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Boeing Charges Pentagon $52,000 For Trash Can Previously Priced At $300

As Democrat and Republican members of the executive and legislative branches trip over each other trying to see who can jack up the Pentagon’s budget more, an investigation by Responsible Statecraft has uncovered some glaring examples of Department of Defense contractors raising the price of their products by astronomical multiples. 

Boeing used to charge about $300 for trash receptacles used aboard E-3 Sentry Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) planes, which use the chassis of a Boeing 707 airliner. After that aircraft vanished from civilian fleets, the trash can lost its status as a “commercial” item, freeing Boeing to stick it to American taxpayers. 

How badly? “In 2020, the Pentagon paid Boeing over $200,000 for four of the trash cans, translating to roughly $51,606 per unit,” reports Responsible Statecraft’s Connor Echols. The next year brought an apparent volume discount: In 2021, the Pentagon bought 11 trash cans at “only” $36,640 each. Together, the price on the two years of purchases represented a whopping $600,000 markup over previous prices.  

Boeing isn’t the only one sticking it to taxpayers. For starters:

  • In 2022, New York-based Jamaica Bearings Company sold the Pentagon 13 radio filters. While it had previously priced them at $350 each, this time Jamaica Bearings charged $49,000 each.
  • Lockheed Martin jacked up the price of an electrical conduit for the P-3 Orion anti-submarine and maritime surveillance plane by upwards of 1400%, raking in an extra $133,000 from 2008 to 2015. 

In the wake of a May 60 Minutes investigation into defense contractor price-gouging, five senators sent a letter to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin asking for the Pentagon to perform its own follow-on inquiry.

“These companies have abused the trust government has placed in them, exploiting their position as sole suppliers for certain items to increase prices far above inflation or any reasonable profit margin,” wrote Senators Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Charles Grassley (R-IA), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Mike Braun (R-IN) and Ron Wyden (D-OR).  

Consolidation of the defense industry is one factor feeding the price-gouging. “In the 1990s, there were more than 50 ‘prime’ DoD contractors capable of competing for major contracts. Now, there are only five,” writes Echols. 

Per the latest iteration of the National Defense Authorization Act, the federal government will spend over $850 billion on “defense” in the 2023 fiscal year, roughly half of which will be devoured by contractors.

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Zelensky Signs Bill Banning Russian Books

In the country’s latest blow to free speech, freedom of expression, and ethnic diversity, President Vladimir Zelensky announced Thursday he’s signed into effect a new law banning Russian books and publications in Ukraine. 

The law blocks any new Russian and Belarusian publications from being imported into the country. “I believe this law is the right decision,” Zelensky wrote of the measure.

But Ukraine has at the same time urged European authorities to fast-track the country into the EU, which could now be further complicated with this latest move.

Ukrainian national media itself has noted this will be a significant hindrance to future EU membership.

As The New Voice of Ukraine (republished by Yahoo) points out, “However, the new law has faced criticism and was vetoed by the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for potentially violating certain provisions of the Ukrainian Constitution, and for not aligning with EU law.”

The publication added, “Nevertheless, a petition supporting the initiative gathered enough signatures to proceed.”

Russia’s RT has also picked up on the story, which is sure to drive further outrage among the Russian population, and in the Russian-speaking regions of eastern and southern Ukraine: 

The move comes after Ukrainian citizens registered an online petition on the official presidential website asking for the ban back in May. The petition reached the 25,000-vote threshold required for it to be formally considered by the head of state. 

The author of the petition noted that the Ukrainian parliament had already approved the law on June 19, 2022, but that Zelensky had never signed the bill. As a result, Russian books continued to be sold in Ukraine, which undermines “the information security of the state and the economic foundations of Ukrainian book publishing,” according to the petition.  

A key driving factor which unleashed civil war in the Donbas since 2014 in the first place was Kiev’s ongoing crackdown against Russian language and culture, impacting many millions of Ukrainians. 

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KYRSTEN SINEMA MOVES TO SLASH PILOT TRAINING AFTER TAKING AIRLINE CASH

IN A BLISTERING attack on her Senate colleague last week, Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., warned independent Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema that a proposal to reduce the number of required in-flight training hours for pilots would result in “blood on your hands.” The attack from Duckworth was prompted by an amendment supported by Sinema and Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., that would allow pilots to meet training requirements by substituting hours spent in a flight simulator for actual flight time.

For Duckworth, who lost both of her legs to a rocket attack on the Black Hawk helicopter she was piloting in 2004 during the Iraq War, the issue is personal. “Now is not the time to put corporate profits ahead of the lives of our constituents who may want to board a commercial flight in the future,” Duckworth said. “A vote to reduce a 1,500-hour rule for pilot training will mean blood on your hands when an inevitable accident occurs as a result of an inadequately trained flight crew.”

