Some wag has made a mosaic of Donald Trump out of dick pics. (click for larger pic)
I have been told that no penises were harmed in the making of this picture.
It is an appropriate homage to the patron saint of the bad comb-over.
Month: November 2015
Two Suggestions for Dealing with the Paris and Lebanon Attacks
It is really pretty horrible:
Three teams of Islamic State attackers acting in unison carried out the terrorist assault in Paris on Friday night, officials said Saturday, including one assailant who may have traveled to Europe on a Syrian passport along with the flow of migrants.
“It is an act of war that was committed by a terrorist army, a jihadist army, Daesh, against France,” President François Hollande told the nation from the Élysée Palace, using an Arabic acronym for the Islamic State. “It is an act of war that was prepared, organized and planned from abroad, with complicity from the inside, which the investigation will help establish.”
As the death toll rose to 129 — with 352 others wounded, 99 of them critically — a basic timeline of the attacks came into view.
The Paris prosecutor, François Molins, said the attackers were all armed with assault rifles and suicide vests. Their assault began at 9:20 p.m. Friday, when one terrorist detonated a suicide bomb outside the gates of the soccer stadium on the northern outskirts of Paris. It ended at 12:20 a.m. Saturday when the authorities stormed a concert hall, the Bataclan. One attacker there was killed; two others detonated suicide vests. Inside the hall, 89 people, who had been listening to a rock band, had been shot to death.
Meanwhile, we see very little coverage of what happened the day before in Beriut:
A fiery double suicide bombing terrorized a mostly Shiite residential area of southern Beirut on Thursday, ripping through a busy shopping district at rush hour. The Lebanese Health Ministry said at least 43 people had been killed and more than 200 wounded in the worst attack to strike the city in years.
The Islamic State extremist group, which controls parts of neighboring Syria, claimed responsibility for the attack. The group portrayed its motives as baldly sectarian, saying it had targeted Shiite Muslims, whom it views as apostates. It mentioned almost as an afterthought that it had targeted Hezbollah, the Shiite militant organization that backs the Syrian government in the civil war raging next door.
Hezbollah maintains tight security control in the district that was hit, and the bombing seemed aimed at hurting the group by attacking civilians in an area where it has many supporters. But the stricken area also typifies working-class Beirut, where Palestinians, Christians and Syrian refugees (mostly Sunnis) live, work and shop.
First, I think that we need to understand that this is state sponsored terrorism:
It is long past time for the oligarchies of the Gulf states to stop paying protection to the men in the suicide belts. Their societies are stunted and parasitic. The main job of the elites there is to find enough foreign workers to ensla…er…indenture to do all the real work. The example of Qatar and the interesting business plan through which that country is building the facilities for the 2022 World Cup is instructive here. Roughly the same labor-management relationship exists for the people who clean the hotel rooms and who serve the drinks. In Qatar, for people who come from elsewhere to work, passports have been known to disappear into thin air. These are the societies that profit from terrible and tangled web of causation and violence that played out on the streets of Paris. These are the people who buy their safety with the blood of innocents far away.
It’s been known for years that these regimes, in particularly the House of Saud, have been ATMs for the terror movement for decades.
To that particularly unsavory lot, we need to add our NATO ally Turkey, where the increasingly autocratic and delusional Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who had decided to throw in for Sunni fundamentalist hegemony for his neighbor to the south, which is also his goal for Turkey.
Quiet diplomacy is not working with these folks. They need to be named, shamed, and sanctioned.
Additionally, changing the goal in Syria, and actively supporting the Assad regime as the best of a bad lot, which has the advantage of being true, and also has the effect of thwarting the goals or Turkey and the potentates on the Persian Gulf, and letting them know that they have crossed a line.
The fact that the Assad regime is that best alternative for the Syrian people and the world is a very real indictment of Western foreign policy.
Why Northrop Won the LRS-B Contract
Over at Aviation Week, Bill Sweetman has a very good analysis as to why Northrop-Grumman beat the joint Lockheed-Martin Boeing bid for the LRS-B bomber program. (Paid subscription required)
When one considers the relative sizes of the competitors, Boeing and LM both dwarf Northrop, it was a surprise when won:
Northrop Grumman won the Long-Range Strike Bomber (LRS-B) contest on cost; the question is whether it also beat its rivals on technology and risk. The immediate response from Lockheed Martin and Boeing was to query the cost and risk assessment behind the decision; Loren Thompson, a consultant to both companies, confirmed that they knew from the numbers announced on Oct. 21 that they had been underbid, quite unexpectedly and by a decisive margin, pointing to fatal flaws in their strategy.
Thompson’s later column in Forbes, focusing on Northrop Grumman’s ability to execute the engineering and manufacturing development (EMD) contract, suggests that the winner undercut its rival on EMD. “I’d say Wes [Northrop CEO Wes Bush] bet the company,” Thompson said. One Wall Street analyst who had predicted a Boeing team win said: “I have an impossible time believing that this will be a financially attractive proposition if he underbid the only defense contractor who understands lean manufacturing.”
But Northrop Grumman did precisely that—relying on its operational experience with wideband, all-aspect stealth technology on the B-2 bomber and the still-secret RQ-180 intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) unmanned air vehicle. Also, the winning formula was not just a question of delivering more stealth or greater range, but of meeting a complex set of requirements that stressed risk reduction, an open systems architecture, agile management and new manufacturing technology.
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Northrop Grumman won the Long-Range Strike Bomber (LRS-B) contest on cost; the question is whether it also beat its rivals on technology and risk. The immediate response from Lockheed Martin and Boeing was to query the cost and risk assessment behind the decision; Loren Thompson, a consultant to both companies, confirmed that they knew from the numbers announced on Oct. 21 that they had been underbid, quite unexpectedly and by a decisive margin, pointing to fatal flaws in their strategy.
Thompson’s later column in Forbes, focusing on Northrop Grumman’s ability to execute the engineering and manufacturing development (EMD) contract, suggests that the winner undercut its rival on EMD. “I’d say Wes [Northrop CEO Wes Bush] bet the company,” Thompson said. One Wall Street analyst who had predicted a Boeing team win said: “I have an impossible time believing that this will be a financially attractive proposition if he underbid the only defense contractor who understands lean manufacturing.”
But Northrop Grumman did precisely that—relying on its operational experience with wideband, all-aspect stealth technology on the B-2 bomber and the still-secret RQ-180 intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) unmanned air vehicle. Also, the winning formula was not just a question of delivering more stealth or greater range, but of meeting a complex set of requirements that stressed risk reduction, an open systems architecture, agile management and new manufacturing technology.
