Category Archives: View

View 787 Tuesday, August 27, 2013

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barrack Obama, January 31, 2009

“Build your enemy a golden bridge to retreat across.”

The Art of War

Sun Tzu

It has become breaking news and hard to follow, but one thrust is clear: the neo-cons and Secretary Kerry seem determined to involve the United States in the Syrian war. There has been no suggestion of what would get us out of the war once we are in it.

The provocation is about 100 civilians killed by war gas. The death of those civilian Syrians could not have been very useful to Bashar al-Assad, and thus he would have had to be a very stupid man to have ordered their use against that target: if you are going to cross a line in the sand, you don’t do it by spitting across it.

In the old days it was traditional for major powers to demonstrate their serious intentions by bombarding a port of a minor nation that wasn’t paying sufficient tribute to the major power. A warship would pull into the harbor and bombard the fort. Tomahawk missiles are I suppose the modern equivalent except that we will be bombarding cities far inland. Drone warfare with a vengeance. If we are fortunate the result will not exceed more than 200 civilian casualties. We will be certain there will be some, and that there will be a teddy bear in the wreckage shown on world television.

The news states that we are doing target selection, and trying to involve others in the fight, to include Turkey. Is this an invocation of NATO against Russia? I don’t know of any formal alliance between Russia and Syria; there is nothing like WTO involved.

We seem on a track to war. Not to effect a regime change – after all both Kerry and Mrs. Clinton have said that Bashar al-Assad is more liberal than his father and at one time they seemed to prefer him to the rebels who slaughter Christians – but to “punish” Syria for using war gas. And we have decided that he has used them, in the most ineffective way he could have used them, for no military purpose whatever.

I’m waiting for the TV image of the teddy bear on the wreckage from an American bombardment.

Syria and the "third possibility that nobody counted upon"

Jerry

I recall listening to the “Entire Massacree” of Alice’s Restaurant some 45 years ago, and many times since. Aside from inspiring me to visit the village of Stockbridge, Massachusetts, the song had a line in it I have never forgotten:

"There was a third possibility that nobody had counted upon."

I thought of that while pondering the recent chemical attack in Syria. Seemingly everybody wants to blame the government, but the government denies they made the attack. As chemical attacks go, it was pretty small. Would the Assad government risk US intervention over so small an attack? I haven’t heard that any strategic assets were being threatened. It just seems like a random attack. Who would do such a thing?

There are four major factions in Syria – one government and three separatist groups. I think the Kurds had nothing to do with this. It seems unlikely the Assads would have much to gain from this attack. The quantity of gas used in the attack seems to fit the resources of someone who had captured that supply from government stores, not the government itself. Could this be an example of the jihadists attacking secular rebels and civilians with captured gas?

Ed

I find a false flag operation far more probable than that Bashar ordered an ineffective gas attack just so he could be accused of using them.

Jerry,

I am speaking as someone who has professional experience and knowledge obtained from professional contacts but no access to specific intelligence.

1. I am mortally convinced that Saddam had chemical weapons, to include non-conventional chemical weapons. Based on information I’ve seen, a portion was likely transferred to Syria by Saddam, a portion was disposed of by Saddam’s forces, and a portion was disposed of by other means. I can’t confirm any of this, but I have seen too much evidence – virtually all open source – just short of confirmation to believe otherwise. I can speculate on sound reasons why the government would suppress such information, even to the political embarrassment of President Bush.

2. Regarding the current Syrian exercise: I am going back to your original comment: who did it. This looks like an attack mostly against civilians in a rebel-held zone, and the casualties appear to be mostly non-combatants. Kerry is blaming Assad, but it could as easily be a false flag operation intended to force the US in against the Assad regime. Given the previous round of emails-essays about Muslim Brotherhood involvement in US politics, I am forced to the belief that the current Administration is supporting the false flag.

A

It would be far better for the United States to be thought feckless for assuming this was not done by Assad than to have us involved in yet one more perpetual war for perpetual peace. We have plenty of work for the armed forces without killing Syrians in Syria.

