A fantastic Unplugged version of Crackerman:
A quick programming note:
I’ve been scouring YouTube searching out great (in my mind) Christmas music. Therefor, beginning tomorrow, motorcitytimes.com will switch to an ‘all Christmas music format.’
Hope you like it.
I found a terrific article discussing aviation security @ STRATFOR.
The article points out the obvious flaw metal detectors, x-ray scanners and the enhanced frisking have when trying to detect explosives:
Drug couriers have been transporting narcotics hidden inside their bodies aboard aircraft for decades, and prisoners frequently hide drugs, weapons and even cell phones inside body cavities. It is therefore only a matter of time before this same tactic is used to smuggle plastic explosives or even an entire non-metallic explosive device onto an aircraft — something that would allow an attacker to bypass metal detectors and backscatter X-ray inspection and pass through external pat-downs.
The solution to screening is to base it on demeanor as in behavioral screening. Demeanor based screening does not involve profiling travelers based on race, nationality, ethnicity or religion:
This ability to camouflage explosives in a variety of different ways, or hide them inside the bodies of suicide operatives, means that the most significant weakness of any suicide-attack plan is the operative assigned to conduct the attack. Even in a plot to attack 10 or 12 aircraft, a group would need to manufacture only about 12 pounds of high explosives — about what is required for a single, small suicide device and far less than is required for a vehicle-borne improvised explosive device. Because of this, the operatives are more of a limiting factor than the explosives themselves; it is far more difficult to find and train 10 or 12 suicide bombers than it is to produce 10 or 12 devices.
A successful attack requires operatives who are not only dedicated enough to initiate a suicide device without getting cold feet; they must also possess the nerve to calmly proceed through airport security checkpoints without alerting officers that they are up to something sinister. This set of tradecraft skills is referred to as demeanor, and while remaining calm under pressure and behaving normally may sound simple in theory, practicing good demeanor under the extreme pressure of a suicide operation is very difficult. Demeanor has proved to be the Achilles’ heel of several terror plots, and it is not something that militant groups have spent a great deal of time teaching their operatives. Because of this, it is frequently easier to spot demeanor mistakes than it is to find well-hidden explosives. Such demeanor mistakes can also be accentuated, or even induced, by contact with security personnel in the form of interviews, or even by unexpected changes in security protocols that alter the security environment a potential attacker is anticipating and has planned for.
There has been much discussion of profiling, but the difficulty of creating a reliable and accurate physical profile of a jihadist, and the adaptability and ingenuity of the jihadist planners, means that any attempt at profiling based only on race, ethnicity or religion is doomed to fail. In fact, profiling can prove counterproductive to good security by blinding people to real threats. They will dismiss potential malefactors who do not fit the specific profile they have been provided.
In an environment where the potential threat is hard to identify, it is doubly important to profile individuals based on their behavior rather than their ethnicity or nationality — what we refer to as focusing on the “how” instead of the “who.” Instead of relying on physical profiles, which allow attack planners to select operatives who do not match the profiles being selected for more intensive screening, security personnel should be encouraged to exercise their intelligence, intuition and common sense. A Caucasian U.S. citizen who shows up at the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi or Dhaka claiming to have lost his passport may be far more dangerous than some random Pakistani or Yemeni citizen, even though the American does not appear to fit the profile for requiring extra security checks.
This makes much more sense than frisking nuns, children and elderly grandmothers. However, to implement a system like this would take a serious effort to implement a system like this and it appears our government is more concerned on trampling on every U.S. citizens 4th Amendment rights;and not actual aviation security.
However, when we begin to consider traits such as intelligence, intuition and common sense, one of the other realities that must be faced with aviation security is that, quite simply, it is not an area where the airlines or governments have allocated the funding required to hire the best personnel. Airport screeners make far less than FBI special agents or CIA case officers and receive just a fraction of the training. Before 9/11, most airports in the United States relied on contract security guards to conduct screening duties. After 9/11, many of these same officers went from working for companies like Wackenhut to being TSA employees. There was no real effort made to increase the quality of screening personnel by offering much higher salaries to recruit a higher caliber of candidate.