The conventional wisdom is that Northrop significantly underbid LM and Boeing, and that they will unable to execute their extremely aggressive bid.
Sweetman notes looks toward Northrop’s experience with the RQ-180, which seems to imply that they may have made a breakthrough in incorporating aerodynamic efficiency and broadband stealth.
I think that it is something else, and I think that Sweetman buried the lede here, because the following requirements should have whoever made the decision fleeing from LM like Laurie Strode did from Michael Meyers:
LRS-B, too, is planned to be upgraded easily and competitively, “with space and weight provision for things we can’t imagine today,” LaPlante said. Open architecture, he noted, could allow the Pentagon to procure a new or upgraded subsystem competitively, “provide it to the prime and say, ‘integrate this.’” Along with the cost of maintaining the bomber’s low-observable systems, upgrades will account for a large proportion of the bomber’s life-cycle cost—which will be much greater than its procurement bill.
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Lockheed Martin brought its experience with stealth systems integration to the party. But the history of the F-22—where upgrades have been constrained by a tightly integrated architecture, so that every change requires painstaking regression testing to ensure that other functions are not affected—was exactly what the LRS-B program’s open architecture is designed to avoid.
(emphasis mine)
Lockheed-Martin has been doing tightly integrated monolithic systems for years, which runs counter to just about every rule of both software and weapons development, where critical functions should be segregated from everything else.
L-M’s model, as shown in the F-22 and the F-35 is put everything in one box that no one can look into except for Lockheed Martin.
They make their money by placing a toll on access.
It’s great for Lockheed Martin, but it’s technically stupid, and bad for the end user and the taxpayer, and it appears that someone in the Pentagon has finally recognized this.
Kept Us Safe, My Ass
Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the rest of Evil Minions™ have always claimed that their actions were justified, because they, “Kept us safe.”
Of course, this ignores 911, which is a lot like saying, “Apart from that Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play Our American Cousin?
Well, in Politico, a bit of fish wrapper that charlie Pierce calls, “Tiger Beat on the Potomac”, we now have an (unquestionably self-serving) account from fromer intelligence personnel claiming that the administration steadfastly ignored clear signs of an imminent and catastrophic terrorist attack on America soil:
“Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” The CIA’s famous Presidential Daily Brief, presented to George W. Bush on August 6, 2001, has always been Exhibit A in the case that his administration shrugged off warnings of an Al Qaeda attack. But months earlier, starting in the spring of 2001, the CIA repeatedly and urgently began to warn the White House that an attack was coming.
By May of 2001, says Cofer Black, then chief of the CIA’s counterterrorism center, “it was very evident that we were going to be struck, we were gonna be struck hard and lots of Americans were going to die.” “There were real plots being manifested,” Cofer’s former boss, George Tenet, told me in his first interview in eight years. “The world felt like it was on the edge of eruption. In this time period of June and July, the threat continues to rise. Terrorists were disappearing [as if in hiding, in preparation for an attack]. Camps were closing. Threat reportings on the rise.” The crisis came to a head on July 10. The critical meeting that took place that day was first reported by Bob Woodward in 2006. Tenet also wrote about it in general terms in his 2007 memoir At the Center of the Storm.
But neither he nor Black has spoken about it publicly in such detail until now—or been so emphatic about how specific and pressing their warnings really were. Over the past eight months, in more than a hundred hours of interviews, my partners Jules and Gedeon Naudet and I talked with Tenet and the 11 other living former CIA directors for The Spymasters, a documentary set to air this month on Showtime.
The drama of failed warnings began when Tenet and Black pitched a plan, in the spring of 2001, called “the Blue Sky paper” to Bush’s new national security team. It called for a covert CIA and military campaign to end the Al Qaeda threat—“getting into the Afghan sanctuary, launching a paramilitary operation, creating a bridge with Uzbekistan.” “And the word back,” says Tenet, “‘was ‘we’re not quite ready to consider this. We don’t want the clock to start ticking.’” (Translation: they did not want a paper trail to show that they’d been warned.) Black, a charismatic ex-operative who had helped the French arrest the terrorist known as Carlos the Jackal, says the Bush team just didn’t get the new threat: “I think they were mentally stuck back eight years [before]. They were used to terrorists being Euro-lefties—they drink champagne by night, blow things up during the day, how bad can this be? And it was a very difficult sell to communicate the urgency to this.”
That morning of July 10, the head of the agency’s Al Qaeda unit, Richard Blee, burst into Black’s office. “And he says, ‘Chief, this is it. Roof’s fallen in,’” recounts Black. “The information that we had compiled was absolutely compelling. It was multiple-sourced. And it was sort of the last straw.” Black and his deputy rushed to the director’s office to brief Tenet. All agreed an urgent meeting at the White House was needed. Tenet picked up the white phone to Bush’s National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice. “I said, ‘Condi, I have to come see you,’” Tenet remembers. “It was one of the rare times in my seven years as director where I said, ‘I have to come see you. We’re comin’ right now. We have to get there.’”
Tenet vividly recalls the White House meeting with Rice and her team. (George W. Bush was on a trip to Boston.) “Rich [Blee] started by saying, ‘There will be significant terrorist attacks against the United States in the coming weeks or months. The attacks will be spectacular. They may be multiple. Al Qaeda’s intention is the destruction of the United States.’” [Condi said:] ‘What do you think we need to do?’ Black responded by slamming his fist on the table, and saying, ‘We need to go on a wartime footing now!’”
“What happened?” I ask Cofer Black. “Yeah. What did happen?” he replies. “To me it remains incomprehensible still. I mean, how is it that you could warn senior people so many times and nothing actually happened? It’s kind of like The Twilight Zone.” Remarkably, in her memoir, Condi Rice writes of the July 10 warnings: “My recollection of the meeting is not very crisp because we were discussing the threat every day.” Having raised threat levels for U.S. personnel overseas, she adds: “I thought we were doing what needed to be done.” (When I asked whether she had any further response to the comments that Tenet, Black and others made to me, her chief of staff said she stands by the account in her memoir.) Inexplicably, although Tenet brought up this meeting in his closed-door testimony before the 9/11 Commission, it was never mentioned in the committee’s final report.
What a surprise.
Once again, I am compelled to make the repeat the wisest thing that I’ve read this century:
But it does inspire in me the desire for a competition; can anyone, particularly the rather more Bush-friendly recent arrivals to the board, give me one single example of something with the following three characteristics:
- It is a policy initiative of the current Bush administration
- It was significant enough in scale that I’d have heard of it (at a pinch, that I should have heard of it)
- It wasn’t in some important way completely f%$#ed up during the execution.
