Schadenfreude Alert

The Kaiser Family Foundation has just released a study on public health costs, and they found that both state spending has mushroomed in states that have refused to adopt Medicaid expansion:

Beginning in FY 2014, policy changes introduced by the Affordable Care Act (ACA) have been driving Medicaid enrollment and spending growth. This report provides an overview of Medicaid enrollment and spending growth with a focus on state Fiscal Year (FY) 2015 and state Fiscal Year 2016. Findings are based on interviews and data provided by state Medicaid directors as part of the 15^th annual survey of Medicaid directors in all 50 states and the District of Columbia conducted by the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured (KCMU) and Health Management Associates (HMA). Information collected in the survey on policy actions taken during FY 2015 and FY 2016 can be found in the companion report. Key findings related to Medicaid enrollment and spending growth are described below.

Medicaid enrollment and spending increased substantially in FY 2015, the first full year of implementation of the major ACA coverage expansions. Across all 50 states and DC, Medicaid enrollment increased on average by 13.8 percent in FY 2015, largely due to the ACA coverage expansions. Driven by growth in enrollment, total Medicaid spending increased by 13.9 percent on average in FY 2015. (ES – 1)  Beyond enrollment, states reported that the other drivers of increases in spending were provider rate increases and the higher cost of health care, including prescription drugs. Improvements in the economy were a downward pressure on enrollment which affected spending, but downward pressure in enrollment and spending as a result of the improving economy were outweighed by the ACA coverage policy changes.

………

In FY 2015, Medicaid enrollment and total Medicaid spending growth in expansion states far exceeded growth in non-expansion states. Expansion states reported Medicaid enrollment and total spending growth nearly three times the rate of non-expansion states. (Figure 2) A total of 29 states were implementing the ACA Medicaid expansion in FY 2015, up from 26 states in the previous year (FY 2015 additions include: New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Indiana).

Across the 29 expansion states in FY 2015, enrollment increased on average by 18.0 percent and total spending increased by 17.7 percent; both enrollment and spending growth were driven by increases in enrollment among adults qualifying under the new expansion group. Of the 29 states expanding Medicaid in FY 2015, more than half (17 states) noted that enrollment initially increased faster than expected. Over two-thirds of expansion states reported that per member per month costs for the expansion population were at or below projections.1 Across the 22 states not implementing the Medicaid expansion in FY 2015,2 enrollment and total spending growth was 5.1 percent and 6.1 percent (respectively), much slower growth compared to the expansion states. Increased enrollment among previously eligible parents and children was the primary reason cited for enrollment growth in non-expansion states. (ES – 2)

This could not happen to a more deserving bunch of narcissistic nihilists.

H/t Talking Points Memo.

I Preferred the Olivier, and Branagh, and the Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson Versions

It is interesting how Shakespeare on the screen has changed over the past 60 years

I am sick to death of Joe Biden's "Hamlet" act about running for President.

Thankfully, this play's run has finally ended:

Vice President Biden on Wednesday announced he is not running for president in 2016, forgoing a primary battle against Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton and likely signaling an end to a political career that has spanned four decades.

Ending months of speculation about his plans, Biden said he could not see a path forward for his candidacy. The window of opportunity, he declared, “has closed.”

“Unfortunately, I believe we’re out of time — the time necessary to mount a winning campaign for the nomination.”

The 72-year-old vice president made the announcement from the White House Rose Garden with his wife, Jill, and President Obama at his side.

I understand that this is an emotionally fraught decision, coming less than 6 months after the death of his son, but the general media freak-out over this has really gotten old.

I am so glad that we won't have to be hearing pundits speculate over this crap any more.

Another Benefit to the Libs Winning in the Great White North

It looks like the elections in Canada make it far less likely for there to be any purchases of the F-35:

British Columbia — Canada will see a major shift in defense policy with the election of a new Liberal Party government and its planned withdrawal from the Iraq coalition air campaign and the US-led F-35 program.

Prime Minister-designate Justin Trudeau promised both during the election campaign leading up to Monday’s vote. Trudeau won a surprise landslide victory, forcing the ruling Conservative Party government into the opposition ranks of the House of Commons.

Trudeau said Tuesday he talked to US President Obama about Canada’s changing role in Iraq and the battle against the Islamic State militant group.

“I committed that we would continue to engage in a responsible way that understands how Canada has a role to play in the fight against ISIL,” Trudeau told journalists in a televised news conference from Ottawa, using an alternative acronym for the Islamic State group, also known as IS. “But (President Obama) understands the commitments I’ve made around ending the combat mission.”

………

Conservative Party leader Stephen Harper said if he was re-elected, he would approve a long-term commitment to the Iraq and Syrian wars.

Although Trudeau intends to end Canada’s role in the bombing campaign in Iraq and Syria, he has promised to boost the number of soldiers available to train Iraqi troops.

………

Trudeau also has promised to move quickly on replacing Canada’s aging fleet of CF-18 fighter aircraft and to pull out of the F-35 program. He said Canada does not need a stealth fighter for its defense needs and that the F-35 is too expensive.

The Liberal Party released its 88-page election platform Oct. 5, which included some details about how it would proceed with replacing the CF-18s. “The primary mission of our fighter aircraft should remain the defence of North America, not stealth first-strike capability,” the platform said. “We will make investing in the Royal Canadian Navy a top priority. By purchasing more affordable alternatives to the F-35s, we will be able to invest in strengthening our Navy.”

………

Alan Williams, who signed the original memorandum that brought Canada into the F-35 program in 1997, said the planned withdrawal from the fighter jet project would be embarrassing for the US.

But he said that Canada has to base its decisions on its own defense needs, and not only on the security and industrial concerns of its allies.

………

The other potential contenders to replace Canada’s CF-18s are the Eurofighter Typhoon, the Dassault Rafale, Boeing’s Super Hornet and Saab’s Gripen.

Williams said holding an open competition for a CF-18 replacement would ensure Canadian aerospace firms have the best chance at obtaining work on such a project.

Trudeau has suggested that the F-35 would not be considered in any competition.