There is frequent mention of the need to make U.S. airport security more like that employed in Israel. Aside from the constitutional and cultural factors that would prevent American airport screeners from ever treating Muslim travelers the way they are treated by El Al, another huge difference is simply the amount of money spent on salaries and training for screeners and other security personnel. El Al is also aided by the fact that it has a very small fleet of aircraft that fly only a small number of passengers to a handful of destinations.
If we in the United States are going to get this right, we need to have a serious look at implementing a demeanor based screening system similar to the Customs and Border Patrol interview that takes place when you enter the U.S.
Aviation Security Threats and Realities is republished with permission of STRATFOR.
September 2008, the EPA filed suit against Tronox, a leading producer of titanium oxide (used for white pigment) for environmental violations they didn’t commit. And the EPA agrees they didn’t as well.
Why does Tronx claim they never owned the property?
In 1964, Kerr-McGee purchased a company that held assets once belonging to the company that operated the wood treatment plant, according to the suit. The lawsuit claims that Kerr-McGee, before it was purchased by Anadarko Petroleum in 2005, transferred ownership to Tronox and spun off the local chemical company into an independent business.
The EPA claims Tronox, as successor to the former owner and operator, now must reimburse the government at least $280 million for the extensive clean-up of the land. The EPA relocated some residents from the site and has removed 451,000 tons of contaminated soil from the site.
Tronox didn’t pollute the land and the EPA isn’t asserting that they did. However, since Tronox now owns the land, they get the punishment.
Fast forward to today and Tronox is bankrupt and is stuck with the $280 million clean up tab.
Via EPA press release:
he U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the U.S. Justice Department and the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York today announced that Tronox Incorporated has agreed to resolve its environmental liabilities for $270 million and 88 percent of Tronox’s interest in a pending litigation. The bankruptcy settlement will reimburse EPA for past cleanup costs and fund future cleanups at contaminated sites across the country.
Tronox and 14 of its affiliates filed for protection under Chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code on Jan. 12, 2009 in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York. At the time of the bankruptcy filing, the company was potentially responsible for past costs incurred and future response costs under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act (CERCLA, commonly known as Superfund) and the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) relating to sites throughout the country, as well as for penalties under CERCLA, RCRA, the Clean Air Act, and the Clean Water Act.
Under the terms of the settlement, Tronox will pay $270 million in cash. The majority of the funding will be placed in five environmental response trusts for the cleanup of numerous sites, most of which have been contaminated with hazardous substances or waste. Non-cash assets, such as insurance and financial assurance assets worth at least $50 million, including property located in Henderson, Nev., will also be provided by Tronox to the environmental response trusts.
The United States has one of the highest corporate tax rates, coupled with some of the most draconian regulations in the world . After an episode like this, what company would want to invest in or expand in America? Purchase a company or a string of properties and if you don’t cross a ‘T’ or dot an ‘I’ your organization could spend two years in court, saddled with a crushing fine and forced into bankruptcy.
Who would want to take the risk.
Via The Blaze:
“If he thinks this is an appropriate way for us to deal with security as he has defended, then I’ve said, ‘OK, Mr. Obama, take your wife, your two daughters and your mother-in-law to Washington Reagan National Airport and have them publicly go through both the body scanner and the full enhanced pat-down in front of others,’” Huckabee told Fox and Friends Tuesday morning.
“‘If it’s OK for your wife, your daughters, and your mother-in-law, then maybe the rest of us won’t feel so bad when our wives, our daughters and our mothers are being put through this humiliating and degrading, totally unconstitutional, intrusion of their privacy.’”
And the video:
Have you ever wondered what tree huggers are thankful for? Typically they are complaining about this or protesting that. But, the following are a few things Tree Huggers are giving thanks for this “Holiday Season.”
