Author: Matthew G. Saroff

Thank You Richard Nixon (Not a Joke)

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One of the things that Richard Nixon did that he doesn’t get credit for is getting lead out of paint and gasoline.

Kevin Drum has written a lot about how falling crime rates 20 years after environmental lead was removed from paint and gasoline crime fell, and now we see lead exposure correlates to teen pregnancy as well:

Jessica Wolpaw Reyes has a new paper out that investigates the link between childhood lead exposure—mostly via tailpipe emissions of leaded gasoline—and violent crime. Unsurprisingly, since her previous research has shown a strong link, she finds a strong link again. But she also finds something else: a strong link between lead and teen pregnancy.

This is not a brand new finding. Rick Nevin’s very first paper about lead and crime was actually about both crime and teen pregnancy, and he found strong correlations for both at the national level. Reyes, however, goes a step further. It turns out that different states adopted unleaded gasoline at different rates, which allows Reyes to conduct a natural experiment. If lead exposure really does cause higher rates of teen pregnancy, then you’d expect states with the lowest levels of leaded gasoline to also have the lowest levels of teen pregnancy 15 years later. And guess what? They do. The chart on the right shows the correlation between gasoline lead exposure and later rates of teen pregnancy, and it’s very strong. Stronger even than the correlation with violent crime.

It’s not surprising.

One of the effects of lead on the developing brain is reduced impulse control, and it seems obvious to me that lack of impulse control would increase the likelihood of high risk sexual behaviors.

I am Actually Familiar With the Turkish Cleric and His Charter Schools

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One of his charter schools is Chesapeake Science Point Public Charter School, which holds a Rubik’s cube competition, and so I’ve been down there a couple of times, and it seemed a bit different, so I Googled it, and discovered that it was a part of the Gülen movement schools, which is led by Fethullah Gülen, a Turkish preacher living in self-imposed exile in the United States.

To be clear, Chesapeake Science Point is not a religious schools in any way shape or form, it’s more of an international school.

One of the interesting things that I discovered about this is that Fethullah Gülen is an ally turned opponent of Islamist PM (now President) of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, despite his residing in Pennsylvania.

So, I found it rather interesting when The Atlantic found the movement, and looked at the schools. The initial discussion is measured and anodyne:

It reads like something out of a John Le Carre novel: The charismatic Sunni imam Fethullah Gülen, leader of a politically powerful Turkish religious movement likened by The Guardian to an “Islamic Opus Dei,” occasionally webcasts sermons from self-imposed exile in the Poconos while his organization quickly grows to head the largest chain of charter schools in America. It might sound quite foreboding—and it should, but not for the reasons you might think.

You can be excused if you’ve never heard of Fethullah Gülen or his eponymous movement. He isn’t known for his openness, despite the size of his organization, which is rumored to have between 1 and 8 million adherents. It’s difficult to estimate the depth of its bench, however, without an official roster of membership. Known informally in Turkey as Hizmet, or “the service”, the Gülen movement prides itself on being a pacifist, internationalist, modern, and moderate alternative to more extreme derivations of Sunni Islam. The group does emphasize the importance of interfaith dialogue, education, and a kind of cosmopolitanism. One prominent sociologist described it as “the world’s most global movement.”

Much of the praise for the Gülen movement comes from its emphasis on providing education to children worldwide. In countries like Pakistan, its schools often serve as an alternative to more fundamentalist madrassas. Gülen schools enroll an estimated two million students around the globe, usually with English as the language of instruction, and the tuition is often paid in full by the institution. In Islamic countries, where the Gülen schools aren’t entirely secular: The New York Times reported that in many of the Pakistani schools, “…teachers encourage Islam in their dormitories, where teachers set the example in lifestyle and prayers.” But the focus is still largely on academics. Fethullah Gülen put it in one of his sermons, “Studying physics, mathematics, and chemistry is worshipping Allah.”

In Western countries such as the United States, Germany, and France, there isn’t any evidence whatsoever that the nearly 120 Gülen charter schools in America include Islamic indoctrination in their curriculum. The schools are so secular that singling out the Gülen schools as particularly nefarious, simply for being run predominantly by Muslims, smacks of xenophobia.

He appears to be running modernist schools, some secular, and some Islamic (not Islamist).

The next part is interesting to me because, once it gets into the nitty gritty of charter schools, as in pretty much every case where I have looked into charter schools, the finances become disturbing:

However, these schools might be suspect for reasons that are completely unrelated to Islamic doctrine. One of their most troubling characteristics is that they don’t have a great track record when it comes to financial and legal transparency. ……… Furthermore, as the Deseret News reported, the school’s administrators seemed to be reserving coveted jobs for their own countrymen and women: “In a time of teacher layoffs, Beehive has recruited a high percentage of teachers from overseas, mainly Turkey.”

………

There are similar stories from other states. In Texas, where 33 Gülen charter schools receive close to $100 million a year in taxpayer funds, the New York Times reported in 2011 that two schools had given $50 million to Gülen-connected contractors, including the month-old Atlas Texas Construction and Training, even though other contractors had offered lower bids. It was the same thing in Georgia, where Fulton County audited three Gülen schools after allegations that they’d skipped the bidding process altogether and paid nearly half a million dollars to organizations associated with the Gülen movement.

