Movie Review: Godzilla: Get it On Redbox

Well I went to see the new Godzilla this past weekend and I was pleasantly surprised. It was a great monster movie but it kind of felt like Pacific Rim with a more memorable monster. There was some decent action but there were huge plot-holes. The acting was decent enough with Bryan Cranston chewing scenery like crazy. The male lead was fairly wooden but he was about 100x better than Kit Harrington.

The movie revolved around 2 weird creatures spawned by nuclear power that menace San Fransisco for some reason. I'll call them Kaiju's because they reminded me of the Kaiju's in Pacific Rim. One huge plot hole I saw was one Kaiju escaped from a Filipino mine and then went all the way to Las Vegas to get to the nuclear storage facility at Yucca Mountain. Why it didn't just take a shorter route to China or Japan (who also have nuclear waste storage facilities) I'll never know. The Kaiju also doesn't have wings so I guess it walked all the way from the Philippines to Las Vegas over some stretch of time.

The plot was fairly strait-forward. It pretty much amounts to Cranston is a nuclear scientist and a Japanese reactor melts down and messes up a nearby town. I.E. Fukushima. He has a son that joins the Navy and becomes a bomb disposal guy. They travel around and meet Ken Watanabe who plays a Japanese scientist of some sort. His role pretty much boils down to furrowed brow and reaction shots to the CGI monsters. He does utter "Godzilla" for the first time in a way that made people in the theater laugh.

The rest of the movie has them travel around and watch as Godzilla destroys Waikiki, the flying Kaiju destroys the Honolulu Airport, the other walking Kaiju destroys Las Vegas and then everyone destroys San Fransisco. The various characters dodge monsters and Aaron Taylor-Johnson tries to unite with his wife played by Elizabeth Olsen.

The monsters fighting was what I came to see and for the most part I was not disappointed. There was plenty of Godzilla kicking ass and he was portrayed as somewhat of a good guy throughout the movie. He was there to provide "balance for nature."  I would actually see another Godzilla movie where he might fight Mechagodzilla or Mothra or something like that.

Finally the plot-holes can take up a huge multi-point list but I don't feel like writing it. Suffice it to say there are many and you can probably make a drinking game out of them if you wanted. The one that was the most glaring was why Aaron Taylor-Johnson had to take the train with the nukes to San Fransisco. The nuke transport train (I have no idea why they didn't just use a B-52 or a B-1 to transport them) was controlled by the army for some reason. Aaron Taylor-Johnson was a navy man and for some reason the army guys didn't have their own Ordinance control guy so they took him along. If Aaron Taylor-Johnson wanted to get back to his wife so badly why didn't he just rent a car and drive to San Fransisco instead of taking the slow-assed nuke transport train? These kind of plot holes are rife through-out the movie so be ready for them.

In any case the movie is worth watching if you like monster movies like Pacific Rim and can overlook glaring plot holes. There are lots of monsters fighting and fearful reaction shots and Bryan Cranston does a very good job as always. It was also nice to see the real Godzilla return to the big screen and not that piece of crap lizard from that awful 1998 Mathew Broderick movie.

Russia Signs Massive Natural Gas Deal with Red China: Masterstroke for Russia and China in "The Great Game"

It seems that the Russians are going to start looking East to diversify away from the the European market.

China signed a landmark deal Wednesday to buy Russian natural gas worth about $400 billion, giving a boost to diplomatically isolated President Vladimir Putin and expanding Moscow's ties with Asia.

Price negotiations on the 30-year deal continued into the final hours of a two-day visit by Putin to China, during which both sides had said they hoped to sign an agreement.

Hmm this is an interesting development. There was talk that this deal fell through but I bet it was quibbling over time period more than a cash figure (perhaps the Red Chinese wanted 50 years or something.) Both of the nations win big and it is a very savvy move in "The Great Game."

In any case it now focuses Russia eastward and either gives Putin a free hand in the Ukraine (and Georgia, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia etc.) or he might reestablish hegemony over what was once the Southern USSR (Kazakhstan and the like.) That would put this information in play:

Putin was in Shanghai for an Asian security conference where China's president called for a new model of Asian security cooperation based on a regional group that includes Russia and Iran and excludes the United States.

A Russian southern scenario would be easier to do especially if they make the grand gesture of taking pressure off of the Ukraine. The Europeans and Obama would get off Putin's back since he already got the piece of the Ukraine that he wanted (the permanent Black Sea port.) Sanctions can be lowered and Putin can appear to back down from "Western pressure."

However, an "economic union" to Putins south would be easy to form. Pro-Moscow leaders can be groomed in a place that has lots of mineral wealth but in an area where few people can find on a map. I'm sure that "Russian tanks enter Kyrgyzstan to quell uprising" would be on page 15 of the New York Times.

Also even stronger ties with Iran (maybe a pipeline leading to a state of the art Gazprom refinery) would be a finger in the eye of the US as well. A stronger Iranian/Russian partnership would benefit both countries equally and restart a Soviet era partnership. Putin loves that Soviet era stuff so it would be a smart play in the Great Game.

Good News from GOP Primaries: Tea Party Got Their Asses Whipped

Well its seems that the Tea Party might be moving toward the dust-bin of history.

Mississippi looms as the only thing standing between those groups and a primary-season oh-fer. It suggests that the major groups are overreaching in who they're targeting - and that Republican primary voters are searching for electable candidates over ideological purity. The era of Christine O'Donnell, Sharron Angle, Richard Mourdock and Ken Buck could be over.

I think the GOP is tired of a bunch of losers getting providing the electorate with either a Democrat or an ignoramus. They are finally getting serious about taking the Senate.

Brave Cat comes to Boys Rescue: Chases off Vicious Dog

I have to say this cat is brave and takes his role as a family pet seriously. The cat even comes back to see if the kid is okay. Warning this video is a little gory at the end when it shows what damage that dog did in his few seconds of grabbing the kid.

New Army Helmet Design Looks Like It Came Out of a Video Game

It looks like it came right out of Halo and is a little too Star Wars Stormtrooper-ish but it is still very cool.

Obamacare Contractor Paying Employees to Hit Refresh Every 10 Minutes

Well chalk-up another $1.5 billion in fraud, waste, and abuse.

A report by KMOV.com  in St. Louis claims that Serco—tasked with processing Obamacare applications—is allegedly paying its workers to do nothing at all.

Employees told the local television station that they are instructed to simply stare at a computer screen and hit refresh every 10 minutes.

"There are some weeks that a data entry person would not process an application," an employee told KMOV.

The report suggests that Serco is keeping an unnecessary number of employees because it gets paid per worker, instead of by the number of applications they are processing. They are currently hiring.

If this country was run like a business it would have been bankrupt decades ago.

The Last Impediment to Buying a XBone has fallen. They are providing a Kinect-less version

Well it seems that when idiot Ballmer goes Microsoft finally starts to make some good decisions. This is one of the main reasons why I haven't bought an Xbone already.

While I admit that Kinect is an incredibly cool piece of technology, I also don’t find it to be particularly useful as far as gaming is concerned. Talking to your console while you’re playing games might be fine if you live by yourself but my wife would absolutely murder me if she had to put up with me constantly shouting out commands to my squad mates in Mass Effect 3. So while I have nothing against Kinect, I also don’t think it’s a piece of technology that’s really worth paying $100 extra for.

Pretty much. I think that paying $100 extra just to say "Xbox On" to turn it on is a huge waste of money. I can push a button on a controller like I have been doing for years. Also if I bought an Xbone I would have put a piece of tape over the camera on the Kinect portion when I was not using it. It would be kind of the same thinking behind putting a sticker over the camera on a laptop. In the days of NSA snooping you can never be too careful. In any case my last argument for not buying the Xbone is gone and I will probably be buying it this summer as well.

