Category: Breaking News

The 3rd World Welcomes Florida

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If you are thinking that sh%$ like buildings falling down for no reason is a symptom of 3rd world dysfunction, then the the collapse of a condominium tower in Surfside, Florida is a pretty good indication that something is very wrong in Florida, though my guess is that this is not isolated to the sunshine state:

After the dust had settled and the fog of incredulity had lifted, Soriya Cohen had only prayer and hope and questions — lots of questions — about the abrupt and violent collapse of a 12-story oceanfront condominium tower in Surfside early Thursday morning.

First and foremost in Cohen’s mind was the whereabouts of her husband, Brad Cohen, whom she had not seen or heard from since part of the Champlain Towers South Condo came crashing down, wiping away 55 units in mere seconds.

Brad Cohen was inside one of those units on the 11th floor along with his brother, Gary Cohen, said Soriya Cohen, when the building collapsed at 1:23 a.m., the time that Miami-Dade Fire Rescue first responded to a call for help at the condominium tower. Soriya Cohen had spent the night with their daughter at a different building in neighboring Miami Beach.

………

It will likely be months or even years before engineers and other experts know exactly why a part of the Champlain Towers South came crashing down.

Before those answers are found, search and rescue crews will continue the painstaking work of picking through a mountain of rubble, looking for even the faintest signs of life that might be buried inside the two-story-high pile of debris.

More than 20 hours after the partial collapse, the death toll remained unknown. Officials confirmed at least one death, and said 35 survivors were pulled from the wreckage, with 10 injured persons treated at the scene and at least two transported to a hospital.

Miami-Dade County police said as many as 99 people are reported missing. There were 102 people from the building who had been accounted for. The part of the tower that collapsed held 55 units. The remainder of the 136-unit tower remained standing, though residents have been evacuated.

………

Security camera footage of the collapse looked eerily similar to a controlled demolition, minus the flash of explosives. One side of the tower buckled first before more of the structure collapsed into a pile of rubble. The cause of the collapse is unknown, though one building expert deemed it “an oddity of biblical proportions” for the 40-year-old structure to fall unexpectedly.

Climate change driven rising water tables, typically Floridian lax building codes and enforcement, and general poor maintenance are the likely causes.

Still this is profoundly 3rd world sh%$.

RisingRead more here: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/miami-beach/article252324218.html#storylink=cpy
 
Read more here: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/miami-beach/article252324218.html#storylink=
Read more here: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/miami-beach/article252324218.html#storylink=cpy

If I Were to Say, “Toxic Radioactive Flood,” What State Would You Assume?

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If you said Florida, we have a winner.

A waste pond once operated by Borden Chemical is now leaking and threatening a massive flood of toxic radioactive waste into Tampa Bay. 

This has to be the most Florida thing ever:

The governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, declared a state of emergency on Saturday after a significant leak at a large pond at the old Piney Point phosphate mine threatened to burst a system that stores water polluted with radioactive materials.

Officials ordered more than 300 homes evacuated and closed off a highway near the large reservoir in the Tampa Bay area north of Bradenton.

………

The state department of environmental protection said a break was detected on Friday in one wall of a 77-acre pond that has a depth of 25ft and holds millions of gallons of water containing phosphorus and nitrogen from the old phosphate plant.

Officials brought in rocks and materials to plug the hole but were unsuccessful.

………

Workers were pumping out thousands of gallons per minute to bring the volume down. Pumping the entire pond would take 10 to 12 days. Others were working to chart a path for controlling how the water can flow from the pond into the Tampa Bay.

………

The pond at the old Piney Point phosphate mine sits in a stack of phosphogypsum, a waste product from manufacturing fertilizer that is radioactive. It contains small amounts of naturally occurring radium and uranium. The stacks can also release large concentrations of radon gas.

Obviously, DeSantis is not to blame, this time. 

This is more a consequence of “Same old, same old,” corruption that has characterized Florida politics since at least the days of Carl G. Fisher.

Why people want to live there, or move there, is completely beyond my understanding.

A Return to Normalcy

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I am referring, of course to the the mass shooting in Boulder Colorado today. 

Of course it was in Colorado, you had Columbine, Aurora, Aravada, Aurora again, and now Boulder.

It appears that mass shooters are to Colorado what Florida Man is to Florida.

Please, let’s set about to prying their guns from their cold dead hands.

