Monthly Archives: November 2008

A lucky escape

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From the Times…

Pirates caught redhanded by one of Her Majesty’s warships after trying to hijack a cargo ship off Somalia made the grave mistake of opening fire on two Royal Navy assault craft packed with commandos armed with machineguns and SA80 rifles.

In the ensuing gunfight, two Somali pirates in a Yemeni-registered fishing dhow were killed, and a third pirate, believed to be a Yemeni, suffered injuries and subsequently died. It was the first time the Royal Navy had been engaged in a fatal shoot-out on the high seas in living memory.

By the time the Royal Marines boarded the pirates’ vessel, the enemy had lost the will to fight and surrendered quietly. The Royal Navy described the boarding as “compliant”.

This is being talked up as a success. But when I look at the rubber boats that the Royal Marines assaulted the pirates in all I can think is that this is a catastrophe in the making.

The way I understand it, the Royal Marines are operating under rules of engagement that prevent them from opening fire until they are fired upon even when the enemy is obviously armed. In modern warfare, it is not a good sigh when the enemy gets off the first shot. A little better fire discipline on the part of the pirates and a couple of rocket propelled grenades and this would have turned out a lot different.

It only took a few mistakes and a couple of dead men to drive the US out of Somalia the first time. I wonder how strong a stomach the pirate fighters will have?

Every Cloud Has Its Silver Lining

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From the AP….

Oil prices plunged below $56 a barrel Wednesday as awful numbers from retailers and a dismal outlook from automakers lent yet more evidence that the U.S. and the rest of the globe will slash its energy use.

This will help a lot of hurting people around the world. You may have to look for a job, but at least you will not pay $3 gallon to get around.

But lest you get too excited by this news, one should keep in mind the following facts:

1: The longer the price stays at this level, the more dependent the world is going to get on Middle Eastern oil. At $56 a barrel, many sources of oil outside the Middle East are no longer profitable.

2: The longer oil stays at this price, the more likely Russia will suffer a catastrophic collapse in the next couple of years. Granted, Russia is going to suffer a catastrophic collapse no matter what. But I was hoping that it would take at least 10 years for Russia to fall apart.

3: The longer oil stays at this price, the more unstable the Middle East is going to be. For example, Iraq is going to have a lot harder time rebuilding itself.

4: Unless there is big break through in the search for alternative energy sources, it is unlikely that oil prices will stay this low unless the world continues to suffer an economic catastrophe. Indeed, by undercutting alternatives, the current low price of oil sets the stage for a huge price increase in the future.

Rubberized Rocket Fuel?

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From Danger Room….

The Pentagon has a new secret weapon to neutralize sites containing chemical or biological weapons: rocket balls. These are hollow spheres, made of rubberized rocket fuel; when ignited, they propel themselves around at random at high speed, bouncing off the walls and breaking through doors, turning the entire building into an inferno. The makers call them “kinetic fireball incendiaries.” The Pentagon doesn’t want to talk about them, but published documents show that the fireballs have undergone tests on underground bunkers.

The ideas that some people come up with up never cease to amaze me. I have wonder how well it would really work in the field though.

That was fast

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From the Telegraph…

Russia’s parliament announced it would rush through a constitutional amendment that could see Vladimir Putin return to the presidency within weeks.

Amid growing signs of panic in the Kremlin, the State Duma said it would meet on Friday to pass legislation that could allow Mr Putin to return to the Kremlin for 12 years.

Giving short shrift to the supposed inviolability of Russia’s 1993 constitution, all three readings of the bill will be compressed into a single sitting, rather than dragged out over several weeks or months as convention normally dictates.

Putin is a fool. If he was smart, he would let the others take the heat for Russia’s fall from grace and then ride in on his white horse. But by trying to get himself back in the hot seat now, he is going to find out how shallow his popularity really is.

When everyone loves you because you brought prosperity, you have to expect that everyone will hate you when trouble comes.

Tragic Justice

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Remember the McCain–Feingold Act? Read this post from Belmont Club and ponder the strange way that justice works in this world.

Trying to keep money from talking in an election is like trying to ban guns. It only works on honest people. The goal of champaign finance laws should never have been about limiting the amount of money people could give. Instead, it should have been about creating transparency.

Instead of mandating artificial limits, McCain should have tried to fund independent real time audits. We don’t mandate a limit on how much money can be spent training an athlete to be the best. We just require that they pass a drug test.

But that is not what we got. Instead, McCain created a system that limited what honest people could do with their own money and at the same time provided little in the way of real transparency. President Bush signed that legislation into law in spite of professing to believe that parts of the law were unconstitutional.

It is tragic that the person who tried the hardest to play by the rules should suffer the most. But it also seems just that the man who helped create those rules should also suffer from them.

We have to fight their wars and bail out their banks?

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From Felix Salmon….

