Category: Stupid

Anti-Vaxxers Can Go Cheney Themselves

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We just had the first measles death in the U.S. in a dozen years:

Well, anti-vaxxers Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey should really feel like sh%$ right now.

For 12 years, not a single American has died because of the measles virus. But because of the anti-vaxxer movement, death by measles is once again a stark reality in the United States.

On Thursday, the Washington State Department of Health confirmed that a woman succumbed to the disease after discovering the cause of death via an autopsy.

In a statement released by the agency, the woman apparently contracted the disease unknowingly while at a hospital during a measles outbreak in the spring. And she was even more vulnerable to the disease because the medication she had been taking weakened her immune system.

………

The woman who died caught a disease that should have remained wiped out within our shores and it would have remained that way had it not been for anti-vaccination nut jobs who refuse to vaccinate their kids out of some ridiculous notion that the MMR vaccine causes autism. This death was preventable and shows why it is time to require vaccinations by law and eliminate the exemptions that allowed the measles to have a comeback in the first place.

It gets even worse, because this woman had been vaccinated for the disease:

A woman who became the first person to die of the measles in the U.S. in 12 years had been vaccinated against the disease, it has been revealed.

Health officials said she had the injection as a child but succumbed because she had a compromised immune system.

Dr. Jeanette Stehr-Green, the Clallam County health officer, told KOMO-TV the woman had been vaccinated as a child, but because she had other health problems and was taking medications that interfered with her response to an infection ‘she was not protected.’

The anti-vaxxers are morally responsible for the death of this woman.

Their actions are unsupported by the facts, selfish, and evil, and I am pleased as punch that California has tightened up its vaccination criteria.

The Stupidest Analysis of the Greek Crisis so Far………

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Over at the Washington Post Max Ehrenfreund proceeds to think himself into a circle to such a degree that that his head is actually fully up his ass:

Suppose senior government officials in Greece had concluded that the euro was a failed experiment, that the rest of the continent would never extend reasonable terms to their country and would instead doom it to perpetual recession, and that the only way to save Greece from disaster — and Europe, too — was to begin the process of unwinding the common currency.

 They’d have encountered a major obstacle to leaving the euro: Greeks really like it. To get rid of it, the country’s leaders would have had just one option: sabotage negotiations with the creditors, blame them for being unreasonable, and then eventually tell voters that Greece has no choice but to go back to the drachma.

Seriously?

Greece has none of the infrastructure to even print Drachmas, because the Greeks were literally forced to smash their printing presses when they joined the Euro:

With speculation swirling that Greece might be forced out of the euro and have to print its own money after a weekend referendum, its finance minister on Thursday said the country no longer had the presses to make drachmas.

“We don’t have the capacity,” Yanis Varoufakis told Australian public radio network ABC.

In 2000, the year before Greece joined the eurozone, “one of the things we had to do was get rid of all our printing presses” as part of the bloc’s assertion that “this monetary union is irreversible,” he said.

“We smashed the printing presses — we have no printing presses,” Varoufakis said.

This is widely known, and it was a policy that was across the Euro Zone.

While it might be possible to get some currency printed up by a 3rd party (North Korea comes to mind) but they appear not to have taken any of the requisite steps to reintroducing the currency.

I am sick to death of this “too clever by half” contrarian bullsh%$.

It’s a cheap trick to make stupid pundits appear smart.

Óχι* Euro?

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So Greece has now officially defaulted on its IMF loan:

Greece has officially missed its payment to the IMF.

Though this is not technically considered a “default” — the IMF now considers Greece “in arrears” — Greece has now officially not paid the 1.6 billion euros (or about $1.8 billion) it owed the IMF by Tuesday.

IMF managing director Christine Lagarde, however, said in June that she would consider Greece in default if it did not pay.

 This is the largest missed payment ever owed to the IMF.

Greece is now no longer in a bailout program for the first time since 2010.

 In a statement, the IMF confirmed that Greece missed the payment due on Tuesday and added that Greece requested an extension of its repayment, which the IMF’s executive board will consider “in due course.”

 Greek banks and the Athens stock exchange remain closed through this week ahead of a July 5 referendum to vote on the latest bailout proposal from Greece’s creditors.

This is a big deal, but I do not think that the Greek government was left with a choice.

It has become increasingly clear that the goal of the Troika has been regime change ever since Syriza won the last election, primarily because they are a bunch of moralistic† idiots, who do not realize that the alternative to Syriza is not a return to the center-left and center-right parties, but rather the rise of the fascist Golden Dawn party”.

This is why Greek PM Alexis Tsipras felt compelled to call a referendum.

The demands of the Troika have always been about a number of things, none of which have anything to do with the well being of the Greek people:

  • Protecting their own domestic banks from thrie exposureto Greek Debt.
  • Reinforcing German hegemony of the Euro Zone. (Berlin only on this one)
  • Making a public example of Greece as a warning to others.
  • Preventing other “leftist” (social democrat by the standards of the 1960s) parties, particularly Die Linke (The Left) in Germany, from coming to power.
  • Discrediting the modern social safety net.

It should be noted that I do not see any way to a happy ending here:

………

But a former deputy governor of Cyprus’s central bank, Spyros Stavrinakis, has warned that reopening the banks will be hard.

Stavrinakis lived through the 2013 Cyprus crisis, in which capital controls were imposed for almost two years.

He says:

Once you impose capital controls, you immediately send a message that there is something wrong with the banking sector.

It is very difficult to phase down and unwind capital controls, once they are imposed, Stavrinakis adds.

………

Most things in the European Union are designed to actively obfuscate reality. These are called deposit insurance schemes but that is a legal lie. In the United States the FDIC is Federal (its right in the name). The EU imposes a requirement that each country “insure” their deposits but it provides no financing for this. The last data I saw (which I can only verify from 3 years ago) is that the Greek deposit insurance fund has a paltry 3 billion dollars in it. In short there is no current backstop for Greek depositors. This is why they are talking about implementing a European wide deposit insurance union but that isn’t supposed to come until next year at the earliest and who knows if that will really happen and to what extent it will be universal among current Eurozone members. relevant links below.