………

There are similar stories from other states. In Texas, where 33 Gülen charter schools receive close to $100 million a year in taxpayer funds, the New York Times reported in 2011 that two schools had given $50 million to Gülen-connected contractors, including the month-old Atlas Texas Construction and Training, even though other contractors had offered lower bids. It was the same thing in Georgia, where Fulton County audited three Gülen schools after allegations that they’d skipped the bidding process altogether and paid nearly half a million dollars to organizations associated with the Gülen movement.

Let’s be clear here: This is actually typical behavior within the Charter school movement, as Diane Ravich notes when contacted by The Atlantic:

………Diane Ravitch, education professor at New York University and Assistant Secretary of Education under George H.W. Bush, writes about this larger transparency issue in her latest book, Reign of Error, explaining, “In 2009, New York Charter School Association successfully sued to prevent the state comptroller from auditing the finances of charter schools, even though they receive public funding. The association contended that charter school’s are not government agencies but ‘non-profit educational corporations carrying out a public purpose.’” The New York State Court of Appeals agreed with the organization in a 7 to 0 vote. It took an act of legislation from the state—specifically designed to allow the comptroller to audit charter schools—for this to change.

Ravitch also writes of a similar instance in North Carolina in which the state, urged on by lobbying giant ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council), proposed the creation of a special commission, composed entirely of charter school advocates, as a way for charter schools to bypass the oversight of the State Board of Education or the local school boards. Ravitch writes, “The charters would not be required to hire certified teachers. Charter school staff would not be required to pass criminal background checks. The proposed law would not require any checks for conflicts of interest—not for commission members or for the charter schools.” In other words, it isn’t the Gülen movement that makes Gülen charter schools so secretive. It’s the charter school movement itself.

It turns out that the Gülen schools got raided by the FBI for steering money from the E-Rate program to favored contractors: (One wonders if the FBI, who has employed nut-job Islamophobic consultants, would have bother to investigated if the target wasn’t Islamic)

This comes across in the latest news story related to the Gülen schools: an FBI raid last month on the headquarters of over 19 Gülen-operated Horizon Science Academies in Midwest. According to search warrants obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times, federal authorities were interested in gathering general financial documents and records of communication. The warrant specifically mentions something called the E-rate program—a federal program that, according to the Sun-Times, “pays for schools to expand telecommunications and Internet access.” A handful of the Gülen-affiliated contractors assisting the schools were receiving money from this federal fund. It’s difficult speculate what this could all mean, as all documents pertaining to the investigation, save the warrants themselves, have been sealed from the public.

And then there is Ohio:

I contacted Matthew Blair, and he told me that the problems with the Gülen schools were merely symptomatic of a larger problem within the state’s education system. “The charter school system in Ohio is broken beyond repair,” he wrote in an email. “As it is, charter schools operate in a lawless frontier. Regulations are few and far between. Those that exist are consistently and consciously overlooked.”

The Gülen schools, he wrote, “are an excellent example” of this problem: “A Gülen organization controls the real estate companies that own their schools. They charge rent to their own schools and tax-payers foot the bill. They refuse to answer public records requests, falsify attendance records, and cheat on standardized tests. Yet, Ohio continues to grant them charters to operate.” He added, “It doesn’t hurt that the Gülen organization is politically active and treats state politicians to lavish trips abroad.” But overall, he said, “this Wild West atmosphere of few regulations creates incestuous relationships among politicians, vendors, and schools. Charter schools like Gülen’s give generously. In return, they are allowed to keep their saloons open and serve whatever they want. The only way to save the charter school system is to start over again by using the model of effective public schools.”

Let me reiterate: This is not a problem specific to the Gülen Schools. This is the standard way that charter schools do business.

I have already wrote about how Rocketship Schools loots taxpayer fund by paying exorbitant prices for software from a for-profit firm whose owners constitute a bulk of the board of directors of the nominally non profit schools, and the real-estate shenanigans are pretty much standard fare.

Charter schools as they are implemented in the United States are a remarkably criminogenic manner.

Google+ Won the Internet Today

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No, this is not The Onion.

I just came across an account f%#$ing with telemarketers that should win the Nobel Price for f%$#ing with telemarketers:*

Today is a good day. I just had a call from a telemarketer. Did I yell and scream at them, you ask? Certainly not. Like a good IT administrator I put my skills to use for their benefit. Here’s how the conversation went:

Computer: “Press 9 to not be contacted in the future. Press 4 to speak to someone about your mortgage issues”
TM: “Hello, are you having problems paying your mortgage?”
Me: “Hi, this is the IT department. We intercepted your call as we detected a problem with you phone and need to fix it.”

………

That’s right. I made a telemarketer unwittingly factory reset his phone which means he will be unable to make anymore calls until someone is able to reconfigure his phone and that will take at least an hour or longer if they can’t do it right away!

Needless to say, I am following the author of this, Chris Blasko, like forever.

Read the rest.  I had never thought to do this, but now, I am considering donating a dime to the NRSC, the RCCC, the RNC, Newsmax, and a couple of Teabagger groups to get on their call lists so that I can f%$# with them this way.

