INTERESTING: Forget the A-10 Warthog: The Army Wants the F-35.

“When you are in a firefight, the first thing infantry wants to do it get on that radio to adjust fire for mortars and locate targets with close air support with planes or helicopters. You want fires. The F-35 has increased survivability and it will play a decisive role in the support of ground combat,” Army Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley told reporters at the Association of the United States Army Annual Symposium.

Gen. Milley’s comments are quite significant, given the historic value of close air support when it comes to ground war. His remarks also bear great relevance regarding the ongoing Pentagon evaluation assessing the F-35 and A-10 Warthog in close air support scenarios.

Over the years, close-air-support to Army ground war has of course often made the difference between life and death – victory or defeat. The Army, Milley said, wants next-generation close-air-support for potential future warfare.

To be clear, the Army doesn’t want its own F-35s, which it doesn’t have the logistical tail to support:

“We fight with the Navy, Marines and Air Force. Our soldiers have never heard an Air Force pilot say ‘I can’t fly into that low-altitude area,’ These guys take incredible risk. If there are troops on the ground, they are rolling in hot,” Milley said.

Good to know.

I HAD BEEN ASSURED BY MANY PROMINENT DEMOCRATS THAT VOTER FRAUD WAS A MYTH: Former Democratic Party leader paid women in alleged Tarrant voter fraud ring, AG says.

A Fort Worth woman recently indicted on voter fraud charges paid others involved in the scheme with funds provided by a former Tarrant County Democratic Party leader, court documents filed this week show.

After learning about a state investigation, Leticia Sanchez — one of four women arrested and indicted on voter fraud charges — allegedly directed her daughter to send a text message to others in the scheme, urging them not to cooperate with investigators, state officials say.

The allegations are made in a state’s notice of intent to introduce evidence in Sanchez’s criminal case, where state officials say she was among those who collaborated to vote for certain down-ballot candidates on a number of north side residents’ mail-in ballots.

Sounds to me like a criminal conspiracy to disenfranchise legally registered voters.

HMM: Trump Admin Will Allow Iran Key Financial Lifeline in Major Concession.

The United States is set to allow Iran to remain connected to the SWIFT baking system, an international monetary consortium that facilities cross-border transactions, according to sources familiar with ongoing talks between top U.S. officials and European allies who have been pressuring the Trump administration to take a softer line on Tehran ahead of the Nov. 4 implementation of new sanctions on Iran.

The move is being met with frustration by Iran hawks on Capitol Hill and elsewhere who have argued that SWIFT continues to provide Iran with a critical financial lifeline as the country continues to fund terrorist operations across the region despite its ailing economy.

In the past months, as European allies pressured the Trump administration to take a softer line with Iran, SWIFT has emerged as a key sticking point. While the Trump administration had vowed to choke off Iran’s financial routes, senior officials appear to have softened that stance in the face of European pressure.

To date, the speed with which the Administration had been able to get sanctions back on Iran had been a pleasant surprise. But now this.

LATE-STAGE SOCIALISM: Suicides Surge in a Hopeless Venezuela.

“We live between terror and impotence,” said Ignacio Sandia, who heads the psychiatry department. “We constantly think we can’t do what we should in the moment we’re able to, and we’re terrified that patients commit suicide and there’s nothing we can do for them.”

Suicides are rapidly rising across this once-wealthy nation, but particularly in mountainous Merida, where they are hitting levels never seen. The Venezuelan Violence Observatory, a nongovernmental organization, estimates that the state’s suicide rate was more than 19 per 100,000 in 2017. Only 12 nations have a rate so high.

Such deaths are becoming ordinary in a population plagued by hyperinflation, hunger and mass emigration. Xiomara Betancourt, a neurologist who heads mental-health services at Corposalud Merida, the public health system, blamed scarcities of antidepressant and anti-anxiety medicine and loneliness as loved ones leave.

Unbelievably sad and unnecessary.

BUT OF COURSE: Former Clinton Staffer Blames Trump for Clinton, Obama Attempted Bombings.

Flashback: Hillary Clinton Says Democrats Can’t Be Civil Until They’re Back in Power.

GOOD GIRL: Quadruple Amputee Dog Wins American Humane’s 2018 ‘Hero Dog’ Award.

Chi Chi, the 4-year-old Golden Retriever from Phoenix, Ariz.,, became a quadruple amputee after she was left for dead in South Korea. Because she was found in a garbage bag with her legs bound, worn to the bone, and already necrotized, doctors could only save her life by amputating portions of all four of her legs. Subsequently, when she first arrived at owner Elizabeth Howell’s home, Chi Chi was afraid of people. But with time, she ultimately came to trust people again.

According to Chi Chi’s owner, the young dog quickly adapted to her first set of custom prosthetics and now loves spending her days as a certified therapy dog sharing her joy and cheerful demeanor with people of all ages. That’s why Chi Chi ultimately won the 2018 Therapy Dog of the Year Award.