Almost forgot, thoughts and prayers:

A gunman killed 10 people at a King Soopers in Boulder on Monday afternoon, the latest in a grim litany of mass shootings in Colorado — this one including among its victims a police officer who was first to respond to reports of shots fired at the grocery store.

The suspect was taken into custody, but there were few answers in the following hours. Officials said it would take days to investigate the large crime scene and to notify families that their loved ones had been killed.

………

A gunman killed 10 people at a King Soopers in Boulder on Monday afternoon, the latest in a grim litany of mass shootings in Colorado — this one including among its victims a police officer who was first to respond to reports of shots fired at the grocery store.

The suspect was taken into custody, but there were few answers in the following hours. Officials said it would take days to investigate the large crime scene and to notify families that their loved ones had been killed.

It’s Colorado, so my guess is that their response will be to ……… loosen gun laws even further.

Seriously, just f%$# the NRA.

Maybe If the FBI Spent More Time Pursuing Real Terrorists, and Less Time Manufacturing Them for High Profile Arrests………

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We don’t know everything now, but what we do know is that a gunman murdered 50 people at a gay bar in Tampa, Florida, and that he contemporaneously made ISIS claims:

A man who called 911 to proclaim allegiance to the Islamic State terrorist group, and who had been investigated in the past for possible terrorist ties, stormed a gay nightclub here Sunday morning, wielding an assault rifle and a pistol, and carried out the worst mass shooting in United States history, leaving 50 people dead and 53 wounded.

 The attacker, identified by law enforcement officials as Omar Mateen, a 29-year-old who was born in New York, turned what had been a celebratory night of dancing to salsa and merengue music at the crowded Pulse nightclub into a panicked scene of unimaginable slaughter, the floors slicked with blood, the dead and the injured piled atop one another. Terrified people poured onto the darkened streets of the surrounding neighborhood, some carried wounded victims to safety, and police vehicles were pressed into service as makeshift ambulances to rush people to hospitals.

 Joel Figueroa and his friends “were dancing by the hip-hop area when I heard shots, bam, bam, bam,” he said, adding, “Everybody was screaming and running toward the front door.”

Of course, we have calls for effective gun control, but, as always, we can expect them to come to nothing.

Here is what we know so far:

  • He worked for G4S, a UK based private security firm which is big into (among other unsavory things) the private prison system.
  • He had previously been under investigation by the FBI.
  • He bought the guns used recently.
  • This is the largest mass shooting in US history.
  • The shooter was a big fan of the New York Police Department repeatedly posting selfies of himself in NYOPD gear.

I tend to think that gay bashing was at the core of the shooting, though in what is probably an unrelated event, an Indiana man drove to West Hollywood with a car full of bombs and guns to attack a gay pride parade:

Police in Santa Monica, California, arrested a man intent on attacking a nearby gay pride parade on Sunday, hours after a terrorist opened fire at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, killing at least 50 and wounding over 50 more people in the worst mass shooting attack in modern U.S. history.

 20-year-old James Wesley Howell was arrested in Santa Monica after assault rifles and chemicals capable of creating an explosive device were found in his vehicle early Sunday morning, police say. He reportedly admitted to officials that he was planning to “harm” the West Hollywood gay pride parade that was taking place about seven miles away later Sunday.

The most obvious point to made here is that the FBI has been too busy engaging in sting operations against people who constitute no meaningful threat to actually do their job on real threats:

The attack on a gay club in Orlando in which 50 people were killed and more than 50 wounded — now the largest mass shooting in U.S. history — demonstrates how potential threats are escaping the FBI’s vast counterterrorism dragnet.

While it’s unclear whether gunman Omar Mateen’s inspiration was hatred of gays, the Islamic State, or something else, attackers like him are the intended targets of the FBI’s post-9/11 prevention program. Federal law enforcement’s top priority today is to stop the attacker of tomorrow.

But Mateen’s mass shooting is an example of how dangerous men slip past the FBI’s watch while federal agents focus on targets of questionable capacity.

………

According to The Daily Beast, whose reporter quoted an unnamed “senior law enforcement source,” Mateen was a person of interest to the FBI in 2013 and again in 2014. The Intercept has been unable confirm independently from sources that Mateen had been under FBI investigation during those years.

If the FBI had in fact investigated Mateen, his capacity for violence would have been easily verified: He had a state firearms license.