*I know that there is no Nobel Prize for f%$#ing with telemarketers, but there should be. If they have prizes for Peace, Literature, Physics, Chemistry, Medicine and Physiology, and Economics, they really should have one for f%$#ing with telemarketers.

Why I Don’t Give to NPR on Pledge Week, Part Infinity

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The first reason is their Jihad against community owned low power radio stations, and now they quote a consulting firm that is bought and paid for by the CIA to condemn Snowden’s NSA Leaks:

On August 1, NPR’s Morning Edition broadcast a story by NPR national security reporter Dina Temple-Raston touting explosive claims from what she called “a tech firm based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.” That firm, Recorded Future, worked together with “a cyber expert, Mario Vuksan, the CEO of ReversingLabs,” to produce a new report that purported to vindicate the repeated accusation from U.S. officials that “revelations from former NSA contract worker Edward Snowden harmed national security and allowed terrorists to develop their own countermeasures.”

The “big data firm,” reported NPR, says that it now “has tangible evidence” proving the government’s accusations. Temple-Raston’s four-minute, 12-second story devoted the first 3 minutes and 20 seconds to uncritically repeating the report’s key conclusion that ”just months after the Snowden documents were released, al-Qaeda dramatically changed the way its operatives interacted online” and, post-Snowden, “al-Qaeda didn’t just tinker at the edges of its seven-year-old encryption software; it overhauled it.” The only skepticism in the NPR report was relegated to 44 seconds at the end when she quoted security expert Bruce Schneier, who questioned the causal relationship between the Snowden disclosures and the new terrorist encryption programs, as well as the efficacy of the new encryption.

With this report, Temple-Raston seriously misled NPR’s millions of listeners. To begin with, Recorded Future, the outfit that produced the government-affirming report, is anything but independent. To the contrary, it is funded by the CIA and U.S. intelligence community with millions of dollars. Back in 2010, it also filed forms to become a vendor for the NSA. (In response to questions from The Intercept, the company’s vice president Jason Hines refused to say whether it works for the NSA, telling us that we should go FOIA that information if we want to know. But according to public reports, Recorded Future “earns most of its revenue from selling to Wall Street quants and intelligence agencies.”)

The connection between Recorded Future and the U.S. intelligence community is long known. Back in July, 2010, Wired‘s Noah Shachtman revealed that the company is backed by both “the investment arms of the CIA and Google.”

Indeed, In-Q-Tel—the deep-pocket investment arm of both the CIA and other intelligence agencies (including the NSA)—has seats on Recorded Future’s board of directors and, on its website, lists Recorded Future as one of the companies in its “portfolio.” In stark contrast to NPR, The New York Times noted these connections when reporting on the firm in 2011: “Recorded Future is financed with $8 million from the likes of Google’s venture arm and In-Q-Tel, which makes investments to benefit the United States intelligence community, and its clients have included government agencies and banks.”

Worse, Temple-Raston knows all of this. Back in 2012, NPR’s Morning Edition broadcast her profile of Recorded Future and its claimed ability to predict the future by gathering internet data. At the end of her report, she noted that the firm has “at least two very important financial backers: the CIA’s investment arm, called In-Q-Tel, and Google Ventures. They have reportedly poured millions into the company.”

Also, she ignores the fact that the changes to encryption, as reported by the New York Times, have been an ongoing process for at least 7 years, predating the Snowden whistle-blowing.

Why would I want to pledge money for the care and feeding mindless hack journalists acting as stenographers for the American state security apparatus?

Huh, Something Good on the Sunday Shows

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Woodward and Bernstein were interviewed about the constellation of scandals that became known as Watergate on Face the Nation:

The high points from the transcript:

WOODWARD: ……… And so what happened here is — and Carl and I have spent a lot of time looking at tape transcripts, and listening to these tapes and so forth, and you see the real Nixon come out which is kind of the dog that never barks on the tapes. Nixon never says, what’s good for the country, what do we need. It was always about Nixon and it was using the presidency as an instrument of personal revenge in a horrendous way.

 ………

 BERNSTEIN: When we were the writing the final days we started to encounter this, and it’s in the final days in person after person would tell us about how he railed against Jews and about blacks and finally Arthur Burns, the patrician economic adviser to the president said to me while we were reporting on the final days, Nixon had epithets for whole sections of mankind. There was an anger.

 ………

 WOODWARD: Yes, and then, also, if you look, he was — he was vice president for Eisenhower for eight years. And there’s some marvelous reporting that’s been done on this, which shows that Nixon was snubbed by Nix — by Eisenhower, that Eisenhower never brought him in. And — and Nixon felt that America was filled with a series of clubs that he could never get into.

 And it — and it just burned him. And, again, it’s on the tapes. He’ll — he’ll say things like, oh, you know, all those — he joined — after he left the vice presidency and lost the governor’s race in ’62, he went to practice law on Wall Street.

 And he says on the tapes with this kind of seething bitterness, you know, any of those lawyers ever ask me to their country clubs and ask me to go out and play golf with them?

 Not a one.