Dr. Dre Might Become a Headphone Billionaire if Apples Buys out Beats

Well I remember buying his album when I was in high school. It looks like he will be very rich very soon once Apple is done spending the cash.

Apple Inc is close to buying headphone maker Beats Electronics for $3.2 billion, the Financial Times reported.

The purchase of Beats, which also runs a streaming music service, would be Apple's largest ever acquisition, the newspaper reported. It said the deal could be announced as early as next week. (http://r.reuters.com/cap77v)

Founded by rapper Dr. Dre and music producer Jimmy Iovine, Beats Electronics primarily produces products under the brand "Beats by Dr. Dre" and competes with headphones made by Skullcandy Inc, Sennheiser Electronic and Bose Corp.

It is a bit of a strange acquisition but maybe this the tip of the iceberg of Apple throwing its cash hoard around. I have a feeling that they might be buying Netflix or a game changer like that soon.

Tea Party Not Just Disliked but Hated even by the GOP

It seems the Tea Party's time as part of the American lexicon is nearing the end according to this poll.

The Tea Party has continued to wear out its welcome, according to a new Gallup poll released Thursday. In the survey, 30 percent of adults said they are "opponents" of the movement, tied for the highest mark Gallup has ever recorded. Meanwhile, support for the Tea Party checks in at 22 percent which, though not quite a record low, combines with the spike in disapproval to give the Tea Party its worst net approval rating ever in Gallup's polling.

Even the GOP has soured on them.

Much of that shift has come from Republicans growing increasingly weary of the group. Tea Party support within the GOP has fallen from 61 percent back in late 2010 to 41 percent today.

You can put me in the 30% camp that checked the "opponents" box. I was a big supporter once too.

MSNBC Busts Out the Racist Cinco De Mayo Celebration #FireBergdorf

If Fox News did this then the entire main stream media would explode trying to go wall to wall to cover it.

During several moments in the show on Monday, correspondent Louis Burgdorf appeared in a suit and tie and a sombrero.

"Happy Cinco de Mayo. Let me just take a shot here to get the thing started," he said before appearing to take a drink. "Ole!"

Later, Roberts was shown dancing with a maraca in one hand while there were margarita glasses and bottles of "tequila" on his anchor desk.

Burgdorf also popped into the closing shot, in which he apparently pretended to drink from one of the tequila bottles for several seconds as Roberts explained the background of the holiday.

If this was Fox News John Stewart would pass out from sheer joy and probably wet his pants. However, there is not a peep from them when their own liberal MSNBC people go "full racist stereotype" on Mexicans.

The "Obama Generation" Might Skip the Midterms

This will probably be bad news for the Democrats trying to hang onto the Senate.

The Institute of Politics’ newest survey of 18- to 29- year-olds found that less than a quarter of these young people plan to “definitely” vote in the 2014 midterm elections. Della Volpe attributes this sharp drop in millennial political participation – which, by contrast, was at a record high in 2008 – to a general “frustration with Washington” and the lack of change under Obama’s watch.

“It's everything, It's the tone, it's the series of issues, it's what's happening domestically as well as what's happening abroad, but the main message is that young people voted for Obama in 2008 so they could have a stake in what was happening in government,” he said. “They truly wanted to take that spirit of volunteerism into government, into public affairs and I think they're frustrated that they weren't asked to do more.”

Well their hero, Obama strait-up lied to the American people ie "if you like your doctor etc." so he can force them to buy something. They then messed up a website that costs $100s of millions which makes them look technologically backward. Next we have hot wars in Syria and a new cold war in the Ukraine. Obama does nothing but twiddle his thumbs and look weak on both fronts. 

Finally, you have Obama's NSA snooping their email, text messages, Yahoo Video Chats, and whatever else and storing all that data to "catch terrorists." In other words the government that the Millennials loved so much now has all their naked pictures, dirty texts, embarrassing drunken moments, and darkest secrets shared only with close friends all tucked away on a computer in Colorado somewhere. In isn't just "no spirit of volunteerism" that is damaging the Obama brand but the "spirit of incompetence, lies, and distrust" that is doing more damage.

Companies Could Save $600 Billion By Dumping People onto Obamacare Exchanges

I guess the hated Obamacare website is going to get a huge number of new enrollees as companies dump health care as a routine perk.

We may soon go back to a model in which employers provide healthcare more as a perk than as a routine benefit, requiring workers to get insurance from other sources. That could save big companies up to $700 billion by 2025, according to a new report from S&P Capital IQ. It’s hard to think of any other single change that could save companies that much money, indicating how powerful the Affordable Care Act (ACA) could become once it has fully impacted the U.S. healthcare system.

Twitter Shares Get Hammered: It Seems that the Active Monthly Users Number is Shrinking

I wonder if this might be the roll-over point for social media?

Around midday, shares of the microblogging company were down 10.4 percent to $38.18 on the New York Stock Exchange, after earlier falling to $37.24, its lowest price since its November 7, 2013 introduction on Wall Street.

Though still above its initial public offering price of $26, Twitter has lost more than half its value since peaking at $73.31 in December 26.

Investors were troubled by data showing the company had 255 million active monthly users in March, below the 257 million projected by Wall Street, said BMO Capital Markets.

It looks like the actual monthly users is not meeting Wall Street expectations and the stock is getting pounded because of it. Twitter needs to do something splashy like buy out Kik or Snapchat or something in order keep themselves relevant.

Obama Reaches Career Low in Approval Rating

I just think people are tired of him and just want to see the page turned on his entire Presidency.

Obama's job approval rating, after a slight winter rebound, has lost 5 points among all adults since March, to 41 percent, the lowest of his presidency by a single point. Fifty-two percent disapprove, with "strong" disapproval exceeding strong approval by 17 percentage points. He's lost ground in particular among some of his core support groups.

It also seems that people want the GOP to take their turn at fixing the economy.

Registered voters by 53-39 percent in the national survey say they'd rather see the Republicans in control of Congress as a counterbalance to Obama's policies than a Democratic-led Congress to help support him. It was similar in fall 2010, when the Republicans took control of the House of Representatives and gained six Senate seats.

That is a pretty big margin of people that are tired of the Democrats running the economy into the ground.

Yeah Blacks Are Better Off Free: Cliven Bundy Reveals He is a Pro-Slavery Asswipe

Well I guess this is where the Left keeps getting the idea that Conservatives are racist assholes.

“I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro,” Bundy said during one of his daily press conferences. “[B]ecause they were basically on government subsidy, so now what do they do? They abort their young children; they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton. And I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy? They didn’t get no more freedom. They got less freedom.”

Whenever someone starts by saying "I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro" it can only go downhill from there. Also I would rather be under government subsidy than the following:

1. Work 16 hour days from sunup to sundown and sometimes at torchlight
2. Endure daily beatings
3. Can have your wife and kids sold right out shattering your "family life" that Bundy praised
4. Die before 40 usually of exhaustion
5. Be bought and sold several times during ones lifetime
6. Be murdered without trial for saying the wrong thing or even looking a white person in the eye
7. Have the same rights as a plow horse, dog, or oxen.
8. Endure the atrocity that was the Middle Passage if you were a slave before 1807

I think Cliven Bundy really needs to crack a book about slavery or perhaps keep his bigoted mouth shut and fade into the dustbin of history. He went from a little guy fighting the Man to racist asshole in a few weeks. I think that might be a new record.

Apples Kills Numbers and Announces 7 for 1 Stock Split

Now they need to announce an iWatch or an iTV and we can really get the stock rolling.

The company posted earnings of $11.62 a share, on revenue of $45.6 billion, blowing past estimates for $10.18 a share on $43.53 billion in revenue, according to a consensus estimate from Thomson Reuters. 

