Tag Archives: Incompetence

The TSA is a pathetic failure, by Matthew Walther

Posted on November 10, 2017 | 4 comments

The TSA is incompetent and wastes millions of hours of travellers’ time each year while making us no safer. By all means, abolish it, and then the entire Department of Homeland Security. From Matthew Walther at theweek.com:

REUTERS/Jason Reed
November 10, 2017

How bad? According to ABC News, in a series of recent tests in which undercover agents attempted to smuggle guns, knives, bombs, and goodness knows what other contraband materials into the “secure” areas of various airports, the agency failed around 80 percent of the time. Probably bureaucratic flunkies will interpret this as a welcome sign of improvement, as it no doubt is better than the 95 percent rate reported a few years ago. The rest of us are just smiling blandly with our shoes off and our belts draped over our shoulders while our 2-year-olds run away with our half-open laptop cases in the direction of the body-scan machines. Please don’t shoot!

It is worth recalling that, like the so-called Department of Homeland Security under which it operates, the TSA is a relic of the immediate post-9/11 era. By “immediate” I mean that this staggeringly incompetent body to which we have surrendered our freedom of movement and our dignity, physical and metaphysical, was willed into existence as a part of the Aviation and Transportation Security Act passed by Congress on Nov. 19, 2001, and signed into law by President Bush that same day.

It is easy to understand why in the aftermath of that tragedy the American people were eager to see something — anything — done. It doesn’t mean that years later the first draft that they scribbled on a piece of loose-leaf note paper with a golf pencil is what we should be going on a decade and a half later. There are lots of things we did during the Bush administration that we don’t do anymore, most of them for the good. For years a prominent feature of network and cable news broadcasts was any statement made by the Homeland Security Advisory System, with its painfully moronic color code. When is the last time you took note of whether your chances of being blown to pieces by a stranger were “blue” or “orange” or, heaven help us, “red”? Banning water bottles and forcing women to put their cosmetic supplies in sandwich bags makes about as much sense in 2017 as listening to the deep cuts on American Idiot or pretending that Jon Stewart is funny.

To continue reading: The TSA is a pathetic failure

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From Superpower to Incompetence, by Paul Craig Roberts

Posted on November 9, 2017 | Leave a comment

Paul Craig Roberts’ personal rant illustrates America’s endemic incompetence. From Roberts at paulcraigroberts.org:

Having grown up during the second half of the 20th century, I don’t recognize my country today. I experienced life in a competent country, and now I experience life in an incompetent country.

Everything is incompetent. The police are incompetent. They shoot children, grandmothers, cripples, and claim that they feared for their life.

Washington’s foreign policy is incompetent. Washington has alienated the world with its insane illegal attacks on other countries. Today the United States and Israel are the two most distrusted countries on earth and the two countries regarded as the greatest threat to peace.

The military/security complex is incompetent. The national security state is so incompetent that it was unable to block the most humiliating attack in history against a superpower that proved to be entirely helpless as a few people armed with box cutters and an inability to fly an airplane destroyed the World Trade Center and part of the Pentagon itself. The military industries have produced at gigantic cost the F-35 that is no match for the Russian fighters or even for the F-15s and F-16s it is supposed to replace.

The media is incompetent. I can’t think of an accurate story that has been reported in the 21st century. There must be one, but it doesn’t come to mind.

The universities are incompetent. Instead of hiring professors to teach the students, the universities hire administrators to regulate them. Instead of professors, there are presidents, vice presidents, chancellors, vice chancellors, provosts, vice provosts, assistant provosts, deans, associate deans, assistant deans. Instead of subject matter there is speech regulation and sensitivity training. Universities spend up to 75% of their budgets on administrators, many of whom have outsized incomes.

The public schools have been made incompetent by standardized national testing. The purpose of education today is to pass some test. School accreditation and teachers’ pay depend not on developing the creativity or independent thinking of those students capable of it, but on herding them through memory work for a standardized test.

To continue reading: From Superpower to Incompetence

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Our Broken Obama Military Can’t Even Manage to Toss Out Traitors, by Kurt Schlichter

Posted on October 2, 2017 | Leave a comment

There are reasons why our military can’t seem to win any of its assigned wars. From Kut Schlichter at theburningplatform.com:

After nearly a decade under President Faily McWorsethancarter, can our military win a fight with North Korea? Because if it is unable to perform the basic task of ensuring that the people commissioned to lead our troops in the defense of the United States are actually loyal to the United States, how the hell can we reasonably expect it to be able to conduct high-intensity combat operations against a Nork Army that prioritizes fighting over political correctness?

I don’t enjoy saying that – it gives me no pleasure to have to wonder whether the Army I served in both in active and reserve status for close to 28 years is broken. And it’s not just the Army. The Marines and the Special Ops community, well, they seem to be holding on to the standards the rest have forgotten, but the Navy and the Air Force – they’re broken too. Our military – in terms of strategy, equipment, and leadership, is in crisis. American troops will die if we don’t fix it.