 ………

 WOODWARD: Yes.
But, um, what — it was seven years ago I went over to do what turned out to be the last interview with Bob McNamara, who was secretary of Defense for Kennedy and Johnson, Mr. Vietnam, and who apologized for Vietnam. And it was three hours. And he had an apartment in the Watergate and I kept pressing McNamara, you know, squeeze out what’s the final lesson of the mistake of Vietnam?

 And he said, there’s one lesson, and that is the advisers to the president need to sit around with the president and argue with him and say, wait a minute, let’s look at all the options. Uh, you have to create a conflict situation.

 And he said what happens in the presidency is no one wants to argue with the president, particularly in front of other advisers. So the president gets isolated and lives in a bubble.

 And I think you can argue that happens to every president, including this one.

I think that this last bit might be the most important lesson.

The founder of GM, William Durant, was famous for not allowing a major decision to made if everyone showed up at the meeting in agreement. He thought that it meant the idea had not been properly thought through.*

I think that he was right.

In addition, I think that any President who goes to a meeting of his staff/cabinet and thinks that he is the smartest guy in the room is likely to be have even more problems with the bubble phenomenon, because they will find it natural for people to agree with him.

*I cannot find this bit on the Google machine right now. I recall hearing it on the radio at some point in the past century.

Hillary Lets Her Inner Neocon Show

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Hillary Clinton was interviewed by noted “liberal hawk”, Iraq war booster, and blithering idiot, Jeffrey Goldberg, and she went full Dick Cheney:

President Obama has long ridiculed the idea that the U.S., early in the Syrian civil war, could have shaped the forces fighting the Assad regime, thereby stopping al Qaeda-inspired groups—like the one rampaging across Syria and Iraq today—from seizing control of the rebellion. In an interview in February, the president told me that “when you have a professional army … fighting against a farmer, a carpenter, an engineer who started out as protesters and suddenly now see themselves in the midst of a civil conflict—the notion that we could have, in a clean way that didn’t commit U.S. military forces, changed the equation on the ground there was never true.”

 Well, his former secretary of state, Hillary Rodham Clinton, isn’t buying it. In an interview with me earlier this week, she used her sharpest language yet to describe the “failure” that resulted from the decision to keep the U.S. on the sidelines during the first phase of the Syrian uprising.

 “The failure to help build up a credible fighting force of the people who were the originators of the protests against Assad—there were Islamists, there were secularists, there was everything in the middle—the failure to do that left a big vacuum, which the jihadists have now filled,” Clinton said.

Let’s be clear. Before Syria turned into a full up civil war, largely at the instigation of the House of Saud, the behavior of the Assad regime was awful, but better than that of Bahrain, whose atrocious behavior was in large part instigated by the House of Saud.

If the Gulf states, particularly the Saudis, had not aggressively shipped weapons and Jihadis to Syria, Syria would pretty much look like Bahrain, a brutal ruthless dictatorship, except that it would not be religiously based.

She continues:

During a discussion about the dangers of jihadism (a topic that has her “hepped-up,” she told me moments after she greeted me at her office in New York) and of the sort of resurgent nationalism seen in Russia today, I noted that Americans are quite wary right now of international commitment-making. She responded by arguing that there is a happy medium between bellicose posturing (of the sort she associated with the George W. Bush administration) and its opposite, a focus on withdrawal.

Because doubling down on a failed strategy, is such a good idea.

Then she doubles down on the whole Clash of Civilizations crap:

“One of the reasons why I worry about what’s happening in the Middle East right now is because of the breakout capacity of jihadist groups that can affect Europe, can affect the United States,” she said. “Jihadist groups are governing territory. They will never stay there, though. They are driven to expand. Their raison d’etre is to be against the West, against the Crusaders, against the fill-in-the-blank—and we all fit into one of these categories. How do we try to contain that? I’m thinking a lot about containment, deterrence, and defeat.”

Of course, Osama bin Laden’s justifications for his actions largely was that we were making war on Arabs and Islam: (H/t Naked Capitalism for the Link)

As for the first question: Why are we fighting and opposing you? The answer is very simple:

 (1) Because you attacked us and continue to attack us.

And Hillary’s solution is to bomb more Muslims and more Arabs.

It should also be noted that she was a big supporter of another Saudi supported bit of failed adventurism, the cluster F%$# that was the nation state of Libya.

Over at Salon, Joan Walsh wonders if the faction of the Democratic party that doesn’t need settle their manhood issues with bombs might be an impediment to her coronation as the Democratic Nominee in 2016.  (She actually hopes that it won’t, because ……… I dunno. She makes no coherent case at all for voting Hillary.)

As an aside, I am so glad that I live in Maryland. My vote for president does not matter, so I feel no compulsion to cast a vote for the Democratic nominee, no matter how retrograde.

It Appears that the Kurdish Word for August is “Tet”

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The US government is now officially sending weapons dirctly to the Kurdish militias:

The U.S. government has begun to funnel weapons directly to Kurdish forces fighting Islamist militants in northern Iraq, U.S. officials said Monday, deepening American involvement in a conflict that the Obama administration had long sought to avoid.

