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Thursday, December 12, 2024

NJ weapons research arsenal also develops drones, as state flooded with mystery aircraft sightings

A US military installation in New Jersey — one of the sites where mystery drone sightings have been reported — has been helping develop robotic drones which can counter weapons of mass destruction, The Post has learned.

The US Army’s Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center, located at the Picatinny Arsenal in Morris County, awarded a Maryland company a $50 million contract in 2018 to develop robotic drones.

The drones can produce three dimensional maps of urban areas and engage in surveillance to counter WMDs, according to a press release from the US Army.

However, a spokesman for the Picatinny Arsenal said the military installation has nothing to do with the recent drone activity over the state — which has resulted in over 3,000 reports made to the FBI since the beginning of the month and has many local residents on edge.

“While the source and cause of these aircraft operating in our area remain unknown, we can confirm that they are not the result of any Picatinny Arsenal-related activities,” said Lt. Col Craig Bonham II in a news release earlier this week.

As a highly secure facility which develops and tests new bombs, guns, ammunition and warfare devices for all branches of the military, it is a target for espionage by foreign adversaries.

The facility itself has recorded 17 confirmed and uncomfirmed sightings of drones over its territory since November 13, which was one of the earliest sightings over the state, according to Bonham.

A “confirmed” sighting is one verified by security personal at the military installation while an “unconfirmed” sighting relates to those reported by others, including local residents.

The facility later focused on research and development of munitions and ammunition. The Picatinny Arsenal’s engineers have developed warheads, cannons, mortars, howitzers, precision-guided munitions and different calibers of ammunition such as high explosive anti-tank rounds, armor piercing rounds, and anti-personnel rounds, according to the Picatinny Enhancement Coalition.

Overall the aresnal supplies 90 percent of the Army’s “lethality” and all conventional ammunition and the site employs 4,500 people, according to the site.

Nighttime drone activity has unnerved some New Jersey residents over the last month with lawmakers demanding answers from the Pentagon, which has denied that the drones have been coming from enemy countries.

“They don’t know what it is,” said Republican NJ Rep. Jeff Van Drew Thursday. “They don’t know what it’s about. They haven’t taken one down to analyze it. They have no idea where it came from.”

Oak Ridge, New Jersey, resident Phil Doyle claimed he sees more than 30 drones per night over his house, which he claimed he sees coming from the direction of the military installation.

“It’s not two or three a night, it’s 30 or 50 a night. They have lights on them so you can see them,” he told NBC.

A spokesperson for the tech company told The Post Thursday that the contract with the military ended in 2023. In a 2018 press release, the US Army said it was working with Robotic Research on the drones.

“It is a great honour to expand our work for the US Army, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), and the Special Forces community on the family-of-systems for autonomous collaborative robotic teaming in support of challenging subterranean missions,” said Robotic Research president Alberto Lacaze when the contract was awarded.

“The Robotic Research team shares the army leadership’s commitment to rapidly fielding effective autonomous counter-WMD solutions for our nation’s warfighters.”

https://nypost.com/2024/12/12/us-news/picatinney-arsenal-also-developed-drones-to-counter-wmds/

Trump trade adviser warns against currency manipulation as China mulls weaker yuan

A top trade adviser to President-elect Donald Trump told Reuters on Thursday that the new administration would not look "fondly" on any attempt by China to manipulate its currency, responding to a Reuters report that authorities there were considering allowing the yuan to weaken next year.

Peter Navarro, Trump's incoming senior counselor for trade and manufacturing, said the White House would not interfere with the Treasury Department's biannual review looking in to whether foreign trade partners are manipulating their currencies.

He added, however: "I don't believe the Trump Treasury Department would welcome Chinese currency manipulation very fondly. The history of China as a currency manipulator is well-known."

Trump's administration labeled China a currency manipulator in 2019, the first time the U.S. government made that determination since 1994. The determination was revoked the subsequent year.

The move is more symbolic than substantive, but would nonetheless signal that Trump is willing to engage in an unprecedented trade war with the world's No. 2 economy as he frequently threatened to do on the campaign trail.

The 2019 move followed a period in which the Chinese government allowed the value of its currency to fall against the dollar.