(Apparently, to the eco-warriors at TreeHugger “Thanksgiving” is now too offensive to say as well.)
According to TreeHugger.com they are thankful for:
Abolitionism Slowly Takes Hold
When it comes to outlawing polluting activities outright, we’ve had some very encouraging examples over the previous twelve months: Los Angeles’ recent banning of plastic bags, the San Francisco banning Happy Meals, Scotland’s goal of 100% renewable energy by 2025, the Indian states of Sikkim and Kerala have begun transitioning to all-organic agriculture in the next five to ten years. All are great steps in the right direction.
Yep, they are thankful that Happy Meals are banned outright. It seems our tree huggers have conveniently forgot that Scotland’s prototype all renewable energy community is a bomb.
We’ve Got Lots of Great Low-Energy Low-Tech Examples From the Past
It’s sometimes easy to think, immersed in a high-tech, high-energy world, that a comfortable life is impossible without so much power around. But as a number of great articles have shown, we’ve got plenty of examples from history (some recent, some not so recent) of how that’s not the case.
From Japan’s traditional ways of constructing buildings and towns, to all the ways buildings can be kept cool without air conditioning, and how we could be putting our own waste to better use as fertilizer, sometimes you’ve got to look backwards to progress.
Our tree hugging friends will not be happy until we are all camping. Year round:
Be sure to watch the discussion about solar power around the 1:30 mark. If you can only run the ‘lights’ for part of the year for two or three people, how do you expect to power, say a hospital?
The tree huggers are also thankful that, according to them, more people are learning (and accepting) to live with less.
More People Are Realizing That Less is More
Perhaps it’s a fortuitous nexus of the recession, environmental awareness, and more people opening there eyes to all the negatives aspects of consumer culture, but over the past year it seems like voluntary simplicity and minimalism have reached some sort of critical (minimal) mass: While certainly not everyone will take minimalism to the extreme of essentially living out of a hard drive, and that’s actually probably a good thing, the fact that the BBC reported on it makes it seem like some line of awareness has been crossed.
Minimalist living out of a hard drive… What this guy is doing is sponging off his buddies by crashing on their couches and soaking up their heat or a/c. Its a brilliant plan until his buddies all decide to adopt that lifestyle.
But, when you get right down to it, the environmental movement is all about doing with less. Except for the elite leaders of the movement of course, they get to keep all their excesses.
I’ve noticed a few of these really cool images taken from the ISS floating around the internet lately:
Mike @ The Classic Liberal has been all over the Airport security issue like a TSA agent frisking an elderly grandmother. Here are a few examples of his excellent work:
Strip-Searched and Covered in Urine
TSA: It’s Our Business to Touch Yours
“I’ll give you one example going back to when President Bush was in office. I disagreed with President Bush on No Child Left Behind,” Bachmann said. “I thought it was a failure, and it failed, a failed opportunity. In that bill the federal government ramped up spending more than we had ever seen.”
“So you would cut that?” Blitzer asked.
“You could start there,” Bachmann responded.
Cant Argue with any of them… Except for including Nirvana: Top 10 Over Rated Acts in Music Today
America is Dying. Won’t Someone Save Her? Please!
This will work great: Gender-Neutral Dorms: University of Arizona & Columbia University Latest in Offering On-Campus “Shacking Up” Option
Intel tackles effort to create safer football helmets
Funny Video @ Spellchek: Economy Cure
Make your check payable to “Bureau of the Public Debt” and STFU about raising taxes
The Saudi King is Ditching his ‘national health care’ and is traveling to America: Saudi King throws our crappy healthcare system a bone
Video: Mythbusters & Sniffer dogs
Dr. Robert H. Goddard- The Father Of Modern Rocketry
There has been a sustained push for “Interactive White Boards” in K-12 schools to “bring lesson plans to life, engage students directly in the learning process and even boost student performance.“
As I posted earlier this year, school districts across the state are pushing for federal dollars to purchase the interactive SMART boards for their classrooms while many educators question the effectiveness of the equipment.