WMDs in Iraq

Dr. Pournelle,

I have to toss the "BS flag" when anyone says that no one found any sort of VX, Sarin, or whichever sort of nerve agent in Iraq. I personally met soldiers from the 4th Infantry Division that not only stumbled upon bunkers of 55 gallon drums full of it, they had to go through the complete decontamination procedures, to include the extra long swabs rammed up into their sinuses and all other orifices. Painful to say the least.

I’m sure that, for whatever reason, our military was directed to report that no WMDs were found. I cannot come up with any good reason why this was so, but suffice to say, that statement is not correct. I lump it in the same category with the stories from Vietnam when our military claimed that Agent Orange had no side effects and from the Gulf War, as is still maintained that Saddam did not use chemical weapons on our soldiers, even though the chemical detectors were repeatedly set off from the "smoke" drifting in on my unit’s positions. Our NCO told us that his direction was to wear NBC suits and masks until told otherwise.

In short, I was in Kuwait and spoke with the 4th ID chemical guys and know the people that experienced the chemo attack in the Gulf War. The all stick by their stories.

Keep up the good work,

Bill R.

But there was great incentive to show WMD and take Johnny Depp over to look at them. Along with other critics of the Iraq war. I would have thought that Bush had paladin officers out looking for any signs of WMD ready to summon the New York Times…

Syria–a DARPA challenge?

How do you disable chemical weapons from afar? What can we do neutralize the poison in the tanks? Or in the atmosphere? Put a blanket over the stockpiles? Chelate the stuff in the air? I realize that such technology might not be available right away, but looking ahead, it seems like a good investment, not only for rogue states, but also for everyone’s homeland security.

Maybe we could yet turn the whole dreadful Syria thing into a positive, if we could figure out a new way to deal with gas, before they turn some loose on closer to home.

JP

Vaporize and burn. There was considerable research on this at Edgewood in the 1960’s and I make no doubt there has been more since them. It is a messy operation and if there are a lot of chemicals the timing is crucial: the napalm has to arrive just in time to prevent the toxins from dispersing before they can burn, but after the disruption of their containers.  I have no idea whether the Navy has ever practiced such operations. They are very tricky and the chance of something going wrong and killing a lot of people is quite high.

If your own troops are threatened there are desperation operations; after all, one does not wait for the enemy to fire his machine guns if you can blow up the bunker.  But if the bunker is in the middle of an orphanage it does give pause to those who order the bombardment.

When I was a sophomore in high school I concluded from my studies that the law ought to be color blind.  Except for the Brothers at my school I was regarded as a communist. I continued in that opinion for the rest of my life, and now I am regarded as a hopeless right wing radical.  Yet I continue to believe that the law ought to be color blind.  I have a dream.

An 88 year old WW II vet was murdered in Spokane by two teen agers who were apparently infuriated when he defended himself, and doubtless thought he had dissed them when he didn’t plead and give them everything he had. I do not see much national outrage. http://www.cnn.com/2013/08/26/us/world-war-vet-beating-death

http://edition.cnn.com/2013/07/13/justice/zimmerman-it-firing/index.html 

View 787 Sunday, August 25, 2013

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barrack Obama, January 31, 2009

Thinking about Syria.

The Wall Street Journal recently featured twin pieces by John Bolton and Elliot Abrams indicating a split in the neo-conservative enthusiasm for involving American troops in Middle East combat actions. Abrams wanted us to snub the Egyptian Mamelukes; Bolton thinks we should support the Egyptian Army.

This may indicate a weakening of the neocon control over the Republican party http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/08/frank-rich-even-neocons-disagree-on-mideast.html It may not. It is certainly worth noting.

The neocon division over Syria is even more dramatic. Some Republicans in Congress appear to be calling for a Congressional resolution authorizing the President to use the American military to intervene in the Syrian civil war. The NYMAG article linked above has this to say: “(It was particularly galling to hear John McCain say this week that such an intervention would come at “very little cost” — essentially the same prediction he made about the war in Iraq.)” It was said of the Bourbons when they returned to power in France after the Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars that they had learned nothing and had forgotten nothing. One may say the same of Senator McCain.

