US Army Retired

US Army Retired

Friday, October 25, 2019

The Trump Effect, Explaining Turkey, Humpback whales’ bubble nets, Anonymous Charges End Placido Domingo’s US Career, 14 Tools That Changed Medicine, and much more for October 25, 2019


US Navy isn’t ready to fight as it should
But the lack of readiness is pervasive across the fleet. The Navy’s maintenance backlog grew by 41 percent from 2012-2017, and the condition of available shipyards continued to deteriorate.
Ships can’t fight well if they’re not up to snuff.
For example, shipyard facilities “now include at least four dozen buildings—comprising 1.2 million square feet of space—that are condemned, uninhabitable, or otherwise unusable for ship repairs or any other work.”
Shockingly, the Navy had only 22 dry docks and sub-tenders in 2019, whereas in 1988 it had immediate access to roughly “50 dry docks, marine railways, and lifts.”
They spend billions on new ships that can’t meet their design parameters. Aircraft carriers that can handle landings. And the inability to fully train and maintain crews.
Even with small improvements and increased attention, more must be done, and quickly. The Pentagon and policymakers must make the maintenance of our sea vessels a priority, or they risk jeopardizing the Navy’s ability to protect our interests

USS Zumwalt Is Running Six Years Late
The USS Zumwalt, the world’s first stealth warship, won’t be ready for any sort of action until the second half of 2021. The six hundred foot long destroyer is six years late and has racked up a total price tag of $7.8 billion dollars. The ship’s two heavy guns, designed to provide long-range gunfire support, are still sidelined by a lack of affordable ammunition.
And, when we build new stuff, it seems we can’t get it right.

This Is What Happens When a U.S. Navy Attack Submarine Crashes Into a 'Mountain'
How in the hell did they get it to any port? Must’ve been s superb crew – and captain.

GOP Governors cheering for President Trump’s impeachment
It’s truly sad that some GOP political hacks simply cannot get over the fact that Donald Trump was elected as a Republican without their exalted blessings.
The governors are:
Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker – somehow GOP and Massachusetts don’t seem to mesh for me.
Vermont Gov. Phil Scott
Larry Hogan of Maryland
Chris Sununu of New Hampshire
I’m surprised that any of those four states elected a Republican as governor. And, if they did it was because the candidates were RINOs,

@realDonaldTrump shows Twitter knows which side its bread is buttered
The author told an audience; “Trump is to Twitter as Michelangelo is to sculpture”.
It was met with an icy silence.
But, he was right on target.
Michelangelo’s genius, one infuriated listener pointed out, was deployed in creating uplifting works of art, whereas Trump’s tweets merely plumbed the depths of human nastiness. Which was spot on. But it nevertheless remained true that Trump is surpassingly good at what he does, which is polluting the public sphere, infuriating his opponents and pandering to the inner demons of his supporters.
I think this explains our Tweeting president very well.

Humpback whales use bubble nets to catch prey

Why Washington D.C. Compulsively Lies About Donald Trump
Because he’s not like the rest of the political hacks inside the Beltway.
I think the world generally, and the world of the powerful in particular, is far less lucid and more incoherent than most assume. The main difference between Trump and his predecessors is that the professional class / deep state / neoliberal order / whatever-you-want-to-call-it is fluent in a language that imposes a kind of regulative fiction on that chaos. Their fluency gives them gives them a patina of legitimacy and not a little power over the less fluent, which comforts some normies but also drives conspiratorial thinking. Trump and a lot of the people around him lack this fluency and have no interest in cultivating it.
In other words, he doesn’t speak their lingo or play their games.
Trump is sui generis in many ways, but voters are probably right to suspect that anyone who threatened the existing order would meet Resistance, as anyone who watched the political press cheer Obama on when he spent months calling Mitt Romney a felon in 2012 can attest to. There will be an election soon, and voters can have their say about Trump directly.

How many of today’s computer users even know what these are?
Would you believe they’re what the US Air Force has been using for its missile launch control system?
I don’t remember when I last saw one of these.
Five years ago, a CBS 60 Minutes report publicized a bit of technology trivia many in the defense community were aware of: the fact that eight-inch floppy disks were still used to store data critical to operating the Air Force's intercontinental ballistic missile command, control, and communications network. The system, once called the Strategic Air Command Digital Network (SACDIN), relied on IBM Series/1 computers installed by the Air Force at Minuteman II missile sites in the 1960s and 1970s.
Well, the Air Force is finally getting rid of them, converting to “solid state storage.”