Of course they f%$#ed up the the prelude to the September 11 attacks.
They f%$#ed everything up.
Talk About Failing Upwards
Neel Kashkeri, one of the mismanagers appointed by Hank Paulson to bail out the banksters, has been named to the presidency of the Minneapolis Federal Reserve:
Neel T. Kashkari, who oversaw the government’s bailout of the banking industry as a Treasury official in the George W. Bush and Obama administrations, was named the next president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis on Tuesday.
Mr. Kashkari, 42, will succeed Narayana R. Kocherlakota in that post in January. He will also take Mr. Kocherlakota’s place as the youngest of the 17 members of the Fed’s policy-making committee, the Federal Open Market Committee.
“Mr. Kashkari is an influential leader whose combined experience in the public and private sectors makes him the ideal candidate to head the Minneapolis Fed,” MayKao Hang, a Minneapolis Fed board member who was co-chairwoman of the search committee, said in a statement.
Mr. Kashkari is the third person this year appointed to lead a regional reserve bank, and all three of the new presidents previously worked at Goldman Sachs. The Philadelphia Fed in March appointed Patrick Harker, a former Goldman trustee, as its new president. The Dallas Fed in August selected Robert S. Kaplan, a former Goldman vice chairman.
Mr. Kashkari will join a minority of Fed officials who do not have advanced degrees in economics, but he has expressed strong views on monetary policy.
In 2012, Mr. Kashkari criticized the Fed’s decision to start a second round of bond-buying.
“At the end of the day, this is not going to lead to real economic growth,” he told CNBC at the time. “Unfortunately, it likely leads to an inflationary outcome.”
He also has compared bond-buying to dosing the economy with morphine — “Makes u feel better but doesn’t cure,” he posted on Twitter in 2013 — and suggested that financial markets would resist weaning.
Those views suggest Mr. Kashkari will break with his predecessor. Mr. Kocherlakota began his term at the Minneapolis Fed as a vocal skeptic of the Fed’s ability to improve economic conditions but underwent a battlefield conversion and became a leading proponent of the Fed’s efforts. He is now the only Fed official pushing to expand its stimulus campaign.
So, he’s been wrong on everything, he f%$#ed up the bank bailout, and now he is President of the Minneapolis Fed.
And another Vampire Squid alumni gets to decide the winners and losers in our economy.
Paul Krugman also observes that Neel is supremely unqualified for anything resembling banking regulation or monetary policy as well:
So, if the Minneapolis Fed felt the need to maintain conservation of NK, they could have chosen to replace Narayana Kocherlakota with a New Keynesian. Instead, they chose Neel Kashkari. Brad DeLong isn’t happy, and this Twitter exchange suggests that he has good reason to worry.
I’ve written before about the all-too-common fallacy of confusing demand with supply, of arguing that because we had a bubble — so that some component of aggregate demand was unsustainable — the economy as a whole was somehow producing more than its potential. Let me just repeat what I said then:
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In the words of Charlie Brown, AAUGH!
That word “artificially” is the real telltale, as is Kashkari’s description of Japanese monetary stimulus as “morphine.” It’s straight out of the liquidationist playbook, e.g. Hayek denouncing the use of “artificial stimulants” to fight the Great Depression.
So, great: we now have a liquidationist in a senior position in the Fed system.
Not just a liquidationist, a crony capitalist incompetent liquidationist.
I’m feeling so much better about our monetary policy now.
This S%$ Keeps Popping Up
This S%$ Keeps Popping Up
I keep hearing about a super Russian jammer that blocks all NATO Sensors at 600 km.
The reports are crap.
First the claims are literally incredible, by which I mean that they are impossible to believe.
They are supposed to hit all radars, sonars, electro-optical sensors, and navigation systems: (in Comic Sans font, no less)
From the combat zone in northern Syria comes news of the deployment of a new Russian electronic jamming system which can reportedly blind radar, disrupt electronic guidance systems, and interfere with satellite imagery as well. As a result, NATO is effectively blinded inside a bubble of 600 km in diameter centered on the Russian base at Latakia, reports, Thierry Meyssan from Damascus.
The technology in question seems similar to the KRET Richag-AV system, although it apparently functions on a larger scale. A tactical version of this system was presented to journalists in the Russian city of Back in April 2015. As Sputnik reported then:
“The Richag-AV system, mounted on the Mi-8MTPR1 (a variant of the Mi-8MTB5-1 helicopter) is said to have no global equivalent. Its electronic countermeasures system is designed to jam radar, sonar and other detection systems in the aims of defending aircraft, helicopters, drones, ground and naval forces against air-to-air and surface-to-air defense systems within a radius of several hundred kilometers. It can be mounted on units from any branch of the armed forces, including helicopters and airplanes, as well as ground and ship-based forces. The Mi8-MTPR1-based Richag-AV platform, using multi-beam antenna arrays with DRFM technology, is designed to actively jam and thus ‘blind’ radar systems in order to defend against radio-electronic guided weapons systems. In a combat situation, the system would operate as part of an aviation shock attack group aimed at breaking through virtually any defense system, blinding everything up to and including the US MIM-104 ‘Patriot’ anti-aircraft missile system.” (OSNET DAILY)
Even a cursory examaminatin reveals this to be patently false.
The physics shows that it cannot work.
First, of course, is the curvature of the earth: at 600 km, you can operate at significant altitude while the signal ia attenuated by rock and dirt.
Signal power decreases as the square of the distance, so if you are using brute force jamming, you would need to 100 times more power if the jammer were at a full distance and the sensor was at a distance of 60 km.
In terms of jamming communications, modern military communications signal hop, so any jammer would have to determine the frequency and respond.
Assuming that the jammer could instantly shift frequencies, it would be 4 milliseconds before it could jam a new frequency because of the speed of light.
With 10 frequency changes per second, and a base speed of 56 kbps for nostaligia’s sake, you end up with 2 kbps, which would have been stunning to me when I was using a 300 baud modem in the early 1980s.
Realistically, you could get more than 10x that out of any communications system, because the base rate would be higher, and the jammer could not respond instantly.
Not enough speed for full time video, but enough for video stills.
Finally, you also have created a huge beacon that would just says to a potential enemy, “Shoot me now.”
The whole idea reads like the Cylon cyberattack in the Battlestar Galactica reboot.