With connections to homes in Martin and St. Lucie counties, Mateen would have fallen under the jurisdiction of the FBI’s Miami office, which has among the bureau’s most active and aggressive counterterrorism units.

The Miami FBI investigated the so-called Liberty City 7 in one of the earliest and most controversial post-9/11 counterterrorism stings, and prosecutors in Florida’s Southern District have prosecuted dozens on terrorism related charges in the last 15 years.

………

For more than a year ending in April — a time during which investigators will now be looking for any clues from Mateen that might have been missed — the FBI in Miami focused on a counterterrorism sting that targeted James Medina, a homeless man with mental problems.

………

According to the FBI’s affidavit, the informant, not Medina, came up with the idea of crediting the planned attack to the Islamic State.

“You can do all that,” Medina told the informant. “Yeah, we can print up or something and make it look like it’s ISIS here in America. Just like that.”
………

Does the FBI’s focus on men like Medina and Suarez — questionable targets of questionable mental fitness — prevent agents from identifying and investigating armed and dangerous men like the one behind what is now America’s worst mass shooting?

It’s a question the FBI, which has faced little congressional scrutiny over its counterterrorism program, has never been forced to answer.

The Orlando shooting isn’t the first case to raise this question. In 2011, when the FBI investigated Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev, agents did not deem him a threat.

Instead, at about the same time, the Boston FBI started a nine-month sting operation against Rezwan Ferdaus, who had no weapons and no connections to international terrorists, and whose mental wellness had deteriorated so much that he was wearing adult diapers at the time of his arrest on terrorism charges.

I’ve not heard about a successful FBI counter-terrorism operation that did not involve them using informants to manufacture the a high profile arrest in a very long time.

It’s pretty clear that the FBI desperately needs some adult supervision.

Feeling the Bern

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Both Bernie Sanders and the Donald Trump won big in New Hampshire, with Sanders ahead by 21% (with 82% reporting), and Trump leading by 19%.

Both Sanders and Trump outperformed the most recent polls by a bit.

I will note that this is a different time from 1992, when Bill Clinton came in 2nd in New Hampshire, because he was so far ahead in fund raising that Paul Tsongas was simply unable to compete in the later primaries and caucuses, particularly Super Tuesday.

Largely due to Act Blue and similar internet related institutions, Sanders has the financial wherewithal to continue on and to compete a number of simultaneous races, particularly given his campaign’s significantly smaller burn (Bern?) rate, which means that his cash on hand is in pretty good shape.

On the ‘Phant side, Kasich came in a solid 2nd, which sets him up to be the next establishment Republican “Great White Hope”.

About F%$#ing Time

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They finally arrested 6 Y’all Qaeda members, including the two of the Bundy brothers:

Ammon Bundy, the leader of an armed seizure of a federal wildlife refuge in Oregon, was arrested and one was person was killed Tuesday night during a traffic stop in rural Oregon, the F.B.I. and the Oregon State Police said.

Five other people, including Mr. Bundy’s brother Ryan Bundy, were arrested, the authorities said.

The Bundy brothers and four supporters were arrested during a traffic stop along Highway 235 around 4:25 p.m., officials said in a news release. Shots were fired during the arrests, and two people who were with the Bundys were struck. One of them died, and the other was arrested and taken to a hospital with injuries that were not considered life-threatening.

………

Each of the defendants faces a felony charge of conspiracy to impede federal officers from discharging their official duties through the use of force, intimidation or threats. They remained in custody late Tuesday.

Arrested on Tuesday were Brian Cavalier, 44, of Bunkerville, Nev.; Shawna Cox, 59, of Kanab, Utah; and Ryan Waylen Payne, 32, of Anaconda, Mont. Joseph Donald O’Shaughnessy, 45, of Cottonwood, Ariz. was arrested in a separate incident, the authorities said. Officials said they were waiting for the medical examiner’s office to identify the person who was killed.

It is unfortunate that one of the protesters was killed: I am sure that the next right wing domestic terrorist will use it as an excuse for the deaths he causes.

According to local reports, it was LaVoy Finicum who was shot and killed, and Ryan Bundy was lightly wounded.

ON the other hand, but the impartial enforcement of the law against right wing militia types is long overdue.

In addition to occupying a federal building, they looted an Indian archaeological site, and bulldozed a road across a nature preserve.

This should have happened weeks ago.