On Thursday, Reuters reported that China's top leaders and policymakers are considering allowing the yuan to weaken in 2025 as they brace for higher U.S. trade tariffs as Trump returns to the White House.

The contemplated move reflects China's recognition that it needs bigger economic stimulus to combat Trump's threats of punitive trade measures, Reuters reported. Trump has said he plans to impose a 10% universal import tariff, and a 60% tariff on Chinese imports into the United States.

Navarro, who also served as an economic adviser during Trump's first term, said Trump could choose to escalate tariffs even further if China weakens its currency, rather than waiting for the biannual Treasury report.

"There's appropriate remedies there," Navarro said. "If (Trump) didn't want to wait for any report, he could just raise tariffs higher."

https://www.xm.com/au/research/markets/allNews/reuters/trump-trade-adviser-warns-against-currency-manipulation-as-china-mulls-weaker-yuan-53987379

'White House releases strategy to counter anti-Muslim, anti-Arab hate'

U.S. President Joe Biden on Thursday released a long-awaited strategy for countering anti-Muslim and anti-Arab hate, up sharply since the start of the Israel-Gaza war, calling for urgent, continued work to reduce discrimination and bias.

The 64-page document comes weeks before the inauguration of former President Donald Trump, who imposed a travel ban on people from some majority Muslim countries during his first term that Biden rescinded on his first day in office.

It mirrors a comprehensive strategy to fight antisemitism released by the White House in September 2023, and comes more than a year after death of six-year-old boy Wadea Al-Fayoume, stabbed by a man who targeted him and his mother because they were Palestinian-American.

In a foreword to the strategy, Biden called the attacks on the Chicago boy and his mother "heinous acts" and noted a spike in anti-Muslim and anti-Arab hate crimes, discrimination and bullying that he called wrong and unacceptable.

"Muslims and Arabs deserve to live with dignity and enjoy every right to the fullest extent along with all of their fellow Americans," Biden wrote. "Policies that result in discrimination against entire communities are wrong and fail to keep us safe."

The Council on American Islamic Relations, a Muslim civil rights group, called the strategy "too little, too late" and faulted the White House for not ending a federal watchlist and "no-fly" list that includes many Arab and Muslim Americans.

The Trump transition team had no immediate comment on the strategy or whether it would support it.

Trump, who won support from some Muslim voters angry about Biden's support for Israel's war in Gaza, has said he will ban entry to the U.S. of anyone who questions Israel's right to exist and revoke visas of foreign students who are "antisemitic."

Tensions between pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian groups surged on some U.S. campuses after the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks in Israel, with human rights advocates warning of rising antisemitism, Islamophobia and anti-Arab hate.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/white-house-releases-strategy-counter-232811710.html

US grand jury charges former Syrian prison official with torture

A federal grand jury in Los Angeles charged a former Syrian government official who headed the Damascus Central Prison from 2005 to 2008 with torture, the U.S. Justice Department said on Thursday.

Samir Ousman Alsheikh, 72, headed the Adra prison, as it is colloquially known, during that period, allegedly ordering subordinates to inflict severe physical and mental pain and suffering on political and other prisoners, the department said.

He was sometimes personally involved in such incidents, the department added in its statement.

Reuters could not immediately contact Alsheikh to seek comment.

The torture aimed to deter opposition to the regime of ousted Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, the department said, adding that Alsheikh later allegedly lied about his crimes to obtain a U.S. "green card", or residence permit.

Alsheikh, who allegedly held positions in the Syrian police and the state security apparatus, was associated with the ruling Syrian Ba'ath Party, and was appointed governor of the province of Deir Ez-Zour by Assad in 2011.

A superseding indictment returned on Thursday alleged that Alsheikh immigrated to the United States in 2020 and applied for citizenship in 2023.

The indictment added three counts of torture and one count of conspiracy to commit torture to charges of visa fraud and attempted naturalization fraud that figured in an initial indictment against Alsheikh in August.

In a separate U.S. indictment unsealed on Monday, two former high-ranking Syrian intelligence officials under Assad were charged with war crimes.

These included conspiracy to mete out cruel and inhuman treatment to civilian detainees, including U.S. citizens, during the Syrian civil war that began in 2011.