Hell, they already have.

We have a Navy that can’t even sail its few remaining ships without running into giant cargo vessels. I come from a Navy family. You should call my dad, the retired lieutenant commander, and ask him what he thinks about the Navy’s current level of seamanship. It will not be a happy chat.

It is, in fact, a disgrace. Our sailors, the precious young men and women we commissioned officers are charged with leading and protecting, are dying because our officer corps tolerates incompetence. One collision is an accident. Two is a lifestyle.

And yeah, they’ve fired some admirals, and that’s a good start, but the problem is a cultural rot, not just one ‘ed-up command. The Navy focused on things besides its mission – “to maintain, train and equip combat-ready Naval forces capable of winning wars, deterring aggression and maintaining freedom of the seas” – and in the last few months that misplaced focus has killed 17 sailors and taken two major vessels out of action in the Western Pacific at the very moment we are on the edge of war.

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How Bad Are The US Computer Systems? An 8” Floppy Disc Houses Nuclear Coordinate Data, by Tyler Durden

Posted on May 27, 2016 | Leave a comment

Big Brother may be set to monitor every citizen and storehouse every piece of information, but before he does so, he’s going to have to update his computers. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

If you thought that $80 billion a year would be a sufficient enough budget for the US government to systematically upgrade its computer systems, think again.

In a report released by nonpartisan congressional investigators found that about $60 billion of the government’s $80 billion IT budget goes straight to maintenance just to keep the aging technology running, not to modernization according to ABC News.

To make matters worse, the government is expected to spend $7 billion less in 2017. In addition to screwing people out of their social security payments, we can now add jeopardizing critical IT systems to the list of ‘out of the box’ cost cutting measures that the US government has come up with. Then again, money must be freed up in order to fund such toys such as $4.4 billion destroyers.

GAO information technology expert David Powner sums up the situation quite nicely, telling a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee at a hearing that “clearly, there are billions wasted.”

Forget billions being wasted for a moment, how about the disturbing fact that The Defense Department’s Strategic Automated Command and Control System, the control system used to coordinate the operational functions of the United States nuclear forces, runs on a 1970s IBM computing platform and uses 8” floppy discs to store data.

That’s not all, the list continues…

Treasury’s individual and business master files, the authoritative data sources for taxpayer information. The systems are about 56 years old and use an outdated computer language that is difficult to write and maintain. Treasury plans to replace the systems but has no firm dates.

Social Security systems that are used to determine eligibility and estimate benefits, about 31 years old. Some use a programming language called COBOL, dating to the late 1950s and early 1960s. “Most of the employees who developed these systems are ready to retire and the agency will lose their collective knowledge,” the report said. “Training new employees to maintain the older systems takes a lot of time.” Social Security has no plans to replace the entire system but is eliminating and upgrading older and costlier components. It is also rehiring retirees who know the technology.

Medicare’s Appeals System, which is only 11 years old, faces challenges keeping up with a growing number of appeals, as well as questions from congressional offices following up on constituent concerns. The report says the agency has general plans to keep updating the system, depending on the availability of funds.

The Transportation Department’s Hazardous Materials Information System, used to track incidents and keep information regulators rely on. The system is about 41 years old, and vendors no longer support some of its software, which can create security risks. The department plans to complete its modernization program in 2018.

To continue reading: How Bad Are The US Computer Systems? An 8” Floppy Disc Houses Nuclear Coordinate Data

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“Brexit” – What Else Is Wrong with the European Union? by Josephine Bacon

Posted on April 26, 2016 | 2 comments

In addition to the sovereignty member nations of the EU relinquish, there new lords and masters are both incompetent and corrupt. From Josephine Bacon at gatestoneinstitute.org:

• Ever since the inception of the European Economic Community, British politicians across the entire political spectrum have been perceptive enough to realize that Britain will lose its sovereignty and turn into a vassal of the France-Germany axis.

• This month, in March, an official audit reported that EU auditors refuse to sign off more than £100 billion ($144 billion) of EU spending. The Brussels accounts have not been given the all-clear for 19 years in a row.

There is a joke going around the internet it how the European Union works (or doesn’t):

Pythagoras’s theorem – 24 words.
Lord’s Prayer – 66 words.
Archimedes’s Principle – 67 words.
10 Commandments – 179 words.
Gettysburg address – 286 words.
U.S. Declaration of Independence – 1,300 words.
U.S. Constitution with all 27 Amendments – 7,818 words.

EU regulations on the sale of cabbage – 26,911 words.

Why are EU Regulations so long? Maybe because they have to be translated into the 18 official languages? Interpreters also have to be found who can work into and from those languages at the European Parliament. The translation budget is massive. One of the official languages currently is Irish. It can confidently be said that there is no one in the Republic of Ireland who does not speak English; many Irish do not even speak or understand Irish, and certainly none of Ireland’s politicians will be fluent only in Irish. But all of the “acquis,” the body of regulations that are already part of the EU body of laws, also have to be translated into the languages of candidates for EU membership, such as Turkey, thus adding more languages to the tally each time a new regulation is passed. If Catalonia breaks away from Spain and remains a member of the EU, Catalan will need to be added, even though Catalan politicians all speak perfect Spanish.

