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Boeing, Boeing, Gone
There is nothing new here but the corruption is deep at Boeing:
“It comes after an unnamed parts supplier uncovered small holes in the material from corrosion, The New York Slimes reported. The FAA is looking into both the long and short-term implications for the aircraft equipped with the faulty parts. It’s not clear how many planes have used components made from the fake titanium.”
Metal behaves differently at altitude and underwater.
Fake metallurgy.
No maintenance workers at the airline that received these fake airplanes verified and validated metallurgy.
The chaos avalanche of the competency crisis continues.
If it’s a Boeing product: fire the CEO for cause, ground all aircraft and require all maintenance crew to wear a body-cam.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/boeing-airbus-holes-titanium-faa-b2562757.html
“From 1985 through 2017, Thomas falsified the results of strength and toughness tests for about half the steel the foundry produced for the Navy. The tests were intended to show that the steel would not fail in a collision or in certain “wartime scenarios,” the Justice Department said.”
Does anyone remember a manufacturer of metals for submarines who was found to have faked testing for 32 years?
32 years.
The culprit, Elaine Marie Thomas, was sentenced to two and a half years and $50,000 in fines.
Two and a half years.
And no one checked her work. No one in quality control verified and validated her findings, even occasionally.
32 years.
This is not a serious nation.
https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2022/02/14/metallurgist-gets-25-years-for-faking-steel-test-results-for-navy-subs/
Email me at cgpodcast@pm.me
Murthy v. Missouri and Our Political Bureaucracy
Government bureaus have interests, and these always lay in more power and more money for their budgets. Here’s a case study to illustrate the general principle that the leadership of administrative agencies are best understood as political partisans.
Over the last few weeks, United States Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has been advocating for “warnings” on social media to protect children and adolescents from the alleged psychological harm that social media pose to them. This announcement came on the eve of a decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in Murthy v. Missouri, in which the Court determined that, due to a lack of standing to sue by the plaintiffs, state governments and five social media users, the lower courts lacked jurisdiction to enter orders barring the Joe Biden administration from seeking to censor public discussion by pressuring social media companies to stop “misinformation,” which meant messages that contradicted or questioned the official administration narrative on a range of politically-sensitive subjects from COVID-19 to the 2020 elections to Hunter Biden’s laptop.
While the Surgeon General cannot unilaterally impose warning labels on anything, his call for such labels amounted to lobbying Congress and the public for new regulation. Treating social media use as a public health issue now assumes new prominence in light of the Court’s jurisdictional decision in this case. The Court was unconvinced that the plaintiffs had shown a real likelihood that the government would pressure social media companies to control speech in the future. As this is an election year with a closely contested presidential race, readers can decide for themselves whether the government is likely to revert to its former efforts to control social media discussion, and whether it is likely that the administration may view the Court’s decision as a green light to resume its practices of seeking to control public discourse on social media.
Next, the Surgeon General announced that gun violence is a “public health crisis,” which supports calls for government intervention in private firearms ownership. He announced this purported crisis just after White House talking points for the preceding week emphasized familiar calls for restricting private firearms ownership, and this, too, amounts to public relations recommending new legislation and regulatory power in an election year.
While the Surgeon General has never held elective office, he is unquestionably a political actor. He worked as a policy advocate in the nonprofit sector, in government, in electoral politics, and as Surgeon General from 2014-2017 and 2021 to today. After President Trump replaced Murthy in 2017, he served on corporate boards and in consulting; in fact, Murthy made over $2 million in Covid-19 consulting fees from business corporations while in private life.
But the issue is not Murthy, because his career is typical of federal policy elites. The career as a policy advocate both inside outside of government, access to opportunities on corporate boards, consulting fees, and paid speeches, all of these are common to policy elites, and other people in similar positions do the same kinds of things all the time. Instead, the point here is understanding bureaucratic behavior in light of elite interests, and the Surgeon General’s public advocacy over the last couple of weeks illustrates this nicely. Viewed as partisan activity on behalf of bureaucratic power, his recent calls for government interventions in social media and private firearms ownership are unsurprising.
The interests of public bureaucracy are always to obtain more regulatory power and more funding and to protect their institutional interests, and the interests of policy elites on the left are aligned with those of the public bureaucracy. Consequently, Murthy would have been rightfully concerned about the pending Supreme Court’s decision in Murthy v. Missouri, so it made sense for him to assert that social media pose public health problems for children, which requires warnings to parents over the potentially dangerous ideas children may learn that contradict official narratives. Likewise, his claim that private firearms ownership is a public health crisis directly supports the Biden campaign’s narrative over the last couple of weeks proclaiming the administration’s accomplishments in gun control policy and calling for new restrictions on private firearms ownership.
