Author: Matthew G. Saroff

M14 Pr0n

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Well, it looks like the M-14 battle rifle is having a bit of a renaissance.

It appears that various US Army and Marines are looking at a “designated marksmen,” a sort of sniper-lite, and they are looking at an M14 as their weapon.

Basically, they are looking at using match grade barrels, a new gas piston system, a fiberglass inline stock, and provisions for a scope.

I’ve not had any personal experience with the M1/M14, though I once talked to an old soldier who hated it, he thought that the M1 was a better weapon, soldiers always hate the new weapon, but I just don’t think that the numbers work all that well.

An M16 weighs about 7 pounds +1 pound per 30 round clip, and the M14 weighs around 11 pounds with a 20 round clip, so weight clearly swings in favor of the M16.

Furthermore, the idea of retaining full auto on a match grade barrel is counter-productive. Once you go full auto the first time, it’s no longer match grade.

Marines are already achieving head shots with scopes with M16s at relatively long range, so I’m not sure how much an advantage one gets with this system.

I think the additional burden in terms of weight, and different ammunition, may not be worth it, and that taking an M16, or other 5.56mm rifle with a scope may be a better solution in most cases, see the United States Army Squad Designated Marksman Rifle, a modified M16, by way of example.

Russians Look at Anglo-French CFV Purchase

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It should come as no surprise that the current Russian STOBAR carrier has not proved itself to be a world beater.

Even so, reports that the Russian Navy is in discussions with Thales about purchasing the Anglo-French CVF aircraft carrier is a bit of a surprise:

The idea being floated is that all indications are Russia would like to build 6 aircraft carriers similar to the 60-70 thousand ton CVF design being developed for the British and French Navies. Ilya Kramnik’s idea is to build the lead ship in France with foreign assistance, including some experience for Russian shipbuilders, then do follow on serial construction of the rest of the class in Russia.

There are a number of thorny issues that make this difficult, among them the likelihood that any US technology on the ships would not be cleared for export.

I think that its more likely that, if there were a joint venture with other countries, it would be Russia-China, and certainly the new shipyard planned at Cahngxing, will be used for the construction and service of larger ships, and the model of the facility, shows an aircraft carrier in a drydock.

Airshow China Missile Pr0n

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It looks like advances in Chinese guided missile technology were prominently on display at Airshow China. (paid subscription required)

The China Aerospace Science and Industry Corp. (Casic) showed off new missles, including new versions of its C704 cruise missiles with IIR and TV guidance, both intended for air launch, and the smaller C705 (look at the wheels and display easels on both pictures for scale).

I think that it has a 9 or 10 inch body diamerter, as vs the 12-14 inch for the C704.


C704


C705

Not Enough Bullets: AIG, the Gift That Keeps on Giving Edition

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AIG is paying $503 million in deferred compensation to its top employees, because it needs to, “keep valuable workers from exiting the troubled insurance giant.”

Let’s see, the company in bankrupt. It’s sucked up hundreds of billions of dollars from the federal government, and it still needs more.

Could someone please explain to me how getting a company this deep in a hole makes senior management “valuable”?

Damn, That Was Fast

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US Special Operations Command (SOCOM) has begun purchases of the Boeing Hummingbird helicopter UAV. They expect to take delivery of at least 10 units this month.

Considering the fact that it was still in test and demonstration earlier this year, this is a blindingly fast fielding, at least by US military standards, which implies that there is some sort of immediate application:

US Special Operations Command (SOCOM) has begun purchasing a new unmanned helicopter, Boeing’s A160T Hummingbird, which can be used for resupply and surveillance missions and will soon be equipped with a new radar that can identify enemy targets hiding beneath dense tree cover.

Note that the bar under the fuselage is not a wing, it’s the foliage penetrating radar.

First A380 Super Jumbo With Standard Production Wiring Flies

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As many of you are aware, the Airbus A380 has a number of setbacks and delays on the way to production, primarily having to do with problems with wiring.

Basically, the wiring guys and the structures guys had problems interfacing with each other, and so EADS had to implement a new production standard, “Wave 2”, for the ramp up to full production.

What they have been shipping has had much more in the way of touch labor than they would have liked, and so has been much slower and more expensive.

Well, Airbus has now flown its first A380 constructed using their “Wave 2” production standard, which clears the way for full rate production.

(the picture is of a Wave-1 aircraft)

Complete Pwna63*

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As has been noted in various places Bush and His Evil Minions&trade have been aggressively creating new regulations in the run-up to the inauguration, in order to saddle Obama with the fallout from their insane ideology for months or years.

Well, it looks like they goofed:

“Fortunately, [the White House] made a mistake,” said a top Senate Democratic aide.

