Year: 2017

Tech Dirt – by Tim Cushing

The Government Accountability Office has taken a run at the TSA’s Behavioral Detection program in the past. Its findings were far from complimentary. Specially-trained “Behavior Detection Officers” (BDOs) were basically human coin flips. Deciding whether or not someone was a threat came down to a lot of subjective readings of human behavior, rather than proven principles.

In response to this report, the TSA started trimming back the number of BDOs it deployed, converting about 500 of them back into regular TSA officers. But the TSA still believed there was something to its pseudoscience patchwork, so it’s still sending out 2,600 BDOs to covertly stare at travelers’ throats and eyes (no, really) until terrorism reveals itself.  Continue reading “There Is Simply No Scientific Backing For TSA’s Behavioral Detection Program”

Dear Ma and Pa:

I am well. Hope you are. Tell Brother Walt and Brother Elmer the Marine Corps beats working for old man Minch by a mile. Tell them to join up quick before all of the places are filled.

I was restless at first because you get to stay in bed till nearly 6 a.m. But I am getting so I like to sleep late. Tell Walt and Elmer all you do before breakfast is smooth your cot, and shine some things. No hogs to slop, feed to pitch, mash to mix, wood to split, fire to lay. Practically nothing.  Continue reading “Farm Kid Writes Home After Joining the Marines”

Air University

Frederick the Great’s Military Instruction was written between the War of the Austrian Succession and the Seven Years War and translated into English by Lieut.-Colonel T. Foster at the end of the 18th century. The dedication to Major General Goldworthy is dated March 1797. I am typing in the 5th edition of 1818. I will get the full text of the dedication, title page, and preface by Foster in later. Getting the main text in first is more important. There are surely typos still in it, but many of the unusual spellings (e.g. defence, pretense, vallies, variations on Konigingraetz) are from Foster. I haven’t put in all the accents on French words like defile and depot, and umlauts are converted to e’s following the umlauted vowel. The schwa vowels that look like oe stuck together or ae stuck together have been decomposed. I’ll try to make up a list of the more exact versions of such words with the Latin 1 codes in place later. Please let me know if you come across the sort of typos where you see “or” where you are expecting “on” that slip through a spelling check program. Thanks to Stuart McAlpine for sending in a proofreading that I will be checking against Foster to correct my errors.   Continue reading “Frederick the Great’s Military Instruction to Generals”

WOW! here is someone’s F’d UP NOTION!! (We’ve been warned of standing armies) Right!?

Yahoo News

President Trump announced on Wednesday a new policy barring trans people from serving “in any capacity” in the military and claiming that their service creates “tremendous medical costs and disruption.”

But about one-fifth of the transgender population in the US are veterans of the military — meaning that transgender people serve in the military at approximately twice the rate of the general population, according to a 2014 report by researchers at the UCLA School of Law.    Continue reading “Transgender people are twice as likely as the general population to serve in the military”

The Intercept – by Sharon Learner

FOR DECADES, SOME of the dirtiest, darkest secrets of the chemical industry have been kept in Carol Van Strum’s barn. Creaky, damp, and prowled by the occasional black bear, the listing, 80-year-old structure in rural Oregon housed more than 100,000 pages of documents obtained through legal discovery in lawsuits against Dow, Monsanto, the Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Forest Service, the Air Force, and pulp and paper companies, among others.

As of today, those documents and others that have been collected by environmental activists will be publicly available through a project called the Poison Papers. Together, the library contains more than 200,000 pages of information and “lays out a 40-year history of deceit and collusion involving the chemical industry and the regulatory agencies that were supposed to be protecting human health and the environment,” said Peter von Stackelberg, a journalist who along with the Center for Media and Democracy and the Bioscience Resource Project helped put the collection online.   Continue reading “100,000 Pages of Chemical Industry Secrets Gathered Dust in an Oregon Barn for Decades — Until Now”

Las Vegas Review-Journal – by Jenny Wilson

Gregory Burleson, a member of Arizona militia groups who participated in the 2014 armed standoff in Bunkerville, was sentenced Wednesday to more than 68 years in federal prison.

During the standoff, which resulted in federal agents deserting an operation to round up rancher Cliven Bundy’s cattle, Burleson was photographed with a long gun, moving around the sandy wash where Bureau of Land Management agents were headquartered.  Continue reading “Bundy supporter Burleson sentenced to 68 years in prison”

CBS News

Senate Republicans have been delivered another blow after failing to secure a simple majority of 51 votes on the 2015 “clean repeal” of the Affordable Care Act with a two-year implementation delay.

Moderate Republicans had voiced opposition to the strategy and were given an early indication of its failure with Republican Senators Heller, Capito, Collins and McCain voting no.   Continue reading “Obamacare repeal lacks votes to pass in Senate”

Fox 10 News

NOGALES, Ariz. (AP) – The U.S. Border Patrol says agents found over a half-ton of abandoned marijuana after following footprints in a rural area near the U.S.-Mexico border.

