You can work

Arizona is one signature away from becoming the first state in the country to recognize out-of-state occupational licenses. That means licensed workers will be able to move to Arizona and immediately find work without going through the expensive, time-consuming, and redundant process of getting re-licensed

Reason

The Putin ECM bubble

As Russian President Vladimir Putin and a convoy of construction vehicles rolled across one of the most controversial new bridges in the world on May 15, 2018, something funky began happening on ships anchored nearby in the Kerch Strait.
The ships’ GPS systems suddenly began to indicate they were actually 65 kilometers away, on land, in the middle of an airport.
The incident is one of many highlighted in a new report that found the Kremlin “spoofed” global positioning systems, or GPS, to effectively place a bubble around Putin or properties associated with him.

CBS

But it may not fool everyone.


Kits that convert unguided bombs into all-weather ‘smart’ munitions, such as the Boeing Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) guidance kit, are widely deployed; in 2013 the company marked production of the 250,000th JDAM kit. These kits guide by an integrated inertial guidance system paired with a GPS receiver; new variants such as the Laser JDAM and JDAM Extended Range providing the ability to prosecute moving targets and deploy the weapon from greater distances.
The Raytheon AGM-154 Joint Stand-off Weapon (JSOW) also uses integrated GPS inertial navigation with thermal imaging infrared seeker. This weapon has been modified under the JSOW C-1 programme to add a two-way strike common weapon datalink to provide a network-enabled weapon with a range of more than 100km.

Air Force Technology

Economy not yet stalling out

“The 196,000 jobs added in March shows the US economy is not stalling out, something investors were worried about following February’s disappointing numbers. And other data in the report showed wages are rising but not at a rate which would spur inflation,” said Chris Gaffney, president of world markets at TIAA Bank. “This was a perfect report for equity investors as it shows the US economy is still marching along while the wage numbers will keep the FOMC on the sidelines.”

CNBC

Can the ICC prosecute US military personnel?

The travails of the global world and an international “rule based order”

The U.S. is not a party to the treaty that created the international court. Instead of joining the organization when it was founded, the U.S. adopted the American Service-Members’ Protection Act, which broadly prohibits the U.S. from facilitating any ICC investigation of U.S. or allied service personnel — and which blocks ICC staff from conducting such work inside the U.S.
While the U.S. claims its citizens and military personnel are outside of the ICC’s jurisdiction, the court says Afghanistan is within its purview because the country ratified the Rome Statute, which established the court, in early 2003.
“The ICC therefore has jurisdiction over Rome Statute crimes committed on the territory of Afghanistan or by its nationals from 1 May 2003 onwards,” the court said in its summary of a preliminary examination in 2013.

NPR

The attack of the mole men

First, it was Hamas, and then Hezbollah. Now, Syria is threatening to undermine Israel with tunnels. In fact, a Syrian general claims that the Syrian Civil War has turned Syrian soldiers into “experts” at digging holes in the ground. …

In its seventy-five-year history, the Syrian military has rarely had a reputation for being expert in anything. But fighting the Islamic State, which has used underground fortifications extensively, has given the Syrian Arab Army—the official name of the Syrian ground forces—a bloody lesson in subterranean warfare. And not just Syrian government soldiers: American soldiers and U.S.-backed Syrian, Iraqi and Kurdish fighters have had immense difficulty rooting out ISIS from labyrinthine tunnel complexes in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. Subterranean passages enable ISIS fighters to avoid air strikes and artillery fire, escape encirclement, and allow them to pop out of the ground to spring ambushes.

National Interest

The airmen are considering their strategy against the molemen.

“They’ve gone underground to match our overmatch,” said retired Army Maj. John Spencer, chair of Urban Warfare Studies with the Modern War Institute at West Point. …

For the Air Force, once the service has identified such a tunnel or other underground facility and figured out what’s inside, the question is what to do about it.
It’s not always necessary to obliterate the entire structure, the way air forces approached such “hard and deeply-buried targets” during World War II, Baker said. Instead of sending an entire squadron to annihilate the area, the Air Force could use one precision-guided munition from one airplane to target a specific “effect” — take out one particular room or feature of a tunnel, and ruin the enemy’s ability to use it in the process.
Aircraft could also take out a power grid, a ventilation system that hundreds or thousands of troops need to breathe underground, or a communications system necessary for leaders’ command and control, rendering it effectively useless.

Air Force Times

The first extraterrestrial bombing mission in history carried out by Japan

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, or JAXA, said Hayabusa2 dropped a small explosive box which sent a copper ball the size of a baseball slamming into the asteroid, and that data confirmed the spacecraft had safely evacuated and remained intact. JAXA later confirmed the impact from images transmitted from a camera left behind by the spacecraft which showed the impactor being released and fine particles later spraying dozens of meters (yards) out from a spot on the asteroid.

AP

April 5, 2019. A day that will live in famy. But NASA beat them for the first deliberate crash into an asteroid. Deep Impact in 2013. The technology should come in handy though for future asteroid deflection missions to fend off the kind of event that killed the dinosaurs. Here’s an overview of the technology.

Most deflection efforts for a large object require from a year to decades of warning, allowing time to prepare and carry out a collision avoidance project, as no known planetary defense hardware has yet been developed. It has been estimated that a velocity change of just 3.5/t × 10−2 m·s−1 (where t is the number of years until potential impact) is needed to successfully deflect a body on a direct collision trajectory. In addition, under certain circumstances, much smaller velocity changes are needed

Wikipedia

Back in the ’50s there was a plan to nuke the moon.