Last May, White House chief of staff Joshua Bolten instructed federal agency heads to make sure any new regulations were finalized by Nov. 1. The memo didn’t spell it out, but the thinking behind the directive was obvious. As Myron Ebell of the conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute put it: “We’re not going to make the same mistakes the Clinton administration did.”

President Bill Clinton finalized regulations within 60 days of the 2001 inauguration, meaning Bush could come in and easily reverse them.

It could take Obama years to undo climate rules finalized more than 60 days before he takes office — the advantage the White House sought by getting them done by Nov. 1. But that strategy doesn’t account for the Congressional Review Act of 1996.

The law contains a clause determining that any regulation finalized within 60 legislative days of congressional adjournment is considered to have been legally finalized on the 15th legislative day of the new Congress, likely sometime in February. Congress then has 60 days to review it and reverse it with a joint resolution that can’t be filibustered in the Senate.

In other words, any regulation finalized in the last half-year of the Bush administration could be wiped out with a simple party-line vote in the Democrat-controlled Congress.

(emphasis mine)

*Ownage.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot: The Don Siegelman Case

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Well, it now appears that in addition to the fact that Leura G. Canary, the U.S. Attorney in Montgomery, was having regular contacts with the prosecutors, despite having “recused” herself from the prosecution, it now appears that prosecutors had ex-parte communications with the jurors:

Next month in Atlanta, a federal court will hear the high-profile appeal of former Alabama governor Don E. Siegelman, whose conviction on corruption charges in 2006 became one of the most publicly debated cases to emerge from eight years of controversy at the Bush Justice Department. Now new documents highlight alleged misconduct by the Bush-appointed U.S. attorney and other prosecutors in the case, including what appears to be extensive and unusual contact between the prosecution and the jury.

(emphasis mine)

It does not get any more unethical and illegal in a case than this. There were contacts, which are generally unethical, and they went unreported to the judge and the defense, which is illegal.

We need to to reform our drug laws in order to make space for Bush and His Evil Minions&trade, because they all need to go to prison, and not a country club prison, but, to quote Office Space, a, “Pound me in the Ass.” prison.

Well, This Sucks

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American Research Group has a survey on 2008 Holiday Shopping, and it has the predicting a 50% drop in sales vs 2007.

Year Average Spending Percent Change
2008 $431 – 50%
2007 $859 – 5%
2006 $907 – 4%
2005 $942 – 6%
2004 $1,004 + 3%
2003 $976 – 6%
2002 $1,037 -1%
2001 $1,052 + 9%
2000 $968 + 3%
1999 $939 + 1%
1998 $928 + 34%

Considering the fact that 70% of the US economy is consumer driven, this is mind boggling.

How George W. Bush Saved Mikheil Saakashvili from Being Hung by the Balls

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We now have the following repors from the Times of London:

With Russian tanks only 30 miles from Tbilisi on August 12, Mr Sarkozy told Mr Putin that the world would not accept the overthrow of Georgia’s Government. According to Mr Levitte, the Russian seemed unconcerned by international reaction. “I am going to hang Saakashvili by the balls,” Mr Putin declared.

Mr Sarkozy thought he had misheard. “Hang him?” — he asked. “Why not?” Mr Putin replied. “The Americans hanged Saddam Hussein.”

Mr Sarkozy, using the familiar tu, tried to reason with him: “Yes but do you want to end up like [President] Bush?” Mr Putin was briefly lost for words, then said: “Ah — you have scored a point there.”

Bush has become the Bogeyman for the world.

He is now Homer Simpson, the stupid pathetic avatar of all that is stupid and pathetic, without the charm.

Lieberman Update

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Well, most importantly it appears that Obama dodged a call from Lieberman to congratulate him on his election victory, and so Lieberman talked to Biden instead.

Not sure if it means anything, but fact that Senators Patrick Leahy and Bernie Sanders have both now publicly come out and said that his chairmanship should be pulled is significant.

Both Klobuchar and Bayh have said that they think that he should be allowed to keep his chairmanship if he apologizes for his behavior, but you will never, ever, see contrition from Joe, so I’m not sure if that means that they are creating an way to support him, or to oppose him.

Dodd, is still working very hard to keep Lieberman in the tent.

Economics Update

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Retail sales are imploding Down 2.8% from September, and down 4.1% year over year,

Here is a historical data, courtesy of Calculated Risk, just so you know how bad these numbers look.

Of course, the financial press always has to find a silver lining, so they make note of the fact that consumer confidence rose from to 57.9 from 57.6, the article attributes this to falling gas prices, but I ascribe it to three words, “Buh Bye Bush.” With the election, they realize that Bush will soon be gone, and so the number goes, though the number still reflects major suckage.

In the overseas economy, yesterday, it was Germany, well today, it’s been confirmed that it’s actually the whole Euro Zone that is in recession.