UBS has a $2 trillion balance sheet; Credit Suisse has another trillion on top of that. Call it $3 trillion between the two of them, which is about ten times Switzerland’s GDP of $300 billion or so. Now that’s what I call too big to save. Oh, and did I mention? At the end of 2007, Credit Suisse was levered by more than 40 times; UBS was levered by more than 64 times. A 16% fall in UBS’s assets would wipe out not only all of its equity but 100% of Swiss GDP on top.

This could be the first make-or-break economic issue to face Barack Obama: if it came to it, would Treasury bail out UBS? I’m sure it would try to get European governments to pitch in too, and the Swiss, of course, to the extent that they can. But I’m sure I’m not the only person praying that UBS never comes close enough to the edge that we have to find out.

I wish I could think that it was ridiculous to say that the US might bail out a foreign bank. But I can’t quite muster up the necessary optimism.

Blah Blah Blah

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From Market Watch…

“Since mid-September, rapid, seismic changes in consumer behavior have created the most difficult climate we’ve ever seen. Best Buy simply can’t adjust fast enough to maintain our earnings momentum for this year,” said Brad Anderson, vice chairman and chief executive officer of Best Buy. “We’re beginning to adjust our cost structure to restore earnings momentum and still gain market share. We firmly believe that our strategy of customer centricity is of great value in driving our performance versus the industry, and that’s the strategy we plan to pursue to continue to strengthen our position in the marketplace.”

This is the kind of double speak that drives me nuts. They are unable to speak in straight forward manner even when everyone knows the truth.

Of course they will gain market share if they can keep from going bankrupt. That is because Circuit City went bankrupt already. The big question is can they avoid Circuit City’s fate?

They lost a lot of money this quarter.

Is this even news?

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From the New York Times…

High school textbooks call it the tongue map — that colorful illustration that neatly divides the human tongue into sections according to taste receptors. There is the tip of the tongue for sweet, the sides for sour and salty, and the back of the tongue for bitter. But recent studies show that while scientists still have much to learn about receptors, the map, at least, is wrong

I had a hard time believing their neat little map in the first place. And I thought it had been disproved some time ago. But the New York Times is making it sound like it is something that they just found out.

On Butchering Chickens

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I just got done killing and butchering a number of Chickens when I checked my RSS feeder and found that that Gene Logsdon had put up a post on how he does it. I found it interesting to compare how he does it to how we do it.

One things for sure, Gene is faster then we are. He says…

My wife and I can kill, scald, and butcher four chickens in half an hour, if we’re in a hurry.

If he is truly counting all the steps it takes to get them in a freezer and his wife really is as fussy as he says she is, he has got us beat on speed. And to make matters worse, we have a machine to help us with the plucking (ours looks like this, but if I had to get one now I would probably get this).

I suspect that part of the secret to his speed is this…

Theoretically, the water should not be quite boiling—about 180° to 190°F. is just right. But we let the water come to a boil, then let it sit a bit. Our water is usually a bit too hot, and it cooks the skin a wee bit but this is no problem other than the skin might tear in the defeathering process. A bit of torn skin is no catastrophe either, and eventually you will learn to avoid it. I like to start with the water a bit too hot, so that if we are butchering four or more chickens at once, which we usually do, the water will not be too cool by the time we get to the last one. Better too hot than not hot enough.

I find this quick and dirty approach appealing. I am a naturally lazy fellow. But the Troll would kill me if I tried to do my scalding this way. She does not like it when the skin cooks. She says that it affects the taste. Since she can usually tell you all ingredients in a dish just by tasting it I suppose she is probably right. But if you scald the way we do, it takes longer.

We scald the chickens in water that is around 140 degrees. The amount of time we leave the chicken in the water varies with the age of the chicken. But it is generally close to a minute. The skin does not cook and our machine can still pluck the birds clean without breaking the skin. But I think both the scalding and the plucking take longer than if we did it Gene’s way.

Having said that, I suspect that Gene’s real speed advantage lies in the butchering end of things. He saves some internal organs for later eating (which we do not) and he takes the crop out at the front whereas we pull it through. But if anything those differences should make it take longer for Gene to butcher than it does us.

The real trick is the initial cutting to pull the gut sack out. People who don’t have much experience go really slow so as to not cut into the intestine and release all the crap. I imagine Gene can do this part really fast given how many years he has done it.

Tell Us Something We Don't Already Know, Part II

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From Bloomberg…

Fannie Mae may need more than the $100 billion in funding pledged by the U.S. Treasury to stay afloat after reporting a record $29 billion loss and confronting more difficulty in issuing and refinancing debt.

“This commitment may not be sufficient to keep us in solvent condition or from being placed into receivership,” if there are further “substantial” losses or if the company is unable to sell unsecured debt, Washington-based Fannie said in a filing today with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Fannie said it has a limited ability to issue debt maturing past one year, citing market conditions, the lack of an explicit federal guarantee and competition from government-insured bank bonds. Fannie, which along with Freddie Mac was seized by regulators on Sept. 6, slashed the value of its assets by at least $21.4 billion for the third quarter and increased credit loss reserves by 75 percent to $15.6 billion. Freddie is required to file its quarterly earnings by the end of the week.

Before long, all debt will be backed by the Federal Government.