Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Beyond Belief

Matthew Snyder was killed in Iraq in 2006. He was a marine. His funeral was picketed by the crazies of the Westboro Baptist Church using signs such as these:


The father of Lance Corporal Snyder sued the "church" for emotional distress and was awarded $5,000,000. The appeals court overturned the decision and the case will be heard by the Supreme Court. Despite this, the appeals court ruled that Mr. Snyder must pay the "church's" legal costs.

Hopefully, the Supreme Court will see matters differently.

Update:
Bill O'Reilly did. He's paying the fine.

Monday, March 29, 2010

Another Carryover from Bush

The new health care bill includes $50,000,000 a year to promote abstinence-only programs for the never-married, i.e., teenagers. I suppose I should realize that this may have been another necessary concession to get the bill passed and it is less than the $150,000,000 that was allocated under Bush. But, this is another government program that does not work except in making some feel that we are doing God's work.

Thursday, March 25, 2010

Some good news

Let's hope that the news about a nuclear arms deal between the U.S. and Russia is true. Today's NY Times reports that there will be one-fourth fewer nuclear warheads and half as many launchers when the deal is implemented.

Another sign of this country's leadership failures

The Congressional Budget Office projects that we'll spend more money on social security than we will take in. This wasn't supposed to happen for at least another six years, but the recession has caused more people than were expected to apply for their benefits.

Future problems with social security have been seen for years, but nada has been done about them. Will our superb leaders start focusing on the issue now? I doubt it.

Not a passing grade

The results of the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress reading test are in and, once more, they are not good. In the years since 1992, the average for eighth-graders has gone from 260 to 264; fourth-graders went from 217 to 221. While the increase is anemic, what really gets me is that the maximum score is 500 and our kids score is less than 60%, which in some circles is considered a failing grade.

We're also not doing well in mathematics. Again, there was an improvement in scores, but the final average scores were still under 60%.

Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Benjamin delights in sticking it to us

A couple of weeks ago it was a visit by Biden that was greeted by an increase in settlement activity in Israel. Supposedly, Benjamin Netanyahu knew nothing about it. This week it's another visit that is accompanied by an increase in settlement activity. Netanyahu's visit to Obama happened just as Israel announced that another settlement complex will be built in East Jerusalem, which is really not part of Israel.

Tuesday, March 23, 2010

They're ubiquitous

The Chinese that is. They're even visiting this site. In truth, they have been visiting for years but over the past month or so their behavior has changed. Now, when they leave, they don't go to a site I've linked to or a "normal" site. They exit to Chinese sites with odd - and tiny - names, such as sex1/nice258. Interesting.

Sunday, March 21, 2010

This is why we fight

Today's NY Times Magazine has a series of truly depressing photographs taken by Ashley Gilbertson. He is going around the country photographing the bedrooms of soldiers killed in our 21st century wars. It so happens that these soldiers are all young people, as young as 19, as old as 24. Here is the bedroom of Lt. Brian Bradshaw from a small town in Washington.

Why did he have to die now? What purpose was served?

Dexter Filkins has a brief, very poignant essay accompanying the photographs. You'll be crying after you read it. Here it is:

Just kids. You step into the barracks thinking big, burly and deep-voiced. And what you get are chubby faces and halfhearted mustaches and voices still cracking, boys hurried into uniforms and handed heavy guns. Sept. 11 was junior high, fifth grade even, a half a lifetime ago. Megan Fox is everywhere, plastered above the bunks, the best that Maxim can offer. Junk food, too, sent A.P.O. (Army Post Office) from home: powdered Gatorade and M&M’s and teriyaki jerky. Underwear and socks. “Love you, bro,” scrawled a sister from California on a care package to Ramadi, Iraq. “Muwah!”

Forty cigarettes and a 10-mile run. Ice cream and cake and 25 pull-ups. Who but a kid can punish himself like that? They go on patrol and search a string of houses, then lift weights to heavy metal and sleep away the heat in the afternoon. Their bodies are hard and soft at once, like youth.

Adulthood’s a switch. The kids climb into their Humvees and close the clanging doors. They push the clips into their M-4’s, pull back the bolts. Safeties off. Only code words and swear words now, no joshing around. Voices drop and eyes go hard. “Movement to contact,” someone says. It won’t be long now.

Death rides along. In the back seat, in the Humvee, on the bouncing road, in the dark. No one mentions the possibility of death. No one talks about the ambush coming. Nor the bomb in the road ahead, buried under the pile of trash, the one that will explode upward, through the seats.

“What’s that up there?” the driver said.

“Hell if I know, move your head,” said the other.