Apple also authorized a 7-for-1 stock split, addressing calls to share more of its cash hoard. The board also approved a dividend increase of approximately 8 percent to $3.29 a share. The company additionally said it would boost the overall size of its capital return program to more than $130 billion by the end of 2015, up from its previous $100 billion plan. 

That is a pretty nice dividend and they are giving some more of their massive cash hoard back to investors. It looks like the iPhone 6 is coming out in the fall so it looks like Apple is still a force to reckoned with.

Fracking is Actually Fixing the Global Warming CO2 Problem?

I guess all those environmental nutjobs against the Keystone XL Pipeline do not know what they are talking about.

The reduction is even more impressive when one considers that 57 million additional energy consumers were added to the U.S. population over the past two decades. Indeed, U.S. carbon emissions have dropped about 20 percent per capita, and are now at their lowest level since Dwight D. Eisenhower left the White House in 1961.

David Victor, an energy expert at UC-San Diego, estimates that the shift from coal to natural gas has reduced U.S. emissions by 400 to 500 megatons CO₂ per year. To put that number in perspective, it is about twice the total effect of the Kyoto Protocol on carbon emissions in the rest of the world, including the European Union.

I guess Crap and Trade on CO2 emissions won't make Al Gore a Climate Change Millionaire after all. Maybe he should have invested in some fracking companies because they seem to be doing more to combat global warming then he has. What is eye-opening though is how little renewable energy is contributing to CO2 reduction.

It is tempting to believe that renewable energy sources are responsible for emissions reductions, but the numbers clearly say otherwise. Accounting for a reduction of 50 Mt of CO₂ per year, America’s 30,000 wind turbines reduce emissions by just one-10^th the amount that natural gas does. Biofuels reduce emissions by only 10 megatons, and solar panels by a paltry three megatons. 

Wind turbines are an eyesore and solar panels do almost nothing to reduce the CO2. Plus biofuels get the dubious distinction of wasting acreage that could have fed someone to power someone elses car instead. So instead of wasting money on this stuff I guess we should just build more natural gas and next generation nuclear plants instead.


What is interesting is that it seems that market forces will reduce the hated CO2 emissions far faster than some policy-maker driven boondoggle or rigged crap-and-trade CO2 scheme ever could. I wonder in light of these facts do we still have to pony up $300 billion to give to third-world despots to combat climate change?

If the Red Chinese follow our lead and start their own fracking and build a bunch of natural gas power plants maybe we can get this global warming thing licked in the next decade. The poor climate scientists with all their scare-mongering will have to go into a new field because the grant money and rubbing elbows with Matt Damon will all disappear.

Socialized Medicine at Its Worst: Woman Went in for an Appendectomy and Left Without an Ovary and She Died

This might be the nightmare scenario we have to look forward to depending on how far a "single-payer option" is advanced by various liberal groups. This all happened in Britain which of course has socialized medicine.

During the Oct. 23 surgery, De Jesus began to bleed "quite heavily. ... In the midst of this, Mr. Al-Abed removed what he clearly believed to be the appendix. He thought he found it, removed it, and gave to a nurse what later turned out to be Patient A's ovary," the tribunal heard. Coker, who was eating lunch at the time, was never summoned, nor was he aware the surgery was taking place. The mistake wasn't uncovered until much later. 

The Telegraph reports that De Jesus returned to the hospital in severe pain on Nov. 7; two days later another doctor realized she still had her appendix, and the next day she went into surgery to have it actually removed. Instead, she died on the OR table, having earlier delivered a stillborn boy. Her cause of death was ruled as multiple organ failure due to septicemia. The Press Association reports the hearing will likely last a month. 

I wonder if the heirs to Ms. De Jesus gets the chance to sue everyone involved in this debacle?

This is Exactly What The Right and Left Need to Do When Talking to One Another

If more liberals and conservatives have this attitude then the world will be a better place.

If you were a salesperson trying to persuade a potential client to switch suppliers, you would be kind and friendly to that client, not dismiss them as stupid or worse for their current supplier choice. So if you're trying to sell an idea – whether on the national political stage or at a family dinner with your uncle – why would you behave any differently? Kindness, respect, finding the basic goodness and human dignity in everyone – that is the essence of emotional correctness, and that is how we begin the conversations that lead to change.

A Happy Warrior wins more converts to his side than some mean-spirited asshole waving his fist at everyone.

Pakistan Accused of "Double Dealing" and Tricking the US on Afganistan

Well it won't be the first time the US was tricked by an "ally" and probably won't be the last.

Perhaps the biggest betrayal of all in the U.S.-Pakistani relationship, and one that came as no surprise to Gall, was the fact that bin Laden found shelter in Abbottabad, Pakistan, for six years before he was killed in a Navy SEAL raid in 2011. And, according to Gall, Pakistan’s government was orchestrating his protection.

“Pakistan did know,” Gall said, speaking about bin Laden’s location. “They were hiding him, they were handling him. Someone on the inside told me this. They had a special desk that knew where bin Laden was.

“Not only that, but put him there, protected him, oversaw him, handled him in the terms of the secret intelligence services,” she added. “And it's all deniable, but I’m told the top bosses knew.”

This is so obvious. There is no way such a high profile figure can hide for 6 years in a country without that country giving him some sort of support. Sometimes it seems that America is so poor at playing the "Great Game" we shouldn't even be playing it in the first place.

Chongqing Hot Pot? Sign Me Up

Now this might be a reason to take a little trip to Chongqing, China.

Thousands of vats of hot pot seasoning thicken the air around Nie Ganru's home with a miasma of chili as flame-red paste, thick with oil, bakes in the sun. 

Nie lives and effectively breathes hot pot, the spicy cook-it-yourself communal Chinese meal that made his fortune, and has built a pot-shaped six-storey museum dedicated to the dish.

Now his home town, the megalopolis of Chongqing, is seeking national and ultimately global recognition for the food.

"It's numbing, it's hot, it's very flavourful, it has an aroma that hits you in the face, and that's why everybody likes it," says the 70-year-old tycoon, who eats it about every other day.

It looks like Sukiyaki but instead of beef broth you cook the food in a mixture of hot peppers and stuff. You then dip chicken and beef into the boiling red mixture and you get some heat and hopefully some flavor mixed in. The broth does like quite evil if you aren't into hot foods though. I am willing to try it as long as there is quite a bit of water or milky stuff provided.

 

Global Warming Report Dials Up the Scare Tactics

Global Warming will be so bad they had to add a new category of risks!

The problems have gotten so bad that the panel had to add a new and dangerous level of risks. In 2007, the biggest risk level in one key summary graphic was "high" and colored blazing red. The latest report adds a new level, "very high," and colors it deep purple.

You might as well call it a "horrible" risk level, said van Aalst: "The horrible is something quite likely, and we won't be able to do anything about it."

The report predicts that the highest level of risk would first hit plants and animals, both on land and the acidifying oceans.

Um, if we cannot do anything about it then why worry? Just take that $30 billion or whatever Al Gore wants and use it to buy mosquito netting or building sea walls to protect against storm surge something. That will save quite a few more lives than whatever these scientists have already earmarked this money for.

Romney Won 18-20 Year Olds? What? Really?

I never knew this fact about the 2012 election.

As George Washington University political science Prof. John Sides wrote earlier this month, 18-year-old voters casting their initial ballot in 2012 broke for Mitt Romney over Obama. Romney won 19 and 20-year-olds, too.

“The political identities of future generations will depend on economic trends and the popularity of presidents who haven’t been elected. Maybe those factors will tend to break in Democrats’ favor, and maybe they won’t,” writes Professor Sides on the Monkey Cage political science blog of the Washington Post

It will be interesting to see how these new voters do in 2016 when they are just getting out of college. Will they be saddled with debt with no job prospects on the horizon? Victims of the Obameconomy they will probably still be effected by the slow-assed recovery. 

