Month: August 2016

It’s a Self Licking Ice Cream Cone

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The DEA has decided to keep classifying Marijuana as a Schedule 1 Drug, which means that they claim that it has no therapeutic value.

It also means that a large portion of the DEA’s budget, the part that is driven by its anti-pot activities, remains safe.

How convenient:

For the fourth consecutive time, the Drug Enforcement Administration has denied a petition to lessen federal restrictions on the use of marijuana.

While recreational marijuana use is legal in four states and D.C., and medical applications of the drug have been approved in many more, under federal law, it remains a Schedule 1 controlled substance, which means it’s considered to have “no currently accepted medical use” and a “high potential for abuse.”

The gap between permissive state laws and a restrictive federal policy has become increasingly untenable in the minds of many doctors, patients, researchers, business owners and legislators.

For instance, last fall, a Brookings Institution report slammed the federal government for “stifling medical research” in the area of marijuana policy. As a Schedule 1 drug, it’s much harder for researchers to work with marijuana than with many other controlled substances. The American Academy of Pediatrics has called on the government to move marijuana into Schedule 2 to facilitate more research into medical uses.

Perhaps this determination should be made by an organization whose budget is not contingent on it remaining illegal.

Linkage

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Artificially induced buzzes in history:

Remember When I Suggested That Some Hillary Supporters Were a Bit ……… Hinky?

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Well, former acting CIA Director Michael Morell, who wants very much to be the next CIA Director, who recently endorsed Hillary Clinton, is calling for the assassination of Russians and Iranians in Syria:

Former acting CIA Director Michael Morell said in an interview Monday that U.S. policy in Syria should be to make Iran and Russia “pay a price” by arming local groups and instructing them to kill Iranian and Russian personnel in the country.

Morell was appearing on the Charlie Rose show on PBS in the wake of his publicly endorsing Hillary Clinton on the New York Times opinion pages.

Clinton has expressed support for increased military intervention in Syria against Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian government. Iran and Russia are backing Assad.

“What they need is to have the Russians and Iranians pay a little price,” Morell said. “When we were in Iraq, the Iranians were giving weapons to the Shia militia, who were killing American soldiers, right? The Iranians were making us pay a price. We need to make the Iranians pay a price in Syria. We need to make the Russians pay a price.”

Morell said the killing of Russians and Iranians should be undertaken “covertly, so you don’t tell the world about it, you don’t stand up at the Pentagon and say ‘we did this.’ But you make sure they know it in Moscow and Tehran.”

Morell also proposed that U.S. forces begin bombing Syrian government installations, including government offices, aircraft and presidential guard positions. The former acting CIA director said that he wanted to “scare Assad.” Morell clarified that he wasn’t actually calling for Assad’s assassination.

………

Morell’s endorsement of Clinton was quickly seen as a sign that he was interested in a role in a possible Clinton administration. He wrote that Clinton would be a “highly qualified commander in chief” and a “strong proponent of a more aggressive approach” to the conflict in Syria.

………

This weekend, Hillary Clinton touted Morell’s endorsement on her Twitter page:

“She will deliver on the most important duty of a president—keeping our nation safe.” —Michael Morell on Hillary https://t.co/zmI3BOCH9Y

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) August 7, 2016

Anyone can say that they endorse you, but the fact that you are touting the endorsement of this Fruitloop does engender confidence in your judgement.

When Donald F%$#ing Trump can make an argument that he is the peace candidate, you are doing something seriously wrong.

The Internet of Things Got Hacked Again, Things that go Buzz in the Night Edition

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In news of the coming tech utopia, a network enabled sexual aid has been hacked, and even in the unhacked condition, it sends personal data back to the manufacturer.

The Internet of Things That Can Be Hacked grows daily. Lightbulbs, trucks, and fridges all have computers inside them now, and all have been hacked by someone. But at least you don’t put those inside your body.