………

Three-and-a-half billion euros. That is roughly how much cash Greece’s banks need to get through the week if each adult takes out the €60 ($67) they are allowed each day. It isn’t much for Greeks to live on, but it may be more than the banks have.

Also, in the realm of the absurd, there is a  crowdfunding project for the Greek Bailout Fund on  Indiegogo, with about €¾ million raised, out of the €1.6 billion needed raised so far.

The German insistence on Versailles Treaty economics, when juxtaposed with the Greek tradition financial profligacy and corruption, has produced a truly toxic mix, which will probably break up the Euro Zone, if not the whole European Union.

*Greek for no.
†The word for “debt” in German is “Schuld”. This is also the word for “guilt” or “blame”, which explains why the Germans are so fond of Sado-Monitarism. The Germans see this as a morality play, and the last time that Germans tried to enforce a morality on the rest of Europe, it was pretty unfortunate.

Dumbass

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Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal thought that an open forum on Twitter would be a good thing.

This has been done before, and has failed before, but Jindal did not get the memo:

Someone on Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal’s campaign staff had the brilliant idea of opening up a discussion between the Republican hopeful and Twitter. The result was a terrible idea, poorly executed.
The first, and possibly most important, set of questions for the candidate:

If you know so little about the Internet that you think #AskBobby is wise, how can you consider yourself a competent 21st Century President?

— Michael O’Neill (@hkeller812) June 30, 2015

he wasn’t dumb enough to do #askbobby. he couldn’t have been.

— Bomani Jones (@bomani_jones) June 30, 2015

Yes — he most certainly was. ………

It goes on from there, and the questions become less “meta” and far more aggressively hostile.

Republicans have been trolling politics since the 1960s, and somehow, they do not understand that there are trolls on the internet.

Not only is Bobby Jindal too stupid to be President, he is too stupid to be allowed around sharp object.

I wonder who is employed by him to cut his meat for him, and I wonder what the f^%$# this benighted soul is going to put on his resume.

My guess is “Nutrition Consultant.”

Clarence Thomas Is a Miserable Excuse for a Human Being

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First, in Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. The Inclusive Communities Project, he suggested that racist impact of government policy might be a good thing, because ……… the NBA:

In a less headline grabbing decision today, the Supreme Court ruled that those affected by discriminatory housing decisions can sue even if they can’t prove the discrimination was intentional.

Civil rights groups were handed an unexpected victory when in a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court endorsed the consideration of disparate impact to establish racial discrimination in housing cases under the 1968 Fair Housing Act.

The otherwise pro-business Justice Kennedy wrote the majority opinion but one of the other noteworthy opinions came from conservative Justice Thomas’ dissent, in which he wrote, “the fact that a practice has a disparate impact is not conclusive evidence that a practice is discriminatory.”

A well enough point, but it was the example he used to illustrate this point that proved most curious.

“Over 70 percent of National Basketball Association (NBA) players have been black,” Thomas pointed out, arguing that “racial imbalances do not always disfavor minorities.”

“If, for instance, white basketball players cannot bring disparate-impact suits— then we as a Court have constructed a scheme that parcels out legal privileges to individuals on the basis of skin color,” he continued.

Thomas went on to cite examples of minorities who “have owned or directed more than half of whole industries in particular nations” including “Jews in Poland” and “the Chinese in Malaysia” to argue that not all disproportional representation is bad.

Seriously?

Bigotry is OK because of the percentage of blacks in the NBA? Or the because of the relative prosperity of the Chinese in Malaysia?*

And then, in his dissent in Obergefell v. Hodges, the gay marriage case, he suggests that slavery did not cause any loss of dignity in its subjects:

Clarence Thomas slammed the majority that ruled in favor of marriage equality, saying the five U.S. Supreme Court justices had engaged in misguided efforts to advance dignity for same-sex couples.

Thomas – who wrote his own opinion, along with the court’s three other dissenters – argued that the Constitution contained no “dignity” clause.

………

“Slaves did not lose their dignity (any more than they lost their humanity) because the government allowed them to be enslaved,” Thomas said. “Those held in internment camps did not lose their dignity because the government confined them. And those denied governmental benefits certainly do not lose their dignity because the government denies them those benefits. The government cannot bestow dignity, and it cannot take it away.”

This is pure crap, and I say it as someone who is required to thank God on a yearly basis because of, “What he did for me when I went forth from Egypt,” on Passover.

Not only is this a failure as a human being, it is a miserable failure as a legal dissent.

Yale Law School needs to apologize to the nation.

*Which was largely a result of the British Empire using ethnically divisive policies in order to maintain control.

The Problem with the EU in a Few Sentences

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I strongly suggests that you read Katharina Pistor’s essay on how the EU is betraying its ultimate goal, a unified and peaceful Europe, in their dealings with Greece in her OP/ED, The Problem With a Small Europe:

News headlines notwithstanding, the fundamental challenge facing Europe today extends far beyond Greece. The real question is what kind of European Union Greece’s creditors want: a “small” one, comprising only the countries that are prepared to live by their exacting standards, or a “big” one that heeds the Treaty of Rome’s call for “ever-closer union.”

………

European integration was built on the ideal of a united Europe working together to uphold peace, generate prosperity, and advance democracy. At first, cooperation centered on the creation of a common market, with European technocrats, led by the European Commission’s then-president, Jacques Delors, pushing for a common currency, despite deep structural differences. The assumption was that political integration would follow.

That did not happen. Indeed, the approach was tantamount to putting the cart before the horse – with serious consequences, exemplified in the eurozone’s enduring crisis. Yet the technocrats are back, now advocating a fiscal union to support the monetary union, with political union nowhere in sight.

