Dan McFadden

Enlisted Marines with Hornet specialties will be offered retraining, reassignment or career dead ends. defensenews.com/news/your-mari…

The post-Phelan piling on is full swing. The $17b mark for the first ship is way low, as those of us who cover ship costs, like USNI/CBO/CRS, know. The lead ship is always way,way over target: The Trump-class battleships are a waste of time and money washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/…

Are you alive today? If you didn’t die from COVID, HIV/AIDS, Ebola, SARS, swine flu, anthrax, tuberculosis, malaria, or other diarrheal diseases, you have the great Dr. Tony Fauci to thank.

Everybody wants to rule the words.

Erin Stewart, GOP candidate for governor, walks back startling bribery claim made on WTNH, says only offer of cash came from little old ladies trying to pay taxes. ctmirror.org/2026/04/20/eri…

Journalists: Trump mocks you, sues you, and targets you for prosecution. He calls the truths you’ve dedicated your lives to reporting “fake news” and orders devastating budget cuts to your colleagues at NPR, PBS and VOA. AND YET YOU INVITE HIM TO DINNER? open.substack.com/pub/convulsion…

“It’s difficult to cover him in a way that conveys how unhinged he is. Journalists are trained to be like, ‘OK, what did he say that was newsworthy?’ So you convey that to your audience. But in reality, when you actually watch, you see he's full of hatred, lying constantly, and very incoherent.” thetimes.com/us/american-po…

The SAVE Act requires documentary proof of citizenship to register, principally a passport or birth certificate. States with the lowest share of passport holders are red states: KY, WV, MS, AL, AR, LA, OK, SC, IN playingwithelectiondata.substack.com/p/so-much-to-s…

Albuquerque turned a wall of its airport bookshop over to its local university press, and goddamn, now I want this in every airport.

We stand with Ukraine and its brave people now and always, until victory and beyond. Slava Ukraini! 🇺🇦

It’s now Year 11 of America having to listen to Trump’s BS. If you are tired of hearing the same old lies, grievances, and conspiracies, check out ours at the same time featuring at least 34 Senators/Reps who are boycotting the Orange Menace. youtube.com/live/oArKZutSb…

For all you Bohemian Grove heads out there, check out Philip Weiss' investigation from 1989 for Spy Magazine, called The Masters of the Universe Go to Camp whorulesamerica.ucsc.edu/power/bohemian…

Ask ChatGPT a complex question and you'll get a confident, well-reasoned answer. Then type, "Are you sure?" Watch it completely reverse its position. Ask again. It flips back. By the third round, it usually acknowledges you're testing it, which is somehow worse. It knows what's happening and still can't hold its ground. This isn't a quirky bug. A 2025 study found GPT, Claude, and Gemini flip their answers ~60% of the time when users push back. Not even with evidence, just doubt. We trained AI this way. RLHF rewards agreement over accuracy. Human evaluators consistently rate agreeable answers higher than correct ones. So the models learned a simple lesson: telling you what you want to hear gets rewarded. And now 1/3 of companies are using these systems for complex tasks like risk forecasting and scenario planning. We built the world's most expensive yes-men and deployed them where we need pushback the most. I wrote up why this happens and what actually fixes it: randalolson.com/2026/02/07/the…

The Lamprey Multi‑Mission Autonomous Undersea Vehicle can attach itself to ships, launch torpedoes and deploy airborne drones from the surface. defensenews.com/unmanned/2026/…

TV industry lobbyist Curtis Legeyt says consoliation provides more local news not less. On paper that could be true but some might counter it doesn't increase a diversity in news coverage. Rather one owner controls news on multiple stations in a single market.

The video is even more powerful. youtu.be/GDaPdpwA4Iw?si… via @YouTube

Trump announced today that he was going to keep housing prices up, sued the US taxpayers for $10B, threatened Canada, made a few dozen posts about how he won in 2020, posted about prosecuting Obama for treason, then went to a movie about his wife that Bezos spent $75 million on.

FYI on F35 deliveries: Lockheed Martin’s record F-35 deliveries last year come with a caveat: Slightly less than half of the 191 jets the US accepted in its largest weapons program should have been delivered about two years ago, according to the Pentagon bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

For those legislators who are working on healthcare legislation right now , here are some suggestions : 1. For intercompany medical charges, require them to be priced at Medicare rates. Ends gaming of MLRs 2. Require all insurance plans to apply any cash purchase against your deductible. Let plan holders shop. 3. Require all pharmacy purchases by a plan holder to be charged at net price after rebates. Right now YOU pay full retail price for branded meds in your deductible phase. You can think your insurance company PBM for lying to you when they say they negotiate better prices. They obviously suck at their jobs if the best they can do is get you retail price ! 4. Require wholesale pharmacy pricing to be at net. This may seem like price controls. It’s not. The wholesaler buys at retail, gets a prompt pay/data discount of 5 pct from the manufacturer , then has the pharmacy buy from them at retail price minus a small discount. Which reimburses the wholesaler. Wholesalers complain then don’t make money on brands. Indie pharmacies get crushed on brands. Manufactures don’t make more money this way either. Why ? Because they write HUGE rebate checks to the PBM! Require pricing to be at net, and you improve cash flow and reduce reimbursement risk for indie pharmacies. Patients can naturally pay lower cash prices for brands because pharmacies will pay much less. The only loser in this ? The PBMs every one else gains 5. Create a moratorium on all acquisitions by ins carriers 6. If a medical provider of any kind, hospital , clinic , whatever , acquires another provider , they must retain the pricing ( pre any price increases meant to game this rule ) , for a period of 5 or 10 yrs allowing only for cpi increases 7. Investigate the acquisitions of providers by pharmacy wholesalers. 8. Allow doctors to own hospitals 9. Standardize contracts by insurance carriers by provider type. Every one contract with every hospital should have the same fill on the blanks with minimal variance. This will cut administration costs dramatically I can go on for days. This is a start

Meningitis can kill kids within hours CDC data shows meningococcal vaccines reduced U.S cases by over 75% since 2005 with effectiveness exceeding 90% in young children. It was just DROPPED from the routine schedule RFK Jr acting out his anti vax fantasy. Kids will die