This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Category: “Your Tax Dollars At Work”

  • When You Have Naïve and Incompetent Leadership . . .

    . . . you often get crap like this.

    Obama revamp of federal bureaucracy created ‘widespread’
    security policies violations, watchdog says

    The Federal agency involved? GSA.  The “watchdog”?  The GSA IG.

    And to add insult to injury: the worst abuses occurred well after the previous      DC clown krewe      Administration admitted it had “screwed the pooch” on IT security and allowed Chinese hackers to obtain 4.2 individuals’ PII as part of the OPM security breach. (The actual number of individuals whose PII was stolen by hackers linked to China was later determined to have been five times that – roughly 21.5 million.)

    The linked article is a bit longish, but IMO reading it is worth the time.  It should p!ss you off.

    It’s nice to finally have responsible adults in charge. At least maybe we won’t see this kind of disregard for security policy and procedures again any time soon.

  • Compass Call

    There’s some good news in this article, as well as some disturbing stuff.

    https://www.airforcetimes.com/articles/target-isis-ec-130h-compass-call

    The real issue is this: short-staffed, losing techs to advancements that take them out of skilled maintenance positions, or to civilian jobs: so what happens if a real crisis arises, and things ramp up with Daesh? This loss of people experienced in their fields is really more important than anything else. Without a strong base layer of hands-on wrench-cranking techs, the entire project goes right down the toilet. This is disturbing, because the war in the Middle East is not dying down. It is increasing in volume. Those drips and drabs that come in on the news feeds, if any come at all, are only a smattering of what is really going on there, and we all know it. The recent attack on a Saudi warship by rebel Houthis from Yemen is the tip of the iceberg.

    Warfare is and always has been a game of cat and mouse, and ditto modern electronic warfare.  In World War II, coded messages were frequently sent from the field to a military base by homing pigeon. Now it’s ISIS using off-the-shelf quadcopters and RC model planes to spy on their enemy’s troops and equipment.

    While the use of small drones carrying cameras is not new, being used as spies by ISIS is quite deadly. They could be visible on radar, but you can’t just drag a radar setup into the field with you, hence these Hercs jammed full of electronic gear for detection and jamming ISIS’s toys, as well as interpreters to decipher their chatter.

    While the drones can be shot out of the air, it requires not only being aware of them, but also being able to spot them. If they’re several hundred feet up, bringing them down from ground level requires a trained spotter as well as a good marksman. The Daesh videos using drones to follow truck bombers appear to be from a substantial height, maybe 1,000 feet.  If they’re being used for recording truck and car bombings, they’re also being used to spy on troops on the ground.  It’s back to WWII and camouflage netting to hide things. Maybe the troops should use inflatable decoy tanks and cardboard planes, too.

    As the article says, it’s easy enough to shoot them down. Spotting them is the more difficult part. It’s also easy enough to spot and jam their signals and contacts.

    So I’m going to ask the dumbest question of the year: where in the Seven Hells are they getting these things? Is there a Toys R Us franchise over there somewhere?

    There’s a nice shot of a Herc in the article.

  • Some Republican fools seek to reinstate earmarks

    From the pen of Poetrooper:

    Here’s a political heads up for those of you who like to give your elected representatives some guidance counseling from time to time. The problem is that a small group of Republican congressmen want to reinstate the “Earmarks” concept wherein lawmakers can sneakily attach funding for pet projects in their districts, the said earmarks, to spending bills, so as to enhance their local popularity. This kind of self-serving promotion, which Republicans wisely eliminated in 2011, is precisely what is wrong with Congress and needs to be nipped in the bud. Here’s the letter I sent to my Senator and Congressman. If you like it, feel free to copy it and send it to your own politicians as your letter.

    Some self-serving members of Congress are unwisely trying to reinstate the Earmarks process after all the hard work it has taken the Republican Party to get control of both houses. We are now poised to solidify those gains in the 2018 elections, so this move by these few greedy lawmakers is political insanity. The majority of the voting public absolutely hates the concept of earmarks and the liberal media will use this move as a club to pound Republican candidates in the 2018 campaign if it is passed.

    We are confident that you have the common sense and political savvy to recognize this foolish move to reinstate earmarks for the disaster it would prove to be. Please stand firmly against it.

  • Mattis to Visit Asia as Pentagon Chief

    Good Morning.  First news of the day, after the ‘Feel Good’ stories section and the comics have been read, is that retired GEN Mattis, now a/k/a Secretary of Defense Mattis, is going to pay a visit to Asia to review matters concerning US-Asian relations on that planet.

    It will seem like another planet to the press until they get used to reporting about it.

    http://www.militarytimes.com/articles/mattis-to-visit-asia-on-1st-overseas-trip-as-pentagon-chief

    I believe he will spend some time discussing options with South Korea, despite their current, and about to be ‘ex’, president’s corruption issues.  I’m going to guess that he might make a brief visit to Vietnam, partly because the Vietnamese government has made it known that they’d like US help dealing with the Chinese – again. 

     

  • Is Obamacare Being Scammed?

    This is another good article by Poetrooper.