Two years ago, someone had the good idea to put a bluetooth connection inside a vibrator, and the We-Vibe 4 Plus was born. The vibrator can connect with a smartphone app that its makers say “allows couples to keep their flame ignited – together or apart”: that is, it can be controlled remotely, while, say, making a video call.

The consequences of a wrong number are left to reader’s imagination.

But at the Def Con hacking conference in Las Vegas, two independent hackers from New Zealand, who go by the handles goldfisk and follower, revealed that the way the vibrator speaks with its controlling app isn’t really secure at all – making it possible to remotely seize control of the vibrator and activate it at will.

In their talk, Hacking the Internet of Vibrating Things, Follower argued that despite titters at the back of the room, the security of a sex toy should be taken seriously. “The company that makes this vibrator, Standard Innovation: They have over 2 million people using their devices, so what’s at stake is 2 million people.”

“A lot of people in the past have said it’s not really a serious issue,” he added, “but if you come back to the fact that we’re talking about people, unwanted activation of a vibrator is potentially sexual assault.”

Potentially worse still, the pair discovered that the app itself was phoning home, letting the manufacturer discover some very intimate information about users.

(emphasis mine)

I want no part of this brave new world.

Seriously? Boasting About an Endorsement from John f%$#ing Negroponte?

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It appears that the latest endorsement for Hillary Clinton from the “Guilty of Crimes Against Humanity” crowd is in, and her campaign is crowing about John Negroponte’s Endorsement, probably because Henry Kissinger was busy:

In her continuing tour of the dingier side of the 20th Century American diplomatic elite, Hillary Rodham Clinton picked up the endorsement on Wednesday of one John Negroponte. ………

 ………

 Well, that’s special, isn’t it? And what did Negroponte do while serving “in numerous diplomatic and national security positions starting in 1960”? I’m glad you asked.

 In the 1980s, he served as the U.S. ambassador to Honduras. In addition to (at best) covering for that country’s murderous autocrats, he also served the Reagan Administration by helping to turn Honduras into a staging area for American-trained death squads in places like El Salvador and Guatemala. (Remember, Eugene Hasenfus was flying out of a base in Honduras when he got shot down over Nicaragua, which is when the Iran-Contra criminal enterprise began to unravel.)………

 In any case, the essential Robert Parry has been dogging this story for nearly 40 years now. From In These Times:

Given the human rights records of the Honduran military and the Nicaraguan contras who set up shop in Honduras during Negroponte’s tenure as ambassador in the early ’80s, he will have no moral standing as a public official who repudiates abusive interrogation techniques and brutal counterinsurgency tactics. Indeed, some cynics might suggest that’s one of the reasons Bush picked him. Negroponte’s work in Honduras means, too, that he will come to his new job with a history of forwarding inaccurate intelligence to Washington and leaving out information that would have upset the upper echelon of the Reagan-Bush administration. For his part, Negroponte, who is now 65, has staunchly denied knowledge of “death squad” operations by the Honduran military in the ’80s.

 In 1983, in another move that helped the Honduran military and the contras, the Reagan-Bush administration closed down the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) office at the U.S. Embassy in Tegucigalpa, just as Honduras was emerging as an important base for cocaine transshipments to the United States. “Elements of the Honduran military were involved … in the protection of drug traffickers from 1980 on,” is how a Senate Foreign Relations investigative report, issued in 1989 by a subcommittee headed by Sen. John Kerry, put it. “These activities were reported to appropriate U.S. government officials throughout the period. Instead of moving decisively to close down the drug trafficking by stepping up the DEA presence in the country and using the foreign assistance the United States was extending to the Hondurans as a lever, the United States closed the DEA office in Tegucigalpa and appears to have ignored the issue.” It’s unclear what role Negroponte played in shutting down the DEA office in Honduras during his time as U.S. ambassador, but it is hard to imagine that a step of that significance could have occurred without at least his acquiescence.