They get to stay on their parents health plans for few years but that is if their parents still have them. We might see a wave of businesses cutting their health plans and save money by taking the penalty. So they might not even get a chance to stay on their parents plan once they graduate.

Hypocrite of the Year: Gun Grabbing California State Senator Leland Yee a Gun Runner?

I think this may have gotten taken from a movie script instead of real life.

Court documents allege that Yee sought campaign donations in exchange for introducing an undercover FBI agent to an arms trafficker. An FBI affidavit says Yee talked with the undercover agent about acquiring weapons worth $500,000 to $2.5 million, including shoulder-fired missiles, from a Muslim separatist group in the Philippines.

Organizers said the arrest of Yee particularly clouds the future of two of his gun control bills.

Yee's SB47 would prohibit the use of so-called bullet buttons and other devices that allow for swift reloading of military-style assault weapons. His SB108 would require the state Department of Justice to study safe firearm storage methods. Both stalled in the Assembly last year.

I guess Yee believes that in the idea of: guns for Muslim separatist groups in the Philippines and not for thee. I wonder if he wanted to ban "bullet buttons" on the automatic weapons he wanted to sell to his Muslim terrorists, err separatist, pals? Also I wonder if he wants the Department of Justice to study safe firearm storage techniques in the terrorist camps of his pals as well? I mean Muslim terrorists might hurt themselves with the guns that Yee sold them.

Student Loan Debt a Corrosive Acid on Students Futures?

It seems that workers saddled by tons of debt are falling behind those who are not.

Graduates who can immediately begin building equity in housing or stocks and bonds get more time to see their investments grow, while indebted graduates spend years paying principal and interest on loans. The standard student loan repayment schedule is 10 years but can be much longer.

The median 2009 net worth for a household without outstanding student debt was $117,700, nearly three times the $42,800 worth in a household with outstanding student debt, according to a report co-written by Elliott last November.

Wow that is quite a disparity. I think it is more important than ever to price a decent college. I will be willing to bet that if you graduated from a State College with only $26k in loans you would be much better off than if you had $100k in loans from some Private College. This is an especially bad rip-off if you look at this:

College degrees can pay off. College graduates ages 25 to 32 working full time earn $45,500, about $17,500 more than their peers with just a high school diploma, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of census data.

So if you had $100K in loans you would owe $1150 per month. That is $13,800 per year which makes you only $3700 ahead of the high school diploma person. That money can be eaten up fairly easily if you don't have health insurance and decide to buy Obamacare or whatever. If this student had the $110k that he paid back to the private school he could have most of the way toward an entire house or a pretty decent nest egg.

I guess this goes to show you that unless you go to an Ivy than it is almost always better to go to a State School than a Private School if they have comparable academic records. I would much rather owe $27k than $100k no matter what.

New Trend Emerging: Hospitals Will Offer Their Own Health Insurance and Health Insurers Will Buy Hospitals

I guess this is a case of cutting out the middle man.

Dr. Kenneth L. Davis, CEO and  president of Mount Sinai Health System, the largest health care provider in the state of New York, said that starting next year, Mt. Sinai will begin offering its own Medicare Advantage plan. It will look for other opportunities to bring premium payments directly into the hospital system, rather than filtering them through insurance companies.

This also opens the door for Insurance Companies buying hospitals.

He noted that large insurer Wellpoint recently completed the acquisition of a health care company in California, apparently with an eye toward replicating the Kaiser model in some form.

I guess this starts the end-to-end care model of health care. You buy the insurance (hopefully at a discount) from your hospital on the Obamacare exchanges and then go to the hospital. Then the hospital charges you a co-pay and pays for the rest.

The hospital would be very good at figuring out how much they need to reimburse on what procedures. It seems to work well for Kaiser so I can see it working well for other groups of hospitals. The hospital wants to do good work so that their insurance will be sold at a good value. Also it provides built-in brand loyalty to certain hospitals as well. If you have Mt. Sinai brand insurance you will probably be going to Mt. Sinai over some other sawbones.

However, there needs to be checks in place if the insurance company owns a hospital. It would be interesting to see if certain things that are not cost effective or lose money suddenly are not done at that hospital. The article says that Mt. Sinai loses $14 million a year on mental health. Do you think WellPoint Hospital will have a money losing mental health ward? I guess these are the changes that Obamacare seems to have created.

What? There Might Be Opportunities from Global Warming? IPCC drums Out Scientist That Believes That.

It seems that dissenters like Richard Tol from Sussex University in England need to be removed from the Global Warming Orthodoxy.

Tol said the IPCC emphasized the risks of climate change far more than the opportunities to adapt. A Reuters count shows the final draft has 139 mentions of "risk" and 8 of "opportunity".

Tol said farmers, for instance, could grow new crops if the climate in their region became hotter, wetter or drier. "They will adapt. Farmers are not stupid," he said.

He said the report played down possible economic benefits of low levels of warming. Less cold winters may mean fewer deaths among the elderly, and crops may grow better in some regions.

"It is pretty damn obvious that there are positive impacts of climate change, even though we are not always allowed to talk about them," he said. But he said temperatures were set to rise to levels this century that would be damaging overall.

That sounds like something an economist would say. People will adapt and figure things out and that might be a benefit of global warming. However, his fellow scientists seem to disagree:

Another expert criticized Tol, saying his IPCC chapter exaggerated possible benefits.

"Of the 19 studies he surveyed only one shows net positive benefits from warming. And it's the one he wrote," said Bob Ward, policy and communications director of the Grantham Research Unit on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics.

Um, shouldn't there be more science behind trying to figure out the benefits from warming? I mean only one guy did any research on it? Or maybe that doesn't factor into the scare tactics that the Global Warming crowd wants to put on everyone.

Obamacare Deadline Pushed Back a Few More Weeks

I swear they are just running this thing by fiat out of the White House.

The decision, scheduled for announcement Wednesday, will give people until mid-April to sign up for insurance. All they need do is check off a box on HealthCare.gov indicating that they tried to enroll by March 31. The government will not check to see if people are telling the truth. The decision to allow more sign-up time was driven by an anticipated last-minute surge in enrollments, which could leave people unable to finish the process, The Washington Post reports.

I have a feeling there won't be a "last minute surge of enrollments" because many uninsured are either unaware of the deadline or can't afford health insurance in the first place.

Working for Michelle Obama Sounds Like Hell on Earth

She seems so easy going but this article really makes her seem like the woman from Devil Wears Prada.

For one thing, the imperative to guarantee results could be paralyzing. “That was the pressure on us,” one ex-aide told me. “‘Don’t do it if it’s not going to be perfect.’” Staff knew that every event should produce positive coverage, and that all the angles had to be exhaustively researched and gamed out (not easy with a team of less than 30). But it was never completely clear what the standard of perfection should be. “There’s no barometer: The first lady having the wrong pencil skirt on Monday is just as big of a fuck-up as someone speaking on the record when they didn’t mean to or a policy initiative that completely failed,” says another former aide. “It just made you super anxious.” Another past employee described a common feeling of “how can we be the caliber that we’re expected to be with no attention and no resources and being an afterthought? And all that can make for sparks. Friction.”

This passage sounds like it was lifted from the Court of the Sun King Louis XIV:

All of this led to a culture of harsh internal judgment. Invitations to meetings with the first lady, in her office above the Jackie Kennedy Garden, became a vital status symbol, a way for staffers to measure their worth. “Every meeting was like an identity crisis, whether you got invited or not,” one former East Winger told me. Casual face-time with Mrs. Obama was coveted as a badge of insiderdom. “Everyone sort of stands at attention in a different way, or they try to make the joke, or they try to be the one noticed, or they try to get the smile,” says a former employee. “And that’s in part a yearning for acknowledgment that you’re part of this, something bigger, and that she knows who you are.” Another former employee put it more bluntly: “They don’t want to work for her; they want to be friends with her.”