Corruption and Waste

This month, in March, an official audit reported that EU auditors refuse to sign off more than £100 billion ($144 billion) of EU spending. The Brussels accounts have not been given the all-clear for 19 years in a row. Moreover, the EU is apparently less than incompetent at managing the funds it has.

This is happening at a time when the EU is demanding that the UK pay it £1.7 billion ($2.45 billion). It was reported on September 17, 2015 in the Daily Mail newspaper that Britain had reluctantly paid this sum, which prime minister David Cameron himself, a fan of staying in Europe, has described as “appalling.”

Also reported on September 17 in the Daily Telegraph, was that, according to the annual report of the European Court of Auditors, £5.5 billion ($7.9 billion) of the EU budget last year was misspent because of controls on spending that were deemed by experts to be only “partially effective.”[1]

The audit, published on March 17, 2016, found that £109 billion ($157 billion) out of a total of £117 billion spent by the EU in 2013 alone was “affected by material error” — that is, disappeared into various people’s pockets.

To continue reading: “Brexit” – What Else Is Wrong with the European Union?

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US Bombs Afghanistan Hospital, Kills 9 Civilians, Injures 37; Tosses It Off As “Collateral Damage”, by Tyler Durden

Posted on October 3, 2015 | Leave a comment

From Tyler Durden, at Zero Hedge, via theburningplatform.com:

Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse for US foreign policy, or for the credibility of the US state department to slide further, it got much worse.

Less than a day after US ambassador to the UN, uber-warhawk Samantha Power informed Russia of the latest US foreign policy stance by tweeter, when she called “on Russia to immediately cease attacks on Syrian opposition and civilians” in the latest desperate attempt to halt the Russian campaign against US-created ISIS which may wipe out the terrorist threat in just a few short days, it was the US itself which admitted that early on Saturday the US airforce bombed an Afghan hospital run by the medical aid group Medecins Sans Frontieres, or Doctors without Borders, in the Afghan city of Kunduz in an air strike that killed at least nine people [the death toll is now at 16] and wounded 37.

As the Executive Director, of Doctors without Borders Jason Cone tweeted, “all parties 2 conflict, including in Kabul & Washington, were clearly informed of precise GPS Coordinates of @MSF facilities in Kunduz” and that the “precise location of @MSF Kunduz hospital communicated to all parties on multiple occasions over past months, including on 9/29.”

In other words, this morning’s US bombing was nothing more than another example of the utter incompetence, carelessness and disregard for innocent civilian lives that has become a staple hallmark of US foreign policy, something we have already witnessed repeatedly in the past 6 years as a result of the thousands of innocent people dead as part of US drone attacks, also known as “collateral damage.”

The attack, which started at 2:15am local time, took place when almost 200 patients and employees were in the hospital, the only one in the region that can deal with major injuries, Medecins Sans Frontieres said.

To continue reading (and pictures): US Bombs Afghanistan Hospital

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Failing 67 of 70 Tests Isn’t Bad, by Harry P.

Posted on June 1, 2015 | Leave a comment

TSA employees failed 67 of 70 tests where undercover agents passed through security while carrying fake prohibited items. We all know what this means. In Washington, nothing succeeds like failure. Looks like it’s time to increase the TSA’s budget. From Harry P. at theburningplatform.com:

TSA fails internal test, lets fake bombs through
The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) failed to find fake explosives and weapons in internal tests at almost all of America’s busiest airports, according to a Monday report from ABC news.

TSA employees failed 67 of 70 tests, where undercover agents tried to pass through security while carrying fake prohibited items. The news prompted Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson to meet with officials at TSA headquarters last week, according to the network.

“Upon learning the initial findings of the Office of Inspector General’s report, Secretary Johnson immediately directed TSA to implement a series of actions, several of which are now in place, to address the issues raised in the report,” the agency told ABC in a statement. The statement did not identify those fixes.

At least one test showed failures by agents to find a fake bomb even after the undercover agent set off a magnetometer. The screener reportedly let the agent through with the fake bomb taped to his back, despite a pat down.

The undercover agents, called the Red Team, have publicly exposed TSA weaknesses in the past. A 2013 test where an agent also made it through a metal detector with a fake bomb prompted then-TSA Sdministrator John Pistole to refer to the testers as “super terrorists” for their ability to use their knowledge of TSA policies to exploit weaknesses.

“They know exactly what the technology’s capabilities are of detection. They know exactly what our protocols are,” he said.

“They can create and devise and conceal items that only the best terrorist in the world would be able — not even the best terrorists would be able to do.”

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/tsa-fails-internal-test-lets-fake-bombs-through/ar-BBkukY7

http://www.theburningplatform.com/2015/06/01/failing-67-of-70-tests-isnt-bad/

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