There is an interesting comparison of capabilities at this page, and you will notice that, apart from low observability performance (stealth), the F-35 does not seem to be a particularly good deal:

	Lockheed Martin F-35A Lightning II	Saab Gripen JAS 39E/F	Eurofighter Typhoon	Dassault Rafale	Boeing F/A-18E/F/G Super Hornet
Crew	1	1(E), 2(F)	1 or 2(Trainer)	1(C,M), 2(B)	1(E), 2 (F,G)
Engines	1	1	2	2	2
Power	28,000 (43,000 with afterburner)	13,000 (22,000 with afterburner)	26,000 (40,000 with afterburner)	22,500 (34,000 with afterburner)	26,000 (44,000 with afterburner)
Thrust-to-weight ratio (with 100% fuel and A2A weapons)	0.87	1.06	1.07	0.99	0.93
Max speed (in mach)	1.6	2	2	1.8	1.8
Supercruise	No1	1.2 (with 2 WVR and 2 BVR missiles)	1.3 (with 2 WVR and 4 BVR missiles)	1.4 (with 6 WVR/BVR missiles)	No
Combat Radius (Air to Air mission)	1,100km (internal fuel only)	1,300km (with centreline 290 gallon tank)	1,389km	1,000+km	1000+km (internal fuel only)
Ferry Range (with external tanks)	2,220km (internal fuel only)2	4,000+km	3,790km	3,700+km	3,300km
Service ceiling:	60,000ft3	50,000ft4	55,000ft	55,000ft	50,000ft+
Wing loading (lower = better):	91.4lb/ft2	58lb/ft24	64lb/ft2	62.8lb/ft2	94lb/ft2
Rate of climb:	Classified	50,000ft/min4	62,000ft/min	60,000ft/min	44,882ft/min
Radar:	AN/APG-81 AESA	Raven AESA	CAPTOR-E AESA (planned)	RBE2-AA AESA	APG-79 AESA
Infrared Search and Track:	AAQ-40 EOTS	Selex "Skyward G" IRST	PIRATE IRST, LITENING pod	SAGEM-OSF	IRST mounted in external fuel tank
Helmet mounted display System:	HMDS (still in development)	Cobra HMDS	Eurofighter HMSS	TopSight HMD	JHMCS
Electronic warfare and countermeasures:	AN/AAQ/37 DAS missile warning system, AN/ASQ-239 Electronic Warfare system, stealth design resulting in decreased radar and infrared signature.	ECM pods, BOL advanced countermeasure dispenser, MAW (missile approach warner), Laser Warning System, towed decoy, internally mounted RF jammers.	ECM pods, flares, IR decoy dispenser, chaff pods, radar warning receiver, MAW, laser warning receiver, towed decoy,	Thales SPECTRA electronic warfare suite	ECM pods, towed decoys, chaff, flares, AN/ALE-165 jammer pod, AN/ALR-67 radar warning reciever
Gun:	GAU-22/A 25mm 4-barrelled gatling cannon	27mm Mauser BK-27 Revolver cannon (E model only)	27mm Mauser BK-27 Revolver cannon	30mm GIAT 30/719B autocannon	20mm M61 Vulcan gatling cannon
Hardpoints:	4 internal, 6 external	10	13 (4 semi-conformal)	14	11
Payload:	18,000lbs (using external pylons)	15,875lbs	16,500lbs	21,000lbs	17,750lbs
“X-Factor”:	Stealth, advanced sensors	Can operate from unprepared runways, low operating cost.	Legendary air-to-air performance, twin engine.	Ground strike ability, naval version available, twin engine.	Naval airframe, easy transition, twin engine.
Problems:	Troubled development, questionable performance, high operating cost.	Smaller design, less payload.	Troubled history, high operating cost.	Proprietary systems and weapons.	Old design, unremarkable performance.

¹Unofficially, the F-35 can supercruise at mach 1.2 for a distance of 241km.
²External fuel tanks are planned for the F-35, but none have been flight tested yet.
³The F-35 has only been tested to 43,000ft so far.
⁴Gripen C information, Gripen E data is unavailable

I would note here that the F-35 is more than 50% more costly than any of the competition, and has a direct operating cost more than that of an F-15, which was never known as an aircraft that was cheap to operate.

Further, it appears that the use of external tanks in a combat configuration will not be something that we will see in the near future, the Pentagon has its eggs in the stealth basket, and adding a combat tank would require its cooperation.

This means that its range in a typical combat configuration will typically be no better than its competitors.

In an air to air mode, the F-35 either needs to carry missiles externally, negating stealth, or to limit itself to just two missiles, placing the aircraft at a disadvantage.

Furthermore, much like Donald Trump's hair, it's fat, heavy and slow.

Finally, the F-35 is a roach motel: Data goes in, but it does not come out until it reaches Lockheed Martin in Ft. Worth, which means that there will be a heavy rent collected for developing new weapons, which will suppress the defense industries in partner nations.

The inability to access the source code of the aircraft also means that there will be some serious tactical issues, as data collected on new threats cannot even be examined by anyone but LM and the Pentagon, which could make for lots of flaming debris when an opponent deploys a heretofore unknown air defense system.

I do understand why Trudeau wants to drop the program:  It is less a defense program than it is an industrial base preservation program centered on the US defense industry.

How Utterly Appropriate

I just learned today that in Norway, the word "Texas: is slang for insanity, mayhem, and chaos:

Y’all already all know that Texas is known for its slang. The state is home to a slew of Southern colloquialisms as well as totally unique sayings you won’t hear anywhere else.

But did you know that the word “Texas” is in itself a slang word?

According to Texas Monthly, Norwegians have long used the word “Texas” in lieu of the word “crazy.”

Think that last statement is hogwash?

Just look at this headline from a Norwegian sports website, VG Sporten:



………

To explain the language phenomenon, Texas Monthly cited a Tumblr which claimed that Norwegian slang word has a lot to do with its association to the wild west and Western shoot-em-up movies. Another web travelogue we found on the internet explained it this way:  “In Norwegian, ‘texas’ means mayhem and chaos, as in cowboys punching each other and breaking chairs over each other’s heads.”