Americans’ trust in the public health bureaucracy has declined since the pandemic, and one of the reasons for this is that many people see too much political influence into what they would prefer to believe are policies based on objective scientific knowledge. But the permanent bureaucracy, and the managerial elites who control it, have interests, and these interests involve more power and funding flowing their way. Serving those interests may involve limiting citizens’ constitutional liberties, and this administration is comfortable with that.
Green Goes to War: The Electric Bonfire Chronicles
The madness continues.
The Pentagon is woke and now they are trying to make war safer for the environment.
The era of the manned tank is over in the twenty-first century much like the aircraft carrier but the fixation on exquisite and vulnerable platforms still mesmerizes the military morons in the DoD.
And I will bet the ten million dollar Psychedelic Electric Abrams will cost more that that…
Now the Green Energy Enviruses have convinced the dim bulbs at the Pentagon that the next Abrams heavy tank variant should be a hybrid or electric.
The US Army today is “woke” and one of the reasons to push hundreds of millions of dollars in research and development of the hybrid electric tank is related to ideology instead of necessity. In fact, any study of tank warfare in Ukraine is unlikely to support the case for a hybrid electric platform, since the main tank vulnerability is visual discovery of tanks by FPV Drones, not because they are heat sources.
There is no evidence the US Army has taken into account the lessons of the Ukraine war and worked on systems to kill drones that are playing havoc with US and European tanks.
A future system would include a networked capability to kill drones and counter air launched mines. Spending money on a hybrid electric platform is a mistake mostly because it avoids confronting the real issues on today’s and future battlefields.
https://weapons.substack.com/p/the-army-wants-a-new-hybrid-electric
My posting is slow this week since I am at a conference in Calizuela, expect the pace to pick up next week to the usual cadence.
Email me at cgpodcast@pm.me
Scott Horton Talks Assange w/ the Great Danny Davis & Matt Hoh
Our very own Scott Horton joined Danny Davis and Matt Hoh to discuss the release of the heroic WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange, who was freed from a UK prison on Monday. He spent five years there awaiting extradition on trumped up charges under the US Espionage Act.
Julian Assange and the Criminalization of Journalism
The US government cannot tolerate journalists who expose its criminal activities. Hence its longtime persecution of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who was freed from prison in the UK yesterday under a plea agreement with American prosecutors.
On April 5, 2010, for example, WikiLeaks published a video under the title of “Collateral Murder” showing a US Apache helicopter in July 2007 indiscriminately massacring Iraqi civilians, including two Reuters journalists, and wounding two children.
On July 25, 2010, WikiLeaks published leaked documents covering the US war in Afghanistan from 2004 to 2010, which were called the “Afghan War Diary” and revealed, among other things, how civilians killed by US forces were being misclassified as “insurgents”.
On October 22, 2010, WikiLeaks published additional leaked documents about the US war in Afghanistan, called the “Afghan War Logs”, as well as documents about the US war in Iraq, or the “Iraq War Logs”. Covering the years 2004 to 2009, the document troves were also called the “The War Diaries”.
The documents were made available to the New York Times, The Guardian, and Der Spiegel, each of which published revelations from the leaked materials on the grounds that it was in the public interest. The documents showed, among other things, how US forces were turning a blind eye to the torture of prisoners by allied Iraqi security forces and that the number of civilian deaths in Iraq was probably much higher than the US government was claiming.
(I reported in October 2010 how the documents revealed little evidence of Iranian backing of Iraqi insurgents despite mainstream media headlines to the contrary.)
It was later revealed that the documents were leaked by Army Private first class Chelsea Manning (then known as “Bradley”), a 22-year-old intelligence analyst who was sentenced in 2013 to 35 years in prison after being convicted of violating the Espionage Act.
Manning was released in 2017 after President Barack Obama commuted her sentence. In March 2019, she was fined $256,000 and jailed for contempt for heroically refusing to testify against Julian Assange before a grand jury as part of a federal investigation against the WikiLeaks founder. She was ordered released by a federal judge on March 12, 2020.
As another example of why Assange has been persecuted by the US government, on November 28, 2010, WikiLeaks published hundreds of thousands of US embassy diplomatic cables under a collection dubbed “Cablegate”. The documents were shared with and reported on by the newspapers New York Times, The Guardian, Der Spiegel, Le Monde, and El País.
A number of illustrative revelations from the leaked cables are included in my book Obstacle to Peace: The US Role in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.
