Month: January 2020

Brilliant

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If you a checking something expensive onto a commercial flight, include a gun, because it allows you to use a lock that baggage handlers and TSA agents cannot routinely open and rifle through.

It’s a federal regulation.

Once TSA inspects the bag, you put YOUR lock on it, and your valuables are secured

Just remember, it cannot be loaded:

I was talking with a friend who works and travels with drones.

Since his equipment costs tens of thousands of dollars it’s at high risk of being stolen at the airport during checked luggage handling.

The drone industry’s travel safety hack?

Throw a gun in with your drone.

— Kiki Schirr 史秀玉 🗝🗝✂️ (@KikiSchirr) January 8, 2020

TSA requires that gun cases remain locked post-inspection for the duration of travel, locked with a lock only you (and not TSA) has a key for.

Further, any case with a gun is practically escorted through the airport after being checked because it can NOT be lost.

Odd #lifehack

— Kiki Schirr 史秀玉 🗝🗝✂️ (@KikiSchirr) January 8, 2020

#AdderallTRump

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The hashtag is trending on Twitter following Donald Trump’s speech on Iran.

Following reports by an ex-staffer on The Apprentice that routinely Trump snorted the stimulant Adderall and abused Sudafed.

Trump’s speech is reported (not gonna watch it, he makes my flesh crawl) to have slurred words, mispronounced words, and sniffed constantly, (58 times) and people noticed:

Why all the sniffing? Why the slurring?

I wonder why President Donald Trump sniffs so much when he’s giving super important public addresses.

What’s up with that snort?

I wonder why he appeared to be slurring his words today.

Anxiety? Dementia, or some other health disorder? Drugs? Lack of drugs?

There are rumors, but nothing confirmed.

Whatever it is?

It ain’t good.

This is guy has the authority to start World War III.

Pleasant dreams.

Maybe Cleaning up the Air?

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This is interesting, but it begs the question, “Doesn’t it work everywhere? If so, why not clean up ALL the air?”

Also, how does this effect adults breathing our polluted air?

An emergency situation that turned out to be mostly a false alarm led a lot of schools in Los Angeles to install air filters, and something strange happened: Test scores went up. By a lot. And the gains were sustained in the subsequent year rather than fading away.

That’s what NYU’s Michael Gilraine finds in a new working paper titled “Air Filters, Pollution, and Student Achievement” that looks at the surprising consequences of the Aliso Canyon gas leak in 2015.

The impact of the air filters is strikingly large given what a simple change we’re talking about. The school district didn’t reengineer the school buildings or make dramatic education reforms; they just installed $700 commercially available filters that you could plug into any room in the country. But it’s consistent with a growing literature on the cognitive impact of air pollution, which finds that everyone from chess players to baseball umpires to workers in a pear-packing factory suffer deteriorations in performance when the air is more polluted.

If Gilraine’s result holds up to further scrutiny, he will have identified what’s probably the single most cost-effective education policy intervention — one that should have particularly large benefits for low-income children.

Another way that our society craps on the poor.

Even the air they breath hurts them.

Pass the Popcorn

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The anarchist daughter of a Republican voter suppression specialist has released the files from her late father’s hard drives to the public:

More than a year after his death, a cache of computer files saved on the hard drives of Thomas Hofeller, a prominent Republican redistricting strategist, is becoming public.

Republican state lawmakers in North Carolina fought in court to keep copies of these maps, spreadsheets and other documents from entering the public record. But some files have already come to light in recent months through court filings and news reports.

They have been cited as evidence of gerrymandering that got political maps thrown out in North Carolina, and they have raised questions about Hofeller’s role in the Trump administration’s failed push for a census citizenship question.

Now more of the files are available online through a website called The Hofeller Files, where Hofeller’s daughter, Stephanie Hofeller, published a link to her copy of the files on Sunday after first announcing her plans in a tweet last month.

“These are matters that concern the people and their franchise and their access to resources. This is, therefore, the property of the people,” Hofeller told NPR. “I won’t be satisfied that we the people have found everything until we the people have had a look at it in its entirety.”