 ………

 “Given what we know about the extent and nature of Honduran human rights abuses, to say that Mr. Negroponte was less than forthcoming in his responses to my questions is being generous,” said Dodd. “I was also troubled by Ambassador Negroponte’s unwillingness to admit that—as a consequence of other U.S. policy priorities—the U.S. Embassy, by acts of omissions, end[ed] up shading the truth about the extent and nature of ongoing human rights abuses in the 1980s. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights had no such reluctance in assigning blame to the Honduran government during its adjudication of a case brought against the government of Honduras [in 1987],” [Senator Christopher] Dodd said.

Hillary Clinton has been completely captured by they dysfunctional, immoral, and incompetent foreign policy consensus that has been mismanaging our foreign policy since the 1960s.

This The Best and the Brightest crap really needs to end.

It has produced nothing but death and misery and failure.

When You Manufacture Terrorism, You Create Terrorism

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In 2015, at a “Draw Muhammad” cartoon contest in (where else) Texas, 2 gunman opened fire, and were shot to death by police.

If you are wondering how they managed to plan this, wonder no more. Not only did the FBI know about it, the TBI was actively encouraging them so as to create a more media friendly arrest:

Days before an ISIS sympathizer attacked a cartoon contest in Garland, Texas, he received a text from an undercover FBI agent.

“Tear up Texas,” the agent messaged Elton Simpson days before he opened fire at the Draw Muhammad event, according to an affidavit (pdf) filed in federal court Thursday.

“U know what happened in Paris,” Simpson responded. “So that goes without saying… No need to be direct.”

That revelation comes amidst a national debate about the use of undercover officers and human sources in terrorism cases. Undercover sources are used in more than half of ISIS-related terror cases, according to statistics kept by the George Washington University Program on Extremism, and civil liberties advocates say some of those charged might not have escalated their behavior without those interventions.

“It would certainly be inappropriate for an FBI undercover agent or cooperating witness to provoke or inspire or urge a person to commit an act of violence,” Michael German, a former FBI agent now at the Brennan Center for Justice, told The Daily Beast. “I could imagine an undercover agent thinking it was just the hyperbolic rhetoric they are participating in, and it wasn’t an intent to go to Texas and do harm.

………

Press officers for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Ohio, the Cleveland FBI Office, and the Department of Justice declined to comment beyond the affidavit. FBI spokeswoman Carol Cratty hung up on The Daily Beast after being asked about the “tear up Texas” text.

But shortly after that exchange, Simpson and his accomplice, Nadir Soofi, drove up to the contest and opened fire on police officers, injuring one of them slightly. Both men were killed in the altercation, but Hendricks would remain free for another year.

Hendricks’s arrest means that every major U.S. attack was linked to FBI investigation before it happened, Seamus Hughes, deputy director of the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, told The Daily Beast.

This is not just an organization doing its job well, this is an organization actively sabotaging its own efforts in an attempt to generate bogus statistics.

The FBI truly is the misbegotten child of J. Edgar Hoover, and it is completely broken.

A Bit of Excitement Today

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Walking to work from the Metro, there was a veritable fleet of trucks parked around the Hippodrome theater.
It turns out that they were filming some scenes from the Kevin Spacey series House of Cards.
They were setting up when I came into work, and shutting down when I was on my way home.

Posted via mobile.

My Money Is This Being the NSA

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A highly sophisticated malware has been discovered more than 5 years after its release into the wild.

It’s level of sophistication indicates that it was produced by a state actor:

Security experts have discovered a malware platform that’s so advanced in its design and execution that it could probably have been developed only with the active support of a nation-state.

The malware—known alternatively as “ProjectSauron” by researchers from Kaspersky Lab and “Remsec” by their counterparts from Symantec—has been active since at least 2011 and has been discovered on 30 or so targets. Its ability to operate undetected for five years is a testament to its creators, who clearly studied other state-sponsored hacking groups in an attempt to replicate their advances and avoid their mistakes. State-sponsored groups have been responsible for malware like the Stuxnet- or National Security Agency-linked Flame, Duqu, and Regin. Much of ProjectSauron resides solely in computer memory and was written in the form of Binary Large Objects, making it hard to detect using antivirus.