Russia Turns East? Now That is an Ominous Sign

Hmm, now this could be the new moves in the Great Game played by Putin in the next several years.

While Europe is furiously scrambling to find alternative sources of energy should Gazprom pull the plug on natgas exports to Germany and Europe (the imminent surge in Ukraine gas prices by 40% is probably the best indication of what the outcome would be), Russia is preparing the announcement of the "Holy Grail" energy deal with none other than China, a move which would send geopolitical shockwaves around the world and bind the two nations in a commodity-backed axis.

Ties looking eastward might be exactly what China and Russia needs to fend off America and Europe. I mean if Europe imposes sanctions that bite and Obama actually grows a spine then Russia could sell its product to the east instead of the west.

I mean a China/Russia axis would be perfect for both countries. The Chinese get the clean natural gas imported from their neighbor to the west and the Russians have a partner that will back it if they try to do further buffer-state satellite building.

It will also keep money in Russian pockets as America slowly moves toward energy independence. The Chinese can keep producing and growing their middle class without having to rely on America so much. In fact the Chinese could debt bomb us without ruining their own economy by relying on Russian imports to tide them over.

Tea Party Scrambles to Stay Relevant: Finally Understands The GOP Needs to Win the Senate

I am glad that the GOP establishment and business leaders are trying to smash these idiots.

More troubling to movement leaders, GOP moneyed interests are taking aim at Tea Party lawmakers deemed disruptive and bad for the brand. Rep. Justin Amash’s hard line on the debt ceiling, for instance, outraged key business interests, including the Chamber of Commerce, which have lined up behind his primary challenger, Brian Ellis. Tea Party Express is keeping a close eye on the race, and FreedomWorks has vowed to defend Amash “punch-for-punch.”  “Five years ago, I never would have imagined the Republican Party would be coming after people the Tea Party had gotten elected,” says Keli Carender, the national grassroots coordinator for the Tea Party Patriots. “It still shocks me.”  

At the same time, Tea Partyers are fending off Republican attempts to “kneecap” the movement as a whole, says Carender. “What they’re trying to do right now is build the meme that groups like ours and the Senate Conservatives Fund are in it ‘for profit.’ ” It’s a play to discredit TPP with the conservative base and peel away the small-dollar donors it relies on, charges Carender: “Not only are we fighting liberals in the Democrat Party and liberals in the Republican Party, now we’re having to fight to maintain credibility with the base.”

Their stupidity on the debt ceiling fight needs to doom them to the dustbin of history but I think someone somewhere took them aside and told them who the real enemy is.

Goal Three, says Brandon, is identifying the best opportunities to turn blue seats red—and here is where movement leaders can sound so pragmatic you wonder if you’ve dialed Karl Rove’s house by mistake. Budowich explains, “As the movement has matured, now it’s not just about making that stand but about creating a mathematical possibility to make policy differences.” He repeatedly stresses, “Our prime objective in 2014 is to take back the Senate. The only way we can do that is by defeating Democrats.” RINO hunting is all well and good, says Budowich, but targeting “squishy Republicans” won’t pry control of the Senate away from Harry Reid.

Um, yeah John McCain is not the enemy Harry Reid is. I'm glad there are some grown-ups in the Tea Party. They should know that every time they get rid of a strong GOP candidate and replace him with some idiot the Dems will hold that seat. Now they need to have a big meeting and tell everyone "do not talk about women's issues for any reason." They need to only talk about three things Obamacare, obamacare, obamacare and they will take the Senate.

Putin Levels Sactions against Lawmakers: Yeah I guess they Weren't Going to Siberia on their Recess Afterall

The real tragedy is these lawmakers have to switch to Ciroc from Stolichnaya when they get drunk before major votes.

Most of the six lawmakers who ended up on Putin's list, which include Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., Mary Landrieu, D-La., Bob Menendez, D-N.J., and Dan Coats, R-Ind., fired off statements ribbing Putin for restricting their non-existent vacation travel in Russia and imaginary bank accounts.

"I guess this means my spring break in Siberia is off, my Gazprom stock is lost, and my secret bank account in Moscow is frozen," McCain wrote in a statement today. "Nonetheless, I will never cease my efforts on behalf of the freedom, independence, and territorial integrity of Ukraine, including Crimea."

Symantec Axes Top Guy: Is that a Good Idea after the Hack of the Decade?

With the most massive hack in US history just a few months ago I'm not sure if it is a good time to fire your CEO.

"It's a jaw-dropping move, especially because Bennett was key to the company's turnaround. I view this as a major step back ...," FBR Capital Markets analyst Daniel Ives said.

Forrester Research analyst Rick Holland said Symantec had been losing market share to nimbler network security software makers such as FireEye Inc, Palo Alto Networks Inc and Checkpoint Systems Inc.

Symantec said it was committed to its target of more than 5 percent organic growth and higher than 30 percent adjusted operating margin by fiscal 2017.

However, BMO Capital analyst Joel Fishbein said it would be difficult for Symantec to achieve 5 percent revenue growth without mergers and acquisitions or divestiture due to a continuing fall in its main PC security and storage businesses.

Part of the problem is that Norton Anti-Virus is a primarily a consumer PC based program and that platform is slowly dying. You don't hear much about tablets or smart phones being hacked as much as PCs are so there really isn't a need for their main product. 

Most corporations would use a different kind of anti-virus product or just go to FireEye for an end-to-end product. I think Symantec really needs to buy out a new era network security firm like FireEye in order for them to stay relevant. 

Also with a look at their site it seems that there are like a 100 different products jumbled together in a mess. Let's say I'm a small business looking to beef up my security after hearing about Target getting hacked. I have no idea where to start or what product I should be looking for. Do I need Risk Automation Suite or NetBackup Appliance 5000 series or what. They seriously need to break these into different groups to make it easier to look at. 

Why do the GOP Not Believe in Climate Change? Yeah it is The Big Government Angle

I have to agree with this assertion of why the GOP does not believe in climate change in such big numbers.

A third interpretation is that political preferences have leaked into the perception of fact. Republicans may conflate the existence of climate change with the need for more government -- more federal research, more federal programs, more intervention in the economy, and more taxes to pay for all of it. Rather than relax their objection to government, maybe it's easier to look for reasons to think that climate change isn't happening, or isn't serious.

Yeah climate change might be happening but all the lies told about it have already clouded the perception of the whole debate. We were told that all of the arctic sea ice would be gone by 2014 and it's still there. We were told about mega-storms and earth-wide calamity if things aren't done right now. Then you have scientists hiding the decline and cooking the books on their own research and the whole thing has been tainted.

You add this to people who are already skeptical of the government doing anything of substance other than shoveling your tax money down a hole. It is any wonder why many Republicans are skeptical about climate change and see it as yet another government hole to pour money down. I mean the Post Office is bankrupt, they can't get a healthcare website to work so why do you think the government can change the climate of the entire earth to make it not be so warm in a 100 years?

It also sounds like another way for the government to control you even more than they already do. It just seems like an inflated issue to try to squeeze more money out of you so Al Gore and his ilk can become rich. If the climate scientists used practical arguments at the beginning instead of scare tactics and calling everyone that disagrees with them anti-science maybe they would have had a chance to convince people. Instead you are dubbed a denier that wants to destroy the earth.

They could have made the argument that renewables and nuclear energy helps ween ourselves off of foreign oil and helps save  middle class Americans money. Now with fracking even that argument seems pointless.

Also the recession did not help matters when we have poor countries begging for billions that the rich countries would have to go deeper into debt to pay. People have just washed their hands of the whole thing and figured paying more tax money to stop what might be bad in the future just doesn't fit into their budget anymore.

