Posts from — April 2011

That would be Paul Ryan, the math-challenged Republicant from Walkeristan.

According to the BBC widget on my sidebar on today in history: Napoleon was shipped to Elba, McArthur got fired by Truman, and Idi Amin was thrown out of Uganda.

According to CNN Laurent Gbagbo of the Ivory Coast joined the list:

(CNN) — Forces stormed the president’s residence in Ivory Coast on Monday and arrested self-declared president Laurent Gbagbo, whose refusal to accept the results of a presidential election last year plunged the West African nation into civil war.

The 11^th of April may not have the zing of the Ides of March, but it works for me. [I missed Napoleon, but was around for the rest of the events.]

In comments about the Fukushima problems, Badtux and I have a running dark joke about the plant being run by Moe-san, Curley-san, and Larry-san [look up the Three Stooges is you don’t understand]. I’m guilty of starting this [see Number 7] in reference to an earlier nuclear problem caused by three Japanese workers enriching uranium using “milk pails” [stainless steel buckets {pronounced BUK-ET}] that resulted in a chain reaction. It is a dark and un-PC bit of humor that turns out to be closer to the truth than we expected.

Ms Ex-Pat at Corrente reports on a rather disturbing New York Times article that indicates that almost 9 out of 10 people working at Japanese nuclear facilities are day-laborers. The guys who accidentally set off the chain reaction at the nuclear fuel facility may have been using the same type of pail to actually milk cows the week before they began enriching uranium.

Apparently trained nuclear workers are expensive and want benefits, so the nuclear industry fills a lot of their jobs by hiring temporary workers. Imagine a TEPCO van pulling into a Home Depot parking lot at 5AM and loading up.

Nuclear energy is too dangerous to be left in the hands of people who are only interested in profits. People keep referring to these problems as Black Swans, but they are all quite predicable. We keep finding out that events that “No one could have imagined …”, were not only imagined, but rather stridently warned against.

Professor Krugman is annoyed with the commentariat:

People like me don’t say that the Ryan plan is too radical; we say that it’s a fraud. The spending cuts are largely fake, either because they’re just magic asterisks or because they wouldn’t survive politically; the revenue estimates are fake, because they combine huge tax cuts with vague assurances that extra revenue will be found by closing loopholes. There’s no there there — except for big tax cuts for the rich and pain for the poor.

Unlike the media some of us can do the math involved with balancing a checkbook, even without a calculator. When the amount of the deposits is less than the amount of the checks, your account is overdrawn. There is nothing serious or courageous about repeating the failed concept that reducing the top tax rates will increase revenues. That delusion was rolled out under Reagan, and it is still a failure.

The only way that messing around with Social Security and Medicare will have a noticeable effect on the deficit is if the government defaults on the bonds in the Trust Fund, and that seems to be what they have in mind to avoid having to pay it back. Of course, doing that destroys the value of all government bonds.

The BBC reports that UK and Netherlands to sue Iceland over lost deposits

The UK and Dutch governments are preparing court action against Iceland to recover 4bn euros (£3.5bn) lost when the country’s bank system collapsed.

It follows a referendum in Iceland which rejected a repayment plan.
…

The UK and the Netherlands say they are owed the money following the collapse of Icelandic savings bank Icesave. British and Dutch depositors were bailed out by their governments, which are now demanding their money back.

The reality is that unlike Ireland, Iceland did not involve the government in the failure of their banks. The government made good on the deposits lost by its citizens, but gave no guarantees regarding other losses.

The banks went bankrupt and are in receivership, so their assets are being liquidated. The banks’ creditors will be paid from those sales.

I don’t quite understand the basis of the lawsuit. How can the UK and the Netherlands obligate the funds of Iceland? The people of Iceland aren’t buying the logic, and don’t want to be responsible for losses when they didn’t share in the profits. If the depositors weren’t insured by the government of Iceland, I don’t understand how Iceland becomes responsible for the losses.

The CBC reports that the date of a national candidates debate may change:

Bloq Québécois Leader Gilles Duceppe wants Thursday’s French-language debate moved up a day to avoid a conflict with Montreal’s first-round NHL playoff game against Boston.
…

The two-hour French debate is scheduled to start Thursday at 7 p.m. ET. The Montreal Canadiens kick off their round one playoff series aganst the Boston Bruins that night in Boston. Duceppe said he knows where Quebeckers TV’s will be tuned.

Politics is all well and good, but not if it is going to interfere with hockey. You have to have your priorities straight.

Please note that major national candidates and party leaders in Canada have to be fluent in both English and French. In the US we have a hard time finding people who can actually speak understandable English.

I would note that no one schedules candidate debates in the US during the World Series, and special sessions in Florida have to accommodate football games.

Texas is experiencing another drought and the results are predictable: Homes burned, threatened by massive fire in Texas

(CNN) — A fast-moving fire has charred more than 71,786 acres in three Texas counties, and it’s expected to grow, the state’s forest service said Friday.

The blaze, which started in Stonewall County, moved quickly into neighboring Knox and King counties, destroying two homes and threatening at least a dozen more, said April Saginor, a Texas Forest Service worker.

Meanwhile, while the Red River of the South [Texas-Oklahoma border] is drying up, the Red River of the North is flooding along the North Dakota-Minnesota border and in Manitoba as it heads north to Lake Winnipeg. The crest is predicted to be about 40 feet above flood stage.

Having discovered how much media attention they could get, Obama, Boehner, and Reid, agreed to deprive poor women in the District of Columbia of choice, and put off closing down the government for a week.

This means that the kabuki resumes on Thursday, which allows Boehner time to recharge his tear ducts, Reid time to look even more haggard, and Obama time to decide who gets thrown under the bus in this round.

