Category: FAIL

Not a Surprise

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Japan has started engaging in a policy of negative interest rates, where you pay the bank for the privilege of storing your money.

It’s supposed to encourage people to spend money, because it creates a kind of a doppelganger of inflation to encourage consumption.

It appears that the only spending that this is encouraging is for safes to store cash in:

The Japanese are spending—but not in a way that is likely to strengthen the country’s economy.

Following the Bank of Japan’s decision to lower interest rates below zero in January, many consumers have reportedly rushed to hardwares store in search of one thing: safes.

Negative interest rates mean customers effectively pay a fee for parking cash in banks, so Japanese citizens are beginning to hoard yen, according to the Wall Street Journal, and they need somewhere to put it.

Sales of safes have doubled from the same period a year earlier at chain hardware store, Shimachu, according to the Journal. The chain has already sold out of one model worth $700. Others savers are considering more unconventional storage spaces.

“In response to negative interest rates, there are elderly people who’re thinking of keeping their money under a mattress,” Mariko Shimokawa, a Shimachu saleswoman told the Journal.

But hoarding cash is exactly what the Japanese central bank wants to avoid.

Bank of Japan Gov. Haruhiko Kuroda lowered rates to -0.1% for certain deposits on Jan. 29. The idea was to prop up the economy and increase inflation by encouraging consumers to spend and borrow while discouraging banks from keeping large reserves.

Officials have already noticed the increase in safe sales. The issue of cash hoarding was brought up in a parliamentary hearing Monday, with opposition lawmaker Katsumasa Suzuki saying that the increase in safe sales suggested a “vague sense of unease,” the Journal reported.

Central banks have been using quantitative easing, essentially printing money, and it hasn’t worked, because the newly printed money has been handed to the banks, who either use it to shore up dodgy loans, or park it in the deposit accounts of those central banks so that they can make money on the spread between their interest payments and their interest income.

Here’s an idea:  Print the money and give it to ordinary people, or drop it from a helicopter, as Ben Bernanke has suggested.

Once people pay off their loans, they will spend the money, and the banks will have to find new business to replace their usurious consumer loans.

Hillary Clinton is Scared, and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz Loses

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It appears that the DNC is reversing itself, and there will be more debates:

After days of jostling over whether to meet for more debates, and how many, aides to Hillary Clinton and Senator Bernie Sanders have reached an agreement, of sorts, they said Saturday: The two will meet next week in New Hampshire and will hold three more debates thereafter.

 A Clinton aide, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss continuing negotiations, confirmed the tentative agreement for four additional debates, which was first reported by BuzzFeed.

 The two campaigns have engaged in a measure of brinkmanship in recent days, with Mr. Sanders’s team one-upping Mrs. Clinton’s by saying it would agree to an additional debate in New Hampshire if her team agreed to more beyond that.

 Michael Briggs, a Sanders spokesman, said the agreement was still being discussed. “I’m optimistic,” he said, but he added, “The details are still being worked out.”

 The Democratic National Committee has yet to weigh in on whether it would sanction the added debates.

 The New Hampshire debate next week was originally scheduled as an unsanctioned one, sponsored by MSNBC and the New Hampshire Union Leader newspaper. But a Democratic National Committee official said The Union Leader would not be a sponsor.

 Still, it would mean a highly watched showdown between Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Sanders before the Feb. 9 primary in New Hampshire.

 After working in 2015 to restrict the number of debates, Mrs. Clinton’s team has since expressed regret about that as Mr. Sanders surged in the polls, especially because she has generally delivered strong performances in the debates.

I don’t know who wins in this arrangement.

Clinton is clearly more comfortable debating, but the more that people see of Sanders, the more that they like him. (OK, this is a win for O’Malley, because he has nothing to lose in the debates, and everything to gain)

I can tell you who loses, however, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, the incompetent and widely loathed head of the DNC, who had been steadfast in resisting debates after scheduling a pittance on weekends up against things like NFL playoff games.

Lose

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At the last kiddie table debate, Rick “A Frothy Mixture” Santorum suggested that debate watchers Google him:

Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum encouraged viewers to Google him in Thursday’s undercard Republican presidential debate, an unfortunate choice of words that reminded many of his search engine woes fueled by sex columnist Dan Savage.

