When I first descried this article the other day, I thought, "Oh my, someone at the Pentagon has some unhealthy childhood baggage", perhaps, more depressing, with possible Oedipal strings, related to the horrible program, 'My Mother The Car'.
The Pentagon’s far-out research agency has unveiled more details of their plan to create a shape-shifting, multi-purpose car.
Flying cars have been tried before, dozens of times. And a few of the efforts have even succeeded. But the Pentagon concept is several steps ahead existing vehicles, like the Terrafugia Transition, which is more like a light-weight plane that can, by folding up its wings, operate on land. The Transition also needs runways for takeoff and landing, and can’t fly in harsh weather.
And, in what could either mean revolutionary progress or massive failure, this initiative has out-there military agency Darpa behind it. In January, the agency, who’ve been toying with the flying car idea since at least 2008, hosted a proposal’s day workshop for their new Transformer (TX) project. At the time, details were sketchy: Darpa wanted a “morphing vehicle body” that could operate largely autonomously, reducing the chance of human piloting error in high-risk war-zones. Plus, the agency’s initial documents noted, a hovering car would be able to cruise over obstacles and avoid areas rife with IEDs.
[snip]
It’s a lofty plan, albeit one with a relatively small budget: Darpa’s allotting around $55 million to the development and testing of prototypes.
Millions of air travellers are stranded as thousands of flights are being cancelled for a third day.
The disruption from the spread of ash would continue into Sunday, European aviation agency Eurocontrol said.
Airlines are losing some £130m ($200m) a day in an unprecedented shutdown of commercial air travel.
"Forecasts suggest that the cloud of volcanic ash will persist and that the impact will continue for at least the next 24 hours," a statement from Eurocontrol said at around 0830 GMT.
[snip]
The UK extended its ban on commercial flights until at least 0700 local time (0600 GMT) on Sunday.
Many other countries, from Ireland to Ukraine, have either closed airspace or shut key airports. In northern France and northern Italy, airports are shut until Monday.
So, we hear you whisper quizzically, what's this volcano in Iceland have anything to do with Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal?
Jindal, among other distortions, dissed the monitoring of volcanos;
While some of the projects in the bill make sense, their legislation is larded with wasteful spending. It includes $300 million to buy new cars for the government, $8 billion for high-speed rail projects, such as a "magnetic levitation" line from Las Vegas to Disneyland, and $140 million for something called "volcano monitoring." Instead of monitoring volcanoes, what Congress should be monitoring is the eruption of spending in Washington, D.C
News tonight has that scientists don't really know how much longer Eyjafjallajökull is going to spew the heavy-duty ash - could be days, weeks, or, even months.
I don't believe it has happened yet, but if this does drag on, you can plan that some Right Wing Freak Show Flying Monkey, Teabagger, or Faux News will find a way to blame this on Obama, the Democrats, mock Climate Change or, incredulously, tie it in to how the government is taking over healthcare (we can, perhaps, count on our seminal Ignorant Dolt, Michele Bachmann for that)
Oh boy, the old saying of "If you want to dance, you gotta pay the band", is playing a medley of waltzes (we'll have to wait, to see, if they are death marches) for the banking/investment firm/giant vampire squid company Goldman Sachs.
Washington, D.C., April 16, 2010 — The Securities and Exchange Commission today charged Goldman, Sachs & Co. and one of its vice presidents for defrauding investors by misstating and omitting key facts about a financial product tied to subprime mortgages as the U.S. housing market was beginning to falter.
The SEC alleges that Goldman Sachs structured and marketed a synthetic collateralized debt obligation (CDO) that hinged on the performance of subprime residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS). Goldman Sachs failed to disclose to investors vital information about the CDO, in particular the role that a major hedge fund played in the portfolio selection process and the fact that the hedge fund had taken a short position against the CDO.
So there you have it. Finally, the financial crisis gets its first major fraud case. Investment banks created complex securities that increased the risks of in the financial system. Most then held on to the securities because they didn't know what they had. Goldman instead came up with an elaborate scheme to lay off the risk on unsuspecting investors. Either way, Uncle Sam had to come in a clean up the mess. As the SEC says, in selling something they knew was worthless, Goldman was no different from the medicine man of old. It's a fraud as old as time.
[snip]
Last: So are hedge funds more to blame in the financial crisis than we thought? It certainly looks that way. When the hedge funds went before Congress a year or so ago, they were praised--Paulson included. Now it looks like Paulson masterminded a trade that cost the government tens of billions of dollars. I would hope his next Congressional meeting will be less pleasant.