Because of the way the software was written, clues left behind by ProjectSauron in so-called software artifacts are unique to each of its targets. That means that clues collected from one infection don’t help researchers uncover new infections. Unlike many malware operations that reuse servers, domain names, or IP addresses for command and control channels, the people behind ProjectSauron chose a different one for almost every target.

 “The attackers clearly understand that we as researchers are always looking for patterns,” Kaspersky researchers wrote in a report published Monday. “Remove the patterns and the operation will be harder to discover. We are aware of more than 30 organizations attacked, but we are sure that this is just a tiny tip of the iceberg.” Symantec researchers, in a report of their own, said they were aware of seven organizations infected.

 Jumping air gaps

 Part of what makes ProjectSauron so impressive is its ability to collect data from computers considered so sensitive by their operators that they have no Internet connection. To do this, the malware uses specially prepared USB storage drives that have a virtual file system that isn’t viewable by the Windows operating system. To infected computers, the removable drives appear to be approved devices, but behind the scenes are several hundred megabytes reserved for storing data that is kept on the “air-gapped” machines. The arrangement works even against computers in which data-loss prevention software blocks the use of unknown USB drives.

………

The main purpose of the malware platform was to obtain passwords, cryptographic keys, configuration files, and IP addresses of the key servers related to any encryption software that was in use. Infected groups include government agencies, scientific research centers, military organizations, telecommunication providers, and financial institutions in Russia, Iran, Rwanda, China, Sweden, Belgium, and possibly in Italian-speaking countries.

I don’t know the specific targets, but the locations appear top indicate that the source of the hack is somewhere in the Fort Mead-DC-Langley axis.

The Term Here is Eating Our Seed Corn

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It appears that Colony Collapse Disorder, which has been decimating bees across the nation, is not just an issue with a specific type of insecticide, but a more general consequence of chemical intensive farming:

As we’ve written before, the mysterious mass die-off of honey bees that pollinate $30 billion worth of crops in the US has so decimated America’s apis mellifera population that one bad winter could leave fields fallow. Now, a new study has pinpointed some of the probable causes of bee deaths and the rather scary results show that averting beemageddon will be much more difficult than previously thought.

Scientists had struggled to find the trigger for so-called Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) that has wiped out an estimated 10 million beehives, worth $2 billion, over the past six years. Suspects have included pesticides, disease-bearing parasites and poor nutrition. But in a first-of-its-kind study published today in the journal PLOS ONE, scientists at the University of Maryland and the US Department of Agriculture have identified a witch’s brew of pesticides and fungicides contaminating pollen that bees collect to feed their hives. The findings break new ground on why large numbers of bees are dying though they do not identify the specific cause of CCD, where an entire beehive dies at once.

 When researchers collected pollen from hives on the east coast pollinating cranberry, watermelon and other crops and fed it to healthy bees, those bees showed a significant decline in their ability to resist infection by a parasite called Nosema ceranae. The parasite has been implicated in Colony Collapse Disorder though scientists took pains to point out that their findings do not directly link the pesticides to CCD. The pollen was contaminated on average with nine different pesticides and fungicides though scientists discovered 21 agricultural chemicals in one sample. Scientists identified eight ag chemicals associated with increased risk of infection by the parasite.

Most disturbing, bees that ate pollen contaminated with fungicides were three times as likely to be infected by the parasite. Widely used, fungicides had been thought to be harmless for bees as they’re designed to kill fungus, not insects, on crops like apples.

“There’s growing evidence that fungicides may be affecting the bees on their own and I think what it highlights is a need to reassess how we label these agricultural chemicals,” Dennis vanEngelsdorp, the study’s lead author, told Quartz.

This is going to get ugly, and I expect to see a collapse of some bee pollinated crops, most likely almonds, before we actually start applying some common sense regulation to the industry.

This Says Something Interesting About American Management

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Though I haven’t quite figured out what.