Perhaps European leaders still believe that the needed political integration will eventually occur. But, even in the unlikely event that it does, a political union that emerges from desperation to save the common currency will be very different from one built purposefully, as the Treaty of Rome envisioned, based on shared values and goals. And, in the meantime, a fiscal union without a political union is an anti-democratic nightmare.

………

In this context, it is perhaps understandable that the creditor countries are increasingly promoting a “small” EU that includes only those that are willing and able to meet their high standards. But, while this might make for a stronger euro – and even a stronger EU – it would carry a huge cost, as it would effectively force members to abandon their democratic ideals. Meanwhile, the excluded countries would be forced to engage in competitive currency devaluations and other beggar-thy-neighbor policies. The dream of shared prosperity in Europe would be dead.

This outcome is not inevitable. A common currency is a means to an end, not an end in itself. If European monetary union is not leading toward the desired end, it – not the goal of ever-closer union – should be altered. And, in fact, most Europeans favor a different means, based on greater flexibility for domestic preferences and a bottom-up approach toward further integration. In such an environment, Greece might not only survive, but thrive.

I would note that the founders of the Euro currency said that their goal was to create a uniform standard of living across Europe.

It appears that they may get their goal, but it will be lowering living standards of more prosperous nations, not raising up their less fortunate neighbor.

Not surprising when one understands that Robert Mundell, the “father of the Euro”, is also considered by many to be the “Father of Reaganomics.”

Impoverishing ordinary people is a feature for people like Mundell, not a bug.

The Military Industrial Complex Is Spending Our Military into Oblivion

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At the rate that this is going, we will be The Blaster: Flush With Cash, Running on Empty

One of the never ending claims made by proponents of the military technical revolution is that emerging complex weapons technologies create more combat power per unit of labor — that we are substituting capital for labor and technology-intensive capital goods are the key America’s competitive advantage, given America’s high cost labor. This claim is bullshit pumped out by a sound-byte addicted Military – Industrial – Congressional Complex.
For readers who think my rhetoric excessive, consider please the following series of graphics. That the revolution in military affairs (RMA) continues with increasing intensity despite such evidence to the contrary, and without substantive critical debate, says a lot about the dominant values in Versailles on the Potomac.
If the claim made by the RMA evangelicals were true, then a percentage reduction in the size of combat forces would be accompanied by a greater percentage savings in defense budgets. But as this table shows, huge reductions in force size (ranging from 56% to 69%) from the spending peak of the Vietnam War (1968) to the spending peak of the so-called Global War on Terror or GWOT (2010) have been accompanied by a 34% increase in the defense budget, after removing the effects of inflation (using DoD deflators which are biased to reduce the size of this disconnect).

Yet, as the next figure shows, compared to Vietnam, the GWOT is a tiny war, when compared in terms of troops deployed or operational tempos (e.g., total attack sorties).
………

The bottom line should be clear to even the most casual observer: The claim that the ongoing military-technical revolution reduces costs by substituting capital for labor is fact-free claptrap. Moreover the hype about this military-technical revolution, which has became ever more hysterical since the mid-to-late 1980s, has been accompanied by a dramatic worsening of the mismatch been promises and reality.

Perhaps the apotheosis of the cost and labor saving dimensions of the military-technical revolution has been the evangelical rhetoric surrounding the use of “labour saving” unmanned airplanes — drones — in the GWOT. I urge readers in denial about my bottom line to carefully study How America Broke Its Drone Force by David Axe in the Daily Beast (attached below for your reading convenience). Axe describes how the high cost of labor-intensive drone operations has broken the back of the drone force to such a point that it had to cut back operating tempos in the face of the increasing intensity of the offensive campaign waged by ISIS.

Bear in mind, the pathetic misery in the drone force described by Axe coincides with Era IV of the boom bust cycle in the preceding chart of Defense Spending.

In 1985 or so, some wag noted that with current trends, that the entire budget of the US Air Force, including personnel, would cover the purchase of just one aircraft by 2050.

At the rate we are going, we won’t have a military, just shiny hardware with no one to operate it.

Chuck Todd, go F%$# Yourself

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I understand that gun control is an incendiary issue, so it makes sense to have a discussion, and even to have a discussion about guns that involves talking with felons, but there is no excuse for Meet the Press decide to have all the felons in its video to be black:

While the country — and South Carolina, in particular — is once again debating racism in America, NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday offered a video of men in prison expressing regret for their own gun violence. All of the men in the video are black.

The segment was part of Sunday’s show, which focused on the recent killing of nine black people at a bible study group in Charleston, South Carolina. The alleged shooter, Dylann Roof, is accused of making racist statements during the rampage and in an online manifesto that describes black people as “stupid and violent.” He has been seen in photos online holding a Confederate flag and wearing the flags of apartheid-era South Africa and white-ruled Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe.

“The circumstances you are about to see are very different from the racist violence in Charleston,” Meet the Press host Chuck Todd said in the introduction to the video.

“The last thing we wanted was to cloud the discussion of the topic,” Todd wrote on the NBC website after receiving a wave of negative feedback on social media about the video.

“The original decision to air this segment was made before Wednesday’s massacre. However, the staff and I had an internal debate about whether to show it at all this week. When we discussed putting it off, that conversation centered around race and perception – not the conversation we wanted the segment to invoke,” he said.

In a panel discussion responding to the blowback, Todd said, “It wasn’t meant to be a black and white issue. And I understand maybe it’s one of those moments when people are only seeing through black and white.”

 This has to be the lamest non-apology apology that I have ever heard in my life.

Translated to English, Todd is saying, “Who cares if the only felons we show are black?  You are too hung up on race.”

I’ve always thought that Todd was a lame and shallow product of the insular and narcissistic White House press corps(e), but this is a whole new level of wankitude.