Not a dry eye in the house, I’m sure. Not in this one, either.

I’M NOT SAYING IT WAS AN ALIEN, BUT IT WAS AN ALIEN: Antarctic researcher who ‘snapped’ and stabbed colleague in frenzy ‘was driven mad living in confined space.’

VIDEO: Former Clinton Staffer Blames Trump for Clinton, Obama Attempted Bombings.

We’re still in the we-don’t-even-know-what-we-don’t-know stage.

TURNAROUND? Tesla may post profit with Model 3 surge, investors look for more.

WELL, GOOD: Tim Cook calls for strong US privacy law, rips ‘data-industrial complex.’

Speaking at the International Conference of Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners (ICDPPC) in Brussels, Cook said that businesses are creating “an enduring digital profile” of each user and that the trade of such data “has exploded into a data-industrial complex.”

“This is surveillance,” Cook said. “And these stockpiles of personal data serve only to enrich the companies that collect them. This should make us very uncomfortable.”

“We at Apple are in full support of a comprehensive federal privacy law in the United States. There, and everywhere, it should be rooted in four essential rights: First, the right to have personal data minimized. Companies should challenge themselves to de-identify customer data—or not to collect it in the first place.

“Second, the right to knowledge. Users should always know what data is being collected and what it is being collected for. This is the only way to empower users to decide what collection is legitimate and what isn’t. Anything less is a sham.

“Third, the right to access. Companies should recognize that data belongs to users, and we should all make it easy for users to get a copy of, correct, and delete their personal data. And fourth, the right to security. Security is foundational to trust and all other privacy rights.”

I’m not usually a fan of Cook’s politics, but he has made privacy one of Apple’s standout features/services over the last few years.

FASTER, PLEASE: US Christens 2 Virginia-Class Nuclear-Powered Attack Submarines.

The future USS Delaware is the 18th Virginia-class SSN and the ninth to be delivered by Newport News. Construction of the new sub began in September 2013 and is 93 percent complete. It is expected to be delivered to the U.S. Navy in 2019.

The weekend also saw the christening of a second Virginia-class SSN, the future USS Vermont (SSN-792), during a ceremony held at General Dynamics Electric Boat Shipyard in Groton, Connecticut, on October 20. The boat’s sponsor is Gloria Valdez, the former deputy assistant secretary of the U.S. Navy for naval shipbuilding. Construction of the Vermont began in May 2014. The new SSN is also slated for delivery in 2019.

The Navy is currently considering cancelling the final Block 7 tranche of Virginia boats and replacing them with a new class of much larger, Seawolf-type fast-attack subs.

BRUCE BAWER: Violence Against Gays on the Rise in Europe. “In most media reports of such incidents, indeed, the Islamic factor can only be discerned through exceeding careful reading.”

Mustn’t confuse the deplorables with facts.

IMPORTANT NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF SCIENCE: Your Poop Is Probably Full of Plastic.

WOW: Mom with ‘gut feeling’ stops school shooter before planned attack.

Koeberle Bull of Lumberton, N.J., woke up to a racist message on Facebook from a man in Kentucky. “It was really vulgar — he called my kids the N-word and hoped terrible things for them,” Bull tells Yahoo Lifestyle.

The mom of three biracial children, ages 16, 11, and 8, was especially concerned about the man’s profile picture in which he showed off a gun, so, going on a “gut feeling,” she called her local police station and filed a report. “But I felt like it wouldn’t really go anywhere, so I posted a screenshot of the message on Facebook,” she says.

The man had blocked Bull. However, her friends dug around for details about his identity, and Bull soon had enough information to share with the police in Lawrenceburg, Ky. “I spoke to Officer Josh Satterly, who told me, ‘There’s no room for this kind of hate in my world,” she says. “He took me seriously.”

Local and state police followed the mom’s tip, and on Thursday, officers drove to the home of a 20-year-old man named Dylan Jarrell, just as he was leaving his house with more than 200 rounds of ammunition, a bulletproof vest, a firearm, a 100-round high-capacity magazine, and a “detailed plan of attack.”

Well done.

REP. ADAM SCHIFF: House Intel will ramp up probe of Trump’s Russia ties if Dems take the House.

Somebody point him to this item: Papadopoulos Told FBI Informant in 2016 There Was No Russian Collusion in Trump Campaign.

DON’T MESS WITH TEXAS: Gov. Greg Abbott: George Soros ‘is trying to turn Texas into California.’

“George Soros has been involved in Texas elections for the past couple of cycles,” Abbott explained. “He is trying to turn Texas into California, and that’s on top of all this money pouring in from California for candidates like Beto.”

They also discussed the growing caravan of migrants currently headed for the U.S. border. Read the latest on the migrant caravan here.

