Lord Haw Haw is Back

... and he works for CBS.

Last night, we watched the 60 Minutes piece on the Gambino boy (such a nice, clean, articulate young man! It's a shame those people got in the way of his bullets!) and then the follow-up 60 Minutes extra segment on Afghanistan. It was a real eye-opener.

Back in 2007, when I used to travel a lot and had to watch Airport CNN because I couldn't escape it, I found an eerie connection between CNN and Lord Haw Haw, the British citizen who voluntarily worked for the Nazis doing propaganda broadcasts.

He would interview Allied POWs, give lists of dead Americans and report the nightly count of Allied bombers shot down. Of course, he worked for the fascists, but then again, a good argument could be made that Wolf Blitzer does the same. This site has a collection of archived broadcasts from Lord Haw Haw. It's chilling to listen to them and then watch CNN.

Last night's 60 Minutes bit on Afghanistan was the full Lord Haw Haw. It started with war dead, then followed a bomb removal crew as it trundled along some Afghan roads, focused primarily on the bombs they didn't find and the times when the bomb detection trucks themselves were blown up and then the segment closed with interviews of the soldiers where the only thing discussed was whether the mission in Afghanistan could succeed.

The answer from the soldiers as told to you by the CBS editors who picked which raw video material would make it onto the show: the mission can succeed only if you define success as coming home. In a war where the only way to win it is to outlast your enemy, having the press on the other side is fatal. When your own press is telling you how many B-17s the Luftwaffe shot down, how the bombing raids missed their targets and talking to POWs in Germany who want their families to know they're being well-treated and they just want to come home, you're totally screwed.

Hey, look! It's another CBS salute to the "fallen heroes" of the Allied air forces!
In another dispiriting development relative to Afghanistan, Der Spiegel is reporting that as soon as Obama announced that we had a time limit on the Afghan surge, our European allies, never the steadiest bunch, all started edging towards the door. Now they're ready to bolt.

When Washington starts withdrawing its troops from Afghanistan in July 2011, its NATO allies in Europe will quickly rush to the exits. A power-sharing arrangement between Kabul and the Taliban is a less than ideal solution, but it is the only realistic option if the West pulls out.

No matter how many times President Barack Obama and his senior officials tell the world that the Americans will not be pulling out of Afghanistan in just 13 months time, most Afghans believe that the US endgame is already well under way. The same is true for governments of neighboring countries known for their interference and influence-seeking in the Hindu Kush.

Given a resolute president like George W. Bush, these developments could be weathered. Given one that flounders in the face of something as relatively straightforward as cleaning up an oil spill, these would seem to doom us in Afghanistan. Until last night, I was an optimist about the Afghan campaign. Now, not so much.

Link of the Day

I'm 6 months late coming to this one, but you really ought to visit this bit from our Poet Laureate. Beautiful.

The Tagline Reminds Me of an Old Parish Priest of Mine

Hey, it was a pretty rough parish. Those donut and coffee gatherings after the 9 AM Mass sometimes got out of hand, particularly when they ran out of the chocolate ones.

On Deepwater Drilling and San Diego Development

I enjoy reading and listening to Charles Krauthammer. He's a clever and wise pundit with a knack for saying things clearly. Having said that, he's got this one wrong.

Here’s my question: Why are we drilling in 5,000 feet of water in the first place?

Many reasons, but this one goes unmentioned: Environmental chic has driven us out there. As production from the shallower Gulf of Mexico wells declines, we go deep (1,000 feet and more) and ultra deep (5,000 feet and more), in part because environmentalists have succeeded in rendering the Pacific and nearly all the Atlantic coast off-limits to oil production. (President Obama’s tentative, selective opening of some Atlantic and offshore Alaska sites is now dead.) And of course, in the safest of all places, on land, we’ve had a 30-year ban on drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Yes, environmental restrictions have made drilling elsewhere off-limits, but even if those places had been available, we would still have been drilling in deep water. Just like the development that turned San Diego from a sleepy, little Navy town in the 1970s to a major metropolis today, oil companies will drill anywhere and everywhere they are allowed. They make money drilling for oil, so they do it as much as they possibly can.

In the late 70s and early 80s, San Diego constantly dealt with issues associated with growth. Developers wanted to build more homes, malls and business parks and the locals wanted to keep San Diego the way it was. Every time a development project came up, the same argument took place and, for the most part, they ended up in favor of the developers. Open space was devoured in favor of more building. No matter what a particular developer had been given in the past in terms of building allowances, they wanted more and they were always aggrieved when they were (always temporarily) denied permission to bulldoze and pave. There was no such thing as "enough."