I just got to the bottom of this, with help from an Aviation Week article from over a month ago by the indispensable Bill Sweetman.
The system is far more limited, and does not hit things like satellites and sonar. It jams AWACS, which is eminently doable, and tactically significant:
Russian defense electronics conglomerate Kret (Concern Radio-Electronic Technology) introduced a range of new electronic warfare (EW) systems at the 2015 MAKS air show at Zhukovsky, near Moscow, including a new helicopter-borne jamming system and a high-power ground-based system designed to blind the widely used Boeing E-3 Airborne Warning & Control System (AWACS) and other systems using the S-band (2-3 GHz). According to Kret, the Krasukha-2 AWACS jammer can act as a high-power microwave weapon, with enough power to damage target hardware. It is developed by Kret’s Gradient subsidiary and is mounted on a BAZ 6909 8 X 8 truck.
The 9-ft.-dia. parabolic reflector focuses energy from a battery of feed horns and at least two secondary side feeds, and sits, with the radio-frequency signal generators, on a 360-deg.-rotatable platform, with up to 5 deg. elevation. It is claimed to be effective over a 45-deg. angle to the main radar beam, jamming through the radar’s sidelobes, and able to mask a target from an AWACS that is 150-300 km (93-186-mi.) from the jammer. The 100-kW-plus generator and power-conditioning system is built into the truck chassis and is driven by a spur from the transmission.
It is an impressive piece of kit, but it does not violate the laws of physics as claimed in the other article.
If they manage to integrate this with an electronically scanned antenna, it would be even more formidable, but it isn’t a world beater.
It is notable in that it is a capability that NATO does not possess, our doctrine is predicated on a system where we always have air superiority.
Russian doctrine does not operate under this assumption.
Deep Thought
Seen on Facebook
It Just Got Real in Spain
The Catalan Assembly has voted to start the secession process in Spain:
Catalonia’s parliament passed a motion declaring the start of the process for breaking away from Spain, a move Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy says is illegal.
The resolution was approved by 72 votes to 63, Carme Forcadell, the president of the regional assembly said Monday after the debate in parliament. Rajoy said he’ll ask the Constitutional Court to block the decision in a televised statement after the vote.
“Today we are solemnly starting a new state, a Catalan state, a republic, a Catalan republic,” Raul Romeva, parliamentary leader of the main separatist group, told lawmakers during the debate. “This was our commitment during the electoral campaign.”
The regional parliament is pushing ahead with its bid for independence even though it is yet to elect a regional leader, after September’s election left the main separatist alliance led by acting president Artur Mas short of a majority. The anti-capitalist party CUP, which backed the separatist motion, opposes Mas’s candidacy because of his support for business and the reports of corruption within his party. The assembly is due to vote on the presidency later Monday.
I’m not sure if this is a real move toward secession, or if it is some sort posturing about the selection for a President, but in either case, this has a real possibility of getting really ugly really fast.
It might not go pear shaped, but I wouldn’t buy any real estate in Spain for the next few months.
Another Reason Not to Vote Hillary
She loves her some charter schools, even when they illegally exclude disabled students:
Good news! Democratic Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton just admitted there are significant problems with the nation’s charter schools!
Bad news! She has no interest in solving them! In fact, she thinks charters are just great.
Here’s Clinton criticizing charter schools:Most charter schools — I don’t want to say every one — but most charter schools, they don’t take the hardest-to-teach kids, or, if they do, they don’t keep them. And so the public schools are often in a no-win situation, because they do, thankfully, take everybody, and then they don’t get the resources or the help and support that they need to be able to take care of every child’s education.
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In short, most charter schools stink. Clinton admits we have a problem. But how do we solve it?
Clinton:I have for many years now, about 30 years, supported the idea of charter schools, but not as a substitute for the public schools, but as a supplement for the public schools. And what I have worked on through my work with the Children’s Defense Fund and my work on education in Arkansas and through my time as first lady and senator is to continue to say charter schools can have a purpose, but you know there are good charter schools and there are bad charter schools, just like there are good public schools and bad public schools.
So I want parents to be able to exercise choice within the public school system — not outside of it — but within it because I am still a firm believer that the public school system is one of the real pillars of our democracy and it is a path for opportunity. …the original idea… behind charter schools was to learn what worked and then apply them in the public schools.So Clinton’s solution to the charter school crisis is what exactly? She seems to be saying that charter schools have major problems, but the best way to fix them is to redouble our belief in this flawed and failing system.
Sanders has been dubious of charters, though he has not explicitly opposed them, and while Governor of Maryland, has presided over one of the most tightly regulated systems for charter schools in the nation.
Hillary, on the other hand, is big into Charters, which is not surprising, given that Wall Street is got its larcenous hooks well and fully into the whole process.
Blow Up One Mainframe, and Shut Down the Entire F-35 Fleet
The US military, and Lockheed-Martin have structured the software of the F-35 so that the plane cannot fly without a direct connection to a L-M mainframe:
The unilateral decision by the United States to locate all F-35 software laboratories on its territory, and to manage the operation and sustainment of the global F-35 fleet from its territory, has introduced vulnerabilities that are only beginning to emerge.
The biggest risk is that, since the F-35 cannot operate effectively without permanent data exchanges with its software labs and logistic support computers in the United States, any disruption in the two-way flow of information would compromise its effectiveness.
All F-35 aircraft operating across the world will have to update their mission data files and their Autonomic Logistic Information System (ALIS) profiles before and after every sortie, to ensure that on-board systems are programmed with the latest available operational data and that ALIS is kept permanently informed of each aircraft’s technical status and maintenance requirements. ALIS can, and has, prevented aircraft taking off because of an incomplete data file.
Given that the United States hopes to sell hundreds of F-35s to allies in Europe, Asia and Australia, the volume of data that must travel to and from the United States is gigantic, and any disruption in Internet traffic could cripple air forces as the F-35 cannot operate unless it is logged into, and cleared by, ALIS.
For example, “Mission data load development and testing is a critical path to combat capability,” Pentagon OT&E director Michael Gilmore said in his fiscal 2014 report. “Accuracy of threat identification and location depend on how well the mission data loads are optimized to perform in ambiguous operational environments.”
Updating and uploading mission data loads depends on a functioning Internet, and as Wired.com noted in an Oct. 29 story, “undersea Internet cables are surprisingly vulnerable.” It quoted Nicole Starosielski, a media scholar at New York University, as saying that “people would be surprised to know that there are a little over 200 systems that carry all of the internet traffic across the ocean, and these are by and large concentrated in very few areas. The cables end up getting funneled through these narrow pressure points all around the globe.”