The CIA has released a WWII manual on sabotage, and it appears to describe life in modern American businesses frighteningly accurately:

In 1944, the CIA’s precursor, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), distributed a secret pamphlet that was intended as a guidebook to citizens living in Axis nations who were sympathetic to the Allies.

The “Simple Sabotage Field Manual,” declassified in 2008 and available on the CIA’s website, provided instructions for how everyday people could help the Allies weaken their country by reducing production in factories, offices, and transportation lines. 

………

See if any of those listed below — quoted but abridged — remind you of your boss, colleagues, or even yourself.

Organizations and Conferences 

  • Insist on doing everything through “channels.” Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.
  • Make “speeches.” Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your “points” by long anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences.
  • When possible, refer all matters to committees, for “further study and consideration.” Attempt to make the committee as large as possible — never less than five.
  • Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.
  • Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions.
  • Refer back to matters decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to re-open the question of the advisability of that decision.
  • Advocate “caution.” Be “reasonable” and urge your fellow-conferees to be “reasonable”and avoid haste which might result in embarrassments or difficulties later on.

Managers 

  • In making work assignments, always sign out the unimportant jobs first. See that important jobs are assigned to inefficient workers.
  • Insist on perfect work in relatively unimportant products; send back for refinishing those which have the least flaw.
  • To lower morale and with it, production, be pleasant to inefficient workers; give them undeserved promotions.
  • Hold conferences when there is more critical work to be done.
  • Multiply the procedures and clearances involved in issuing instructions, pay checks, and so on. See that three people have to approve everything where one would do.

Employees

  • Work slowly.
  • Contrive as many interruptions to your work as you can.
  • Do your work poorly and blame it on bad tools, machinery, or equipment. Complain that these things are preventing you from doing your job right.
  • Never pass on your skill and experience to a new or less skillful worker.

I’m sure that my dad, who spent much of his professional life as a consultant in management and organization, is familiar with these hallmarks of a dysfunctional organization.

I’m also wondering just how surprised he is that these behaviors are indistinguishable from deliberate sabotage.

Corbyn Just Scored Some Major Wins

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He just won a court case over voting rights for members and his supporters slate swept the elections for Labour’s executive committee:

Jeremy Corbyn has consolidated his grip on the Labour party after he won the first round of the latest high court battle over the rules of the leadership contest – and his supporters swept the board in elections to the party’s ruling National Executive Committee.

After another day of twists and turns in the fierce battle for the future of the party, some of Corbyn’s critics among Labour MPs were privately saying his position now appeared unassailable.

The next step by the Blairites and their ilk will be to actively sabotage the next election, because they will keep the Tories in power forever to keep their privileged positions within the party.

Cyber Currencies’ Fatal flaw

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You can never be sure that someone won’t come after your assets via the blockchain.

When you realize that almost every square inch of the earth (Antarctica excepted) was stolen at some point, and the same applies to most assets in the modern world.

With Bitcoin and its ilk, there is no statute of limitations:

An interesting little observation by Izzy Kaminska over in the FT about a problem that Bitcoin faces. It’s a legal problem that leads to an economic one. And the problem Bitcoin faces is one that is based upon the very existence of the blockchain itself. There’s a good reason that all functioning economic systems have something akin to a market ouvert rule, or something like squatters’ rights. Note that I say something like, not exactly either of those rules. For example, if you find money in the street then you can’t and shouldn’t just keep it. But if you hand it in to the police, no one then claims if for some period of time, then it does become yours. No, you can’t just move into someone elses’ house and insist that it belongs to you. But move in for long enough (the time period varies) and no one complains or does anything and it becomes yours. You don’t get title when you buy stolen goods. But something you bought in good faith, in an open marketplace, does become yours eventually. Even if it had been stolen some point further down the ownership chain.