………

Stephanie then reconnected with her mother, Kathleen, and visited her parents’ apartment in North Carolina, where she found four external hard drives and a clear plastic bag containing 18 USB thumb drives in her father’s room. Stephanie says her mother encouraged her to take the devices.

………

It turned out they were filled with photos of Stephanie with her children and other personal items — as well as files from her father’s work as a redistricting consultant for Republicans.

While looking for an attorney to represent her mother in 2018, Stephanie says she connected with the North Carolina chapter of Common Cause, an advocacy group that had brought a lawsuit against Republican state officials to overturn political maps Thomas Hofeller helped draw. After mentioning the hard drives to Common Cause, Stephanie received a court order to turn them over as potential evidence for the lawsuit. She did so in March after making a copy of some of the files for herself.

Since then, the Hofeller files have led to bombshell developments in two major legal battles in the political world.

In September, Common Cause won its legal challenge to political maps in North Carolina, where a state court cited some of the files as evidence of gerrymandering designed to unfairly give Republicans an advantage in winning elections and maintaining control of the state legislature.

………

For her part, Stephanie says she’s committed to transparency with the public in case she gets access to any more of her father’s files.

“If I were to find something,” she says, “I would most certainly share it.”

There is a whole lot of slime found underneath those rocks.

It Never Is

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A study in the New England Journal of Medicine shows that hospital mergers do not improve patient outcomes.

In fact it results in worse outcomes.

This should surprise no one.  It is the way of mergers and acquisitions:

Hospitals continue to turn to M&A to navigate tricky industry headwinds, including lowering reimbursement and flatlining admissions as patients increasingly turn to alternate, cheaper sites of care. Provider trade associations maintain consolidation lowers costs and improves operations, which trickles down to better care for patients.

………

Thursday’s study analyzed CMS data on hospital quality and Medicare claims from 2007 through 2016 and data on hospital M&A from 2009 to 2013 to look at hospital performance before and after acquisition, compared with a control group that didn’t see a change in ownership.

American Hospital Association General Counsel Melinda Hatton took aim at the study’s methods to refute its findings, especially its reliance on a common measure of patient experience called HCAHPS.

………

The results contradict a widely decried AHA-funded study last year conducted by Charles River Associates that found consolidation improves quality and lowers revenue per admission in the first year prior to integration. The research came quickly under fire by academics and patient advocates over potential cherrypicked results.

A spate of previous studies found hospital tie-ups raise the price tag of care on payers and patients. Congressional advisory group MedPAC found both vertical and horizontal provider consolidation are correlated with higher healthcare costs, the brunt of which is often borne by consumers in the form of higher premiums and out-of-pocket costs.

There is nothing that the finance industry, which makes bank on fees from M&A activity, cannot ruin.

Tweet of the Day

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There are a lot of replies to this tweet that take the form of ‘good for her she’s educated and earned it.’ Those come from Democrats who should be kicked out of the party and replaced with the working class voters they hate. https://t.co/yJJ2VojCby

— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) January 7, 2020

The fact that the elites are so invested in self-dealing, nepotism, and corruption is a very real problem.

Trump is the symptom of this problem, not the cause.

If You Choose Not To Decide, You Still Have Made a Choice

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Rush Nails This

Andrew Bosworth, who heads Facebook’s VR & AR division is suggesting that Zuckerberg’ss bastard child should do nothing about Trump and his lies, particularly as they pertain to political ads.

This is a conscious decision to support Trump, because the more he lies, the more clicks they get:

Since the 2016 election, when Russian trolls and a tsunami of misinformation turned social media into a partisan battlefield, Facebook has wrestled with the role it played in President Trump’s victory.

Now, according to a memo obtained by The New York Times, a longtime Facebook executive has told employees that the company had a moral duty not to tilt the scales against Mr. Trump as he seeks re-election.

