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August 22, 2015

What Difference Does It Make?



Hillary: "Bill, how long am I going to be in here?" 

Bill: "At this point, what difference does it make?"

Breathtaking

Donald Trump makes tons and tons of money. That's his job. He's a billionaire.

Jeb Bush is a politician who wants to make tons and tons of money. That wasn't his job. He's a thief.

From the International Business Times:
For Florida taxpayers, the move by the administration of then-Gov. Jeb Bush to forge a relationship with Lehman Brothers would ultimately prove disastrous. Transactions in 2005 and 2006 put the Wall Street investment bank in charge of some $250 million worth of pension funds for Florida cops, teachers and firefighters. Lehman would capture more than $5 million in fees on these deals, while gaining additional contracts to manage another $1.2 billion of Florida's money. Then, in the fall of 2008, Lehman collapsed into bankruptcy, leaving Florida facing up to $1 billion in losses. [emphasis mine ~sig94]

But for Jeb Bush personally, his enduring relationship with Lehman would prove lucrative. In 2007, just as he left office, Bush secured a job as a Lehman consultant for $1.3 million a year, Bloomberg reported.

[...]"This is a breathtaking conflict of interest going on here,” said Craig Holman, governmental ethics lobbyist with Public Citizen, a good-government group. “This cost Florida very dearly, and it enriched Jeb Bush."
Sounds like Jeb might could teach the Clintons a thing or three about corruption.

Back In The Saddle



This is definitely not a remake of the Gene Autry hit.

Kim Jong Un And The Full Metal Jacketed Enema

Someone needs to turn this insane little prick into compost.
From CBS News
North Korea Official: Kim Jong Un Approves ‘Final Attack Operation’ On South Kore

PYONGYANG, North Korea (CBS News/CBSDC/AP) — A North Korean military official said on Friday that senior party and defense officials led by North Korean leader Kim Jong Un met Thursday night and “reviewed and approved the final attack operation.”

The move came after Thursday saw the most serious confrontation between the rivals in years. The official gave no details about what kind of military retaliation North Korea would see as appropriate for South Korea’s shelling of its territory on Thursday.

However, Kim Yong Chol, director of the general reconnaissance bureau of the North Korean army, denied Friday that North Korea had fired across the Demilitarized Zone and said South Korea had not offered conclusive evidence of where a rocket would have come from. He suggested South Korea may have made a human error in its assessment of events and that its decision to retaliate was dangerous and rash.

“Skirmishes can lead to all-out war,” Chol said.

South Korea’s defense minister Han Minkoo on Friday warned North Korea that it would face “searing” consequences if it launched fresh provocation.

“This time, we’ll cut off a vicious circle of North Korean provocation,” Minkoo said, adding that Seoul was closely cooperating with the U.S. to deter potential aggression by North Korea.

Early on Friday, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un declared his frontline troops in a “quasi-state of war,” and ordered them to prepare for battle.a
Yeah, yeah, yeah .... this has been going on for decades, first under the elder poofy-haired murderous prick and now under his hellish spawn. Take out Kim Jong Un and you spill the whole bowl of kimchi. End of extensive US involvement once ROK forces wipe up the mess. Yeah, yeah China this and China that. Piss on 'em. If they mobilize we cut them off at the economic level - try selling all your cheap crap to the Mexicans once we lean on your biggest trade partners (S. Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Germany and Australia).

Time to end it. Almost 30,000 American GI's are being used as a trip wire in case this loon decides to go into full tilt Sudetenland mode. It's expensive too.
The cost to taxpayers of supporting U.S. troop levels in South Korea is significant. The
Department of Defense (DOD) estimates that non-personnel U.S. costs in South Korea were nearly $1.1 billion in Fiscal Year 2012 – and that figure does not include more than $2 billion in U.S. military personnel costs or hundreds of millions of dollars in South Korean contributions intended to offset U.S. costs.
~Office of the Under Secretary of Defense (Comptroller)/Chief Financial Officer, Operation and Maintenance Overview Fiscal Year 2013 Budget Estimates (February 2012).

I'm not saying we should cut and run. We should have removed the reason why we're there in the first place. And of course this is all predicated on someone growing balls in the US government.

August 21, 2015

RobEx

Israeli designers have proposed swarms of single-wheeled robot drones could soon replace delivery truck. Of course you may have have a problem when they drop a 350 pound refrigerator at your door and take off.


Kobi Shikar, an engineering and design student at Shenkar School of Engineering and Design in Ramat Gan, Israel, claims they could even replace the need for container lorries.