So it is with the oil companies. To blame the environmentalists for this disaster is a huge mistake. Like the developers, the oil companies will drill everywhere you let them and any time they aren't permitted to do so, they'll cry out about how put upon they are.

In hindsight, drilling at 5000' seems to have been a pretty stupid idea without proven technology to seal off a blowout, but the decision to do so was independent of decisions to block off Alaska or shallow ocean waters to drilling. You can't blame the environmentalists for this one.

If they thought there was oil beneath your swimming pool, they'd be trying to drill there, too.

A Maximum Leader Cheezburger

British Conservatives Don't Get It, Either

The Tories are in charge! Yay! British schools are saved!

The new British government has made a start implementing its 'free schools' policy. What will this mean for our education system? Simon Wilson reports.

What are the Lib-Cons doing?

They are cracking on with implementing Tory school reforms, which survived the coalition talks all but intact. First, the government announced this week that it will fast-track an Academies Bill through Parliament aimed at boosting the number of schools that operate outside local authority control. Under Labour, academies were largely focused on improving standards in the most difficult areas. In future, academies are more likely to be the highest-achieving schools, many in affluent areas. In time, however, the new education secretary, Michael Gove, wants to give every school in England (other parts of Britain run their own systems) the chance to opt out.

It's charter schools and competition for the British. Good luck with that. In reality, it's all about family structure. If your kids are coming from a broken home, they're starting with a massive handicap. Broken homes have half the labor force and half the earning power of traditional, nuclear families.

If two companies are making the same number of shoes, the one with half the labor force and half the cash is going to produce lower quality shoes almost all of the time. It's the same if you're making cars, wedding cakes, mobile homes or kids. You can have all the competition you want and all the efficiency you want, but the end result is going to be the same. You lose.

If you're going to embrace personal freedom at the expense of personal commitment and responsibility, at least have the decency to own the results.

Modern conventional wisdom says there is a combination of funding levels and educational reforms that can take these children and educate them properly to produce productive, successful citizens. We've spent 45 years looking for that sweet spot. You'd think we would have found it by now.

What Inexperience and Incomptenece Look Like

I never thought the blame given to President Bush after Katrina was very fair. It was a colossal natural disaster and humans being human, some agencies made mistakes in the immediate aftermath. Similarly, I've thought that the criticism of Obama over the Gulf oil spill was a lot of political opportunism and totally unfair. That's what I felt two weeks ago.

5 days is a lot less time to react with coherence and sophistication than 40. In 40 days you can do an awful lot and a competent organization ought to do it with purpose and planning. The Obama Administration has neither of those things and yesterday's press conference showed it. Peggy Noonan, Our Holy Ambassador to the Court of the Mainstream Media, has an outstanding piece today with this tidbit.

The original sin in my view is that as soon as the oil rig accident happened the president tried to maintain distance between the gusher and his presidency. He wanted people to associate the disaster with BP and not him. When your most creative thoughts in the middle of a disaster revolve around protecting your position, you are summoning trouble. When you try to dodge ownership of a problem, when you try to hide from responsibility, life will give you ownership and responsibility the hard way. In any case, the strategy was always a little mad. Americans would never think an international petroleum company based in London would worry as much about American shores and wildlife as, say, Americans would.

Belgium can work this way. Belgium is small enough so that their leaders can claim that mighty outside forces are at work and tiny Belgium is impotent to stop them. The US cannot work that way and having a president who won't or can't take charge of situations is fatal to his presidency, which is Peggy's point.

Over at our Monastery of Miscellaneous Musings, Dean had the same initial reaction that we did and is coming to a similar conclusion.

Because of the fact that most criticism of this nature tends to be cheap political grandstanding, we are no more apt to blame the Katrina aftermath on Bush than we are to blame Obama for the Gulf/BP oil spill response.

Katrina was fumbled at first, but eventually the Bush Administration got it right. The Iraq War was fumbled for a while, but eventually the Bush Administration got it right. In both cases, President Bush took command of the situation and provided forceful, determined leadership. President Obama, in the stimulus bill debate, in the health care debate and now in the Gulf oil spill, has consistently tried to maintain an Olympian detachment from the proceedings.

Which is exactly what you'd expect from someone with no executive experience.