Dick Waving like This Could Get All of Us Killed

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Because our coup in the Ukraine is not progressing well, the US is looking at forward deploying armor and troops along the Russian border:

In a significant move to deter possible Russian aggression in Europe, the Pentagon is poised to store battle tanks, infantry fighting vehicles and other heavy weapons for as many as 5,000 American troops in several Baltic and Eastern European countries, American and allied officials say.

The proposal, if approved, would represent the first time since the end of the Cold War that the United States has stationed heavy military equipment in the newer NATO member nations in Eastern Europe that had once been part of the Soviet sphere of influence. Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the war in eastern Ukraine have caused alarm and prompted new military planning in NATO capitals.

It would be the most prominent of a series of moves the United States and NATO have taken to bolster forces in the region and send a clear message of resolve to allies and to Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, that the United States would defend the alliance’s members closest to the Russian frontier.

To quote a line from the movie The Hunt for Red October, “This business will get out of control. It will get out of control and we’ll be lucky to live through it.“

When we look at this sort of foreign adventurism, what is almost universal is that it comes back to bite the United States in the ass.

What IS universal is that the target of this sort of crap end up worse off than they were before.

But we keep on doing this, again, and again, and again, and again.

Finally, a Good Analogy for What Is Happening to Greece

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What the Troika is actually trying to do is not to do the right thing, they are, as Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya Sen notes, trying to go Versailles on Greece:

On 5 June 1919, John Maynard Keynes wrote to the prime minister of Britain, David Lloyd George, “I ought to let you know that on Saturday I am slipping away from this scene of nightmare. I can do no more good here.” Thus ended Keynes’s role as the official representative of the British Treasury at the Paris Peace Conference. It liberated Keynes from complicity in the Treaty of Versailles (to be signed later that month), which he detested.

Why did Keynes dislike a treaty that ended the state of war between Germany and the Allied Powers (surely a good thing)?

Keynes was not, of course, complaining about the end of the world war, nor about the need for a treaty to end it, but about the terms of the treaty – and in particular the suffering and the economic turmoil forced on the defeated enemy, the Germans, through imposed austerity. Austerity is a subject of much contemporary interest in Europe – I would like to add the word ­“unfortunately” somewhere in the sentence. Actually, the book that Keynes wrote attacking the treaty, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, was very substantially about the economic consequences of “imposed austerity”. Germany had lost the battle already, and the treaty was about what the defeated enemy would be required to do, including what it should have to pay to the victors. The terms of this Carthaginian peace, as Keynes saw it (recollecting the Roman treatment of the ­defeated Carthage following the Punic wars), included the imposition of an unrealistically huge burden of reparation on Germany – a task that Germany could not carry out without ruining its economy. As the terms also had the effect of fostering animosity between the victors and the vanquished and, in addition, would economically do no good to the rest of Europe, Keynes had nothing but contempt for the decision of the victorious four (Britain, France, Italy and the United States) to demand something from Germany that was hurtful for the vanquished and unhelpful for all.

The high-minded moral rhetoric in favour of the harsh imposition of austerity on Germany that Keynes complained about came particularly from Lord Cunliffe and Lord Sumner, representing Britain on the Reparation Commission, whom Keynes liked to call “the Heavenly Twins”. In his ­parting letter to Lloyd George, Keynes added, “I leave the Twins to gloat over the devastation of Europe.” Grand rhetoric on the necessity of imposing austerity, to remove economic and moral impropriety in Greece and elsewhere, may come more frequently these days from Berlin itself, with the changed role of Germany in today’s world. But the unfavourable consequences that Keynes feared would follow from severe – and in his judgement unreasoned – imposition of austerity remain relevant today (with an altered geography of the morally upright discipliner and the errant to be disciplined).

Aside from Keynes’s fear of economic ruin of a country, in this case Germany, through the merciless scheduling of demanded payments, he also analysed the bad consequences on other countries in Europe of the economic collapse of one of their partners. The thesis of economic interdependence, which Keynes would pursue more fully later (including in his most famous book, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, to be published in 1936), makes an early appearance in this book, in the context of his critique of the Versailles Treaty.

The purpose of the Versailles Treaty was to break Germany and German spirit, and 20 years later, Europe was at war again.

Now European powers, primarily Germany, are attempting to break Greece and Greek spirit.

This will not end well.

Whiny Bitch of the Day: France

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France has its panties in a bunch because Belgium has produced a €2.50 coin commemorating Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo:

Perhaps befitting a battle that ended French hegemony in Europe, Paris, it seems, has been outflanked once again.

 After it objected to a decision in March by Belgium to introduce a new 2 euro coin to commemorate the 200th anniversary of Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, the Belgians retreated, scrapping 180,000 coins they had already minted.

 But victory for France is proving elusive.

 This week, Belgium decided to circumvent French resistance by invoking a little-known European Union rule that allows countries to issue euro coins of their choice, provided they are in an irregular denomination.

 That led to the unveiling of a €2.50 coin — a first in Belgium — and 70,000 of them have now been minted. The coins, which can only be spent inside Belgium, display a monument of a lion atop a cone-shaped hill on the site of France’s humiliation, as well as lines indicating where troops were positioned when forces led by Britain and Prussia defeated Napoleon in the countryside near Brussels.

 Johan Van Overtveldt, the Belgian finance minister, insisted on Monday that the new coins were not meant to provoke Gallic anger.

 “The goal is not to revive old quarrels in a modern Europe — and there are more important things to sort out,” he was quoted as saying by Agence France-Presse. “But there’s been no battle in recent history as important as Waterloo, or indeed one that captures the imagination in the same way.”

 ………

 In Britain, where the 19th-century poet laureate Robert Southey called the Battle of Waterloo “the greatest deliverance that civilized society has experienced” since Charles Martel repelled an Islamic conquest of Europe in 732, the new €2.50 coin aroused similar adulation.