CNN bigwig calls for hounding 'delusional' Senate Republicans at work, home
CNN’s political director urged the news team to get “in their faces” of all Republican senators on a daily basis, both at work and at home, about President Trump’s Ukraine phone call, according to undercover audio.
Another good find to show extreme anti-Trump CNN bias. And, yet another disgusting call to violence from a so-called stanchion of freedom of speech.
“I think we have to be in their faces of all 53 Republican senators on as much of a daily basis as possible, whether they’re at home or on the hill, asking each one of them, is it okay for the President of the United States to apply pressure to a foreign country in hopes of getting a domestic political opponent investigated?” said Mr. Chalian on the audio.
If the Left continues to call for violence, violence will soon follow. And, I don’t think the Leftists know or understand who they’re calling out.

Anonymous Charges End Placido Domingo’s US Career
An amazing artist who has been responsible for bringing opera to millions of Americans can no longer perform in the USA – all due to 9 women, only 1 identified, who accused him of hitting on them – 20 to 40 years ago.
On August 13, 2019, however, the AP announced that nine females, all but one anonymous, were accusing Domingo of making unwanted sexual advances decades ago. The accusers—chorus singers, a few small-time soloists, and one ballet dancer—alleged wet kisses, solicitations to rehearse at his apartment, whispered blandishments while on stage, a hand down a shirt or up a skirt in cabs, and persistent phone calls.
The latest of the incidents allegedly occurred in the early 2000s; most dated from the 1980s and 1990s. Some of the accusers had had voluntary sexual liaisons with the singer, yet still asserted victimhood. An anonymous singer with LA Opera claimed that in 1998, after they kissed on his couch, he undressed her in his bedroom for a session of “heavy petting” and “groping.” A mezzo soprano in the chorus of LA Opera slept with Domingo in 1991 at the Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles and at his apartment. After those two encounters, she cut off physical contact. The one named accuser, soprano Patricia Wulf, said that he never touched her, but used to whisper in her ear backstage: “Do you have to go home tonight?”
No proof. No faces behind the accusations. Is he a conservative or something that the Left is attacking him?

Politico panel predicts President Trump’s second “crazy” term
Would President Trump’s second term be crazy?
Politico claims to have armchair time travelers who predicted the president’s win in 2016 when everybody else thought it was impossible.
So now they are going to tell us what a second term would be like.
The time is January 2021. The election has left the nation a psychological mess and a sulfurous cloud of election meddling by foreign hackers hangs over the still-contested results. Trump’s Ukraine scandal ultimately spared him but it wounded Joe Biden enough to give Elizabeth Warren the nominationHakeem Jeffries, a 50-year old lawmaker from a Brooklyn-Queens district that is a stone’s throw from the president’s childhood home.. Once again, though, the result came down to the Electoral College, but even closer than in 2016. Warren, like Hillary Clinton four years earlier, took the popular vote by a resounding margin. But this mixed verdict has done nothing but further entrench the battle lines of a civil war that has become more than just a metaphor.
Here we go. Another push to get rid of the Electoral College, the most basic protection against mob rule ever envisioned by our Founders.
They claim he will call out the troops on Inauguration Day and that the Dims would boycott it en masse. Their seats are given away in a lottery open to Trump supporters.
They claim the Dims will hold the House by a slim margin but Pelosi will call it quits, turning the Speaker’s gavel over to Hakeem Jeffries, a 50-year old lawmaker from a Brooklyn-Queens district that is a stone’s throw from the president’s childhood home.
The real kicker. He’ll continue stacking the Federal judiciary with conservatives and will have a chance to change SCOTUS for decades to come.
Trump’s critics also worry that, given four more years in office, the president's unconventional ways could have other long-lasting effects on society. “Young people will grow up thinking that’s the way politics is,” said Shays. “So many of the things our Founding Fathers believe in will just go out the window.”
To Trump supporters, including the ones who came along on our time machine ride, all the talk about the end of democracy sounds laughable. “We said the same thing in 2012. ‘The stakes are just so high,’” Nunberg said of the fears surrounding a second Obama term. “We were fine.”
America, Trump’s supporters argue, is much more durable than the president’s critics acknowledge—even if he wins two terms. “It drives me crazy,” Fleischer said, “when people think Donald Trump’s tweets somehow are stronger than James Madison’s handwriting.”
You really need to take the time to read the full piece. It’s sound, sometimes amusing, and an open admission by swamp creatures that Donald J. Trump will win again in 2020. Full piece @ https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/10/21/what-if-trump-wins-2020-229835