“Go and Google Rick Santorum and Hillary Clinton you’ll see a five-minute debate. I’ll let you decide who won the debate,” he said during his closing statement. “I’ll tell you who won, I know I’m out of time, I’m going to take some of Rand Paul’s time here for a second.”

The prompt recalled sex columnist Dan Savage’s retribution campaign against Santorum for his anti-gay remarks, when Savage asked readers to come up with an alternate definition for “santorum.” A highly NSFW entry rose to the top and has for years plagued top search engine results for Santorum’s name across sites.

If you Google “Santorum”, you will find multiple references to, “The frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the by-product of anal sex,” a neologism coined by Dan Savage in the late 2003.

If you are Rick Santorum, you should NEVER ask people to Google you.

There is No Moderate Opposition in Syria

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In looking for rebels to supply, the government seems to be unable to fine forces that are not affiliated with terrorists:

Last July, an ultraconservative Islamist rebel group made a splash by publicly offering to work with Western powers to resolve the Syrian civil war and build “a moderate future,” a surprising overture from a force that regularly fights alongside al Qaida loyalists.

But the very next month, the same rebel group eulogized Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban chief who sheltered Osama bin Laden before and after the 9/11 attacks, as a steadfast warrior who embodied “the true meanings of jihad and sincerity.”

The mixed messaging from Ahrar al Sham poses a serious dilemma for the Obama administration and its allies as they determine which rebel militias are acceptable partners in a revived diplomatic effort to resolve the Syrian conflict.

Ahrar al Sham is one of Syria’s largest and most effective rebel forces, and its involvement in – or exclusion from – peace negotiations could determine the viability of any settlement hatched from a new series of negotiations in Vienna. The group is too important to exclude from talks on the country’s future, say officials and analysts who monitor the conflict.

We have created a situation where the government of President Bashar Assad is the closest we have to a non terrorist non jihadi alternative.

We have lost.  Let’s cut our losses and get the f%$# out.

Blow Up One Mainframe, and Shut Down the Entire F-35 Fleet

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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.”

………

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.

………

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%$#.

This is Not a Surprise

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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.

There is Someone Less Popular than Barack Obama in Kansas

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It’s Kansas Governor Sam Brownback:

Only 18 percent of Kansans are “very” or “somewhat satisfied” with Gov. Sam Brownback’s (R) job performance, according to a poll from Fort Hays State University released Friday.

 In comparison, President Barack Obama (D) had a job approval rating 10 points higher in the deep red state than the Republican governor: 28 percent.

 “This could be some of the lowest approval ratings of any Kansas governor in history,” Bob Beatty, a political scientist at Washburn University, told the Topeka Capital-Journal on Saturday.

It appears that the people of Kansas aren’t evil, they are just kind of slow.

That’s why it’s taken 4 f%$#ing years for them to get the fact that they are dealing with a delusional psychopath.

Seriously, folks, what were you waiting for, for him to start carrying around a white Persian cat?

I’m Sure That the Pentagon Will Conduct a Full Investigation with All the Thoroughness and Integrity of the Pat Tillman Investigation

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Ashton Carter is promising a full investigation of what led to a 30 minute long barrage of munitions on a hospital run by Doctors Without Borders (MSF):

U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter on Sunday promised a full and transparent investigation into whether a U.S. aircraft providing support for American and Afghan commandos was responsible for the explosions that destroyed a hospital in northern Afghanistan, killing 22 people.

Speaking to reporters traveling with him to Spain, Carter said, “the situation there is confused and complicated, so it may take some time to get the facts, but we will get the facts.”

He said he spoke to Gen. John Campbell, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, and to Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, during his flight to Madrid, adding that “there will be accountability as always in these incidents, if that is required.”

Carter said he told Campbell to make sure that the U.S. provides any medical care needed for those in the northern city of Kunduz.

U.S. officials said American special operations forces advising Afghan commandos in the vicinity of the hospital requested the air support when they came under fire in Kunduz. The officials said the AC-130 gunship responded and fired on the area, but Carter said it’s not certain yet whether that was what destroyed the hospital.

