Navy budget cutbacks have gone too far...

Voters Are Angry, Voters Are Fed Up, Voters Are Blah Blah Blah

Oh please:

The surging candidacies of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are fueled by people’s anger with the status quo and desire for authenticity in political leaders.

We hear this every four years. Voters are always angry. They always prize straight talk. They are endlessly entranced by outsiders. And it's always a surprising new phenomenon.

Can we just stop it? This isn't new. It's an evergreen. But political reporters always believe it, and every four years at least a few of them take a tour of "real" America and find exactly what they set out to find. People are fed up! And yet, every four years a fairly ordinary mainstream politician is eventually sent to the White House anyway. Go figure.

POSTSCRIPT: Someone with access to Nexis should do a stroll through the archives. I'll bet you can easily find at least one example of this in a major newspaper during the early stages of every election cycle for at least the past 40 years.

http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2015/08/voters-are-angry-voters-are-fed-voters-are-blah-blah-blah

The Marines Who Took Down the American Flag in Havana

Around noon on Jan. 4, 1961, after spending hours feeding mounds of government documents into an incinerator, three American Marines assigned to the embassy guard force in Havana turned their attention to a solemn task: lowering the American flag.

As they stepped outside, the Marines were greeted by a throng of Cubans who had gathered. Many of them were clamoring for visas, hoping to get a ticket out before diplomatic relations between Washington and Havana were formally severed.

“We looked at the flagpole, we looked at them, we looked at the flagpole, we looked at them,” James Tracy, one of the Marines, recalled. “I guess they got the idea. They cleared the sidewalk.”

Mr. Tracy saluted the flag as Larry Morris pulled the halyard. Once down, Mike East grabbed the tips of the flag as his two comrades stepped in to help fold it. The Cubans gave them polite applause as the men headed back into the building.

On Friday, the three Marines will fulfill an old dream as they return to Havana with Secretary of State John Kerry, who is traveling there to mark the re-establishment of diplomatic relations between the United States and Cuba. The American government has asked the men to raise the flag once again.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/13/opinion/the-marines-who-took-down-the-american-flag-in-havana.html?smid=tw-nytopinion&_r=0

Thanks, Obamacare: America's Uninsured Rate Is Below 10% For First Time Ever

For the first time in more than 50 years of surveys, the CDC on Wednesday reported that more than 90% of Americans — 90.8% of us, to be specific — have health insurance.

Until now, no major survey had ever found that the uninsured rate in America has hit single digits.

The data comes from the National Health Interview Survey, which the CDC has been conducting for more than 50 years. The questions have sometimes changed, but until this year, the answers haven’t: More than 10% of respondents, and sometimes as many as 18% of Americans, have reported that they’ve been uninsured.

The clear factor is the Affordable Care Act’s push for coverage expansion, which kicked in almost two years ago. I spoke about the ACA’s role with several experts back in June, and you can easily see the law’s effects on the chart.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/dandiamond/2015/08/12/for-first-time-americas-uninsured-rate-is-below-10/



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Man Charged in Bitcoin Scheme Appears in New York Court

Anthony Murgio, a Florida man who was charged last month by federal prosecutors in Manhattan with running an illegal bitcoin money exchange firm and is thought to have information about last summer’s hacking attack against JPMorgan Chase, seemed to be taking the unfolding criminal case against him in stride during a court appearance on Monday morning.

Mr. Murgio, 31, made small talk with the two federal agents in the hallway of the federal court in Lower Manhattan, while waiting to appear on those charges before the United States magistrate judge, James C. Francis IV. At one point, he even rushed to see if a woman who had fallen in the hallway was hurt and needed help getting up.

But when he appeared in court, Mr. Murgio said nothing, letting his lawyer, Gregory W. Kehoe of the big law firm Greenberg Traurig, do the talking. The hearing was brief and the judge allowed Mr. Murgio, who has run a number of less-than-successful businesses since graduating from Florida State University, to remain free on $100,000 bail. Mr. Murgio posted the bail a week ago after his arrest on July 21 in Tampa after spending a few nights in the Pinellas County jail while he and his family secured the money.

Federal authorities contend that Mr. Murgio’s company, Coin.mx, allowed online criminals to illegally exchange the digital currency bitcoin for cash as part of a money-laundering scheme. Mr. Murgio could be sentenced to up to 20 years in prison if convicted on the money-laundering charges.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/11/business/man-charged-in-bitcoin-scheme-appears-in-new-york-court.html

yep...

China Read Emails of Top U.S. Officials

Source: NBC News

China's cyber spies have accessed the private emails of "many" top Obama administration officials, according to a senior U.S. intelligence official and a top secret document obtained by NBC News, and have been doing so since at least April 2010.

The email grab -- first codenamed "Dancing Panda" by U.S. officials, and then "Legion Amethyst" -- was detected in April 2010, according to a top secret NSA briefing from 2014. The intrusion into personal emails was still active at the time of the briefing and, according to the senior official, is still going on.

In 2011, Google disclosed that the private gmail accounts of some U.S. officials had been compromised, but the briefing shows that private email accounts from other providers were compromised as well.

The government email accounts assigned to the officials, however, were not hacked because they are more secure, says the senior U.S. intelligence official.

Read more: http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/china-read-emails-top-us-officials-n406046

War in Space May Be Closer than Ever

The world’s most worrisome military flashpoint is arguably not in the Strait of Taiwan, the Korean Peninsula, Iran, Israel, Kashmir or Ukraine. In fact, it cannot be located on any map of Earth, even though it is very easy to find. To see it, just look up into a clear sky, to the no-man’s-land of Earth orbit, where a conflict is unfolding that is an arms race in all but name.

The emptiness of outer space might be the last place you’d expect militaries to vie over contested territory, except that outer space isn’t so empty anymore. About 1,300 active satellites wreathe the globe in a crowded nest of orbits, providing worldwide communications, GPS navigation, weather forecasting and planetary surveillance. For militaries that rely on some of those satellites for modern warfare, space has become the ultimate high ground, with the U.S. as the undisputed king of the hill. Now, as China and Russia aggressively seek to challenge U.S. superiority in space with ambitious military space programs of their own, the power struggle risks sparking a conflict that could cripple the entire planet’s space-based infrastructure. And though it might begin in space, such a conflict could easily ignite full-blown war on Earth.

The long-simmering tensions are now approaching a boiling point due to several events, including recent and ongoing tests of possible anti-satellite weapons by China and Russia, as well as last month’s failure of tension-easing talks at the United Nations.

Testifying before Congress earlier this year, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper echoed the concerns held by many senior government officials about the growing threat to U.S. satellites, saying that China and Russia are both “developing capabilities to deny access in a conflict,” such as those that might erupt over China’s military activities in the South China Sea or Russia’s in Ukraine. China in particular, Clapper said, has demonstrated “the need to interfere with, damage and destroy” U.S. satellites, referring to a series of Chinese anti-satellite missile tests that began in 2007.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/war-in-space-may-be-closer-than-ever/

Like they were born to be partners -- Why should water separate them?

Japan is way ahead of us...WAY ahead!

"Bernie Sanders Clearly In Pocket Of High-Rolling Teacher Who Donated $300"