Category: Stupid

The Stupid, It Burns!

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In Canada, a Yoga class has been canceled because of accusations of cultural appropriation:

In studios across the nation, as many as 20 million Americans practice yoga every day. Few worry that their downward dogs or warrior poses disrespect other cultures.

But yoga comes from India, once a British colony. And now, at one Canadian university, a yoga class designed to include disabled students has been canceled after concerns the practice was taken from a culture that “experienced oppression, cultural genocide and diasporas due to colonialism and western supremacy,” according to the group that once sponsored it.

In a telephone interview with The Washington Post, Jennifer Scharf, who taught the class for up to 60 people at the University of Ottawa, said she was unhappy about the decision, but accepted it.

“This particular class was intro to beginners’ yoga because I’m very sensitive to this issue,” she said. “I would never want anyone to think I was making some sort of spiritual claim other than the pure joy of being human that belongs to everyone free of religion.”

Oh, you poor delicate flowers.

On a related note, I am starting a charity, the Association of Cranial Rectal Inversion Disease, (ACRID) for people with their heads chronically up their asses.

H/T Stephen Saroff      o o  The Bear who Swims      
                        (_)_____o      
                     ~~~~(______)~~~~~~~~~~
                         oo    oo

Not This Sh%$ AGain!

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Once again, after seeing the continued popularity of Donald Trump amongst the Republican party base, the punditry reach into their bag, and pull out Willard Mitt Rmoney. Give me a f%$#ing break:

Huge congratulations to Suffolk University and the Boston Globe for crafting a poll in New Hampshire that actually offers an interesting bit of news. The story of the Republican primary in the state has largely been the same for months, with Donald Trump holding a steady and robust lead. In the Real Clear Politics polling average, he’s up 15 points. In Suffolk’s new poll, he’s up 10 — but with a healthy-sized number of undecideds.



But then Suffolk and the Globe added something to the mix. If we added Mitt Romney to the list, they asked, would you switch to him? For 30 percent of respondents, the answer was “yes.” Romney leads all other Republicans by a two-to-one margin. Trump loses a third of his support.

Seriously, can we give this a rest?

Rmoney is popular because He is Not Running., and as soon as he joined the race, he would be forced to fall into lockstep with the batsh%$ insane wing of the party base, and we would be back to where we started.

The depressing thing about this is that on the other side of the aisle, the favored candidate of the pundit class, Hillary Clinton is the weakest candidate against “The Donald.”  (Yes, the polling shows that O’Malley even though a cipher to most voters polls slightly better against Trump.)

So, it’s “insane” to  nominate Donald trump, but the only sane thing for the Democrats to do is nominate the candidate that he is most likely to beat.

Could the pundit class please go Cheney themselves?

There is No Evidence that Mass Surveillance Makes Us Safe

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This is not an exaggeration/

Pro Publica examined almost a decade of mass surveillance, and could not any meaningful benefit derived from drinking from the data fire hose:

Current and former government officials have been pointing to the terror attacks in Paris as justification for mass surveillance programs. CIA Director John Brennan accused privacy advocates of “hand-wringing” that has made “our ability collectively internationally to find these terrorists much more challenging.” Former National Security Agency and CIA director Michael Hayden said, “In the wake of Paris, a big stack of metadata doesn’t seem to be the scariest thing in the room.”

Ultimately, it’s impossible to know just how successful sweeping surveillance has been, since much of the work is secret. But what has been disclosed so far suggests the programs have been of limited value. Here’s a roundup of what we know.

An internal review of the Bush administration’s warrantless program – called Stellarwind – found it resulted in few useful leads from 2001–2004, and none after that. New York Times reporter Charlie Savage obtained the findings through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit and published them in his new book, Power Wars: Inside Obama’s Post–9/11 Presidency:

[The FBI general counsel] defined as useful those [leads] that made a substantive contribution to identifying a terrorist, or identifying a potential confidential informant. Just 1.2 percent of them fit that category. In 2006, she conducted a comprehensive study of all the leads generated from the content basket of Stellarwind between March 2004 and January 2006 and discovered that zero of those had been useful.