Carter said he believes the U.S. will have better information in the coming days, once U.S. and international investigators get access to the hospital site. Officials said the senior U.S. military investigator is in Kunduz but hasn’t yet been able to get to the site because it continues to be a contested area between the Afghans and the Taliban militants.

If Mr. Carter is really interested in investigating what happened at this hospital, and I rather doubt that he is serious about a full and honest investigation, he will be dealing with an officer corps determined to obstruct him, and to the degree that they fail, they will be determined to ensure that any consequences flow as low on the chain of command as possible.

Nothing to see here, move along.

More Freedom Bombs………

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It looks like the US military launched an intense and sustained airstrike against a hospital in Kunduz, Afthanistan:

An airstrike apparently carried out by U.S. forces heavily damaged a charitable hospital in northern Afghanistan on Saturday, killing at least 19 people — three of them reportedly children — in an incident that a senior U.N. official equated to a war crime.

The airstrike occurred before dawn when a Doctors Without Borders trauma center in war-torn Kunduz was struck while doctors were treating dozens of patients. Hospital officials said they were assaulted from the air for 30 to 45 minutes, resulting in a large fire that burned some patients to death in their beds. Among those killed were 12 of the charity group’s staff members, the group said.

“This attack is abhorrent and a grave violation of international humanitarian law,” said Meinie Nicolai, the group’s president.

While the charity’s workers reported waves of bombs hitting their facility, the U.S.-led military coalition in Kabul issued a statement confirming one American airstrike that may have caused “collateral damage” to a “medical facility.” Authorities said it was launched against “insurgents who were directly firing upon U.S. servicemembers” who had traveled to Kunduz to advise Afghan security forces.

………

It was unclear how close Taliban fighters may have been to the hospital Saturday or whether the U.S. military didn’t realize the building was a hospital. Afghan security officials said Taliban fighters had been pouring into the facility in recent days seeking treatment for gunshot wounds and other injuries.

The charity and other international organizations reacted with outrage, and the hospital’s management said it had repeatedly informed the U.S.-led coalition of the facility’s precise GPS coordinates over the past few months. The location of the hospital was last conveyed to the international coalition three days before the airstrike, officials added.

………

“This event is utterly tragic, inexcusable and, possibly, even criminal,” said Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, adding that “if established as deliberate in a court of law, an airstrike on a hospital may amount to a war crime.”

Jason Cone, executive director of Doctors Without Borders in the United States, said hospital officials in Kunduz immediately reached out to U.S. military officials when the airstrike occurred.

“The bombing continued for more than 30 minutes after American and Afghan military officials in Kabul and Washington were first informed,” the organization said in a statement.

A U.S. military official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to talk freely, said the strike appears to have been carried out by an AC-130 gunship, a heavily armed warplane.

I will make a point here: An AC-130, notwithstanding its bulk and lumbering appearance, is a precise weapon, arguably much more precise than guided bombs, if just because they engage at a fraction of the distance.

They hit what they were ordered to hit, and they did so for nearly an hour.

The only questions is whether their orders were an error, or if the the targeting was deliberate, either because MSF was treating members of the Taliban (a war crime by the US) or because the Taliban was using the hospital compound for military purposes (a war crime by the Taliban).

Rather unsurprisingly, MSF is demanding an independent investigation, but given the record of the US military on such matters, and the continuing cover-up of the Pat Tillman friendly fire incident, I would not hold my breath.

What actually happened is unclear at this time, but what is clear, and in fact is certain, is that this will be used by the Taliban for a long time as a recruiting tool.

Fail.

And in the Ongoing Clusterf%$# in Syria………

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There is a very good reason why Presidents should never, Ever listen to the war mongering interventionists (on both sides of the political) who prowl the halls of power in Washington. Because they are always wrong.

All they bring are disaster and misery, in this case, of course, we are talking about Syria, where our support for regime change in Syria, particularly when juxtaposed by the Saudi desire to overthrow a secular Arab government at all costs has created an unrelenting string of disasters.

First, we are now seeing a realignment in the Middle East, with Russia, Iraq, Iran, and Syria sharing intelligence to aid each other in their fight against ISIS:

For the second time this month, Russia moved to expand its political and military influence in the Syria conflict and left the United States scrambling, this time by reaching an understanding, announced on Sunday, with Iraq, Syria and Iran to share intelligence about the Islamic State.

