CREEPIER AND CREEPIER: Albany doctor allegedly ran sick human experiments for Nxivm.
Archive for 2018
May 7, 2018
MICHAEL LEDEEN: The Issue is Iran, Not the Deal.
Iran has a long history, with moments of great achievement, but its current leaders have not enhanced its glory. Quite the contrary; Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and his henchmen have ruined the place. The destruction of the country’s ecosystem brings to mind a similar ruin inflicted on the Soviet Union by its Communist rulers. If Iran were truly what Obama believed, then all that incredible talent and resources and sophistication would have enabled the Islamic Republic a great success story, instead of a basket case.
The country’s aggressive foreign policy isn’t a great success, either, unless you think that Syria is a great success. Finally, Israel’s ability to humiliate Iranian security by making off with tens of thousands of sensitive documents about the covert nuclear program gives the lie to claims about Iran’s brilliance and cleverness. Most Iranians don’t think their oppressors are very clever, which is why they are demanding the regime stop its foreign adventures and do something to help Iranians in Iran.
This offers America a seemingly tailor-made opportunity for regime change in Tehran: support the dissidents, as we did in the Soviet Union.
Faster, please.
PEAK 2018, REACHED: Huda Beauty’s Vagina-Lightening Blog Post Sparks Controversy.
AT AMAZON, save in Mystery, Thrillers & Suspense.
EVERGREEN HEADLINE: Teens, Parents Aren’t on Same Page When Talk Turns to Sex.
THE LONDON CAGE: Dr. A. A. Nofi reviews Helen Fry’s The London Cage: The Secret History of Britain’s World War II Interrogation Centre.
At first the “cage” housed captured U-Boat personnel and “well connected” prisoners. In 1944 the Brits began adding high ranking Nazi SS officers and soldiers suspected of committing war crimes.
Unbeknownst to the prisoners, however, the whole place was bugged, not just the housing facilities, but even parts of the garden. As the German prisoners talked, British intelligence personnel, often Jewish refugees from Nazism, were able to listen in on and record their conversations, which often yielded useful intelligence, and frequently incriminating evidence as well.
The cage was located in London’s posh Hyde Park district. Interesting review.
NEWS FROM MY HOMETOWN: Glenn Jacobs, expected to be elected mayor, is a libertarian. What that means for Knox County. Note that this is Knox County Mayor. There’s also a City of Knoxville Mayor.
RISE OF THE MACHINES: ‘Smart dresser’ might help dementia patients clothe themselves.
NO. Celebrities Endorse Lowering Voting Age to 16.
Instead we should raise the voting age back to 21 and lower the drinking age back to 18, giving teenagers three years to develop the skill they’ll need to exercise their franchise.
GUNSHIPS BATTLING JAMMING IN SYRIA:
The electronic jamming signals affecting AC-130 gunships over Syria may have crews checking and cross-checking their data, including target information, before they lock on with their cannons, according to a top commander here.
“Whether that’s being man-made, or maybe it’s a mistake inside the airplane, it’s hard to say sometimes, but the process is, as you see those things pop up, the safety for the people on the ground is the primary concern,” said Col. Tom Palenske, commander of the 1st Special Operations Wing…
More:
“We’re not going to kill ourselves out of this war. And the way you do that is you make sure you’re as precise as possible, only targeting the guys we’ve validated as bad guys,” Palenske said, referring to operations in the Middle East where the gunships have flown countless missions, often with danger-close strikes.
“When you’re going to put lethal fires down in either enemy position or to protect friendlies, you’re concerned about the innocents around both our guys in uniform and civilians,” he said. “And when there’s some glitch being put out there by trons that threatens the accuracy of that, then the [AC-130 crews] have got to make sure they do no harm.”…Palenske did not say what kind of electronic warfare equipment adversaries are using, nor who the adversaries are, even though Islamic State fighters, Iranian-backed militia and Russian troops are in country.
