What's the difference between a database and the circular file?

What's-his-face Obama's press secretary was on this morning explaining about how they let the leg bomber on the plane. The government has a 500,000 name data base containing derogatory information. The leg bomber's father called the US embassy to warn us about his son's radicalization. The embassy entered the leg bomber's name into the 500,000 name data base. This ain't much different from putting the name into the circular file.

Words of the Weasel Part XIII

Mitigation. When something goes wrong we don't fix the problem, we mitigate it. We create a "mitigation plan" . Which looks real good in the cover-your-ass file after the disaster. The Sunday pundits were grilling Janet Nepoliotano about the leg bomber this morning. She explained the government had a mitigation plan and exercised it. Which is easier to say than to explain how that turkey got on the plane with a bomb strapped to his leg.

Leg Bomber

The Christmas day story of a Nigerian attempting to bring down a Northwest Airlines flight with a bomb strapped to his leg is going around. Question. Would the leg bomb have enough power to destroy a Boeing airliner?
By the way, I hope the burns the leg bomber received hurt a lot.

Congressmen used to vote their district

Used to be, Congressmen always voted their district. Any issue which the voters in the district cared about, the Congressman would vote the way his voters wanted him to.
Somehow that is gone this year. The districts are against Obamacare by better than 50% (depends whose poll you read, but they all show the voters don't like Obamacare). Yet we have the Senate voting Obamacare in by 60%, a supermajority.
What are those Senators thinking? Can they believe their district doesn't care? Or that the district won't remember which way they voted come next November? Or that currying favor with the Democratic Congressional leadership is more important than what the district thinks?
It's a puzzler. Congress didn't used to work this way. I think the voters will remember in November this time. Too bad they won't be able to repeal Obamacare then. Firstly you can't take goodies away from people. Second, Obama would veto a repeal bill. So we are stuck with it.

Why ObamaCare is a disaster.

The Senate voted for cloture on the ObamaCare bill in the wee hours of the morning. That required 60 votes. Actual passage of the bill only requires 51, so passage looks highly likely. (Would you believe a done deal?)
Right now the United States spends twice as much on health care as any other country in the world. US public health is not the best in the world, a number of other countries have greater life expectancy and lower infant mortality than we do. In short we are wasting vast sums of money on health care.
Obamacare will make tens of millions more eligible for medical benefits. This will pour another god awful amount of money into health care.
America cannot afford today's health care costs. 18% of GNP gets poured down the health care rathole. Obamacare will jack that up a lot.
Obamacare does nothing for the malpractice scams that enrich lawyers, does nothing to allow interstate sale of health insurance. and does nothing to permit importation of cheaper prescription drugs.
Obamacare is going to pay for itself by taxing healthcare. This ain't gonna work.
In short, the costs of Obamacare are great enough to drag the United States into a permanent recession. Kind of like the lost decade in Japan.
Start tightening your belts folks, life is gonna get a lot worse.

Dark Matter "discovered"? part II

Ars Technica has a much better write up of the dark matter experiment than the New York Times.

SAAB to die

GM will shut down SAAB. A pity, the cars were cool. They had some buyers for the company. You would think GM would do better by giving SAAB away, selling it for $1. Turn SAAB over to anyone. If it flies wonderful. If it goes bankrupt at least it isn't GM's fault. Just shutting SAAB down makes it all GM's fault, and is just as expensive as giving it away.
On the other hand, GM senior management has been brain dead for decades. Looks like the new guy (good old whats-his-face) is no smarter than dearly departed Waggoner or Henderson.