Archive for the 'fabrications' Category

Student of history

Friday, January 29th, 2010

As with the history of the Berlin Airlift, the history of the East-meets-West, and that of D-Day, so we have the history of the recent Supreme Court decision, Citizens United. Time after time President Obama or his team get their history wrong. What is the reason? (a) laziness; (b) incompetence; (c) thinking the facts don’t matter; (d) thinking Americans are too stupid to notice; (e) all of the above; (f) none of the above?

The perils of lying to your supporters

Saturday, January 9th, 2010

In politics, as in sports and life, it is easier to see and be outraged by the lies and dirty tricks of the other team, rather than those of your own. That’s natural. But there are sometimes moments when it becomes painfully obvious that your own team has committed an outrageous wrong. Often these moments occur when the nature of the lie threatens to undermine the reason that you put faith and trust in the guy leading your team, and you suddenly have the sense that you’ve been played for a sucker all along.

President Bush had several such moments. His nomination of the clearly underqualified Harriet Miers (she can’t write!) was one. It (a) smacked of cronyism, and (b) seemed to validate a key contention of the other team, that George Bush was not too bright The nomination of Miers tended to undermine the defenses of Bush that he might be tongue-tied, but he was smart enough and a straight shooter. Another such moment was Bush’s endorsement of a very unpopular and unenforceable-by-design immigration bill, in language that was deeply offensive to conservatives.

President Obama has had episodes that approached these Bush experiences, at least in our opinion. They included his inanimate response to the brutality in Iran and his unemotional responses in the matters of Hasan and the undiebomber. Obama’s defenders took the position that his cool responses showed a man of deep strategy, instead of a guy who didn’t get it. Those debates remain undecided in political terms to this day. But his repudiation of a campaign pledge of openness and transparency is another matter. Liberals wanted an end to what they saw as the obfuscation, secrecy and outright lies of the Bush administration, and Obama offered himself as the cure, promising unparalleled openness and transparency on numerous occasions. Then he betrayed his supporters. This was one reaction:

It remains to be seen what will be the fallout to the Obama administration of repudiating his pledge of transparency and accountability to his supporters. Maybe very little. Or maybe it will soon be his press secretary’s turn to get thrown under the bus — an Obama trademark in such uncomfortable moments.

Santa’s bag was only half full

Friday, December 25th, 2009

Coal in your stocking courtesy of the double-counting in the Reid bill:

CBO and the staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) estimated that the PPACA, incorporating the manager’s amendment, would reduce Part A outlays by $245 billion and increase HI revenues by $113 billion during the 2010-2019 period. Those changes would increase the trust fund’s balances sufficiently to postpone exhaustion for several years.

However, the improvement in Medicare’s finances would not be matched by a corresponding improvement in the federal government’s overall finances. CBO and JCT estimated that the PPACA as amended would add more than $400 billion ($245 billion + $113 billion + interest) to the balance of the HI trust fund by 2019, while reducing federal budget deficits by a total of $132 billion by 2019.

The reductions in projected Part A outlays and increases in projected HI revenues would significantly raise balances in the HI trust fund and create the appearance that significant additional resources had been set aside to pay for future Medicare benefits. However, the additional savings by the government as a whole — which represent the true increase in the ability to pay for future Medicare benefits or other programs — would be a good deal smaller.

The key point is that the savings to the HI trust fund under the PPACA would be received by the government only once, so they cannot be set aside to pay for future Medicare spending and, at the same time, pay for current spending on other parts of the legislation or on other programs.

So people have begun to notice that the Reid bill double-counted revenues to make the erroneous claim that Medicare would be helped and the Federal budget deficit reduced, when only one of those things could be true. But by the time people noticed, the deal was done and everyone had left town.

At the end of the day, who cares? It’s less than a trillion dollars so it’s pretty much rounding error. And it’s small beer compared to some of the antics that have gone on over this past year. So Merry Christmas and let’s hope 2010 is an improvement.

It would be funny but…

Monday, December 21st, 2009

ABC reports that a mystery Senator apparently is going to get a payoff for voting for the healthcare bill to the tune of $100 million for a hospital facility (later to be named for the Senator of course).