Like Russia’s earlier move to bolster the government of President Bashar al-Assad by deploying warplanes and tanks to a base near Latakia, Syria, the intelligence-sharing arrangement was sealed without notice to the United States. American officials knew that a group of Russian military officers were in Baghdad, but they were clearly surprised when the Iraqi military’s Joint Operations Command announced the intelligence sharing accord on Sunday.

It was another sign that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia was moving ahead with a sharply different tack from that of the Obama administration in battling the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, by assembling a rival coalition that includes Iran and the Syrian government.

For the second time this month, Russia moved to expand its political and military influence in the Syria conflict and left the United States scrambling, this time by reaching an understanding, announced on Sunday, with Iraq, Syria and Iran to share intelligence about the Islamic State.

Like Russia’s earlier move to bolster the government of President Bashar al-Assad by deploying warplanes and tanks to a base near Latakia, Syria, the intelligence-sharing arrangement was sealed without notice to the United States. American officials knew that a group of Russian military officers were in Baghdad, but they were clearly surprised when the Iraqi military’s Joint Operations Command announced the intelligence sharing accord on Sunday.

It was another sign that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia was moving ahead with a sharply different tack from that of the Obama administration in battling the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, by assembling a rival coalition that includes Iran and the Syrian government.

The ineptitude of our foreign policy apparatus has allowed Russia to resurrect the Soviet era relations that used to exist there.

It gets even worse, with even the Syrian Kurds approaching Russia military aid:

The Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) has asked Russia to support it in its fight against ISIS as well as the Al-Qaeda affiliated Nusra Front.

YPG chief Sipan Hemo told Sputnik Türkiye—which is owned by Moscow—that his fighting force requested arms from Russia as well as general military coordination, according to a translation of the interview prepared by Turkey’s Anadolu news agency.

“He also called on Moscow to bomb Al-Nusra Front’s positions,” Anadolu added a day after Russia began its airstrikes in Syria on behalf of the Bashar al-Assad regime.

In turn, the report added that a foreign relations official for the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union Party—which controls the YPG—said his party was “ready to cooperate with any actor fighting ISIS.”

I rather expect that the YPG does not expect Russia to support them, after all they want to secede from Syria, but this is a a great way to whipsaw the US into bombing other Islamist targets, and, more importantly, keeping the Turks from bombing the Kurds.

Yet another failure in a chain of failures.

It really is beginning to look like the end stage of empire:  Increasingly delusional policies that lead to failures, which lead to doubling down on delusional policies.

This is part of a series of failures that feed on themselves.

What Happens When Your Intelligence Service Thinks Itself a Breed Apart………

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It turns out that the CIA’s unwillingness to play nicely with other US Agencies left a trail of bread crumbs that the KGB used to identify covert operatives:

As the Cold War drew to a close with the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, those at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, finally hoped to resolve many long-standing puzzles.

The most important of which was how officers in the field under diplomatic and deep cover stationed across the globe were readily identified by the KGB. As a consequence, covert operations had to be aborted as local agents were pinpointed and CIA personnel compromised or, indeed, had their lives thrown into jeopardy.

………How could these disasters have happened with such regularity if the agency had not been penetrated by Soviet moles?

The problem with this line of thought was that it did not so much overestimate CIA security as underestimate the brainpower of their Russian counterparts.

A name soon emerged from the KGB undergrowth: that of Yuri Totrov, a veritable legend who soon became known with grim humor as the shadow director of personnel at CIA.

The Cold War over, a senior and very experienced officer was dispatched to Japan to seek out Totrov and offer him a vast sum of money for his “memoirs.” Totrov’s retort was typically blunt. “Have you not read what is on my file at Langley? It says, ‘Not to be Pitched.’”

………

So how, exactly, did Totrov reconstitute CIA personnel listings without access to the files themselves or those who put them together?

………

What Totrov came up with were 26 unchanging indicators as a model for identifying U.S. intelligence officers overseas. Other indicators of a more trivial nature could be detected in the field by a vigilant foreign counterintelligence operative but not uniformly so: the fact that CIA officers replacing one another tended to take on the same post within the embassy hierarchy, drive the same make of vehicle, rent the same apartment and so on. Why? Because the personnel office in Langley shuffled and dealt overseas postings with as little effort as required.