A Drug Cartel Just Defeated The Mexican Military In Battle
Last Thursday in the city of Culiacan, the capital of Sinaloa state, a battle erupted between government forces and drug cartel gunmen after the Mexican military captured two sons of jailed drug kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman. The elder son, Ivan, was quickly freed by his men, who overpowered government forces and secured his release. Ivan then launched an all-out siege of the entire city in an effort to free his younger brother, Ovidio.
The cartels probably have more money to arm and equip their men than the Mexican government does. And, what is most shocking is that the president of Mexico had to step in and personally order the military to stand down and turn their prisoner over to his brother.
The eight-hour battle ended when government forces, outgunned and surrounded, without reinforcements or a way to retreat, received an order directly from Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador to release their prisoner and surrender. Lopez Obrador later defended this decision, insisting that his security strategy is working and saying, “Many people were at risk and it was decided to protect people’s lives. I agreed with that, because we don’t do massacres, that’s over.”
The city is only 600 miles south of Nogales, Arizona. And there are other cartels a whole lot closer to our borders. What if this happens in Tijuana or Juarez or Matamoros? And our police or even National Guards gets sucked in?
The idea that a nation of 120 million people with whom the United States shares a 2,000-mile border and ever-increasing economic ties might spiral into collapse has not seriously occurred to the American people. We’ve had a century of relative peace on our southwest border, and aside from dealing with an occasional surge of illegal immigration, we have assumed that it will continue. It will not.
Culiacan should be a wake-up call that the war now underway in Mexico will not stay there, and that we’d better start thinking about what that will mean for America.

Why is Turkey Fighting Syria’s Kurds?
The Kurdistan Workers’ Party, known by the Kurdish acronym PKK, was founded as a Marxist-Leninist group in Turkey in 1978 in response to state-backed discrimination against Turkish Kurds, with the goal of creating an independent Kurdistan. A PKK insurgency against the Turkish state began in 1984, and fighting between the two sides has continued intermittently ever since, accompanied by heavy-handed Turkish repression in Kurdish areas, resulting in the deaths of more than 40,000 people, a majority of them Kurdish civilians. The PKK, for its part, has focused its attacks on the Turkish military over the years, but it has also hit civilian targets. Turkey and the United States have both designated the PKK a terrorist organization.
And, according to this, the Kurds first emerged in the 10th century. A majority of Kurds belong to the Shafi‘i school of Sunni Islam, but significant numbers practise Shia Islam and Alevism, while some are adherents of Yarsanism, Yazidism, Zoroastrianism and Christianity.
This then goes on to identify the SDF and its efforts to fight ISIS and avoiding being linked with the PKK. Turkey claims it is.
Worth reading to help understand what’s going on in the region and why Syria is rushing to the aid of the Kurds in its territory.

Babylon Bee
Trump Names Energizer Bunny New Secretary Of Energy @ https://babylonbee.com/news/trump-names-energizer-bunny-new-secretary-of-energy
Pope Announces Any Time Spent Watching 'The View' Counts As Time Served In Purgatory @ https://babylonbee.com/news/pope-announces-any-time-spent-watching-the-view-counts-as-time-served-in-purgatory
Trump Blamed For Causing Violence In Typically Peaceful Middle East @ https://babylonbee.com/news/trump-blamed-for-causing-conflict-in-usually-peaceful-middle-east

Explaining Turkey
The article actually starts by discussing President Trump as an unconventional leader. But then, it goes into a couple of examples that are most interesting.
Sweden stubbornly keeping to driving on the left while Norway, Finland, and Denmark drove on the right and how the changeover went about.
But the crux comes when it recalls that Turkey actually sided with Germany during WWII. And it discusses Mustafa Keman, known as “Ataturk,” or “Father of the Turks.”
Ataturk denounced the prior "Young Turks" and went on a rampage of reform. He built hundreds of schools all across Turkey and made elementary education mandatory. Women were forbidden to wear the veil. Ataturk hammered Turkey into a modern secular European republic (and that includes giving women the right to vote and all kinds of such modernization).
(The Shah of Iran tried the same thing but got screwed by Jimmy Carter and the CIA)
snip
here comes the zinger. Ataturk was wise enough to know that he could not achieve his desired reforms unless he completely trashed the Arabic alphabet and the ancient Ottoman alphabet and put in their place the modernized Latin alphabet in which the Turkish language is written today.
There's no way to force you to do this, but I really wish you would take time out now to imagine what life would be like if, all of a sudden, every single word in your life had to be in an alphabet other than the ones you learned as a very young child. Imagine if every single book, beginning with the Bible, the Torah and the Quran, had to be reprinted with Ataturk's new alphabet! Not to mention newspapers, magazines and best-sellers of every kind. And, just as when Sweden made its traffic shift, every road sign in the country had to be changed!
What would you do if suddenly it was decided that the USA would no longer use the Latin alphabet and everything was suddenly changed to something else?