APPROPRIATION. — There are authorized to be appropriated, and there are appropriated to the Department of Health and Human Services, $100,000,000 for fiscal year 2010, to remain available for obligation until September 30, 2011, to be used for debt service on, or direct construction or renovation of, a health care facility that provides research, inpatient tertiary care, or outpatient clinical services. Such facility shall be affiliated with an academic health center at a public research university in the United States that contains a State’s sole public academic medical and dental school.” (Manager’s Amendment To H.R. 3590, Pg. 328)

Here’s the funny part. For some reason the Senator in question apparently doesn’t want it known that he is taking a payoff, or at least that’s the way it looks to us from the elaborate excuse coming from Democratic staffers: “Democratic staffers say there are 11 states with medical schools that could qualify for the funding (we’re still waiting for the list). The Secretary of HHS would decide who gets a piece of the $100,000,000 pie.” Yeah, right. HT: Powerline

On the Origin of Specious

Friday, December 11th, 2009

Willis Eschenbach has been digging into the temperature data from Darwin Airport that indicate radical, accelerating AGW. He believes the books have been cooked and the hockey stick is specious:

Before getting homogenized, temperatures in Darwin were falling at 0.7 Celcius per century … but after the homogenization, they were warming at 1.2 Celcius per century. And the adjustment that they made was over two degrees per century…when those guys “adjust”, they don’t mess around. And the adjustment is an odd shape, with the adjustment first going stepwise, then climbing roughly to stop at 2.4C…

People who say that “Climategate was only about scientists behaving badly, but the data is OK” are wrong. At least one part of the data is bad, too. The Smoking Gun for that statement is at Darwin Zero.

One thing seems pretty clear in the ClimateGate debate — the credibility of one side or the other will be seriously impaired at the end of all this. HT’s: Ace, Volokh

YAD061 — a tree that will live in infamy

Tuesday, December 8th, 2009

Telegraph:

the CRU studies were based on cherry-picking hundreds of Siberian samples only to leave those that showed the picture that was wanted. Other studies based on similar data had clearly shown the Medieval Warm Period as hotter than today. Indeed only the evidence from one tree, YADO61, seemed to show a “hockey stick” pattern, and it was this, in light of the extraordinary reverence given to the CRU’s studies, which led McIntyre to dub it “the most influential tree in the world”.

But more dramatic still has been the new evidence from the CRU’s leaked documents, showing just how the evidence was finally rigged. The most quoted remark in those emails has been one from Prof Jones in 1999, reporting that he had used “Mike [Mann]‘s Nature trick of adding in the real temps” to “Keith’s” graph, in order to “hide the decline”. Invariably this has been quoted out of context. Its true significance, we can now see, is that what they intended to hide was the awkward fact that, apart from that one tree, the Yamal data showed temperatures not having risen in the late 20th century but declining…

these incriminating documents relate to are not just any group of scientists. Professor Philip Jones of the CRU, his colleague Dr Keith Briffa, the US computer modeller Dr Michael Mann, of “hockey stick” fame, and several more make up a tightly-knit group who have been right at the centre of the last two reports of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). On their account, as we shall see at this week’s Copenhagen conference, the world faces by far the largest bill proposed by any group of politicians in history, amounting to many trillions of dollars.

You’d think that such egregious behavior would have been exposed long before this. The elimination of the Medieval Warm Period by these fraudsters was in its way a cry for help, one that went mostly unheeded until now.

Memorable drivel

Tuesday, December 8th, 2009

The AP reports utter nonsense:

It dawned with the warmest winter on record in the United States. And when the sun sets this New Year’s Eve, the decade of the 2000s will end as the warmest ever on global temperature charts. Warmer still, scientists say, lies ahead…all people everywhere under that warming sun faced one threat together: the buildup of greenhouse gases, the rise in temperatures, the danger of a shifting climate, of drought, weather extremes and encroaching seas, of untold damage to the world humanity has created for itself over millennia…

Nasheed’s tiny homeland, a sprinkling of low-lying islands in the Indian Ocean, will be one of the earliest victims of seas rising from heat expansion and melting glaciers. On remote islets of Papua New Guinea, on Pacific atolls, on bleak Arctic shores, other coastal peoples in the 2000s were already making plans, packing up, seeking shelter.

The warming seas were growing more acid, too, from absorbing carbon dioxide, the biggest greenhouse gas in an overloaded atmosphere. Together, warmer waters and acidity will kill coral reefs and imperil other marine life — from plankton at the bottom of the food chain, to starfish and crabs, mussels and sea urchins.

Over the decade’s first nine years, global temperatures averaged 0.6 degrees Celsius (1.1 degrees F) higher than the 1951-1980 average, NASA reported. And temperatures rose faster in the far north than anyplace else on Earth.