Syrian rebels put an end to more than 50 years of rule by the Assad family over the weekend following a lightning advance.

The 13-year civil war killed hundreds of thousands, unleashed a refugee crisis and left cities bombed to rubble, the countryside depopulated and the Syrian economy hollowed out by global sanctions.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/us-grand-jury-charges-former-041314627.html

A running list of ‘intelligence community’ screwups

By Jack Hellner

Below are just some of the things that the Democrat intelligence community under Joe Biden has screwed up on:

A Chinese spy balloon was allowed to fly over the U.S. gathering information.

Large drones have been flying around the Northeast for weeks, and the intelligence community and FBI allege to have no knowledge of who owns them. Yet the public is told they are not foreign owned, and the public is in no danger—how can they know that if they don’t know what they are, or who is behind them?

The borders are wide open with known terrorists and other violent criminals flowing in, yet the intelligence community is extremely quiet on the risks.

Tens of thousands of young Chinese men have come across the border, and the intelligence community seems to have little (if any) interest.

Hamas planned the October 7 attacks against Israel for years, yet somehow our intelligence community had no idea.

The intelligence community seemed to have no idea rebels were going to take over Syria until it happened.

The intelligence community seemed to have no idea that the Taliban would overrun Afghanistan in such a short time.

Throughout all these intelligence failures under Biden, I do not recall The Wall Street Journal saying how dangerous Biden’s people are, and calling for their replacement; but that’s exactly what the paper’s editorial board is doing over Trump’s picks, and he’s not even in office!

How Tulsi Gabbard Sees the World

Her dogmatic, hard-left views make her a risky fit for assessing intel.
Consider her [Gabbard’s] views on Israel, Syria and Iran. The chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency said Friday that Iran’s capacity to produce near-weapons-grade uranium is “increasing dramatically,” perhaps “seven, eight times more.” That and the Syrian regime’s collapse put a premium on sound intelligence and judgment early in Mr. Trump’s term.
The DNI’s job is to convey intelligence fairly to a President even when it benefits a disfavored policy or overturns a cherished notion. Ms. Gabbard’s record suggests she is as likely to reject new intel and muddy the waters.
That’s how it was with Syria, where Ms. Gabbard’s opposition to U.S. involvement led her to defend dictator Bashar al-Assad from findings of chemical-weapons use. At times in her 2020 campaign, she wouldn’t concede that the Butcher of Damascus is a war criminal.
Ms. Gabbard could have made a case for U.S. restraint without apologizing for Mr. Assad. Instead she published a report full of crank theories, including that Syrian chemical attacks ‘may have been staged by opposition forces for the purpose of drawing the United States and the West deeper into the war.’

They say she might not be worried enough about Iran and its nuclear weapons. Let’s see, the Biden administration has funded Iran and allowed the buildup, but we are supposed to be scared that Tulsi might not take the issue seriously enough? Just last month, Biden “quietly renewed” economic sanctions waivers, freeing up another $10 billion for the regime.

Secretary of State Blinken reportedly organized the letter signed by 51 former intelligence officials which falsely asserted the Hunter laptop was Russian misinformation—intentional interfered in the election—yet I don’t recall the WSJ saying that people who are so willing to lie to the public, like Blinken and his signers, should have their security clearances taken away.

They are also worried that in the past, Tulsi didn’t take the threat of Assad seriously enough—but it was Barack Obama who drew the fictional red line for Assad and who did nothing when he reportedly used chemical weapons on his people. Instead, he allowed Putin to monitor the weapons. That is appeasement. Why didn’t the intelligence officials complain? But according to the WSJ, Tulsi is dangerous.

I am sure Tulsi, along with the entire Trump administration, will work tirelessly to weaken Iran, in contrast to Biden, Obama, and their team, who all worked to strengthen Iran and the tyrants.

I am also sure that Tulsi, along with the entire Trump team, will work to lower the price of energy, which will weaken Iran and Russia, helping to lower global inflation rates and create a more peaceful world.

