XBradTC

Secret CIA assessment says Russia was trying to help Trump win White House

So says WAPO.  And the Obama Administration.  (URR here.) Actually, Drudge beat me to the punch in calling the CIA assessments "fake".  As with most of the agitprop produced by the Obama Administration and its minions, including sycophant mainstream media fops, whatever "truth" may be contained in these assertions is both debatable and nearly irrelevant.  

The article admits that the alleged Russian "hacking" of the DNC cannot be directly tied to Russia.  But, of course, the article states with near certainty that it was agents acting on behalf of Russia who were responsible.  While this may (and I emphasize MAY) be empirically true, the untold portion of that story is that many of these "agents" are also in the employ of the US government, covertly, and work for other entities such as Wikileaks, other foreign governments, or business interests.  That is, in the Black Hat community, how they make their money.  And they make a lot of it.  

And much more is left untold.   The hue and cry over Russia providing DNC e-mails to Wikileaks for release in order to influence the election neglects to mention that many of the Wikileaks e-mails regarding Hillary Clinton's State Department time show thousands upon thousands of leaks and compromise of classified information, and a trail of influence-peddling via the Clinton Foundation that would put any recorded conviction under RICO to shame.  It also fails to mention that Hillary Clinton expunged some thirty thousand such items of correspondence, directing that the unauthorized server on which they were stored be erased with a sophisticated application (Bleachbit) not readily available to you and me.  Despite the fact that this deletion was done AFTER that evidence was under active subpoena.  And all the while she acted the innocent bumbler whose knowledge of computers was rudimentary at best.  

President Obama, for his part, claims that Russian interference, if indeed true, somehow "crosses a new threshold".  Either he is startlingly ignorant Soviet Russia's intrusion in virtually every US national and Congressional election from the 1920s to the present, which I doubt in the extreme, or Obama is once again being deliberately misleading to the American people.  Such misrepresentation has been a staple of Obama's far-left Alinskyite propaganda campaign, and is indistinguishable from the lies told on his behalf by the beholden media.  (See: "If you like your doctor", et. al., under Obamacare affordable, or "Benghazi protesters", or myriad other such subjects.)

In a parting shot as he sees his "legacy" falling apart like wet cardboard, Obama wants to lend his fading influence to the idea that the 2016 Presidential Election wasn't really valid, and seems to intend a "deep dive" into the supposed Russian influence (at taxpayer expense, of course) to prove so.  O, but were he so interested in Fast and Furious, the rise of ISIS, Benghazi, the Clinton Foundation, Hillary's classified e-mails, the IRS scandal, the EPA scandal, the DOJ subpoena scandal, San Bernadino, Orlando, Fort Hood, Chattanooga, etc.  But alas.  On such matters as those, he is conspicuously uncurious, as is the Mainstream Media.  

So we will be told by Obama how Russia "stole" the 2016 Presidential Election.  Sans anything resembling proof, of course.  With CIA Director Brennan's seconding of the motion.   Trust anything they say, assert, or point to as salient fact at your own risk.  Because, though they and their fellow travelers decry "fake news", they are the very purveyors of the product.   And even after  the results of the 2016 election show so powerfully that a great deal of the American people are onto them, they seem intent on avoiding reality, and on trying to convince the rest of us to do the same.  

Oh, one more thing.  I don't believe Benjamin Netanyahu had to dive very deep to find Barack Obama's fingerprints all over US attempts to influence Israel's elections.   Seems ol' Bath House Barry and his merry band of Bolsheviks couldn't pick a winner there, either.  

So, last night, a NAVADMIN message started making the rounds on Facebook. And soon, CNO Richardson confirmed that it was genuine.

From USNI News:

 

The Navy is performing a brisk about-face on a controversial plan that shelved ratings titles for enlisted sailors, according to a message Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John Richardson that was set for release on Wednesday morning but was leaked on social media on Tuesday night.

The NAVADMIN message cancels a late September decision in which service leadership announced it would no longer address sailors by their rating – a more than 200-year-old tradition in which enlisted were known by their job title – and instead refer to enlisted sailors with the generic titles of Seaman (E-1 to E-3) or Petty Officer (E-4 to E-6).