In an endnote, Savage then added:

The program was generating numerous tips to the FBI about suspicious phone numbers and e-mail addresses, and it was the job of the FBI field offices to pursue those leads and scrutinize the people behind them. (The tips were so frequent and such a waste of time that the field offices reported back, in frustration, “You’re sending us garbage.”)

This isn’t security, it’s security theater, and the victories it achieves are in battles between for budget money from Congress. 

More IP Idiocy

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The Swiss charity the Anne Frank Fonds will be atempting to add her father as co-author to the book in an attempt to expand the copyright term, which has the effect of preventing public posting of the work which otherwise would have happened on 1 January:

When Otto Frank first published his daughter’s red-checked diary and notebooks, he wrote a prologue assuring readers that the book mostly contained her words, written while hiding from the Nazis in a secret annex of a factory in Amsterdam.

But now the Swiss foundation that holds the copyright to “The Diary of Anne Frank” is alerting publishers that her father is not only the editor but also legally the co-author of the celebrated book.

The move has a practical effect: It extends the copyright from Jan. 1, when it is set to expire in most of Europe, to the end of 2050. Copyrights in Europe generally end 70 years after an author’s death. Anne Frank died 70 years ago at Bergen-Belsen, a concentration camp, and Otto Frank died in 1980. Extending the copyright would block others from being able to publish the book without paying royalties or receiving permission.

This sort of sh%$ is getting out of hand.

IP protections have become more and excessive, and they have nothing to do with the intended purpose of IP protections, which is to encourage innovation and creativity.

I Would Call Chuck Schumer a Schmuck, but a Schmuck has a Head

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The distinguished gentleman from New York just came out publicly against allowing Syrian refugees into the United States.

I’m sure that if he had been alive in 1939, he would have been comfortably playing Mahjong with friends while the passengers on the MS St. Louis were sent back to die at the hands of the Nazis:

Sen. Charles Schumer (N.Y.), the third ranking member of the Senate Democratic leadership, on Tuesday said it may be necessary to halt the resettlement of Syrian refugees in the United States.

Republicans immediately seized on Schumer’s comment, which breaks with other Democrats who have argued against halting the program.

Schumer, however, declined to take the option off the table ahead of a special briefing scheduled for Wednesday afternoon on the process that is now used to vet refugees entering the United States.

“We’re waiting for the briefing tomorrow, a pause may be necessary. We’re going to look at it,” he said.

Schumer is widely expected to become leader of Senate Democrats in the next Congress, after Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (Nev.) retires.

A spokeswoman for Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) highlighted Schumer’s statement as an example of “bipartisan concern” over refugees.

Centrist Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin (W.Va.) signed a letter to President Obama Monday calling on him not to allow another Syrian refugee into the country unless federal authorities can guarantee with 100-percent assurance they are not connected to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

Other Democrats have rejected freezing Obama’s plan to resettle at least 10,000 Syrian refugees in the current fiscal year.

What a toxic combination of stupidity, cowardice, and evil.

His position is deeply wrong, and will be seized on by Islamist terrorists as a recruiting tool.

I wish that I was registered to vote in New York so that I could vote against him.

We are Going to Bail Out These Motherf%$#ers Too

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The private equity group Blackstone is now the largest private owner of real-estate in the world:

Blackstone has grown its size nearly four-fold since its 2007 IPO.

But the biggest private equity firm on Wall Street has seen even greater growth in its real estate division, which has expanded from a $17.7 billion business when Steve Schwarzman took his company public to one that today manages nearly $100 billion worth of property.

Steve Schwarzman is America’s landlord, now, and he’s not afraid to acknowledge it.

“We’re now, we believe, the largest owner of real estate in the world,” he told Business Insider in an interview at his company’s Park Avenue headquarters in midtown Manhattan.

“We have a performance record that is… pretty much in a league of our own, we’ve compounded [returns of] around 18% after fees. We’ve had almost no losses of any type.”