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The fear is that an “ultimate Russian hack on the United States could involve severing the fiber-optic cables at some of their hardest-to-access locations to halt the instant communications on which the West’s governments, economies and citizens have grown dependent,” the article said.
Whatever the other repercussions, such an event would severely limit the ability of the world’s F-35 fighters to fly – due to a loss of ALIS link – and to operate effectively, as their fighting ability would disappear if their software and mission data files could not be updated.
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Given that the ALIS mainframe is located at Fort Worth, Texas, operating the F-35 will require three very large data conduits to and from these locations, again using Internet cables as the volume of data is too great for satellite transmission.
In fact, if the F-35 performs as advertised, it should gather very argue amounts of tactical data during each mission – data that it will have to transmit to the software labs in the US so they can be used to update the mission data files, adding another large volume data flow in both directions.
They don’t need to cut internet cables. They send some guy in with an explosives vest to the mainframe, and the fleet is grounded.
More important to our foreign “Partners” is that this also means that an F-35 fleet can shut down by Lockheed-Martin over a billing or maintenance dispute, or by the US over a foreign policy dispute.
This is not a bug, this is a feature, and it is one that almost certainly came from L-M, because it creates a captive customer: No one can maintain the aircraft without paying a toll to them.
Even if the aircraft performs as promised, the basic concept for its operation is untenable.
Run away from this clusterf%$#.
There Are Historical Precidents
This hearkens back to the Borgia Papacy.
We now have allegations that Vatican official took bribes to move “facilitate” cannonization:
There is nothing like a good old Vatican scandal to bring Rome to its knees.
Never mind that the city government is already in complete shambles on the eve of the Vatican’s Holy Jubilee, which could double the many millions of visitors to the Eternal City over the next year. No, instead of finalizing preparations for what should be a feather in the pope’s mitre, the Vatican is bracing itself for the release on Thursday of two books that seek to expose the sinister side of everything from saint-making to the very sanctity of the Holy See.
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The most damning of the two is Merchants in the Temple—to be released as Via Crucis in Italian on Thursday and in English a week later—by Gianluigi Nuzzi, the journalist who was the recipient of the butler’s stolen files, which Nuzzi published in his best-selling 2012 book, His Holiness. In his new book, he focuses on Francis and finance, all the while weaving an intricate story between the popular pontiff’s promises and what Nuzzi tries to prove are his failings. Along the way, he also reveals through stolen documents, hidden taped conversations, and meeting minutes just who he believes Francis really is.
“The Pope, so sweet and affable in public appearances, but steadfast and firm before his closest collaborators,” Nuzzi writes. “Francis of the big smiles and kind words shows himself to be absolute in his goals and intolerant of the Curia’s ‘human ambition to power.’”
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But among the biggest scams the Vatican elite apparently make money from is the high price of sinister saint-making, which runs those trying to push their saintly cause even to be considered around €50,000 to cover the costs of the expert theologians, physicians, and bishops who examine the cause. The process of saint-making also involves postulators, or those in charge of pushing the causes forward.
When the special commission in charge of cleaning up the Vatican’s finances found out that there were essentially no records at all of where donations for the causes of saints went, they froze the accounts of almost everyone involved in the holy work of choosing saints, including a postulator, who had more than €1 million spread out among three Vatican bank accounts. No wrongdoing was determined, and the postulator was left to enjoy his tax-free haven, but apparently no accounting has yet been produced.
………
Any profits from donations meant to lift up would-be saints are supposed to go to the Fund for the Causes of the Poor, but that fund remained stagnant despite several banner years in saint-making revenue, writes Nuzzi, who recalls that Pope John Paul II alone beatified 1,338 blesseds in 147 rites and 482 saints in 51 celebrations. “This raised the Commission’s suspicions,” he writes. “No documents. No justification and bookkeeping for an activity involving tens of millions of euros. Yet these are huge sums of money for which Vatican regulations demand proper bookkeeping.”
It’s clear that the current Pontiff is trying to unravel this ball of yarn, but he is fighting 1000 years of how business has been done, though my guess is that the whole sainthood thing is largely an artifact of John Paul II, who made more saints during his reign than every other Pope combined.
I think that it is going to be very difficult for Francis to deal with this.
The Vatican is bigger than any pope.
Brownshirt Much?
Ernst Röhm Jim Pasco, executive director of the of the PBA, the Police Union has taken to physically threatening director Quentin Tarantino over his statements regarding the police:
On Wednesday, the Free Thought Project reported on the remarkably brave stance Academy Award-winning film director Quentin Tarantino, has made in owning his comments condemning police brutality.
After police across the country had announced their plans to boycott his films, Tarantino refused to be bullied and remained steadfast in his decision to call the police who murdered people “murderers. ”
Tarantino was not calling all cops murderers, nor was he purporting that he “hates cops.” However, these facts are not important to those throwing bricks from the other side of the blue wall.
In fact, during a recent interview with the Los Angeles Times, Tarantino responded, “All cops are not murderers. I never said that. I never even implied that.”
And what is the response of the PBA?
In a veiled threat, the largest police union in the country says it has a “surprise” in store for Quentin Tarantino.
Jim Pasco, executive director of the Fraternal Order of Police, would not go into any detail about what is being cooked up for the Hollywood director, but he did tell THR: “We’ll be opportunistic.”
“Tarantino has made a good living out of violence and surprise,” says Pasco. “Our officers make a living trying to stop violence, but surprise is not out of the question.”The FOP, based in Washington, D.C., consists of more than 330,000 full-time, sworn officers. According to Pasco, the surprise in question is already “in the works,” and will be in addition to the standing boycott of Tarantino’s films, including his upcoming movie The Hateful Eight.
“Something is in the works, but the element of surprise is the most important element,” says Pasco. “Something could happen anytime between now and [the premiere]. And a lot of it is going to be driven by Tarantino, who is nothing if not predictable.
“The right time and place will come up and we’ll try to hurt him in the only way that seems to matter to him, and that’s economically,” says Pasco.
When asked if this was a threat, Pasco said no, at least not a physical threat. “Police officers protect people,” he says. “They don’t go out to hurt people.”
Yes, that disavowal of violence is so convincing.
What a story for the 68th anniversary of Kristallnacht.
My guess is that we are going to see law enforcement shutdowns of showings of The Hateful Eight using flimsy “public safety” pretenses all around the country.
