Tweet of the Day

Finally someone who looks cool riding a Segway! pic.twitter.com/CibYREtByk

— Leann (@Leannbe) June 29, 2015

This is epic.

The Tears of the Cuban Emigre Dead Enders Will Flavor My Cocktail

The US and Cuba are opening up embassies in their respective capitals:

President Barack Obama announced Wednesday that the U.S. and Cuba have struck a deal to open embassies in each other's capitals and re-establish diplomatic relations for the first time in half a century.

"The progress we make today is another demonstration we don't have to be imprisoned by the past," Obama said.

Obama emphasized that the U.S. and Cuba have some shared interests, such as strong anti-terrorism policies and disaster response. But he acknowledged that the two nations still have "very serious differences" on issues like free speech.

"We won't hesitate to speak out when we see contradiction to those values," the president said.

According to a statement from the Cuban government, officials are aiming to reopen their embassy on or after July 20. White House deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes told MSNBC that the U.S. will open its embassy in Cuba "shortly after" July 20.

55 years of mean spirited and counter-productive (the Castros still run the place after 55 years of isolation) foreign policy has ended.

The real pity is that it took so long.

I'm looking forward the import of the revolutionary Cuban lung cancer vaccine into the United States.

I So Hope that Cuomo is Toast

Bill De Blasio, the mayor of the world's greatest city, has had enough, and he has accused Governor Andrew Cuomo of prosecuting a vendetta against him at the expense of the City of New York:

Mayor Bill de Blasio, in candid and searing words rarely employed by elected officials of his stature, accused Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo on Tuesday of stymieing New York City’s legislative goals out of personal pettiness, “game-playing” and a desire for “revenge.”

In an extraordinary interview, Mr. de Blasio, appearing to unburden himself of months’ worth of frustrations, said that Mr. Cuomo — who, like the mayor, is a Democrat — “did not act in the interests” of New Yorkers by blocking measures like reforming rent laws and the mayor’s long-term ability to control the city’s public schools.

“I started a year and a half ago with a hope of a very strong partnership,” Mr. de Blasio said of the governor, whom he has known for two decades. “I have been disappointed at every turn.”

Mr. Cuomo, the mayor said, had acted vindictively toward the city, citing cuts in state financing for public housing and what he called an abrupt ramp-up of state inspections of city homeless shelters “with a vigor we had never seen before.”

“That was clearly politically motivated,” Mr. de Blasio said, “and that was revenge for some perceived slight.”

The mayor added: “It’s not about policy. It’s not about substance. It’s certainly not about the millions of people affected.”

………

There is a long history of bitterness between mayors and governors of New York, even those from the same party. But Mr. de Blasio, speaking calmly and deliberatively, indicated that his relationship with the governor had deteriorated to a historic low.

The mayor summoned journalists to his City Hall office for a pair of interviews on Tuesday afternoon, only hours before he was to leave New York for a weeklong family vacation to the Southwest. He said he had finally run out of patience with Mr. Cuomo, who has been widely viewed as being an obstacle to the mayor’s agenda since Mr. de Blasio took office in 2014.

“We will not play these games,” Mr. de Blasio said, adding that Mr. Cuomo’s behavior was “not anything like acceptable government practice, and I think people all over the state are coming to the same conclusion.”

………

Some mayoral aides suggested that Mr. de Blasio might be able to convince city liberals and Democrats that Mr. Cuomo was no longer representing their interests, threatening the support for a governor who was defeated outside New York City in last year’s campaign.

………

“I’m not going to be surprised if these statements lead to some attempts at revenge,” Mr. de Blasio said, his voice even. “And we’ll just call them right out. Because we are just not going to play that way.”

If the 5 boroughs sit on their hands in the next gubernatorial election,  Andrew Cuomo loses.

In fact, there is a reasonable chance that if New York City works against him, he loses the primary.

After all, running as "inevitable" in 2014, Zephyr Teachout, who had next to no money, and started late, got 34% of the vote against a Democratic Party apparatus that was uniformly against her.

He is widely loathed by the party base, and he returns the feelings.

It's also clear that he is still a person of interest in federal investigations of corruption in Albany.

I do not think that Cuomo gets it, but stick a fork in him. he's done.

Disclaimer:  It is possible that I am projecting my own feelings into this matter.

The Clown Car Gets Bigger, a Lot Bigger

Jabba the Governor, AKA Chris Christie, has announced his candidacy for the Presidency:

Gov. Chris Christie declared an uphill candidacy for president on Tuesday with New Jersey-style swagger, unconcealed disgust for Washington and a high regard for his own candor, vowing that “there is one thing you will know for sure: I say what I mean and I mean what I say.”