 “Well done Belgium beat the French at their own game of finding ways around EU rules, the English should take note!!” Michael Dunn, from Stratford-upon-Avon, wrote on Twitter.

 Others were less impressed. On Facebook, Manuel Di Pietrantonio suggested that the value of the dispute was about €2.50.

I agree with Mr. Di Pietrantonio.  It’s a tempest in a teapot, and it is the French who are making it so.

Commemorating its 200th anniversary is completely appropriate.

Waterloo is a very big deal:  Not only did it end the career of Napoleon, but it was the triumph of the General Staff over the lone general, which served to transform war.

I so want to get one and try to spend it in Paris.

The Only Donald Worse than Trump

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Larry Wilmore, who I had neglected to put on my list of People I Do Not Want to Piss Off, (Since corrected) was rather put out by Donald Rumsfeld’s rewriting history on Iraq and claiming that he never suggested that he was bringing a stable democracy to Iraq.

Rumsfeld, 2003:

From the very beginning, we were convinced that we would succeed, and that means that that regime would end. And we were convinced that as we went from the end of that regime to something other than that regime, there would be a period of transition. And, you cannot do everything instantaneously; it’s never been done, everything instantaneously. We did, however, recognize that there was at least a chance of catastrophic success, if you will, to reverse the phrase, that you could in a given place or places have a victory that occurred well before reasonable people might have expected it, and that we needed to be ready for that; we needed to be ready with medicine, with food, with water. And, we have been.

Rumsfeld, 2015:

Over a decade after presiding over the invasion of Iraq, Donald Rumsfeld admitted that the country may not have been ready for a democracy.

In an interview with British newspaper the Times, the former Secretary of Defense reflected on America’s role in shaping the Middle East, and suggested expecting Iraq to seamlessly transition to a democracy was “unrealistic.”

“I’m not one who thinks that our particular template of democracy is appropriate for other countries at every moment of their histories,” Rumsfeld told the Times. “The idea that we could fashion a democracy in Iraq seemed to me unrealistic. I was concerned about it when I first heard those words.”

Larry Wilmore rightly said the Rumsfeld is, “The only Donald worse than Trump.”

And I am saying that Larry Willmore is a part of the sacred and hermetic order of People I Do Not Want to Piss Off.

The Political Acumen of Little Orphan Annie

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Hillary Clinton gives a major speech against Republican’s racist voter suppression plans, and Richard Hanson, who is generally considered one of the more knowledgeable academics on this phenomenon has a sad because moderate Republicans who support voting rights will be scared off by this.

My first response is, “Name 3 moderate Republicans on the national scene who have come out against voter suppression.”

My second response is that voting rights have already been politicized by the Republican Party.

Voter fraud is rarer than getting struck by lightning in the United States, and the Republicans have passed so called “Ballot Integrity” laws without regard to the facts, and in a totally partisan manner.

Dr. Hanson looks at the world, and sees it as he wants it to be, not how it is:

Hillary Clinton spoke at Texas Southern University last week, where she put forward some good and provocative ideas for improving our elections. She wants Congress to fix the part of the Voting Rights Act that the Supreme Court gutted in 2013. She wants to expand early voting periods nationally to at least 20 days. And most provocatively, she advocates automatic universal voter registration across the country, including a program to automatically register high school students to vote before their 18th birthdays.

But the partisan way she’s framed the issue—by blaming Republicans for all the voting problems—makes it less likely these changes will actually be implemented should she be elected president. Instead, she’s offering red meat to her supporters while alienating the allies she would need to get any reforms enacted.

………

However, talking about election reform so provocatively may also doom the chances for meaningful election reform. Clinton used her speech not only to advance these ideas but to bash Republican opponents, including Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin and former Gov. Rick Perry of Texas, both of whom passed restrictive voting laws in the last few years. “What part of democracy are they afraid of?” she asked.

Republicans are not being sincere about their concern for voter fraud.

They use it as a fig leaf to keep black, brown, and young people voting.

Republicans do not want to fix the voting system. They want to manipulate it to partisan advantage.

Has John Thune Been Dining on Lead Paint?

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It is amazing just how much stupid can be jammed into just 140 characters:

Six million people risk losing their health care subsidies, yet @POTUS continues to deny that Obamacare is bad for the American people.

— Senator John Thune (@SenJohnThune) June 8, 2015

I am not a big fan of Obamacare, but to claim that Obamacare might be responsible for ending the subsidies that it created is a level of stupid that buggers the mind.

Oh, Snap!

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In arguments before the Supreme Court, Antonin “Fat Tony” Scalia presented the case of convicted murderer Henry Lee McCollum as a perfect justification for the death penalty.

It turns out that McCollum was innocent:

A little over two decades ago, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was dismissive of then-Justice Harry Blackmun’s concerns about the death penalty. In fact, Scalia had a case study in mind that demonstrated exactly why the system of capital punishment has value.

 As regular readers may recall, Scalia specifically pointed to a convicted killer named Henry Lee McCollum as an obvious example of a man who deserved to be put to death. “For example, the case of an 11-year-old girl raped by four men and then killed by stuffing her panties down her throat,” Scalia wrote in a 1994 ruling. [Callins v. Collins, which involved Texas, not North Carolina] “How enviable a quiet death by lethal injection compared with that!”

 For Scalia, McCollum was the perfect example – a murderer whose actions were so heinous that his crimes stood as a testament to the merit of capital punishment itself.

 Yesterday, McCollum was pardoned. Scalia’s perfect example of a man who deserved to be killed by the state was innocent. North Carolina’s News & Observer reported:

Gov. Pat McCrory on Thursday pardoned two half-brothers who were exonerated of murder after spending three decades in prison.

The governor took nine months to make the decision, saying he thoroughly reviewed the pardons sought by Henry McCollum and Leon Brown. Both men are intellectually disabled.
If this story sounds at all familiar, it was last fall when a judge ordered the men released. The confessions appeared to have been coerced 30 years ago and new DNA evidence implicated another man whose possible involvement had been overlooked at the time.