Obama Foreign Policy in One Photograph
It turns out that Henry Kissinger and Samantha Power have been hanging out at ball games and talking diplomacy. (It’s an ESPN link, life is weird)
Samantha Power is the UN Ambassador, and has been an important adviser to Obama since his first Presidential campaign, and we get this:
But the 90-year-old former Secretary of State knows baseball, and has been an avid Yankees fan since his youth. Power, on the other hand, can detail decades-old at-bats in the Bronx-Boston rivalry, but from her vantage point as a fervent Red Sox fan. The Irish-born ambassador even wrote this essay for The Boston Globe after the Red Sox won the World Series in 2013.
For 30 minutes, as the van negotiated traffic from the East Side of Manhattan to the Major Deegan, Power and Kissinger discussed baseball and diplomacy. The two are natural allies, given his experience and her current work at the United Nations, which included the passage Thursday of a resolution to send 12,000 peacekeepers to the Central African Republic, from where Power had returned that morning.
Power would have a few other issues she’d want to discuss “between pitches” in the owner’s box, but the conversation began with the subject of the Red Sox and Yankees rivalry.
What follows is a delightfully chatty interview of the two of them, about how wonderful it is for them to talk baseball and world domination foreign relations.
It appears that there is far less space between Kissinger’s policy of homicidal realpolitik and Samantha Powers’ policy of muscular liberal interventionism than one would otherwise imagine.
Isolationism is beginning to look a lot more attractive to me.
H/t naked capitalism.
Shades of Razorfish
In the late 1990s, one of the darlings of the Dotcom boom was a company called Razorfish.
It all came crashing down in 2000, when its hipster founders appeared on CBS, and they were incapable of describing what their company actually did, despite thousands of employees worldwide and a market valuation in the billions.
In a very real way, it was a seminal moment in the dotcom boom became the dotcom bust, because suddenly it became clear to those ordinary people for who the whole “Internet thing” went from a dazzling mystery to a bunch of hipster snake oil.
The Dotcom bubble, like bubbles, had run out of stupider people who would buy their crap,
Well, I just came across this profile of Famo.us, and I think that it is a clear indicator that it is time to head for the exits, because if this nothing burger can get this sort of funding, the inmates are running the asylum once again:
Famo.us’ 15 minutes of open source fame have come to an end. JavaScript rendering engine Famo.us has pivoted away from its hardcore open sourced engineering platform which had raised over $31 million. It’s now refocused on commercializing the idea of powerful mobile web apps with a content management system for branded marketing apps.
The startup changed its website to famous.co, stuffed its old open source information on famous.org, and laid off a big chunk of the team, including its VP of Engineering, Head of Open Source, and a dozen engineers. But at least now Famo.us has the runway to take another shot at the spotlight.
………
Famo.us’ 15 minutes of open source fame have come to an end. JavaScript rendering engine Famo.us has pivoted away from its hardcore open sourced engineering platform which had raised over $31 million. It’s now refocused on commercializing the idea of powerful mobile web apps with a content management system for branded marketing apps.
The startup changed its website to famous.co, stuffed its old open source information on famous.org, and laid off a big chunk of the team, including its VP of Engineering, Head of Open Source, and a dozen engineers. But at least now Famo.us has the runway to take another shot at the spotlight.
………(emphasis mine)Though it was tough to tell if Famo.us would work, investors gave it the benefit of the doubt. That was in large part thanks to Newcomb, who had sold his last startup, natural language search engine Powerset, to Microsoft for $100 million. In early 2013, Famo.us added a $4 million Series A from Javelin Venture Partners and Samsung to its $1.1 million in seed funding from Greylock, Naval Ravikant, Roger Dickey, [and, disclosure, TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington’s CrunchFund].
But Newcomb’s quest to redefine mobile with open source threatened to make Famo.us unsustainable. He told TechCrunch when announcing the funding, “That lean startup style — I don’t believe that” and that he was purposefully trying to be a perfectionist.
Newcomb knocked down the wall between his San Francisco penthouse apartment and the one next to it to create a lavish office for Famo.us. When TechCrunch reporter Anthony Ha visited, Newcomb pointed to some desks that seemed adequate, but insisted they would be replaced soon because they weren’t the right kind of wood.
He told Ha that since Famo.us was a platform for building beautiful apps “everything we do has to represent perfection and elegance.” You can take a tour of the office in TechCrunch’s Cribs video above.
………
By August 2014, Famo.us had grown to 25 employees and had 90,000 sign-ups for the platform, still awaiting the finished platform’s public open source release. It managed to raise another $20 million plus $5 million of debt from New York’s Insight Venture Partners. Newcomb told VentureBeat it planned to hire up to 40 more staffers with that cash, though Fetterman departed.
Finally, in June Famo.us “launched.” From a different site Famous.org, it fully open sourced its Engine that improves performance for hardware, and its Framework for integrating Famo.us into apps with blog posts by Myles Borin and Zack Brown.
………I spoke to Newcomb, who confesses that for six months the company struggled to come up with a way to actually earn money. A source close to the company tells me Newcomb pushed the engineer-heavy company into “ideation mode” that made some employees feel like the startup lacked direction. They described engineers as being “fed up.”
………
There the company laid out an entirely new business: “Our mission at Famous is to empower digital marketing professionals to build beautiful branded apps that amplify every aspect of their digital marketing campaigns.” The product is a content management system for digital marketers. It allows them to create “micro-apps” that are basically mobile-optimized websites that can be easily shared and opened without being installed like a native app.
(emphasis mine)
Look at the highlighted portions.
Venture capitalists are throwing money at this, because they believe that there are bigger suckers willing to take a piece of this.
At some point, you always run out of pigeons, and Famo.us is an indicator that the supply is getting thin.
I’m not saying that it’s time to put your money in a mattress, I’m just saying that keeping it in San Jose might be ill advised.
F%$# Me, I Agree with Bill O’Reilly
Over the weekend, George Will and Bill O’Reilley got into it over whether or not Reagan was show signs of Alzheimers in his first term, and whether his shooting by John Hinkley might have accelerated the progress of the condition.
Bill O’Reilly is right about this, and so does Charlie Pierce. (I just threw up in my mouth)
It’s a medical fact that trauma can accelerate the progress of dementia, and there are numerous accounts of of the Gipper checking out in his first term, his first debate performance against Walter Mondale being one.
