A Culprit?

My sister, the Elephant's Child, posts some compelling data pointing towards a possible culprit in the recent economic turmoil.

Bad Bad Bad: Deadly Iranian Shipment

The South African Times reports on the mysterious deaths of several pirates after hijacking an Iranian military-owned merchant ship in Somali waters. The Somali pirates "suffered skin burns, lost hair and fell gravely ill “within days” of boarding the MV Iran Deyanat. Some of them died." According to the report, the pirates had not opened any of the cargo containers before falling ill. Folks, there are only a few things in this world that deadly. Some have alleged the ship was to deliver chemical weapons to Somali fighters. Scary as that would be, lets hope that's the worst of it.

Don't Roll Up Grandma

I'm not really big into themed weddings, particularly not video-game themes, but I have to admit this couple's Katamari wedding cake is pretty brilliant.


Good thing it's still too small to roll up the wedding guests, although it's big enough I'd probably keep the babies away. (If you're thoroughly confused right now, Wikipedia might help).

Doooooo doo doo doo doo-doo dooo dooo doo-doooo doooo doo-doo doooooooo...

The S-Word

Stephen Trimble shares a PowerPoint slide of the US Air Force's newest airborne networking strategy. Just don't call it SkyNet.

A Pair of Bailout Perspectives

An old friend, K, posted her opinion of the bailout yesterday on Facebook, including this corrective to those who are themselves crying for a piece of the action arguing against using taxpayer funds to rescue Wall Street:

The bailout is meant to fix the credit market and stabilize the economy.
Individuals aren't the only ones who use credit - companies use it too, and they use it just like we do: to cover expenses until they have the cash to pay them off. These expenses include: money owed to other companies for supplies, copyrights, etc., and of course, payroll.

If companies have their credit lines cut or severely reduced, they won't be able to cover their expenses...and this doesn't apply only to poorly managed companies. A bad credit market affects everyone, including well-run, ethical businesses. There were financially sound Fortune 500 companies that almost didn't make payroll last week for this very reason.

So, what happens if there's no bailout is employees don't get paid, companies go under and countless workers are laid off. This is what the bailout is meant to prevent. It might not give money directly back to the taxpayers but it will help them keep their jobs. Aiding companies that have used poor business practices and people who made bad decisions with their mortgages is an unfortunate side effect, but it's better than the whole economy going in the tank.

Very true, and probably the most succinct argument I've read yet for the necessity of the bailout. Then this morning, Charles Krauthammer agrees with K and adds an additional (and vital) warning against the instinct to punish Wall Street's supposed malfeasance:

Congress has every duty to be careful with taxpayers’ money and to suggest improvements in the administration plan. But part of Congress’ reaction has nothing to do with improving the proposal and everything to do with assuaging the rage of constituents — even if it jeopardizes the package’s chances of success, either by weakening it or by larding it up with useless complicating provisions designed solely to give the appearance of sticking it to the rich [and] window dressing such as capping pay packages, which the Bush administration has already caved in to. I’ve got nothing against withholding golden parachutes from failed executives. But artificially capping the pay of people brought in to lead these wobbly companies back to health is a fine way to tell talented executives to look elsewhere for a job.

I like having smart friends.

I Want One: Steampunk Raygun

What a beautiful piece of workmanship from the people at Weta Works:


HT: Gadget Lab

Pre-Gaming President Bush's Economy Speech

Apparently the president is making a speech tonight about the current economic "crisis". (The scare quotes aren't to diminish the seriousness of the situation; I'm just really sick of that word). Anywho, an advance copy of the president's speech seems to be making the rounds. An excerpt:

To sustain this shining city on a hill, we need to rescue the ignorant, irresponsible folks — from Wall Street to Capitol Hill to Main Street — who got us to where we are today. We must guarantee that no American suffers the soft bigotry of being forced to live with the consequences of his bad decisions. Our financial system rests on a foundation of huge banks, brokerage houses and quasi-governmental agencies that followed Washington’s lead by gambling on long-shot, poorly-collateralized investments.

Now this glorious way of life is threatened, and we must act to preserve it. We need to guarantee that the structures, systems, people and products that got us to this point won’t be tossed on the ash heap of history. If these giant companies fail, then America will be left with nothing but thousands of small to mid-sized financial firms that made prudent investment decisions during the past 15 years.

Americans value the liberty they have to buy homes they can’t afford, to invest in securities backed by nothing but hope, and to draw six- and seven-figure salaries based on the courage to risk taxpayer dollars on deals that even the dealmakers don’t understand.

Man, I wish this was going to be his speech. Not that I disagree that the recent bailouts were necessary (that judgment is well beyond my expertise, so I'll trust the experts), but instead of hearing politicians rail against greed [pointedly coughs in Senator McCain's direction], I'd like to hear a bit more of an admission of how we've gotten ourselves into this situation through our own collective irresponsibility. Aspects of the current crisis have been fed by poor (and bi-partisan) decision-making in Congress, on Wall Street, and at our own kitchen tables. If our politicians succeed in placing some quick blame and doing a legislative patch-job, we'll only succeed in laying the foundation for more trouble down the road.