The WSJ along with most of the media just keep their mouths shut on Tulsi, Pete Hegseth, and others since they rarely, if ever, demanded accountability on all of the failures during Obama and Biden.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/12/a_running_list_of_intelligence_community_screwups.html

Re-Skilling America

Should fewer Americans go to college? In 2022, 37.6% of adults without a disability had at least a bachelor’s degree. In 1990 only 20% of the older-than-25 population had a bachelor’s degree, and in 1970 the share was 11%. And yet according to the Strada Institute for the Future of Work, a decade after graduation with four-year degrees 45% of Americans work in jobs that do not require college diplomas. These unfortunate young Americans have wasted four years of their lives and tuition money, and in some cases have incurred sizable student loan debt, in exchange for coursework that is essentially worthless.

What explains the large-scale miscredentialing of the American workforce? The endless greed of tuition-hungry universities is one factor. But the main cause is the insistence of many American employers, including federal, state, and local government, that new hires have college diplomas—even for jobs that are currently filled by workers without four-year degrees.

Like other forms of inflation, degree inflation reduces the inflated unit of currency. Today a worker earning between $40,000 and $60,000 in inflation-adjusted 2022 dollars is as likely to have a bachelor’s degree as a worker in 2006 who earned between $60,000 and $80,000, when there were fewer college graduates as a share of the workforce. According to the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity (FREOPP): “Between 1990 and 2021, all occupational categories except one—teachers and librarians—experienced degree inflation, meaning the proportion of prime-age workers with a bachelor’s degree increased.”

There is no reason to believe that receptionists and bank tellers with B.A.s in popular majors like communications or business, to say nothing of gender studies, are more productive and skilled than their non-college-educated predecessors who had high school educations plus on-the-job training. According to a survey of employers by Bloomberg, college diplomas are most often used as a screening device for entry-level job applicants, rather than as evidence that the potential hires have job-relevant skills: “For more than half of employers surveyed (60 percent), a college diploma was seen as a stand-in for work ethic, personal skills and mental capacity, as opposed to the actual skills associated with the job.”

From the employer’s perspective, weeding out job applicants in favor of college graduates on the assumption that at least someone with a B.A. is likely to show up on time and complete assigned tasks may make sense. But wasting four or more years in college at a cost of $100,000 and up is a wildly inefficient way for graduates to prove they are more punctual and harder working than their peers. Worse, using college degrees as a simple sorting mechanism discriminates against the majority of Americans, whether from inner cities or rural areas, whose education ends with high school or some college, for a mix of cultural and economic factors that have no strong relation to either native intellect or the capacity for work discipline.

What if young people could acquire certificates for useful job skills that would encourage employers to waive the four-year-college requirement? For years pundits and policymakers have discussed the need for noncollege pathways to career success, and some firms and government agencies have begun to waive unnecessary college diploma requirements for applicants. The problem is that any attempt to replace four-year degrees with widely recognized skill certificates runs into barbed-wire barriers in the form of existing licensing requirements in many occupations. It is not enough to have a skills certificate, if you must also pass a federal or state licensing exam in order to work.

In their book The Captured Economy: How the Powerful Enrich Themselves, Slow Down Growth, and Increase Inequality (2017), Brink Lindsey and Steven M. Teles point out that occupational licensing has risen from covering only about 5% of American workers in the 1950s to 15% in the 1970s to being required for around one in four today. Behind this explosion of occupational licensing requirements is the economic self-interest of practitioners of the licensed trade, who pressure state licensing boards to protect them from competition by making licensing standards artificially high. According to a study by the Obama administration, licensing requirements tend to produce a “wage premium” for licensed workers, ranging from a negligible one in the case of food preparation workers (think McDonald’s) to a percent wage premium of more than 15% for health care support workers and workers in business, finance, and education.

The danger that the artificially inflated incomes may fall with more entrants to the sector motivates occupational cartels to resist licensing reform. While minimal skill requirements are necessary in occupations involving health or public safety, many licensing requirements are deliberately made excessive in order to protect incumbent members of an occupation who influence the requirements of state licensing boards. In addition to boosting incomes in cartelized occupations by restricting competition, onerous state licensing requirements reduce interstate mobility because workers must get a new state license to work in the same profession when they move from one state to another.

