Go see "Charlie Wilson's War"

Great movie. Good dialog, funny bits, cast of 1000's, good guys win in the end. Good acting, follows the book closely enough. Charlie Wilson is a hard partying, hard drinking, trouble-getting-into Texas Congressman with a staff composed entirely of hot women. An outrageous rich Texas society woman gets Charlie into Pakistan, and the Paki's helicopter Charlie up to an Afghan refugee camp. The Afghan's misery and willingness to fight the Soviets wins Charlie's heart. Back in DC he hooks up with an old line CIA case officer, Gust Ava-something-or-other. Unlike most CIA troops, Gust hates communists and wants to fight them. Charlie gets the appropriations thru Congress, Gust gets the arms into Afghanistan, and the Russians start taking hits. Good scenes of Afghanis packing ultra modern guided missiles on muleback, US Congressmen in dark suits and dark glasses walking thru refugee camps full of camels, refugees in native dress, burning tires, tents, jeeps, kids.
One downer. The sound men have muddled the sound track and a lot of the funnier bits of dialog cannot be heard over the score and the sound effects. Plus the actors mumble.
Go and see it. This is one of the few decent movies to come out of Hollywood.

The glass is only half full according to NPR

The clock radio was play NPR this morning, and they had a long piece on President Bush's State pf the Union address. They picked over every paragraph, and rephrased it in negative terms. "The war is Iraq is going better" became "It has a long way to go". "The Iraq parliament passed the debaathification law" became "They haven't passed an oil law". And on, and on...
I used to think NPR was reasonably non partisan. That seems to be fading. This broadcast was a democratic party hit piece.

President Bush's State of the Union address

I watched it. Not bad, I stayed awake to the end. Bush spoke well. The content of the speech was a long long laundry list of things the Congress oughta do. Most of them were OK bu me. He said "future" earmarks in committee reports will NOT be honored. The congress critters will have to actually get the pork into the appropriations bill and get it voted on and signed, as opposed to the current system where the administration works from the committee report, a behind the scenes document the no one has seen.
Too bad "future" pork means next year's pork, when Bush will be out of office. I wish he had said "all earmarks starting with the ones in the 07 omnibus spending bill".

How smart are bankers, really?

Brian Wesbury writing on the Wall St Journal's op-ed page said "Beneath every dollar of counterpary risk, and every swap, or leveraged loan is a real economic asset." Oh really? Let's parse that out. "Real economic asset" should be something like a house, a car, a factory, an airliner, something physical that can be repossessed and sold. Then there are "near real economic assets" like paper money, stocks and bonds. Issued by powerful governments or corporations, the near real stuff depends upon the strength of the issuer rather than intrinsic value. Both real and near real assets are reasonable things to buy and sell.
Then we come to "securitized mortgage bonds". Are these real? A mortgage is real, the mortgage holder can seize the property if the borrower defaults. The owners of securitized mortgage bonds don't get that right. Are they backed by powerful corporations? No way, they are "off the books" and offered by "special investment vehicles". In short, the "sub prime mortgage crisis" roiling Wall St is the trading of unreal securities. Investors wised up last summer and stopped buying them.
Brian Westbury is the chief economist for First Trust Portfolios, L.P. His faulty understanding of the economy seems to be wide spread on Wall St. Investors with First Trust are in for a bad time in the very near future.

Falling Satellites

News is full of stories about a US reconnaissance satellite about to de orbit. It's fairly big and they have no prediction about where and when it will actually reentry. Much of the usual "sky-is-falling" talk. Vermont Public Radio compared the incident with the Skylab re entry and another US satellite reentry. VPR made no mention of the Soviet nuclear powered radar ocean reconnaissance satellite that crashed in northern Canada twenty odd years ago, complete with fallout from the smashed nuclear reactor. I guess they don't want to accuse the peaceful Soviets of flying military recon satellites, even when the Soviets have been out of business for better than a decade.
For that matter, VPR always describes the spacecraft as "spy satellites" rather than "photo recon satellites". Spying is illegal, and spies get executed. Reconnaissance is a legal operation of war or peace time.

The Cuckoo's Egg gets real.

Back in the late 1980's Clifford Stoll was a computer systems admin at UC Berkeley. Small amounts of University CPU time were un accounted for. In running down the discrepancy Stoll discovered that he had a hacker logging into his Unix machine and fishing around for passwords and classified data. After a year or more or cat and mouse computer games, Stoll localized the hacker to an apartment in Hannover West Germany. He had the telephone number, the street address, the name of the hacker. West German police wanted to bust said hacker, but West German law was very protective about civil liberties. The West German cops said they needed a complaint from the Americans before they could arrest the hacker since breaking into American computers was not a crime in West Germany.
Stoll tried every thing he could over a course of months to get the FBI interested in the case. No luck. The Bureau was into its stupid phase.
Now, twenty years later, the Americans are going to do something about hackers. About time. According the the Wash Post, American intelligence agencies will be watching the net for hackers breaking into US government computers.
More effective would be to ban the use of Windows for all government work due to rediculous vulnerability.

Peggy Noonan says Bush destroyed Republican Party

Op ed piece in the Wall St Journal here. Peggy really unloads on Bush. Lists Iraq, spending, growth of government and immigration. She feels Bush deliberately went against the desires of the party members, leading to demoralization and back biting.
I suppose. On the other hand, I still feel Bush did right by going into Iraq after 9/11. The other course of action was to retreat to Fortress America, and let Al Queda, the Taliban, Hamas, and other terrorists consolidate their bases in the middle east. Bush decided to take the war to the enemy by occupying the enemy's downtown. And he has stuck to his guns despite endless attacks by the media, the CIA, State Dept, and the armed forces bureaucracy.
The offensive in Iraq gave us freedom from terrorist attacks on US soil since 9/11. Why? Simple, offer young jehadi's the choice of combat in friendly Iraq, where they can speak the language and can blend in, or boarding an airliner bound for the great Satan, where they stick up like sore thumbs and might get lynched if their cover fails. Even young jehadi's are smart enough to figure the odds on that choice.