As it has been pointed out many times before, the more money spent on education does not translate into improved results.
Increased spending on education does not increase results
Questions of effectiveness aside, opinion leaders and educators are pushing for the new SMART boards.
Technology has changed everything? How were students able to get by for all these years without finding the lecture notes on their teachers blog.
To me the SMART boards seem like a lot of flash and very little substance.
Reading this makes me wonder how someone like Dr. Robert Goddard was able to get by without ‘having to crane his neck to see what’s going on?’
Via The National Museum of the U.S. Air Force:
Physicist and inventor Dr. Robert H. Goddard is considered the father of practical modern rocketry and space flight. In the early 20th century, he conceived many key concepts for later development of ballistic missiles, earth-orbiting satellites and interplanetary exploration. The U.S. Air Force’s strategic missile and space launch capabilities are built on the foundations laid by this American pioneer.
As a young man, Goddard was inspired by science fiction, and he became convinced that space travel was possible with rockets. In 1914 Goddard patented the concept of multi-stage rockets and liquid-fueled rockets. In 1920 he wrote about the possibility of a rocket going fast enough to leave the earth’s atmosphere, and even reaching the moon. The press ridiculed Goddard’s ideas and the government paid little attention to his work.
His ideas, however, found a following in Germany, which later took many of Goddard’s ideas to develop the V-2 rocket, the only operational ballistic missile used during World War II.
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Goddard’s ideas established several fundamentals of modern rocketry and space flight. Along with his mathematical calculations establishing the idea of “escape velocity” (the speed required to break away from earth’s gravitational pull), Goddard proved that rockets would provide thrust in a vacuum, that is, they would work outside of the earth’s atmosphere.
In addition to building and launching the first liquid-fueled rocket, Goddard also was the first to put scientific instruments on a rocket. Among his other inventions was the concept of using gyroscopes to stabilize rockets, and steering rockets by using moveable vanes to deflect exhaust gas. Goddard also pioneered “film cooling” using a rocket’s liquid fuel to cool the engine and keep it from melting. This key technical feature can be seen in the German V-2 and many other modern rocket engines, some developed in the U.S. after WW II in part by the same German engineers who were influenced by Goddard’s pre-war work.
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Finally, the New York Times — having famously ridiculed Goddard’s intellect in 1920 — admitted it was wrong after Apollo 11 lifted off on its way to the moon in 1969.
Men like Dr. Goddard were able to get by without a SMART board, our kids can as well.
After a leading member of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change let the the proverbial cat out of the bag this week regarding the true intentions of the global warming movement, the oh so elite Frank Rich (magna cum laude graduate from Harvard College) quickly follows suit.
In the middle of Frank Rich’s weekly screed trashing Sarah Palin, Mr. Rich let his (and most of his fellow elites) true feelings show.
It’s anti-elitism that most defines angry populism in this moment, and, as David Frum, another Bush alumnus (and Palin critic), has pointed out, populist rage on the right is aimed at the educated, not the wealthy. The Bushies and Noonans and dwindling retro-moderate Republicans are no less loathed by Palinistas and their Tea Party fellow travelers than is Obama’s Ivy League White House. When Palin mocks her G.O.P. establishment critics as tortured, paranoid, sleazy and a “good-old-boys club,” she pays no penalty for doing so. The more condescending the attacks on her, the more she thrives.
I think this one simple paragraph crystallizes the elites in Washington’s condescension toward the American people. They look down on us, the average American and wonder why we are so unhappy with them since they are the learned. The scholar class.
Truth be told, the elites can’t exactly point to a track record commensurate with the lofty (in their minds) Ivy League credentials bestowed upon them. The elites record is a string of failures.
One of the best and brightest, Ben Bernake (B.A. in economics in 1975 from Harvard University summa cum laude and Ph.D. in economics in 1979 from MIT) suggests fixing our economy through essentially counterfeiting.