The invariable indicators took further research, however, based on U.S. government practices long established as a result of the ambivalence with which the State Department treated its cousins in intelligence.

Thus one productive line of inquiry quickly yielded evidence: the differences in the way agency officers undercover as diplomats were treated from genuine foreign service officers (FSOs). The pay scale at entry was much higher for a CIA officer; after three to four years abroad a genuine FSO could return home, whereas an agency employee could not; real FSOs had to be recruited between the ages of 21 and 31, whereas this did not apply to an agency officer; only real FSOs had to attend the Institute of Foreign Service for three months before entering the service; naturalized Americans could not become FSOs for at least nine years but they could become agency employees; when agency officers returned home, they did not normally appear in State Department listings; should they appear they were classified as research and planning, research and intelligence, consular or chancery for security affairs; unlike FSOs, agency officers could change their place of work for no apparent reason; their published biographies contained obvious gaps; agency officers could be relocated within the country to which they were posted, FSOs were not; agency officers usually had more than one working foreign language; their cover was usually as a “political” or “consular” official (often vice-consul); internal embassy reorganizations usually left agency personnel untouched, whether their rank, their office space or their telephones; their offices were located in restricted zones within the embassy; they would appear on the streets during the working day using public telephone boxes; they would arrange meetings for the evening, out of town, usually around 7.30 p.m. or 8.00 p.m.; and whereas FSOs had to observe strict rules about attending dinner, agency officers could come and go as they pleased.

It is very interesting to see that many of the CIA’s failures during the cold war appear not to be the result of treason, or of individual incompetence.

They are the result of a toxic and dysfunctional organizational culture, and the events since then, torture, spying on congressional staffers investigating them, etc. has indicated that if anything, the problem has gotten worse.

Do’h!!!!!!!

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Bummer of a birth mark, Федеральное космическое агентство Россиu

It appears that there may be a few issues with the Russian space program:

The Soyuz TMA-16M capsule with international space crew descends beneath a parachute just before landing near the town of Zhezkazgan, Kazakhstan

Work at Russia’s new $ 3 billion spaceport in the Far East has ground to a halt after a critical piece of infrastructure was discovered to have been built to the wrong dimensions, and would not fit the latest version of the country’s Soyuz rocket, a news report said.

The Vostochny Cosmodrome, under construction in the Amur region, north of China, is intended to become Russia’s primary spaceport, replacing the Soviet-built Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

The cutting-edge facility was meant be ready for launches of Soyuz-2 rockets in December, but an unidentified space agency of a of a told the TASS news agency of a of a late Thursday that the rocket would not fit inside the assembly building where its parts are stacked and tested before launch.

The building “has been designed for a different modification of the Soyuz rocket,” the source said, according to news website Medusa, which picked up the story from TASS.

………

“Work with the rocket at the integration and testing complex now can not be conducted because the facility is not ready,” the spokesperson said in the report. “There are still imperfections in the construction.”

The problems with the testing and assembly building are the latest incident in a saga of corruption scandals, embezzlement cases, high-profile arrests, worker strikes, and construction delays at the Vostochny cosmodrome.

If there is an equivalent of The Daily Show in Russia, they are all getting drunk right now, because their script has already been written. 

American Clusterf%$#

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Not Syria this time, Afghanistan:

Afghanistan was plunged deeper into crisis a day after the Taliban seized the northern city of Kunduz, as the insurgents on Tuesday kept assaulting the reeling Afghan security forces and the government struggled to mount a credible response.

Not only did a promised government counteroffensive on Kunduz not make headway during heavy fighting on Tuesday, but the day ended with yet another aggressive Taliban advance, with insurgents surrounding the airport to which hundreds of Afghan forces and at least as many civilians had retreated, thinking it would be safe.

After more than a day of relative silence as the situation worsened around Kunduz, the American military showed the first signs of increased involvement in what the Pentagon called “a setback,” conducting at least two airstrikes, and reportedly more as attacks continued at the airport late Tuesday.