Agents found 24 packages containing 1,100 pounds (499 kilograms) marijuana Monday after a canine team patrolling mountain roads east of Nogales, Arizona, found dozens of footprint impressions on a known smuggling route.   Continue reading “Border Patrol agents find half-ton of marijuana after tracking footprints”

Yonhap News Agency – by Lee Haye-ah

WASHINGTON, July 25 (Yonhap) — A top Republican congressman on Tuesday called for “forceful, swift” steps to stop North Korea’s missile and nuclear development.

Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-TX) made the call after the House Armed Services Committee held a closed-door briefing on the North’s pursuit of intercontinental ballistic missiles.

The session followed the communist nation’s first test of an ICBM on July 4, which experts say could reach parts of the U.S., including Alaska.   Continue reading “Top U.S. lawmaker calls for ‘forceful’ steps to stop N. Korea”

Fox News

President Trump touched off a firestorm Wednesday after tweeting that he wants to ban transgender people from serving in the U.S. military in any capacity — citing advice from his “generals” and medical costs.

In a series of tweets, he wrote:

“After consultation with my Generals and military experts, please be advised that the United States Government will not accept or allow…Transgender individuals to serve in any capacity in the U.S. Military. Our military must be focused on decisive and overwhelming..victory and cannot be burdened with the tremendous medical costs and disruption that transgender in the military would entail. Thank you.”  Continue reading “Trump announces ban on transgender individuals serving in military”

RT

The US Department of Defense has been caught out selling large amounts of military supplies to a fake police department. The fake department was created by the US government itself to sniff out waste and fraud.

The Government Accountability Office issued a revealing report last week showing that the Pentagon sold more than 100 controlled items valued at $1.2 million to a fake police department set up by the government watchdog agency through the 1990s-era 1033 program, according to a report released by the GAO. The 1033 program allows local and state law enforcement to apply for excess equipment from the US military.  Continue reading “Pentagon snared in govt sting as fake cops easily acquire $1.2mn worth of military gear”

Mail.com

LUCASVILLE, Ohio (AP) — Ohio put a child killer to death Wednesday, carrying out the state’s first execution after a 3½-year delay and signaling the possible resumption of capital punishment in the state.

Ronald Phillips was executed by lethal injection without any of the complications that marred the state’s last execution and caused the governor to pause scheduled executions. Phillips was sentenced to die for the 1993 rape and killing of Sheila Marie Evans, his girlfriend’s 3-year-old daughter.   Continue reading “Ohio puts child killer to death in 1st execution in 3 years”

Mail.com

CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP) — No knot-tying demonstrations. No wood-carving advice. President Donald Trump went straight to starting a fire in a speech at a national Boy Scout gathering. Parents, former Scouts and others were furious after Trump railed against his enemies, promoted his political agenda and underlined his insistence on loyalty before an audience of tens of thousands of school-age Scouts in West Virginia on Monday night.

“Is nothing safe?” Jon Wolfsthal, a former special assistant to President Barack Obama, wrote on Twitter, saying Trump turned the event into a “Nazi Youth rally.” Trump, the eighth president to address the National Scout Jamboree, was cheered by the crowd, but his comments put an organization that has tried in recent years to avoid political conflict and become more inclusive in an awkward position.   Continue reading “Parents, former Scouts alarmed by Trump’s speech at jamboree”

Mail.com

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump accused Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, a fellow Republican, of disappointing the country by opposing the GOP effort to demolish the Obama health care law, after initial votes demonstrated the party will be hard pressed to make any sweeping changes in the statute.

Senators planned to vote Wednesday on a Republican amendment to repeal much of President Barack Obama’s law and give Congress two years to come up with a replacement. That was expected to be rejected by a combination of solidly opposed Democrats and Republicans unwilling to tear down the law without a replacement in hand.   Continue reading “Trump assails GOP senator who opposed health care bill”

21st Century Wire

Back in January of 2016, 21WIRE reported how the Oregon Standoff protesters’ convoy was intercepted in a ambush by federal forces, and how Lavoy Finicum was executed by a rogue agent. The mainstream media was silent. Running point on the government’s propaganda campaign was the Oregonian newspaper’s supposed ‘award-winning reporter’ Les Zaitz who shamefully referred to the planned federal ambush as “a traffic stop.” As it turns out – the mainstream media was completely wrong – while we were right.   

This was an elaborate federally managed cover-up from the beginning.   Continue reading “FBI Agent Indicted In Killing of Lavoy Finicum, Hires High-Profile DC Lawyer”

Phys.org – by  Malcolm Ritter

But he and his colleagues are cooking up something else altogether: yeast that works with chunks of man-made DNA.   Continue reading “Scientists build DNA from scratch to alter life’s blueprint”