We have mail on the subject:

Syrian gas attack

Dear Dr. Pournelle:

You wrote: "There are more stories of chemical weapons used in Syria. I find them utterly unconvincing. The evidence for actual use of chemical weapons is not clear, and even if it were incontrovertible I would be more inclined to suspect false flag operations than sudden senility in Bashar Al-Assad."

The basis for the allegation is reported in a story ("Syria: Cameron and Obama move west closer to intervention <http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/24/syria-cameron-obama-intervention/print> ") in the British newspaper The Observer, which provides some details of the evidence. I quote the relevant section of the article for your convenience:

"The dramatic upping of the stakes came after the international medical charity Médecins sans Frontières (MSF) reported that three hospitals in Damascus had received approximately 3,600 patients displaying neurotoxic symptoms <http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/24/syrian-chemical-weapons-rebel> in less than three hours on the morning of Wednesday, 21 August. Of those patients, 355 are reported to have died.

"Dr. Bart Janssens, MSF’s director of operations, said: "Medical staff working in these facilities provided detailed information to MSF doctors regarding large numbers of patients arriving with symptoms including convulsions, excess saliva, pinpoint pupils, blurred vision and respiratory distress."

"He said the reported symptoms strongly indicated "mass exposure to a neurotoxic agent. This would constitute a violation of international humanitarian law, which absolutely prohibits the use of chemical and biological weapons."

"France’s foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, said on Saturday that "all the information at our disposal converges to indicate that there was a chemical massacre near Damascus and that the [regime of Bashar al-Assad] is responsible".

"The foreign secretary, William Hague, said last week <http://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2013/aug/21/william-hague-syria-chemical-weapons-video> that "this is a chemical attack by the Assad regime" and "not something that a humane or civilised world can ignore"."

Now, it is certainly possible that the medical professionals involved are mistaken, or that they have been suborned into making fictitious accusations. To borrow your own reasoning, I find it much easier to believe that an increasingly-desperate Assad was willing to risk Western (meaning US, really) intervention by using gas on his own people, than that MSF would simply make something like that up. Assad, at least, has clear motivation: he doesn’t want to wind up hanging upside down from a meathook. What possible motivations MSF would have, by contrast, are somewhat unclear.

As lagniappe, you will note that the article quotes the French (socialist) foreign minister as strongly supporting the gas story: again, given France’s somewhat unhelpful attitudes toward US interventions in the past, this seems essentially like an admission against interest.

This certainly seems–if not conclusive–certainly strongly validating of the gas attack allegations.

I believe it is perhaps overly conclusory to suggest ("They [the gas stockpiles] turned out to be non-existent…") that we didn’t find anything in Iraq. There was plenty there, including dual-use chemicals usable as precursor agents, and dual-use equipment which could have been diverted to manufacture war gasses: what there wasn’t, was a large stockpile of assembled and ready-to-use bombs and shells. The CIA’s report on the subject <https://www.cia.gov/library/reports/general-reports-1/iraq_wmd_2004/chap5.html> is readily available on the web.

Finally, I do not understand your arguments based on the rationality of an adversary. While both Saddam and Assad are, I am confident, rational actors, I think it is perhaps overly optimistic to suppose that they will weigh all risks and benefits in the same manner that you or I might. Hence your suggestion that (in effect) it would be (or, in Saddam’s case, would have been) irrational to conceal or indeed use chemical weapons ("…I would be more inclined to suspect false flag operations than sudden senility in Bashar Al-Assad…He has many good reasons to convince the world he does not have any WMD’s, and no real incentive to have or use them.") seems a bit of a stretch.

Very respectfully,

David G.D. Hecht

Mr. Hecht may be correct. Everyone assumes that Assad or – more likely one of his generals – has used war gasses in the civil war and killed from one to several hundred civilians. Since the President has drawn a Red Line requiring some dramatic US intervention of Assad uses “weapons od mass destruction” I am perfectly willing to be persuaded that there were no WMD’s employed by Assad: I prefer that the US not be marked as a paper tiger for failing to react after the President’s line in the sand to our active involvement in yet another Middle Eastern war where nothing will go well, and we will replace a strong man who longs for some kind of stability with a chiliastic regime driven by an ideology hostile to Americans – the probable result of US intervention.