The decade’s final three summers melted Arctic sea ice more than ever before in modern times. Greenland’s gargantuan ice cap was pouring 3 percent more meltwater into the sea each year. Every summer’s thaw reached deeper into the Arctic permafrost, threatening to unlock vast amounts of methane, a global-warming gas…More methane escaping the tundra meant more warming, more thawing, more methane released.

At the bottom of the world, late in the decade, International Polar Year research found that Antarctica, too, was warming. Floating ice shelves fringing its coast weakened, some breaking away, allowing the glaciers behind them to push ice faster into the rising oceans.

On six continents the glaciers retreated through the 2000s, shrinking future water sources for countless millions of Indians, Chinese, South Americans. The great lakes of Africa were shrinking, too, from higher temperatures, evaporation and drought. Across the temperate zones, flowers bloomed earlier, lakes froze later, bark beetles bored their destructive way northward through warmer forests. In the Arctic, surprised Eskimos spotted the red breasts of southern robins. In the 2000s, all this was happening faster than anticipated

The only problem with the article is that everyone now knows that since 1998 there has been no warming at all.

What’s wrong with this picture?

Monday, December 7th, 2009

We agree that if the chart above is accurate, some anomalous warming has been taking place on earth recently. Certainly the hockey stick is alarming. But perhaps what should have been more alarming is the disappearance of the Medieval Warm Period from roughly 900-1300, when temperatures were several dregrees warmer than they are today. For example, it was warm enough and the seas were sufficiently ice-free in about 1000 AD that Leif Eriksson was able to sail to Newfoundland, which later became impossible again. Marc Sheppard has much more on this and related topics in the American Thinker.

Clear and concise words on the AGW controversy

Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009

MIT professor of meteorology Richard Lindzen has a few well-chosen words on global warming. The article should be read in its entirety. WSJ:

Claims that climate change is accelerating are bizarre. There is general support for the assertion that GATA has increased about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit since the middle of the 19th century. The quality of the data is poor, though, and because the changes are small, it is easy to nudge such data a few tenths of a degree in any direction. Several of the emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) that have caused such a public ruckus dealt with how to do this so as to maximize apparent changes.

The general support for warming is based not so much on the quality of the data, but rather on the fact that there was a little ice age from about the 15th to the 19th century. Thus it is not surprising that temperatures should increase as we emerged from this episode. At the same time that we were emerging from the little ice age, the industrial era began, and this was accompanied by increasing emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2, methane and nitrous oxide. CO2 is the most prominent of these, and it is again generally accepted that it has increased by about 30%…Even a doubling of CO2 would only upset the original balance between incoming and outgoing radiation by about 2%. This is essentially what is called “climate forcing.” There is general agreement on the above findings…

The main statement publicized after the last IPCC Scientific Assessment two years ago was that it was likely that most of the warming since 1957 (a point of anomalous cold) was due to man. This claim was based on the weak argument that the current models used by the IPCC couldn’t reproduce the warming from about 1978 to 1998 without some forcing, and that the only forcing that they could think of was man. Even this argument assumes that these models adequately deal with natural internal variability—that is, such naturally occurring cycles as El Nino, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, etc.

Yet articles from major modeling centers acknowledged that the failure of these models to anticipate the absence of warming for the past dozen years was due to the failure of these models to account for this natural internal variability. Thus even the basis for the weak IPCC argument for anthropogenic climate change was shown to be false. Of course, none of the articles stressed this…

even if the IPCC’s iconic statement were correct, it still would not be cause for alarm. After all we are still talking about tenths of a degree for over 75% of the climate forcing associated with a doubling of CO2. The potential (and only the potential) for alarm enters with the issue of climate sensitivity—which refers to the change that a doubling of CO2 will produce in GATA. It is generally accepted that a doubling of CO2 will only produce a change of about two degrees Fahrenheit if all else is held constant. This is unlikely to be much to worry about. Yet current climate models predict much higher sensitivities. They do so because in these models, the main greenhouse substances (water vapor and clouds) act to amplify anything that CO2 does. This is referred to as positive feedback…

The notion that the earth’s climate is dominated by positive feedbacks is intuitively implausible, and the history of the earth’s climate offers some guidance on this matter. About 2.5 billion years ago, the sun was 20%-30% less bright than now (compare this with the 2% perturbation that a doubling of CO2 would produce), and yet the evidence is that the oceans were unfrozen at the time, and that temperatures might not have been very different from today’s. Carl Sagan in the 1970s referred to this as the “Early Faint Sun Paradox.”