Beyond the Taliban’s gains in Kunduz, there was evidence that the insurgents were also pushing a broader offensive in northern Afghanistan, officials said. One particular point of concern was Takhar Province, just east of Kunduz, where the insurgents were said to be heavily assaulting military checkpoints and government facilities in several districts over the past two days.

The generals in Washington are beginning to look like ……… The Washington Generals.*

Seriously, can anyone remember the last time our military adventures have come even close to success?

*Until recently, the Washington Generals were the team that played, and lost, by design, to the Harlem Globetrotters thousands of time, and won once.

Because We Know that Eliminating Human Physical Contact Improves the Development of Children

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Out on Mercer Island, Washington, the school district has banned the game of tag as a sweeping ban of all forms of physical contact between students:

Webster’s defines “tag” as “a game in which the player who is it chases others and tries to touch one of them who then becomes it.” Wikipedia explains that the game, also known in Britain as “it, tip you’re it” is “a playground game that involves one or more players chasing other players in an attempt to ‘tag’ or touch them, usually with their hands.”

So is the game of “tag” still “tag” if tagging is banned?

That is the question for the Mercer County School District in Washington state and for some unhappy parents.

It all started with a social media report earlier this week when a group of parents, responding to what they had heard was a ban on the game of tag in elementary schools, formed a group called “Support ‘tag’ at Recess.”

It was their impression that there was indeed a ban and the word soon spread to the news media.

………

A spokesman for the school district seemed to reinforce the impression with a statement:

“The Mercer Island School District and school teams have recently revisited expectations for student behavior to address student safety. This means while at play, especially during recess and unstructured time, students are expected to keep their hands to themselves. The rationale behind this is to ensure the physical and emotional safety of all students.

“School staffs are working with students in the classroom to ensure that there are many alternative games available at recess and during unsupervised play, so that our kids can still have fun, be with their friends, move their bodies and give their brains a break.”

“Good grief, our kids need some unstructured playtime,” mom Kelsey Joyce told the TV station. “It’s a game that practically everyone has played – but if you go to public school on Mercer Island, keep your hands to yourself.

“I totally survived tag,” said Joyce. “I even survived red rover, believe it or not.”

More significantly, the school board ignored the fact that physical touching is an necessity, particularly for developing children.

The reason that children play touching games is because children need touching.

Oops!

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Someone is getting fired

On the Chicago TV station WGN, they did a story on the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur, and their likely soon to be fired graphics guy called up the badge that the Nazis forced Jews to wear in concentration camps:

The news director of a Chicago TV station apologized after a staff member mistakenly chose a symbol of Nazi Germany to illustrate a story about Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement.

“Regrettably, we failed to recognize that the artwork we chose to accompany the story contained an offensive symbol,” the director, Jennifer Lyons, said in an apology on Wednesday. “This was an unfortunate mistake. Ignorance is not an excuse.”

The apology came the morning after Tom Negovan, an anchor with WGN-TV Chicago, read a 20-second description of the holiday. Over his shoulder, viewers could see a graphic of a Star of David badge emblazoned with the German word “Jude,” or Jew, on striped material of the kind used in Nazi prisoner uniforms.

Un-dirtyword-believable.

So Not a Surprise

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It appears that a single minded focus on testing at the expense of education doesn’t even work on other fill in the bubble tests like the SAT:

New statistics show that average SAT scores countrywide have dropped to their lowest level since the college admissions exam was redesigned in 2005, continuing a 10-year trend that education advocates say illustrates the failures of test-driven schooling.

According to the College Board, which reported the statistics on Thursday, the average SAT score for the class of 2015 was 1490 out of a possible 2400, with points declining on all three sections of the test—reading, math, and writing.

That raises an alarm for the The National Center for Fair & Open Testing (FairTest), an education advocacy group, which said the latest SAT numbers highlight the failings of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) and other standards-based scholastic achievement measures.

Bob Schaeffer, FairTest public education director, said in response to the latest statistics, “Test-and-punish policies, such as ‘No Child Left Behind’ have clearly failed to improve college readiness or narrow racial gaps, as measured by the SAT,” adding that other standardized admissions exams like the ACT and the National Assessment for Education Progress show similar trends. 

 I would note that Obama, and His Evil Minions™, in particularly the perfidious Arne Duncan, have been even more aggressive in pushing relentless testing and corporatized education and breaking the teachers unions than their predecessors, so don’t expect this study to make any difference in policy.