Lord Griffiths of Fforestfach is quite the Christian apologist for wealthy people; he wrote a book called Morality and the Marketplace and has thought long and hard about how to reconcile the teachings of Jesus Christ with the relentless drive to acquire money. He's done pretty well with it. But wasn't there something about camels, and heaven, and rich men? And if Jesus wants Goldman Sachs employees to get multi-million-dollar taxpayer-financed bonuses, why are the Benedictine Sisters of Mt. Angel launching a shareholder movement to get Goldman to reign in its compensation packages? We guess that, for the fabulously wealthy who go for the whole heaven/hell thing, it makes sense to enjoy as many Amber Lounge after-parties as you can squeeze in while you're in this world, because the one that awaits doesn't really have much to offer.
“It appears that the financial ‘protection’ provided by Goldman and described in the SEC complaint may have been more akin to the kind of protection provided by organized crime,” Hurley said.
McClatchy Newspapers, in a series published in November about Goldman’s role in the subprime lending disaster, found that Goldman sold more than $40 billion in mortgages in 2006 and 2007 while secretly betting on a housing downturn that would sink their value. It’s unclear whether any of those transactions have drawn SEC or Justice Department scrutiny, but a Senate investigations panel has been examining them.
Goldman's response to the SEC charges is a yawner - "The SEC’s charges are completely unfounded in law and fact and we will vigorously contest them and defend the firm and its reputation."
Ah, Felix Salmon, you want to step up here and talk a little about that "Goldman reputation"; Goldman’s reputation in tatters
Goldman talks ad nauseam about how everything it does it does for its clients, and how any profits it ultimately ends up making are just a result of being “long-term greedy”. But if it attempts legalistic hair-splitting about how its behavior in the Abacus case was technically not illegal, it’s just going to end up looking even more culpable in the eyes of its clients. Goldman, if it was behaving honorably here, would have been open about the whole truth of what was going on. It would have revealed Paulson’s role in structuring the deal to IKB and other investors, and it would have revealed Paulson’s short position to ACA. Instead, it played IKB and ACA for suckers. And that’s just not the kind of behavior that Goldman likes to think that it engages in.
A number of journalists and commentators (yours truly included) have taken issue with the fact that some dealers (most notably Goldman and DeutscheBank) had programs of heavily subprime synthetic collateralized debt obligations which they used to take short positions. Needless to say, the firms have been presumed to have designed these CDOs so that their short would pay off, meaning that they designed the CDOs to fail. The reason this is problematic is that most investors would assume that a dealer selling a product it had underwritte was acting as a middleman, intermediating between the views of short and long investors. Having the firm act to design the deal to serve its own interests doesn’t pass the smell test (one benchmark: Bear Stearns refused to sell synthetic CDOs on behalf of John Paulson, who similarly wanted to use them to establish a short position. How often does trading oriented firm turn down a potentially profitable trade because they don’t like the ethics?)
I suppose we could riff that they will double-somersault the casket into the grave, or, that the final epitaph would be "BOING!"
We don't know if there is some ritual, or ceremonial platitude, they would give someone who invented the trampoline, so, we'll call it "The Last Bounce' George Nissen, Father of the Trampoline, Dies at 96
One by one, the trapeze artists topped off their routines by dropping from their high-swinging bars into the net stretched below, then rebounding into somersaults, to the roar of the crowd at the traveling circus in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. And one child in the stands began to wonder: Hey, what if there was a contraption that made it possible to keep on bouncing and flipping?
George Nissen, 16, who was a member of the high school gymnastics and diving teams, was soon tinkering in his parents’ garage, strapping together a rectangular steel frame and a canvas sheet. Though not as springy as he had hoped, he called it a bouncing rig. That was in 1930.
[snip]
Then, in 1937, Mr. Nissen and two friends formed a traveling acrobatics act called the Three Leonardos and began performing across the Midwest and Texas and then in Mexico. It was there that he heard the Spanish word for diving board, el trampolin.
[snip]
Mr. Nissen, who devoted his life to promoting and manufacturing the trampoline, once renting a kangaroo to bounce with him in Central Park, died last Wednesday at a hospital near his home in San Diego. He was 96.
“And at the banquet before the competition he would do a handstand,” Mr. Normile said. “It became a tradition.”
[snip]
“The last time I saw him there was in 2006,” Mr. Normile continued. “He did one of those kind of yoga headstands where you’re on your head and elbows. That was only four years ago; he was 92.”
In a bombshell announcement this morning, President Obama, following up on his successful Nuclear Security Summit, said that an agreement was reached last evening with the other participating 47 countries, and a new "Clunkers for Nukes" program will be launched.