Taheri's Last Word

Amir Taheri takes two steps back to explain how Senator Obama's extraordinary private foreign policy fits into the bigger historical picture (or more accurately, is without precedent). He relates how figures from Edward Kennedy to Ronald Reagan to Hillary Clinton have refused even to comment on the status of their government's negotiations with a foreign power, citing the long-standing political tradition that a loyal opposition does not undermine the standing government's foreign policy diplomatically, but uses the appropriate legislative channels.

Every agreement and every treaty contains mechanisms for its suspension or abrogation. Therefore, even supposing Bush was negotiating an absolutely terrible agreement with the Iraqis in which he would be selling the family silver, Obama should have waited until he saw the text, and then demanded the cancellation of the accord through the constitutional channels.

One key feature of all mature powers, at least since the Congress of Vienna, is the reliability of their international commitments. Even putschists who seize power in a military coup make sure that their first pronunciamento includes this key sentence: We shall honor all of our country’s international obligations and commitments.

Furthermore:

Senator Obama is the leader of a loyal opposition in the United States, not the chief of an insurrection or a revolutionary uprising. What we are witnessing in the U.S. is an election, not an insurrection or a coronation, even less a regime change.

Obama and his followers seem not to recognize the difference.

What is Foreign Policy Experience, Anyway?

Clifford May asks this important question today over at National Review Online. Important, because it's something that everyone's talking about even though it's not at all clear that we know what we mean by it, or that we all mean the same thing. Does Governor Sarah Palin's gubernatorial experience with foreign trade delegations count? For something, maybe. Does the fact that Alaska is kinda close-ish to Russia, or that she is nominally Commander in Chief of the Alaska National Guard? Hardly. Similarly, the other three candidates are from the Senate, where they have had at best a spectator's experience of foreign policy. Even if any of the candidates did have experience in executive decision-making, it still comes down to a fundamental problem of looking to experience in electing any executive: the new leader will face situations nobody will have predicted, few if any of these situations will be directly analagous to anything he has done before, and even an entire lifetime's worth of experiences is too limited a library for anyone to rely on past personal experience. A candidate's record matters insofar as it provides a witness by which to make judgements about his judgement. As May puts it, "The best a voter can do is attempt to discern ... a candidate’s values, temperament and, yes, ideology — which is to say his political philosophy." He then poses a series of key questions, the sort I wish the media were asking of all the candidates. Let's stop arguing about who has foreign policy "experience", and start looking for evidence of foreign policy judgement.

Obama's Two-Faced Ad

Jake Tapper's Political Punch blog over at ABC News exposes the incredible dishonesty of the Obama campaign's recent Spanish-language attack ad "Dos Caras" ("Two Faces") in which out-of-context Rush Limbaugh quotes are used to paint McCain as an immigrant-hating nativist. Except Rush isn't much of a fan of McCain and particularly opposes him on his immigration policy, which is well to the left of Rush's audience. Furthermore, neither quote from Rush is at all hateful in its original context. I know this is Spin-proofing 101, but if they're only giving you five or six words of a quote it might be worth looking up the whole thing.

Landlines Obsolete?

Mike Elgan wonders why you still have a landline phone. As he says, "It's 2008, and the landline phone should have been made obsolete by now." He blames the poor service and expense of wireless carriers, which is a big part of the situation, I'm sure. 20 million American households do rely solely on their cell phone for all telephony needs, but that's "just" around 17 percent. Personally, that's 20 million too many. Far too few people realize their cell phone is unlikely to work in an emergency situation. Terrorist attacks can bring down cell networks by damaging key infrastructure as on 9/11, but also by triggering a massive surge of call use like that which brought down cellular service following the London Tube bombings. Not all cell towers have backup generators for simple power outages, and even those that do will likely be interrupted temporarily. Ditto for the servers that run VoIP-based telephony, whether Skype or digital landlines like Vonage. In short, your "obsolete" landline is the one most likely (by far) to keep working when the lights go out or worse.

Emergency preparedness is pretty low in America these days, the government's well-intentioned efforts notwithstanding. We've already seen far too many Americans incapable of helping themselves when disaster strikes. It won't help the situation when they can't even make a call.

I'm Willing to Bet...

...that a good percentage of the people gleefully sharing and perusing the hacked contents of Governor Sarah Palin's private e-mail account are the same sort of people who are up in arms about the invasions of privacy involved in the Bush administration's terrorist wire-tapping policies. Just sayin'.

I Want One: NWA Bumper Sticker

Zombie snapped this photo of a San Fransisco bumper, including the obligatory Obama sticker along with one advocating the National Waffle Association:

I'll pass on Obama, but I sure love waffles! I'm in!