That Richardson and the senior leadership at the Navy even considered this shows a stunning disconnect from the sailors actually on the deckplates. Instead, they spent far too much time worrying about SecNav Mabus’ insane social engineering priorities, and trying to eliminate “man” from all the various ratings and job descriptions, even as there was literally no on in the fleet, male or female, calling for such.

I’m no fan of Donald Trump, but this reversal is surely a concession that the Obama era is over, and that presumptive future SecDef James Mattis will have priorities other than tossing out over 200 years of tradition.

Does the Navy’s enlisted personnel management system need improvement? I’ll leave that for you squids in the audience to argue. I suspect there actually are some good ideas in the plan. But this whole mess could have been avoided easily. And wasn’t.

Покушение на посла России в Турции https://t.co/fZOhvqesOQ pic.twitter.com/wBwV9qTvdA

— Грани.Ру (@GraniTweet) December 19, 2016

//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

So, yeah. Russia and Turkey had only just achieved a rapproachment after the Turkish Air Force shot down a Russian Su-24 last year.

And wire reports are saying the shooter was a Turkish policeman.

Between Russian war efforts in Syria, and the increasing Islamicist tendency in Turkey, things might get a little too interesting in the region.

And let’s not forget that Turkey is a NATO member. Go look up Article 5.

No narration. After easily capping A, I started in on B. And things got a little exciting.

99k damage in less than three minutes? Totally worth getting sunk.

A Chinese Navy warship has seized an underwater drone deployed by an American oceanographic vessel in international waters in the South China Sea, triggering a formal diplomatic protest from the United States and a demand for its return, a U.S. defense official told Reuters on Friday.

The incident, the first of its kind in recent memory, took place on Dec. 15 northwest of Subic Bay off the Philippines just as the USNS Bowditch, an oceanographic survey ship, was about to retrieve the unmanned, underwater vehicle (UUV), the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

"The UUV was lawfully conducting a military survey in the waters of the South China Sea," the official said.

via www.cnbc.com

This is, of course, a deliberate provocation by the Chinese. How closely it is tied to US presidential politics, who knows?

The Chinese have been behaving obnoxiously in the region for some time now.

Mind you, this is a measured provocation- note that seizing property is quite different from seizing personnel.

As to the Chinese response to our demarche, I suspect the reply will be something along the lines of 'or what?"

Personally, my thinking is, if the PLAN wants to play a little rough with our oceanographic research ships, we should advise those masters to ram the Chinese.

Rubbin' is racin'.

Modern jet fighters today all, to one degree or another, rely on fly by wire technology to interpret the pilot’s control inputs, and move flight control surfaces to produce the desired maneuver. The most well known example of this is the F-16 Fighting Falcon. 

But earlier generations of jets, such as the F-4 Phantom, had a direct linkage (boosted via hydraulics) from the control column to the flight control surfaces.

The aerodynamic forces upon an aircraft can cause planes to do things you might not intuitively expect, particularly at high angles of attack, or AoA. AoA is, very roughly, the angular difference between the mean chord of the wing, and the relative wind acting upon the aircraft.

A well known example of this was rolling the Phantom at high AoA. You’d think that you’d simply move the stick to one side to produce a roll in that direction. And at low AoA, that would be true. But at high AoA, moving the control stick to the left would actually generate a roll to the right. Roll authority at high angles of attack in the Phantom was normally exercised by using the rudder pedals. 

That’s easy enough to understand reading here on a page. But having to seamlessly transition from one way of flying to another while in a swirling dogfight was a real challenge. I had once former Phantom pilot tell me he spent his first tour learning to fly the Phantom, and it wasn’t really until his second that he became proficient at fighting it.

Special Operations requires special airlift. And the 67th SOS provides it throughout Europe, and worldwide when deployed.

So, on a lark, I took the Tier VIII US Destroyer, the Benson, out for a spin.

Normally that ends in tears and a hail of cruiser gunfire. But this time, I exercised a little patience, and it paid off nicely.

Not a photoshop.