 The reason for these rules, and yes they vary across places and concerning different specific items, is that at some point we’ve got to give up on historic unfairnesses and or illegalities and just get on with the current allocation of scarce resources. We just don’t want to wall off something that may or may not have been stolen in, say, 1820, from being put to use today. We almost certainly would want to make sure that something stolen yesterday was returned to its rightful owner. But at some point between those two dates we’ve got to have a cut off point.

………

And that’s where Bitcoin has the problem, in that very existence of the blockchain:

The first relates to the ongoing legal recourse rights of Bitfinex victims. Even though they may have lost their right to pursue Bitfinex for compensation, they are still going to be entitled to track the funds across the blockchain to seek recourse from whomsoever receives the bitcoins in their accounts. That’s good news for victims, but mostly likely very bad news for bitcoin’s fungible state and thus its status as a medium of exchange.

Just one successful claim by a victim who tracks his funds to an identifiable third party, and the precedent is set. Any exchanges dealing with bitcoin in a legitimate capacity would from then on be inclined to do much stronger due diligence on whether the bitcoins being deposited in their system were connected to ill-gotten gains. This in turn would open the door to the black-listing of funds that can not prove they were originated honestly via legitimate earnings.

Of course, people should not steal things. And yet for a currency to work it has to be possible to take the currency at its face value. Thus it may well be that the bank robber paid you for his beer with stolen money but you got it fair and square and thus the bank doesn’t get it back as and when they find out. Another way to put this is that the crime dies with the criminal. And yet the blockchain upends all of that. Because every transaction which any one bitcoin has been involved in is traceable.

The problem with cyber currencies and the rest of the internet enabled Libertarian-Utopian is that they believe that computer code developed over a few months can somehow trump contract law and record keeping that has been developed over the past 1000+ years.

Ask yourself, what happens if you have a fruit tree with branches that cross a property line.  Who owns the fruit on those branches?

It is very complicated.

In some places, the branches, and fruit, belong to the property owner over whose property it extends.

In others, it belongs to the property owner of the location of the trunk, but  the owner of the property can prune branches over their yard and dig up roots under the yard.

In some places, it belongs to one person when it on the branch, and another when the fruit falls.

In some places, a landowner can sue for trespass for branches over their yard.

This is just a fruit tree.

Recording property transactions are far more significant, and potentially far more complex, and we saw what happened when the banks decided to create MERS to “streamline” fraud real estate transactions.

I’m an engineer, not a lawyer, dammit, * but is clear to me that the people behind these efforts have only the vaguest idea of how society works, and how long it took to get society works.

*I love it when I get to go all Dr. McCoy!

Tweet of the Day

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The anti-Trump surprise candidate is a former CIA agent and Goldman Sachs guy who does TED talks, he’s going to take votes away from HIllary

— Will Menaker (@willmenaker) August 8, 2016

Seriously, for all the big deal that people are making about his candidacy today, it’s about as useful as tits on a bull.

Note also that Evan McMullin has already dropped his time with the Vampire Squid from his online resume ……… Like that’s gonna make a difference.

H/t  naked capitalism

Adding to the List of They Who Must Not Be Named

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I’ve always though that the Olympics was a Petri dish for corruption, violent nationalist tendencies, and egregiously bad “journalism”.

This year, it appears that NBC has outdone itself in its coverage.

It’s bad.

It’s really bad.

It’s really, really, really bad.

Seriously, it ain’t good.

I’m adding the Olympics, and discussions of Olympic coverage to my list of They Who Must Not Be Named, absent something of Munich level catastrophe.

Linkage

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Have some climate change inaction figures:

H/t DC at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

David Sirota Collects Another Scalp

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Last month David Sirota’s reporting revealed conflicts of interest in the review of the merger between Anthem and Cigna, resulting in regulatory and political push-back against the deal.

This month, his reporting of Chris Christie’s sweet heart deals with political contributor hedge funds has led to the New Jersey pensions backing away from the deals:

Governor Chris Christie’s pension officials on Wednesday signed off on a major divestment of hedge funds — a move that is expected to save taxpayers and retirees tens of millions of dollars in fees that had been flowing to Wall Street. The decision caps an intensifying campaign against the hedge fund investments by groups representing retirees.

