With Oliver North, NRA’s descent into crackpottery continues | The Kansas City Star

I met Oliver North several times when he shopped in the Northern Virginia hardware store where I worked in high school. He was a neighbor and, though I didn’t know her, his daughter was in my high school class. When the Iran-Contra hearings took place my instinct was to cheer on my neighbor until I came to realize that lying to Congress – the People’s branch of government – really wasn’t anything to be celebrated.

Once North was convicted of felonies and his reputation was in tatters he crawled his way back into being a conservative pundit. I’d say both he and the NRA are getting what they deserve.

The National Rifle Association, which proclaims its devotion to the Second Amendment and the rest of the Constitution, announced that Retired Marine Lt. Col. Oliver North will be its next president. How perfect.

The New York Daily News reports: “North’s nomination will likely draw rebuke, considering his involvement in the 1980s Iran-Contra scandal, in which senior Reagan administration officials covertly sold weapons to the arms-embargoed Iranian regime, and used the proceeds to fund the right-wing Contras guerillas in Nicaragua. The scandal left a dark stain on Ronald Reagan’s administration, although congressional committees found no evidence to suggest that the President himself was aware of the shadowy deals.”

North was convicted on three felony counts for his part in the scandal that rocked the Reagan administration (including misleading Congress and ordering that documents be destroyed), though he successfully had his conviction overturned on the grounds that his congressional testimony, obtained under a grant of immunity, may have tainted the jury. So, naturally, he now will lead a group that touts its devotion to law and order and the Constitution.

Source: With Oliver North, NRA’s descent into crackpottery continues | The Kansas City Star

The Price of This Drug Went Up 100,000 Percent Since 2001 for No Good Reason

Pharmaceutical companies are evil, part 45,326.

Did you catch 60 Minutes last night? If you did, you may have learned about a drug called Acthar that went from $40 in 2001 to over $40,000 today. It’s a perfect illustration of just how poorly regulated the US pharmaceutical industry continues to be and how there’s absolutely no good reason for the extreme prices Americans pay for medicine.

Acthar has been on the market since 1952 and is primarily used to treat infantile spasms, a rare condition. Why does Acthar cost $40,000 today, an increase of 100,000 percent from the cost in 2001? Pure greed.

Source: The Price of This Drug Went Up 100,000 Percent Since 2001 for No Good Reason

How a USB drive sparked the push for Korean peace – Axios

The Korean dynamics are changing at light speed because Kim Jong-un cares far more about economics than his father ever did, per people close to advisers of South Korean President Moon Jae-in.

Under the hood: A source who has spoken recently with top South Korean government advisers — and who spoke anonymously to preserve their confidences — told me Moon “freaked out” last year when Trump was threatening “fire and fury” against Kim.

Moon saw last summer that the White House and Pentagon were working on military options in the event that Kim threatened the U.S.

So he went into diplomatic overdrive, using the military crisis to present Kim with economic development plans he’d long wanted to deliver.

One story that was widely reported in the South Korean press but didn’t get much attention in the U.S. is that, at their April summit, Moon gave a USB drive to Kim.

“The USB makes the case to Kim — there really is another path for you,” John Delury, an expert in North Korean affairs at Seoul’s Yonsei University, told me. He said the USB, which contained a plan for tens of billions worth of economic development in North Korea including railways and energy, sent the message to Kim: “We’re serious about working with you for what we think is your real ambition — to be a wealthy East Asian country.”

Source: How a USB drive sparked the push for Korean peace – Axios

I-Team: UFO – LASVEGASNOW

LAS VEGAS – UFO investigators are hoping to obtain a treasure trove of Pentagon documents that were generated by a once-secret military study of flying saucers and other weird aircraft.The government confirms there was a UFO program. It supposedly ended in 2012, but the Pentagon has not yet released any reports or files.

The I-Team gives the first look at documents which prove the UFO study was real and was based in southern Nevada.

Source: I-Team: UFO – LASVEGASNOW

The Shady Cases of Michael Cohen’s Personal Injury Practice – Rolling Stone

Lock this guy up and throw away the key.