Also, we have automotive news from that side of the pond, with the three major credit insurers in Europe pulling insurance coverage to suppliers of Ford and GM. Basically this means that if either of the auto makers default, the suppliers are on their own.

They have basically decided that the risk of a default is too much for them to cover.

And in domestic bad news cast as good news, we make note of the fact that banks and bank like institutions borrowed less from the Fed this week. Only an average daily borrowing rate of 95.4 billion, down from $110 billion.

Down to an average of 95.4 average daily borrowing list week. Let’s run the numbers 95.4 billion/business days * 250 days a year = 28.85 trillion…$23,850,000,000,000.00…By comparison, the US GDP in 2006 was 13.6 trillion.

We also have Freddie Mac tapping a $100 billion bailout fund that was not counted in the above.

As Calculated Risk notes, “Remember Fannie and Freddie have much lower default rates than the loans packaged by Wall Street. If conditions worsened dramatically for Freddie and Fannie, imagine how bad it is for Wall Street MBS and loans held by lenders like Wachovia (Wells Fargo) and WaMu (JPMorgan Chase).”

As to energy, oil is down on demand concerns, and and retail gasoline is down almost $2/gallon from peak.

There is a part of me that wonders if the swing in oil/gas was some sort of electioneering, but it clearly did not work.
In currency, the dollar rose, because when people are frightened, they still flee to the dollar for safety…for a while at least.

Hillary Clinton to Run State?

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According to some well “placed sources”, yes Hillary is on the short list for Secretary of State.

This raises some interesting questions:

  1. What does this mean for an Obama foreign policy?
  2. What does this mean about the differences between Clinton and Obama on foreign policy in the primaries?
  3. Why is the Obama team suddenly leaking like a sieve, when it was so disciplined during the campaign?

I’m not sure what numbers 1 and 2 mean, but what number 3 means is that the Clintonistas on the transition team cannot keep their damn mouths shut.

This is a good reason to keep former Clinton staffers to a minimum in his administration.

The End of Wall Street’s Boom

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Go read the whole thing, it’s an inventory of how corruption, self dealing, stupidity, and lack of moral created the Wall Street debacle.

Upton Sinclair put it best when he said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it, though in the case of Wall Street, it is more the year end bonuses than the straight salary.

Here is a typical quote:

That’s when Eisman finally got it. Here he’d been making these side bets with Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank on the fate of the BBB tranche without fully understanding why those firms were so eager to make the bets. Now he saw. There weren’t enough Americans with sh$#ty credit taking out loans to satisfy investors’ appetite for the end product. The firms used Eisman’s bet to synthesize more of them. Here, then, was the difference between fantasy finance and fantasy football: When a fantasy player drafts Peyton Manning, he doesn’t create a second Peyton Manning to inflate the league’s stats. But when Eisman bought a credit-default swap, he enabled Deutsche Bank to create another bond identical in every respect but one to the original. The only difference was that there was no actual homebuyer or borrower. The only assets backing the bonds were the side bets Eisman and others made with firms like Goldman Sachs. Eisman, in effect, was paying to Goldman the interest on a subprime mortgage. In fact, there was no mortgage at all. “They weren’t satisfied getting lots of unqualified borrowers to borrow money to buy a house they couldn’t afford,” Eisman says. “They were creating them out of whole cloth. One hundred times over! That’s why the losses are so much greater than the loans. But that’s when I realized they needed us to keep the machine running. I was like, This is allowed?”

People should be going to jail.

Lots and lots of people should be gong to jail.

What Happens When Shipping Collapses?

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So the Baltic Dry Index, a measure of the costs of shipping bulk cargo, have have dropped to 826 points on November 5, down from its high of 11793 in May:

Put simply, the cost of shipping has dropped through the floor. Sending a tonne of iron ore from Brazil to China in early June would have set you back more than $100 (£62) per tonne, or around $15m per voyage. But freight rates have now dropped to only slightly over $10 per tonne, or just $1.5m for the 70-90 day journey.

As if that wasn’t dramatic enough, the drop in daily charter rates is even sharper. At the peak of the market, a 170,000-tonne Capesize bulk carrier was hired out at the eye-watering daily rate of $234,000. At the beginning of this week, it was $5,611 – a fall of nearly 98 per cent.

Obviously, shipping has not fallen 90%, but the world has gone from serious shortage of shipping capacity to serious surfeit of shipping in about 6 months.

While that is concerning as an indicator of economic activity, what might be more concerning is the likelihood that a significant portion of world shipping, may simply shut down completely, because they are unable to get letters of credit from financial institutions.

Letters of credit are essentially guarantees that once cargo goes out to sea, that the value of the cargo will be delivered to the purchaser, and like other forms of insurance, it’s becoming increasingly hard to get, and so there is unshipped cargo sitting on docks for want of a letter.