On Dec. 30, Andrew Bosworth, the head of Facebook’s virtual and augmented reality division, wrote on his internal Facebook page that, as a liberal, he found himself wanting to use the social network’s powerful platform against Mr. Trump. But citing the “Lord of the Rings” franchise and the philosopher John Rawls, Mr. Bosworth said that doing so would eventually backfire.

………

In a meandering 2,500-word post, titled “Thoughts for 2020,” Mr. Bosworth weighed in on issues including political polarization, Russian interference and the news media’s treatment of Facebook. He gave a frank assessment of Facebook’s shortcomings in recent years, saying that the company had been “late” to address the issues of data security, misinformation and foreign interference. And he accused the left of overreach, saying that when it came to calling people Nazis, “I think my fellow liberals are a bit too, well, liberal.”

Mr. Bosworth also waded into the debate over the health effects of social media, rejecting what he called “wildly offensive” comparisons of Facebook to addictive substances like nicotine. He instead compared Facebook to sugar, and said users were responsible for moderating their own intake.

“If I want to eat sugar and die an early death that is a valid position,” Mr. Bosworth wrote. “My grandfather took such a stance towards bacon and I admired him for it. And social media is likely much less fatal than bacon.”

The post by Mr. Bosworth, a former head of Facebook’s advertising team, provides an unusually candid glimpse of the debates raging within Facebook about the platform’s responsibilities as it heads into the 2020 election.

(emphasis mine)

Translation, f%$# truth, I have stock options.

Mandy Rice-Davies Applies*

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AT&T, Frontier, Windstream, and their industry lobby group are fighting against higher Internet speeds in a US subsidy program for rural areas without good broadband access.

The Federal Communications Commission’s plan for the next version of its rural-broadband fund sets 25Mbps download and 3Mbps upload as the “baseline” tier. ISPs seem to be onboard with that baseline level for the planned Rural Digital Opportunity Fund.

But the FCC also plans to distribute funding for two higher-speed tiers: namely an “above-baseline” level of 100Mbps down and 20Mbps up, and a “gigabit performance” tier of 1Gbps down and 500Mbps up. It’s the above-baseline tier of 100Mbps/20Mbps that providers object to—they either want the FCC to lower that tier’s upload speeds or create an additional tier that would be faster than baseline but slower than above-baseline.

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai has portrayed the $2 billion-per-year fund’s goal as modernizing rural broadband by bringing up-to-gigabit speeds to remote corners of the nation. Companies pushing lower standards are trying to ensure that ISPs offering much slower speeds can get a large slice of that federal funding without making significant network upgrades.

The above-baseline tier’s upload target should be 10Mbps instead of 20Mbps, according to an FCC filing on December 23 by Frontier, Windstream, and lobby group USTelecom (which represents those two providers as well as AT&T, Verizon, and others).

………

Two groups that represent smaller ISPs urged the FCC to reject calls for slower speeds. NTCA—The Rural Broadband Association and ACA Connects (formerly the American Cable Association) pointed out in a filing today that the Connect America Fund Phase II auction already included a 100Mbps/20Mbps tier.

It should surprise no one that many of the incumbents support crappier service, this is kind of their thing, because they are primarily interested in extracting monopoly rents, not providing good service.

There is a reason that companies like Comcast and Frontier and AT&T are among the most loathed in the United States.

*Well they would say that, wouldn’t they?

The Boeing 737 MAX is Toast

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The FAA is looking at requiring significant simulator time for 737 MAX pilot certification, which would make the MCAS system largely irrelevant, the pitch up issue that it was created to combat was pretty minor from a stick and rudder perspective, and would likely mean that there will be very few new orders for the airliner:

Federal aviation regulators are considering mandatory flight-simulator training before U.S. pilots can operate Boeing Co.’s 737 MAX jets again, according to government and industry officials familiar with the deliberations, a change that would repudiate one of the plane maker’s longstanding arguments.

The Federal Aviation Administration months ago rejected the idea—which would entail extra costs and delays for airlines—as unnecessary. But in recent weeks, these officials said, requiring such training before returning the grounded U.S. MAX fleet to the air has gained momentum among agency and industry safety experts.