In a Reddit string entitled “Norwegians on Texas,” one Reddit user wrote that when he uses the expression “Det var helt Texas,” he pictures a  “cowboy crashing a party and shooting two revolvers into the air.”

It’s certainly not the most current of cultural references and can certainly lead to negative connotations, but it might be worth noting that the idiom is a largely old one. Some speculate that the idiom has been in use since at least the 1970s.

Considering my failed attempt to raise the term Snollygoster in the public consciousness, maybe it is time for me to start using "Totally Texas" for batsh%$ insane.

Someone Anonymous Headline Writer is Getting Himself Cut a New Asshole Right Now………*

Over at "All the News That's Fit to Print," they are writing about all those people in Washington who are eager to declare war on Syria and call it a no fly zone.

Unfortunately, a headline writer at the New York Times, did his job poorly, and so the title is, "G.O.P. Candidates Leading Charge in Call for Syrian No-Fly Zone."

There is a small problem though, which is revealed on paragraph 3:

Hillary Rodham Clinton has split with President Obama, advocating a no-fly zone in an attempt to stop the bloodshed, reduce the flow of refugees and give the United States leverage against Russia.

Who knew that Hillary had joined the Republican Party?

On a slightly more serious note, when people are talking about a no-fly zone, they are taking about going to war against the government of Syria.

Enforcing a no fly zone requires that you suppress all air defenses, destroy infrastructure that might support air operations (like civilian power stations and the phone system), and bomb airfields.

I am so glad that I live in Maryland, where my vote for President does not count, because I am never voting again for frothing at the mouth war mongers like Clinton, because if Maryland is in play, then the election is already settled.

H/t Moon of Alabama.

^*Full disclosure, when I worked at Jarvis Products on meat packing equipment, inducing a tool that actually cut a new asshole on cow, chicken, and pig carcasses.

Don't Let the Door to Hit Your Ass on the Way OUt

Former US Senator Jim Webb has left the building:

Former Virginia senator Jim Webb announced Tuesday afternoon that he would no longer pursue the Democratic presidential nomination, saying that he will instead gauge support in the coming weeks for a possible White House bid as an independent candidate.

"More people in this country call themselves political independents than Republicans or Democrats. I happen to agree with them," Webb told reporters at a news conference at the National Press Club in Washington.

"I am withdrawing from any consideration of being the Democratic Party's nominee for the presidency," he said. “This does not reduce in any way my concerns for the challenges facing the country … or my intentions to remain fully engaged in the debates that are facing us."

You are out of the Democratic primary because people saw you in the debate, and they did not not like you.

What's more, with the House of Representative resembling an open air insane asylum, this whole "but each side does it" pseudo-balance is getting old.

You have been running a non-campaign on the assumption that people will recognize your staggering brilliance, and no one is buying that baloney.

Just ……… Go ……… Away

Quote of the Day

Credit where credit is due, this is well executed CAS

It just goes to show there’s only one man named Ash you should listen to, and he’s too busy chainsawing evil dead to talk nonsense like this.

— The War Nerd On why Ash Carters on the Russian intervention in Syria are 6 pounds of sh%$ in a 5 pound bag. (Paid Subscription usually required, but you can access it for the next 24 hours)

The always entertaining War Nerd makes some very good points on the complete incoherence of the US/Nato campaign in Syria:

I stole that headline from an Ernest movie, Scared Stupid. Always loved that title. “Scared Straight”? I’ve never seen fear make anybody smarter. When people get scared, they get stupid.

And at the moment, the Anglo media is all scared about the Russian air strikes in Syria. So they’ve started a counter-bombardment of their own, dumping tons of stupid on us helpless civilians.

It’s not even a consistent brand of stupid. It’s all over the map: the Russian air strikes are bad because they’re helping Islamic State, or because they’re brutal, or because they’ve failed.

That last claim, that the Russian campaign has already failed, is the most ridiculous of all. Take this headline from the Daily Telegraph: “Russia Reducing Air Strikes against Syrian Rebels as Intervention Fails.”

“Fails,” huh? Already? After—well, lemme take my shoes off so I can count up the days since Russia started bombing Syria. Comes to 17 days, by my finger-and-toe reckoning. Who knew that an air bombardment campaign could be called a failure after slightly more than two weeks? Somebody should tell the USAF about this rule, because if memory serves, they’ve run a few bombing campaigns that went on a little longer than 17 days before getting their reckoning.

Buried deep in that story is the Russian command’s actual statement:

"The intensity of our military aviation operations decreased slightly in the last 24 hours….a result of active offensive operations by the Syrian armed forces, the front line/front-line [sic] with the terrorists is changing."

That’s a plausible account. The first rule of close air support is, “Don’t bomb your own people.”  And that’s a tricky job when Russian-speaking pilots and air controllers are working with what’s left of the Syrian Arab Army, a disorganized lot at the best of times. So the Russian claim may be the simple truth. Or not; who knows? All you can say for sure is that claiming a dip in sorties on Day 17 means the air campaign has failed is laughable BS.

US Secretary of Defense Ash Carter joined the chorus, predicting “the Russian campaign in Syria is doomed to fail.” Doomed, yet!

And why, Mr. Carter, are those Russkies so doomed? Carter explained,

"Fighting ISIL without pursuing a parallel political transition only risks escalating civil war in Syria… There is a logical contradiction in the Russian position and now its actions in Syria.”

It just goes to show there’s only one man named Ash you should listen to, and he’s too busy chainsawing evil dead to talk nonsense like this. Actually, Russia’s campaign is much more simple and logical than the USAF’s messed-up mission in Syria. Russia is using its air force to try to blast out a viable territory for an Alawite/Shia state along the Syrian coastal hills. Assad’s people are longtime Russian clients and allies, and the Russian air force is helping them maintain their key turf against a much more numerous enemy. It may fail, but at least that’s a reasonable plan.

………

Maybe our Secretary of Defense knows something I don’t know—I mean beyond the best place for prime rib in Georgetown—but it seems to me that the Russian air campaign makes very straightforward military sense.

If there’s an air force whose mission in Syria really does have “a logical contradiction at its core,” it’s a little group called the USAF. Not that it’s the USAF’s fault; they do their jobs very well. But what job, exactly, what mission, were they given?