For more than 30 years there have been attempts to resolve the paradox with greenhouse gases. Some have suggested CO2—but the amount needed was thousands of times greater than present levels and incompatible with geological evidence. Methane also proved unlikely. It turns out that increased thin cirrus cloud coverage in the tropics readily resolves the paradox—but only if the clouds constitute a negative feedback. In present terms this means that they would diminish rather than enhance the impact of CO2.

It is interesting to remember that science has always had witch doctors, political hacks, and outright frauds. Clarice Feldman has a piece on the left-wing harmonic convergence in the fraud that is anthropogenic global warming. (The firm Fenton Communications, which we’ve noted in passing previously, is part of the nexus.) Bruce Walker discusses the egregious Trofim Lysenko. The main difference between the fraudsters of yesterday and those of today would seem to be that the paychecks now are much larger, and the intended power-grab more dangerous than in ages past.

Is it science or is it Enron?

Monday, November 30th, 2009

The East Anglia epicenter of AGW alarmism is even worse than you might have thought. Times:

Scientists at the University of East Anglia have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based. It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years.

The UEA’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was forced to reveal the loss following requests for the data under Freedom of Information legislation. The data were gathered from weather stations around the world and then adjusted to take account of variables in the way they were collected. The revised figures were kept, but the originals — stored on paper and magnetic tape — were dumped to save space when the CRU moved to a new building.

So they threw away the actual data and kept the cooked books. Does that sound like science or does it sound like Enron? Would you want to spend a trillion dollars based on this? HT: Roger Simon

(BTW, based on the sequence of data requests and data purges and the large amounts of money involved in perpetuating the AGW scam, we won’t be surprised if charges of criminal or civil fraud are ultimately filed in this case.)

Anatomy of AGW fraud

Monday, November 30th, 2009

The East Anglia CRU was apparently the epicenter of AGW alarmism. Christopher Booker in the Telegraph recounts the scandal that has almost resulted in the world’s kleptocracies picking the pockets of American taxpayers to the tune of trillions of dollars:

The reason why even the Guardian’s George Monbiot has expressed total shock and dismay at the picture revealed by the documents is that their authors are not just any old bunch of academics. Their importance cannot be overestimated, What we are looking at here is the small group of scientists who have for years been more influential in driving the worldwide alarm over global warming than any others, not least through the role they play at the heart of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Professor Philip Jones, the CRU’s director, is in charge of the two key sets of data used by the IPCC to draw up its reports. Through its link to the Hadley Centre, part of the UK Met Office, which selects most of the IPCC’s key scientific contributors, his global temperature record is the most important of the four sets of temperature data on which the IPCC and governments rely – not least for their predictions that the world will warm to catastrophic levels unless trillions of dollars are spent to avert it.

Dr Jones is also a key part of the closely knit group of American and British scientists responsible for promoting that picture of world temperatures conveyed by Michael Mann’s “hockey stick” graph which 10 years ago turned climate history on its head by showing that, after 1,000 years of decline, global temperatures have recently shot up to their highest level in recorded history.

Given star billing by the IPCC, not least for the way it appeared to eliminate the long-accepted Mediaeval Warm Period when temperatures were higher they are today, the graph became the central icon of the entire man-made global warming movement.

Since 2003, however, when the statistical methods used to create the “hockey stick” were first exposed as fundamentally flawed by an expert Canadian statistician Steve McIntyre, an increasingly heated battle has been raging between Mann’s supporters, calling themselves “the Hockey Team”, and McIntyre and his own allies, as they have ever more devastatingly called into question the entire statistical basis on which the IPCC and CRU construct their case.

This is an incredible scandal, and not one red cent of the taxpayers’ money should be spent in furtherance of this hoax. However, since America is currently governed by a clueless college professor (who is apparently entirely untroubled that his enablers are thugs), keep a close eye on your wallet.

Remember when deniers were traitors?

Wednesday, November 25th, 2009

We originally posted this back in June, but it seems relevant again, given the recent events in East Anglia. As we said at that time, cap and trade is a solution that doesn’t work for a problem that doesn’t exist. Yet worthies like Paul Krugman are vehemently for cap and trade and find “treason” among the global warming “deniers”:

the House passed the Waxman-Markey climate-change bill. In political terms, it was a remarkable achievement. But 212 representatives voted no…as I watched the deniers make their arguments, I couldn’t help thinking that I was watching a form of treason — treason against the planet.