“The deliberations appear headed for a much different direction than before,” according to one of the officials, who described increased FAA emphasis on the topic.

………
Boeing has long maintained 737 MAX pilots don’t need supplemental simulator training beyond what pilots receive to fly other 737 models, a stance that many FAA officials now regard with increasing skepticism, according to the officials.

The FAA’s changed outlook on simulator training has arisen partly because Boeing and regulators are proposing rewriting some emergency checklists for pilots and creating some new ones, according to some of these officials.

In addition, one of these officials said, the FAA expects certain cockpit alert lights to be updated so they can notify crews of potential problems with an automated stall-prevention feature called MCAS. Misfires of that system led to two fatal MAX nosedives in less than five months, taking 346 lives and resulting in global grounding of the planes in March.

Simulator training typically is used to ensure flight crews understand and can respond appropriately to numerous changes in emergency procedures or alerts.

Since at least early fall, regulators in Europe, Canada and some Asian markets have signaled they are leaning toward mandating extra simulator training as part of their independent reviews of the MAX’s safety.

………

Complicating the FAA’s decision is an industrywide shortage of functioning 737 MAX simulators.

In response, the FAA, Boeing and airlines are considering installing new software in existing 737 NG simulators so they can better mimic the characteristics of MAX jetliners, according to these officials.

Meanwhile, agency chief Steve Dickson, a former airline captain and safety executive, plans to personally test software fixes and training changes as soon as the end of January or early February.

A year ago, when the FAA was analyzing earlier versions of MCAS fixes, Boeing argued strongly against upfront simulator requirements. The company said in a letter to the agency that differences between 737 NG and MAX models relating to the MCAS software “do not affect pilot knowledge, skills, abilities or flight safety.” At the time, FAA and Boeing officials tentatively agreed on training sessions that aviators could perform by themselves on tablets or laptop computers.

………

Separately, a broader internal review of the MAX’s design by Boeing, extending well beyond software questions, has uncovered a potential safety problem stemming from the location of certain wire bundles inside the tail.

………

An FAA spokesman said the agency will ensure that all safety related issues identified during the review process are addressed before the MAX is approved for return to passenger service.

The central selling point of the 737 MAX was that 737 NG pilots could transition to the newer plane with little more than an hour or so training session on an iPad.

This is not going to happen, and it appears that the timeline of certification for the aircraft is still uncertain.

Unless the name of your airline rhymes with mouth-fest, there is no reason for an air carrier to order a new narrow body from Boeing.

I’m Not Sure That This Is Good News

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A lot of people have been making hosannas over John Bolton’s announcement that he would testify if he were subpoenaed by the Senate for the impeachment trial.

I’m a pessimist about this.

Given that John Bolton is probably still sporting an erection from our recent assassination of an Iranian general*, and the former National Security Advisor has been aggressively called for war with Iran for decades, I do not think that he will do ANYTHING that would make it difficult for Trump to launch a war against Iran:

Awfully mustachioed of you, John. It was nice visiting your website, too.

I don’t trust this guy as far as the car threw me. He’s going to be the shot that brings down the elephant now that we’re just inches away from the war for which he’s been slavering his entire adult life? Please. At the very least, this is a bag job to give cover to whatever Mitch McConnell’s plan to chloroform the impeachment trial is. They can refuse to call him, and he’s covered. He can show up and refuse to answer—executive privilege, state of war, in these perilous times, y’know? But the idea that Bolton’s going to cooperate in any meaningful way, and that his testimony will advance the case against the president* in any meaningful way, requires a suspension of disbelief that rivals that of the Brooklyn Bridge.

Even if Bolton is a vindictive SOB, and he is, and even if he is probably VERY angry that Trump fired him, he will never, ever, do anything that might lead to peace with Iran.

Bolton really wants to send poor young Americans overseas to fight and die.

