Archive for October, 2009
October 30th, 2009 by Jon Taplin
From this morning’s Washington Post.
Nearly half the members of a powerful House subcommittee in control of Pentagon spending are under scrutiny by ethics investigators in Congress, who have trained their lens on the relationships between seven panel members and an influential lobbying firm founded by a former Capitol Hill aide.
Five of the seven are Democrats. Obama and Pelosi need to clean house. Get this ethics investigation going immediately so that if they are guilty we can get new candidates in place to run in 2010. As Obama said yesterday, the task of reforming the Pentagon has just begun. What he didn’t say was that the forces arrayed against that reform are mighty and corrupt.
October 29th, 2009 by Jon Taplin
Turns out the human ability to cool off through sweating as opposed to the animal’s panting, was crucial to our evolution.
Most mammals can sprint faster than humans — having four legs gives them the advantage. But when it comes to long distances, humans can outrun almost any animal. Because we cool by sweating rather than panting, we can stay cool at speeds and distances that would overheat other animals. On a hot day, the two scientists wrote, a human could even outrun a horse in a 26.2-mile marathon.
Why would evolution favor the distance runner? The prevailing theory is that endurance running allowed primitive humans to incorporate meat into their diet. They may have watched the sky for scavenging birds and then run long distances to reach a fresh kill and steal the meat from whatever animal was there first.
We used to run a lot, now we get in a car if we’re going more than four blocks.
October 28th, 2009 by Jon Taplin
Google (and Verizon) takes on Apple (and AT&T)–Head On
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e52TSXwj774]
October 28th, 2009 by Jon Taplin
Every Halloween, Trinity Church in Cedar Hill, Texas puts on an elaborate special effects laden production called “Hell House”. It’s ostensible purpose is to get the local kids “scared straight”–no more drugs, sex and rock and roll for them. The reenactments of the Columbine Massacre, the abortion clinic and the young man dying of AIDS are particularly graphic.
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October 27th, 2009 by Jon Taplin
Matthew Hoh, the most senior U.S. civilian in Afghanistan’s Zabul Province has resigned in protest over the direction of our war policy. His story in the Washington Post today is both bracingly honest and depressing. His conclusions are that when we insert ourselves into a rural province, the insurgency then follows.
With “multiple, seemingly infinite, local groups,” he wrote, the insurgency “is fed by what is perceived by the Pashtun people as a continued and sustained assault, going back centuries, on Pashtun land, culture, traditions and religion by internal and external enemies. The U.S. and Nato presence in Pashtun valleys and villages, as well as Afghan army and police units that are led and composed of non-Pashtun soldiers and police, provide an occupation force against which the insurgency is justified.”
American families, he said at the end of the letter, “must be reassured their dead have sacrificed for a purpose worthy of futures lost, love vanished, and promised dreams unkept. I have lost confidence such assurances can be made any more.”
A little more of Hoh’s kind of courage and a little less of Richard Holbrooke’s kind of careerism, and we might just be able to extract ourselves from this tragic farce.
October 26th, 2009 by Jon Taplin
Does anyone believe this story?
The pilots told the National Transportation Safety Board that they missed their destination because they had taken out their personal laptops in the cockpit, a violation of airline policy, so the first officer, Richard I. Cole, could tutor the captain, Timothy B. Cheney, in a new scheduling system put in place by Delta Air Lines, which acquired Northwest last fall.
How is it that they could miss 90 minutes of radio calls from control towers and other pilots unless they were asleep? This is a classic case of the Prisoner’s Dilemma. Who is going to be the first one to rat the other out?
October 26th, 2009 by Jon Taplin
With all the Bloviators pulling out their “Afghanistan=Vietnam” analogies, Joshua Kurlantzick writes in the Washington Post, that we should only be so lucky.
76 percent of Vietnamese say U.S. influence in Asia is positive, according to a 2008 study by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs — a greater percentage than in Japan, China, South Korea or Indonesia. When President Bill Clinton visited Vietnam in 2000, citizens greeted him like a rock star, mobbing him whenever he stepped out in public. Two-way trade now surpasses $15 billion annually, compared with virtually nothing in 1995, the year the two countries normalized diplomatic ties. American companies have descended upon Vietnam, and last year foreign direct investment in the country tripled compared with 2007.
Ever since President McKinley sent a declaration of War against Spain to Congress in April of 1898, the Washington Establishment has equated American influence with our military power. But as Intel builds new fab plants in Vietnam, we must understand that our real influence stems from our financial and cultural power. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan erode both of those sources of soft power.
October 23rd, 2009 by Jon Taplin
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDR47EKTrCQ&feature=player_embedded]
October 23rd, 2009 by Jon Taplin
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDR47EKTrCQ&feature=player_embedded]
October 23rd, 2009 by Jon Taplin
As most legitimate advertisers flee the paranoid environs of Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh’s daily program, gold sellers have leaped in to fill the void. Both Beck and Limbaugh give testimonials to their advertisers such as this.
Glenn Beck
“Before I started turning you on to Goldline, I wanted to look them in the eye. This is a top notch organization that’s been in business since 1960.”
Obviously all these new boiler room high pressure sales groups that used to be pushing sub-prime refinancings are now trying to convince the unsophisticated listeners of right wing talk that they better buy gold before the dollar becomes worthless because of Obama’s reckless spending. But how do firms like Goldline make money? Well it’s all there in the fine print of their sales agreement.
Goldline’s “bid” is the price it pays to clients for a product. Goldline’s “ask” is the price it charges clients for a product. Goldline has a price differential or “spread” between its bid (buy-back) and ask (selling) prices for precious metals, rare coins and rare currency…
The price of Goldline’s semi-numisimatic and numismatic coins and currency include the bid/ask spread that ranges between 30% and 35%.
OMG! An average stock broker commission is 2% and these scammers are getting 35% off the top. Where is the FTC and the CFTC in investigating this fraud? Why are Limbaugh and Beck propagating this scam?