New York Attorney General Goes After High Frequency Traders

I guess the era of millisecond trading might be severely curtailed if the New York Attorney General gets his way.


"Rather than curbing the worst threats posed by high-frequency traders, our markets, as structured today, are increasingly too focused on catering to them," he said on Tuesday in a speech at New York Law School.

Schneiderman has begun meetings with the exchanges and alternative trading venues to discuss reforms, according to a person familiar with the situation.

He also looks like he will be going after so-called "dark pools" where big investors have to go in order to buy large amounts of stock to avoid tipping off high frequency traders that inflate prices on them. It would be interesting to see if he can get this done in order to avoid another "flash crash" or other nonsense caused by these traders.

The NSA Listens to Every Phone Call in an Unnamed Foregin Country (cough, Iran, cough, cough)

I wonder if this counts as violating this countries sovereignty or not?

This NSA program dates to 2009 and is called MYSTIC, according to documents obtained by the Post. It is used to intercept conversations in one specific country, but documents show the NSA intends to use it in other countries, the Post said.

It records all conversations across the unidentified foreign country and stores billions of them for 30 days. The program wasn't fully operational until 2011. One of the program's senior managers told the Post that MYSTIC is comparable to a time machine, meaning voices from any call can be replayed without requiring the NSA to identify a person before the conversations are collected.

Hmm, it might be Afghanistan but I have a hard time thinking they make billions of calls every 30 days. In any case people wonder why the US is so hated in the rest of the world. I mean Ahmed's call to his grandmother about buying onions has been intercepted by NSA snoops and pored over for hidden meanings.

Movie Review: Need for Speed: Get it On Redbox

Well I saw this little gem last week and I have to say I was pleasantly surprised how much I enjoyed it. It was kind of a throwback to a fun 80s style movie that made fun of itself. It was actually one of the better video game franchise movies that I have seen in a long time. It wasn't as good as the Resident Evil movies but it was far better then the usual video game movie drek out there.

The movie is pretty much about Jesse from Breaking Bad (Aaron Paul) and a British gal with a weird name (Imogen Poots) going cross country being chased by cops and other fun shenanigans. Poots was super good looking throughout the movie and I hope she becomes something in the US. I mean Imogen Poots can go head to head with Benedict Cumberbatch as the strangest named British imports.

The movie boils down to a small town guy that wants to become big time is visited by an evil guy that ends up killing off his friend and sending him to jail. Then Jesse needs to get revenge and proves his innocence by racing in some big race organized by Monarch played by Michael Keaton. Keaton chews scenery and acts like a madman so well I kind of wanted to see more of him. He mostly does his part as a podcaster that runs the race and doesn't come face to face with any of the characters.

I kind of wanted Jesse to be more animated and fun but he mostly has a blank look in much of the movie and barely speaks. I guess his character is the strong silent type but Aaron Paul is a great actor and I would have loved to see him do more actual emoting. They did give him a little red meat to chew when his friend was killed by the evil bad guy but I would have liked to see more.

However, he did have decent chemistry with Poots and they made a very good road trip couple. However there was a scene where Paul was weaving backwards through traffic that would have been interesting if Poots was checking her phone and not at all freaked out by Paul's driving. It would have showed that ice water was in the veins of the female lead and been pretty funny as well. Instead she freaked out in typical Hollywood fashion. Although there was a nice scene where she was super excited by a Dukes of Hazard style jump over an expressway.

Also one of the main characters of a movie like this was the cars. Lots of $250K Koenigseggs and Lamborghini Huracáns flying around at top speeds. You also get to see them crash and get totaled as well. That should make any car nut cringe in horror. Also much of the film the main characters drive in a stock-looking Mustang that was supposed to be specially made and cost $2 million. I am not a car guy but it just looked kind of generic to me. I wanted them to tool around in a Corvette or a muscle car from the 60s. Instead it was a generic looking Mustang that looked like it needed an alignment adjustment that was the star of the show. It was like watching a Call of Duty: Ghosts movie and seeing the main character using an M1 Garand to fight the bad guys.

In any case if you want to see a fun movie that moves at top speed and don't need all that much acting chops then this is one to Redbox when it comes out. There really isn't much reason to watch it at the theater but it is a fun movie to watch with your buddies with a case of beer.

Is it Time to Switch to T-Mobile? If Softbank Buys Them Out a "Price War" Will Be Launched

I like the idea of a billionaire with a huge Japanese company buying a US company and then fighting for my business.

SoftBank Corp. President Masayoshi Son will start a "massive price war" if U.S. regulators allow his company to purchase T-Mobile US Inc., he said in an interview with PBS's Charlie Rose. 

The billionaire, who bought control of Sprint Corp. last year, said combining the third- and fourth-largest U.S. mobile-phone carriers would give him enough scale to compete against larger operators AT&T Inc. (T) and Verizon Communications Inc. 

Sounds like the kind of changes that will benefit consumers in the short term. They are already buying out contracts so switching to them will hopefully be pain-free.

Um, Yeah I think There is Another Tech Bubble

This article makes quite a bit of sense.

In reality, Facebook can afford to spend 11% of its already sky-high $180 billion market cap in the hope of capturing nearly a billion eyeballs, so the valuation doesn’t have to make sense to the social network. Zuckerberg is just playing with funny money.

The comparison of Verizon’s nearly 100 million subscribers that spend about $70 a month to unmonetized users of a messaging app makes little sense. And Verizon is an established market leader with essentially two competitors while WhatsApp competes with dozens of other messaging apps. The competitive barriers are in now way comparable. 

Yes Facebook paid $19 billion for a messaging app when there are perhaps 5 that I have heard of people using. All of them are very similar and are really not worth $19 billion to tell the truth. I mean I cannot tell much of a difference between Snapchat, Whatsapp, Kik or any of the others. They do different things and have different amounts of installed base but $19 billion worth?

I'm not even sure how Facebook will make that money back because I have serious problems with the advertising model when it comes to free apps. The only time I have ever clicked through a mobile ad was in error. The top of the ad would sometimes stick up onto the regular part of an app that I was using. I ended up uninstalling the app and getting something that was similar.

In any case I think the bubble is in place and something will come along and pop it in the next few years. I thought it would be something like Facebook and Twitter new users finally slowing down but it seems to be inflating right along. But I think sooner rather than later we will have our Pets.com at the Super Bowl moment. Could $19 billion for Whatsapp be it?

Paul Ryan: Please Lay off the Free School Lunches; Almost no one is Against a Free Meal for a Child

From the "own-goal department" of the GOP we have Paul Ryan trying to take food out of the mouth of babes. (The easy liberal counterattack if I have ever seen one)

“The left is making a big mistake here. What they’re offering people is a full stomach and an empty soul. The American people want more than that. This reminds me of a story I heard from Eloise Anderson. She serves in the cabinet of my buddy, Governor Scott Walker. She once met a young boy from a very poor family, and every day at school, he would get a free lunch from a government program. He told Eloise he didn’t want a free lunch. He wanted his own lunch, one in a brown-paper bag just like the other kids. He wanted one, he said, because he knew a kid with a brown-paper bag had someone who cared for him. This is what the left does not understand.”

So taking away that government program will suddenly get this poor kid a sack lunch? There might be a decent chance he will not get to eat and be hungry throughout the day. It just seems heartless to try to deny this kid some sustenance that the parents obviously cannot afford. Plus hungry kids test poorly and don't learn well so that puts this kid even further behind.

Instead of offering someone a full soul but an empty stomach why don't you offer his parents a job instead. This is exactly why I don't understand why the GOP is dead-set against a minimum wage hike. If you pay people $3 more per hour we might have more sack lunches and less free school lunches. McDonalds and Walmart might lose money but I'm sure they have smart managers that can make up the difference.