*Really sorry about that mental image.†
†No really, I am SINCERELY sorry about that mental image.‡
‡You were aware that in the late 1970s, he was frequently seen at the infamous sex club Plato’s Retreat, so I figure that there are WAY too many people who have seen his erection.

Your End of the World Update

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1200 km from Mar a Lago

I’ve generally thought that the War Powers Act was largely a dead letter, with Presidents ignoring the requirements of the law, and Congress lacking the cojones to devend the law in court.

That being said, Trump claiming that a tweet is sufficient notice to Congress takes the cake:

President Trump claimed Sunday that his tweets are sufficient notice to Congress of any possible U.S. military strike on Iran, in an apparent dismissal of his obligations under the War Powers Act of 1973.

 Trump’s declaration, which comes two days after his administration launched a drone strike that killed top Iranian military commander Qasem Soleimani, was met with disbelief and ridicule from congressional Democrats, who called on the president to respect the role of the legislative branch in authorizing new military action abroad.

Meanwhile, Trump is claiming that he will target Iranian cultural sites, a war crime, and an Iranian official has tweeted a link to a Forbes article that listed Trump properties around the world in response.

Given that the Houthi drones that struck Saudi oil facilities have a range of (at least) 1200 km (750 miles), and are small enough to be carried on a boat not much larger than the one that carried Greta Thunberg across the Atlantic.

The boat, or for that matter a pickup truck, could be parked in Cuba, Nassau, or Cancun and hit Mar a Lago, which is, of course, what Hesameddin Ashena implied in his tweet.

If I were Trump, I would not be OCD about making his tee times.

Meanwhile, CBP is arbitrarily detaining US citizens of Iranian origin at the US border, which, notwithstanding denials, appears to be a part of a deliberate, and bigoted, policy.

This is seriously f%$#ed up.

Thank You Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

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It has now been revealed that New York State offered even more taxpayer money to Amazon than was previously revealed:

State officials offered Amazon.com Inc. almost a billion dollars more of incentives than was previously known to win its second-headquarters contest and were even prepared to pay part of some employees’ salaries if the tech company developed a campus in New York.

Documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal show the scope of what state and local officials initially put on the table as part of the 2017 HQ2 competition, in which more than 200 cities submitted bids to host a facility that Amazon said would house 50,000 jobs.

The company said in November 2018 that sites in Northern Virginia and the Long Island City neighborhood of Queens would split the new headquarters. New York state and city officials agreed to give $3 billion of incentives to the e-commerce giant to hire as many as 40,000 employees.

Facing opposition from some local elected officials, Amazon abandoned its plans for New York on Valentine’s Day last year.

The Journal obtained the records through a Freedom of Information Law request to Empire State Development, the state’s economic development authority.

The documents show that in its first formal bid to Amazon, in October 2017, the state offered to provide up to $2.5 billion of incentives to the company for a campus in New York. The offer also applied to sites that state and local leaders proposed in the Hudson Valley, Albany, Central New York, Buffalo, Rochester and on Long Island.

The state’s initial offer included $1.4 billion of tax credits based on the number of employees hired and $1.1 billion of various grants. That was $800 million more than the ESD agreed to in a memorandum of understanding signed a year later: The state provided $1.2 billion of tax credits and $505 million to reimburse some construction costs.

………

On top of the state’s final $1.7 billion package, New York City ultimately offered Amazon up to $1.3 billion of extra incentives through two programs open to any company.

………

ESD initially proposed to spend $500 million to create a Center for Commercial Innovation near the selected site that would let Amazon partner with various colleges for research relevant to its business. The site would also subsidize job-training programs, according to the proposal, and the state pledged to pay 25% of certain graduates’ first-year wages with Amazon to help it achieve workforce diversity.

………

State Sen. Mike Gianaris, a Democrat from Queens and one of the leading opponents of the Long Island City campus, said news of the initial offer underscored his call to re-examine state incentive programs.

“The more we learn about this twisted process, the worse it appears,” Mr. Gianaris said. “I think it’s good we didn’t have to provide any incentives to get Amazon here, because they appear to be coming anyway.”

