https://federalnewsradio.com/defense-main/2017/12/navy-says-its-wasted-4-billion-on-continuing-resolutions-since-2011/

Congress’ seemingly unbreakable habit of running the government via a series of continuing resolutions, rather than full-year appropriations bills, has caused the U.S. Navy to waste $4 billion since 2011, officials said Monday.

Service leaders disclosed the estimate just four days before the expiration of the current continuing resolution, expressing a degree of exasperation that it remains unclear exactly how — or if — the government will be funded for the remainder of 2018. They argued that as much as the sea service believes it needs additional funding in order to carry out the full scope of its missions, receiving what funds it does get in a stable, predictable way is even more crucial.

“We have put $4 billion in a trash can, poured lighter fluid on it, and burned it,” Navy Secretary Richard Spencer said in remarks at a U.S. Naval Institute forum in Washington. “Four billion is enough to buy a squadron of F-35s, two Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, 3,000 Harpoon missiles. It’s enough money to buy us additional capacity that we need. Instead, it’s lost, because of inefficacy in the ways of the continuing resolution.”

Although the Defense Department has faced fewer continuing resolutions than domestic agencies have in recent decades, it has still spent at least part of each of the past 10 years under a CR. Because of that, Navy managers have become somewhat adept at navigating their way through the stopgap funding measures.

http://money.cnn.com/2017/12/05/news/companies/corporate-consolidation/index.html?iid=hp-toplead-dom

You've got fewer choices than you used to.
The dominant companies in all kinds of industries now control their markets like never before, thanks in large part to a string of corporate mergers.

"Almost every industry in the United States has become more concentrated over time. That's for sure," said Thomas Philippon, professor of finance at New York University. "All this consolidation has led to less competition, and higher costs for consumers."

More than 75% of U.S. industries have experienced an increase in concentration levels over the last two decades, according to a study by three professors -- Gustavo Grullon of Rice University, Yelena Larkin of York University and Roni Michaely of Cornell.

The trend is a good one for companies. Corporate profits and stock prices are up, and the consolidation and reduced competition is clearly part of the reason, said Larkin. But a lack of competition can lead to higher prices and lost jobs, among other problems.

"Even in cases where prices have fallen, such as airlines, service has deteriorated with the decreased competition," said Dean Baker, co-chairman of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a liberal think tank.

And Baker says if tax reform does bring about a sharp drop in corporate taxes, that could free up money for companies to make even more acquisitions.

http://www.cnn.com/2017/12/05/politics/white-women-class-divide-gender-divide/index.html

If Republican Roy Moore wins next week's Senate special election in Alabama, it will be largely because of his support among women.

More specifically, Moore's ability to survive the allegations of sexually pursuing young girls, which have rocked his campaign, will likely turn on whether he can maintain his pre-scandal advantage among white women without a college education -- even as their college-educated counterparts have moved toward Democrat Doug Jones in much bigger numbers than usual for deeply conservative Alabama, according to public and private polling in the race.

With that contrast, the Alabama race is illuminating one of the least understood political trends of the Donald Trump era. Many commentators have warned that Republicans face a systemic problem with female voters under Trump -- and could see that difficulty deepen if Moore wins and is seated in the Senate. But that conclusion is far too sweeping. Rather than a monolithic response, the Trump era instead is widening the divide between the political preferences of white-collar and blue-collar white women.

The much-touted gender gap hasn't disappeared. Whether looking at whites, blacks or Hispanics, Democrats consistently run better among women than men (or from the other angle, Republicans run better among men than women).

But in the Trump era, the class divide looks more powerful than the gender divide, especially among whites. In the 2016 presidential race, Trump ran much better among white women without a college education than those with an advanced degree. In fact, the gap between the two groups was by far the widest recorded in exit polls since at least the presidential race of 1980.

http://www.businessinsider.com/us-missile-defenses-fired-5-saudi-houthi-riyadh-missed-2017-12


A member of a special force loyal to the Houthi rebels riding atop a vehicle during a military parade in Sanaa, Yemen.

