HMMM: Henry Kissinger: ‘Temptation to Deal’ with North Korea ‘with a Pre-emptive Attack is Strong.’
Archive for 2018
February 2, 2018
MAX FISHER: In Afghanistan’s Unwinnable War, What’s the Best Loss to Hope For? “Few modern wars have raged this long, this destructively and with this much outside intervention. If there is an obvious way out, history does not provide it.”
Other than Fisher’s necessarily tragic conclusion, quoted above, there’s no good way to excerpt his article — so just read the whole thing.
MY COUNTRY TIS OF XHE: Canadian National Anthem Revised With Gender-Neutral Language.
SHOULDN’T THE DYING HAVE THE “RIGHT TO TRY” UNAPPROVED TREATMENTS HERE? President Donald Trump’s shout-out to the “Right-to-Try” movement during his State of the Union Address should give a boost to a movement that has received little attention in recent years. LifeZette’s Brendan Kirby talks to a key leader in the movement, and a critic who says the FDA already has a provision for the terminally ill to try experimental treatments here in the states, rather than having to travel to Mexico, Europe or elsewhere.
LATE-STAGE SOCIALISM: Venezuela’s Health Care System Ready To Collapse Amid Economic Crisis.
Marcos Carvajal, a 34-year-old former pitcher for the Colorado Rockies and Florida Marlins, died of pneumonia on Tuesday. He fell sick in December, but the antibiotics needed to treat the illness were hard to find. Drugs for Carvajal eventually were sent from abroad but he relapsed, returned to the hospital on Monday and died the next day.
The Pharmaceutical Federation of Venezuela estimates the country is suffering from an 85 percent shortage of medicine amid an economic crisis also marked by severe hyperinflation and food scarcity.
The entire Venezuelan health care system is on the verge of collapse, says Francisco Valencia, head of the public health advocacy group Codevida. Some hospitals lack electricity, and more than 13,000 doctors have left Venezuela in the past four years in search of better opportunities.
“They don’t give food to the patients in the hospital,” Valencia tells Here & Now’s Peter O’Dowd. “They don’t have the proper medical supplies to take care of the people who go to the emergency [room] like gloves, like every basic thing they need for an emergency.”
It seems like ages since Bernie Sanders, Michael Moore, Sean Penn, et al., commented on the Bolivarian workers’ paradise.
SHARYL ATTKISSON IN THE HILL: New FBI messages reveal agents sought way to evade federal record requirements. “It’s a shockingly cavalier attitude from an attorney and high level FBI official.” Well, not all that shocking, sadly.
HOW INVITING A TARGET FOR TERRORISTS IS 200 CONGRESSMEN ON ONE TRAIN? That’s a question a few folks are starting to ask in the wake of Wednesday’s Amtrak train collision with a garbage truck at a rural Virginia crossing. The train carried an estimated 200 Members of Congress, aides and family members. One strategically placed Improvised Explosive Device (IED) could have killed how many, 50, 100, more lawmakers? LifeZette’s Jim Stinson talks to Sebastian Gorka and others saying wait a minute.
I FEEL FINE: Surviving The Death Of The Blogosphere. I think that the old blogosphere was superior to “social media” like Twitter and Facebook for a number of reasons. First, as a loosely-coupled system, instead of the tightly-coupled systems built by retweets and shares, it was less prone to cascading failure in the form of waves of hysteria. Second, because there was no central point of control, there was no way to ban people. And you didn’t need one, since bloggers had only the audience that deliberately chose to visit their blogs.
and AT AMAZON, Jordan Peterson’s book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos 
TELL HIM YES ON ONE AND NO ON TWO: Should I get a flu shot? Is it too late to get a flu shot?
Don’t mess around with the flu. This year’s chest cold — which I just got over — is bad enough.
(Classical reference in the headline.)
PREVIEW: Succeed or fail, SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy test sure to be a blast.
SpaceX revealed the Falcon Heavy in 2011, predicting it would fly as early as late 2013. Musk is known for his ambitious timelines, and it turned out the rocket’s design was more difficult to perfect than originally thought. Initially, SpaceX considered equipping the Heavy with a complicated propellant crossfeed system, in which the two side boosters re-fill the center booster as the rocket ascends. When the side boosters are empty, they drop away, leaving the center core with a full fuel tank. This ultimately makes the rocket more efficient.