The eleventh-hour amendment in the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation comes as the September 30 deadline to reauthorize the Federal Aviation Act looms.

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Russia Has Deployed Military Combat Dolphins to Crimea, Says UK Intelligence Digest

A bizarre Cold War throwback emerges as new intelligence claims Russia has deployed an “increased number” of military dolphins to its naval base in Crimea meant to attack human saboteurs.

Russia has been reinforcing its Black Sea naval base, says the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defence (MOD), since the country launched another invasion of Ukrainian territory in 2022. While many of the defences deployed are conventional including nets and booms to catch torpedos, submarines, and surface ships, others are somewhat less so, including the deployment of military dolphins.

Satellite photos reveal, the MOD says, “a near doubling of floating mammal pens in the harbour” in recent weeks. These pens, they say are likely to be the home to bottle-nosed dolphins trained to “counter enemy divers”, in other words, to attack unauthorised visitors.

Discussing Russia’s earlier use of dolphins to protect its naval base in the Black Sea from enemy divers, King’s College London academic Professor Andy Lambert said last year: “Dolphins would be ideal for killing human divers … fast, clever, and powerful”. The report also notes that, unlike a warship, dolphins are not magnetic and don’t risk setting off proximity mines.

Russia has stationed its Black Sea fleet in Sevastopol on the Crimean Peninsula for nearly 250 years, even after Crimea became a Ukrainian, post-Soviet territory at the end of the Cold War. Indeed, the return to prominence of military mammals in the Black Sea now has a Cold War flavour to it, as forces on both sides of the Iron Curtain attempted to train whales, dolphins, and seals to perform military tasks.

The MOD notes the Russian navy still uses beluga whales and seals in arctic waters to this day, and a suspected Russian-trained “spy whale” with a camera harness has been turning up in northern European ports in recent months. A 2016 report noting that Russia was seeking to buy five dolphins to reinvigorate its dolphin training programme also published the remarks of an ex-Soviet Colonel who witnessed the training of the animals by Russia during the Cold War.

Colonel Viktor Baranets said dolphins were trained to plant explosives on ships.

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FACEBOOK HIRES EX-CIA AGENT ‘MISINFORMATION’ CHIEF TO LEAD ‘ELECTIONS POLICIES’

Meta has promoted a former CIA agent from a senior role on Facebook’s “misinformation” team to “Head of Elections Policies” at the social media giant.

Aaron Berman, a 17-year veteran of the CIA, served as Facebook’s “misinformation” chief during the 2020 election.

In the run-up to the 2020 election Facebook and other Big Tech companies buried information, such as the Hunter Biden laptop story, that was damaging to Democrats.

Those same “misinformation” teams allowed social media to be flooded with false claims that helped Biden and the Democrats, such as the Russia Hoax or the fabricated Jan. 6 “insurrection” narrative.

Nevertheless, Berman, who played a key role in Facebook’s failed censorship efforts, will now lead the company’s “elections policies” in the run-up to the critical 2024 race.

Berman served at the CIA between March 2002 and July 2019.

During that time, he wrote for and edited the President’s Daily Brief, an influential top-secret document prepared by the U.S. intelligence community given to the president each morning, according to Breitbart.

According to Berman’s Linkedin, he enjoyed positions of considerable influence at the agency, including “supervising teams of dozens of analysts and with multi-million-dollar budgets,” and leading briefings for members of Congress and National Security Council members.

In 2019, he left the agency and joined Facebook (now known as Meta), where he became a senior product policy manager for “misinformation.”

According to Berman, he “built the misinformation policy team’s US workforce and put policies into practice during critical events.”

While Berman does not say what these “critical events” were, his time in Facebook’s “misinformation” department coincides with the run-up to the 2020 election.

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HOW AN “AVERAGE” YOGA COACH MANAGED TO BECOME A HEAD OF THE CIA DIVISION RESPONSIBLE FOR ARMS TRANSFERS TO MILITANTS IN AFRICA AND MIDDLE EAST

“America is the land of opportunity” – this phrase fully describes our nation. America gives an opportunity for every person not only to achieve anything they put their mind to, but also reach a mighty power and get filthy rich. Despite the fact that it is not customary to speak about it, but in most cases people assume such power through deception and hypocrisy. They serve as heads of serious departments, using their post to manipulate the American taxpayers’ money.

Today we’d like to tell you a dizzying story about a yoga teacher, Chanda Creasy, whose enlightenment path took her to a top-secret CIA unit responsible for weapons supplies to militants in Africa and Middle East, receiving millions of dollars in kickbacks.