Of course, the whole process starts again with the farce about raising the “debt limit”, and then the budget bill for the fiscal year that starts in October.

In the meantime, there is nothing being done about jobs, and the country is slipping back into a recession.

The Romans at least provided bread with their circuses, we just get the clowns.

BBC Business reports that the Vickers Banking Commission report to back ‘firewalls’

An interim report from the Banking Commission due on Monday will not support the total break-up of Britain’s biggest banks, the BBC understands.

Instead it will favour ring-fencing their risky investment banking operations, so they do not jeopardise the savings of ordinary depositors.

The move will still cause anger at big banks like Barclays, according to BBC business editor Robert Peston.

It means their investment banking units will find it more expensive to borrow.

What this does is separate the retail banking from investment banking. The government will guarantee the retail banking unit, but the investment banking unit will be allowed to fail. The investment banking units has been “borrowing” from their associated retail banking unit, including the deposits of account holders. Now they will be required to find their funding in the market.

Barclays, for example, can still be involved in both types of banking, but people will be put on notice that their losses on the investment banking side are not guaranteed, and will not be covered. This is called “capitalism”. You may have heard about it.

Retail banking serves a social/public need and is required for commerce, but investment banking is another form of gambling.

By now you have read about the 7,000 votes that magically appeared on the computer of Waukesha County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus. If not, Susie Madrak has the story which is encapsulated in this paragraph:

Wisconsinites should respond with equal skepticism to the news that Waukesha County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus, a former Republican legislative staffer who worked for Prosser when he served as Assembly speaker and with Gov. Scott Walker when he was a GOP rising star, has found all the votes that justice needs to secure his re-election and that the governor needs to claim a “win” for his agenda.

Susie’s article mentions that Nickolaus claimed the problem was because she forgot to hit “save” after entering the data initially, and that computer people have already pointed out that you don’t have to “save” in ACCESS, it saves data automatically.

I go back so far that I used the first version of ACCESS. It was an ill-fated, terrible communications program, so bad that Microsoft expunged it from memory and reused the name for the data base component of the Windows Office suite.

If you want a taste for how thoroughly integrated into ACCESS the autosave function is, read this forum entry about stopping Access from autosaving. You can’t just turn it off, you have to program around it, and even then, you might not stop it completely.

I did some volunteer work for a group that used an ACCESS data base, and we really wanted to verify the data before it was entered because the people who were doing the entry were all volunteers. In the end it was easier to clean up the data after the fact than to fight with ACCESS.

If she entered anything into an ACCESS data field, it was saved. There are a lot of problems with ACCESS, but losing data isn’t one of them. With 15 years of IT experience, Nickolaus knows that.

This is the sort of thing that destroys credibility with the public, when the government and scientists refuse to state the obvious because there is “an ongoing investigation” or “there is a lawsuit pending”, but neglect to qualify their statements by stating, flat-out, that the lawsuit / investigation is keeping them from saying what they know.

UPDATE: The researchers working on the situation in the Gulf of Mexico are almost all under non-disclosure agreements with BP or the US government. Their funding and access is tied to their not saying or writing anything about what they discover. The few independents working on the problem are extremely limited in what they can do, as access to the area affected is strictly controlled, so they have to work on the fringes.

CNN reports that Scientists unsure why dolphins washing up dead

(CNN) — Dead baby bottlenose dolphins are continuing to wash up in record numbers on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, and scientists do not know why.

Since February 2010 to April 2011, 406 dolphins were found either stranded or reported dead offshore.

The occurrence has prompted the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to designate these deaths as an “unusual mortality event” or UME. The agency defines a UME as a stranding incident that is unexpected or involves a significant loss of any marine mammal population.

“This is quite a complex event and requires a lot of analysis,” said Blair Mase, the agency’s marine mammal investigations coordinator.
…
[Read more →]

At Last

You looking at me?

[Editor: And I shall call this one S.U., for Specialist Underhouse, because the facial markings look like the Army’s Specialist stripes, and this is the second of the two cats that have spent their lives under my house.]

Friday Ark

The Orlando Sentinel reports that Courts get funding reprieve. Won’t be shuttered.

Florida Supreme Court Chief Justice Charles T. Canady and Gov. Rick Scott’s Office reached a breakthrough agreement this morning, meaning courts statewide won’t have to shut down four days next week and for two weeks in May.

The agreement authorizes a loan that will fund circuit and county courts operations, meaning hundreds of employees statewide will not be forced out of work temporarily.

Just yesterday, it was feared that the budget shortfall — estimated at about $50 million — would mean exactly that plus three weeks of trial and court delays.

Here is what you need to know to understand this issue:

The affected courts are funded by the filing fees, and when the foreclosure cases were discovered to be less than fully honest and aboveboard, the filing fee income dried up. The court has set up a special system to try foreclosures, and now it is stuck paying for a system that was no longer needed, and not generating any revenue.

The system once had a “rainy day fund”, but the legislature needed money to cover the deficit without raising taxes a while back. The court thought the fund was loaned to the legislature, but the legislature considered it a gift, and now is “loaning” money to the courts.

Florida has no stable form of funding for anything in government, and the legislature is draining every fund to cover the general revenue gap and not looking at taxes, except to cut them.

One of the consequences of this Federal shutdown will be to close the national parks. This will certainly be disappointing to all of the Civil War reenactors who have been working for months to get ready for the 150^th anniversary of the start of the Civil War.

I sure that thousands of people with cap-and-ball muskets will not be upset that the venue for their planned activities will be closed on the day of the scheduled event. I mean, 150 or 151, what’s the difference?