This rush to cut food stamps and free school lunches just makes the GOP look mean-spirited. The least thing this mighty and rich country can do is to make sure that there are no hungry people within its borders. It is very Christian to feed the hungry and clothe the destitute. But when the government takes on this task all the GOP wants to do is cut these programs. The "full soul, empty stomach" principal is just not something most people will get behind.

Finally, what is the savings that can come from these cuts? How could that money be better spent? I would be willing to bet it just a few billion that can be cut out of some other program. Or it can just be gleaned from reducing fraud, waste, and abuse. Shouldn't feeding people be a good use of ones tax money?

Dems Pull Stunt to Combat Climate Change: Is Hot Air a Greenhouse Gas?

It seems that the Dems are trying to pull a publicity stunt for Climate Change awareness.

"Despite overwhelming scientific evidence and overwhelming public opinion, climate change deniers still exist," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said. "They exist in this country and in this Congress."

The Nevada Democrat made the comments in kicking off the marathon gabfest at 6:27 p.m. on Monday. The final address is expected to end about 15 hours later, at 9 a.m. on Tuesday.

Thirty of the Senate's 53 Democrats, plus the two independents who caucus with them, have signed up to participate. The White House said it would post live tweets during the overnight session under the hashtag #up4climate.

I don't deny that climate change might exist. I mean if the scientists didn't cook the books I would be more apt to believe them. Also it seems their models can't explain why the earth is no longer warming for the past decade. It still might be happening but everything has been obscured.

I just don't want us to give $30 billion in graft money to "combat climate change" so that 3rd world dictators can buy attack helicopters. Any UN "climate change fund" will be riddled with corruption and be like a huge gift to diplomats with their hands out. Also I want the Red Chinese to give more because they are polluting far faster than we are.

Sony Video Game Chief Jack Tretton Resigns; I Wonder Why?

The Playstation 4 looks like it is winning the console wars for this cycle and they get rid of the guy that has been there since 1995?

Under his leadership, Sony's latest videogame console that launched in November, the PlayStation 4, was the top-selling console in the United States in January, according to market research form NPD. Sony said on Tuesday that it has sold more than 6 million PlayStation 4 units worldwide as of March 2.

Um, that seems pretty impressive and is beating the crap out of the PS3 at this time from what I can gather. Sony, seems really good at screwing up just when things are going good. They will probably bring in some dolt that will make some mistake to put the XBone back into parity with the PS4.

Harry Reid Calls His Own Democrats Racist

Talk about friendly fire when you are playing the tired old GOP is racist card.

Adegbile had been rejected, the majority leader explained, because "he stood for civil rights," and "Republicans have done everything they can, for a number of years now, to stop people from voting ... "

So welcome to the club, Sens. Chris Coons, Heidi Heitkamp, Joe Manchin, Robert Casey, John Walsh, Joe Donnelly and Mark Pryor. By disagreeing with Reid, you're all honorary racists, which is the same thing as being a Republican, according to the Democratic defamation machine.

Yup racism charges are so ingrained into the Dem attack that it falls on deaf ears for the most part. 

Tea Party Gets Asses Whipped in Texas

Well it seems that the Eyes of Texas are no longer on some Tea Party challengers.

The show-stealer with national implications was the impressive victory of John Cornyn, the second-ranking Republican in the Senate, over conservative Rep. Steve Stockman and six other Republican challengers. Cornyn, the one-time head of the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee, drew the challenge despite his solid conservative voting record and credentials. He rolled to victory with 61 percent of the overall vote – exceeding a high bar of performance set by many political experts.

At the same time, nine-term Republican Rep. Pete Sessions easily defeated his GOP primary challenger, Katrina Pierson, who was backed by FreedomWorks, a national Tea Party group.

So the Washington insiders beat the crazy Tea Partiers by a pretty wide margin as I expected. I hope Ted Cruz isn't getting too comfortable in his Washington perch right now. It looks more and more like the shutting down the government and threatening a destroying the world economy is turning out to be the Tea Parties Waterloo.

Target Finds a Person to Fall on Her Sword: That Person is Chief Information Officer Beth Jacob

In the words of Metallica: Do my dirty work, scapegoat. Do, do my deeds, for you're the one who's shamed.

Target said Jacob's resignation was her decision. But analysts say Jacob, who brought a series of technology initiatives to Target's stores and its website, was a scapegoat.

"Target has been obviously impacted. People are questioning Target's security. And she was the fall guy," said Walter Loeb, a New York-based independent retail consultant.

It doesn't matter to me if Tony Stark is their computer security person I will not buy anything from Target for any reason. You can't give up 40 million credit and debit card numbers when you pretty much sell the same thing I can buy from Walmart for cheaper.

Radio Shack Circles the Drain: Doesn't Matter to Me

It seems Radio Shack is going the way of Blockbuster as technology makes the store obsolete.

Much of what RadioShack used to stand for, the little esoteric electronics stuff you couldn't get anywhere else, can be (and should be) bought online. The economics of that stuff, as Radio Shack's increasingly death-spiral performance shows, simply doesn't pay. And they don't carry the stuff many of us want. And the sales help -- and this is a big generalization and no disrespect to the many hard working Radio Shack employees -- is hit-and-miss, at best.


I remember Radio Shack was the big bully in the 80s and now they are slowly dying. When Greenberg talks about the Radio Shack employees being poor I would have to agree with him. I remember back in the day when I was a little kid their employees shooing me away from their computers. I wasn't going to hammer the keys or have sticky fingers touching the mouse. I just wanted to interact with the technology that their were selling. The whole ordeal ended up making me against Radio Shack

In fact the only thing I had bought since then was a car charger for my phone when it was nearly dead. I probably could have bought it from Amazon but I needed it that day and Radio Shack was closer than Best Buy. I have never went back since and this was the early 2000s.

It just boils down to tech can be bought cheaper and more conveniently from Amazon. Best Buy is used as Amazon's showroom for tech and can be kept afloat by selling appliances. You still can't drop ship a refrigerator for anything close to a cheap price. But Radio Shack is just an anachronism from an earlier time and needs to go the way of Blockbuster.

Kremlin economic aide Sergei Glazyev Would "Crash" the US Economy if Sanctions are Brought Against Russia

Tough talk Glazyev but our economy is much stronger than you think.

He told the RIA Novosti news agency Russia could stop using dollars for international transactions and create its own payment system using its "wonderful trade and economic relations with our partners in the East and South."

Wait does he mean the Chinese? The Yuan is pegged to the dollar and they have trillions in bonds. If the Russians "crashed" the US financial system it would damage the Red Chinese as well. Also how would this payment system work? You won't be able to convert dollars into rubles? It's not like the rest of the world would stop using dollars because the Russians stop. It would effectively isolate their economy.

Russian firms and banks would also not return loans from American financial institutions, he said.

"An attempt to announce sanctions would end in a crash for the financial system of the United States, which would cause the end of the domination of the United States in the global financial system," he added.

Um, can you say capital flight? The Americans would not be the only ones to pull their money out of Russia. Who knows if the loans of the Red Chinese or the Australians will be the next to be defaulted on. There will be a run on Russian banks that you have never seen before. This would probably collapse these Russian banks and firms as foreign capital will run for the door. I hope the Russians are good at bailing out their banks.

He said that economic sanctions imposed by the European Union would be a "catastrophe" for Europe, saying that Russia could halt gas supplies "which would be beneficial for the Americans" and give the Russian economy a useful "impulse".

This doesn't make sense. It would probably get Europe to increase their buildup of LNG terminals and the natural gas boom in the US will be huge. This would be a great boon for the US economy. Um, thanks Russia you just made one of our big exports even more expensive. Some European nations like Poland will hurt but it won't be a catastrophe for anyone but the Russians. 

Putin Blinks: Rattles the Sabres but the Russian Market Crash May Have Been Too Much

I'm sure Putin is motivated by all sorts of delusions of grandeur but maybe his portfolio (or the portfolios of his ex-KGB cronies) got him to stand down.