One of our top commenters suggested that my account Monday morning of the dust-up between George Effing Will and Bill O’Reilly was incomplete because I failed to mention the precise casus belli. The Top Commenter is absolutely correct, and my omission is all the more odd because it involves a personal tin drum that I’ve been pounding since I wrote my Alzheimer’s book in 2000. It also involves one of the most serious of all history’s Unspoken Truths. What set Will’s chilly blood aflame apparently was the fact that, in his book, Killing Reagan, O’Reilly pretty baldly states that Ronald Reagan was a symptomatic Alzheimer’s patient for most of his presidency, and that having been shot was trauma enough to start what AD researchers call a “cascade” of symptoms that accelerated the progress of his disease.
(As it happens, O’Reilly’s speculation is on solid scientific footing. Alzheimer’s researchers and caregivers have known for years that physical trauma can worsen the effects of the disease. Certainly, the recent research into the connection between head trauma and dementia backs this up, and I remember a fascinating Japanese study at an Alzheimer’s research conference that I attended in Osaka that studied the effect of a massive earthquake in that country on Alzheimer’s patients in the affected regions. In almost all cases, the disease accelerated.)
I am not willing to go as far as O’Reilly apparently does, but I have believed—and written—for years that Reagan was a symptomatic AD patient at least throughout his entire second term. My initial concern in this regard arose in 1984, during Reagan’s first debate with Walter Mondale, when he plainly did not know where he was or what he was supposed to be doing. At the time, my father was beginning a slow slide into Alzheimer’s himself. I knew what I was looking at on TV—and so, I learned later, did Dr. Dennis Selkoe, a prominent AD researcher in Boston. Since then, accounts of Reagan’s curiously vacant episodes have popped up all over various historical accounts, and personal memoirs, of the Reagan presidency. In the latter case, everybody from Ollie North to Lawrence Walsh mentions at least one moment in which the person who was Ronald Reagan disappeared right before their eyes. In an interview in 1999 for this magazine, John McCain told me of his experience at a White House dinner, when Reagan lapsed into some middle space of his own.
Seriously, while I have no problem with disagreeing with George will, the fact that this involves me agreeing with Bill O’Reilly makes me feel a bit sick.
Jeremy Corbyn Goes There
He just (rightly, IMNSHO) accused Britain’s Chief of the Defence Staff General Nicholas Houghton of attempting to meddle in civilian politics:
British Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn accused the country’s armed forces chief on Sunday of taking sides in the hot button political issue of overhauling Britain’s nuclear weapons program.
Gen. Nicholas Houghton earlier on Remembrance Sunday, when Britain commemorates its war dead, said he was “worried” by Corbyn’s vow never to press the “nuclear button”.
Corbyn issued a statement expressing “serious concern” over Houghton’s statement, calling on Defence Secretary Michael Fallon to “take action.”
“It is a matter of serious concern that the chief of the defence staff has today intervened directly in issues of political dispute,” said Corbyn, who is opposed to a revamp of Britain’s nuclear weapons system, Trident.
“It is essential in a democracy that the military remains politically neutral at all times,” said the Labour leader.
Corbyn is right, of course, Houghton’s behavior is unacceptable in a democracy, particularly when juxtaposed with long time rumors of military preparations for a coup in 1974.
One hopes that Houghton will learn his lesson, and shut the f%$# up.
Canadian Defense Industry May See Immediate Benefit from F-35 Cancellation
Specifically, Canada has two needs, to replace its tired F/A-18s. but it also needs to replace much of its navy, which is well past its “sell by date”.
It turns out that the money saved by cancelling the F-35 may well free up money to allow for new ships, which will have the effect of creating a net plus for the Canadian defense industry:
While Canadian firms stand to lose business with the country’s withdrawal from the F-35 program, its maritime industry is expecting a potential windfall from the change of direction in defense.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has promised to put more money into Canada’s ailing naval shipbuilding program, including any savings from selecting a cheaper alternative to the F-35 fighter jet. Maritime industry officials said that could mean more ships and more work.
Trudeau promised the shift in defense priorities during the recent federal election campaign. His government was elected Oct. 19 and took power Nov. 4.
The previous Conservative Party government had launched the National Shipbuilding Procurement Strategy (NSPS) in 2011. That outlined an ambitious CAN $30 billion plan (US $23 billion) to construct new vessels for the Royal Canadian Navy and Canadian Coast Guard. NSPS would see construction of 28 major warships and 116 smaller vessels.
Conservative Party Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who was defeated by Trudeau, had earlier dismissed the Liberal promise to spend more money on shipbuilding as unnecessary, noting that his government originally put enough funding into NSPS.
But the shipbuilding strategy has been dogged by concerns from industry. Defense analysts, the Royal Canadian Navy and the country’s Auditor General Michael Ferguson have all warned there is likely not enough money to build all the needed vessels.
Before the Conservative Party government was defeated, Defence Minister Jason Kenney acknowledged that the NSPS plan, supposed to build up to 15 replacement ships for the Navy’s frigates and destroyers, might actually only finance 11 vessels.
Trudeau may very well have backed himself into a win-win scenario for canada.
Chinese Begin to Market the F-35 Done Right
The Chinese were at the Dubai airshow, and the manufacturer is aggressively marketing their FC-31 medium weight fighter:
China’s Aviation Industry Corporation (AVIC) has stated plans to fly a production version of its FC-31 Gyrfalcon fifth-generation fighter by 2019.
Although reluctant to take questions, company officials also stated they are in negotiations with the Chinese government to offer the aircraft to the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Air Force, despite previous reports that the fighter would only be offered for export.
Speaking in Dubai, where the company is displaying a model of the FC-31 outside China for the first time as the company begins the export push for the Gyrfalcon, Li Yuhai, deputy general manager at AVIC, said the aircraft was demonstrating the “technological and management progress” of the program.
………
Peng said the aircraft’s primary armament would be the PL-9 short-range missile, the SD-10A medium-range air-to-air missile and small diameter bombs. He said the aircraft would be able to carry 2,000 kg (4,400 lb.) of weapons in its single internal bay and 6,000 kg (13,220 lb.) externally.
The company would not say which engine would power production aircraft but that it would be a “advanced medium thrust engine” producing 88.29 kN. (20,000 lb./9,000 kg) of thrust. The demonstrator aircraft is currently powered by the Russian RD-93 which powers the Mikoyan MiG-29.
What is notable here is that, because it does not carry the dead weight that the F-35 does, because it does not carry baggage associated with the STOVL F-35B.
Note the superior rear vision, and the fact that it has a single larger internal weapons bay, which provides greater capacity and flexibility, both of which are an artifact of not having to accommodate a lift fan.