The enemy electronic jammers are trying to jink the AC-130s into killing civilians (generating atrocity headlines) or fire on U.S. and allied forces. Syria’s civil war has echoes of the Spanish Civil War. The belligerents are testing new weapons and experimenting with new tactics and techniques.
WASHINGTON KNOWS BEST: Obama’s calorie rule kicks in thanks to Trump.
Starting Monday, calorie counts will have to be posted at thousands of restaurants, grocery stores and movie theaters, representing a milestone change in how the food industry shares information with the American public. The rule, an oft-forgotten provision of Obamacare, is being pushed over the finish line by a Trump nominee, FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, who says the labeling requirement is simply about transparency.
“I do not see these nutrition issues as a right-versus-left issue,” Gottlieb told POLITICO, noting that the obesity epidemic is a serious — and worsening — public health problem. “Using information as a vehicle to try to inspire competition is a conservative notion.”
It was “government information” which led to our obesity epidemic.
ILYA SHAPIRO: What This Term’s SCOTUS Decisions Reveal About Neil Gorsuch.
Thomas and Gorsuch will more often agree with each other than not, and it’s the rare case where Thomas and Kennedy will be arrayed against Gorsuch and Roberts. But in areas as different as criminal procedure and unenumerated rights, there will be disagreement, with Gorsuch pushing back more on federal and state action, both executive and legislative, that impinge liberty.
Conversely, on administrative law—how much deference should judges give executive agencies?—and the proper weight of to give precedent (“stare decisis”), we can expect convergence. These are among the areas where Thomas differed most from Scalia, and where Gorsuch will likely be even more “engaged” in reining in government overreach rather than being “restrained” in the traditional conservative mode.
Good.
WELL: Here’s The F-22 Production Restart Study The USAF Has Kept Secret For Over A Year. “We finally see the study that was oddly classified on arrival and it has new relevance based on Japan’s desire for a new stealth fighter.”
Working primarily with RAND’s conclusions from 2011, the Air Force crafted the following cost estimates and assumptions for what it would take to restart F-22 production and produce 194 additional Raptors:
•Total non-recurring start-up costs over a five year period totaling $9.869 billion in 2016 dollars, equal to more than $10 billion in 2018 dollars at the time of writing.
•This included approximately $228 million to refurbish production tooling, $1.218 billion to requalify sources of components and raw materials, $5.768 billion to redesign four subsystems, and $1.156 billion in other associated “restart costs,” along with $1.498 billion in “additional government costs.”
•Two of the four subsystems needing “redesign” would be the AN/APG-77 low probability intercept (LPI) radar and the F119 engine, neither of which are still in production.
•The other two were the aircraft’s software package and an unspecified fourth system, acting as a placeholder to hedge against the Air Force discovering that other systems needed replacement during the restart process.
•The aircraft’s electronic warfare, communication, navigation, and Identification Friend or Foe (IFF) systems were among those that might also need replacement or substitution with another system.
•While the 2011 RAND study estimated an average unit cost of $266 million, this was based on a total purchase of just 75 aircraft.
•The Air Force estimated that the initial unit cost for an order of 194 aircraft would be approximately $216 million.
•This would drop to around $206 million by the time the last one rolled off the production line.
•The unit price would begin to largely level out after the service had purchased the first 100 aircraft.
•The total procurement cost would be between $40 and $42 billion, with the entire program costing a little more than $50.3 billion.
The Air Force also noted that while approximately 95 percent of the F-22-related production tooling is still available, the physical productions facilities either no longer exist or are supporting other Lockheed Martin programs, such as the F-35. After the 2011 study, the service elected to put the “primary production tooling” into a warehouse at Sierra Army Depot in California in case there was a need to make certain spare parts in the future.
So it’s merely expensive then, and not next-to-impossible as we’d been led to believe.
IN THE MAIL: From Derek Hunter, Outrage, Inc.: How the Liberal Mob Ruined Science, Journalism, and Hollywood.