The Assads have held together a coalition of minorities, and in doing that have had to be tolerant of Christians, Druze, Kurd, and other minorities in Syria. The cost of the Assad regimes has been high: thousands dead. Over decades, tens of thousands.

Of course the cost of Saddam Hussein was very high, too. Tens of thousands. Hundred of women ravished by his barbarian sons. Of course the cost of liberation from Saddam has been over 100,000 Iraqis killed as well as 3600 Americans killed among 36000 casualties. Going into Iraq was going to cost $300 billion. I recall at the time saying that for $300 billion investment we could make the US nearly independent of Middle Eastern oil, and it wouldn’t cost more than a few hundred killed in oil fields and on oil platforms. And of course as we all knew, the real cost was a lot more than $300 billion we couldn’t afford, and the result hasn’t been anything like as favorable as it was hoped it would be.

So yes: I am willing to believe that Assad is smart enough to avoid using war gas. I’d rather believe that and be wrong than prove him wrong and send an expeditionary force to empower al Qaeda in Syria. Colin Powell says that Assad is a liar, which is true enough: but then it’s the Middle East.

As to what we found in Iraq, it was palaces, not VX.

WMDs in Syria

Okay, I’ll bite. You said(View 786 Tuesday, August 13, 2013):

""…They turned out to be non-existent…""

in reference to the WMDs that Hussein may have had. I think there is a case to be made for their transference to Syria from Iraq, prior to our second invasion. I know the conspirasphere is rife with examples (both supporting the theory and debunking it). I am not sure that the fact that they have never, up to now, been located is evidence of their non-existence.

Here’s an article from a year or so ago ‘demolishing’ the WMD in Iraq theory:

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/07/syria-iraq-wmd-meme/

a quote from the article:

""Fourth, from a U.S. military perspective, the transfer would have been impossible to hide. I worked at U.S. Central Command’s Mideast headquarters before, during, and after the invasion, which gave me a good understanding of what was going on at the time. The region was blanketed by U.S. military assets. Operation Enduring Freedom was in full swing in Afghanistan, and Operations Northern and Southern Watch <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraqi_no-fly_zones> were still in place over Iraq. If something moved — like, say a convoy of Winnebagos of Death <http://abcnews.go.com/International/story?id=79784&page=1> heading for Syria — it could be detected and killed.""

The last sentence is what caught my eye. The author seems to think our intel before the second Iraq invasion was 100% accurate. We saw everything, knew where everything was etc. Well, if that is the case, why did intel indicate the existence of WMDs? I’ll give you that and say that knocks pre-invasion intel down at least .01%; pre-invasion intel is now 99.99% accurate. Which calls into question the ability to see something move and subsequently knock it out. Suppose among the .01% of things missed/incorrect was a convoy (unlikely to use a convoy if you are sneaking things around, I believe) or multiple vehicles to move things out country…

And I suppose the first sentence is eye catching as well. Simply impossible to hide? From a military perspective? Then why does military intel indicate non-existant WMDs? Did military intel also find unicorns that we aren’t hearing about? Which is it? Military intel is 100% reliable or it is not? WMDs were there or not? I don’t know the term in logic, but it seems that someone is trying to use two conflicting statements to support his theory. And BAM, case closed, nothing more to see here, Bush lied, people died, etc.