"Legitimate governments, rogue players, terrorists, they're all eligible to turn in their nuclear weapons, or materials, and have their choice of a pre-owned automobile," stated White House spokesman Robert Gibbs, at an unscheduled briefing this morning.
"We have an overstock situation," said Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood.
"We're swimming in used cars ... We lost count, we have so many."
Gibbs further explained, that the "Clunkers for Nukes" program will be scaled, in favor of the client.
"We're offering one car, for every ten-pounds of nuclear material, be it simple, unaltered plutonium, or enhanced, weapons-grade plutonium. It's projected, some potential clients could walk away with three, four, possibly even, five cars with their trade-in."
Gibbs would neither confirm, or deny, that President Obama, in a Rose Garden ceremony, would, symbolically trade in an two old American nuclear warheads, for cars that would be saved for his daughters, when they reach the appropriate age.
News of the "Clunkers for Nukes" program reached the Middle East, as Al Jeezera is reporting that Osama bin Laden is planning on releasing a new audio tape, indicating he is looking for a 1965 Cadillac, and may reach out to U.S. officials.
While the subject matter surrounding this corpulent former RNC Bag Man is, wholly, worthwhile, the less I have to do with anything to do with Haley Barbour, the better.
Just hearing his name, or seeing him on television gives to excogitate, on whether to head for a second shower-of-the-day (possible, a third, if we, unfortunately, crossed paths earlier).
His name brings to mind the devastating riff Barry Crimmins used to perform, in which he said that the only way to properly view Haley Barbour was "kneeling in a bed of potatoes with an apple in his mouth."
So, after our previously successful, "A Eric Massa Cloud", we give way to the highlights of this growing, sorid mess. A Haley Barbour Cloud
OKLAHOMA CITY – Frustrated by recent political setbacks, tea party leaders and some conservative members of the Oklahoma Legislature say they would like to create a new volunteer militia to help defend against what they believe are improper federal infringements on state sovereignty.
Tea party movement leaders say they've discussed the idea with several supportive lawmakers and hope to get legislation next year to recognize a new volunteer force. They say the unit would not resemble militia groups that have been raided for allegedly plotting attacks on law enforcement officers.
[snip]
State Sen. Randy Brogdon, R-Owasso, a Republican candidate for governor who has appealed for tea party support, said supporters of a state militia have talked to him, and that he believes the citizen unit would be authorized under the Second Amendment to the Constitution.
If it's scary, why are you doing this? What's alarming is that several lawmakers are on board with this proposal, although reading between lines it looks dubious it could actually pass the state legislature and become law, especially since -- and I'm not sure how this could have happened -- the governor of Oklahoma is a Democrat. Still, you never know what can happen when an idea gets rolling. It seems to me that if the citizens of Oklahoma think Washington is overextending its power, there are other solutions -- at the ballot box in 2010 and 2012, for example. Has Oklahoma City, of all places, forgotten what happened the last time somebody there stood up to claim he was not rolling over for the federal government?
As we alluded to above, deeply concerning, it were another state, other than Oklahoma.
Only one in four Oklahoma public high school students can name the first President of the United States, according to a survey released today.
The survey was commissioned by the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs in observance of Constitution Day on Thursday.
[snip]
"They're questions taken from the actual exam that you have to take to become a U.S. citizen," Dutcher said.
[snip]
About 92 percent of the people who take the citizenship test pass on their first try, according to immigration service data. However, Oklahoma students did not fare as well. Only about 3 percent of the students surveyed would have passed the citizenship test.
Something tells me, if it ever got to the point, where they would have to draft a bill for this, they are likely to run into some problems, maybe things like spelling, proper puncuation, who actually is the President ...
When all the other governors around the country see this report, don't be surprised if we see a mass exodus, a run of abdications across the land, all heading to the same money trough as Mommy Moose;
Since leaving office at the end of July 2009, the 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee has brought in at least 100 times her old salary – a haul now estimated at more than $12 million -- through television and book deals and a heavy schedule of speaking appearances worth five and six figures.
That conservative estimate is based on publicly available records and news accounts. The actual number is probably much higher, but is hard to quantify because Palin does not publicize her earnings.
[Snip}
Palin appears to select audiences that are likely to provide a warm welcome. In February, Palin coupled a paid speech to the Daytona Chamber of Commerce with an appearance at NASCAR's Daytona 500 and a local book signing, and was welcomed with cheers of "We love you, Sarah!" In the past nine months, she has stopped in to address the Bowling Proprietors Association of America, the Complete Woman Expo, the Wine & Spirits Wholesalers of America, and the Sierra-Cascade Logging Conference, among others.