The decision to arm the Kurds, via a covert channel established by the CIA, was made even as Pentagon officials acknowledged that recent U.S. airstrikes against the militants were having only a temporary deterrent effect and were unlikely to sap their will to fight.

“I in no way want to suggest that we have effectively contained, or that we are somehow breaking, the momentum of the threat,” said Army Lt. Gen. William C. Mayville Jr., the director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

In a reflection of the administration’s reluctance to fight another full-fledged war in Iraq, Mayville said there are no plans to expand the limited air campaign, which President Obama ordered last week to prevent the massacre of Iraqi minorities and to protect U.S. military and diplomatic personnel in the northern city of Irbil.

………

In addition to the airstrikes, U.S. military officials have said they are conducting 50 to 60 reconnaissance flights a day over Iraq to get a clearer picture of the refu­gee crisis and movements by Islamic State fighters.

When the Gulf of Tonkin incident happened, I was just two years old, so I don’t know what that was like, but I my gut is feeling disturbing echoes.

What happens when (and it is when, not if) the first US pilot is shot down?

When I called Obama Bush with a Tan, I may have been wrong.

Perhaps a better analogy is that of LBJ, only with out the commitment to either social justice or civil rights.

Man Who Works Sucking the Marrow out of the Economy Is Hired to Suck the Marrow out of the LA Times

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At least, there is symmetry.

That sound that you hear is the legendary publisher Otis Chandler spinning in his grave:

The Los Angeles Times has named Austin Beutner, a former deputy mayor of Los Angeles and Wall Street banker, as its new chief executive and publisher.

 The appointment, announced on Monday, comes a week after The Times’s parent, the Tribune Company, spun off its newspapers into a separate publicly traded company called Tribune Publishing.

 Mr. Beutner, 54, a former partner at the private equity firm Blackstone Group and a co-founder of the investment bank Evercore Partners, most recently worked as Los Angeles’s deputy mayor of economic development. He also explored a run for mayor and was once reported to be a possible buyer of The Los Angeles Times alongside the billionaire Eli Broad.

 Jack Griffin, Tribune Publishing’s new chief executive, noted in a statement how these experiences would help Mr. Beutner in his new role.

 ………

 Mr. Beutner is taking over The Los Angeles Times at a major transitional point for its parent company, Tribune. After Tribune braved years of bankruptcy proceedings and threats of takeover by eager buyers, The Los Angeles Times, along with its fellow Tribune-owned papers like The Chicago Tribune, split from Tribune’s television stations into a separate company. But print institutions like The Los Angeles Times now face a brutal time for newspapers as more readers consume the news online.

And this guy won’t be helping.

He is there is to exsanguinate the LA Times, much like any vampire squid in finance.

Think what Mitt Rmoney did at Bain.

Why Documentation Sucks

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The essay, at Ask Slashdot speaks specifically to documentation for open source software, but I would argue that it could be applied almost anywhere:

Back when Sourceforge wasn’t a sh%$-heap of garbage in every possible way I did a lot of documentation for various programs. I’m not a programmer at all, but I can use the damn things and tell others how to do so as well. The biggest problems I had were ALWAYS at the hands of the developer. They’d have these posts desperately looking for documentation writers then treat us like total f%$#ing garbage when we had to ask questions. I can’t f%$#ing tell you how many times I was told to read the f%$#ing source, despite me being very up-front about my lack of coding ability. “If you can’t figure out how to use the program then how can you write documentation?”

MOTHERf%$#ER, IT DOESN’T WORK LIKE THAT. F%$# you in your goddamn asshole you f%$#ing arrogant f%$#ing pricks.

I stopped bothering when I stopped using Linux, which is a story in itself. The fact of the matter is the majority of programmers are assholes that have no business operating in normal society. Lock them in the f%$#ing closet and let them read the f%$#ing source until they jizz all over their crusty beards while fantasizing about Stallman’s brown pucker. Maybe THEN the people that make documentation will give enough of a sh%$ to try to do so again.

BTW, that is a comment, not the main post, but I think that he “gets” it.

When the programming community, whether open or closed source, holds documentation writers in abject contempt, the loser is the user.

H/T E-Cop at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

This is Not at All Surprising

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We are now seeing reports that the word “Peacekeeper” is being painted on the sides of Russian military vehicles near the Ukrainian boarder:

But there’s some frightening evidence that Moscow intends to invade mainland Ukraine.

“The probability of invasion is much, much higher than it has ever been,” James Miller, managing editor of The Interpreter, told War is Boring in an e-mail. The Interpreter translates media from the Russian press and blogosphere into English for use by analysts and policymakers.

The Russians reportedly have moved military vehicles with “peacekeeping” insignia to the border—a first since the crisis in the Ukraine began. Earlier this month, NATO warned that the Russians could mount an incursion into Ukrainian territory under the guise of a peacekeeping mission.

The Interpreter reports that it has found several pictures and a video showing Russian armored vehicles bearing the insignia “MC,” an abbreviation of the Russian words mirotvorcheskiye sily or “peacekeeping force.”

Given that the Ukranian military appears to be ramping up an already indiscriminate artillery barrage on Donetsk, it I would not be at all surprised seeing some sort of “peacekeeping” operation or “no fly zone” from the Kremlin.