MICHAEL WALSH: In No Apparent Rush, the Grand Inquisitor Plods On.
RULES ARE FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE: Rosie O’Donnell Donated over the Legal Limit to Democratic Candidates. “All told, O’Donnell gave a total of $5,400 over the legal limit to the five candidates, using five different New York addresses, and in the Post’s words, four variations of her name.”
Sounds like she knew exactly what she was doing.
ROGER SIMON: Is Robert Mueller Destroying The Democratic Party?
JOSH MARSHALL: Stunning Developments on Trump/Private Black Ops Oppo Targeting Obama Staffers.
We start with this story in The Guardian. It’s very hedged and key details are not included. But the gist is that aides to Donald Trump hired an Israeli security firm to dig up dirt on two prominent supporters of the Iran nuclear deal. They are Ben Rhodes and Colin Kahl, both Obama administration national security hands who were involved in the negotiation. They both continue to be prominent supporters of it into the Trump era. Last night I said that it sounded like Black Cube, the firm that surveilled and ran black ops operations against Harvey Weinstein’s accusers on his behalf.
Then overnight Kahl came forward with a story from around the time the firm was reportedly hired in which someone approached his wife about investing in their children’s charter school. You can read the thread here. There was a backstory and details. But it sounded to the Kahls like an intelligence operation – not altogether uncommon for people in that line of work to see. So they eventually cut off communication.
Then a short time ago, Laura Rozen confirmed with Kahl that the purported firm which reached out to the Kahls was ‘Reuben Capital Partners’. That’s the same name used by Black Cube in the Weinstein operations, first reported in The New Yorker by Ronan Farrow last year.
How dare anyone steal from the Clinton playbook or cut in on Fusion GPS’s turf.
DAILY CALLER EXCLUSIVE: How Buzzfeed’s ‘Data-Monster’ Leveraged User Data To Fuel Super PACs, Target Voters.
BuzzFeed partnered closely with multiple Democratic and anti-Trump super PACs in 2016 to target its own users with dozens of political advertisements that were not in accordance with its own policies, according to a Daily Caller News Foundation investigation.
Former BuzzFeed Vice President Rena Shapiro, who led the website’s native political advertising team during the 2016 election, described candidly in a pair of unearthed interviews how she partnered closely with political groups to create ads that harnessed the data BuzzFeed collects on its audience of over 650 million people to solve their “ultimate need, which is to get elected, to get their message out there, or to canvas people together to create impact around a cause.”
Plus:
BuzzFeed raised eyebrows in June 2016 when it announced it had canceled a $1.3 million advertising agreement with the Republican National Committee due to disagreements with then-candidate Donald Trump’s “offensive statements.”
Doing business with any group that supports Trump, BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti said after canceling the RNC ad buy, would be “hazardous to our health.”
And:
BuzzFeed’s advertising business demonstrated in 2016 that by refusing to work with pro-Trump political groups it had skin in the political game. But Smith, the website’s editor-in-chief, insists that its news coverage of the president is rooted in the facts. He said in January that the website would have treated a Hillary Clinton presidency the same way they’re treating Trump’s.
But juxtaposing BuzzFeed’s critical coverage of Trump to that of his predecessor, President Barack Obama, suggests otherwise.
BuzzFeed’s coverage of Obama was “almost uniformly uncritical and often sycophantic,” according to a 2016 analysis by Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR), a left-leaning media watchdog group.
At this point I probably don’t have to remind you to think of them as Democrat operatives with bylines.
ARE THERE ANY PUBLIC OFFICIALS IN BROWARD COUNTY WHO AREN’T LYING WEASELS? Broward school district officials admitted Sunday that the confessed Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School gunman was assigned to a controversial disciplinary program, after the superintendent repeatedly claimed Nikolas Cruz had “no connection” to the alternative punishment designed to limit on-campus arrests.
IS THERE ANYTHING DONALD TRUMP CAN’T DO? He’s got Democrats in New York, Illinois, and California opposing higher taxes.