On the first page of chapter one, “The Rise of Hamas in Gaza”, I cite a 1989 US State Department cable observing how “some Israeli occupation officials indicated that Hamas served as a useful counter to the secular organizations loyal to the PLO”, and as a result, “Israeli forces may be turning a blind eye to Hamas activities”.
(To learn more about that, see my article for the Libertarian Institute last month titled “How Israel Supported Hamas Against the PLO”. Institute director Scott Horton and I also discussed it on his show.)
On page 18 of the same chapter and again on page 233 in the chapter “Murder on the High Seas”, I cite a November 2008 State Department cable stating that “Israeli officials have confirmed to econoffs [US Embassy economic officers] on multiple occasions that they intend to keep the Gazan economy functioning at the lowest level possible consistent with avoiding a humanitarian crisis.”
Describing a policy that was being supported by the US, the cable reiterated that Israeli policymakers “intend to keep the Gazan economy on the brink of collapse without quite pushing it over the edge”.
(I also reported in September 2013 how diplomatic cables provided no evidence of Syria amassing chemical weapons from Iraq despite mainstream media headlines to the contrary.)
In April 2011, WikiLeaks published the “Guantanamo Files” containing information about the treatment of prisoners of the US “war on terrorism” being held in the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba (“Gitmo” for short).
As a result of WikiLeaks’ exposure of criminal US government policies and actions, the government began investigating Julian Assange for ostensibly violating the Espionage Act. In the UK in 2012, fearing that he would be arrested and extradited to the US, Assange sought and was given asylum by the government of Ecuador in its London embassy.
An April 2019, Assange was expelled from the embassy and arrested by British authorities while the US unsealed an indictment charging him with violating the Espionage Act. He had remained imprisoned at the Belmarsh maximum security prison in southeast London while fighting the US government’s attempts to have him extradited.
Upon his release yesterday, Assange boarded a flight for Australia to be reunited with his wife, Stella Assange, and their children. In a statement about his release posted to X, WikiLeaks reminded,
WikiLeaks published groundbreaking stories of government corruption and human rights abuses, holding the powerful accountable for their actions. As editor-in-chief, Julian paid severely for these principles, and for the people’s right to know.
A video posted by Stella Assange showed him signing paperwork and boarding the plane unrestrained and without any visible security escort.
https://x.com/Stella_Assange/status/1805393089819033890
A court document filed by US attorney Shawn Anderson in the district of the Northern Mariana Islands indicates that Assange agreed to plead guilty to the charge of having “knowingly and unlawfully conspired with Chelsea Manning” to obtain classified documents related to US “national defense”. According to the New York Times, the US agreed to drop other charges from its indictment.
According to a report from news.com.au,
He had faced 18 counts from a 2019 indictment for his alleged role in the breach that carried a max of up to 175 years in prison.
The United States will seek a 62-month sentence to reflect the amount of time that Assange has served in a high-security prison in London while he fought extradition to the US.
The deal would then credit that time served, allowing Assange to immediately return home to Australia.
Thus, while the release of Julian Assange from prison is great news, this turn of events still represents a serious blow to press freedom. As the New York Times also notes,
Mr. Assange and his supporters have long argued that his efforts to obtain and publicly release sensitive national security information was in the public interest, and deserved the same First Amendment protections afforded to investigative journalists.
Many supporters renewed those concerns even as they expressed relief that he would be released.
“The United States has now, for the first time in the more than 100-year history of the Espionage Act, obtained an Espionage Act conviction for basic journalistic acts,” said David Greene, head of civil liberties at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit focused on First Amendment issues.
“These charges should never have been brought,” he said.
In 2021, a coalition of civil-liberties and human-rights groups urged the Biden administration to drop its efforts to extradite him from Britain and prosecute him, calling the case “a grave threat” to press freedom.
Much of the conduct he is accused of is what “journalists engage in routinely,” the group contended. “News organizations frequently and necessarily publish classified information in order to inform the public of matters of profound public significance.”
The US government has maintained that Assange’s actions put US “national security” at risk, which is an accusation reminiscent of how the 1971 publication by the New York Times of the Pentagon Papers leaked by Defense Department consultant Daniel Ellsberg resulted in the accusation that this was a “betrayal of national secrets.”
That leak played a significant role in the shift in public opinion that ultimately brought an end to the US government’s criminal war in Vietnam.
Julian Assange was persecuted for over a decade for heroically exposing the criminal organization in Washington, DC. His crime was doing journalism.
Cross-posted from JeremyRHammond.com.
About Bloody Time They Let Him Go…BUT…
“About Bloody Time,” the common Aussie utters to the news that Assange is now free.