The federal government can first undertake credential reforms in its own hiring. While federal employment is roughly 3 million jobs, or less than 2% of the national workforce, state and local governments tend to follow federal requirements while employing an additional 20 million Americans.

To date, attempts to overcome the balkanization of the American workforce by instituting universal licensing requirements have met only limited success. Twenty states have enacted “universal license recognition,” permitting workers licensed in other states to practice a trade. But as the Institute for Justice points out, the scope of these universal license recognition laws is limited by residency requirements (five states), rules that the previous state license must be “substantially equivalent” to the state’s own requirements, penalizing workers from states with less rigorous licensing (12 states). More generous jurisdictions, including Virginia and Arizona, allow transplanted workers to pursue their trades on the basis of a similar “scope of practice” rather than similar licensing requirements (eight states), while five states permit obtaining a license if the practitioner has at least three years of experience in an occupation.

State-level occupational licensing made sense in an agrarian America with mostly local markets. However, if a new constitutional convention were held today, it is doubtful that the delegates would set up a system in which dental aides may need to pass a different test each time they move across arbitrary state borders. At the same time, nationalizing education requirements for hairdressers and florists and casket sellers is unlikely to be a cause many national politicians would treat as a priority.

The good news is that technological innovation is likely to create many entirely new occupations, while rendering others obsolete. This may provide opportunities for exclusive federal government licensing in some cases and, in other new vocations, the outsourcing of state licensing to national nonprofit organizations. In aviation, an occupation that did not exist before the development of modern technology and one that is inherently national, the federal government is the sole licensing authority. Pilots must be certified at the national level by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), part of the U.S. Department of Transportation. As telecommuting creates new jobs in which clients are in different states or countries than practitioners, the federal government can seek to preempt regulation, including licensing regulation.

Another option involves national licensing associations recognized by state authorities. One new technology-based industry is nuclear medicine, a field that uses radioactive tracers for diagnosis and treatment. A national organization, the Nuclear Medicine Technology Certification Board (NMTCB) was founded in 1977 as a nonprofit incorporated in Delaware. In 1978 the NMTCB administered its first exam to more than 600 students in 22 sites across the country. Today a majority of states require a license to practice nuclear medicine, and most of them waive a state exam for those who have been certified by NMTCB or by the American Registry of Radiologic Technologists (ARRT), a national nonprofit based in Mendota Heights, Minnesota.

As technological innovation creates new job categories—flying car mechanic? Robot pet veterinarian? AI-assisted virtual reality fantasy castle interior decorator?—states should be encouraged to outsource occupational certification to national nonprofits with national tests and national registries of certificants like NMTCB or ARRT.

A program to eliminate or nationalize occupational licensing requirements must be accompanied by policies to boost the power of workers, both licensed and unlicensed, to demand higher wages—policies that include unionization or sectoral wage boards, higher state or local minimum wages, and laws against the abuse by employers of noncompete agreements. Otherwise, the elimination of the wage premium caused by overly restrictive, cartellike state licensing schemes will cause the wages of everyone in the industry to drop. The goal must be to lower barriers to entry to the nursing aide profession without lowering the incomes of nursing aides.

Reductions of both legal and illegal immigration are also necessary in order to increase both access and wages. Lowering excessive barriers to entry in licensed occupations, or eliminating licensing of some trades altogether, will not improve the lives of American workers if they are forced to compete with great numbers of desperate immigrants willing to work for low wages in miserable conditions.

Providing greater career opportunities for young Americans who obtain certifiable skills as an alternative to obtaining a four-year college degree is necessary. But it will not happen overnight. Success will require greater nationalization and standardization of skills training, with states outsourcing more certifications to national nonprofit agencies, and with federal preemption of the regulation of new industries. And moving from our balkanized, state-based licensing system to an integrated national labor market will fail to raise the incomes of non-college-graduate workers, unless the power of those workers to compel employers to pay higher wages is enhanced by pro-labor laws and tighter labor markets.

Change will not happen overnight, but we can see how today’s overcredentialed and underpaid workers can be succeeded by workers who can go from high school to practicing a trade for a living wage without a costly four-year detour on a university campus in order to obtain a degree they are unlikely to ever use.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/reskilling-america

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