    A recent article in the Miami Herald reports that if Obamacare is repealed, the Miami area will be one of the most highly impacted in the country due to the high number of enrollees there.  The article mentions five congressional districts and, true to the Herald’s reliably liberal slant, tries to make it look as though the three Republicans who are opposed to Obamacare are hurting their districts while the two Democrats are championing their federally insured voters.

    Four paragraphs into the article, my antennae were twitching, sensing related, possibly pertinent data from an earlier source.  A quick Google search proved the antennae still reliable, finding numerous articles describing Miami as the epicenter of Medicare fraud.  In fact, the problem is so extensive that Miami has the distinction of being the site of America’s first and largest federal Medicare Fraud Strike Force.  That information just naturally elicits a deepening suspicion of a correlation between such widespread corruption and the high utilization of Obamacare.

    Admittedly, the two programs are substantially different, but they are also similar in the most important way: they are federally mandated and heavily federally regulated.  It requires no special genius to conclude that criminal specialists in defrauding one federal health program just might be the same criminals to devise the means to criminally defraud another federal health program that in its infancy has far less policing oversight than an older, more established, and better regulated program like Medicare.  With even investigators at the Government Accountability Office admitting that Obamacare is susceptible to fraud through fictitious enrollments, such high utilization of Obamacare in the same areas where Medicare fraud is most prevalent begins to whiff of something more than coincidence.  One has to wonder just how many of those high numbers of Miami area enrollees exist only on paper.

    That, folks, is another good reason for getting the feds out of the health insurance business.

     

  • A bit of whimsy

    by Poetrooper

    Jean Kerry revisits scene of crime VN Express and other news sources are reporting that Jean Fraud Kerry has returned to the Mekong Delta, ostensibly on a trade mission (yeah, right, with only days remaining in office), but far more likely to revisit the scene of the war crime he tried to perpetrate against the American people when the criminal Democrats nominated him as their presidential candidate in 2004.

    Landing in Hanoi late Thursday, Kerry begins his official two-day visit on Friday. He will meet with Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc and other senior Vietnamese officials in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. On Saturday he will also tour the Mekong Delta, where he served as a commander of an American patrol boat during the Vietnam War.

    Personally, I’m thinking about emailing that premier whose name is pronounced Win Wan Phuc and telling him,

    “On behalf of the American veterans community, you Win Wan; you can Kiep Dys Phuc.”

  • GMAFB, Part . . . Aw Hell, I Lost Count

    Well, the PC crowd is       showing its ass       demonstrating its “wisdom” yet again.  This time, it’s the “enlightened” city government of Bloomington, Indiana, that’s hard at work “saving us from ourselves”.

    It seems that the City of Bloomington has chosen to officially rename two holidays.  Henceforth, in Bloomington, they will not be known by their common – and legal – names.

    The Bloomington city government chose to do this because they deemed the actual names of the holidays to be “culturally insensitive”.  Gotta protect those “special little snowflakes” from being offended, dontcha know.

    The two holidays Bloomington’s ordered renamed?  Good Friday – and Columbus Day.

    I’m not joking.

    Freaking idiots.  Yo, Bloomington:  Hank Hill has a message for you regarding this stupidity.  He kinda sums things up in about 5 seconds, IMO.

    The main campus of the University of Indiana is located in Bloomington, so this really isn’t too surprising.   This kind of libidiotic PC crap is regrettably quite common in college towns.

    Hey, wait a minute . . . “Indiana”.  Isn’t that rather “culturally insensitive”, too?  (smile)

  • Bless Their Pointy Little Leftist Heads

    Ah, Baltimore.  That “glorious” East Coast city with one of the highest murder rates in the nation.

    Per Wikipedia, Baltimore’s murder and non-negligent homicide rate in 2014 was 33.8 per 100,000 population.  That’s the highest on the East Coast, higher even than Newark’s.  And it’s the 4th-highest in the US overall – trailing only St Louis, Detroit, and New Orleans.

    So, what has Baltimore done to try and reduce this rate?  Glad you asked.  The other day, they passed a law banning firearm replicas.  You know, like BB guns which look too much like real pistols.

    I’m serious.  From the linked article:

    City Council President Bernard C. “Jack” Young said replica guns are contributing to violence on Baltimore’s streets. He said people are using the fake weapons in robberies, and children who carry them are put in harm’s way.

    Yeah, that’s a real quote.  Apparently the Baltimore city council president actually thinks many criminals in Baltimore are committing armed robberies with replica firearms.  Well, either that or he’s dissembling for public consumption.

    But hey – it’s Baltimore.  So it’s entirely possible he really is that freaking clueless.

    OK, here’s the background info on what IMO actually caused this idiocy:  apparently last April a Baltimore teen got into an altercation with a Baltimore cop – and got shot because he flashed his replica BB-gun.  (The 14-year-old dumbass was lucky; he survived.)  To prevent another such “unfortunate occurrence”, Baltimore has by city ordinance now banned the possession of such “replica firearms” by its citizens.

    I guess that shouldn’t be a surprise, though.  Baltimore is indeed a part of the People’s Republic of Maryland.  Idiocy like this seems to be endemic there.