“If you think these are people who are leaving Honduras or Guatemala or wherever they’re coming from, [and are] just trying to escape violence and seek asylum, that is incorrect,” Abbott said. “This is very well organized. It’s funded. There are others who are behind this. And very importantly, in this caravan [there] are not just people from Honduras and Guatemala. We know that some of the leaders of it are involved in MS-13. We know that some of the people are from countries across the globe.”

As I said yesterday, this “caravan” is a national security concern rather than an immigration issue.

RELIGION OF PEACE UPDATE: ISIS Media Group Threatens to Behead FBI Official Over Arrest of Chicago Member.

IT’S ALMOST LIKE THE WHOLE THING WAS JUST A PARTISAN ATTEMPT TO DELEGITIMIZE A REPUBLICAN PRESIDENT: Papadopoulos Told FBI Informant in 2016 There Was No Russian Collusion in Trump Campaign. “That exculpatory information was left off of the FISA warrant.”

TURNS OUT YOU CAN DO THAT ON TELEVISION: CNN Draws Fewer Viewers Than Nickelodeon.

THE CITY THAT HAD TOO MUCH MONEY: Vancouver was the first place to experience the tidal wave of Chinese cash. Now the city is leading efforts to stop it.

One academic terms the process “the Vancouver model”: a seamy mingling of clean and dirty cash in casinos, real estate, and luxury goods made possible by historic ties to China and by Canada’s lax record of fighting financial crime.

It’s a product of one of the largest financial flows of the 21st century: The money being frenetically shuffled by millions of wealthy Chinese into safe assets abroad, in defiance of their country’s capital controls. Since mid-2014, capital flight from China may have totaled as much as $800 billion, according to estimates from the Institute of International Finance.

In Vancouver, the tidal wave has wrought a dramatic economic, demographic, and physical transformation. Alberni Street, a formerly dowdy downtown thoroughfare, has in the past decade welcomed a two-level Prada boutique with a black marble facade, one of the largest Rolex showrooms in North America, and a 62-story tower with a five-star Shangri-La hotel. All have Mandarin-speaking staff. In May, Rolls-Royce chose Vancouver to unveil its first sport utility vehicle, which starts at more than $300,000, hosting a Champagne reception at its sleek new local dealership in an upmarket neighborhood about two miles south of Alberni. Six sold on the first day—bound, perhaps, for the “car condo,” a kind of luxe garage with customizable suites that’s being built in a majority-Asian suburb. The units start at more than C$800,000, and the first batch recently sold out.

Much of the money coming in has been legitimately earned, if sometimes extricated by gray-market means.

If China’s economy were actually as robust as so many people fear — and if the Communist Party really had such a fearsome hold on everything — then capital flight wouldn’t be a problem for them or for Vancouver.

THE NEW CIVILITY: Guy Goes Nuts Ripping Up Ted Cruz Signs. “Oh, I’m a gun owner, too! If you guys shoot me over that, that would be great, that would be really, like, an appropriate response.”

Video at the link.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: A Second Caravan Approaches and Much, Much More. “Mexico has offered all these caravan folks asylum but most continue to the U.S. If you aren’t sure what the motives are here, passing on Mexico’s offer gives an indication the caravan travelers aren’t just looking for asylum. So far Mexico has processed 1,699 applications for asylum while 7,000+ people are on the move toward the U.S. border.”

CYBERSECURITY UPDATE: Investigating Implausible Bloomberg Supermicro Stories.

One of the biggest reasons people in the server management industry doubt the Bloomberg report is that it is not plausible for these chips to function in the networks of their intended targets, allegedly “30 companies.” Amazon AWS noted as much in their rebuttal response to this article when they said: “The remaining two non-critical issues with the web application were determined to be fully mitigated by the auditors if customers used the appliances as intended, without exposing them to the public internet.” (Source: Bloomberg)

We are going to get to how hard it is to pull this type of hack off later in this article. For now, the important piece is that the attack, as described in the passage above, would not work at its intended targets. Standard industry practice guards against this attack vector.

This is a long, dry read, but might be worth at least skimming.

BLUE WAVE? Dem holds single-digit lead in race to replace Franken.

ONE SECOND AFTER: China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran Set For Electronic Pulse Attacks on U.S.

Bill Gertz:

“The United States critical national infrastructure faces a present and continuing existential threat from combined-arms warfare, including cyber and manmade electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack, and natural EMP from a solar superstorm,” says a recently published report from the congressional Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack.”

Once largely a concern of a Cold War surprise attack from Russia to shut down American nuclear forces communications, the spread of nuclear weapons has increased the danger of disruptive EMP attack from a nuclear burst in the upper atmosphere.

“Within the last decade, newly nuclear-armed adversaries, including North Korea, have been developing the ability and threatening to carry out an EMP attack against the U.S.,” the report said.

“Such an attack would give countries that have only a small number of nuclear weapons the ability to cause widespread, long-lasting damage to U.S. critical national infrastructures, to the United States itself as a viable country, and to the survival of a majority of its population.”

Glenn has been warning for years that our electrical grid is in desperate need of hardening against such attacks.