They went into real estate after the crash, which was the bottom of the market.

They have been making insane margins, which means insane risk, though they probably do not realize this, 

Then this game of Jenga ends with a crash comes tumbling down, and it will, Blackstone will be too big to fail.

It’s already too big to fail.

And the rest of us are going to have to bail them out.

Kept Us Safe, My Ass

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Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the rest of Evil Minions™ have always claimed that their actions were justified, because they, “Kept us safe.”

Of course, this ignores 911, which is a lot like saying, “Apart from that Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play Our American Cousin?

Well, in Politico, a bit of fish wrapper that charlie Pierce calls, “Tiger Beat on the Potomac”, we now have an (unquestionably self-serving) account from fromer intelligence personnel claiming that the administration steadfastly ignored clear signs of an imminent and catastrophic terrorist attack on America soil:

“Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” The CIA’s famous Presidential Daily Brief, presented to George W. Bush on August 6, 2001, has always been Exhibit A in the case that his administration shrugged off warnings of an Al Qaeda attack. But months earlier, starting in the spring of 2001, the CIA repeatedly and urgently began to warn the White House that an attack was coming.

By May of 2001, says Cofer Black, then chief of the CIA’s counterterrorism center, “it was very evident that we were going to be struck, we were gonna be struck hard and lots of Americans were going to die.” “There were real plots being manifested,” Cofer’s former boss, George Tenet, told me in his first interview in eight years. “The world felt like it was on the edge of eruption. In this time period of June and July, the threat continues to rise. Terrorists were disappearing [as if in hiding, in preparation for an attack]. Camps were closing. Threat reportings on the rise.” The crisis came to a head on July 10. The critical meeting that took place that day was first reported by Bob Woodward in 2006. Tenet also wrote about it in general terms in his 2007 memoir At the Center of the Storm.

 But neither he nor Black has spoken about it publicly in such detail until now—or been so emphatic about how specific and pressing their warnings really were. Over the past eight months, in more than a hundred hours of interviews, my partners Jules and Gedeon Naudet and I talked with Tenet and the 11 other living former CIA directors for The Spymasters, a documentary set to air this month on Showtime.

 The drama of failed warnings began when Tenet and Black pitched a plan, in the spring of 2001, called “the Blue Sky paper” to Bush’s new national security team. It called for a covert CIA and military campaign to end the Al Qaeda threat—“getting into the Afghan sanctuary, launching a paramilitary operation, creating a bridge with Uzbekistan.” “And the word back,” says Tenet, “‘was ‘we’re not quite ready to consider this. We don’t want the clock to start ticking.’” (Translation: they did not want a paper trail to show that they’d been warned.) Black, a charismatic ex-operative who had helped the French arrest the terrorist known as Carlos the Jackal, says the Bush team just didn’t get the new threat: “I think they were mentally stuck back eight years [before]. They were used to terrorists being Euro-lefties—they drink champagne by night, blow things up during the day, how bad can this be? And it was a very difficult sell to communicate the urgency to this.”
That morning of July 10, the head of the agency’s Al Qaeda unit, Richard Blee, burst into Black’s office. “And he says, ‘Chief, this is it. Roof’s fallen in,’” recounts Black. “The information that we had compiled was absolutely compelling. It was multiple-sourced. And it was sort of the last straw.” Black and his deputy rushed to the director’s office to brief Tenet. All agreed an urgent meeting at the White House was needed. Tenet picked up the white phone to Bush’s National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice. “I said, ‘Condi, I have to come see you,’” Tenet remembers. “It was one of the rare times in my seven years as director where I said, ‘I have to come see you. We’re comin’ right now. We have to get there.’”

 Tenet vividly recalls the White House meeting with Rice and her team. (George W. Bush was on a trip to Boston.) “Rich [Blee] started by saying, ‘There will be significant terrorist attacks against the United States in the coming weeks or months. The attacks will be spectacular. They may be multiple. Al Qaeda’s intention is the destruction of the United States.’” [Condi said:] ‘What do you think we need to do?’ Black responded by slamming his fist on the table, and saying, ‘We need to go on a wartime footing now!’”