Taxpayer incentives are a scam.  They never pay for themselves, and when the additional taxes to pay for them on other, smaller, employees are factored in, they don’t generate any jobs either.

Unfortunately, without federal legislation to prevent this, companies like Amazon will continue to play states and localities against each other, and everyone will lose but robber barons like Jeff Bezos.

Of Course He Is

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Benyamin Netanyahu is trying to pass a bill through the Knesset granting him immunity for the corruption charges for which he has been indicted.

His incredible toxicity is why Israel will have to hold its 3rd election in a year, because he is, to quote Mel Brooks, “Incredibly Guilty.”

So Netanyahu is desperate to get a get out of jail free card:

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced Wednesday that he would ask the Israeli parliament to grant him immunity in three criminal cases, tying up further the already lengthy legal proceedings against him in a political system that has been gripped by deadlock for the past year.

Netanyahu’s immunity request to the Knesset would shield him from prosecution at least while he remains in office. It also pitches the country’s political establishment against the legal system ahead of an unprecedented third general election in less than a year. That election is set for March 2.

………

In November, Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit concluded that there was enough evidence to prosecute Netanyahu in three cases involving allegations that he and his wife, Sara, accepted more than $260,000 worth of luxury goods in exchange for political favors and that he interceded with regulators and lawmakers on behalf of two media companies in exchange for positive news coverage.

Seriously, this man is a cancer on Israeli body politics.

Making Mike Bloomberg Look Like Jesse Jackson

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“It’s an embarrassing thing to admit, the people who wrote the Constitution did not understand that slavery was a bad thing…”

–#MayorPete appearing on a childrens’ public television show in 2014#PeteButtigieg #PeteForAmerica #Pete2020 #PeteButtigieg #PetebuttigiegisalyingMF pic.twitter.com/ZUZNLf67wb

— Resist Programming 🛰 (@RzstProgramming) December 29, 2019

In all his racist glory

Between firing his police chief when he uncovered racism in the ranks, allowing the already lily white South Bend PD lose about half of its black officers during his tenure, and taking black people’s homes and giving them to white developers, it was already pretty clear that Pete Buttigieg has been promulgating racist policies that far exceed what Mike “Stop and Frisk” Bloomberg could imagine in a fever dream.

The question has always been whether this is just clueless, cowardice, or a deliberate attempt to use hostility to minorities as a political tactic.

Well now the man who graduated magna cum laude from Harvard with a degree in history is saying that, “The people who wrote the Constitution did not understand that slavery was a bad thing.”

This can only be deliberate pandering to racists.

Even I know, and I was not a history major, that Thomas Jefferson actually put condemnations of slavery and the slave trade in the first drafts of the constitution.

Whether he is a racist in his heart, like Jesse Helms, or merely a political opportunist who has chosen racism as a political ploy, like Strom Thurmond and George Wallace, it does not matter.

Pete Buttigieg is a racist politician, even if he is not a racist man: (Though he might be personally racist as well)

Once again, South Bend, Ind. mayor and presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg finds himself under the microscope and under fire for recently unearthed video of him saying something trash.

………

Well, now Buttigieg is up against it again; this time for an old clip from his appearance on a children’s public television show in 2014.

“Similarly, the amendment process—they were wise enough to realize that they didn’t have all of the answers and that some things would change. A good example of this is something like slavery—or civil rights. It’s an embarrassing thing to admit, but the people who wrote the Constitution did not understand that slavery was a bad thing and did not respect civil rights.”

Oh Jesus Christ, Pete.

First of all, if they “did not respect civil rights” I think it’s safe to say that they knew when they were doing a bad thing, they just didn’t care.

In fact, writer Aleia Woods of NewsOne did a fine job of pointing out a direct refutation of this Buttigieg’s statement by one of the framers himself. [This is in addition to my aforementioned example of Thomas Jefferson]

In fact, James Madison, one of the “people who wrote the Constitution” and owned as many as 118 slaves, according to White House History, admitted to knowing just how immoral and barbaric slavery was. He referred to slavery as a “dreadful calamity” in a private letter written to Frances Wright in 1825.