Su-25 Attack Aircraft Production May Resume

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I do not see a big export market, so I gotta figure that new production is intended for use in what the Russians call the “Near Abroad”, and what Americans call the “Former Soviet Union”:

The Ulan-Ude Aviation Plant (UUAP) may resume the production of Sukhoi Su-25 fighter jets, the plant’s managing director Leonid Belykh said.

“We used to produce the Su-25 jets and today our equipment is still in good condition, so the question is under consideration. Some serious investment will be needed, and it is likely that another factory will take up the production. But if the government orders us to do it, we shall do it. If the production is to be transferred to somebody else, so be it,” Belykh told RIA Novosti.

Su-25 is a heavily armored subsonic strike attack aircraft designed for the close air support of ground forces in daytime and at night, the targets being within visible range. It is also used for the support of installations with given coordinates on a 24-hour basis in all weather conditions.

To be clear, this is not a formal request from Moscow, but rather a sales pitch made to Moscow from a defense plant.

Still, it does say something about the mindset on the side of both Russia’s defense industry and Russia’s military.

Pass the Popcorn

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The judge reviewing the collusion among Silicon Valley firms to suppress high tech wages has just ruled the settlement to be inadequate:

The judge overseeing the landmark Silicon Valley wage theft antitrust lawsuit has struck down the $324 million settlement reached between most of the class action plaintiffs and the defendants — Apple, Google, Intel and Adobe.

 In her 32-page order striking down the settlement terms, issued just moments ago, US District Judge Lucy Koch writes:

“This Court has lived with this case for nearly three years, and during that time, the Court has reviewed a significant number of documents in adjudicating not only the substantive motions, but also the voluminous sealing requests. Having done so, the Court cannot conclude that the instant settlement falls within the range of reasonableness. As this Court stated in its summary judgment order, there is ample evidence of an overarching conspiracy between the seven Defendants…”

This is stunning news, and it means that we still may get a trial after all, and learn more about the Techtopus wage theft conspiracy.

 Judge Koh bases her rejection by comparing the $324 million sum to the earlier settlement in 2013 with three other defendants in the wage-theft lawsuit: Intuit, LucasFilm and Pixar. Judging by that metric, Judge Koh argues that the settlement figure should have been at least $380 million. She also cites the “strength” of the plaintiffs’ case against the Big Tech defendants, and rejects the plaintiffs’ attorneys’ argument about the difficulties in winning an antitrust wage theft lawsuit of this scope.

This should get interesting for a number of reasons:

  • The documents make it pretty clear that the plaintiffs’ claims are airtight. (They also prove that Steve Jobs was a sociopathic @sshole, but that has been common knowledge for decades within the tech sector)
  • If the case proceeds, discovery should create even more damning information.
  • The blatant illegality of the behavior is such that the insurance carriers for the tech firms may end up suing them, claiming that the behavior is covered under the “deliberate acts” exclusions that almost all liability insurance policies contain.

This should be entertaining.

Someone Runs the Actual Cost of an F-35 JSF

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And the numbers are horrifying:

The F-35 is not just the most expensive warplane ever, it’s the most expensive weapons program ever. But to find out exactly how much a single F-35 costs, we analyzed the newest and most authoritative data.

 Here’s how much we’re paying.

 A single Air Force F-35A costs a whopping $148 million. One Marine Corps F-35B costs an unbelievable $251 million. A lone Navy F-35C costs a mind-boggling $337 million. Average the three models together, and a “generic” F-35 costs $178 million.

 It gets worse. These are just the production costs. Additional expenses for research, development, test and evaluation are not included. The dollars are 2015 dollars. This data was just released by the Senate Appropriations Committee in its report for the Pentagon’s 2015 appropriations bill.

Let’s go into the methodology for this article:

The methodology for calculating these F-35 unit costs is straightforward. Both the president’s budget and each of four congressional defense committees publish the amounts to be authorized or appropriated for each model of the F-35, including the number of aircraft to be bought.

 The rest is simple arithmetic: Divide the total dollars for each model by the quantity.

 ………

 There are just two things F-35 watchers need to be careful about.

 First, it’s necessary to add the funding from the previous year’s appropriation act to the procurement money the government allocated for 2015. This is “advance procurement” for 2015 spending, and pays for “long lead” components that take longer to acquire.

 Second, we have to add the cost of Navy and Air Force modifications.

 For the F-35, these costs are for fixing mistakes already found in the testing process. With the aircraft still in its initial testing, the modification costs to existing aircraft are very low. But the 2015 amounts for modifications are surrogates for what the costs for this year’s buy might be. If anything, this number can be an under-estimate.

 ………

 In a briefing delivered to reporters on June 9, F-35 developer Lockheed still advertised the cost of airplanes sans engines. Highly respected Aviation Week reported on July 22 that taxpayers put up $98 million for each F-35A in 2013.

 In reality, we actually paid $188 million.

 Some of these numbers are for the airframe only. In other cases, you get a “flyaway” cost. But in fact, those airplanes are incapable of operative flight. They lack the specialized tools, simulators, logistics computers—and much, much more—to make the airplane useable. They even lack the fuel to fly away.