Think about it, America has one of the highest corporate tax rate in the world and all the elites can suggest is raising taxes and counterfeiting to rescue our economy.
Ireland, until recently, has been an economic powerhouse. Its economic growth, fueled by a low corporate tax rate, became the envy of Europe.
However, another thing grew in Ireland as well. The size and spending of it government. Via True Economics.
Amidst this crisis, it is worth taking a look back at the road that we have traveled on our way to the current predicament. It is fashionable today to make claims that the past – the recent past in fact – has been a place of greater fiscal responsibility, the age of ‘sustainable’ public finances. But is the claim true? Have lost our way all of a sudden around 2005-2007, or have we always been traveling along the same route.
click for a larger version
In absolute levels terms, spending and tax receipts have clearly grown dramatically over the years. These are nominal figures, of course. But notice that total expenditure line almost invariably exceeds total receipts levels. The chart also shows pretty dramatic changes that took place since 2007.
As the economy in Ireland grew, so did size and expenditures of their government. Even after the economy went into a ‘recession’ in 2007, the government didn’t stop spending for three years.
Now Ireland’s government is broke and is looking for a bail out from the European Union. The price for the bailout? The other EU members demand Ireland raise their corporate tax rate.
But while Ireland’s woes are bad news for every eurozone nation, some officials and politicians on the Continent may be allowing themselves a moment of schadenfreude.
This is because a European bailout of Ireland would come at a price that could include a requirement that Ireland raises its corporation tax rate.
It is currently just 12.5% against 33% in France, 30% in Germany and Spain and 28% here – though Chancellor George Osborne has promised to trim Britain’s rate to 24% during this Parliament.
Big government European nations are going to effectively strangle Ireland’s economy with the demand for an increase of its corporate tax rate rather than spending cuts.
It is clear from the above chart that Ireland, like most governments, has a SPENDING problem, not a tax problem.
As a point of reference, the US corporate tax rate is one of the highest in the world:
OECD average. The U.S. rate is also higher than the average rate in the G-7 nations, and is much higher than the average rate in our full sample of 80 countries.
The high U.S. effective tax rate is the result of a high federal statutory rate of 35 percent plus state-level corporate income tax rates. In addition, state and local sales and asset-based taxes on capital add to the tax burden on new investment. The latter taxes add about 7 percentage points to the U.S. effective rate, but only about 2 percentage points to the effective rate in other countries.
When people in the United State complain that we outsource too much or that “we don’t make things here any more” consider that the United States has the highest effective tax rates in the G7. Plus any business in America has to overcome a phalanx of local, state and federal regulations just to operate.
China’s ban on exporting rare earth element materials recently highlights a vulnerability with the US economy.
Yttrium
Rare earth materials are something that many people don’t think of, but they play a crucial role in modern life and technology.
Rare earth metals and alloys that contain them are used in many devices that people use every day such as: computer memory, DVD’s, rechargeable batteries, cell phones, car catalytic converters, magnets, fluorescent lighting and much more.
During the past twenty years there has been an explosion in demand for many items that require rare earth metals. Twenty years ago there were very few cell phones in use but the number has risen to over 5 billion in use today. The usage of computers and DVDs has grown almost as fast as cell phones.
Many rechargeable batteries are made with rare earth compounds. Demand for the batteries is being driven by demand for portable electronic devices such as cell phones, readers, computers and cameras.
Several pounds of rare earth compounds are in batteries that power electric vehicles and hybrid-electric vehicles. As concerns for energy independence, climate change and other issues drive the sale of electric vehicles the demand for batteries made with rare earth compounds will climb even faster.
Rare earths are used as catalysts, phosphors and polishing compounds. These are used for air pollution control, illuminated screens on electronic devices and optical-quality glass. All of these products are expected to experience rising demand.
Rare earth materials are also extensively used in industrial applications. They are found everywhere from diesel additives to high energy lasers and magnets.