Relying on his biggest, and perhaps his last, remaining advantage in a field of better-financed and better-liked rivals — his personality — Mr. Christie portrayed himself as the only candidate in the Republican field who is forthright and forceful enough to run the country.

“We need strength and decision-making and authority back in the Oval Office,” he said.

Pacing the stage without a prepared text and raising his voice to a shout at times, he vowed to campaign and govern as a colorful teller of difficult truths, even if “it makes you cringe every once in a while.”

The unfortunate part about his role as self-proclaimed truth teller, is that no one buys it any more:

After 14 years of watching Christie, a warning: He lies

Tom Moran | Star-Ledger Editorial Board

Most Americans don't know Chris Christie like I do, so it's only natural to wonder what testimony I might offer after covering his every move for the last 14 years.

Is it his raw political talent? No, they can see that.

Is it his measurable failure to fix the economy, solve the budget crisis or even repair the crumbling bridges? No, his opponents will cover that if he ever gets traction.

My testimony amounts to a warning: Don't believe a word the man says.

If you have the stomach for it, this column offers some greatest hits in Christie's catalog of lies.

Don't misunderstand me. They all lie, and I get that. But Christie does it with such audacity, and such frequency, that he stands out.

He's been lying on steroids lately, on core issues like Bridgegate, guns and that cozy personal friendship with his buddy, the King of Jordan. I'll get to all that.

But let's start with my personal favorite. It dates back to the 2009 campaign, when the public workers unions asked him if he intended to cut their benefits.

He told them their pensions were "sacred" to him.

"The notion that I would eliminate, change, or alter your pension is not only a lie, but cannot be further from the truth," he wrote them. "Your pension and benefits will be protected when I am elected governor."

He then proceeded to make cutting those benefits the centerpiece of his first year in office.

This, we know now, was vintage Christie. Other lying politicians tend to waffle, to leave themselves some escape hatch. You can almost smell it.

But Christie lies with conviction. His hands don't shake, and his eyes don't wander. I can hardly blame the union leaders who met with him for believing him.

………

And that's my warning to America. When Christie picks up the microphone, he speaks so clearly and forcefully that you assume genuine conviction is behind it.

Be careful, though. It's a kind of spell.

He is a remarkable talent with a silver tongue. But if you look closely, you can see that it is forked like a serpent's.

Admittedly, this is just The Largest Newspaper in the State of New Jersey saying this, and who reads the papers these days.

However, the New York Times, which is where the Sunday morning gasbags get their talking points, said the same thing, though they did not use the word "Lie" because they are such delicate flowers:

On his new website, Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey portrays himself as a guy who gets attacked for “telling it like it is,” but that’s what his mom told him to do from her deathbed.

It is part of the legend Mr. Christie has carefully cultivated for many years, with startling success. He is described as “brash” and “bold,” with a certain rough charisma that his political opponents just cannot handle. “I get accused a lot of times of being too blunt and too direct and saying what’s on my mind just a little bit too loudly,” he says in the first video for his presidential campaign, showing him with a selected group of adoring voters.

It’s fundamentally nonsense. There are lines between brash and belligerent, between open and obnoxious, and, most important, between “telling it like it is” and not telling the truth. Mr. Christie crosses those lines all the time, as Tom Moran, the editorial page editor of The Star-Ledger of Newark, documented in a blistering column about Mr. Christie’s “catalog of lies.”

………

Expect to see a lot of Mr. Christie at those phony “town hall” meetings, staged with selected supporters. You will hear a lot about his common touch, his “straight talk” and his love for Bruce Springsteen.

It’s a smoke screen. Look behind it at the governor whose own constituents say by an overwhelming majority that he has done a bad job, should not run for the White House and would make a bad president.

I don't think that I've ever seen the New York Times editorial board gone after an American with such vehemence.

The media's man crush on Chris Christie is over.

His brand of "straight talk" has gone from an asset to a joke line.

Sanity Wins in California

California, in response to a measles outbreak in California, the state legislature passed , and now Governor Jerry Brown has singed into law, what is one of the most aggressive vaccine mandates in the nation:

Adopting one of the most far-reaching vaccination laws in the nation, California on Tuesday barred religious and other personal-belief exemptions for schoolchildren, a move that could affect tens of thousands of students and sets up a potential court battle with opponents of immunization.

California’s weakened public health defenses against measles and other preventable diseases led to the adoption of the measure, signed Tuesday by Gov. Jerry Brown, intended to stem the rising number of parents who opt not to inoculate their children.