Say what you will about him, but President Bush came to office with plenty of executive leadership experience and never flinched from taking charge of a situation.
Update: Dean links to this Karl Rove piece with this bit in it.

On May 8, Louisiana sent a letter to BP and the EPA begging BP not to use dispersants below the surface of the water. Subsurface use of dispersants keeps oil slicks from forming. But when it doesn't come to the surface to evaporate, the oil lingers below, gets into underwater currents, and puts at risk fisheries that supply a third of America's seafood.

On May 13, EPA overruled the state and permitted BP to use dispersants 4,000 feet below the surface. Then, a week after BP released 55,000 gallons of dispersants below the surface, EPA did an about-face, ordering BP to stop using the dispersant and to "find a less-toxic" one. Louisiana officials found out about this imprecise guidance in the Washington Post. BP refused, EPA backed off, and Louisiana's concerns about their marine fisheries remain.

This is what inexperience and incompetence look like.

Sending 1200 Racists to the Border

President Obama is sending 1200 National Guardsmen to our border with Mexico to beef up protection there. Once they arrive, will they engage in profiling? If not, what will they be looking for? Swedes, maybe?

Jeeze, the National Guard? He might as well have sent the Klan.

A Backlash Against the SEIU

... that leads to violence? Maybe. Dig this - at the very least, watch the first minute or so where they show the video of the event.

Synopsis for those who don't want to watch the whole thing: The nation's larges civil service union, the SEIU, owes BofA about $100M. Last week, they took 14 buses and sent about 500 people up to the front lawn of a BofA executive to scream and yell. The cops did nothing to stop it and when questioned, are giving a bunch of nitpickery in response. It looks positively Venezuelan.

This one is a little scary to me. Since the cops aren't going to protect you, you have to protect yourself. Dogs? Guns? Counter-protests? What happens when 500 Tea Party types show up on the front door step of an SEIU boss' house?

And how did you like those lame excuses? The Maryland cops get notified, but can't get there in time for 14 buses full of protestors to disembark, organize and begin chanting? How long does it take 14 buses full of people to do anything?

Les Phillip Rocks

Check him out here.

Hooray for the Varsity Team!

Dig this.

President Barack Obama last week fired his intelligence chief, Dennis Blair, without an immediate successor teed up. People familiar with the matter said the White House had expected Mr. Blair would stick around until a replacement was found. Mr Blair declined.

Who needs executive experience when you've got hopenchange?

Roubini is Wrong

... but not by much.

I love listening to Nouriel Roubini, the economist professor from NYU who called the crash correctly. He's a voice of reason and his opinions are always well-considered. Having said that, as I've listened to him and other economists talk, I've come to the conclusion that Nouriel is sometimes just as culturally blinded as the rest of them.

When faced with the issue of the Greek debt crisis, Nouriel correctly points out that the Greeks are insolvent. Their wages are too high to be competitive, so economic growth is unlikely until that falls. Their government budgets are way out of whack and if they cut them, it will probably lead to a recession. All kinds of havoc will ensue. And that's where his analysis ends.

There's another side to the equation, one that afflicts us here in San Diego as well and that is over regulation. In Greece, as I understand it, you need approval from 11 (or is it 17?) government entities to start a business. Growth by human creativity is impossible because the government strangles it. Here in San Diego, we considered building an addition on my wife's old home instead of moving. The building regs were such that it was impossible, no matter how reasonable it was. We couldn't work anything out with our neighbors, either. Instead, the government told everyone what to do with conflicting, confusing and monstrous regulations on every phase of the effort. So we gave up that idea and our potential contractor lost business.

The Greeks (and we here in California) have an untapped source of revenue - their citizens. If they placed less power in the hands of the government and more in the hands of their people, they could, without changing budgets or wages in any way, increase economic growth instantly. The fact that even a brilliant sage like Nouriel doesn't make that a central point of his talks or essays indicates just how indoctrinated our society is in the religion of government omnipotence.

My building permit was denied, my truck was cited for improperly inflated tires, my children were seized by the government because I let them play with a BB gun and the cross on my front lawn was taken down by court order, but I'm still happy! They let me keep my old dental work, pending further review!

Is Gen Y That Different?

While perusing Bloomberg this morning, I came across this little tidbit that wonders if Gen Y is really that difference from previous generations. Here's the main point.

