aliens

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Is there life on Jupiter’s moon?

The hunt for alien life just made a pretty big breakthrough.

Unfortunately — or perhaps fortunately — we’re not anticipating flying saucers on the White House lawn anytime soon. Instead, scientists discovered a (relatively) easily-accessible source of hydrogen and oxygen — which together make water, one of the most basic ingredients for life — on one of Jupiter’s moons.

There is already lots and lots of evidence for the existence of both liquid and frozen water in other parts of our solar system. Frozen water is abundant in asteroids. In 2009, huge amounts of frozen water were found on Earth’s moon. Some scientists suggest that Mars’ surface has been shaped by the flow of liquid water, and NASA’s Curiosity rover found frozen water in soil samples on Mars just this year. And back in 2000, the Galileo probe found evidence of water on Jupiter’s moons Ganymede and Europa — and scientists believe that liquid oceans of water are trapped beneath the the moons’ frozen surfaces.

Read More At TheWeek.com

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Springtime for the Military-Industrial Complex

The FT erroneously concludes that the boom-times are over for the military contractors:

The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have been a boon to US contractors. The US has used so many of them in the conflicts that at times they outnumbered the military they supported. But the boom times are coming to an end and military service companies in particular are being squeezed.

Moody’s, the rating agency, expects revenue and margin pressure on defence service companies to become visible soon as the US Department of Defence, the world’s biggest military spender, negotiates tougher terms for contractors, reduces spending on them and brings its troops home from Afghanistan in time to meet the end 2014 deadline set by President Barack Obama.

In Iraq and Afghanistan the top contractor was Kellog, Brown & Root, the engineering and construction services company. It earned $40.8bn during the past decade, while Agility, the logistics company, and DynCorp, which specialises in security, earned $9bn and $7.4bn respectively, according to a US government report.

After a decade of unrivalled prosperity thanks to war and a booming global economy the defence service sector will have to work harder through innovation, as well as lean and well-focused management, to prosper.

In a word, nope. What cuts? The Obama budget aims to increase military expenditures far-above their already-puffed-up status quo:

Offering a military budget designed to head off charges that he’s weak on defense, President Obama unveiled a Pentagon spending plan that fails to cut any major procurement programs and calls for spending $36 billion more on the military in 2017 than it will spend this year.

Here’s what Obama intends to increase (and what Romney, of course, intends to increase more):

Yeah, America is spending more today drone-striking American citizens in Yemen, drone-surveilling Mexican drug lords and “turning our attention to the vast potential of the Asia-Pacific region” than she was during the cold war when a hostile superpower had thousands of nukes pointing at her.

Military contractors have nothing to fear. Whether it is the Pacific buildup to contain Chinese ambition, or drone strikes in the horn of Africa or Pakistan, or the completely-failed drug war, or using the ghost of Kony to establish a toehold in Africa to compete with China for African minerals, or an attempted deposition of Bashar Assad or Egypt’s new Islamist regime, or bombing Iran’s uranium-enrichment facilities, or a conflict over mineral rights in the Arctic, or (as Paul Krugman desires — and what the heck, it’s 2012, why not?) an alien invasion, or a new global conflict arising out of a global economic reset, it’s springtime for the military contractors. It’s everyone else who should be worried.

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Krugman on Why the Eurozone is in Big Trouble

I’ve been quite explicit about my disagreement with Paul Krugman. His view is that the main problem in America’s economy is a lack of demand that could easily be reversed by a big enough fiscal stimulus. My view is that lowered demand merely reflects underlying structural problems, very often at a global or systemic level. Big stimuli would make the problems go away for a few months or years, only to re-emerge at a later date if the underlying causes aren’t addressed (as I discussed in more depth here).

But he’s definitely onto something (as opposed to on something) today. Here’s a Venn diagram of the road ahead for Europe:


The real question is whether or not Professor Krugman would include a fake alien invasion (to create spending and raise demand) in the “things that might actually work” category.

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Krugman Calls For Alien Invasion?

Last week, Keynesian inquisitor-extraordinaire Paul Krugman shot off the bizarre suggestion that “historically low-inflation” called for more monetary easing. I debunked the notion of historically low inflation here. Alas, Krugman has now not only made the vague suggestion that another war could potentially be good for the economy, but has taken a step into the absurd, by suggesting that what we really need is an alien invasion. Zecharia Sitchin would be proud. From TIME:

According to the New York Times columnist and Nobel Prize laureate, you know what would end the economic slump in 18 months? Aliens.

Paul Krugman probably feels like an alien himself these days, considering Washington is completely ignoring his unwavering arguments for more fiscal stimulus as President Obama and Congressional Republicans try to out-deficit-reduce each other. So maybe that’s why Krugman has aliens on the brain.

While talking off the cuff on Fareed Zakaria’s GPS program (Zakaria is also a TIME Magazine contributor), Krugman conjectured about what would happen if aliens landed on earth and attacked us.

“If we discovered that space aliens were planning to attack, and we needed a massive build-up to counter the space alien threat, and inflation and budget deficits took secondary place to that, this slump would be over in 18 months,” Krugman says, referencing an episode of The Twilight Zone in which an alien threat was manufactured to bring about world peace.

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