The Trump Effect
It takes a Nobel Prize winner to describe it?
Economics has been called the "dismal science," but Robert Shiller, who won the 2013 Nobel Prize in economics, is feeling optimistic. Interviewed last Friday on CNBC's "Trading Nation," Shiller says a new phenomenon he calls the Trump Effect could keep the economy booming.
Don’t tell the Lame Street Media that. It’s invested in pronouncing a steep recession in early 2020. The only way the Dims could ever have a chance of beating him.
He mentions the enthusiasm at Trump rallys like nothing seen before. While some media outlets cover them, they really don’t touch the heart of them – thousands of strangers becoming friends and neighbors and avid supporters of the president’s agenda.
There will be no recession.

Obama raises money with Soros’ kid to destroy the republic
Anyone surprised that the Muslim Kenyan would get together with the America-hating Soros family to do everything he can to weaken conservatives?
The push to eliminate conservative voices in America continues full steam ahead. Barack Obama will host a fundraiser this evening at the home of Alex Soros to raise money for his “redistricting” efforts across the United States.
If you aren’t familiar with what that means and the threat it poses to your freedom… it basically means changing all the district maps in the United States, so that conservative ‘rural’ areas (which are generally less receptive to democrat promises and fabrications), will have their districts ‘diluted’ with progressive voters.
If there was ever a question about Obama’s efforts to create “Change” in this country, this effort should put an end to it. His version of change is a One World Order and the end of the longest-standing form of government in modern history.
“Restoring fairness to our democracy by advocating for fairer, more inclusive district maps around the country is a priority for President Obama,” Obama spokesman Kevin Lewis said in a statement at the time.
Wrong. “Fairness” is the buzzword being used to deceive and delude, while the media carefully ignores these efforts and focuses on the immediate goal of ousting the most effective president the country has had in decades.

10 Medical Advances That Will Shape the Future of Healthcare
I expected some staggering advances in treatment. Instead, this deals with other forms of medical advances. And, this is just the author’s idea of what’s leading.
These methods and machines are making the future of medicine far brighter.
Crowdsourcing. Websites where doctors can discuss symptoms in order to get more precise diagnoses.
PatientsLikeMe websites where those in the same situation share advice, new treatments, novel trials, recent research and plain old empathy.
IBM’s Watson where doctors can tell the machine in a natural voice the patient’s symptoms and wait while the supercomputer gathers data to suggest diagnoses and treatment.
Bones by Design, Organs on Demand
Smartphone apps. In 2012, to pick a recent example, the FDA cleared an iPhone app that lets your doctor take a remote EKG just about anywhere there’s a suitable connection.
Biohackers sewn into your clothing or implanted in you body to tell your doctor in real time what’s going on. (I had something similar where my cardiologist could read my vitals 24/7 and be alerted if something wrong happened.)
The Beating Battery. Nanogenerators that convert the mechanical energy of a heartbeat into electrical energy
Breathalyzers to diagnose cancer,
Antibiotic smart bombs designed to target and destroy specific strains of bad bacteria that actually cause disease in humans.
Container hospitals. What good are advances in medical treatment if you don’t have access to the medical facilities that provide them? That’s the idea behind a Chinese initiative to use shipping containers to create a kind of hospital in a box.

10 Breakthrough Moments in Medicine
Ideas and innovations that solved some of medicine’s most confounding mysteries.
Again, the author’s idea of what was so great. I’m sure people think of many others of equal importance.
Antibiotics and Their Incalculable Impact
The World-Changing Application of Germ Theory
Prevention, Not Treatment
A Big Dig Through Data Uncovers Epidemiology — and a Cesspool
The Ugly Face of War Leads to Modern Plastic Surgery
Making Blood Transfusions Work, Finally
The End of Hysteria and the Advent of Women’s Health
Where There’s Smoke …
From Grinding Organs to Transplanting Them
Bedlam Is Now Just an Expression

14 Tools That Changed Medicine
(Amputation kit)
We shaped the instruments. Then they shaped us.
Discover Magazine is filled with these today.
Hypodermic Needle
Maggots
Stethoscope
Randomized Controlled Trial
Amputation Kit
Dialysis Machine
Condom
Transorbital Lobotomy Orbitoclast
Permanent Marker
Toothbrush
Ambulance
Defibrillator
Medical imaging
Band aids
(Again, there are a whole lot more, so let’s see what you think was important.)
And, if you want even more, go to;
10 Weird, Wacky and Worthwhile Experiments, Unexpected and offbeat discoveries sometimes yield the most startling advances in medical science. @ http://discovermagazine.com/2018/medical-mysteries/10-weird-wacky-and-worthwhile-experiments


Posted by Dale Day at 4:33 PM
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