Bad Day at the Big Casino

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In China, they had to halt trading on the exchanges following a massive selloff, with oil hitting a 7 year low and the Dow dropping by almost 1½%:

China accelerated the devaluation of the yuan on Thursday, sending currencies across the region reeling and domestic stock markets tumbling, as investors feared the Asian giant was kicking off a virtual trade war against its competitors.

 Trading on China’s stock markets were suspended for the rest of the day, for the second time this week, as a new circuit-breaking mechanism was tripped less than half an hour after the open.

 The People’s Bank of China again surprised markets by setting the official midpoint rate on the currency at 6.5646 yuan per dollar, the lowest since March 2011.

 That was 0.5 percent weaker than the day before and the biggest daily drop since last August, when an abrupt near 2 percent devaluation of the currency also roiled markets.

And:

Wall Street experienced another mini panic attack on Wednesday after North Korea claimed to successfully test a hydrogen bomb. The markets were already being spooked by the financial and economic turbulence out of China and the latest plunge in oil prices below $34 a barrel.

The Dow dropped 252 points, closing below 17,000 for the first time since mid-October. The S&P 500 fell 1.3% and the Nasdaq lost 1.1%.

It marks the Dow’s worst start to a trading year through three days since 2008. The index also fell 276 points on Monday due to worries about China.

If the economy and the markets continue in this direction, get used to saying President Trump.

I’ve Had It with These Motherf%$#Ing Shooters On ……… I’ve Just Had It!

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Some bunch of lunatics just shot up a Christmas party at a center for the disabled in San Bernadino, California:

At least 14 people were killed and 14 others injured in a shooting at a San Bernardino, Calif., center for people with developmental disabilities, Police Chief Jarrod Burguan said. (Reuters)

At least two attackers opened fire at a holiday party for county employees in San Bernardino, Calif., on Wednesday, killing at least 14 people and injuring 17 others in what the city’s police chief described as an act of domestic terrorism.

Five hours after the shooting, law enforcement officials swarmed a residential neighborhood not far from the complex where the shooting occurred after police “located what appeared to be the suspects’ vehicle,” Sgt. Vicki Cervantes, a San Bernardino police spokeswoman, said during a news conference.

Officials exchanged gunfire with the suspects, she said, after finding a dark SUV that appears to match a description given by police earlier in the day. Two suspects — a man and a woman — were killed during this shootout, Jarrod Burguan, chief of the San Bernardino Police Department, said during an evening news conference.

A third person was seen running away, and it is unclear if that person was involved in the shooting today, Burguan said. That person was in custody late Wednesday afternoon, he said. Authorities were still working on seeing if there was a third person involved in the shooting or possibly any other people, he said.

F%$# the NRA.

F%$# Wayne LaPierre.

F%$# US culture of violence.

Just F%$#.

I Preferred the Olivier, and Branagh, and the Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson Versions

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It is interesting how Shakespeare on the screen has changed over the past 60 years

I am sick to death of Joe Biden’s “Hamlet” act about running for President.

Thankfully, this play’s run has finally ended:

Vice President Biden on Wednesday announced he is not running for president in 2016, forgoing a primary battle against Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton and likely signaling an end to a political career that has spanned four decades.

 Ending months of speculation about his plans, Biden said he could not see a path forward for his candidacy. The window of opportunity, he declared, “has closed.”

 “Unfortunately, I believe we’re out of time — the time necessary to mount a winning campaign for the nomination.”

 The 72-year-old vice president made the announcement from the White House Rose Garden with his wife, Jill, and President Obama at his side.

I understand that this is an emotionally fraught decision, coming less than 6 months after the death of his son, but the general media freak-out over this has really gotten old.

I am so glad that we won’t have to be hearing pundits speculate over this crap any more.

It’s Back!!!

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Another school shooting:

A fight that broke out between two groups of students at Northern Arizona University’s Flagstaff campus left one person dead and three hospitalized after one of the students opened fire on the others.

The shooter has been identified as Steven Jones, an 18-year-old freshman at the school, who has been taken into custody by campus police, according to NAU police chief Greg Fowler.

Colin Brough has been identified by the school as the student who was killed in the incident, and Nicholas Prato, Kyle Zientek and Nicholas Piring were named as the individuals who were shot but are being treated at Flagstaff Medical Center.

Brough and the three young men who were injured were all members of the Delta Chi Fraternity, according fraternity rep Justin Sherman.