As recently as 2010, the North Carolina Republican Party used a McCollum photo on campaign fliers to attack a Democratic candidate as “soft on crime.”

 McCollum hadn’t done anything wrong.

(emphasis mine)

Scalia’s habit of assuming facts not in evidence is really starting to wear thin.

This is something that judges, at least judges outside of Texas, should never do.

Governor Ratf%$# Outdoes Himself

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Our Governor, Larry Hogan, wants to kill the Purple Line light rail line that will run east and west north of the District.

He thinks that it is too expensive, but he wants to drop $10 billion on a 500km/h magnet levitation line:

Maryland Governor Larry Hogan campaigned on cutting costs. Since taking office, however, he’s expressed interest in throwing big money at numerous transportation programs—just not the transit lines that actually work and which businesses and residents want. His latest big spending idea: A $10 billion maglev between DC and Baltimore.

Hogan is in Japan right now on a trade mission, and according to WAMU’s Martin di Caro, has agreed to work with Japan and seek federal funds for a study of what it’d take to build a maglev line here at home.

The Federal Railroad Administration has $27.8 million available for a maglev study, but Maryland is the only state in the nation that’s interested in seeking the money. Japan is offering $5 billion in loans to help make the line happen, but that money would still have to be paid back.

The maglev line could run over 300 miles per hour and, di Caro reports, possibly go from DC to Baltimore in 15 minutes (though time estimates for transportation facilities often are rosier, before the gritty details come in).

However, to run that fast, the tracks would have to be very straight. There’s no place to put very straight tracks right through the mostly-suburban area in between; instead, maglev supporters expect the line to be mostly in a tunnel. According to contributor and maglev supporter Peter Dovak, Japan’s maglev (which is different from its well-known “Shinkansen” high-speed trains) will run in a tunnel for 85% of its length.

That makes it very expensive.

This guy is a complete tool.

After 30 Years and Billions of Dollars the Missile Defense Contractors Still Cannot Solder a Wire Correctly

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Notwithstanding the myriad tough technical problems that are involved, one would think that the Missile Defense Agency would at least be able to make the manufacturers make the interceptors to spec:

Two serious technical flaws have been identified in the ground-launched anti-missile interceptors that the United States would rely on to defend against a nuclear attack by North Korea.

Pentagon officials were informed of the problems as recently as last summer but decided to postpone corrective action. They told federal auditors that acting immediately to fix the defects would interfere with the production of new interceptors and slow a planned expansion of the nation’s homeland missile defense system, according to a new report by the Government Accountability Office.

As a result, all 33 interceptors now deployed at Vandenberg Air Force Base in Santa Barbara County and Ft. Greely, Alaska, have one of the defects. Ten of those interceptors — plus eight being prepared for delivery this year — have both.

Summing up the effect on missile-defense readiness, the GAO report said that “the fielded interceptors are susceptible to experiencing … failure modes,” resulting in “an interceptor fleet that may not work as intended.”

………

One of the newly disclosed shortcomings centers on wiring harnesses embedded within the kill vehicles’ dense labyrinth of electronics.

A supplier used an unsuitable soldering material to assemble harnesses in at least 10 interceptors deployed in 2009 and 2010 and still part of the fleet.

The same material was used in the eight interceptors that will be placed in silos this year, according to GAO analyst Cristina Chaplain, lead author of the report.

The soldering material is vulnerable to corrosion in the interceptors’ underground silos, some of which have had damp conditions and mold. Corrosion “could have far-reaching effects” because the “defective wiring harnesses” supply power and data to the kill vehicle’s on-board guidance system, said the GAO report, which is dated May 6.

………

Chaplain told The Times that based on her staff’s discussions with the Missile Defense Agency, officials there have “no timeline” for repairing the wiring harnesses.

The agency encountered a similar problem with wiring harnesses years earlier, and the supplier was instructed not to use the deficient soldering material. But “the corrective actions were not passed along to other suppliers,” according to the GAO report.

L. David Montague, co-chairman of a National Academy of Sciences panel that reviewed operations of the Missile Defense Agency, said officials should promptly set a schedule for fixing the harnesses.

“The older they are with that kind of a flawed soldering, the more likely they are to fail,” Montague, a former president of missile systems for Lockheed Corp., said in an interview.

The second newly disclosed defect involves a component called a divert thruster, a small motor intended to help maneuver the kill vehicles in flight. Each kill vehicle has four of them.

The GAO report refers to “performance issues” with the thrusters. It offers few details, and GAO auditors declined to elaborate, citing a fear of revealing classified information. They did say that the problem is different from an earlier concern that the thruster’s heavy vibrations could throw off the kill vehicle’s guidance system.

The report and interviews with defense specialists make clear that problems with the divert thruster have bedeviled the interceptor fleet for years. To address deficiencies in the original version, Pentagon contractors created a redesigned “alternate divert thruster.”

The government planned to install the new version in many of the currently deployed interceptors over the next few years and to retrofit newly manufactured interceptors, according to the GAO report and interviews with its authors.

That plan was scrapped after the alternate thruster, in November 2013, failed a crucial ground test to determine whether it could withstand the stresses of flight, the report said. To stay on track for expanding the fleet, senior Pentagon officials decided to keep building interceptors with the original, deficient thruster.

What sort of moron structures a multi-billion dollar multi-year defense system in such a way that there is absolutely no quality control?

To accelerate deployment, then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld exempted the missile agency from the Pentagon’s standard procurement rules and testing standards.

(emphasis mine)

OK, that kind of moron.

Why the hell is the MDA still operating this way? 

Rumsfeld has been “spending more time with his family” for about 9 years, so one would think that the pentagon would be able to correct at least one of his f%$#-ups in the interim.

