The Concatenate

[First filed: September 30, 2008 @ 08:09]

The NY Times reports on the Wall Street bailout failing to get through congress with bi-partisan opposition.

“The vote against the measure was 228 to 205, with 133 Republicans turning against President Bush to join 95 Democrats in opposition. The bill was backed by 140 Democrats and 65 Republicans.

Last week was the only chance to get this through, populist opposition to it is only going to firm from here, and start to get organised.

The opposing congressman did not, one suspects, vote against this out of a desire to stymie the united leadership of both parties and the president, but rather because they’re deathly feared that voting for it would lose them their seats.

UPDATED: The thinking tory’s tory, David Brooks in the New York Times, is furious at this democratic assault on capital but he still makes a good point:

“House leaders of both parties got wrapped up in their own negotiations, but did it occur to any of them that it might be hard to pass a bill fairly described as a bailout to Wall Street?”

Also the left wing Michael Moore’s thoughts from before the vote are worth considering.

All the Australian media has been intoning seriously about the potential failings of the JSF.

Particularly they’re worried that it won’t be able to dogfight the flashy new Russian jets in the region and that it’s slow to turn and slow to climb.

Firstly dogfighting. If you’re worried about this you should also be concerned about the dueling skills of the pilots with sabre in hand.

In WWII there were a few occasions where swords were used in anger. But any time spent training and equipping with swords was completely wasted.

Much the same can be said of fast jet dogfighting. Pilots like to think it will still matters because it makes them out to be knights of the sky rather than delivery truck drivers. We need to stop indulging the fancies of 100 odd pilots when worrying about the defence of the entire country.

Now onto the thrust to weight ratio of the JSF which is at the heart of the other issues.

Let’s pause for a moment and look at the acronym:

Joint. Strike. Fighter.

Joint means inter-service. So it has to meet the minimum requirements of many different end users.

Strike means bombing.

Only the third and last letter suggests any air-to-air combat capability.

The JSF is intended to be the Toyota Hilux of the skies, not the Bugatti Veyron.

Anyone expressing alarm now at the JSF’s low thrust-to-weight ratio has not been paying attention from the outset and their opinions should be dismissed.

Naturally Australia’s pilots would prefer we pay for Veyrons. But Bugattis are not so good at lugging stuff to where we need it.

If (and it remains a big if) the JSF does what it’s meant to; it will be arriving in theatre and snapping off guided missiles (targetted by far away AEW&C Wedgetails) before the enemy even knows it is there. Meanwhile another JSF configured for ground attack will be pulverising the enemy’s airfield.

But there’s a lot to be said for sacking the pilots all together, skipping this last generation of manned combat aviation, and going straight for flying killbots.

This week’s panic, however, was rent-seeking from the pilot’s guild, and we should tell them they’ve been indulged enough.

Time to bail out to the airlines boys and shag hosties until you get one up the duff and have to marry her.

Simon Jenkins in The Times has a good roundup of where things stand with the collapses on Wall Street and the attempts to fix it.

At issue though, the big problem that’s stalling a Government desperate to initiate the bailout, is a fundamental problem gripping any neutral observer.

These bankers have, for 60 years, siphoned off a chunk of all the world’s money for their personal pleasure. They told us it was justified because they understood the ever more complex instruments they’d created to ever further leverage the same pile of money.

They hired all the brightest brains coming out of all the world’s universities, and then put them to work, in large part, doing things you could train my kelpie George to do. Light goes red, hit the sell button.

We could, perhaps have asked if all those bright young things couldn’t be doing more for the world out doing something productive and left the trained kelpies to manage the markets. The wisdom of hindsight again.

But as long as the money kept flowing, as long as the markets performed their intended tasks of insuring liquidity and providing investment capital for new ventures, the rest of us didn’t worry too much about the insane schemes used to play with our money in, at the end of the day, zero sum games.

And now, having taken so much of our money these bankers are turning around red-faced. Admitting that they had failed to account for the basic fundamentals of their businesses. Letting slip that, after all they hadn’t understood what they hell they were doing with derivatives piled on derivatives.

And the solution now is taxpayer funded subsidies? Because no investor wants to put their own money into these schemes any more?

The people catching the bus to work are going to have to pay up to keep the obscene old men in their Maybachs?