Public health officials said a proliferation of waivers, many sought because of unfounded concerns about the safety of vaccines, helped fuel a measles outbreak that started at Disneyland in December and quickly spread across the West, infecting 150 people.

………

California joins Mississippi and West Virginia as the only states to ban vaccination waivers based on religion. All 50 states require immunization of children starting school, although about 20 allow exemptions based on personal beliefs.

Beginning with the 2016 school year, the new law could affect more than 80,000 California students who annually claim personal belief exemptions.

Only medical exceptions will be allowed for those entering day care and kindergarten. Children with physician-certified allergies and immune-system deficiencies, for example, will be exempted.

I will mix my victory toast with the tears of anti-vaxxers.

These anti-science ratf%$#s have a lot of blood on their hands.

The New Brewster Buffalo

A test pilot with a wide range of fighter experience engaged in mock dogfights with an F-16, and the result was Not pretty:

A test pilot has some very, very bad news about the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. The pricey new stealth jet can’t turn or climb fast enough to hit an enemy plane during a dogfight or to dodge the enemy’s own gunfire, the pilot reported following a day of mock air battles back in January.

“The F-35 was at a distinct energy disadvantage,” the unnamed pilot wrote in a scathing five-page brief that War Is Boring has obtained. The brief is unclassified but is labeled “for official use only.”

The test pilot’s report is the latest evidence of fundamental problems with the design of the F-35 — which, at a total program cost of more than a trillion dollars, is history’s most expensive weapon.

The U.S. Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps — not to mention the air forces and navies of more than a dozen U.S. allies — are counting on the Lockheed Martin-made JSF to replace many if not most of their current fighter jets.

And that means that, within a few decades, American and allied aviators will fly into battle in an inferior fighter — one that could get them killed … and cost the United States control of the air.

The fateful test took place on Jan. 14, 2015, apparently within the Sea Test Range over the Pacific Ocean near Edwards Air Force Base in California. The single-seat F-35A with the designation “AF-02” — one of the older JSFs in the Air Force — took off alongside a two-seat F-16D Block 40, one of the types of planes the F-35 is supposed to replace.

The two jets would be playing the roles of opposing fighters in a pretend air battle, which the Air Force organized specifically to test out the F-35’s prowess as a close-range dogfighter in an air-to-air tangle involving high “angles of attack,” or AoA, and “aggressive stick/pedal inputs.”

In other words, the F-35 pilot would fly his jet hard, turning and maneuvering in order to “shoot down” the F-16, whose pilot would be doing his own best to evade and kill the F-35.

………

The F-35 was flying “clean,” with no weapons in its bomb bay or under its wings and fuselage. The F-16, by contrast, was hauling two bulky underwing drop tanks, putting the older jet at an aerodynamic disadvantage.

But the JSF’s advantage didn’t actually help in the end. The stealth fighter proved too sluggish to reliably defeat the F-16, even with the F-16 lugging extra fuel tanks. “Even with the limited F-16 target configuration, the F-35A remained at a distinct energy disadvantage for every engagement,” the pilot reported.

“Insufficient pitch rate.” “Energy deficit to the bandit would increase over time.” “The flying qualities in the blended region (20–26 degrees AoA) were not intuitive or favorable.”

The F-35 jockey tried to target the F-16 with the stealth jet’s 25-millimeter cannon, but the smaller F-16 easily dodged. “Instead of catching the bandit off-guard by rapidly pull aft to achieve lead, the nose rate was slow, allowing him to easily time his jink prior to a gun solution,” the JSF pilot complained.

………

And when the pilot of the F-16 turned the tables on the F-35, maneuvering to put the stealth plane in his own gunsight, the JSF jockey found he couldn’t maneuver out of the way, owing to a “lack of nose rate.”

………

And to add insult to injury, the JSF flier discovered he couldn’t even comfortably move his head inside the radar-evading jet’s cramped cockpit. “The helmet was too large for the space inside the canopy to adequately see behind the aircraft.” That allowed the F-16 to sneak up on him.

In the end, the F-35 — the only new fighter jet that America and most of its allies are developing — is demonstrably inferior in a dogfight with the F-16, which the U.S. Air Force first acquired in the late 1970s.

The test pilot explained that he has also flown 1980s-vintage F-15E fighter-bombers and found the F-35 to be “substantially inferior” to the older plane when it comes to managing energy in a close battle.