 ………

 Here’s another curious fact. The unit costs of the Marines’ short-takeoff, vertical-landing B-model and the Navy’s aircraft-carrier-capable C-model are growing.

 The cost of an F-35B grew from $232 million in 2014 to a bulging $251 million by 2015. The cost of the Navy’s F35C grew from $273 million in 2014 to a wallet-busting $337 million by 2015.

 The quantity numbers for the F-35B have not changed, remaining at six per year. The number of F-35Cs to be produced has slipped from four to two, but surely learning processes on the F-35 line have not been going so far backward as to explain a 23 percent, $64 million per unit cost increase.
………

 Next time an advocate tells you what the current unit cost is for a program, ask: “What is Congress appropriating for them this year?” And, “How many are we buying?” Then get out your calculator. The result might surprise you.

At these prices, I cannot see how the United States can afford to buy this aircraft, much less the partners in the program, as well as other customers.

BTW, to run some numbers, the F-35A has an empty weight of 13,199 kg, the price of gold is $42.01/gram, and the price of silver is $0.64/gram.

Running the numbers then, a similar weight of gold would be $554 million, and for silver, it would $8.4 million.

So, it costs about 1/5 of its weight in gold, and pretty much every fighter since the F-4 Phantom II has cost more than its weight in silver.

That is kind of depressing.

Tinfoil Hat Time!

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Much to the delight of sky-watchers in Nevada, it appears that there is some major construction at Groom Lake (aka Area 51):

In the latest satellite imagery released to the public, dated June 30th (partial) and June 2nd (full), Area 51 continues to undergo changes, and one of them is significant in nature. This new construction project is of especially high interest, not just because of its physical size, but also because of its very peculiar location and timing.

 ………

 In 2007, the biggest addition in some time was added to the base’s southwest corner, hidden partially behind a giant dirt berm. This fairly massive and modern hangar was fitted-out with extensive office space and a pair of 175 foot doors, one on each side of the structure. The facility was clearly purpose-built for something, and that something, or some things, were not small in size. The width of the doors alone added to the mounting evidence that what was contained within was an asset, or assets, that were strategic in nature.

 ………

 At the time that this new structure was completed, it was thought to house a proof of concept demonstrator for the Next Generation Bomber (NGB) program and/or a deep penetrating and very stealthy High Altitude Long Endurance (HALE) reconnaissance drone, basically an aircraft with similar capabilities as the RQ-4 Global Hawk but much more survivable and even more autonomous.

 ………

 With this background in mind, we now return to the new developments at Area 51. A new engine test cell located towards the northern part of the base appears to have been finalized since the last images were available, and there are some other small improvements that are noticeable around the sprawling installation, but the massive hangar being constructed far south of the aforementioned hangar built in 2007 is quite literally, a big deal.

 The location of this new structure, measuring about 225 feet across, is interesting as it is located right off the end of the runway, far south of the rest of the base. This location would keep it out of the immediate view of the general apron area, and would also allow for quick access to the runway, resulting in minimal taxi times.

 The fact that this new hangar will have doors on each side, evidenced by the taxiway emanating out from both sides of the structure, means that pre-flight checks, and possibly engine starts, could be executed while under the structure’s protective cover. This is beneficial when trying to avoid satellite flyovers.

 Although the times when flyovers occur are all known, and operations are planned around them accordingly, such planning is no guarantee that the aircraft will not experience problems while taxing, taking off or landing, thus leaving it exposed to prying eyes in low earth orbit. So having a hangar as close to where the aircraft launches and recovers is beneficial if that aircraft is of an especially sensitive nature.

I think that we can be reasonably certain that it’s directly connected to a specific project, I don’t think that the USAF builds massive hangars just to F%$# with aviation buffs.

My guess is that this is associated with the next generation bomber, the successor to the B-2, but that is just a wild-assed guess.

This is a Remarkably Valid Point

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In various discussions of what the US should do to “fix” the Middle East, no one has asked a more basic question, whether the US should be involved at all: (as an aside, this also applies to the “West” more generally)

In case you hadn’t noticed, the Middle East is going from bad to worse these days.

 ………

 A string of events like this attracts critics and Cassandras like yellow jackets to a backyard picnic. In the Washington Post, neoconservative Eliot Cohen laments the “wreckage” of U.S. Middle East policy, blaming everything on Barack Obama’s failure to recognize “war is war” and his reluctance to rally the nation to wage more of them. (Never mind that the last war Cohen helped get the United States into — the invasion of Iraq in 2003 — did far more damage than anything Obama has done.) A far more convincing perspective comes from former Ambassador Chas Freeman who surveys several decades of America’s meddling in the region and comes to a depressing conclusion: “It’s hard to think of any American project in the Middle East that is not now at or near a dead end.”