But wait, she's not all that greedy;
She did not charge fellow Tea Party favorite Michele Bachmann for an appearance at a fundraiser in Minnesota last week, for instance. And she has indicated that she will not collect fees for speeches at certain charitable functions. At the same time, a report in the Hamilton Spectator quoted organizers who said she would be paid "in the ballpark" of $200,000 to speak at a fundraising dinner for the Juravinski Cancer Center and St. Peter's Hospital outside of Toronto.
Yep, sure sounds like rock-solid Republican values there.
This winking at the Teabaggers is really payin' off.
Summertime is coming, The Wasilla Whiz Kid could probably hit, five, maybe six, county fairs, per-state, per-day.
All the organizers have to do is announce she'll be there and, bang, they know they'll have a few scores-of-thousands Teabaggers lining up, wrapping around the Funnel Cake stand.
On SNL Saturday evening, Seth Meyers, during Weekend Update, noted that Apple released the iPad, "proving the theory that people will buy something to find out what it is."
So, last Friday, another one pops up, in the NYT, from author Steven Johnson, giving Apple a "wink-wink-slap-on-the-wrists", for not playing nice in the iSandbox, with application developers, but then goes on to extol, heaping glowing hosannas, on Apple, for their "one-click-purchase", and for their genius of creating the AppStore Rethinking a Gospel of the Web
Over the last two years, however, that story has grown far more complicated, thanks to the runaway success of the iPhone (and now iPad) developers platform — known as the App Store to consumers.
The App Store must rank among the most carefully policed software platforms in history. Every single application has to be approved by Apple before it can be offered to consumers, and all software purchases are routed through Apple’s cash register. Most of the development tools are created inside Apple, in conditions of C.I.A.-level secrecy. Next to the iPhone platform, Microsoft’s Windows platform looks like a Berkeley commune from the late 60s.
[snip]
Those of us who have championed open platforms cannot ignore these facts. It’s conceivable that, had Apple loosened the restrictions surrounding the App Store, the iPhone ecosystem would have been even more innovative, even more democratic. But I suspect that this view is too simplistic. The more complicated reality is that the closed architecture of the iPhone platform has contributed to its generativity in important ways.
The decision to route all purchases through a single payment mechanism makes great sense for Apple, which takes 30 percent of all sales, but it has also helped nurture the ecosystem by making it easier for consumers to buy small apps impulsively with one-click ordering. People don’t want to thumb-type credit card information into their phones each time they download a game to distract the kids during a long drive in the car. One-click purchase also supports lightweight, inexpensive apps, the revenue from which can support small software teams.
Consumers are also willing to experiment with new apps because they know that they have been screened for viruses, malware and other stability problems as part of the App Store’s approval process.
iPad isn't a computer, as much as it is an enlarged iPhone, minus the calling features, a technological piece of catnip, designed to have all the little MacKitties rub up against it, and then pull out their wallets at Apple's Citizen Kane-level domination ambitions, the AppStore.
We might have had the wrong reference there.
It's not Citizen Kane market domination Apple is after, but rather, to become the new millennium's Microsoft.
Instead of a PC on every desk, it's an iApp on every device!
And, there's only one super information highway to travel - you have go through Apple to get it. All hail the AppStore!
Through a new partnership with an Internet company that specializes in personalized shopping, MasterCard is set to introduce a Web shopping mall on Monday that it says can pinpoint with considerable accuracy what its cardholders are likely to purchase.
The site, called MasterCard Marketplace, relies on technology developed by Next Jump, a New York company that monitors customer behavior from thousands of retailers and uses the data it gathers to help merchants tailor their product offerings.
[snip]
Some privacy advocates, meanwhile, say the technology makes them uncomfortable.
Anita L. Allen, a law professor who studies privacy issues at the University of Pennsylvania, said that as consumers gave up more private information for short-term gains, “In the end, we turn into citizens who live in a world where we have no control over our own data.”
[snip]
But some privacy experts question the growing use of customer data on sites like MasterCard Marketplace, even if people divulge it willingly.
Joseph Turow, a communications professor at the University of Pennsylvania, said that hiding the identity of customers from merchants was not enough.
The type of profiling done by sites like MasterCard Marketplace, he said, often leads to “social discrimination,” in which people are lumped into categories they may find objectionable. He said companies rarely explained to people how they were categorized.