Although Putin doesn’t really have much to fear in terms of retribution for making mistakes within his own country, the markets were giving him a different story, as Russia’s MICEX (MICEXINDEXCF.ME) index tumbled a whopping 10.8% yesterday. Recovery in markets abroad, and here in the states (^GSPC, ^DJI), have essentially brought us back to the status quo, something which Zachary Karabell of Envestnet felt was the most likely scenario.

Or conversely maybe he had a massive short trade on and made a quick 10.8% on his billions by essentially using his military to scare the markets. I have a feeling that the MICEX version of the SEC is not as powerful in Putin's Russia so that kind of chicanery might be possible. He probably has money in the US Stock market as well and had a chance to catch the downward move and the recovery as well.

Putin also had a chance to take the temperature of the world while playing the "Great Game" to rebuild a Russian Empire. He pretty much invaded his neighbor using Hitler's Austrian Gambit (I'm protecting ethnic Germans I mean Russians) and all the world did was condemn it in the strongest possible terms.

There were no economic sanctions or aircraft carrier movements by the US. The EU just stamped their feet and did not come to the financial or military aid of the Ukranians. The UN didn't censure him or do much of anything substantial. Putin could have ordered his troops to seize the country and annex it and there would have been no real consequences by the rest of the world.

Now if he is as devious as I think he is, Putin's next plan would be to partition the country using the UN as a tool. His excuse will be "protecting the interests of the Russian minority." Then he creates a satellite of the eastern half of the country with a puppet strongman in place. After all, getting half of a country for free is better than a war of aggression for the whole thing. All the satellite countries but none of that worthless rebuilding that the US has to do all the time.

Russia has loved a buffer zone of countries between it and Europe going back to Peter the Great. So Putin the Great (or Putin the Terrible?) is forming his own in 2014. It is sad that Putin is playing chess in the "Great Game" and the rest of the world is playing Chutes and Ladders.

Dems Might Lose the Senate According to This Poll

It seems that Obama might be a lame duck with two years to go on his second term.

Republicans have a large, 8-point advantage among voters in states with Senate races, according to a new Washington Post/ABC News poll released Tuesday.

Democrats hold a slight edge in the overall generic congressional ballot. But in the key battle for the Senate, Republicans lead the generic ballot by a 50-42 margin in states with a 2014 Senate race.

Republicans need to pick up six seats in November to retake control of the Senate, something that could instantly make President Barack Obama a lame duck president of sorts in his last two years.

Well Obama can still be weak and ineffectual in foreign policy. I wonder if the Dems will be sad that the only real thing to come out of the Obama years is a flawed health insurance law that almost everyone hates.

Movie Review: Pompeii: Avoid It

Well I saw another bad movie this past week. I was actually excited to see this one because I have studied Pompeii since I was a kid and read this extremely good book The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found. I was strait-up disappointed and I think this movie might kill Roman movies for a while. Hopefully, sword and sandal (which is one of my favorite genres) will be kept going if 300: Rise of an Empire kills it this coming weekend. 

So I was really all set to be taken back to AD 79 through the power of movie magic and CGI. Unfortunately I got a lot of Jon Snow from Game of Thrones (Kit Harington) and a very weird looking woman (Emily Browning) and their various travails. We also have Kiefer Sutherland hamming it up as a Roman General turned Senator who wears his armor everywhere for some reason. He also does this hopeless, affected British accent. It goes to show you that Brits can do American accents but almost never the other way around.

The movie for the most part establishes that Jon Snow is the Celt who is the last of some unnamed horse tribe killed off by Kiefer Sutherland and a sinister looking guy that slightly resembles Anthony Weiner. John Snow is the lone survivor and he becomes a gladiator. Hmm I think there was a movie with a better actor in it called the Gladiator that had a similar plot. In fact we even have a scene where he moves up because he is a badass but goes to Pompeii to fight instead of Rome. Oliver Reed's ghost did not appear.

Well Jon Snow eventually gets to Pompeii but on the road he meets up with Browning when her horse breaks his leg. Well Snow is a bad-assed horseman and euthanized the horse making Browning all sympathetic to him. The two actors did not have very much chemistry so it pretty much amounted to there was writing some where in the script that said "John Snow falls in love with Browning, hijinks ensue"

There is some fighting and a black gladiator is introduced played by Adabisi from Oz (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) who meets up with Russell Crowe I mean John Snow. They become friends while boasting how they will kill each other in the ring. I am just so tired of how gladiators in Hollywood are portrayed in such an a-historical manner. They rarely slaughtered one another and were highly trained warriors that cost big money to maintain. They were, in many ways, like MMA fighters (but even more popular) that used deadly weapons. If you owned a Gladiator school you rarely wanted your trained fighters to die in the ring if you could help it. That was the job of criminals and Christians and such not someone that could potentially make you rich. There is no way that a resort city like Pompeii would have had a bunch of fights to the death in their Arena.

In any case the Gladiators are brought to the house of Browning's parents where they are on display for a roman dinner. Of course it wasn't a true Roman dinner which would have been cool to see on the big screen. Instead it was just some background for the two wooden leads to "fall in love" in front of. Also they establish that Sutherland and Browning were an item (kind of) when she was visiting Rome for some reason or another. Jon Snow steals a horse and other nonsense and he is caught and has to fight in some rigged match instead of Sutherland just killing him.

So the next day instead of Jon Snow fighting Adabisi for "hiiis Freeeedom!" they have to fight a bunch of gladiators dressed as Roman soliders in front of a paper-mache menhir with a spiked collar surrounding its top. I swear it got nabbed from a Warhammer Fantasy Khorne diorama. They even had a True Detective-istic swirl on it to make the derivative-ness complete. The whole set just looked awful and stupid and the entire battle scene just looking like it was taken off the cutting room floor of Gladiator. I especially liked the super dull blades that popped up throughout the movie.

Right after the fight is when Vesuvius blows its top and we go from Gladiator to Volcano without Tommy Lee Jones in 5 seconds. The mountain exploding and the disaster scenes were quite good so I can't fault it here. Lots of fleeing Romans and pyroclasts and the little known part where there was a tsunami that was caused when the mountain blew. In this part people run around, Adabisi saves some kid, and there is a hackneyed chariot chase between Sutherland and Jon Snow. We even have a slow motion death of the slave friend of Browning played by Brit actress Jessica Lucas. Um, quick someone tell the director that there weren't only black slaves in Rome. In fact, they were kind of a rare sight because they would have to have come from thousands of miles away.

In any case the acting was wooden and Kit Harington pretty much has only one expression through the whole movie. Browning was a non-factor and I liked her much better in Sucker Punch. In fact she actually looked like a different person in that movie. Someone had to point out it was the same actress. I was like "wait the beautiful girl from Sucker Punch is this emaciated waif?" I immediately thought "I hope it is just Hollywoods "thin-mania" and not heroin or something sinister like that. Well bottom line is if you want Pompeii read that book I sited above and skip this Gladiator retread full of terrible acting and stupid looking fighting.

  


 

Ellen's Oscar Selfie is Priceless

Well it seems this picture broke Twitter for a little while.

The best part is Kevin Spacey making a funny turtle face in the background. Also it seems that half of Jared Leto's face is cut off as well. It is an interesting and candid moment from the Oscars that seemed to go nearly an hour overtime. I think Ellen did a great job as Oscar host.

Also bring back the olden day Oscar setup where the stars sit at tables and can eat and drink. Having them sit in a big auditorium just looks weird and I bet everyone is starving by the time they get to the various parties. I think the Golden Globes have it right. The stars are more relaxed and can have more fun and can get liquored up if they want. For the Oscars you have to have manufactured fun from Ellen to break the tension in the room.