The New Brewster Buffalo

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A test pilot with a wide range of fighter experience engaged in mock dogfights with an F-16, and the result was Not pretty:

A test pilot has some very, very bad news about the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. The pricey new stealth jet can’t turn or climb fast enough to hit an enemy plane during a dogfight or to dodge the enemy’s own gunfire, the pilot reported following a day of mock air battles back in January.

 “The F-35 was at a distinct energy disadvantage,” the unnamed pilot wrote in a scathing five-page brief that War Is Boring has obtained. The brief is unclassified but is labeled “for official use only.”

 The test pilot’s report is the latest evidence of fundamental problems with the design of the F-35 — which, at a total program cost of more than a trillion dollars, is history’s most expensive weapon.

 The U.S. Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps — not to mention the air forces and navies of more than a dozen U.S. allies — are counting on the Lockheed Martin-made JSF to replace many if not most of their current fighter jets.

 And that means that, within a few decades, American and allied aviators will fly into battle in an inferior fighter — one that could get them killed … and cost the United States control of the air.

 The fateful test took place on Jan. 14, 2015, apparently within the Sea Test Range over the Pacific Ocean near Edwards Air Force Base in California. The single-seat F-35A with the designation “AF-02” — one of the older JSFs in the Air Force — took off alongside a two-seat F-16D Block 40, one of the types of planes the F-35 is supposed to replace.

 The two jets would be playing the roles of opposing fighters in a pretend air battle, which the Air Force organized specifically to test out the F-35’s prowess as a close-range dogfighter in an air-to-air tangle involving high “angles of attack,” or AoA, and “aggressive stick/pedal inputs.”

 In other words, the F-35 pilot would fly his jet hard, turning and maneuvering in order to “shoot down” the F-16, whose pilot would be doing his own best to evade and kill the F-35.

 ………

 The F-35 was flying “clean,” with no weapons in its bomb bay or under its wings and fuselage. The F-16, by contrast, was hauling two bulky underwing drop tanks, putting the older jet at an aerodynamic disadvantage.

 But the JSF’s advantage didn’t actually help in the end. The stealth fighter proved too sluggish to reliably defeat the F-16, even with the F-16 lugging extra fuel tanks. “Even with the limited F-16 target configuration, the F-35A remained at a distinct energy disadvantage for every engagement,” the pilot reported.

 “Insufficient pitch rate.” “Energy deficit to the bandit would increase over time.” “The flying qualities in the blended region (20–26 degrees AoA) were not intuitive or favorable.”

 The F-35 jockey tried to target the F-16 with the stealth jet’s 25-millimeter cannon, but the smaller F-16 easily dodged. “Instead of catching the bandit off-guard by rapidly pull aft to achieve lead, the nose rate was slow, allowing him to easily time his jink prior to a gun solution,” the JSF pilot complained.

 ………

 And when the pilot of the F-16 turned the tables on the F-35, maneuvering to put the stealth plane in his own gunsight, the JSF jockey found he couldn’t maneuver out of the way, owing to a “lack of nose rate.”

 ………

And to add insult to injury, the JSF flier discovered he couldn’t even comfortably move his head inside the radar-evading jet’s cramped cockpit. “The helmet was too large for the space inside the canopy to adequately see behind the aircraft.” That allowed the F-16 to sneak up on him.

In the end, the F-35 — the only new fighter jet that America and most of its allies are developing — is demonstrably inferior in a dogfight with the F-16, which the U.S. Air Force first acquired in the late 1970s.

 The test pilot explained that he has also flown 1980s-vintage F-15E fighter-bombers and found the F-35 to be “substantially inferior” to the older plane when it comes to managing energy in a close battle.

This is what happens when you allow the USMC’s supposed need for a STO/VL airframe to dominate all other considerations with regard to basic airframe, which is the reason for poor rear vision, and hence the need for the humungous high tech helmet, with visor mounted display, which prevents adequate view to the rear.

I would note that the real problem here is not that our pilots might have inferior equipment, in WWII the F4F Wildcat achieved a 6:1 kill ratio, and the lamentable F2A Brewster Buffalo achieved a 26:1 kill ratio in Finnish service.