Officials have said that interceptors from a US missile defense system took out a ballistic missile fired at an airport in Saudi Arabia, but a new analysis by The New York Times suggests that didn't happen.
The likely failure of the US missile defense system shows a weakness as Saudi Arabia's enemies seem intent on firing more and more missiles.

In late November, a missile fired by Iran-backed Houthi militants in Yemen came streaking through the sky toward the airport in Saudi Arabia's capital, Riyadh.

The Saudis spotted the incoming fire and shot off five missile interceptors from a US-supplied missile defense system to stop the threat, they say.

"Our system knocked the missile out of the air," US President Donald Trump later said of the incident. "That's how good we are. Nobody makes what we make, and now we're selling it all over the world."

But a new analysis by The New York Times suggests that the missile's failure to hit its target was a fluke and that the missile interceptors all missed.

Essentially, the analysis says that the parts of the Houthi-fired missile that crashed in Saudi Arabia indicate that the interceptors, fired from a Patriot Advanced Capability 3 system, did not hit the warhead as they were supposed to.

Instead, an interceptor probably hit a part of the missile tube that had detached from the warhead, The Times found. The warhead most likely continued to travel, unimpeded, to where it blew up outside the airport. Witnesses reported hearing the explosion, and satellite imagery uncovered by The Times suggests that emergency vehicles responded to the blast.

The missile, an old Scud variant, can be expected to miss by about a kilometer. The Scuds are old and error-prone, and the older ones used by the Houthis are relatively cheap.

But the missile defense system developed by the US costs a few million dollars and has been touted by defense officials as one of the most advanced in the world.

In South Korea, the same missile defense systems and technologies are designed to defend US troops and thousands of civilians from a North Korean missile strike.

http://fortune.com/2017/11/30/dogs-or-cats-smarter-study/

They might chew your shoes, occasionally pee on the rug, or snarf down your entire dinner the minute you turn your head, but it turns out your family dog is measurably smarter than your cat.

Researchers at Vanderbilt decided to put the age old debate to the test objectively, studying the number of cortical neurons in the brains of a number of animals. The results? Canines had a significantly higher number than felines.

Dogs, it turns out, have about 530 million cortical neurons. Cats have less than half that, coming in with 250 million. (We humans have about 16 billion.)

“I believe the absolute number of neurons an animal has, especially in the cerebral cortex, determines the richness of their internal mental state and their ability to predict what is about to happen in their environment based on past experience,” said Suzana Herculano-Houzel, associate professor of psychology and biological sciences at Vanderbilt, who oversaw the study with a collection of international researchers.

The paper, which will be published in the journal Frontiers in Neuroanatomy (and almost certainly maligned on reddit, the Internet’s haven for cat lovers), notes that the physical size of the brain doesn’t necessarily relate to overall intelligence. For example, researchers found that the brain of a brown bear, while 10 times as large as a cat’s, has roughly the same number of neurons. (Raccoons, also, are on par with cats when it comes to smarts.)

Despite the findings, don’t expect this argument to go away anytime soon. Herculano-Houzel herself admits that, while the study was objective, she herself does have a bit of a bias.

“I’m 100 percent a dog person,” she says, “but, with that disclaimer, our findings mean to me that dogs have the biological capability of doing much more complex and flexible things with their lives than cats can.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/world/north-korea-launch/

It wasn’t a big surprise, but it was a big deal — so much so that North Korea issued commemorative stamps. Two successful missile launches in July almost certainly proved that the country had produced an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of striking the United States. A Nov. 29 test that flew even higher and longer indicated that the entire U.S. mainland most likely was within range.

According to U.S. intelligence analysts, the country also has nuclear warheads small enough to fit on its missiles. On Sept. 2, the country tested its most powerful nuclear device yet, a blast seven times the size of the bomb the United States dropped on Hiroshima.

Nonproliferation experts had long assumed that the secretive country’s nuclear capability was further along than many people wanted to believe, but seeing the proof was still jarring.

North Korea has launched 20 missile tests in 2017, and 15 were successful, according to a database maintained by the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies. The tests represented giant leaps forward in technology.