To fully appreciate the irresponsibility and immorality of climate-change denial, you need to know about the grim turn taken by the latest climate research. The fact is that the planet is changing faster than even pessimists expected: ice caps are shrinking, arid zones spreading, at a terrifying rate. And according to a number of recent studies, catastrophe — a rise in temperature so large as to be almost unthinkable — can no longer be considered a mere possibility. It is, instead, the most likely outcome if we continue along our present course…

researchers at M.I.T., who were previously predicting a temperature rise of a little more than 4 degrees by the end of this century, are now predicting a rise of more than 9 degrees. Why? Global greenhouse gas emissions are rising faster than expected; some mitigating factors, like absorption of carbon dioxide by the oceans, are turning out to be weaker than hoped; and there’s growing evidence that climate change is self-reinforcing — that, for example, rising temperatures will cause some arctic tundra to defrost, releasing even more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Temperature increases on the scale predicted by the M.I.T. researchers and others would create huge disruptions in our lives and our economy. As a recent authoritative U.S. government report points out, by the end of this century New Hampshire may well have the climate of North Carolina today…

Gosh! Other government reports, suppressed by the government, draw very different conclusions. And it certainly seems that global cooling has been going on for some time, likely as a result of solar activity. For the record, we’re skeptical of AGM because an increase of 100ppm in CO2 causing such catastrophic problems just doesn’t pass the test of common sense, in our opinion. Indeed, it has been argued that increases in CO2 are an effect of rising temperatures, not the cause. We could be wrong of course, but Krugman’s rather hysterical tone doesn’t help the hypothesis he’s trying to sell.

Oh, what the heck, we give up. Perhaps we should just take the advice of Paul Krugman and stop being “deniers” and “traitors” — and perhaps implement this from Tom Friedman: “A simple, straightforward carbon tax would have made much more sense than this Rube Goldberg contraption. It is pathetic…It stinks. It’s a mess. I detest it. Now let’s get it passed in the Senate and make it law.” What impels these men to such righteous fervor, and to such apparent hysteria at dissent?

For the record

Wednesday, November 25th, 2009

The NYT puts a stake in the ground (HT: American Thinker):

A thick file of private emails and unpublished documents generated by an array of climate scientists over 13 years was obtained by a hacker from a British university climate research center and has since spread widely across the Internet starting Thursday afternoon.

Before they propagated, the purloined documents, nearly 200 megabytes in all, were uploaded surreptitiously on Tuesday to a server supporting the global warming Web site realclimate.org, along with a draft mock post, said Gavin Schmidt, a NASA climate scientist managing that blog. He pulled the plug before the fake post was published.

I have a story in The Times on the incident and its repercussions, which continue to unfold. But there’s much more to explore, of course (including several references to me). The documents appear to have been acquired illegally and contain all manner of private information and statements that were never intended for the public eye, so they won’t be posted here.

The UK Telegraph has a different approach to the matter. For what it’s worth, we think it is more likely that there was a whistleblower involved in this episode than not. Finally, the Times not publishing information “never intended for the public eye” in this case makes us think of the Pentagon Papers and the NSA pseudo-scandal, among other stories. Interesting editorial choices.

Numbers, numbers

Friday, October 30th, 2009

Like so many other wasteful and inefficient government programs, cash for clunkers was apparently an expensive program — $24,000 in government spending per car (actually even more if the resale value of the destroyed “clunker” is added to the total). CNN:

The Cash for Clunkers program gave car buyers rebates of up to $4,500 if they traded in less fuel-efficient vehicles for new vehicles that met certain fuel economy requirements. A total of $3 billion was allotted for those rebates.

The average rebate was $4,000. But the overwhelming majority of sales would have taken place anyway at some time in the last half of 2009, according to Edmunds.com. That means the government ended up spending about $24,000 each for those 125,000 additional vehicle sales.

And that’s not all when it comes to crazy numbers from government spending. AP: “The government’s first accounting of jobs tied to the $787 billion stimulus program claimed more than 30,000 positions paid for with recovery money. But that figure is overstated by least 5,000 jobs.” What’s even more ridiculous than the misstatement of job creation is that 25,000 jobs were the result of a $787 billion program. What a waste.