 “What happened?” I ask Cofer Black. “Yeah. What did happen?” he replies. “To me it remains incomprehensible still. I mean, how is it that you could warn senior people so many times and nothing actually happened? It’s kind of like The Twilight Zone.” Remarkably, in her memoir, Condi Rice writes of the July 10 warnings: “My recollection of the meeting is not very crisp because we were discussing the threat every day.” Having raised threat levels for U.S. personnel overseas, she adds: “I thought we were doing what needed to be done.” (When I asked whether she had any further response to the comments that Tenet, Black and others made to me, her chief of staff said she stands by the account in her memoir.) Inexplicably, although Tenet brought up this meeting in his closed-door testimony before the 9/11 Commission, it was never mentioned in the committee’s final report.

What a surprise.

Once again, I am compelled to make the repeat the wisest thing that I’ve read this century:

But it does inspire in me the desire for a competition; can anyone, particularly the rather more Bush-friendly recent arrivals to the board, give me one single example of something with the following three characteristics:

  1. It is a policy initiative of the current Bush administration
  2. It was significant enough in scale that I’d have heard of it (at a pinch, that I should have heard of it)
  3. It wasn’t in some important way completely f%$#ed up during the execution.

Of course they f%$#ed up the the prelude to the September 11 attacks.

They f%$#ed everything up.

Talk About Failing Upwards

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Neel Kashkeri, one of the mismanagers appointed by Hank Paulson to bail out the banksters, has been named to the presidency of the Minneapolis Federal Reserve:

Neel T. Kashkari, who oversaw the government’s bailout of the banking industry as a Treasury official in the George W. Bush and Obama administrations, was named the next president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis on Tuesday.

Mr. Kashkari, 42, will succeed Narayana R. Kocherlakota in that post in January. He will also take Mr. Kocherlakota’s place as the youngest of the 17 members of the Fed’s policy-making committee, the Federal Open Market Committee.

“Mr. Kashkari is an influential leader whose combined experience in the public and private sectors makes him the ideal candidate to head the Minneapolis Fed,” MayKao Hang, a Minneapolis Fed board member who was co-chairwoman of the search committee, said in a statement.

Mr. Kashkari is the third person this year appointed to lead a regional reserve bank, and all three of the new presidents previously worked at Goldman Sachs. The Philadelphia Fed in March appointed Patrick Harker, a former Goldman trustee, as its new president. The Dallas Fed in August selected Robert S. Kaplan, a former Goldman vice chairman.

Mr. Kashkari will join a minority of Fed officials who do not have advanced degrees in economics, but he has expressed strong views on monetary policy.

In 2012, Mr. Kashkari criticized the Fed’s decision to start a second round of bond-buying.

“At the end of the day, this is not going to lead to real economic growth,” he told CNBC at the time. “Unfortunately, it likely leads to an inflationary outcome.”

He also has compared bond-buying to dosing the economy with morphine — “Makes u feel better but doesn’t cure,” he posted on Twitter in 2013 — and suggested that financial markets would resist weaning.

Those views suggest Mr. Kashkari will break with his predecessor. Mr. Kocherlakota began his term at the Minneapolis Fed as a vocal skeptic of the Fed’s ability to improve economic conditions but underwent a battlefield conversion and became a leading proponent of the Fed’s efforts. He is now the only Fed official pushing to expand its stimulus campaign.

So, he’s been wrong on everything, he f%$#ed up the bank bailout, and now he is President of the Minneapolis Fed.

And another Vampire Squid alumni gets to decide the winners and losers in our economy.

Paul Krugman also observes that Neel is supremely unqualified for anything resembling banking regulation or monetary policy as well:

So, if the Minneapolis Fed felt the need to maintain conservation of NK, they could have chosen to replace Narayana Kocherlakota with a New Keynesian. Instead, they chose Neel Kashkari. Brad DeLong isn’t happy, and this Twitter exchange suggests that he has good reason to worry.

