The Art of Invention :)

Yours Truly is back from building databases and solving the world's problems, this time with a riff on Rube Goldberg and why Rube's unique approach to design applies to government in ways that can't be made up. For starters, the F 35, the multi trillion dollar fubar unable to fly through clouds. 

In January, the Lockheed Martin production facility in Fort Worth, Texas, reported it was well along "in the final phase of building the wings" of the 100th F-35 constructed by the Bethesda, Maryland, company. Of the first 99 F-35s, none are yet operational.

The F-35 isn't even close to fully operational - it can fly only on sunny days. It can't fly at night. And it can't fly in clouds or near lightning. We know this because the Pentagon tells us so, in a report written for the Secretary of Defense by the Director of Operational Test and Evaluation, J. Michael Gilmore, dated February 15, 2013.

He who makes the rules

Barack Obama’s biggest second-term challenge isn’t guns or immigration. It’s saving his biggest first-term achievements, like the Dodd-Frank law, from being dismembered by lobbyists and conservative jurists in the shadowy, Byzantine “rule-making” process.

None of it made a difference. In September 2012, the U.S. Court for the District of Columbia Circuit overturned the CFTC’s rule. In the decision, the court wrote that the commission lacked a “clear and unambiguous mandate” to set position limits without first demonstrating that they were necessary and appropriate. And with that, more than two years after the passage of Dodd-Frank, there were still no federally administered position limits for any commodities except grain, and the CFTC was back to square one. The muckety-mucks at the exchanges rejoiced, as appropriate.

And we haven't even discussed healthcare, the siloed, proprietary and closed system operating totally outside of the net, complexified beyond belief, a system that will never, ever work as intended as long as the environment remains as uncompetitive and closed as it truly is.

Taxes, 20,000 pages and counting, the most complex document on earth, keeps metastasizing every month, only accessible to the upper 1/10th of 1% and big corporations able to grease the system by paying top dollar to minions to enable the GEs of the world to pay no taxes. 

And the beat goes on. :)