Devolving

Saturday, August 15th, 2009

The Secretary of State was in Nigeria and appears to have said that we have crooked elections in the United States because high government officials manipulate the vote on behalf of their relatives. AP:

“Our democracy is still evolving,” Clinton said. “You know we had some problems in some of our presidential elections. As you may remember, in 2000 our presidential election came down to one state where the brother of one of the men running for president was governor of the state. So we have our problems too.”

Maybe Hillary Clinton should stick to channeling her husband.

Jack Risko biography and Dinocrat contact information

Tuesday, February 10th, 2004

Google profile:

Jack Risko is President and CEO of Windstar Capital Advisors LLC, a firm specializing in managing, advising and investing in both growth companies and companies facing restructuring issues. He is also Chairman and CEO of AeroTrade Holdings LLC, a firm specializing in the sales, trading, and leasing of CFM56 and JT8D aircraft engines.

As a Turnaround and Growth CEO, Mr. Risko has twice bought unprofitable companies, turned them around, and increased sales 3-4x.

Accomplishments at NAC

Prior to our acquisition, NAC was an unprofitable company that specialized in mature aircraft engine product lines. Within 30 days of our closing the deal to purchase the company in 1995, NAC was mistakenly accused of being in violation of US Department of Defense quality regulations. This effectively halted the delivery of one third of NAC’s sales, which were subject to a government contract. That event caused a grave liquidity crisis as well as simultaneous DoD and DoJ investigations.

I became CEO shortly after these troubles arose. My team and I were able to resolve matters successfully by taking the following actions: Operational restructuring, ISO 9001 certification within six months, consultation with banks and major vendors, as well as ongoing dialogue with DoD and DoJ. This simultaneous multi-pronged focus on operations and customers allowed NAC to clear its name, triple sales from $53MM to $180MM, make an acquisition and restore profitability, all at the same time.

My team’s talents in the area of sales, operations and strategic planning paid off quickly. We did a $70M in sales acquisition from American Airlines and a successful IPO on NASDAQ within 24 months of assuming control. Shortly thereafter, NAC was sold to Rolls Royce.

Accomplishments at AeroThrust

NAC’s accomplishments drew the attention of Saab AB’s investment bankers. Saab’s subsidiary, AeroThrust Corporation was, in 2001, similar to NAC, unprofitable and bleeding. We closed the deal to buy the company on 11/1/01, which was a historically bad time in aviation. Over the next five years, we made great strides.

We tripled sales from $35MM to over $100MM by adding FedEx, SAS, Webjet, Spanair, Sriwijaya, Shandong, WestJet, and US Government contracts to our key accounts. We added approximately $20 million in net worth to the balance sheet, despite making heavy investments into R&D and product line expansion. In early 2008 we divided our high-margin leasing business and our low-margin Maintenance, Repair, and Overhaul (MRO) operations into separate companies, and set out to finance them separately, including doing an AIM offering in London. WR Hambrecht valued the company at the time at approximately $120MM.

The Oil Spike and the genesis of AeroTrade

In 2009-2010, in step with the global economic crisis, AeroThrust encountered the result of fleet changes at customers due to the oil price spike. 80% of our business was in the fuel-inefficient JT8D engine. After oil peaked at $147 a barrel, 80% of our market essentially vanished over the next two years, since airlines worldwide chose not to overhaul engines, but burn green time. Fleets of Alitalia, Iberia, SAS, and many others were either grounded or sold. Like KKR’s MRO company Aveos and many other MRO companies, we decided to exit the MRO business in 2010-2011, and to focus on the profitable leasing business we started in 2007. That became the genesis of AeroTrade.

Other Information

Mr. Risko has also participated as an early investor and/or CEO or COO in a number of e-commerce and technology firms including iSolve, software.com, POGO Jet, ForMyCause.com and a number of other firms. In addition to start-ups, Mr. Risko also has extensive experience at the back end of the company life-cycle, and has advised companies in Chapter 11 and Chapter 7 situations.

Prior to these activities, Mr. Risko was a banker. He was an investment banker in M&A at Morgan Stanley and a commercial banker at Citibank in New York, serving the coal and steel industries. During his career in finance, Mr. Risko also headed US corporate finance for a major Canadian investment bank. Mr. Risko has a BA from Yale and an MBA from Harvard.

Contact: jrisko@windstarcapital.com

Contact: jrisko@windstarcapital.com

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