That dog won’t hunt. Revolutions have kicked off over less.

In the Washington Post Charles Krauthammer was joking when he made this suggestion, but it wasn’t that much of a joke:

“Capping executive pay is piffle. What we need are a few exemplary hangings. Public hangings. On television. Pick a few failed investment firms, lead their CEOs in chains through the canyons of Manhattan and give the mob satisfaction. Better still, precede the auto-da-fe — fire is highly telegenic — with 24-hour reality-TV coverage of their recantations, lamentations and final visits with the soon-to-be widowed. The ratings would dwarf “American Idol,” and the ad revenue alone would make the perfect down payment on the $700 billion.

Interesting times.

The SMH has a story on claims of drink spiking in Beijing bars.

Oddly enough the frequency of spiking seemed to coincide with the frequency of athletes completing their compeition.

Even more curious is the way that the symptoms of these “spikings” eerily match the symptoms of just plain downing too much booze:

“One other victim last night told The Herald that in their case they suddenly felt ill, vomited and then passed out on a couch in the otherwise popular nightclub.”

No-one robbed or sexually assaulted? Sounds like too much good old fashioned alcohol to me,

A scary analysis by Chris Hitchens suggest that the escalating war in Afghanistan is really a lot bigger and nastier than suggested by the reporting we’re getting here at home.

If you view the war as a conflict with Pakistan then a lot of things get clearer, if less pleasant.

Good Morning,

Your new Liberal Leader according to the Australian is Malcolm Turnbull.

Brendan’s snap spill motion has backfired badly but he was probably right to roll the dice on it.

It’s 50-50 at best that Malcolm will make it to the election as leader.

But as everyone gets a turn they build a better public profile which helps the party present as a group of “somebodies” come election time.

45-41 is not a great margin though.

Interesting times.

In the Register Andrew Orlowski celebrates the 25th birthday of the only software maker you can truly trust, the Free Software Foundation.

In years to come Free Software is probably going to become so ubiquitous that people will forget that it was only the steely determination of one man, Richard Stallman, who didn’t care if people laughed at him, that kept the key components of information technology in the public domain.

So this anniversary is one well worth remembering.

Well the Sarah Palin thing is working out even better than could be expected for the Republicans.

Not only are the Democrat bloggers and fellow travellers in the mainstream publicly beating up on a mother of five they’re spouting bile attacking a 17 year old girl.

Democrat leaning pundits are pontificating that women should be staying home with their kids rather than pursuing public service, and now it’s the Democrats running hard on the value of experience, something McCain has established as his brand.

This is the multiplying advantage of surprise writ large.

Meanwhile the uncommitted voters look at Sarah Palin’s life, see a reflection of their own, and get steadily more determined to at least not vote for the side carrying on in this manner.

The reaction of the Chicago Tribune’s John Kass is probably typical of the neutral’s take on this sorry saga.

When Guillermo del Toro of “Pan’s Labyrinth” fame signed up to write and direct the sequel to the comic book derived “Hellboy” many people were surprised.

In a very real way, however, what he’s created is as much a sequel to Pan’s Labyrinth as it is to the first Hellboy story.

It’s a morality play touching on acceptance, but mostly built on loathing of our mundane world and the people who make it up.

In this movie normal people are petty at best and vindictive cowards at worst. And yet the heroic outside will still put his life on the line to save us all.

The wisecracking Hellboy is mostly gone here, but not really missed as the pace of action throughout is frenetic.

It’s fast, furious, and in parts achingly beautiful.

Three and a half stars.

UPDATED: A keen eyed reader has pointed out that Guillermo del Toro did the first Hellboy movie, so what we’re seeing here is the studio backing his vision from Pan’s Labyrinth.

The world is getting a new web browser.

The official Google Blog details the release of “Chrome” into the wild.

There’s also a comic book explaining what it is and how it works.

Under the bonnet I hear it’s been built on the same WebKit that powers the Apple Safari browser, in turn tracing it’s lineage to the Linux Konqueror browser from the KDE team.

At the moment it’s Windows only (Apple and Linux users already having good webkit based browsers I guess).

The exciting thing is going to be a web-browser built from the ground up to run the AJAX pages we seem to spend our lives on now (Gmail and Facebook spring to front of mind).

It goes into the wild tomorrow.