From the Trenches World Report

Haaretz – by Ido Efrati

The Agriculture Ministry will launch a pilot project to grow hemp, a strain of cannabis, for industrial use after the Justice Ministry this week removed hemp from the list of substances with the legal status of dangerous drugs.

This will not be the first time hemp has been officially cultivated in Israel – in November 1942 Davar newspaper carried a report on the cannabis harvest in Kibbutz Dafna.  Continue reading “No Longer Illegal, Hemp Is Back in Israel After 75 Years”

NPR – by John Ydstie

After a two-day meeting in Washington, D.C., Federal Reserve policymakers say they’ll keep their benchmark rate in a range between 1 percent and 1.25 percent for the time being.

Fed officials said “job gains have been solid” and the U.S. “labor market continues to strengthen” in the statement after a meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee.

The officials described economic activity as “rising moderately.” They noted that unemployment rate has declined since the beginning of the year. The Fed is close to meeting its mandate to maximize employment.  Continue reading “Federal Reserve Holds Interest Rates Steady”

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”