 The campaign was prompted by an International Business Times investigative series that first spotlighted the skyrocketing fees.

 At a meeting of the Christie-controlled State Investment Council, pension officials cut in half the amount of state pension money that will be allocated to hedge funds, according to a press release from the New Jersey state AFL-CIO. That $3 billion reduction was part of an overall reduction of pension investments in higher-risk “alternative investments” that generate big fees, but whose returns have in many cases failed to keep pace with low-fee stock index funds. In all, the reduction in hedge fund investments is expected to save more than $120 million in fees next year, according to the labor federation, whose retiree members rely on the pension system.

 ………

 After a decade of public pensions pumping more retiree money into alternative investments, new questions have recently been raised about the fees and returns generated by the strategy. Major pension funds in California and New York have reduced their investments in hedge funds.

Back in 2014, before the national debate over pension fees had intensified, IBT first began reporting on how Christie’s administration had significantly increased the amount of pension money flowing to high-fee alternative investment firms. The two-pronged year-long series explored the politics of pension investments as well as the revenue implications of the investment shift.

 Under Christie, pension investments flowed to politically connected firms whose employees had delivered campaign donations to Christie-linked political groups. IBT also documented how Christie’s political team was in contact with the governor’s top pension adviser. That adviser’s private firm concurrently invested in a fund he had directed public pension money into. The adviser subsequently resigned after the state’s largest labor federation filed an ethics complaint against him.

So, these Gaultian supermen on Wall Street have once again been proved to be, “parasites”, “looters”, and “moochers.”

We need to shut down this sort of unproductive rent seeking.

Combat Ready My Ass

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The US Air Force has declared that its first squadron of F-35s is combat ready:

The U.S. Air Force on Tuesday declared an initial squadron of Lockheed Martin Corp F-35A fighter jets ready for combat, marking a major milestone for a program that has faced cost overruns and delays.

………

“The U.S. Air Force decision to make the 15 F-35As … combat ready sends a simple and powerful message to America’s friends and foes alike – the F-35 can do its mission,” the program’s chief, Air Force Lieutenant General Chris Bogdan, said in a statement.

Not so much:

Dan Grazier, a fellow of the Project On Government Oversight, said, however, “This is nothing but a public relations stunt.” He added that it would not be possible to know if the F-35 jets were ready for combat until after initial operational testing.

That’s putting it mildly.

As the folks at The Register note. “It’s got dodgy radar, relies on an insecure database, boasts a buggy operating system, and a laser targeting system that can’t be used for training in the UK, but the United States Air Force is satisfied that the F-35A fighter is ready for combat.”

Also: its ejection seat can injure smaller (less than 165 lb) pilots, and its cannon cannot be fired.

This is a statement that is intended for the consumption of the Pentagon and Congress, and not reflective of the maturity of the program.

I Really Hope That They Stream This Online

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We now know that Debbie Wasserman Schultz is concerned about the primary later this month, because has just agreed to debate Tim Canova:

U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz said Thursday she would debate her primary challenger Tim Canova.

“I have always said that when we got to August that I would focus on the question of whether or not I was going to debate my opponent,” she said in a brief telephone interview. “I am going to debate my opponent.”

Canova’s campaign treated the development like a victory. “It’s good news for the residents of South Florida,” Canova said. “Debbie Wasserman Schultz has never had to account for her record. She’s never engaged in a debate as long as she’s been a member of Congress. And it’s well past time to have that accounting.”

If you are comfortably in the lead, you pretend as if your opponent does not exist.

She is agreeing to debate because she expects the primary to be close.

I’ll post updates about when and where the debates will be, but in the meantime, throw some money at Matthew Saroff’s Act Blue Page which is currently set up to split contributions between Tim Canova and Alan Grayson, who is running for Florida Senate against former Republican, serial fabulist, and Wall Street BFF Patrick Murphy.