U.S. arrests former Green Beret, son, in connection with Ghosn escape from Japan

> But these guys did believe in what they were doing, and they made huge sacrifices for it, including being willing to lay down their own lives. So maybe the overall operation being conducted wasn't honorable, however in my mind at least, what they were willing to sacrifice for what they believed was right, is something commendable.

So did the Nazis.

Corrupt prosecutors are evil and way too common. Prosecutors are supposed to be the gatekeeper -- they should be a bulwark against injustice.

I wish there was some plea offer reform to stop prosecutors from making coercive plea offers. I think that is one of the worse offenses against justice. E.g., offering plea deals with a choice of pleading guilty to a misdemeanor with no jail or you get multiple felonies thrown at you and the potential for years of prison.

The Feds are even worse with their false statements or mail/wire fraud charges. No wonder they get their convictions. Plea guilty to one count of making a false statement or you get 100 counts of mail fraud -- take your pick.

you know the plausible conspiracy theory that FANG etc companies for the past 15 years have been deploying an anti-competitive strategy of soaking up tech talent into excessively compensated jobs and putting them to work on vaporware BS projects that get canned after 3-5 years? even though GoogaAppaFaceSoftZon waste billions of dollars keeping tech nerds on the hamster wheel, that is still cheaper than the risk of having a large pool of Ronin tech geniuses who will launch competion to FAANG.

i often wonder if the same strategy is at play in Private Military Corps. having tens of thousands of retired and hungry for action SOCOM super soldiers could be a disaster. Having a large pool of idle mercs would make it easier for some Dr No to hire them to launch coups or terrorist attacks, like we have seen with the Zetas Cartel and the Mexican military in general. so PMCs serve a purpose to soak up excess SOCOM labor capacity, and keep them busy on movie script busy work that doesn't actually accomplish very much. The Pentagon doesn't have to worry about a veteran's coup like Smedley Butler's Business Plot against FDR in 1933.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot

while PMC's lavish compensation seems to us like an irrational market, counter-intuitively it is perfectly rational compared to the counter risk cost of coups and terrorism.

i would go even further and say 99% of the Infosec/CyberWhatever DFENS industry is also the same strategy of soaking up excess hacker labor on make-work. how much duplication of effort and futility is there in the Infosec industry. as we have seen from Snowden leaks and the Shadowbroker leaks of NSA source code, all digital security is a joke to Nation State hackers. NSA doesn't even need to break a sweat to disable all versions of every known AV, firewalls and traffic mirrors never spot them because they have countless exploits to root the scanners. so what purpose do marquee Computer Security corps like Crowdstrike, Mandiant, Symantec etc serve?

Infosec corps soak up hacker labor so we dont have 50,000 underemployed hackers who will get bored or angry and hack the planet.

it's cheaper to give potentially dangerous people fake jobs than to risk them destroying The System.

>This is also how Los Zetas formed. A bunch of elite soldiers figured out they could make a lot more money as enforcers for drug cartels.

And then very quickly figured out that the "drug cartel" bit was the easy part and they got rid of their employers rather quickly.

The whole Zetas story is a fascinating one. If only their employers had read The Prince:

"Mercenaries and auxiliaries are useless and dangerous; and if one holds his state based on these arms, he will stand neither firm nor safe; for they are disunited, ambitious and without discipline, unfaithful, valiant before friends, cowardly before enemies; they have neither the fear of God nor fidelity to men, and destruction is deferred only so long as the attack is; for in peace one is robbed by them, and in war by the enemy. The fact is, they have no other attraction or reason for keeping the field than a trifle of stipend, which is not sufficient to make them willing to die for you. They are ready enough to be your soldiers whilst you do not make war, but if war comes they take themselves off or run from the foe; which I should have little trouble to prove, for the ruin of Italy has been caused by nothing else than by resting all her hopes for many years on mercenaries, and although they formerly made some display and appeared valiant amongst themselves, yet when the foreigners came they showed what they were. Thus it was that Charles, King of France, was allowed to seize Italy with chalk in hand;"

> Now, it seems like every Navy SEAL now publically writes a book, sponsors a coffee line, or slaps their name, likeness and story all over everything from T-Shirts to gun accessories to clothing lines. It's made a complete mockery of what has always been a silent service and honorable job, and it's spawned a HUGE environment of tacticool people who want to act and look the part.

You can thank the propaganda machine being run through Hollywood, especially over the last few years (Zero Dark Thirty, American Sniper, Hurt Locker, etc.), for a lot of that.