I’ve written before about the all-too-common fallacy of confusing demand with supply, of arguing that because we had a bubble — so that some component of aggregate demand was unsustainable — the economy as a whole was somehow producing more than its potential. Let me just repeat what I said then:

………

In the words of Charlie Brown, AAUGH!

That word “artificially” is the real telltale, as is Kashkari’s description of Japanese monetary stimulus as “morphine.” It’s straight out of the liquidationist playbook, e.g. Hayek denouncing the use of “artificial stimulants” to fight the Great Depression.

So, great: we now have a liquidationist in a senior position in the Fed system.

Not just a liquidationist, a crony capitalist incompetent liquidationist.
I’m feeling so much better about our monetary policy now.

The Stupid, It Burns Us!!!!

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In response to the question, “Who would you like to have a beer with who is not a politician?Who would you like to have a beer with who is not a politician?”,  Republican establishment great white hope Marco Rubio responded that he wanted to have a beer with Nobel Prize winner Malala.

You remember Malala?

She was shot in the head by the Taliban for advocating for the education of  girls.

She is 19 years old, and so not legal to drink, and a Muslim, which means that she is forbidden to drink.

This is so stupid, on so many levels.

Can We Please Give Texas Back to Mexico? Part MCMLVII

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There is now a case wending its way through Texas courts.

Some home schoolers are saying that actually requiring they make an effort to educate their children is a violation of their rights:

Laura McIntyre began educating her nine children more than a decade ago inside a vacant office at an El Paso motorcycle dealership she ran with her husband and other relatives.

Now the family is embroiled in a legal battle the Texas Supreme Court hears Monday that could have broad implications on the nation’s booming home-school ranks. The McIntyres are accused of failing to teach their children educational basics because they were waiting to be transported to heaven with the second coming of Jesus Christ.

At issue: Where do religious liberty and parental rights to educate one’s children stop and obligations to ensure home-schooled students ever actually learn something begin?

“Parents should be allowed to decide how to educate their children, not whether to educate their children,” said Rachel Coleman, executive director of the Massachusetts-based Coalition for Responsible Home Education.

Like other Texas home-school parents, Laura and Michael McIntyre weren’t required to register with state or local education officials. They also didn’t have to teach state-approved curriculums or give standardized tests.

But problems began when the dealership’s co-owner and Michael’s twin brother, Tracy, reported never seeing the children reading, working on math, using computers or doing much of anything educational except singing and playing instruments. He said he heard one of them say learning was unnecessary since “they were going to be raptured.”

It appears that Texas lives by the motto, “If you can’t fool all of the people all of the time, you should start breeding them for stupidity.”

Are You F%$#ing Kidding?

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Fox Lake Police Lieutenant Charles Joseph Gliniewicz stole thousands of dollars from a youth fund, and when investigators started getting close, he faked his own death staged his suicide to make it look like it was a cop killed in the line of duty.

Following a manhunt, they found his body After finding the body, a manhunt insued, and immediately people blamed Black Lives Matter.

As my son is wont to say, what the f%$#ing f%$#?

There aren’t many stories that articulate how absurd and ridiculous America’s relationship with race is better than this one. It is layers on layers on layers on layers on layers of ridiculous, dry rubbed with “What the f%$#?” marinated in “This is some bullsh%$” and served with a generous helping of “You need more people” on a lightly toasted “No, seriously. Get the f%$# outta here” kaiser roll.

Fox Lake Lt. Charles Joseph Gliniewicz was a crooked cop who staged his own death in September. And he wasn’t just run-of-the-mill crooked. He stole tens of thousands of dollars from a youth fund; using the cash on vacations, gym memberships, and porn. (Which, admittedly, aren’t the worst things in the world to use your embezzled cash on. You can say many things about Charles Joseph Gliniewicz, but at least he wasn’t boring.)