If you were to sum it up, it’d go something like this: “Hit Sunni targets east of the coastal hills, but ignore everything to the west; help the Kurds in the north, but grudgingly, as little as possible, for fear you’ll offend Turkey; and while you’re attacking Assad’s enemies, keep reassuring the Israelis that you’re just as anti-Assad as you are anti-Islamic State.”

Sound stupid? It is. It’s a ridiculous compromise adopted to please the Israelis and Saudis, based on the dumb-ass notion that Sunni fighters in eastern Syria are evil sectarian bastards, but the Sunni fighters facing off against the SAA in the west are “moderates.”

It’s true that Islamic State is uncommonly vile, but let’s not lie; the only faction in Syria that even tries to rise above sectarian hatred are the young Kurdish commies of YPG/J. Every other group is sectarian, and militias that start out sectarian only get meaner as they go, by the iron logic of primitive war, where massacre is the norm. And this sectarian taint isn’t new. Syria’s Sunni were chanting “Christians to Beirut, Alawites to the graveyard” long before the fighting started. For once, Robert Fisk got it right, in an article called “Syria’s Moderates Have Disappeared, and There Are No Good Guys”:

“The Russian air force in Syria has flown straight into the West’s fantasy air space. The Russians, we are now informed, are bombing the “moderates” in Syria – “moderates” whom even the Americans admitted two months ago, no longer existed.”

The crazy US policy of ignoring Sunni militias in the west made for some fat, soft targets. No wonder the Russian air force jumped at the chance to intervene. They must’ve spent months drooling over drone and satellite photos from the west, between Homs and Aleppo—targets totally untouched by the USAF.

………


Then the Russians decided it was time to show, Gulf War style, that they had some fancy shock-and-awe munitions of their own. These belated colonial wars are, among other things, great sales videos for arms exporters like the US and Russia.

To see a typical Russian sales video, check out this clip of a Russian attack on a defensive line, mixing bombers, CAS, and rocket launchers scattering cluster bombs. Watch it and see if it looks like a “failure.” Because me, I personally would not want to be anywhere within five km of the target zone.

………

Notice how the guy filming it keeps saying, “Allahu Akbar”? That seemed odd to me. It’s a Salafist battle cry as a rule. You never hear Alawites from the SAA shouting it in their battle videos. So I asked around, and apparently it marks the narrator as Sunni, a pretty slick, cinematic way of implying that the Russian/Iranian/Hezbollah/Alawite side has some Sunni allies.

So…failure? No. Any advance will probably be slow; the lines don’t change much in Syria, because the level of combat power across the board is very low. These are forces who’d rather bombard each other than engage. Only Hezbollah has real combat power, and they’re spending it thriftily.

But there are already signs the Russian air strikes are allowing some advances.

That doesn’t mean the Russian campaign will succeed; like Gandalf used to say, “All courses may run ill.” But at least they have a sane, comprehensible, achievable goal, unlike the US in Syria.

Now for the next accusation, that the Russian strikes are brutal.

Well, yeah, they are. That’s the general idea. I don’t mean to be flippant here, but air strikes only look neat when you stay up there and watch from the pilot’s angle. On the ground, even the supposedly “surgical” strikes are nightmarish. Which, again, is the whole idea. And if we’re going to be honest about it, we can stop pretending there are any neat, clean surgical strikes. A new report just came out showing that nine out of ten people hit by those targeted drone assassinations are civilians who happen to be in the vicinity.

As a rule, you can tell when the media approve of air strikes by the angle. If it’s all nice clean pilot’s-view of distant explosions, it’s a good strike. If they show you funerals, weeping relatives, blasted apartments, it’s a bad strike. So you can tell, just from the headline—“This Is What the Russian Air Strikes in Syria Look Like from the Ground”—that it’s a bad strike. For example, ground-angle stories on Israeli airstrikes only started hitting the US media in the past few years. Now they’re fairly common but for most of my lifetime you just didn’t see those weeping Palestinians. When the strike is done by our own airforce, you still don’t see them unless you go to foreign or marginal leftist sites. But boy do they start popping up when it’s the Russians playing their air-to-ground video games.

………
The Russians are bombing more or less the way all the other foreign air forces in Syria are bombing. They’re having a more powerful effect because they’re hitting targets that haven’t been hit by first-world CAS til now. That’s the only difference.

………

Truth is, Russia and Islamic State have different projects going in Syria, projects that don’t even overlap much. Syria is more full of bad projects than the ninth-grade Metal Shop class where they set my jacket on fire with a soldering iron (while I was wearing it). That place was full of projects thought up by adolescent psychopaths, all designed to kill or maim, and mostly ineffective.

Which, come to think of it, is not a bad description of Syria at the moment. For a smallish country, Syria has more theaters of war going than a multiplex doing a Private Ryan marathon. The Kurds of YPG/PKK have their own project going in the north, along the Turkish border. The Alawites are trying to survive and carve a rump state for themselves in the coastal hills. The Christians have executed a simple plan: “get the Hell out of here while we can.” Hezbollah’s project could be summed up as, “Ugh, I guess we gotta help these weak-ass Alawites after all, damn it.” Israel’s project is “Attack Hezbollah nonstop, but never touch the Sunni militias because they’re not a real threat.” Jabhat-an-Nusra, Ahrar-as-Sham, and the other Sunni militias are competing for ownership of the inland Sunni state they hope will come out of this chaos.

But Islamic State? Their project isn’t really about Syria at all. IS is an Iraqi outfit. Yeah, they have all these noisy foreign volunteers, the whole C-minus demographic of Birmingham, Dusseldorf, and Marseille, but that’s not their real power. IS inherited Saddam’s officer class, and their goal is to regain Baghdad. Syria is a side bet, one of the vacuums they’re so good at occupying. Eastern Syria—a flat dry place with few people except along the Euphrates—was mostly abandoned by both the Alawites and the other Sunni militias, who focused on trying to win the more valuable real estate to the West. That’s when Islamic State moved in from its Iraqi base and started a Syrian franchise.