H/T the hairiest Saroff, aka Bear who Swims.
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This Is Not The ……… OK ……… It IS Kind of The Onion

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Just when you thought that the FIFA scandal could get any more surreal, or more pathetic, one of the FIFI officials accused of bribery and money laundering has cited an article from The Onion to defend himself from the charges:

Jack Warner, a former vice president of FIFA, was arrested last week in connection with a sweeping United States Justice Department investigation that slapped 14 bigwigs with charges of racketeering, wire fraud and money laundering.

Warner, apparently unfamiliar with The Onion, defended himself against these charges Sunday by holding up an article from the news satire website — “FIFA Frantically Announces 2015 Summer World Cup in the United States” — stating that “all this has stemmed from the failed U.S. bid to host the World Cup.”

“If I was so bad, if FIFA is so bad…why is it the USA wants to keep the FIFA World Cup?…Something has to be wrong,” Warner says.

This is f%$#ed up and sh%$.

It’s also funny as hell, but it’s f%$#ed up and sh%$.

I Guess Obama Wants to Ensure That There Is Someone Worse with a Nobel

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We now have evidence that the US State Department is pressuring the Nobel Prize committee to nominate Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko for the Peace Prize:

A leaked letter dated May 19th and sent by the Chairman of Ukraine’s parliament, Vladimir Groysman, to the chargé d’affaires of the U.S. Embassy in Oslo Norway, thanks her for “the efforts you have made to have Petro Oleksiyovych Poroshenko nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize,” but continues: “Still we consider your assurances of support by the two members of the Nobel Committee as insufficient,” because there are five members of the Committee, and the support of 3 of them is necessary.

Thus, “We expect further efforts aimed at shifting the position of Berit Reiss-Andersen, Inger-Marie Ytterhorn and especially that of the Chair of the Nobel Committee Kaci Kullman Five. Regarding the latter, we recommend that you take advantage of the information you are going to receive from Germany. Your colleagues in Berlin have assured us that the dossier will soon be delivered to the U.S. Embassy in Oslo. It is of utmost importance for Mr. Poroshenko to have firm guarantees that he will be awarded the 2015 Nobel Peace Prize, since it could highlight the unanimous support of Ukrainian integrity by the democratic community of the world. Assistant Secretary of State Viktoria Nuland has highly estimated your job during her visit to Kyiv.”

Once again, like a bad penny, every time there is a harebrained neocon scheme at State, Victoria Nuland is at the heart of the skulduggery.

The three mentioned Nobel Peace Prize Committee members are a politcally varied group. Ms. Reiss-Andersen is from the social democratic or “Labour” party; Ms. Ytterhorn is from the libertarian or “Progress” party; and Ms. Five is from the Conservative Party. The two unidentified members are Thorbjørn Jagland from the Labour Party, and Henrik Syse from the Conservative Party. If this letter is correct, those are the two who are referred to by the letter’s phrase, “your assurances of support by the two members.”

 The letter also makes a vague reference to the poor reputation that the Committee has engendered on account of the Committee’s having granted the Prize to Barack Obama in 2009 (a decision that the Committee’s Chairperson, Ms. Five, concurred with and has been criticized for): “We understand the difficulties you face when promoting the candidacy of the President of Ukraine, therefore we ask you to exert additional leverages by engaging those U.S. Senators who effectively cooperated with the Committee in 2009.” Presumably, this means that whomever “those U.S. Senators” were, the Chairman of Ukraine’s parliament thinks that they were “effective.”

 President Poroshenko entered office on 25 May 2014 after a U.S.-sponsored coup in Kiev that installed Arseniy Yatsenyuk as Ukraine’s Prime Minister on 26 February 2014, after the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for European and Asian Affairs, Victoria Nuland, had instructed the U.S. Ambassador in Kiev on 4 February 2014 to get “Yats” appointed as the junta’s leader; she issued that instruction to him by phone on February 4th and the coup occurred on February 22nd; Yatsenyuk was then appointed on February 26th, and he remains in power today. One pro-Russian part of Ukraine, Crimea, then seceded and joined Russia, and another, Donbass, seceded and was not accepted by Russia; it thus was bombed by the Ukrainian Government during May through December 2014, since Donbass’s repeated requests to be allowed to join Russia were spurned by Vladimir Putin. (Yet, Ukraine accuses Russia of providing the fighters who are actually the men of Donbass, who refuse to be ruled by the U.S.-coup regime. Russia sends them guns, and volunteers have come from Russia and many other countries to help the Donbass defenders.) German intelligence estimates that “up to 50,000” people were killed in that bombing campaign, but U.S. and other official estimates are only around 5,000.

 Even before Poroshenko took office, the new Ukrainian government of “Yats” Yatsenyuk invaded Donbass, using bombers, tanks, rocket-launchers, and everything it had; and, when Poroshenko gave his victory speech in the ceremonial Presidential election on May 25th, he promised, and it was very clear from him, that: “The anti-terrorist operation [he called the residents there ’terrorists’] cannot and should not last two or three months. It should and will last hours.” (Another translation of it was “Antiterrorist operation can not and will not continue for 2-3 months. It must and will last hours.”) But it did last months — Poroshenko’s prediction was certainly false; and, moreover, he lost first one round of the war, and then another — his prediction of its outcome was likewise false. And recently, he said that the war must be resumed for yet a third round, in order that Ukraine win back both Crimea and Donbass. However, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry warned him on May 12th that he must not do that, and that if he did he’d be violating the Minsk II ceasefire accords which had been arranged by France’s Francois Hollande and Germany’s Angela Merkel. Then, three days later, his Assistant Secretary Victoria Nuland, who had arranged the February 2014 coup, told both Yatsenyuk and Poroshenko to ignore what Kerry had just said, and that, “We continue to stand shoulder to shoulder with the people of Ukraine and reiterate our deep commitment to a single Ukrainian nation, including Crimea, and all the other regions of Ukraine.”