And here’s an article from a year or so ago ‘supporting’ the WMD in Iraq theory:

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Peace/2012/07/14/And-where-did-syrias-chemical-weapons

a quote from the article:

""In 2006, former Iraqi general, Georges Sada, who served under Saddam Hussein before he defected, wrote a comprehensive book detailing how the Iraqi Revolutionary Guard moved weapons of mass destruction into Syria, before the US-led action to eliminate Saddam Hussein’s WMD threat, by loading the weapons into civilian aircraft in which the passenger seats were removed.""

and a quote of a quote from the article:

""…“Mr. Sada’s comments come just more than a month after Israel’s top general during Operation Iraqi Freedom, Moshe Yaalon, told the Sun that Saddam ‘transferred the chemical agents from Iraq to Syria.’…"

So there’s at least testimony from someone who may have known of what happened to Iraq’s WMDs. I give you, not gold standard proof. At best it is just personal testimony, and thus we cannot convict on it… It does raise a shadow of a doubt about the non-existence of WMDs though. Enough that I don’t feel at all sure of myself to say that they never existed.

Now, that all being said, it is not in (what’s-his-name ?Asshad Bashir?) the leader of Syria’s interest to use WMDs on his people (as you noted). I believe the President said about a year ago that WMDs being used on people would be a ‘red line’ that once crossed would result in the US getting involved in the ground game in Syria. So now we have ‘evidence’ that the leader of Syria used WMDs on his people, a thing that I don’t think is in the President’s (Obama) best interest; we don’t want to get involved in Syria, he may have wanted to a year ago when he said what he said, but now I think perhaps he wishes he didn’t say what he said… Plus it would look silly to go invading a country over WMDs when it is found out that the rebels used the WMDs in a false flag attack to draw US forces into the conflict. An act that would be in the interest of the rebels in Syria.

Now it can be said that Syria was no friend of Iraq in the Hussein days, and who better to send WMDs to in Syria than rebellion minded people? We know Saddam sent jet fighters to Iran, another non-friend of Iraq… the second article touches on that.

I don’t know if I can come up with a catchphrase as awesome as ‘Bush lied and people died’ to say ‘Obama is an idiot and now we are in a conflict not of our own where neither side is on our side at the end of the day’ but I am sure someone could shorten and sweeten that one up, should the need arise…

All that being said, it is just as likely that Syria could have made some chemical weapons of their own which have fallen into rebel hands in one way or another. As much as I’d love for some physical evidence of Iraqi WMDs to be found, I don’t think we need to get involved in Syria to find it, and I have a feeling that could be yet another reason to for the current administration to stay out of it.

I agree that we never found any WMDs in Iraq, I do not agree that the fact of not finding the things is proof of their non-existence. But then I believe in God too, so perhaps my belief in proof of existence of things is suspect…

That’s my two cents anyhow, I hope wired and breitbart aren’t considered conspirasphere sites. The theories in the conpirasphere are MOST entertaining, Zionist Illuminati CIA shills are behind it, AGAIN! Somebody should do something about those guys…

-pate

I don’t know who used what on whom in this latest brushup. I do know that the number of casualties resulting from American intervention in the Syrian civil war will dwarf the number of dead from whatever war gasses may have been employed. War gas can be an effective method of civilian control if you control the territory” : Saddam and his general Chemical Ali made that clear enough if we hadn’t learned it from Yellow Rain earlier. And of course the USSR had the worst weaponized anthrax incident in history, making it clear that they were developing chemical/biological weapons (which they probably still have).

War gas is not a particularly effective weapon in the present situation. What Assad wants is stability: ne needs people to believe that if he wins they will at least be safe from this violence. We have seen what happens in Libya and Egypt when the Arab Spring ripens.

It’s not that hard to make serious war gasses. Any rebel group determined to do it would be able to come up with some. And Iraq certainly had a lot of them at one time: they aren’t that easy to dispose of and who knows where they went. All that is subject matter for a serious novel. It is not a matter for US military intervention.

George Washington warned us not to be involved in the territorial disputes of Europe. He could have added “and the Middle East” easily enough. We rejected his advice during the Balkan mess in the 1990’s with the result of permanent damage to the region’s economy and convincing the Russians that America is anti-Slavic. That latter has colored US Russian relations ever since, and was a major cost of our ham handed intervention in the territorial disputes of Europe.

Our perpetual war for perpetual peace hasn’t worked out so very well.

As I file this, Assad has invited the UN inspectors to come see the chemical weapons battleground.