So the war Russia has joined isn’t even really the same war that Islamic State is fighting. IS wants to embiggen its Iraq-based “caliphate”; Russia wants to drive the other Sunni militias off that key highway, M5, so the Alawites can start a mini-state along the coast.

Meanwhile, the “moderate” Sunni militias are getting hit hard for the first time. As that happens, IS will push from the east, and the SAA/Hezbollah/Revolutionary Guards from the west. At some point, Russia’s air power may meet IS head-on. But a lot of other dumb, bloodthirsty rival projects will have to get ground away in this multi-faction, multi-loon war before that happens.

I think that the Brecher is actually being a bit too sympathetic of the goals and strategy of the US here.

Basically, Obama, once again is trying to please everyone, so you have him trying to appease:

• The delusional interventionists on the right (Richard Pearle) and the left (Samantha Power)
• The US officer corps (particularly the wild blue yonder set) seeing this as another opportunity to further their careers
• The House of Saud's desire to prosecute their thousand plus year old great game against the Shia.
• Islamist Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's delusional desire to extend Sunni hegemony over that part of the world while killing as many Kurds as possible.

And while he is doing all of that, Obama is cowering in fear that he will be accused of "losing" Syria in the same way that Truman was accused of "losing" China by Nixon.

Notwithstanding his running, and winning, on opposing "Stupid Wars" in the 2008 Presidential campaign, this war is even stupider than the invasion of Iraq.

Bush and his evil minions^™ were completely delusional and willfully ignorant, but at least they had a goal, while Obama and his evil minions^™ are intervening simply because they think that they can.

H/t to Naked Capitalism for unlocking this for a few days.

Entitled Idiots Who Should Not Have Your Money

Pretty much the whole management and venture capitalist class in Silicon Valley:

Nobody likes to be questioned.

But lately, some of Silicon Valley's big tech investors seem to be particularly upset that journalists are questioning some of the valley's hottest startups.

There's a fundamental difference in point of view here. The funders see first-hand how hard it is to build something and sympathize with the struggle. The journalists are supposed to be as objective and careful as possible and report what they find — even if some people don't like it.

The latest example is Theranos, whose science was called into question by The Wall Street Journal on Thursday. Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes was quick to defend her company, as you'd expect from a CEO.

But some VCs also seemed genuinely upset. Not at the substance of the allegations, but for not giving founders the benefit of the doubt when it comes to building something.

………

Startup founders have a really hard job. They are trying to do something new and drive society forward. The tech press doesn't know all the facts so you should give them a break.

The first sentence is indisputably true — it's hard (and lonesome) to found a tech startup.

………

The second sentence is where things get sticky.

A lot of tech founders are trying to do something new and drive society forward. But some of them are not.

………

The third sentence is where they completely miss the point.

Journalists don't set out to write takedowns of companies. But when a journalist begins investigating a company and finds something is amiss, and the story is well vetted and fairly reported, the venture community should welcome that reporting.

I'm beginning to think that of all the problems facing the business culture of the United States , it is the Ayn Rand inspired corrosive narcissism which is worst of all.

If you look at Theranos, for example, the facts are fairly clear.

The company has misrepresented the scope of its technology, and there have been repeated reports that the at least some of the tests are significantly less accurate.

This technology may, or may not, be successful at a later date, but it is clear that its valuation, one which makes its CEO a billionaire is Silicon Valley "Unicorn" bullsh%$.

Canadian Election Update

Pretty much says it all

---

Election Results
Party	Current Seats	Election Results (Preliminary)	Net
Liberal	36	188	+152
Conservative	159	101	-58
New Democratic	95	38	-57
Bloc Québécois	2	10	+8
Green	2	1	-1
Strength in Democracy	2	0	-2

John Oliver lays waste to Harper

The Canadian election tonight has turfed out the Conservative Party after 10 years.

It really does amaze me that they reelected Stephen Harper 3 times.

He has always been very straightforward on the fact that he dislikes the idea of Canada as a modern western nation.

He vision of Canada appeared to be a white Christian Saudi Arabia. He makes Dick Cheney look like an environmentalist, and he was trying to starve the Canadian health system into oblivion.

I kind of figured that the game was up when Harper tried a Hail Mary by campaigning with: crack-smoking former Toronto Mayor Rob Ford.

Still, that did not stop John Oliver from risking the wrath of Canadian authorities by suggesting that Harper is Canada's dick boyfriend. ($5,000 CDN & 6 months in jail, but the video is worth it)

The NDP has completely cratered, largely because after unprecedented electoral success in the last election, they were the official opposition (2^nd place) for the first time ever, Jack Layton the party leader, up and got cancer, and was replaced by Tom Mulcair who tacked to the right, promising no deficits, which meant no austerity, and so ended up to the right of the historically more centrist Liberals.

One of the longstanding criticisms of the LDP is that they are seen as ineffective, and can be relied on to waffle^* rather than have the courage of their convictions.

So they gave up their ideology this time around, and got clubbed like baby seals.^†

It will be interesting to see how much the young Trudeau, the new PM to be, will be able to undo the damage that Harper has done.

My guess is that many of the changes that Harper has made will be very hard to roll back.

H/t Obsidian Wings for the kitty pic.

^*This is an obscure Canadian political and historical pun.
^†A somewhat less obscure pun involving Canada.

Tehran Deployes MARV Reentry Vehicls

Click to enlarge and view as slide show

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Pershing and EMAD Comparison
    Pershing II MARVEMAD


    MARV flight profile Indian Agni 2        

Iran has a new ballistic missile, the EMAD, and it appears that it will deploy a maneuverable reentry vehicle (MARV), which could potentially result in much higher accuracy and the possible ability to evade defenses:

Iran has successfully test fired a new, domestically produced, medium range ballistic missile, named Emad (pillar, in Farsi). “This is Iran’s first medium range missile that can be guided and controlled until hitting the target,” Iran’s Defense Minister Hossein Dehghan was quoted as saying. According to analyst estimates the new missile could be ready for service next year.