Sadly, this — an officer committing suicide — is not terribly uncommon or particularly newsworthy. As Shaun King pointed out earlier today, “cops are more likely to commit suicide than they are to die in an inner-city gun battle, by a targeted assassination or by a car crash from a high speed chase.” But this isn’t about Gliniewicz, who apparently was battling some serious demons. It’s about the reflexive need to blame his death — back when it was still thought to be a homicide — on BlackLivesMatter. Which is what many people did. And, this wasn’t just the usual pajama-clad neckbeards on Twitter and Fox News making this claim either. Ron Hosko, current president of the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund and a former assistant director of the FBI’s Criminal Investigative Division (yes, that FBI), wrote a piece in USA Today effectively blaming #BLM for creating the climate that led to Gliniewicz’s murder. Which, again, wasn’t a murder.

(%$# mine)

Oh, you poor delicate flowers.

It’s almost enough to have me juxtapose a porcine metaphor with law enforcement personnel.

When Republican Presidential Candidates Have Lost Megyn Kelly, the Race has Jumped the Shark

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Shoot me, I agree with Megyn Kelly

Specifically, the latest candidate whine fest over debate moderation has Kelly lambasting them, which means that they have truly jujped Jumping C. Megalodon*.

She suggested that the candidates might want a massage as well:

Fox News host Megyn Kelly on Monday night mocked the letter drafted by Republican presidential campaigns listing a series of rules and questions for networks hosting future debates.

 After listing some of the demands, including that networks not allow lightning rounds or candidate-to-candidate questioning, Kelly jokingly suggested, “And then maybe the foot massage?”

 She then criticized the campaigns’ request that they approve any graphics about the candidates ahead of the debate.

 “Can you imagine having to submit our graphics for approval to the candidates? Good luck with that,” she said.

It really is pathetic.

*The largest shark, and likely largest predator fish ever. It died out some 1.5 million years ago. The Genus is still in dispute, between either Carcharodon (Great White) or Carcharocles (broad toothed Mako). But in either case, you are jumping C. Megalodon, you have jumped the biggest shark ever.

Well, Someone in the Pentagon Can Think beyond Dick Swinging

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The Russians and the US are developing communication protocols in Syria.

I am not talking about some sort of foreign relations touchy feeley crap.  I am talking about about the actual technical protocols to allow Russian and US forces to communicate with each other:

US and Russian fighter pilots communicated directly in the skies over Syria on Tuesday in a successful test of new procedures for avoiding incidents as they pursue separate air campaigns, the Pentagon said.

Navy Capt. Jeff Davis said the test, carried out between one aircraft from each side over south central Syria, lasted three minutes and “met its intended objective.”

“This test assured that the first time this mode of communication was used would not be during an unplanned encounter,” Davis said.

The United States and Russia signed a “memorandum of understanding” on Oct. 20 aimed at de-conflicting their air operations over Syria, where they are waging parallel air campaigns with different objectives.

………

A US defense official said Tuesday’s test did not amount to joint training with the Russians, as Moscow has described it in a statement.

“We put on hold all military to military cooperation following the onset of Russian aggression in Crimea, and that remains in effect,” the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Actually, what this means is that someone in the US military has realized best case scenario with all of this is that we don’t have US and Russian forces shooting at each other.

When one considers the facts on the ground:

  • The US is bombing ISIS and supporting al Qaeda affiliated fighters it has labeled “moderates” seeking to overthrow Assad, while supporting the Kurd’s fight against Isis.
  • The Turks bombing the Kurds and supporting both Isis and Al Qaeda affiliated fighters seeking to overthrow Assad.
  • The Saudis supporting both Isis and Al Qaeda affiliated fighters seeking to overthrow Assad.
  • The Russians coordinating airstrikes with the Assad regime against both ISIS the al Qaeda affiliated fighters seeking to overthrow Assad.

It’s a wonder that they haven’t already started shooting at each other, what with all the all the bullets flying in different directions.

Of Course, the Germans Have a Word for It

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Fachidiot (Google Translate)

It means someone who has achieved a measure of accomplishment in their own field, but area complete blithering idiot outside of this narrow area of expertise.