All this means is, should you shop there, you will soon, thereafter, be bombarded with spam emails, extolling all the great items on sale.
And what about security?
If they are measurable, I would bet this story has been bookmarked by scores-of-thousands of hackers, from the Russian Mob, to acne-covered teens, twitching there fingertips hovering over their keyboards, virtually hyperventilating, just waiting to crack this puppy.
Being in debt-bondage to MasterCard .... Priceless!
Power comes from lying ... Lying big and getting the whole damn world to play along with you ... Once you got everybody agreeing with what they know in their hearts ain't true, you get them by the balls
Well, the Oxymoronpalooza ended this weekend, otherwise referred to by the MSM as the Southern Republican Leadership Conference, and, not to anyone's surprise, there was more red meat tossed about then at a month full of Texas barbecues.
No doubt, the Café du Monde must have been off-limits, lest any of the slimebags be caught being "French" by some tourist Teabagger, surely creating a litmus test, and, likely, a career-killer.
Below the fold, more excerpts from Cheney's speech.
When it comes to foreign policy, it looks increasingly like there are three pillars to the “Obama Doctrine” – (1)Apologize for America, (2)Abandon our allies, and (3)Appease our enemies.
There was nothing about the speech that necessarily indicated one way or another whether Palin would run for president in 2012. She's not doing anything that looks like preparing a national organization, but she's so well-known that she wouldn't have to. Her political outfit, SarahPAC, did hand out little packets of Alaska-made caribou and reindeer jerky to every delegate ("An Alaskan Snack from SarahPAC!" the label read, along with invitations to follow her on Twitter and Facebook). And there were a few Palin buttons around the room.
But it's not entirely clear she'd have the whole thing sewn up. As the delegates filtered out of the hall afterwards, I stopped one woman randomly, figuring her own Palin button meant she was a big fan. True enough, she was. "It was awesome," she said, identifying herself only as Loretta from east Tennessee. "She's wonderful. She thinks the way America thinks, she knows what we want, and she's not afraid to voice it... We need change, but we can't afford Obama's change -- he's killing us." Palin, she told me, would bring the right kind of changes -- jobs, prosperity, God back in our country. "This is a Christian country, it's not a Muslim country," she said. "We have Muslims here, and they are welcome here. But we as Christians have rights, too." Obama, she insisted, is a Muslim (which is why she wouldn't tell me her last name or exactly where she lives). So surely, Loretta would be voting for Palin if she ran in two years? "I don't think she's ready," she said. "I love her. I don't think we're ready for her as president yet... I think she still needs to educate herself a little more on foreign policy."
Well, she got to do a lot of bad jokes, bash the President, and it doesn't matter if she just took the stage and started reading the Louisiana phone book, the Teabaggers love her - emphatic period.
But the plan that Gingrich got the most applause from, as he tried to rally a few thousand GOP activists to say "yes," involved... just saying no in a different way. "When we win control of the House and Senate this fall, stage one of the end of Obamaism will be a new Republican Congress in January that simply refuses to fund any more," he said. "The Congress doesn't have to pass the money. If EPA gets no money, it can't enforce cap and trade."
[snip]
In other words, shut down the government. Which, of course, worked out very well for Gingrich the last time he tried it.
[snip]
If that sounds familiar, it's probably because that was the agenda Gingrich carried into power after the 1994 election. It turns out the "party of yes" concept isn't actually about working with the White House to get anything done; it's about finding new ways to sell the same old GOP policies without looking stubborn in the process.
While the crowd lapped it up like happy soup, Jed Lewison, over on the Daily Kos, stuck a pin in Newt's balloon;
Moreover, if Gingrich were serious, the GOP would be shutting down the Federal government now. Whether or not we like it, the fact remains that Republicans in the Senate could filibuster appropriations bills today. They don't need to win the fall elections to stop appropriations bills. Yet they are not following Gingrich's strategy because they know -- as Gingrich proved in 1995 -- that it is political suicide.
[snip]
I suppose if the GOP were to essentially dismantle the Federal government, stopping the Social Security Administration from sending out checks and blocking Medicare from paying claims that they could also stop the subsidies. But if you believe the GOP will actually go that far, I've got a state in Bob McDonnell's Confederacy to sell you.
Newt's pledge may sound good to the teabagging Republicans. But they should also know this: They. Will. Never. Do. It. Didn't do it in 1995. Won't do it in 2011.
To add some more spice, Make-Up Mitt Romney won the Straw Pole (by one vote, over Ron Paul), and he wasn't even in attendance.
With this level of idiocracy being bandied about, the Midterms are sure gonna be fun.