The Islamic Republic of Iran already has surface-to-surface missiles with ranges of up to 2,000 kilometers that can hit Israel and US military bases in the region. The new missile seems to be a derivative of these liquid-propelled Ghadr and Shahab missiles. This Medium-Range Ballistic Missile (MRBM) is also powered by liquid-fuel and; according to unconfirmed sources, it has a range of up to 1,700 km., (1,060 miles) carrying a payload of 750 kg (1,650 pounds). Its accuracy is estimated at 500 meters (1,650 ft), compared of 2,000 meters (1.2 miles) accuracy achieved by the current Shahab 3 missile.

Given that this saw deployment with the US in the late 1970s, and is currently being deployed by India, this is not, as this article implies, some sort of exotic super technology.

Instead, it is a rather mature technology, and as such, is doubtless accounted for in the software of most ABM systems.

One thing that I did notice, at least compared to the Pershing II and Agni II is that the control surfaces are much smaller, which would imply that it would produce smaller deviations from a ballistic flight path.

I think that this implies that its primary function is to increase accuracy of the missile, and not to evade interceptors like THAAD and Arrow, as terminal guidance would necessarily involve less control authority.

Given the range, 1700 km, the top speed would be in the 3.5 km/s range, which means that temperature of the nose cone might be low enough to allow for a terminal radar to improve accuracy, much as the Pershing II did.  (Wiki lists the Pershing II CEP of 30m)

If the CEP could be kept to under 100m, this would greatly increase its utility when carrying a conventional warhead.

And this Guy Got a Nobel Peace Prize?

Every time we get a new bit of information about Obama's drone policies, it just gets worse:

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that U.S. drone policy is insane.

But one story told by the main drone whistleblowing reporter – Jeremy Scahill – shows just how insane it really is.

Specifically, Scahill explained today that Americans target TALL people in Afghanistan and other countries … assuming that tall men must be Arabs or “foreign fighters.”

In one instance, the U.S. targeted for drone assassination a man who they thought was unusually tall. In reality, he was a normal-size man … who happened to be surrounded by children.

Notwithstanding some domestic accomplishments, such as his half assed healthcare reform, Obama's true legacy will be his immoral and counterproductive drone war.


Obama's embrace of the contemptible and disasterous historical legacy of the Dulles brothers is complete.

Who is Cooler, the Penguin, or the Scotsman?

H/t naked capitalism.

Scott Adams Called This Confusopolies

In response to improvements in information and comparison shopping made available to the consumer through the Internet, the airlines have conspired to make their fare systems Byzantinely complex.

This may be why airlines are waging a war on travel websites. The tools available on these sites make it too difficult to f%$# the customers like a drunk sorority girl:

Once upon a time, there were reasonably well-known ways to pay less for your airfare. Airlines had rules governing ticket prices, those rules were consistent across airlines, and almost everybody knew what the rules were. (If you booked further in advance, the tickets were cheaper. If you stayed a Saturday night, the ticket would be cheaper. That kind of thing.)

Those days, however, are long gone. Airline tickets are no longer priced according to simple rules: they’re dynamically priced according to insanely complex algorithms which, to the naked eye, make no sense at all. Cheap tickets still exist, of course—the problem is that there’s no reliable way of finding them. If you managed to luck into such a ticket a few weeks or months ago, good for you—but don’t for a minute expect that if you behaved exactly the same way today, then you would get a similar result.

A recent paper by Symeon Meichanetzoglou, Sotiris Ioannidis, and Nikolaos Laoutaris sums up the current status quo: “complexity asymmetry,” they conclude, “defeated the web.” The paper is based on a massive database of 1,449,349 flight tickets involving 63 destinations and 125 different airlines—and finds that even the most common-sense rules of airline ticket pricing are regularly violated.

For instance, let’s say you want to book a round-trip flight from Brussels to Stuttgart. The researchers studied six different airlines flying that route, with 619 different fares, and found that 24.5% of the time, it was cheaper to buy two one-way tickets (one from Brussels to Stuttgart, and one from Stuttgart to Brussels) than it was to buy a round-trip. And when they looked at airlines rather than routes, they found similar outliers: one Dutch airline was cheaper more than half the time when buying singles rather than round-trip tickets. (Especially, it seems, on the Frankfurt-Zurich route.)

………

A few years ago, Delta got in trouble for showing higher prices to its frequent fliers than to everybody else; it blamed a “computer glitch.” Ever since then, conspiracy theories have abounded, especially among people who search for flights, find relatively cheap ones, and then find that the fares have suddenly increased when they decide to buy. Is it a good idea to use some kind of private browsing mode when shopping for tickets, so that the airlines can’t identify you and jack their prices accordingly?

The answer, frankly, is that although it won’t hurt if you do that, you’re going to end up outsmarted whatever you do. The airlines and flight search engines have infinitely more information than you do, and that information asymmetry is always going to work to their advantage. If you find a cheap fare, good for you; if you don’t, it’s not your fault. The system is rigged against you. The battle of consumers against the airlines is over. And the airlines have won.

There are industries that hate their customers more than the airlines ***cough*** cable companies ***cough***, but this is a veritable rogues gallery of evil that they have joined.

This is a Feature, Not a Bug

It turns out that Lockheed-Martin and the Pentagon are adding insult to injury, and requiring that F-35 customers fund software upgrade laboratories, because these will be the only entities capable of maintaining the aircraft.

So in addition to everything else, the JSF will be a "forever" source of revenue for LM, while ensuring that foreign operators will never develop expertise necessary to be a competitor: (Paid subscription required):

Foreign air forces using the Lockheed Martin F-35 Joint Strike Fighter are being compelled to build and fund $150 million software laboratories, based in the U.S. and almost 50% staffed by U.S. personnel, that generate data crucial to the fighter’s ability to identify new radio-frequency threats.

This regime is more stringent and far-reaching than earlier U.S. fighter export deals. Those usually withheld key software — known as source code — from the customer, but in most cases allowed local users to manage their own “threat libraries,” data that allowed the electronic warfare (EW) system to identify radio-frequency threats, with in-country, locally staffed facilities.