View 786 Tuesday, August 23, 2013

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barrack Obama, January 31, 2009

We have a number of comments on recent posts, and they seem relevant. Meanwhile the Mamelukes have released their retired Grand Master Mubarak although he remains technically under house arrest, but attended by loyal orderlies and guards. Nothing unexpected. Keeping the loyalty of the troops is important, and disrespect to the aging pharaoh is now way to insure that loyalty and respect.

There are more stories of chemical weapons used in Syria. I find them utterly unconvincing. The evidence for actual use of chemical weapons is not clear, and even if it were incontrovertible I would be more inclined to suspect false flag operations than sudden senility in Bashar Al-Assad. If the second Iraqi war taught anything it was that having weapons of mass destruction is not going to help a dictator achieve a long and tranquil life or secure retirement. War gasses aren’t as effective in the real world as they are in literature: one reason for the horror associated with The Great War war gasses is that so many survived for a long life afterwards and could tell their stories. Of course modern war gasses like VX and Soman are far more effective, so we combine the remembered horror of the survivors with the modern fatalities. Saddam Hussein used war gasses during the 1990’s after the First Gulf War, and the threat that he had them and would used them was a major factor in the US decision to intervene after 9/11. It was reasonable to suppose that Saddam had war gasses: his own generals were convinced that he had them (that was one of Saddam’s means for controlling them). MI-6 certainly purported to believe they existed.

They turned out to be non-existent, but the lesson was plain for all to see, and Bashar Assad certainly saw it. He has many good reasons to convince the world he does not have any WMD’s, and no real incentive to have or use them.

The Arab Summer continues.

Aëtius

Jerry

Regarding recent reference to Aëtius in your mail, some may find the following passage from Gregory of Tours’ History of the Franks of some interest:

And Attila king of the Huns went forth from Metz and when he had crushed many cities of the Gauls he attacked Orleans and strove to take it by the mighty hammering of battering rams. Now at that time the most blessed Annianus was bishop in the city just mentioned, a man of unequaled wisdom and praiseworthy holiness, whose miracles are faithfully remembered among us. And when the people, on being shut in, cried to their bishop, and asked what they were to do, trusting in God he advised all to prostrate themselves in prayer, and with tears to implore the ever present aid of God in their necessities. Then when they prayed as he had directed, the bishop said: "Look from the wall of the city to see whether God’s mercy yet comes to your aid." For he hoped that by God’s mercy Ætius was coming, to whom he had recourse before at Arles when he was anxious about the future. But when they looked from the wall, they saw no one. And he said: "Pray faithfully, for God will free you this day." When they had prayed he said: "Look again." And when they looked they saw no one to bring aid. He said to them a third time: "If you pray faithfully, God comes swiftly." And they besought God’s mercy with weeping and loud cries. When this prayer also was finished they looked from the wall a third time at the old man’s command, and saw afar off a cloud as it were arising from the earth. When they reported this the bishop said: "It is the aid of the Lord." Meanwhile, when the walls were now trembling from the hammering of the rams and were just about to fall, behold! Ætius came, and Theodore, king of the Goths and Thorismodus his son hastened to the city with their armies, and drove the enemy forth and defeated him. And so the city was freed by the intercession of the blessed bishop, and they put Attila to flight.

— Book II ch. 7. http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/gregorytours/gregorytours2.shtml

That’s even better than looking out and seeing Gandalf the White and the Riders of Rohan coming up in the rear of the orcish horde at the climax of The Two Towers.

Aëtius’ successor, AEgidius, in alliance with Childeric the Frank — and with the Britanni that he had invited to settle in what is now Britanny — defeated the Saxons under Odoacer, again at Orleans with the remnant of the army that had beaten Attila. His son, Syagius, was the last Roman to rule in Soissons, an island of Romanitas in a Franco-Gothic sea. (In another context, John Lukacs used to say, "On one side were Latins, and light, and wine; on the other were Germans, and darkness, and beer.") Childeric’s son was Clovis, accounted the first king of France.

MikeF

Horns, horns, horns … Rohan had come at last.

Aetius has been called “The Last Roman”.