I was delighted to catch up recently with one of my teachers, and found her as passionate about educating children today as she was three decades ago, when I was in school. We had a great conversation, but I must admit to a sense of disquiet as I heard her opinions about the next generation.

Gen Y's desire to learn is lower than that of preceding generations; it doesn't have big dreams or huge aspirations; and the pursuit of instant gratification has compromised its values, she felt.

I agree with the premise that this generation is different, but I'm not sure it's worse. My first reaction is to say it's simply dreadful, but that's my first reaction to almost everything and should be taken with a grain of salt. To me the difference comes from attention spans and that comes from the entertainment available to us. Here's my example.

When I was in junior high, there were no video games. Pong hadn't even come out. My friends and I amused ourselves by making Civil War ironclads from cardboard and aluminum cans and then holding naval battles in our back yard with a BB gun*. We researched the ship designs, experimented with construction techniques, learned how to treat deep cuts from ragged pieces of Coors cans after cutting them with tin snips and made cannon muzzles from tiny pieces of aluminium coiled with a needle-nosed pliers. The project lasted for weeks as we researched, built, shot and refined the process again and again.

Video games eliminate the need for that. We weren't intellectually superior, we simply had no choices. To me, the changes are all about attention span. And if we had to have longer attention spans, we had nothing on previous generations.

"You should see the cool new video games, Dad!" "I've got one right here for you, honey. I carved it out of wood with a knife and painted it with pigments made from clay."
* - The number of modern rules this violates is almost without count. First off, one of us had to take the side of the racist Confederacy. Second, we used an actual gun. Third, we used tools and building materials that could hurt us and used them without supervision! The list goes on and on.

Jungle Predator

Giving iTunes Another Try

A while back, I downloaded and installed iTunes. The results were unpleasant as the thing went and converted all my wma music files to mp3 whereupon Mozy spent two days trying to back them all up. At the time it was all quite unnecessary. Now, however, what was once undesirable has become needed as my Droid thirsts for mp3 music files instead of wma.

Pardon me for a bit while my PC occupies itself for a good while converting and backing up files.

Update: Hmm. The stupid thing wants to convert them to aac files instead of mp3. What a waste. Still, it does have a good podcast feature.

After Review, It Was Discovered That Our Posture Was Supine

This is surreal.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said North Korea's military actions against the South have placed Northeast Asia in a "precarious situation" and that the U.S. was intensifying efforts to de-escalate regional tensions while still deterring Pyongyang.

Mrs. Clinton said the Obama administration was initiating a review of the U.S.'s military and economic posture towards Kim Jong Il's government to ensure the safety of its regional treaty allies, South Korea and Japan.

Umm, the NoKos just torpedoed a South Korean Navy vessel and killed a bunch of sailors. We're responding by reviewing our posture. If there's any doubt about what will happen once Iran goes nuclear, this should pretty much put an end to that.

Update: From the comments on that WSJ article: "We're obviously not talking enough. Gotta talk longer and faster." Outstanding!

Fuzzy

Our salvias have fuzzy, purple flowers. I like them very much. I left the originals fairly large and I think they're worth a click.

Cheezburger of the Day

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

How to Tell if You're Financially Screwed Up

... your financial statements look like this (you'll need to click on it).

Image from Der Spiegel.
Taking Greece as an example and making it personal, assume you make $50,000 a year. Greek-sized debt means you owe $65,000 on your credit cards. If you get to that point, you've made some colossal mistakes in the way you've handled money. It's not something that's open for debate, either, it's just totally wrong. You need make a major change in the way you operate with money in every respect.

I don't understand the writers who talk as if the Euro can be saved with some modifications or how this might not end so badly for Europe in general. If a friend came to you with a problem like this, you wouldn't suggest that they if clip a few coupons and cut down on the Starbucks and everything will be fine. Problems like this show that their fundamental mental model of finances is totally wrong.

Socialism works until you run out of other people's money. They've run out. It's a failure. What else can you say about this stuff? I know I'm a broken record on this subject, but when presented with facts like this and then analysis pieces that mumble and beat around the bush trying to preserve the status quo, I end up totally flabbergasted. It's like seeing a house on fire and listening to family inside discuss whether or not they should fight the fire with a single bucket half full of water or just use some Dixie cups filled from the sink.

Fear Can Make You Lie

Education has long been one of the major power bases for liberals. What students are taught in high school and college has a major effect on how they vote in their first elections. The thought that social studies curricula might be changed is frightening to the liberal power centers like the Washington Post.