For the U.K. in particular, the reliance on U.S.-located laboratories looks like a pullback from its earlier position. In 2006, concern over access to JSF technology reached the national leadership level, and prompted a declaration, by U.S. President George W. Bush and U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair, that “both governments agree that the U.K. will have the ability to successfully operate, upgrade, employ, and maintain the JSF such that the U.K. retains operational sovereignty over the aircraft.”

That promise seemingly contrasts with the severe limits now being imposed on non-U.S. access to the system.

………

Another source close to the U.K. user community notes that Lockheed Martin has advertised the capability of the “fusion engine” — the software that combines inputs from different sensors and datalinks — to identify targets and implement rules of engagement automatically. But if the logic of the fusion engine itself is not understood at the U.K.’s operational level, he says, “You can imagine that this slaughters our legal stance on a clear, unambiguous and sovereign kill chain.”

The restrictions are also likely to be cumbersome. By contrast, “Swedish air force Gripens are often updated between sorties,” a Saab spokesman says. Signals intercepted and recorded by the fighter’s EW system on one sortie can be analyzed and the system updated in hours.

If this sounds like incompetence, it's because you do not understand the goal of the program.

The goal is maintaining and extending US hegemony in the weapons market, so that they have money for overpaying retired generals as "consultants".

Finally, Someone Goes There

Rather it is "The Donald" who maked the observation that that has this far eluded the rest of the Presidential candidates, that 9/11 happened under Bush's watch:

Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump implied that George W. Bush bore some responsibility for the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center in a Friday interview with Bloomberg.

“He was President,” Trump said. “Blame him, or don’t blame him, but he was President. The World Trade Center came down during his reign.”

Trump asserted that unlike the George W. Bush, he would be “a leader” who could command the United States during national crises.

“I think I’m much more competent than all of them,” Trump said, referring to George W. Bush and President Barack Obama.

“Say what you want, the World Trade Center came down during his time,” Trump told Bloomberg.

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush took to Twitter to criticize his GOP presidential rival for the remarks, writing that his brother “kept us safe.”

911, the Anthrax attacks, anti-abortion terrorists, Mohammed Reza Taheri-azar, DC Sniper, LAX attack on El Al, Jewish Federation of Seattle, Jewish Federation of Freemont, and that's just limiting myself to attacks in the United States.

"Kept us safe," my ass.

And Now We Learn that Her Insurance Company Demanded It

Remember the story of Jennifer Connell, the Aunt who sued her nephew for injuring her wrist when he hugged her?

Not so much:

The law firm of Jainchill and Beckert released a statement on behalf of Jennifer Connell:

From the start, this was a case was about one thing:  getting medical bills paid by homeowner’s insurance.  Our client was never looking for money from her nephew or his family. It was about the insurance industry and being forced to sue to get medical bills paid. She suffered a horrific injury. She had two surgeries and is potentially facing a third.  Prior to the trial, the insurance company offered her one dollar. Unfortunately, due to Connecticut law, the homeowner’s insurance company could not be identified as the defendant.

………

Connell, a 54-year-old human resources manager, said she loves her nephew, but told the court he should be held responsible for her injury. Connell claims Tarala, of Westport, was negligent and careless, and is suing him for $127,000.

“Our client was very reluctant to pursue this case, but in the end she had no choice but to sue the minor defendant directly to get her bills paid. She didn’t want to do this anymore than anyone else would. But her hand was forced by the insurance company. We are disappointed in the outcome, but we understand the verdict. Our client is being attacked on social media. Our client has been through enough," said her attorneys in a statement.

F%$# the insurance companies.

Seriously, just f%$# them.

H/t Crooks and Liars.

Could Someone Please Hang this Guy from a Lamp Post?*

Don't You Want to Slap That Smile From His Face

It turns out that Martin Shkreli, he of the rapacious drug price hike infamy donated a few thousand dollars to the Bernie Sanders campaign and demanded an audience.

Sanders donated the money to a medical clinic and told him to piss off:

It must be strange, if you’re the kind of person who generally believes he can wave his wallet in the direction of something he wants and make it — poof! — appear, when that magic trick doesn’t work. When a drunken demand for mac and cheese goes unheeded. Or when a pharmaceutical company CEO gets turned down by a politician. Sorry, Martin Shkreli!

Just last month, Shkreli earned the disgust of a good portion of the Internet — as well as Democratic hopefuls Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders — when it was revealed his company, Turing Pharmaceuticals, had raised the price of toxoplasmosis drug Daraprim from $13.50 a pill to $750 overnight. Sanders even wrote a letter to Shkreli, asking for an explanation. But though Shrkreli quickly vowed that “I think that it makes sense to lower the price in response to the anger that was felt by people,” no change has been forthcoming. He now says that “Until we figure out demand, we won’t lower the price. We have to find a safe price to lower it to.” Seems like something he’d want to get on, soon.

Shkreli has, however, meanwhile managed to find the time to troll journalists and retweet photos of cats rolling around in money. He also, according to the Boston Globe, “says he has donated to presidential candidate Bernie Sanders — who has been bashing Big Pharma on the campaign trail — to try to get a meeting so the two can talk it out.” It did not work out that way.

Shkreli claims he recently donated $2,700 — the maximum individual contribution — to Sanders’ campaign. He told the Boston Globe he had hoped for a private meeting with Sanders to explain the rationale of drug company pricing. But on Thursday, the Sanders campaign said they were giving the money to the Whitman-Walker health clinic in Washington, adding, “We are not keeping the money from this poster boy for drug company greed.”

And Shrkreli now says he’s “furious” over the snub. “I think it’s cheap to use one person’s action as a platform without kind of talking to that person,” he says. “He’ll take my money, but he won’t engage with me for five minutes to understand this issue better.” And he continues, “I’d ask him, what role does innovation play in health care? Is he willing to sort of accept that there is a tradeoff, that to take risks for innovation, companies have to invest lots of money and they need some kind of return for that, and what does he think that should look like?” I guess you can’t always get what you want. Meetings with senators, your toxoplasmosis drug returned to a reasonable cost, that sort of thing.

Seriously, Mr. Shrkreli, how about you make the world a better place, and just drop dead.