A few years before he started working for Donald Trump, and long before he gave legal advice to people like Fox News personality Sean Hannity, Michael D. Cohen had a different kind of clientele. Cohen roamed the courthouses of New York City, filing lawsuits on behalf of people with little means who were seeking compensation for the injuries they suffered in car collisions. Many personal-injury lawyers make their living this way, but there was something striking about Cohen’s cases: Some of the crashes at issue didn’t appear to be accidents at all.

A Rolling Stone investigation found that Cohen represented numerous clients who were involved in deliberate, planned car crashes as part of an attempt to cheat insurance companies. Furthermore, investigations by insurers showed that several of Cohen’s clients were affiliated with insurance fraud rings that repeatedly staged “accidents.” And at least one person Cohen represented was indicted on criminal charges of insurance fraud while the lawsuit he had filed on her behalf was pending. Cohen also did legal work for a medical clinic whose principal was a doctor later convicted of insurance fraud for filing phony medical claims on purported “accident” victims. Taken together, a picture emerges that the personal attorney to the president of the United States was connected to a shadowy underworld of New York insurance fraud, a pervasive problem dominated by Russian organized crime that was costing the state’s drivers an estimated $1 billion a year.

Source: The Shady Cases of Michael Cohen’s Personal Injury Practice – Rolling Stone

How Michael Cohen, Trump’s Fixer, Built a Shadowy Business Empire – The New York Times

He was a personal-injury lawyer who often worked out of taxi offices scattered around New York City.

There was the one above the run-down auto repair garage on West 16th Street in Manhattan, on the edge of the Meatpacking District before it turned trendy. There was the single-story building with the garish yellow awning in the shadow of the Queensboro Bridge. There was the tan brick place on a scruffy Manhattan side street often choked with double-parked taxis.

And then there was his office on the 26th floor of Trump Tower overlooking Fifth Avenue, right next to the one belonging to Donald J. Trump.

Before he joined the Trump Organization and became Mr. Trump’s lawyer and do-it-all fixer, Michael D. Cohen was a hard-edge personal-injury attorney and businessman. Now a significant portion of his quarter-century business record is under the microscope of federal prosecutors — posing a potential threat not just to Mr. Cohen but also to the president.

Source: How Michael Cohen, Trump’s Fixer, Built a Shadowy Business Empire – The New York Times

Navy Cape Henlopen, The U.S. Navy at Cape Henlopen SOSUS Naval Facility

I visited Rehoboth Beach, Delaware last week for some intuitive training. While I was there I got a chance to visit the Cape Henlopen State Park, former home of a U.S. Navy base known as NAVFAC Lewes. This facility was one of many that was tuned to track deep-diving Soviet submarines, some thousands of miles away. The program was called SOSUS for Sound Ocean Surveillance System and was highly successful at tracking subs until that traitor Navy Chief Warrant Officer John Walker Jr. sold it out to his Soviet handlers.

To defend against the threat of Soviet submarine operations inthe eastern Atlantic or off the coast of the U.S., in the mid-to-late 1950s, the Navy established an underwater Sound Surveillance System (SOSUS). Naval facilities (NavFacs) of the system were located along the coast of the U.S. and Carribean Islands. From those facilities cables ran to the edge of the continental shelf with hydrophones that could detect the sound of submarines.

The mission of these NavFacs was “To provide world-widemaritime surveillance and cueing from undersea sensors to warfare commanders and intelligence partners in support of Anti-Submarine Warfare (ASW).” But, since that mission statement was (then) classified, a cover story was provided explaining the role, purpose and operations of the stations as an extension of and adjunct to the acoustic and oceanographic surveys conducted by the Navy’s fleet of research ships.

Soon the Navy realized that NavFac Cape May was threatened by beach erosion, which would eventually undermine the station buildings. Thus, in September 1960, Delaware Senator Allen J. Frear announced that $1,500,000 had been allotted for the construction of a Navy oceanographic research facility at Fort Miles, which had been a WWII Army Coastal Defense Artillery fort and was still being utilized as an Army training facility and as a Department of Defense military receation center. In October 1960, the Navy had obtained 626 acres at the southern end of Fort Miles.

