Detroit.

My Image of Punk is that it came from the UK, California, and New York, as personified by the Sex Pistols, the Dead Kennedys, and the Ramones.

You can get a cliff notes version of their career in this New York Times review of the recent Renaissance that the band has been experiencing.

In their first incarnation, their recption by local crowds was less than enthusiastic:

Death began playing at cabarets and garage parties on Detroit’s predominantly African-American east side, but were met with reactions ranging from confusion to derision. “We were ridiculed because at the time everybody in our community was listening to the Philadelphia sound, Earth, Wind & Fire, the Isley Brothers,” Bobby said. “People thought we were doing some weird stuff. We were pretty aggressive about playing rock ’n’ roll because there were so many voices around us trying to get us to abandon it.”

It’s a fascinating bit of musical history.

It’s Bank Failure Friday!!!!

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

  1. RockBridge Commercial Bank, Atlanta, GA
  2. Peoples First Community Bank, Panama City, FL
  3. Citizens State Bank, New Baltimore, MI
  4. New South Federal Savings Bank, Irondale, AL
  5. Independent Bankers’ Bank, Springfield, IL*
  6. Imperial Capital Bank, La Jolla, CA
  7. First Federal Bank of California, F.S.B., Santa Monica, CA

Full FDIC list

*I think that my parents had an account there in the mid-1980s, when my step-mother was dean at the University of Illinois at Springfield.

Obama Gets Revolt from the Faithful on Healthcare

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Which is not particularly surprising, as his behavior has been pretty revolting on healthcare.

It turns out that OFA, originally “Obama for America,” and now “Organizing for America,” just called for a phone bank to support the Nelson/Lieberman healthcare reform sellout bill, and the base decided that they had to wash their hair:

On Wednesday morning, Organizing for America, as Obama’s reconstituted campaign organization is now known, e-mailed its list of 13 million Obama supporters asking them to “call your senators now and help us ‘ring in reform.’”

The campaign yielded 150,000 calls — less than half the number of a similar effort in October — and it prompted a backlash among online and local activists who had logged countless volunteer supporting Obama’s campaign and legislative agenda, but who felt betrayed by recent Democratic concessions in the health-care reform fight.

………

………while some OFA subscribers replied directly to the call-to-action e-mail with angry messages and others asked to be removed from the list entirely.

(emphasis mine)

I had myself removed from the OFA mailing list some months ago, and I do not regret this at all.

Additionally, the latest This Research 2000/Progressive Change Campaign Committee/Democracy for AmericaPoll shows that the public overwhelming opposes the personal mandates in the bill if there is no public option.

Respondents said that they supported a public option 59% to 31%, opposed a madate without a public option 33% to 56%, and that Obama didn’t fight Lieberman hard enough: 63% to 29%.

What a surprise. Hoocoodanode that the American public would object to a tax on breathing with the proceeds going to insurance company executive bonuses?

The real problem here is not that the bill sucks, the problem is that it’s increasingly obvious, as Senator Russ Feingold notes, that Barack Obama and Rahm Emanuel thought that forcing people to buy overpriced insurance and overpriced pharmaceuticals was a good way to keep those industries from donating to Republicans, the average citizen be damned:

Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.), among the most vocal supporters of the public option, said it would be unfair to blame Lieberman for its apparent demise. Feingold said that responsibility ultimately rests with President Barack Obama and he could have insisted on a higher standard for the legislation.

“This bill appears to be legislation that the president wanted in the first place, so I don’t think focusing it on Lieberman really hits the truth,” said Feingold. “I think they could have been higher. I certainly think a stronger bill would have been better in every respect.”

It seems that Obama’s fetish with signing a bill with “healthcare reform” on it, to the exclusion of any principles, or the need to actually make things better, so he could have a trophy on the wall has bitten him on the butt.

DeForest Kelly put it best when he said, “It’s not enough! You didn’t care as long as you could hang your trophy on the wall. Well, it’s not on it, Captain Mr President, it’s in it.”