(emphasis mine)

The important thing is not that this is absurd, nor is it why Victoria Nuland has a job at the State Department and a security clearance.

The important thing here is that this is a graphic example of just how f%$#ed up and failed our policy in the Ukraine has proved to be.

We went for a color revolution by funding and supporting Ukrainian Fascists (not hyperbole, the Pravyi Sektor party and its associated paramilitaries are Fascists who idolize Nazi collaborators) for no particular reason, and Russia reacted to what it saw as an existential threat, because it was an existential threat, and we have slavering war mongers in Kiev, and a civil war in which the Russian aligned rebels are winning.

Heck of a job, Brownie Victoria Nuland.

Run Away from These People

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On a web site dedicated to people who do consumer electrical work, someone posits that Tesla’s new home battery packs will force homes to go voltage DC current. This is absolutely and completely wrong, because fails to get even a single fact right, as would be clear to anyone who knew the most basic physics:

CE pros might be sitting in the proverbial catbird seat when it comes to the future of wiring homes.

 With the solar revolution seemingly in full swing all across the nation, consumers are enamored with “going off the grid.” And many homeowners are counting on home batteries to be the next phase of their off-the-grid plans. Companies likes Tesla and RoseWater Energy Group are leading the way in the development of these new power storage devices for homes.

 But if the battery power trend takes off, it must lead to a new paradigm in which homes will be powered more with low voltage wiring than line voltage electrical, according to a blog by CE veteran Paul Self on Buildz.com.

Indeed, will the pure science limitations of AC/DC conversion eventually force a gigantic sea change from builders, electricians and the National Electric Code itself in the way homes are constructed and wired? The answer is “Yes” that might have to happen, says Self.

Here is Self’s logic: [Or more accurately, here are his completely incoherent thoughts]

“An underlying issue with solar power and the Tesla battery is the fact that they run on DC while the power infrastructure in buildings is AC. Stepping power up and down from AC to DC and vice-versa wastes energy, about 20 percent is lost in the conversion. Some converters do a better job than others, but resolving this 20 percent loss is very important when working on a battery stored energy supply.

Ummmm. No. Inverters operate at efficiencies of about 95% at their design points, and if you are connected to the grid, as Tesla envisions, you will only use the inverter .

Many devices in a home could run on DC. Almost all non-incandescent light bulbs can run on DC and require a transformer to step the 110 VAC down to a 12 – 5 VDC signal for the bulb.

No. The a fluorescent light ballast operates as follows: It uses a transformer to jump UP the voltage (not down), then rectifies it to DC, and then uses an inverter (square wave, because unlike motors, that is fine for gas tubes) to hop the frequency from 60hz in the wall, to 1+ Khz to eliminate flicker.  (For incandescents, it’s not an issue, because even as the AC current goes through them they hot.  CFLs are generating lights from individual sparks).

Other devices like computers, TVs, cable boxes, and cell phone chargers all operate similarly.

No again. They cannot use line current, they need to condition the power, and it is easier to do this with AC current.

Appliances like electric ovens, electric water heaters, and air conditioners will require 110VAC, but most of the house is on DC.
Let me paint you a picture.

They reacquire 110VAC because they are high power, and at low voltage, the amperage, and wire size go through the roof. (Details follow)

  • Sun generates 12VDC via the solar panel

Yes, a panel will generate relative low voltage DC, but if arranged in series, you can generate 100s of volts, and have smaller and cheaper wiring with less transmission losses.

  • Solar panels push power to a battery

Again, note arranging in series. In their cars, for example, Tesla battery packs operate at DC voltages between 250V and 425V.

  • The battery or the solar panel push 12VDC to a DC to AC converter (20% loss of power).

From an info page for an inverter for solar vendor

Again. Inverters are around 95% efficient these days.

  • AC is distributed throughout the house

  • Many devices then convert the power BACK to DC (20% loss of power)

Again, the efficiencies of rectifiers is about 95%, not 80%, and the devices that have to convert it back to DC would have to do so anyway, because power from the batteries is not as uniform as their electronics requires.

  • This all seems pretty silly to lose this much power. I am sure it is less than a cumulative loss of 40 percent power, but when your trying to free yourself of the power company, this really adds up.

Also note that he knows no math.  Two devices operating at a 20% loss (80% efficiency) would give us losses of 80% x 80% = 64%; 100% -64% = 36%.

This guy cannot even do basic multiplication.

You know what also “really ads up”?

Copper.

Let’s take a 40 W light bulb.

Power is Voltage x Current = V x I, so for a 120V source, the current is ⅓ amp. For his 12 Volt DC system, the current would be 3⅓ amps, 10 times more current.

You can also express power in terms of current and resistance, P=I2R, so losses in transmission would go through the roof.

Well, they would, except if you look up the charts, it turns out for a typical (I chose 50 feet) length, the DC wiring has much lower resistance, because it is much thicker.

How much thicker? Well the table for wiring for 12VDC gives us 6 Ga wire, and the worksheet for 120VAC gives us 14 Ga wire, and the wire gauge size table gives us conductor diameters of 0.17″ and 0.064″ respectively.

That is a lot of copper you end up paying for, and for many applications.

He also ignores the fact that DC Motors (the kind with brushes) are less efficient, run hotter, and wear out more quickly.

The motor on your furnace, and dryer, and washing machine, are typically induction motors, that operate directly off of  your house current, and with a DC house you would need inverters for the motors.  (So called “Brushless DC motors” contain their own power circuitry linked to an induction motor).

If you see this guy, do not let him near your electronics.  He will kill himself, or kill you, or set your house on fire.

Note that I am NOT an electrical engineer, though I got the basics in school, but this is so ignorant, and so wrong, that I felt compelled to Fisk this bit of  bovine scatology.

H/T /.