“The magnitude of this evil among us is so deeply felt, and so universally acknowledged, that no merit could be greater than that of devising a satisfactory remedy for it,” he wrote, according to the Founders Archive.

This man is a moral and political disaster.

Quote of the Day

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It’s often wrong to think conservatives are full of shit. They’re just not using words and phrases to mean things that they normally mean. It’s not true that they are big hypocrites or lying about “religious freedom,” it’s that to them, “religious freedom” means the freedom of members of their dominant preferred religion to enact theocracy and oppress everybody else. That is simply what it means to them.

—Atrios

This is a very important observation: When the Talibaptist talk, they are using language in a very different way from the mainstream.

Understand that they are not talking to you, they are talking to each other, so when they are refer to, “Compassionate Conservatism, ” they are referring to Marvin Olasky thesis that you have to force people into starvation to really help them, and when they talk about, “Religious Freedom”, they are talking about killing gay people, resegregating society, and establishing a real version of The Handmaid’s Tale on earth.

This Business Will Get out of Control. It Will Get out of Control and We’ll Be Lucky to Live through It.

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Cue Freddie Dalton Thompson

We just assassinated Iranian general Qassem Suleimani at the Baghdad airport.

In addition to being a fairly blatant example of wagging the f%$#ing dog, it’s also calculated to escalate the situation.

Additionally, it has already generated greater solidarity in Iran:

This is batsh%$ insane:

The White House said Donald Trump ordered an air strike that killed powerful Iranian general Qassem Suleimani in Baghdad in the early hours of Friday, in a dramatic escalation of an already bloody struggle between Washington and Tehran for influence across the region.

Suleimani, who ran Iranian military operations in Iraq and Syria, was targeted while being driven from Baghdad airport by local allies from the Popular Mobilisation Units (PMU). The deputy head of the PMU, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandes, a close Suleimani associate, was also killed in the attack.

“General Suleimani was actively developing plans to attack American diplomats and service members in Iraq and throughout the region,” a Pentagon statement said. “This strike was aimed at deterring future Iranian attack plans. The United States will continue to take all necessary action to protect our people and our interests wherever they are around the world.”

Minutes before the statement Trump tweeted a US flag without comment. Later, the White House put out a statement saying the strike was a “decisive defensive action” carried out “at the direction of the president”.

Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, ordered three days of mourning and vowed that the US would face “severe revenge” for the killing.

I’ve Heard about Getting Back on the Horse, but This Is Ridiculous

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It appears that the Boeing’s failure to properly implement automation on the 737 MAX, to the tune of 346 dead passengers, has led the Seattle (Chicago) aviation giant double down on automation in its airliners.

It’s clear that Boeing has neither the skill set nor the corporate culture to properly implement flight control automation, but they want to get rid of the pilots.

To quote Nietzsche, “It is like the bite of a dog into a stone, it is a stupidity.”

Boeing Co. is increasingly committed to transferring more control of aircraft from pilots to computers after two crashes exposed flaws in an automated system on its 737 MAX that overpowered aviators in the disasters.

Executives at Boeing and other makers of planes and cockpit-automation systems for some time have believed more-sophisticated systems are necessary to serve as backstops for pilots, help them assimilate information and, in some cases, provide immediate responses to imminent hazards.

Now, such changes also seek to address the fact that average pilots may not react to problems—including those tied to automation—as quickly or proficiently as designers traditionally assumed, according to former and current Boeing officials and industry executives. The view took hold after a flight-control system known as MCAS put two MAX jets into fatal nosedives within the past 14 months that together killed 346 people. “We are going to have to ultimately almost—almost—make these planes fly on their own,” then Boeing Chairman Dave Calhoun said in a CNBC interview in November. Mr. Calhoun will become the plane maker’s chief executive Jan. 13.

The first rule of being in a hole is to stop digging, something which completely escapes the  finance types now running the company.