^*From his testicles, not his neck.  Death by rope is too quick,^†
†OK, in a perfect world, there would also be some pinata play as well.^{‡
‡And fire ants, definitely fire ants}

My Wife Refuses to Appreciate My Beautiful Mind

I was talking to my Sharon^* and noted that she would never guess the latest place where the consequences of fracking.

She declined to guess, and I told her that it was Oklahoma, where they are freaking out over a 300 fold increase in the number of earthquakes brought on by rejecting waste water into deep wells.

This generated a blank look from my wife, and I said that pumping the water deep under ground causes earthquakes.

I got another blank look, and I explained how the water, when injected deep underground, lubricates between faults, and that the lubrication translates into more motion, Kind of Like Sex.

I got a "what the f%$# are you talking about?" look from her, so I further explained that proper lubrication allows for more motion.

And then I got That look from her.

If you have ever been married, you know the look that I'm talking about, the one that has you worrying about her sharp knives ……… and then you start to worry about her dull knives.

^*Love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife.

Makes More Sense than a Mysterious Breakthrough in Mathematics

There have been a number of reports, some of which appear to have come from the NSA itself, that the secretive organization can decrypt what should be unbreakable codes.

It now appears that this is not some sort of mathematics breakthrough. Instead,a recent paper suggests the basic algorithm used for key exchange appear to be flawed.

They further suggest, and I agree, that the NSA is to some degree responsible for the ubiquity of this security flaw:

There have been rumors for years that the NSA can decrypt a significant fraction of encrypted Internet traffic. In 2012, James Bamford published an article quoting anonymous former NSA officials stating that the agency had achieved a “computing breakthrough” that gave them “the ability to crack current public encryption.” The Snowden documents also hint at some extraordinary capabilities: they show that NSA has built extensive infrastructure to intercept and decrypt VPN traffic and suggest that the agency can decrypt at least some HTTPS and SSH connections on demand.

However, the documents do not explain how these breakthroughs work, and speculation about possible backdoors or broken algorithms has been rampant in the technical community. Yesterday at ACM CCS, one of the leading security research venues, we and twelve coauthors presented a paper that we think solves this technical mystery.

The key is, somewhat ironically, Diffie-Hellman key exchange, an algorithm that we and many others have advocated as a defense against mass surveillance. Diffie-Hellman is a cornerstone of modern cryptography used for VPNs, HTTPS websites, email, and many other protocols. Our paper shows that, through a confluence of number theory and bad implementation choices, many real-world users of Diffie-Hellman are likely vulnerable to state-level attackers.

For the nerds in the audience, here’s what’s wrong: If a client and server are speaking Diffie-Hellman, they first need to agree on a large prime number with a particular form. There seemed to be no reason why everyone couldn’t just use the same prime, and, in fact, many applications tend to use standardized or hard-coded primes. But there was a very important detail that got lost in translation between the mathematicians and the practitioners: an adversary can perform a single enormous computation to “crack” a particular prime, then easily break any individual connection that uses that prime.

………

Based on the evidence we have, we can’t prove for certain that NSA is doing this. However, our proposed Diffie-Hellman break fits the known technical details about their large-scale decryption capabilities better than any competing explanation. For instance, the Snowden documents show that NSA’s VPN decryption infrastructure involves intercepting encrypted connections and passing certain data to supercomputers, which return the key. The design of the system goes to great lengths to collect particular data that would be necessary for an attack on Diffie-Hellman but not for alternative explanations, like a break in AES or other symmetric crypto. While the documents make it clear that NSA uses other attack techniques, like software and hardware “implants,” to break crypto on specific targets, these don’t explain the ability to passively eavesdrop on VPN traffic at a large scale.

Since weak use of Diffie-Hellman is widespread in standards and implementations, it will be many years before the problems go away, even given existing security recommendations and our new findings. In the meantime, other large governments potentially can implement similar attacks, if they haven’t already.

Our findings illuminate the tension between NSA’s two missions, gathering intelligence and defending U.S. computer security. If our hypothesis is correct, the agency has been vigorously exploiting weak Diffie-Hellman, while taking only small steps to help fix the problem. On the defensive side, NSA has recommended that implementors should transition to elliptic curve cryptography, which isn’t known to suffer from this loophole, but such recommendations tend to go unheeded absent explicit justifications or demonstrations. This problem is compounded because the security community is hesitant to take NSA recommendations at face value, following apparent efforts to backdoor cryptographic standards.

My money is on the NSA creating this problem, rather than it merely exploiting it.

Based on what I've read, it seems more consistent with the social norms of that organization.

Not a Surprise

Speaking of things that are now "Inoperative", it appears that the it is no longer the policy of Her Majesty's Secret Service to not spy on members of Parliament:

The Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT), the UK body that hears complaints about intelligence agencies, has ruled that the communications of MPs and peers are not protected by the Wilson Doctrine, which was thought to exempt them from surveillance by GCHQ and other intelligence agencies. Back in July, the UK government had already admitted that the Wilson Doctrine "cannot work sensibly" when mass surveillance is taking place, but today's decision goes further by explicitly rejecting the idea of any formal immunity from spying.

As The Guardian explains: "The [Wilson] convention is named after former prime minister Harold Wilson, who pledged in 1966 that MPs’ and peers’ phones would not be tapped. In December 1997, the then prime minister Tony Blair said the doctrine extended to electronic communication, including emails." In its judgment, the IPT wrote: "We are satisfied that the Wilson Doctrine is not enforceable in English law by the Claimants or other MPs or peers by way of legitimate expectation." The IPT agreed it was "a political statement in a political context, encompassing the ambiguity that is sometimes to be found in political statements."

………

One of the two Green party politicians who had brought the complaint to the IPT, MP Caroline Lucas, said after the ruling: "This judgement is a body blow for parliamentary democracy. My constituents have a right to know that their communications with me aren’t subject to blanket surveillance—yet this ruling suggests that they have no such protection. Parliamentarians must be a trusted source for whistleblowers and those wishing to challenge the actions of the Government." She went on to call for new legislation providing protection to MPs, peers, Members of the Scottish Parliament, Welsh Assembly Members, and MEPs from extra-judicial spying.

Live in obedient fear, citizen.