Bradley Manning Sentenced to 35 Years in Prison

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/08/bradley-manning-sentenced/

Bradley Manning Sentenced to 35 Years in Prison

"Manning will be eligible for parole after serving a third of his sentence, which means he could be released in about nine years at around the age of 33. "

I was in Afghanistan when this happened, and it made my job almost impossible immediately. Then it got worse as the usual knee jerk reactions to be seen doing something came into effect.

He’d best be grateful he had the worst judge I can recall since OJ Simpson. I’d have thrown the book at him. There was no judgment call, he signed his SF312 which is the standard DoD Non Disclosure Agreement so he can’t claim ignorance.

My utter lack of respect for those in charge is why I’m retiring.

I do not understand why Manning was not charged with treason. But nowadays no one is. Major Hassan is guilty of workplace violence, and his victims do not merit the Purple Heart although they would have had Hassan waited until he and his victims were overseas.

I (heart) boobies

Jerry

It seems that our local school district is now nationally famous — and via Chaos Manor, internationally famous — for its doomed attempt to enforce a modicum of dignity in what was once supposed to be an academic institution. I noticed that a couple of responses to the story gloried in the fact that their children were already jaded and sexualized, but this may or may not be true of youth in east-central Pennsylvania. What inquiring minds want to know is what will go on the rubber bracelet for prostate awareness.

MikeF

After the last Oscar presentation, I do not believe it possible to enforce any modicum of decency in a public institution. Perhaps that is the proper place to try; I’d have to know more about the reading assignments given in that school. I would agree that such decisions ought to be local.

Annals of Bureaucracy

Jerry,

Don’t ever let you C-PAP machine die. I am having to deal with the untimely death of mine at the early age of 18. I thought that dealing with insurance companies was bad but dealing with Medicare esoterica is in a class beyond transfinite numbers. My new machine is going to have a monitor chip. If I do not use it for 4 hours straight 70% of the nights they can come and repo the beast. The moron who wrote that reg never had an enlarged prostate and a shrinking bladder. I am sorely tempted to cash in one of my last chits at Langley and have the Uncle Guido Squad give him/her/it an equally hard time of it but as a law abiding dude I am going to have to go back to a chamber pot for the first time since I was four and pee with my mask on. After all the Lone Ranger did.

I bet the lawyer who wrote that reg was never able to cut it in private practice and thinks he is doing a great public service. The New Reality bites.

Val Augstkalns

View 787 Thursday, August 22, 2013

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barrack Obama, January 31, 2009

More Bunny Inspectors. I seem to recall the President promising a laser like focus on expenditures and budget items, but that was back in campaign days.

Thomas Stemberg: A New Law to Liberate American Businesses

If Congress could close military bases, it can reduce job-killing regulations.

Nearly 30 years ago, I started a company called Staples Inc. SPLS -1.37% that went on to do pretty well. Launching a business like Staples in 2013 would be a much harder proposition, with success by no means certain. There are so many government impediments to business today that the next Staples—and its 50,000 jobs—might never get off the ground.

Chief among those roadblocks: the blizzard of bureaucratic red tape that buries businesses and stifles job creation. These include the additional 16 million hours that vending-machine and chain-restaurant business owners must spend complying with new food regulations each year. But there is also the license that magicians require to do a rabbit disappearing act, which mandates an annual fee, surprise inspections and a rabbit disaster plan. All told, American business faces 46,758 pages of rules to live by in the Federal Register.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324653004578651852012786828.html

Stemberg proposes a commission like the base closing commission – the Defense Realignment and Base Closing Commission to be precise – that would take a laser like focus on regulations and propose lists of those to be abolished; the Congress would be required to take each list and do an up or down vote on the package, no amendments or sneaky readjustments. Whether it would work or not can be debated. Certainly something has to be. We have had for more than four years a President who promised, along with Hope and Change, a laser focus on budget expenditures.

I do get discouraged.

To give you some idea of just how bad things are in both the schools and the courts – that latter probably because the schools have been awful for decades – you might read these:

The 3rd Circuit Court’s ‘boobies’ boo-boo

The justices who decided the case of the breast cancer bracelets need to take a refresher course in adolescence.