I Want One: USB Bottle Opener

Mike Elgan gives this USB flashdrive/bottle opener the ever-fleeting title of Worst USB Gadget Yet. But this is one of the better ideas out there, if only because you can never have enough of bottle openers built into other tools, particularly if you, like me, drink a lot of imported beer and microbrews. I had a roommate with a bottle opener built into a pair of his sandals, and I probably opened about half the beers I drank in California with his footwear.

Vote for Jesus!

Dan at Necessary Roughness has a comment on religious appeals to voters:

If Jesus came down and said that he wanted abortion providers to finish the job if babies were born after the procedure, or that he wanted everyone dependent on government, or that he’d soak the rich and tax evil oil companies, I’d still vote against him. Jesus’ kingdom is not of this world, and I thank him for that.

Amen.

Disturbing

Last week, Amir Taheri reported in the New York Post that Senator Obama had sought to negotiate his own foreign policy with the Iraqi government on his last visit there this summer, allegedly urging the Iraqis to hold off on the Strategic Framework Agreement until the next (presumably meaning his) administration. Here's the crux:

According to Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, Obama made his demand for delay a key theme of his discussions with Iraqi leaders in Baghdad in July.

"He asked why we were not prepared to delay an agreement until after the US elections and the formation of a new administration in Washington," Zebari said in an interview.

Obama insisted that Congress should be involved in negotiations on the status of US troops - and that it was in the interests of both sides not to have an agreement negotiated by the Bush administration in its "state of weakness and political confusion."

It's disturbing (and as far as I know, unprecedented) for a candidate to be out making foreign policy as self-assumed president-in-waiting. He's actively undermining the legitimacy of a sitting president, with a key foreign government, no less. Obama has apparently decided it's not enough to already act like president, he needs to prevent anything out of his power from happening in the meantime.

Now, this story been sitting quietly in an open browser window for a few days because I didn't want to blog on it until we got some verification. That came today with the Obama campaign's masterful non-denial:

But Obama's national security spokeswoman Wendy Morigi said Taheri's article bore "as much resemblance to the truth as a McCain campaign commercial." In fact, Obama had told the Iraqis that they should not rush through a "Strategic Framework Agreement" governing the future of US forces until after President George W. Bush leaves office, she said.

Which is completely different from "[asking] why we were not prepared to delay an agreement until after the US elections and the formation of a new administration in Washington". That's quite a denial: "It's all dirty lies. Our candidate most certainly did not do x. Rather, he did x." Huh? The only difference is in the wording, which sounds even worse in Morigi's account. At least Zebari had Obama making a suggestion; Morigi says he simply told them what to do.

Good For You, Whoever You Are

Congratulations to the hackers who successfully stopped the posting of al-Qaeda's annual 9/11 terror message this past week. These people are, apparently, working hard on their own time to disrupt the communications of terrorists. I love it, and I wish there were more of them. A patriotic mob of online thugs could accomplish things no Pentagon-basement cyber-warfare unit could dream of (and for that matter, things that would be criminally spooky if not illegal, were the government doing them). I hear murmurs that many of the cyber-attacks on the US are carried out by just such groups from other countries, when are we going to start firing back? I guess there's pretty safe odds we already are.

UPDATE: Rusty Shackleford of The Jawa Report whom the Hindustan Times noted as one of the likely agents of the attack on al-Qaeda's website in the above-linked story, has denied his involvement. And admitted that, even if he were involved, he would deny it then, too.

I Knew Those Things Were Trouble

A study conducted by Sheraton hotels finds that 35% of business travelers would choose their BlackBerry over their spouse.

Credit Where Credit is Due

I have to give Senator Obama credit for his recent appearance at Columbia, in which he supported the repeal of the university's Vietnam-era ban on the ROTC, now continued in ostensible opposition to the Department of Defense's so-called "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy. McCain called first for the return of the ROTC, which is no big surprise, but Obama's agreement on the topic wouldn't have been expected. Regardless of one's position on the propriety and tenability of the policy, Obama says "we should have an honest debate while still offering opportunities for everyone to serve.” Sounds good to me. Some people, though, just don't get the point, calling this a "flip-flop" from Obama. He never said he'd changed his mind on Don't Ask Don't Tell, though, and I assume he still opposes it. A future leader of America live-blogs the appearances, reminding me that I really need to save up my downpayment for that cabin in the woods.

Now, while crediting his support of the ROTC, I can't give him a pass on his Orwellian "Plan for Universal and Voluntary Citizen Service", and Shikha Dalmia explains why. I'm all for service, mind you; I'm in the Army after all, and I personally believe that truly voluntary charitable work could be perfectly capable of providing the entirety of our social "safety net". It's when community service is funded, organized, mandated, and coerced using government money and enforcement powers that the whole thing starts feeling a little bit, well, fascist.

Bad Bad Bad: Oil War in the Delta

Bad bad bad. Militants in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria have declared an "oil war" against the government. The Niger Delta is one of the most productive oil fields in Africa and according to some analyses the most influential on the world oil market. I've voiced my fears about Nigeria before. This is not encouraging.