Source: Navy Cape Henlopen, The U.S. Navy at Cape Henlopen SOSUS Naval Facility

Operation Paul Bunyan: The most heavily-armed tree-trimming operation in history

The tree involved with the Korean Axe Murder Incident

Talk is in the air that North and South Korea may finally sign a peace agreement that will officially end the Korean War. The guns mostly went silent with the 1953 signing of the Korean Armistice, but there were still outbursts of violence, such as the Korean Axe Murder Incident of 1976.

The Korean Axe Murder Incident began on August 18, 1976 when United Nations Command (UNC) forces (consisting of U.S. Army and Republic of Korea [ROK] troops) identified a poplar tree in the Korean Joint Security Area (JSA) of the DMZ that blocked the view in the summertime of a UNC checkpoint (CP No. 3) from a UNC observation post (OP No. 5). A work party of UNC soldiers, led by U.S. Army CPT Arthur Bonifas and USA 1LT Mark Barrett, was organized to trim the tree using axes and other tools.

This prompted a response from North Korean soldiers. A group of 15 North Korean soldiers led by a notoriously confrontational officer, Senior Lt. Pak Chul, tried to intervene, with Chul claiming the tree was planted by North Korean founder Kim Il Sung himself. The UNC troops promptly ignored Chul and his troops and returned to trimming when Chul ordered his men to kill them. In a skirmish lasting less than 30 seconds, Chul’s men killed Bonifas with one of the working party’s axes and then fled. Barrett managed to escape the initial attack and hid in a nearby depression but UNC forces did not notice he was missing until after North Korean troops had found him and also killed him with an axe.
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GEDmatch, a tiny DNA analysis firm, was key for Golden State Killer case | Ars Technica

To get a leg up in the investigation in the cold case of the “Golden State Killer” (aka the “East Area Rapist”), authorities recently turned to modern DNA and genealogy analysis tools.

But they didn’t use any of the big-name DNA analysis firms like 23andMe; instead they relied on GEDmatch, a free, open source site run by a small two-man Florida company that just a few years ago was soliciting donations via PayPal.

According to the East Bay Times, which first reported the connection to GEDmatch late Thursday evening, California investigators caught a huge break in the case when they matched DNA from some of the original crime scenes with genetic data that had already been uploaded to GEDmatch. This familial link eventually led authorities to Joseph James DeAngelo, the man who authorities have named the chief suspect in the case. To confirm the genetic match, Citrus Heights police physically surveilled him and captured DNA off of something that he had discarded.

Source: GEDmatch, a tiny DNA analysis firm, was key for Golden State Killer case | Ars Technica

Rewriting computer history

I was reading this New York Magazine article about how the pioneers of the Internet were apologizing for what it has become, nevermind that many of the “pioneers” they mentioned were Johnny-come-latelys in comparison to the actual beginning of the Internet.

NYMag’s story did feature two actual pioneers, though computer pioneers more than Internet ones: Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs. They included this photo and captioned it “Steve Jobs (left) in his parents’ garage in 1976, working on the first Apple computer with Steve Wozniak.”

There are a few problems with this photo and caption. First off, the photo is backwards. If you switch the photo to the proper orientation, you’ll be able to read that the text on the computer under Wozniak’s hand reads “Apple II.”

This brings us to the second issue with this photo and caption: it is not the first Apple computer (the “II” thing kinda gives this away). Apple’s first computer, the Apple I, did not come with a keyboard nor case. It was essentially a circuit board.

Was this photo really taken in the garage of Jobs’s parents? Wozniak has said that the whole garage thing is a myth and that no testing or production ever took place there. The photo shows a very neat-looking workspace with a workbench. According to what’s said to be the first news story on Apple Computer, the Steves were still working out of the Jobs garage when the article was written.
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