Well, Ben Carson said that he would meet with the families of “The Next One”, so get your running shoes on.

He Didn’t Jump, He Was Pushed

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In a surprise announcement, the worst Speaker of the House in the history of ……… well ……… history, John Boehner, made a surprise announcement that he will be resigning from Congress:

Speaker John A. Boehner, an Ohio barkeeper’s son who rode a conservative wave to one of the highest positions in government, said Friday he would relinquish his gavel and resign from Congress, undone by the very Republicans who swept him into power.

Mr. Boehner, 65, made the announcement in an emotional meeting with his fellow Republicans on Friday morning as lawmakers struggled to avert a government shutdown next week, a possibility made less likely by his decision.

Mr. Boehner told almost no one of his decision before making it Friday morning. “So before I went to sleep last night, I told my wife, I said, ‘You know, I might just make an announcement tomorrow,’ ” Mr. Boehner said at a news conference in the Capitol. “This morning I woke up, said my prayers, as I always do, and thought, ‘This is the day I am going to do this.’ ”

His downfall again highlighted the sinewy power of a Republican Party faction whose anthem is often to oppose government action. It also made vivid the increasingly precarious nature of a job in which the will and proclivities of politically divisive body must be managed. No House speaker since Thomas P. O’Neill Jr., who held the gavel from 1977 to 1986, has left the job willingly.

As much as I appreciate the standard line that Boehner left under his own power, I kind of doubt it.

If this was really about him being tired of a restive Congress, he would have left when he realized that he lacked the skill of vote counting, which is essential for a legislature.

I have repeatedly referred to him as the worst Speaker ever because, in the House of Congress most amenable to steam roller politics, he was constantly back on his heels, because he wanted the job of Speaker so badly that he was unable and unwilling to actually manage the house.

It simply makes no sense that he left left because he got tired. He left because some of his colleagues had “the talk” with him.

Still, if you favor the “left under his own power” theory, I would suggest that you read ​Charlie Pierce’s take on this:

Way I figure it is this. In their private chat yesterday, Boehner explained to the pope the problems he was having with the flying monkey caucus, and Papa Francesco who, after all, heads a bureaucracy with a long history as a seething cauldron of ambition, scandal, murder and betrayal, as well as a unique tradition of crazy institutional proceedings (See: Cadaver Synod), listened to Boehner’s plight and said, mildly, “Jesus H. Christ in a Fiat, my son, these people crazy. Get out while you can.” That’s the way I’m going to figure it, anyway.

It is a sane theory, but sanity does not apply in this situation.

Sanity has almost been as rare as competence during the Speakership of John Boehner.

On Friday, I Said Chill the F%$# out about the Dow………

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Today, over at Bloomberg, equity analyst and gadfly Barry Ritholtz puts some useful historical data behind my sentiment:

China’s markets set the tone for the day (and perhaps the week) with an 8.5 percent blood-letting. Global stocks followed suit, which came after last week’s 5 percent tumble.

………

Finally, let’s put into broader context the frequency of corrections. U.S. markets average one 10 percent correction every 20 months. On average, we should expect these declines to take 71 trading days to play out (about three months).

Seriously, just chill.

Time to Chill the F%$# Out, Everyone

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I get it. Stocks fell a lot today, but on a percentage basis, it’s not even in the top 20:

Stock prices around the world continued to plunge on Friday, threatening to end one of the longest bull runs in the history of the United States stock market.

A searing six-year rally in United States stocks had advanced into the summer months, shrugging off challenges like the dispute over Greece’s debt that nearly led to the country crashing out of the euro. But in the last two weeks, world markets tumbled as investors grew increasingly concerned about economic conditions in China, which unexpectedly devalued its currency last week, and the outlook for the economies of other large developing countries.

As the selling accelerated Friday afternoon, some benchmark indexes were at or near 10 percent below their recent peaks — a “correction” in Wall Street parlance. “This is likely going to go down as the first meaningful correction in four years,” said David Rosenberg, an economist and strategist at Gluskin Sheff.

Sell-offs in the financial markets need not cause harm in the real economy. In many cases in the postwar period, the United States stock market has recovered after reacting negatively to problems overseas. Strong employment numbers and other economic indicators suggest that the United States economy remains resilient.