Achieving air superiority comes down to training and tactics, so even with an inferior platform, particularly when backed up by superior numbers and logistics.

If the US goes into combat with the F-35 it will not be a disaster.

The real disaster is that we are spending over a Trillion dollars on something that provides no advantages over existing aircraft.

We could buy homes for more than 4 million families, or provide health insurance for 10 million families for a decade, or fix around one third of our deferred infrastructure needs.

The opportunities that have been missed while we are spending money on a white elephant are the real disaster here.

Dumbass

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Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal thought that an open forum on Twitter would be a good thing.

This has been done before, and has failed before, but Jindal did not get the memo:

Someone on Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal’s campaign staff had the brilliant idea of opening up a discussion between the Republican hopeful and Twitter. The result was a terrible idea, poorly executed.
The first, and possibly most important, set of questions for the candidate:

If you know so little about the Internet that you think #AskBobby is wise, how can you consider yourself a competent 21st Century President?

— Michael O’Neill (@hkeller812) June 30, 2015

he wasn’t dumb enough to do #askbobby. he couldn’t have been.

— Bomani Jones (@bomani_jones) June 30, 2015

Yes — he most certainly was. ………

It goes on from there, and the questions become less “meta” and far more aggressively hostile.

Republicans have been trolling politics since the 1960s, and somehow, they do not understand that there are trolls on the internet.

Not only is Bobby Jindal too stupid to be President, he is too stupid to be allowed around sharp object.

I wonder who is employed by him to cut his meat for him, and I wonder what the f^%$# this benighted soul is going to put on his resume.

My guess is “Nutrition Consultant.”

The Military Industrial Complex Is Spending Our Military into Oblivion

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At the rate that this is going, we will be The Blaster: Flush With Cash, Running on Empty

One of the never ending claims made by proponents of the military technical revolution is that emerging complex weapons technologies create more combat power per unit of labor — that we are substituting capital for labor and technology-intensive capital goods are the key America’s competitive advantage, given America’s high cost labor. This claim is bullshit pumped out by a sound-byte addicted Military – Industrial – Congressional Complex.
For readers who think my rhetoric excessive, consider please the following series of graphics. That the revolution in military affairs (RMA) continues with increasing intensity despite such evidence to the contrary, and without substantive critical debate, says a lot about the dominant values in Versailles on the Potomac.
If the claim made by the RMA evangelicals were true, then a percentage reduction in the size of combat forces would be accompanied by a greater percentage savings in defense budgets. But as this table shows, huge reductions in force size (ranging from 56% to 69%) from the spending peak of the Vietnam War (1968) to the spending peak of the so-called Global War on Terror or GWOT (2010) have been accompanied by a 34% increase in the defense budget, after removing the effects of inflation (using DoD deflators which are biased to reduce the size of this disconnect).

Yet, as the next figure shows, compared to Vietnam, the GWOT is a tiny war, when compared in terms of troops deployed or operational tempos (e.g., total attack sorties).
………

The bottom line should be clear to even the most casual observer: The claim that the ongoing military-technical revolution reduces costs by substituting capital for labor is fact-free claptrap. Moreover the hype about this military-technical revolution, which has became ever more hysterical since the mid-to-late 1980s, has been accompanied by a dramatic worsening of the mismatch been promises and reality.

Perhaps the apotheosis of the cost and labor saving dimensions of the military-technical revolution has been the evangelical rhetoric surrounding the use of “labour saving” unmanned airplanes — drones — in the GWOT. I urge readers in denial about my bottom line to carefully study How America Broke Its Drone Force by David Axe in the Daily Beast (attached below for your reading convenience). Axe describes how the high cost of labor-intensive drone operations has broken the back of the drone force to such a point that it had to cut back operating tempos in the face of the increasing intensity of the offensive campaign waged by ISIS.

Bear in mind, the pathetic misery in the drone force described by Axe coincides with Era IV of the boom bust cycle in the preceding chart of Defense Spending.

In 1985 or so, some wag noted that with current trends, that the entire budget of the US Air Force, including personnel, would cover the purchase of just one aircraft by 2050.

At the rate we are going, we won’t have a military, just shiny hardware with no one to operate it.