Who epitomizes this word?

Who could it be?

Oh, I dunno, maybe a world renowned neurosurgeon who makes Donald Trump look smart and sane Presidential Candidate by comparison?

It’s not surprising to find a Surgeon in this position.

One of the open secrets of the medical profession is that doctors work with their minds, and surgeons work with their hands.

Former Senate leader Bill Frist is another classic example of this phenomenon.

Surgery is not a “big picture” line of work. You open you fix, you close.

Diagnosis, by contrast is a process by which you take a constellation of sometimes conflicting information, and create a synthesis.

One of these things involves a big picture and critical thinking.

The other is surgery.

Not this Sh%$ Again!

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Obama has decided to put boots on the ground in Syria, and as near as I can figure, it’s because we cannot admit that our policy has failed:

In a dramatic shift in policy, the United States is preparing to send about 50 special operations forces to Syria within days to begin training and assisting “moderate” rebels fighting the Islamic State.

The U.S. military has sent elite forces into Syria before to conduct short in-and-out raids, but the move will for the first time keep American service members on the ground — and in harm’s way — in a four-plus year conflict that has killed over 200,000 people. It marks a significant departure in strategy for a White House that has repeatedly ruled out any U.S. “boots on the ground” in either Iraq or Syria and bristled at any suggestion that the American forces would take part in combat.

The U.S special operations forces being deployed to Syria will not play a direct combat role, at least initially, a senior defense official said Friday. Instead, the small number of commandos will focus more on advising local Arab and Kurdish rebels who are fighting the Islamic State in northern Syria.

The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the Defense Department is not ruling out direct action raids in the future, but for now, “they will remain singularly at the headquarters” of the rebel groups, to ”help with operational planning.”

Still, the American forces could come under fire in their new mission, which could last weeks or months, officials said.

This is nucking futs.

The problem here is that we have mindlessly supported the policy goals of  the House of Saud.

As Pepe Escobar aptly notes, “But the problem was never Iran. The problem is the ideological matrix of goons who metastasize into Caliphs: Saudi Arabia,” and now that it has proven to be an abject failure, we have do double down, because our state security apparatus is unwilling to the failure of this policy.

So, now the White House and the Pentagon are so afraid that someone, anyone, else might approach something resembling a resolution in Syria that we are now supporting al Qaeda affiliated groups that we are calling “Moderates”.

This is insanity.  This is stupidity.

This is  ……… There are no words.

Northrop Grumman Wins Contract for New Bomber

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NG beat out a coalition of Lockheed Martin and Boeing. (paid subscription required)

My guess is that this was largely driven by the desire to make sure that all the primes had business. Boeing has the new tankers, LM has the F-35, and now NG has this:

Northrop Grumman is the winner of the Long-Range Strike Bomber (LRS-B) contest, beating a rival team with six times its annual sales.

 The U.S. Air Force announced Oct. 27 that Northrop Grumman beat a Boeing/Lockheed Martin team in a competition to develop and build 100 of the bombers, which are expected to reach initial operational capability in the mid-2020s. The Pentagon says the next phase of the work, engineering and manufacturing development (EMD), should cost $21.4 billion in 2010 dollars, including the delivery of an unspecified number of test aircraft.

 Another $1.9 billion has already been spent on risk reduction, bringing both competing teams through the initial design phase. In 2016 dollars, the estimated EMD cost is $23.5 billion, the Pentagon says. The B-2 cost $37.2 billion to develop in 2016 dollars.

 The Air Force also says that the average procurement unit cost for the Northrop Grumman bomber (which does not have a formal designation yet) will be $511 million in 2010 dollars, assuming a 100-aircraft buy ($564 million in 2016 dollars). This figure, the result of two independent Pentagon estimates, is lower than the $550 million (2010 dollars) goal that was set in 2011, when then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates approved the start of the program.