Still, fear in financial markets can feed on itself. And the declines in the markets are coming not only as China struggles, but also as the Federal Reserve is winding down its huge stimulus efforts. Trillions of dollars of cheap money from the Fed has fueled economic growth and helped push markets higher around the world. Now, the question is whether the world can stay on the recovery path without the Fed’s largess.

Such concerns on Friday helped push stocks far below the peaks they reached just weeks ago when investors were ebullient. The Dow Jones industrial average is more than 10 percent below the high it reached in May. At Friday’s close, the index was down 530.94 points, to 16,459.75, a loss of 3.1 percent on the day.

The Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index, a broader benchmark, fell below the psychologically important 2,000 mark. It was down 3.2 percent on the day and more than 7 percent below its recent peak. It fell 64.84 points, to 1,970.89. The index lost $1.14 trillion in value this week, according to S.&P. Dow Jones Indices.

In fact, according to the Wiki, the 20th largest percentage fall of the Dow was more than twice what happened today.

If this has you freaking out,  you need not to be investing in the stock market.

This Is All F%$#Ed up and Sh%$

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After many years of complaints by the US that China should let its currency float according to market forces, the Bank of China has broadened the range that it will allow the Yuan to float, having the effect of devaluing the currency:

As China contends with an economic slowdown and a stock market slump, the authorities on Tuesday sharply devalued the country’s currency, the renminbi, a move that could raise geopolitical tensions and weigh on growth elsewhere.

The central bank set the official value of the renminbi nearly 2 percent weaker against the dollar. The devaluation is the largest since China’s modern exchange-rate system was introduced at the start of 1994.

………

China’s devaluation represents a difficult dilemma for the Obama administration. The United States Treasury has tried to use quiet diplomacy in recent years to encourage China to free up its currency policies, while blocking efforts in Congress to punish China for major intervention in currency markets over the past decade to slow the rise of the renminbi. Many in Congress have long accused China of unfairly building up its manufacturing sector at the expense of American jobs by undervaluing the renminbi, and the Chinese devaluation could fan those criticisms.

In a seeming nod to such concerns, the central bank said that it would begin to use the market closing, not the previous morning’s official setting, to calculate the renminbi’s official daily fixing against the dollar. But China’s economic weakness now means that further opening up of the currency to market forces could mean a weaker renminbi, not a stronger one. That, in turn, would make Chinese goods even more competitive in the United States and Europe.

China’s central bank “has finally thrown in the towel on supporting the renminbi,” said Eswar S. Prasad, a professor of economics at Cornell University. At the same time, he added, easing its grip on the currency’s value “has blunted criticism by combining the currency devaluation with a more market-determined exchange rate.” The United States and institutions such as the International Monetary Fund have called on China to be more hands-off in managing the renminbi.

Obviously there is irony here, but this is real news.

To quote Joe Biden, “This is a big F%$#ing deal.”

This is the last best effort by Chinese economists to try to keep the economy moving.

I don’t know where this is going, but it is not going to be pretty.

Bad Day at the Office

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Explosion


Subsequent fire

During an exercise, SM-2 standard missile exploded on launch, damaging the Aegis Class destroyer, The Sullivans:

A US Navy guided missile destroyer was damaged by a surface-to-air missile that exploded shortly after launch during an exercise off the U.S. Atlantic coast on Saturday USNI Reports. 

 The US Navy confirmed that a Raytheon made Standard Missile-2 (SM-2) test missile exploded after suffering a malfunction as it was fired from the guided-missile destroyer USS The Sullivans (DDG 68) during a planned missile exercise off the coast of Virginia. There were no injuries and only minor damage to the port side of the ship resulting from missile debris. The ship returned to Naval Station Norfolk for assessment.

Thankfully, there were no injuries.

BTW, the explosion appears to be of the missile booster, not the warhead.

In descending order, the likely causes of this are:

  • Cracks in the propellant, causing an uncontrolled burn.
  • A flaw in the engine casing.
  • A flaw in the nozzle.
  • Something else (Yeah, I know it’s kind of a catch all)

What the navy is probably doing now, in addition to collecting bits of the missile and figuring out what happened, is pulling all the missiles from that production lot for inspection, and they will probably increase inspections more generally.

My (slightly) informed guess (I used to work on missiles at Lockheed-Martin Missiles and Fire Control) is that this was an older missile, and that cracks developed over time as a part of the aging process, but opinions are like assholes, everyone has one.