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/commentary/la-oe-weaver-boobies-tinker-third-circuit-court-20130821,0,3570673.story

I am blessed that this never happened to me

School is no Place for a Reader

Jennifer A. Franssen

A perplexing fate awaits a reader in an elementary school. There is no place for this strange child in classroom, library or playground. Watching my daughter caught in this predicament I find myself troubled by the paradox of an institution charged with teaching children to read that seems unable to offer either welcome or nourishment to the ardent reader within its walls.

http://notesandqueries.ca/school-is-no-place-for-a-reader/

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73s/Best regards de John Bartley K7AAY

If you want your children to be able to read, you must teach them yourself, preferably before they get to first grade. Just about all children from dull normal up can learn to read at age 5, and it was traditional for a hundred years for the English Upper and Upper Middle class children to learn to read at home taught in the nursery by nannies. There is no reason to assume that English gentry have better protoplasm than your children.

If you want to know more on that, see http://www.readingtlc.com/. My wife’s reading program is old, it’s clunky, it looks like DOS or early Windows because that’s what it was written for, but it works: seventy half hour lessons, and just about everyone from age 4 to 44 can learn to read nearly all English words of any length. By read I mean see the word and pronounce it even if this is the first encounter with the word, or even if it’s a nonsense word like porkmine or elfsocks or muckasimfor.

Many of us have always known this, but now it’s out:

Area 51: The real cover-up

The secret base didn’t house UFOs, but that doesn’t mean the government had nothing to hide.

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/commentary/la-oe-turley-area-51-20130821,0,943923.story

I didn’t know anything about the air pollution, but many of us understood that U-2 and SR-71 and other surveillance and high performance projects operated out of there. In 1964 I was editor of Project 75 which surveyed everything known about ballistic missile technology and had explicit need to know access to everything relevant to the present and future technologies in any way relevant to the Strategic Offensive Forces of the United States. That included flying saucers. If there were any extra-terrestrial technologies known in 1964 I never heard of them, and since the purpose of Project 75 was to structure the SOF to assure the survival of the United States, I can’t imagine why if we knew of any new technologies they didn’t get into the design survey. I certainly looked into everything known at Wright Patterson, and although I never visited Groom Lake I did go to the command hq. that oversaw the place. Nothing. (Nothing about Roswell, either, needless to say.)

But there was a cover-up, and the story is out now.

And a bit of encouraging news:

Jeffrey Singer: The Man Who Was Treated for $17,000 Less

Bypassing his third-party payer, my patient avoided a high hospital ‘list price.’

Every so often I have an extraordinary and surprising experience with a patient—the kind that makes us both say, "Wow, we’ve learned something from this." One such moment occurred recently.

A gentleman in his early 60s came in with a rather routine hernia in his lower abdomen, one that is easily repaired with a simple outpatient surgical procedure. We scheduled the surgery at a nearby hospital.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324139404579017113415486176.html

The story tells how hospitals have different price schedules for insured and uninsured patients. You have heard the stories before, but this is explicit.

Perhaps there is a substitute for Obamacare?

Of course the whole notion of housing and food and medical care for those who can’t afford it has the problem that there is no agreed moral obligation to provide any of those to anyone unless you make certain assumptions that can be called ‘religious’.

Tocqueville noted that in Europe many matters of general welfare were traditionally considered a problem for government, and dealt with by government agents and bureaus. To his surprise nearly all those in America were dealt with by “the associations”: private associations some religious, some secular and civic. That American tradition was diluted over the years, but it still survives, although since Johnson’s Great Society days the tradition in America is like Europe. Housing and health and welfare are problems for government and taxpayers. As a result the associations have been weakened.

It may be time to reconsider just what are the responsibilities for being one’s brother’s keeper. Or sister’s. Or partner’s. The associations worked very well until times of great economic stress.  And the associations were better able to deal with the problems of ‘entitlement’, justice, fraud, and the whole question of the deserving and undeserving poor.