 ………

 For the time being, however, the make-up of Northrop Grumman’s team is a secret, as are most attributes of the program. Not even the engine subcontractor is disclosed, although the Air Force said today that all major subsystems have been selected. Although most analysts agree it is overwhelmingly likely that the bomber will resemble a smaller cousin of the B-2, a blended wing-body aircraft with two engines and an unrefueled radius of action of around 2,500 nm, no such details have been confirmed.

Note that the range is less than half that of the B-52 and the B-2, and 15 less than that of the B-1, which has been criticized for excessive use of tankers in combat operations.

The payload is not public, but given that it will have two engines, I would expect to be far less than that of the B-2’s 40,000 lbs (to say much less of the B-52’s 70,000 lb payload, and the B-1’s 75,000 lb payload).

My guess is that this would place around a 25,000 lb payload, which means that we are spending an awful lot of money for a similar payload and range performance of the B-47, a medium bomber that first flew in 1947. (FWIW, Aviation Week has pegged the payload and range even lower)

And you wonder why I lament US weapons development and procurement.

Details of the selection process also remain highly classified, but it is likely that the winning bid rested on Northrop Grumman’s operational experience with wide-band, all-aspect stealth technology on the B-2 bomber and the still-secret RQ-180 intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) unmanned air vehicle.

 But the winning formula was most likely not just a question of delivering more stealth or more range. In LRS-B, the winner had to meet a complex set of requirements that stress risk reduction, an open systems architecture, agile management and manufacturing technology.

The USAF wants its strategic bomber, and because its first pass at this, the Next Generation Bomber, was expensive enough to make the B-2 look cheap, they trimmed away enough requirements to end up with something equivalent to the FB-111, which really isn’t a strategic bomber at all.

This is absurd.

Quote of the Day

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If you’re keeping score at home, in Syria, we’ll be fighting alongside the people against whom we’ll be fighting in Syria. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. And the friend of my friend is the enemy of the enemy of my friend. And the friend of the devil is a friend of mine. This isn’t foreign policy. It’s a Lewis Carroll poem, and it’s getting to be a longer one.

—Charlie Pierce on how the misruling class in DC seems determined to put boots on the ground in Syria.

It appears that Obama’s statements in 2003 that he opposed “Stupid Wars” is now inoperative.

Donald Trump is Just F%$#ing with Us Now

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Trump defends Islamic head coverings, says women want to wear them: "It's easy—you don’t have to put on makeup.” https://t.co/tfLYhDv8ir

— ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) October 26, 2015

His latest bit, he just said that women might wear burkas because they find makeup too inconvenient:

Trump was speaking about foreign policy, which lead into his critique of anti-Muslim sentiments.

 Here are his comments in full:

Then I saw women interviewed. They said, ‘We want to wear them. We’ve worn them for a thousand years. Why would anyone tell us not to?’ They want to! What the hell are we getting involved for? Fact it’s easier. You don’t have to put on make-up. Look at how beautiful everyone looks. Wouldn’t it be easier? Right? Wouldn’t that be easy?

Seriously.

The Donald is trolling us, and this is a troll that is more trollish than Goatse. (If you do not know what Goatse is, do not google it. Ever. Trust me on this one.*)

*The same goes for Lemonparty. Do not go there.†
†Of course, if you had a choice between any of these and Donald Trump, any sane person would go with Goatse and Lemonparty, but barring a time machine and an accident involving an ancestor of Donald Trump’s, the best you can do is cut your losses.

Quote of the Day

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What we have seen take place is nothing less than a feral and unhinged scream from the swamp of reaction that resides in our culture, where every crank with a computer resides, consumed with bitterness and untreated angst, much of it in the form of self loathing over their own inadequacies and lack of talent – not to mention in some cases a jump from the extreme left to extreme right of the political spectrum, with all the psychological dysfunction such a metamorphosis describes.

—John Wight at Counterpunch on observing the torrent of abuse that Seumas Milne has endured since become Jeremy Corbyn’s communications chief

Seriously, the public freak-out over Labour being run by a guy who is ……… Labor ……… is kind of a major mindf%$#.