This is what happens when you allow the USMC's supposed need for a STO/VL airframe to dominate all other considerations with regard to basic airframe, which is the reason for poor rear vision, and hence the need for the humungous high tech helmet, with visor mounted display, which prevents adequate view to the rear.

I would note that the real problem here is not that our pilots might have inferior equipment, in WWII the F4F Wildcat achieved a 6:1 kill ratio, and the lamentable F2A Brewster Buffalo achieved a 26:1 kill ratio in Finnish service.

Achieving air superiority comes down to training and tactics, so even with an inferior platform, particularly when backed up by superior numbers and logistics.

If the US goes into combat with the F-35 it will not be a disaster.

The real disaster is that we are spending over a Trillion dollars on something that provides no advantages over existing aircraft.

We could buy homes for more than 4 million families, or provide health insurance for 10 million families for a decade, or fix around one third of our deferred infrastructure needs.

The opportunities that have been missed while we are spending money on a white elephant are the real disaster here.

Óχι* Euro?

So Greece has now officially defaulted on its IMF loan:

Greece has officially missed its payment to the IMF.

Though this is not technically considered a "default" — the IMF now considers Greece "in arrears" — Greece has now officially not paid the 1.6 billion euros (or about $1.8 billion) it owed the IMF by Tuesday.

IMF managing director Christine Lagarde, however, said in June that she would consider Greece in default if it did not pay.

This is the largest missed payment ever owed to the IMF.

Greece is now no longer in a bailout program for the first time since 2010.

In a statement, the IMF confirmed that Greece missed the payment due on Tuesday and added that Greece requested an extension of its repayment, which the IMF's executive board will consider "in due course."

Greek banks and the Athens stock exchange remain closed through this week ahead of a July 5 referendum to vote on the latest bailout proposal from Greece's creditors.

This is a big deal, but I do not think that the Greek government was left with a choice.

It has become increasingly clear that the goal of the Troika has been regime change ever since Syriza won the last election, primarily because they are a bunch of moralistic^† idiots, who do not realize that the alternative to Syriza is not a return to the center-left and center-right parties, but rather the rise of the fascist Golden Dawn party".

This is why Greek PM Alexis Tsipras felt compelled to call a referendum.

The demands of the Troika have always been about a number of things, none of which have anything to do with the well being of the Greek people:

• Protecting their own domestic banks from thrie exposureto Greek Debt.
• Reinforcing German hegemony of the Euro Zone. (Berlin only on this one)
• Making a public example of Greece as a warning to others.
• Preventing other "leftist" (social democrat by the standards of the 1960s) parties, particularly Die Linke (The Left) in Germany, from coming to power.
• Discrediting the modern social safety net.

It should be noted that I do not see any way to a happy ending here:

………

But a former deputy governor of Cyprus’s central bank, Spyros Stavrinakis, has warned that reopening the banks will be hard.

Stavrinakis lived through the 2013 Cyprus crisis, in which capital controls were imposed for almost two years.

He says:

Once you impose capital controls, you immediately send a message that there is something wrong with the banking sector.

It is very difficult to phase down and unwind capital controls, once they are imposed, Stavrinakis adds.

………

Most things in the European Union are designed to actively obfuscate reality. These are called deposit insurance schemes but that is a legal lie. In the United States the FDIC is Federal (its right in the name). The EU imposes a requirement that each country “insure” their deposits but it provides no financing for this. The last data I saw (which I can only verify from 3 years ago) is that the Greek deposit insurance fund has a paltry 3 billion dollars in it. In short there is no current backstop for Greek depositors. This is why they are talking about implementing a European wide deposit insurance union but that isn’t supposed to come until next year at the earliest and who knows if that will really happen and to what extent it will be universal among current Eurozone members. relevant links below.

………

Three-and-a-half billion euros. That is roughly how much cash Greece’s banks need to get through the week if each adult takes out the €60 ($67) they are allowed each day. It isn’t much for Greeks to live on, but it may be more than the banks have.

Also, in the realm of the absurd, there is a  crowdfunding project for the Greek Bailout Fund on  Indiegogo, with about €¾ million raised, out of the €1.6 billion needed raised so far.

The German insistence on Versailles Treaty economics, when juxtaposed with the Greek tradition financial profligacy and corruption, has produced a truly toxic mix, which will probably break up the Euro Zone, if not the whole European Union.

^*Greek for no.
^†The word for "debt" in German is "Schuld". This is also the word for "guilt" or "blame", which explains why the Germans are so fond of Sado-Monitarism. The Germans see this as a morality play, and the last time that Germans tried to enforce a morality on the rest of Europe, it was pretty unfortunate.