The recent Chelyabinsk meteorite was the second atomic bomb sized object to hit Earth within a 100 yearWikipedia

The trouble with rationed health care

If price doesn’t set the level, the government does. That’s why a combination of private (price set) and government (rationed to indigents and subsidized for low income) is often the policy mix of choice.

Nearly a quarter of a million British patients have been waiting more than six months to receive planned medical treatment from the National Health Service, according to a recent report from the Royal College of Surgeons. More than 36,000 have been in treatment queues for nine months or more.

Forbes

Sanders: let’s study reparations

Following his remarks at Al Sharpton’s National Action Network Conference, Sanders was asked whether he would support a bill, introduced by Representative Sheila Jackson Lee (D., Texas), that would form a commission to study the institution of American slavery and devise a plan to compensate living descendants of slaves.
“If the House and the Senate pass that bill, of course I would sign it. There needs to be a study. But I think what we need to do is to pay real attention to the most distressed communities in America,” Sanders said.

NRO

AOC weighs in.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., called Friday for “examining and pursuing an agenda of reparations” as part of a lengthy list of proposals delivered before an Al Sharpton-sponsored conference in New York — touting a controversial policy that’s increasingly gained support from the 2020 field of Democratic presidential candidates.

Speaking about her cornerstone Green New Deal, which would entail a massive government-led overhaul of the economy and U.S. energy usage, the freshman Democrat also said the plan does not “shy away from bold conversations of health care, housing and education as human rights, of living wages and dignified work, of policy that isn’t just drafted with the next election in mind but also with the next generation in mind.”

Fox

Dismantling the electoral college

Ohio could decide to hand its votes in presidential elections over to the Democratic Party if a proposed ballot measure passes in November. If approved, the proposed constitutional amendment would award Ohio’s electoral votes to the candidate who wins the national popular vote. The language of the ballot measure would enshrine the following in the state’s constitution.

It is the expressed will of the People that every vote for President be valued equally and that the candidate who wins the most votes nationally becomes President. Therefore, the General Assembly shall within sixty days of the adoption of this amendment take all necessary legislative action so that the winner of the national popular vote is elected President.

Pjmedia

Also …

New Mexico is the 14th state to move away from the traditional use of the electoral college in presidential elections. Yesterday, Governor Michelle Luján Grisham signed House Bill 55 for her state to join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. By so doing, the Governor agrees with New Mexico Democrat Party lawmakers to give all the state’s electoral college votes to the winner of the national popular vote.

KFYR

The terrible cycle begins

Former FBI Director James Comey on Tuesday condemned President Donald Trump’s calls for a possible investigation into how special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia inquiry started, adding that it creates a troubling precedent.

During an interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, Comey was asked about whether he feared possible counterinvestigations.

“I don’t fear it personally. I fear it as a citizen,” he said. “Right? Investigate what? Investigate that investigations were conducted? What would be the crime you’d be investigating? So it’s a terrible cycle to start.”

Politico

Make sure not to misgender anyone

British police warn vs intemperate Brexit debate. You might be talking about the end of Britain as an independent country, treason or betrayal. But always remember to be polite.

“I am thinking about disorder and people being responsible in the way they speak,” he said. “There’s a responsibility on those individuals that have a platform or voice to communicate in a way that is temperate and not in any way going to inflame people’s views.

Martin Hewitt, chair of the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC), said it was “incumbent” on anyone in a “position of responsibility” to express their views in a way that did not incite violent behaviour.

Telegraph

Facebook leaks

Forget Cambridge Analytica. Facebook has been leaking like a sieve beyond that well known incident.

a Mexican digital publisher called Cultura Colectiva, openly stored 540 million records, including comments, names, likes, and reactions to posts, in a publicly accessible database hosted by Amazon Web Services. …

Just yesterday Facebook was forced to stop asking users for their e-mail passwords to verify new accounts, after criticism that it’s poor practice to do so. And last month it turned out Facebook had been storing hundreds of millions of users’ passwords in plain text, another major security no-no.

All that Planned Parenthood

Who knew that the economy would need people?

Were it not for immigrants, the labor crunch would be even more intense. In 2016, immigrants accounted for one in four construction workers, according to a study by Natalia Siniavskaia of the home builders’ association, up from about one in five in 2004. In some of the least-skilled jobs — like plastering, roofing and hanging drywall, for which workers rarely have more than a high school education — the share of immigrants hovers around half. New York Times

The world might actually run out of people.

That’s the conclusion Canadian journalist John Ibbitson and political scientist Darrell Bricker come to in their newest book, Empty Planet, due out February 5th. After painstakingly breaking down the numbers for themselves, the pair arrived at a drastically different prediction for the future of the human species. “In roughly three decades, the global population will begin to decline,” they write. “Once that decline begins, it will never end.”

Tyranny or chaos, perhaps both


Libya has been plunged into chaos since the ouster of the dictator Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi in 2011, with rival cities and militias competing for power. The bedlam has slashed the country’s oil production, drained much of its sovereign wealth, offered havens to Islamist militants and turned its long Mediterranean coast into a major point of departure for African and Middle Eastern migrants fleeing to Europe.

New York Times