………

 Since World War II, the meddling that Freeman recounts has been conducted in partnership with various regional allies. These alignments may have been a strategic necessity during the Cold War (though even that could be debated), but the sad fact is that the United States has no appealing partners left today. Egypt is a corrupt military dictatorship with grim prospects, and Erdogan’s AKP regime in Turkey is trending toward one-party rule, while its ambitious “zero problems” foreign policy has gone badly off the rails. Working with the Assad regime in Syria is out of the question — for good reason — but most of Bashar al-Assad’s opponents are no prize either. Saudi Arabia is a geriatric, theocratic monarchy that treats half its population — i.e., its women — like second-class citizens (at best). [Me: actually, when you count the Shia in Saudi Arabia, it’s more like 65% of the population] Iran is a different sort of theocratic state: it has some quasi-democratic features, but also an abysmal human rights record and worrisome regional ambitions.

………

 Faced with this unpromising environment, what would be the sensible — or dare I say realistic — thing for the United States to do? The familiar answer is to say that it’s an imperfect world and that we have no choice but to work with what we’ve got. We hold our noses, and cut deals with the least objectionable parties in the region. As Michael Corleone would say, it’s not personal; it’s strictly business.

But this view assumes that deep engagement with this troubled area is still critical to U.S. national interests, and further assumes the United States reaps net benefits from its recurrent meddling on behalf of its less-than-loyal partners. In other words, it assumes that these partnerships and deep U.S. engagement make Americans safer and more prosperous here at home. But given the current state of the region and the condition of most of our putative allies, that assumption is increasingly questionable.

 In fact, most of the disputes and divisions that are currently roiling the region do not pose direct and mortal threats to vital U.S. interests. It is admittedly wrenching to watch what is happening in Syria or Gaza, or to Israel’s democracy, but these events affect the lives of very few Americans directly. Unless, of course, we are foolish enough to throw ourselves back into the middle of the maelstrom.

………

 Some will argue that we have a moral responsibility to try to end the obvious suffering in different places, and a strategic imperative to eradicate terrorists and prevent the spread of WMD. These are laudable goals, but if the history of the past twenty years teaches us anything, it is that forceful American interference of this sort just makes these problems worse. The Islamic State wouldn’t exist if the neocons hadn’t led us blindly into Iraq, and Iran would have less reason to contemplate getting nuclear weapons if it hadn’t watched the United States throw its weight around in the region and threaten it directly with regime change. [I would also add, that if we hadn’t overthrown Iran’s democracy in the 1950s at the bequest of the BP oil company, there would not be a  theocracy there at all, and a prosperous and democratic Iran might have forced the House of Saudi to be a bit less repulsive over the years.]

So instead of acting like a hyperactive juggler dashing between a dozen spinning plates, maybe the best course is to step back even more than we have already. No, I don’t mean isolationism: What I mean is taking seriously the idea of strategic disengagement and putting the whole region further down on America’s list of foreign policy priorities. Instead of constantly cajoling these states to do what we think is best — and mostly getting ignored or rebuked by them — maybe we should let them sort out these problems themselves for awhile. And if any of them eventually want American help, it should come at a steep price. {I’d kind of like to know what sort of price he is suggesting that we should be demanding]

Among other things, the policy I’m suggesting would mean the United States would stop its futile efforts to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I’ve argued against such a course in the past, but it is now obvious to me that no president is willing to challenge Israel’s backers here in the United States and make U.S. support for Israel conditional on an end to the occupation. Until that happens, even well-intentioned efforts to broker a peace will keep failing. Instead of continuing to squander valuable time and prestige on a fruitless endeavor, the U.S. government should disengage from this thankless task until it is ready to do more than just palaver and plead. If Israel’s leaders want to risk their own future by creating a “greater Israel,” so be it. It would be regrettable if Israel ended up an apartheid state and an international pariah, but preventing that tragedy is not a vital U.S. interest. (If it really were, U.S. policy since Oslo might have been rather different.)

………

 To be sure, the course of action I’m sketching here is likely to leave the Middle East in a pretty messy condition for some time to come. But that is going to be the case no matter what Washington decides to do. So the question is: should the United States squander more blood and treasure on a series of futile tasks, and in ways that will make plenty of people in the region angry and encourage a few of them look for ways to deliver some payback? Or should the United States distance itself from everyone in the region, and prepare to intervene only when a substantial number of American lives are at risk or in the unlikely event that there is a genuine and imminent threat of regional domination?

………

One final thought: this argument would not preclude limited U.S. action for purely humanitarian purposes — such as humanitarian airdrops for the beleaguered religious minorities now threatened with starvation in Iraq. That’s not “deep engagement”; that’s merely trying to help people threatened with imminent death. But I would not send U.S. forces — including drones or aircraft — out to win a battle that the Iraqi government or the Kurds cannot win for themselves. The United States spent the better part of a decade chasing that elusive Grail, and the end result was precisely the sort of chaos and sectarian rivalry that has produced this latest crisis. We may be able to do some limited good for the endangered minorities, but above all, let’s do no further harm: not to the region, and not to ourselves.

(emphasis mine)

This is an interesting idea, and one that is further reinforced by the hyperactive bellicosity of our current Secretary of State, John Kerry.

I do not think that we have seen a positive intervention by the United States, or by its former colonial rulers, France and the UK, in the past 100 years.

When you consider how poorly their actions compare to those of the prior power in the region, the Ottoman Empire, it boggles the mind.