But first let’s start our story with Chanda’s yoga personal website where she tells fascinating fairy-tale about her meeting with yoga while serving as a Peace Corps volunteer in Ethiopia. You probably didn’t know that Ethiopia is the best place to experience yoga, as well as meditations under scorching African sun without a hat will make you reach Satchidananda in a fastest way.

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No prison time for pedophile Portland Antifa member who pleaded guilty to stabbing black conservative at 2020 riot

A Portland Antifa member who spent years in prison for a child sex crime conviction pleaded guilty this morning to stabbing a black conservative livestreamer during the 2020 BLM-Antifa riots.

Blake David Hampe, 46, pleaded guilty in a sweetheart deal to felony second-degree attempted assault. He will serve no prison time, instead getting three years of probation. The charge is downgraded from the original felony second-degree assault charge. A felony charge of unlawful use of a weapon was dropped in the plea deal.

On July 25, 2020—during the height of the nightly far-left rioting in downtown Portland—Hampe was recorded on video stabbing Andrew Duncomb. Duncomb was hospitalized and narrowly survived being paralyzed as the blade pierced inches from his spinal cord.

Hampe had his face covered with a helmet and goggles during the attack and nearly escaped. This reporter witnessed him being captured by a protest crowd who mistook him for being a right-winger following the stabbing. After he was booked into jail, Hampe’s $250,000 bond was covered by a far-left bail support group.

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Maryland Supreme Court Limits Testimony on Bullet-Matching Evidence

The Maryland Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that firearms experts will no longer be able to testify that a bullet was fired from a particular gun. The decision is likely the first by a state supreme court to undercut the widespread forensic discipline of firearms identification, which is used in criminal cases across the country.

In a 4–3 decision first reported by The Baltimore Sun, the Maryland Supreme Court overturned the murder conviction of Kobina Ebo Abruquah after finding that a firearm expert’s trial testimony linking Abruquah’s gun to bullets found at a crime scene wasn’t backed up by reliable science. In the majority opinion, Maryland Supreme Court Chief Justice Matthew J. Fader wrote that “firearms identification has not been shown to reach reliable results linking a particular unknown bullet to a particular known firearm.”

The ruling is a major victory for defense groups like the Innocence Project, which works to overturn wrongful convictions and limit what it calls faulty forensic science in courtrooms. It’s also not the only one: Radley Balko recently reported at The Watch on a similar ruling from a Cook County circuit judge in Illinois.

But Tuesday’s ruling is the first by a state supreme court limiting such testimony that Tania Brief, a senior staff attorney at the Innocence Project, which filed an amicus brief in the case, is aware of.

“One of the tensions in our work is that the law is always playing catch-up with the current scientific understanding,” Brief says. “And this is a real step forward in the law catching up with what the current scientific understanding is.”

Forensic firearms identification includes well-established uses such as determining caliber and other general characteristics, but examiners are also frequently called on to testify whether a particular bullet was fired from a particular gun. A gun’s firing pin and the grooves on the inside of a gun barrel leave marks on cartridge casings when a bullet is fired, so a firearm examiner compares crime scene bullets to samples fired from the suspect gun and looks for matching patterns under a microscope.

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Nation’s First Elected Transgender State Rep. Arrested On Child Porn Charges: Police

A former New Hampshire state representative and the nation’s first transgender-identifying state lawmaker was arrested by police this week and charged for allegedly distributing child pornography. 

Stacie Marie Laughton, a Democrat who previously resigned twice from the New Hampshire state house, is now facing four counts of distributing sexually explicit images of children. Laughton was born Barry Charles Laughton, Jr. 

Nashua Police Department public information officer Sgt. John Cinelli said that police were called to respond to a juvenile incident on Tuesday and were then told that the former lawmaker had been distributing explicit images. On Thursday, police searched Laughton’s house and arrested him. 

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A Delaware city is set to give corporations the right to vote in elections

The state of Delaware is famously business-friendly. With more than 1.8 million entities registered in the First State, companies outnumber its human residents by nearly two-to-one. 

One city is now moving to raise businesses’ influence in the state even further, with a proposal to grant them the right to vote.

Seaford, a town of about 8,000 on the Nanticoke River, amended its charter in April to allow businesses — including LLCs, corporations, trusts or partnerships — the right to vote in local elections. The law would go into effect once both houses of Delaware’s state legislature approve it.

The proposal has rekindled a debate over how much power corporations should have in local government, with fierce opposition from civic interest groups who say businesses already wield too much influence over politics.

“It was very shocking to see this attempt to have artificial entities have voting rights,” said Claire Snyder-Hall, executive director of Common Cause Delaware, a watchdog group. 

“We’re seeing voter suppression all over the county, and this is the flipside,” she added. “It’s not saying the residents of Seaford can’t vote, but it’s diluting their votes by allowing nonresidents to vote.”  

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