“It’s nothing,” the driver said.

In Helmand Province, in Afghanistan, the bombs were so big that one guy disappeared. He’d been on a foot patrol in a field. After a while they found his leg in a tree; they had to go up and pull it down. The rest of him didn’t turn up, so they spent the night in the same place and woke up the next morning and started searching again. He’d floated down a canal.

Sometimes, right after a guy is killed, you feel as if you are in possession of a terrible secret. He’s there on the ground, alive only a minute ago, and the only people who know he’s dead are standing right there by him. The rest of the world thinks he’s alive, as alive as he was when he climbed out of bed that same morning, only a few hours before.

And at that moment, you think about how the word of his death will travel; how it will depart Iraq or Afghanistan and move across the ocean and into the United States and into the town where he lives, Corinth, Miss., say, or Benwood, W.Va., and into the houses and the hearts of the people who love him most in the world. And at that moment, standing there, looking down on the dead man, you can wonder only what the family will do when the terrible news finally arrives, how they will resist it and wrestle with it and suffer from it, and how they will cope and how they will remember.

Saturday, March 20, 2010

Petraeus warns about Israel

Mark Perry reports about a January briefing of Adm. Mullen by Petraeus' staff. Here's a summary:
The briefers reported that there was a growing perception among Arab leaders that the U.S. was incapable of standing up to Israel, that CENTCOM's mostly Arab constituency was losing faith in American promises, that Israeli intransigence on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was jeopardizing U.S. standing in the region, and that Mitchell himself was (as a senior Pentagon officer later bluntly described it) "too old, too slow ... and too late."
Judging from this writeup in Wikipedia, Perry may actually know something of the matter.

2 hours of peace

Late yesterday afternoon we visited the pool at the hotel where we are staying in the Florida keys. There were about 50 people there, perhaps 20 - 25 kids of all ages from 3 up. In the two hours we were there I was shocked that not one kid had a tantrum, not even one scream. A further display of the American dream was parents and grandparents playing with the kids for more than 10 minutes.

It was a cheering scene.

Monday, March 15, 2010

The Devil Is In The Details

Who knows what Dodd's proposed financial control bill really says but the fact sheet he put out isn't bad. Here's the summary:

Consumer Protections with Authority and Independence: Creates a new independent watchdog, housed at the Federal Reserve, with the authority to ensure American consumers get the clear, accurate information they need to shop for mortgages, credit cards, and other financial products, and protect them from hidden fees, abusive terms, and deceptive practices.

Ends Too Big to Fail: Ends the possibility that taxpayers will be asked to write a check to bail out financial firms that threaten the economy by: creating a safe way to liquidate failed financial firms; imposing tough new capital and leverage requirements that make it undesirable to get too big; updating the Fed’s authority to allow system-wide support but no longer prop up individual firms; and establishing rigorous standards and supervision to protect the economy and American consumers, investors and businesses.

Advanced Warning System: Creates a council to identify and address systemic risks posed by large, complex companies, products, and activities before they threaten the stability of the economy.

Transparency & Accountability for Exotic Instruments: Eliminates loopholes that allow risky and abusive practices to go on unnoticed and unregulated - including loopholes for over-the-counter derivatives, asset-backed securities, hedge funds, mortgage brokers and payday lenders.

Federal Bank Supervision: Streamlines bank supervision to create clarity and accountability. Protects the dual banking system that supports community banks.

Executive Compensation and Corporate Governance: Provides shareholders with a say on pay and corporate affairs with a non-binding vote on executive compensation.

Protects Investors: Provides tough new rules for transparency and accountability for credit rating agencies to protect investors and businesses.

Enforces Regulations on the Books: Strengthens oversight and empowers regulators to aggressively pursue financial fraud, conflicts of interest and manipulation of the system that benefit special interests at the expense of American families and businesses.

It may sound cruel but this bill is really more important than the health bill, but it's been relegated to the shadows by the health bill. Will our leaders pass it or any bill which limits the power of the financial industry?

Sunday, March 14, 2010

War of the Worlds Redux

This time it's Georgia, the country not the state, that was taken in by a fake documentary on local tv that purported to be an invasion by Russia.
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Smaller is better

That's one of the mantras of John Arquilla in the current issue of Foreign Policy. Arquilla, who teaches at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, has been urging our armed services to adopt new ways of thinking and fighting for quite a while. In this article he argues that we are really geared to fight wars featuring big battles rather than the wars that we are actually involved in wherein the enemy fights in small groups.