Also, the wing appears a bit larger, probably because it does not have to shave weight to make vertical landings.
Also, the Klimov RD-33 engine has an 8:1 thrust to weight ratio, as versus the 6:1 ratio of the F135 because it does not have to carry around design features that are only needed for driving the lift fan.
Basically, the US Marine Corps requirement that there be a variant that has vertical landing capabilities is a large part of why the plane is broken.
The Chinese, in making what is a very similar aircraft, have avoided those pitfalls.
The Kunduz Hospital Bombing
First, let’s be clear on one thing, the US Military has bombed hospitals in the past as a matter of explicit policy, so it is reasonable to assume that this was the case here:
“Bombing of Hospitals Called Routine.” That was the August 9, 1973, Newsday coverage of congressional hearings on “clandestine U.S. air and ground activities in Cambodia and Laos”:
U.S. commanders in Vietnam placed no restrictions on ground or air attacks against Viet Cong or North Vietnamese hospitals a Senate committee was told yesterday by several Vietnam veterans.
In direct testimony and in letters, the veterans said hospitals often were considered targets rather than areas to be avoided as required by the Geneva convention on warfare.…
………
In testimony on the hospitals, Alan Stevenson, a stockbroker from San Francisco and former Army intelligence specialist, said that while in Quang Tri province in 1969, he routinely listed hospitals among targets to be struck by American fighter plans.………
Former Air Force captain general Gerald Greven said he personally ordered bombing raids against hospitals: It was policy, he said, to “look for hospitals as targets.”
This provides some context, and it’s pretty clear that bombing hospitals has been official military doctrine in my lifetime.
When one looks at who the hospital were treating, and when they were treated, it reinforces the suspicion that the hospital was targeted because of its role as a hospital:
On Tuesday, the Daily Beast noted that DOD had not fulfilled its promise to release the preliminary results of its investigation into the October 3 bombing of the Médecins Sans Frontières trauma center in Kunduz a month earlier.
………
One possible explanation may be that on October 24, ISAF Commander John Campbell ordered another inquiry, this one carried out by a higher ranking general from another command.
………
Today, MSF released its own report of the bombing.
The report is interesting because, from the start, it has been clear MSF had a pretty good inkling of why they had been targeted. It lays out how, on September 28, the patient base in the hospital shifted from being primarily government forces to Taliban forces (though there were also 26 children treated that day) — though all were subject to MSF’s requirement that no weapons be brought into the compound. About half the 130 patients in the hospital during the attack were Taliban.
Perhaps most interesting is this paragraph, indicating that by Wednesday September 30, MSF had concluded two of those Taliban patients were more senior Taliban.
By Wednesday, MSF was aware of two wounded Taliban patients that appeared to have had higher rank. This was assumed for multiple reasons: being brought in to the hospital by several combatants, and regular inquiries about their medical condition in order to accelerate treatment for rapid discharge.
I’m going to guess that one or both of these men were used to claim the hospital was operating as a command post, if not to claim it could legitimately be targeted.Much later in the report, it describes Afghan forces searching the hospital as the evacuation started.
When juxtaposed with the fact that MSF had communicated with the military a few days prior to the incident and told commanders that there was no military presence, it further reinforces the suspicions that the hospital was deliberately targeted:
………
In Kabul, the group’s general director, Christopher Stokes, told reporters that the Pentagon had been in direct contact just days before the attack to ask whether Taliban militiamen were “holed up” in the Kunduz hospital compound and whether the staff felt threatened.
Stokes said MSF replied that there were no armed Taliban on the grounds and the 140-bed hospital was functioning normally.
“There was no following” dialogue from the U.S. military “saying, ‘We have different information. We are going to bomb you,’ ’’ Stokes said.
My sense is that the strikes were deliberate.
Of course, I’m sure that we will get the official Pentagon report sometime in 2017 absolving the military of all blame.
This is Not a Surprise
Even in the ethically dubious world of charter schools, online charters seem to be dicey.
Now comes a study which indicates that online charters are about as effective as not going to school at all:
A new study on the effectiveness of online charter schools is nothing short of damning — even though it was at least partly funded by a private pro-charter foundation. It effectively says that the average student who attends might as well not enroll.
The study was done by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes, known as CREDO, and located at Stanford University, in collaboration with the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington and Mathematica Policy Research. CREDO’s founding director, Margaret Raymond, served as project director. CREDO receives funding from the pro-charter Walton Family Foundation, which provided support for the new research.
CREDO has released a number of reports in recent years on the effectiveness of charters — using math and reading standardized test scores as the measure — which collectively conclude that some perform better than traditional public schools and some don’t. In its newest report, released this week, CREDO evaluated online K-12 charter schools. There are 17 states with online charter students: Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas, Utah and Wisconsin, as well as the District of Columbia.
The study sought to answer this question: “How did enrollment in an online charter school affect the academic growth of students?” Academic growth, as mentioned before, is measured by standardized test scores for the purpose of this study, which evaluated scores from online charter students between 2008 and 2013 and compared them to students in traditional public schools (not brick-and-mortar charters). Here are some of the findings:
- Students in online charters lost an average of about 72 days of learning in reading.
- Students in online charters lost 180 days of learning in math during the course of a 180-day school year. Yes, you read that right. As my colleague Lyndsey Layton wrote in this story about the study, it’s as if the students did not attend school at all when it comes to math.
- The average student in an online charter had lower reading scores than students in traditional schools everywhere except Wisconsin and Georgia, and had lower math scores everywhere except in Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin.
Layton quoted Raymond as saying, “There’s still some possibility that there’s positive learning, but it’s so statistically significantly different from the average, it is literally as if the kid did not go to school for an entire year.”
(emphasis mine)
Fundamentally, the problem here is that many of the supporters of things like cyber-charter schools are autodidacts, the sort of people who would literally break into computer science lab in the dead of night to teach themselves about computers. (This is an actual example from the life of Bill Gates, a big charter supporter.)
People who are that aggressively self taught are few and far between, and there are simply not enough people who fit that mold (I don’t, for example) for the rapidly expanding rolls of internet academies, and those who could succeed with these institutions don’t really need them. They could learn anywhere.
BTW, this is also an indictment of MOOCs, (Massive Open Online Courses) which seem to be the latest fad in higher education.
I will note however that there are remote learning approaches that do work, most notably Open University in the UK, but these involve to use of tutors who actually have a significant amount of face time with their students, as well as face to face evaluations.
Of course those get in the way of profits, so in the charter and the MOOC world, these things are eschewed.