Some 6 percent of the planned 1,700-strong F-35 fleet may be unfit for combat, sticking U.S. taxpayers with a $20 billion tab for fighters… that can’t fight.
The U.S. military has signaled that it might cancel essential upgrades for more than 100 early model F-35 stealth fighters flown by the Air Force, rendering the radar-evading jets incompatible with many of the latest weapons.
In that case, some 6 percent of the flying branch’s planned 1,700-strong F-35 fleet would be unfit for combat, sticking U.S. taxpayers with a $20 billion tab for fighters… that can’t fight.
Experts say the military never should have bought the planes the first place, as they rolled out of Lockheed Martin’s Fort Worth factory before the F-35’s design was complete and thoroughly tested—a deliberate strategy called “concurrency” that the military hoped would speed up the program’s progress.
“The risk that the services would be stuck with less-than-capable aircraft is one that the Pentagon knowingly took when leaders decided to overlap the development and testing of the program with the production,” wrote Dan Grazier, an analyst with the Project on […]
Not so long ago, nobody met a partner online. Then, in the 1990s, came the first dating websites.
Match.com went live in 1995. A new wave of dating websites, such as OKCupid, emerged in the early 2000s. And the 2012 arrival of Tinder changed dating even further. Today, more than one-third of marriages start online.
Clearly, these sites have had a huge impact on dating behavior. But now the first evidence is emerging that their effect is much more profound.
For more than 50 years, researchers have studied the nature of the networks that link people to each other. These social networks turn out to have a peculiar property.
One obvious type of network links each node with its nearest neighbors, in a pattern like a chess board or chicken wire. Another obvious kind of network links nodes at random. But real social networks are not like either of these. Instead, people are strongly connected to a relatively small group of neighbors and loosely connected to much more distant people.
These loose connections turn out to be extremely important. “Those weak ties serve as […]
Illustration by Eddie Alvarez/The Washington Post;
Photos by Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post, U.S. Senate, DEA, iStock
In April 2016, at the height of the deadliest drug epidemic in U.S. history, Congress effectively stripped the Drug Enforcement Administration of its most potent weapon against large drug companies suspected of spilling prescription narcotics onto the nation’s streets.
By then, the opioid war had claimed 200,000 lives, more than three times the number of U.S. military deaths in the Vietnam War. Overdose deaths continue to rise. There is no end in sight.
A handful of members of Congress, allied with the nation’s major drug distributors, prevailed upon the DEA and the Justice Department to agree to a more industry-friendly law, undermining efforts to stanch the flow of pain pills, according to an investigation by The Washington Post and “60 Minutes.” The DEA had opposed the effort for years.
The law was the crowning achievement of a multifaceted campaign by the drug industry to weaken aggressive DEA enforcement efforts against drug distribution companies that were […]
Kathleen Hartnett White
Credit: Texas Public Policy Foundation
President Donald Trump nominated Kathleen Hartnett White, a fringe player in the climate debate who promotes the idea that increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is good for humanity, to lead the White House Council on Environmental Quality on Thursday.
Hartnett White, a senior fellow and director of the Armstrong Center for Energy and the Environment at the fossil-fuel funded Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF), has questioned the scientific consensus that human activities are the major driver of catastrophic climate change. She has described efforts to combat climate change as primarily an attack on the fossil fuel industry.
Hartnett White’s hard-line position that carbon dioxide emissions can be goodrepresents an extreme stance, even among Republicans who refuse to concede the role of humans in climate change. The best science indicates not only that human-caused greenhouse gas emissions are responsible for global warming, but that global warming is widely expected to have catastrophic effects for humanity if it is not curbed.
If confirmed by the Senate, Hartnett White would […]
As the report spells out Trump "proposed cutting NOAA by 16%, including slashing $82 million from the National Weather Service. The cuts would end developing extended forecasts and cut research in hurricanes, tornadoes and mapping oceans.
“The budget would ensure that NOAA and the National Weather Service become second- or third-tier weather forecasting enterprises frozen in the early 2000s,” said David Titley, a meteorology professor at Pennsylvania State University and the former chief operating officer at NOAA under Obama."
But under Trump and the Republican congress we have endless money for war.
CYGNSS Satellite Mission Aims to Improve Hurricane Forecasting
Credit: NASA
Our nation’s weather forecasting was so bad in 2005 that the National Hurricane Center didn’t predict Katrina’s direct hit on New Orleans until three days out.
More than a decade and millions of taxpayer dollars later, weather predictions have improved. Somewhat.
We could be facing the most active period of major storms on record, with the most Atlantic hurricanes to occur in a row since 1893, but our nation’s forecasters are consistently behind European, British and sometimes Canadian forecasters — which is probably why they missed Hurricane Irma by 194 nautical miles, as I’ve written about before for DCReport. Even the U.S. Air Force uses British weather-modeling software.
“We need to do better,” said Cliff Mass, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Washington.
During Hurricane Irma, American forecasters missed the path […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