He said the robotic delivery service could replace the need for large delivery vehicles clogging up the roads but perhaps more usefully it may also remove the need to deliver items during working hours.
Story here.
It also brings to mind the scifi movie, "I. Robot" wherein delivery robot drones prove to more more of a handful than a helper.


Consistency

Like the stench of a rotting corpse, the foul odor of corruption accompanies Hillary's wake as she steamed through political waters over the last forty years. Here are some of her dealings.

1974
1978-98
 1993
1993
 1966
1998
2001
 2001-15
2008
 2010
 2012
 2012
2015

Funky Music


A Bad Lip Reading of The Republican Debate




This is hilarious.

H/T iOTW

August 20, 2015

Help Me Out


Not sure if this is the German city of Freiburg im Breisgau after the Allies crossed the Siegfried Line in 1944, or the American city of Detroit after the Tigers beat the Padres in 1984.

I'm Just A Singer


August 19, 2015

Hillary Feels Fresh

You Better Run


God's Memory Banks

From the UK Independent:

Single DNA molecule could store information for a
million years following scientific breakthrough

“A little after the discovery of the double helix architecture of DNA, people figured out that the coding language of nature is very similar to the binary language we use in computers,” Dr Grass said.

“On a hard drive, we use zeros and ones to represent data, and in DNA we have four nucleotides, A, C, T and G,” he said.

The DNA molecules were synthesised by machine and heated to 71C for a week, which is equivalent to being stored at 50C for 2,000 years, after which it was decoded back into the original text without any errors, Dr Grass told the meeting.

[...]DNA has the advantage over hard drives in that it is an extremely dense form of data storage with the potential to survive for long periods of time. An external hard drive for instance is about the size of a paperback book, can store about five terabytes of data and might last 50 years.

In contrast, an ounce (28 grams) of DNA could fit on a penny, store 300,000 terabytes of memory and palaeontologists have shown the information stored in DNA recovered from fossils can survive for up to a million years.

One of the remaining problems, other than the currently exorbitant cost of making DNA for digital storage, is to be able to retrieve the information quickly and easily, which is why Dr Grass is working on a method of labelling specific places on the DNA molecule to make it easier to search.

August 17, 2015

Trump On Immigration

Trump's campaign website contains information on his various political/policy positions. This one is on immigration reform:
1. A nation without borders is not a nation. There must be a wall across the southern border.

2. A nation without laws is not a nation. Laws passed in accordance with our Constitutional system of government must be enforced.

3. A nation that does not serve its own citizens is not a nation. Any immigration plan must improve jobs, wages and security for all Americans.

Make Mexico Pay For The Wall

For many years, Mexico’s leaders have been taking advantage of the United States by using illegal immigration to export the crime and poverty in their own country (as well as in other Latin American countries). They have even published pamphlets on how to illegally immigrate to the United States. The costs for the United States have been extraordinary: U.S. taxpayers have been asked to pick up hundreds of billions in healthcare costs, housing costs, education costs, welfare costs, etc. Indeed, the annual cost of free tax credits alone paid to illegal immigrants quadrupled to $4.2 billion in 2011. The effects on jobseekers have also been disastrous, and black Americans have been particularly harmed.
More here.

I am not endorsing Trump for anything, yet, but he is the only one that - as far as I know - is not beholden to anyone. He's got his own money.

Listen to this presser where Trump talks about campaign financing.


She's Excited


August 16, 2015

The Last Man

The last American combat death in WWII occurred on August 18, 1945, when two US Army Air Corps bombers were attacked by Japanese fighters. The bombers were on a mission to verify Japanese compliance with the terms of the cease fire which the Emperor had announced on August 15th.
Sergeant Anthony J. Marchione—a 20-year-old aerial gunner in the U.S. Army Air Forces—bled to death in a bullet-riddled B-32 Dominator bomber in the clear, bright skies above Tokyo. The young man from Pottstown, Pennsylvania, has the dubious distinction of being the last U.S. service member to die in combat in World War II.
American GI's were still being killed a year or more after the war ended, but these deaths were caused by rouge guerrilla units/individuals who refused to surrender.

The B-32 is not widely known as an American combat aircraft as were the B-17, B-24 and the B-29 bombers.


The Consolidated B-32 Dominator (Consolidated Model 34) was a heavy bomber made for United States Army Air Forces during World War II, and had the distinction of being the last Allied aircraft to be engaged in combat during World War II. It was developed in parallel with the Boeing B-29 Superfortress as a fallback design should the B-29 prove unsuccessful. The B-32 only reached units in the Pacific during mid-1945, and subsequently only saw limited combat operations against Japanese targets before the end of the war. Most of the extant orders of the B-32 were cancelled shortly thereafter and only 118 B-32 airframes of all types were built.
Source.

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