Having small groups usually means that you can have many of them. For example, the Viet Cong had hundreds of thousands of AK-47s they could use at just about any time; we relied a lot on B-52s trying to bomb the Cong into submission. The 21st century example he uses is the thousands of IEDs (22 are built every day) vs. the periodic attack of the drones. Arquilla attributes the problem to the current thinking which is really still living in the past and has a hard time believing that smaller groups of troops who are networked to other groups and attack aircraft could do a better job and at less cost. Another example Arquilla refers to is the November 2008 attack on Mumbai where 10 guys were able to withstand the Indian forces for three days and were also able to kill 160 people.

It's possible that the only way to get the brass to start thinking differently is to freeze their budget. Gee, haven't you heard that recently?

Friday, March 12, 2010

When is a sale not a sale?

Richard S. Fuld, Jr. (Chairman and C.E.O., Leh...Image by World Resources Institute Staff via Flickr

The report of the examiner in the case of the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy is out. The financial press is all over it largely because it documents misjudgments and fraud on the part of the major players in the case. In the words of the examiner, Anton Valukas,
"Lehman’s financial plight, and the consequences to Lehman’s creditors and shareholders, was exacerbated by Lehman executives, whose conduct ranged from serious but non‐culpable errors of business judgment to actionable balance sheet manipulation; by the investment bank business model, which rewarded excessive risk taking and leverage; and by Government agencies, who by their own admission might better have anticipated or mitigated the outcome."
Lehman played a dangerous game in its battle to be considered one of the big boys. They violated their own risk protocol. They got themselves into a situation where the long-term assets were funded with short-term money. They claimed some transactions as sales although all they did was arbitrarily move assets - significant assets in the $50 billion range - back and forth from the balance sheet so that their publicly reported numbers would look good. They hid all this from the board of directors. And their auditors, Ernst & Young, accepted all this chicanery.

What do you think is going on today with the Wall Street cognoscenti? Is everything on the up and up? Can we believe them?
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Thursday, March 11, 2010

Map of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, in 20...Image via Wikipedia

Daniel Levy, a Jew, and Amjad Atallah, a Palestinian, feel strongly that the U.S. must assume a leadership role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; that is the only way the actors can start moving to a future solution. For too long we have taken a back seat to Israel and let them run the show. We have to start to realize that we are very much at risk in this conflict and must take a leadership role, that could start with bringing Gaza back from the dead and really pushing Palestinian unity. They have a point.
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Tuesday, March 09, 2010

Another Slap in the Face

So a short time after Biden promises undying support to Israel, the Israeli Interior Minister announces a program to build 1600 housing units for Jews in Jerusalem. The Israelis are determined to do whatever they want as regards housing for settlers. Our opinion means nothing. They thumbed their noses at us last spring when Obama called for a halt to the settlements. Now, they couldn't even wait until Biden had left before sticking us again.

When will we learn?

Saturday, March 06, 2010

It makes no sense

Look at what we spend on 'defense'. It's sinful. Couldn't we just halve our expenditures and use the savings more wisely?

Thursday, March 04, 2010

A Much Better Way to Start the Day

Reading an article that things are getting better in African economies.

You read that right! Two academics - one from MIT, the other from Columbia - studied African economies during the period 1970 - 2006 and have concluded that things are much better than we had thought. More specifically the abstract of their article says:
We show that: (1) African poverty is falling and is falling rapidly. (2) If present trends continue, the poverty Millennium Development Goal of halving the proportion of people with incomes less than one dollar a day will be achieved on time. (3) The growth spurt that began in 1995 decreased African income inequality instead of increasing it. (4) African poverty reduction is remarkably general: it cannot be explained by a large country, or even by a single set of countries possessing some beneficial geographical or historical characteristic. All classes of countries, including those with disadvantageous geography and history, experience reductions in poverty. In particular, poverty fell for both landlocked as well as coastal countries; for mineral‐rich as well as mineral‐poor countries; for countries with favorable or with unfavorable agriculture; for countries regardless of colonial origin; and for countries with below‐ or above median slave exports per capita during the African slave trade
My emphases.

A Fine Way to Start the Day

I am being ironic in using 'fine' in this post's title because this post is about something called the 'Prison Rape Elimination Act'(PREA), an act that I had never heard of until I read this article in the NY Review of Books. In 2003 our leaders passed a law that actually attempted to solve a problem, mirabile dictu.

Sure, I knew that rape is relatively common in prisons. What I didn't realize is that many of the rapes are performed on kids. More discouraging, 80% of the rapes are committed by prison staff and, very often, by the female staff. And, for whatever reason fewer than half of the staff accused are actually prosecuted. 25% of the accused staff stay in their jobs, some are even promoted.

It's a very depressing article.