They are letting Assange go free, to return to Australia. The condition was that he had to reach a plea deal. Admit he was guilty. A compromise that removes a man from his legal limbo, releases him from the worst of British prisons and allows him to be with his family. What does it mean for the future of journalism? Can a government now pick and choose which authors, podcasters, journalists it likes and seeks to prosecute under its own laws. Let’s not forget that Assange is an Australian citizen, being pursued by the US government using its own laws for a man who was not on their soil when he received the information, he was not even the first to publish it and now he resides in prison in the UK. Is it just American exceptionalism or will it be possible for other nations to do much the same? Can any offended national government pursue anyone in the world ‘legally’ now?
“The end has not arrived”, Australian politician Barnaby Joyce warns over the conditions of the plea deal, “We still need to be cautious.” Assange must plea to the felony charges on US soil. There is still a risk to him. If the US nabs him on their soil. Then what? The Australian government will flip up it’s skirt and present it’s rear again. Memories of 1975 and Whitlam lingering in every Australian PM’s mind, though the current viceroy to the US empire is not Gough Whitlam. He is just another flab in a suit that promises other peoples money, an Australian PM through and through. The rest of the world will do what? Say some words?
With nations like the Ukraine conjuring up enemy lists, executing some of those on it, journalists that it deems as misinformation agents we can see the malicious nature of government in its pursuit over the control of information. Will nations openly act as the Mexican narco-terrorists have and pursue journalists with murderous intent, dare I mention how the Saudi Kingdom brutally murdered Jamal Khashoggi. Not to mention the US assassination of Anwar al-Awklai because of words he wrote and said, they even murdered his teenage son. Both US citizens. In Palestine the IDF has made it a practice of killing journalists who are sharing the reality on the ground in that genocide. It’s all so normal to see another dead journalist along with rows of murdered babies.
It is a dangerous place for those reporting on injustice and war. Those who dare to represent the innocent and speak up against power, those who expose the violence and horrors. This has always been the case, no amount of legalese or civilised back patting has changed any of that. Now, we see a plea deal made between the most famous journalist in history with the same government that he had he helped expose murdering Reuters journalists and civilians in Iraq. Assange’s crime is journalism. A precedent may be set where governments can negotiate and agree to co-operate when it comes to punishing, imprisoning and killing journalists. Information and freedom of speech suffocated all the more.
They say the pen is mightier than the sword. The sword takes life, the pen only reports on it. Those who wield the sword and serve the masters of death and tyranny will eagerly stab any and everything that they are paid to. The people, the billions who feel powerless are mightier than the sword wielders and their masters. History is rife with the common person refusing, standing up and like cowards the armed and trained flee, those who are protected by them cower and hide. The journalists, the reporter, writer and those sharing the truths of savagery are just putting words to paper and on screens. What is done with that information is for the reader, those who are informed and aware. The truth can only inspire rebellion and revolution, the spirit needs to already exist.
The Gordon Gecko communists pretend to hate corporations, yet most seek work inside of them. The anti-fascists are happy to work for the government. Many kid themselves that they care about justice, yet when injustice is before them they shrug. Most claim to know politicians lie and are corrupt yet believe the promises and vote in each election. The curtain between us and the mad wizard is not emerald green but clear plastic, we can see him dancing in the nude. Yet we continue to follow that yellow brick road regardless.
Assange is now free. But are we?
June 2024
The Continuing US Icebreaker Fiasco
There will be no more new US icebreakers.
There is no capability in the manufacturing base.
There are no industrial design talent stacks or ability to build icebreakers that work under government contracts. The shipyard throughput is a little above zero.
The Arctic is a Russian lake.
What’s my evidence?
Coast Guard and Navy estimates of PSC procurement costs have increased about 39% since the April 2019 PSC program contract award. Another oversight issue for Congress concerns schedule delay in the PSC program. The Coast Guard originally aimed to have the first PSC delivered in 2024, but the ship’s estimated delivery date has been delayed repeatedly and is now expected to occur no earlier than FY2029.
***
How fully developed was Polarstern II’s design at the time that it was adopted as the parent design for developing the PSC design? How much of Polarstern II’s detail design and construction plan was completed at that time? Again, the US government is green-lighting concurrent technology inputs (not mature at time of design) and even worse, not completing the design before building begins. More extracts and further reading in the 2024 GAP study:
Article:
https://news.usni.org/2024/05/24/report-to-congress-on-polar-security-cutter-program-2
GAO Study:
https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/24682217/coast-guard-polar-security-cutter-polar-icebreaker-program-background-and-issues-for-congress-may-22-2024.pdf
Email me at cgpodcast@pm.me.
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