The crossfeed feature ended up being too complex, but even without it, the Falcon Heavy was a challenge to bring to fruition. Whereas the Delta IV Heavy has just one engine for each of its three boosters, the Falcon Heavy has nine, for a grand total of 27 engines that must all ignite and work in tandem without tearing the rocket apart. SpaceX’s two disasters in 2015 and 2016 delayed things further: the 2016 accident damaged the company’s only launch pad, Space Launch Complex 40, forcing SpaceX to rush to get pad 39A operational. But since there’s a chance the Heavy flight will end in disaster and damage pad 39A, SpaceX also needed to get pad 40 operational again.
There’s actually a further bit of controversy surrounding this point. Only pad 39A is outfitted for crew flights, which are expected to start later this year (an ambitious timeline, according to the Government Accountability Office). Should the Falcon Heavy damage 39A, how will that affect NASA’s commercial crew program, which has been waiting to launch astronauts from American soil since 2011? It’s a fair question, and you can bet NASA officials will be watching this demo flight with clenched teeth.
Whatever you think of Elon Musk or his various ventures, this is going to be quite a thing to see.
INEZ FELTSCHER STEPMAN: We Need To Do Something About Civil Service Reform:
In November 2016, Washington was abuzz with talk of “landing teams,” as though transitioning from a Democratic administration to a Republican one was akin to landing at Omaha Beach. After Trump’s election, his employees in the executive branch openly declared their intention to “resist” by undermining his policies. Republican insiders bemoaned the slow appointments of people to political office within the administration, knowing that even a full political staff guiding a hostile department is much like the rudder of a sailboat trying to turn the Titanic.
That’s because the bulk of the civil service—2.8 million bureaucrats—has become a permanent class of powerbrokers, totally unaccountable to the winds of democratic change. Regardless of whether the man who sits in the Oval Office is President Trump or President Obama, the functions of the executive branch agencies carry on in much the same way as they did before.
As Congress debated the Pendleton Act in 1883, the first of many laws over the next century that added layers of job protection for government employees, they thought they were correcting the excesses of the spoils system. They could never have dreamed of the kind of system we have today, where federal employees get two civil trial-level appeals before a Merit Board (including discovery and the calling of witnesses), and where it takes years to fire a bureaucrat convicted of a felony he committed in the course of doing his job.
But incompetence and corruption are the least of the problems with the modern civil service. With 95-99 percent of political donations from government employees going to Hillary Clinton in the last election, it looks less like a system of apolitical administrators and more like an arm of the Democratic Party.
Well, that’s because that’s what it is.
LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Memo Day – Weasels and Liars Edition. “Rumors are that the memo will be released today, despite a heroic, often surreal effort to stop its disclosure.”
DAVID HARSANYI: The Media’s Ugly David Duke-Louis Farrakhan Double Standard.
It’s true that no politician has control over who supports him, even if politicians occasionally instigate that support. I mean, Farrakhan endorsed Barack Obama’s presidential run in 2008. Hillary Clinton was accused of passive-aggressive racism for even bringing up the topic. “I did not solicit his support,” the candidate explained at the time. “I can’t say to somebody that he can’t say that he thinks I’m a good guy.” Obama was correct, even if his antagonist policies towards Israel may have pleased the Nation of Islam leader who went to Iran to celebrate the anniversary for the Islamic Revolution a couple of years back.
On the other hand, when Obama posed for a photo with the man who claims white people are a “race of devils” and said Hitler was a “very great man” at a Congressional Black Caucus gathering in 2005, it was entirely his fault. We only found out about the picture recently — and thus the new questions — because the Congressional Black Caucus allegedly suppressed photos of Democrats hanging out with a man who spent decades spreading noxious anti-Semitic and racist conspiracies theories to African-Americans.
Obama is now gone. There are, however, 45 members in the CBC leading the resistance against Donald Trump. Four of them — Maxine Waters, Barbara Lee, Al Green, and William Jefferson — can been seen here exchanging pleasantries and running through some talking points on the hurricane Katrina response with Farrakhan in 2009.
But that’s different because shut up.
DON’T GET COCKY: Trump Makes Quick Work of Re-Election Fundraising. “President and his super PAC appeal to supporters big and small to build massive war chest—faster than any prior White House occupant.”
In the past year, Mr. Trump has appealed to supporters big and small to build up a re-election war chest, held nine political rallies in states he won in 2016 and aired campaign-sponsored television commercials to promote his policy agenda. He has also embraced the political action committees and major donors he once called a scourge on governing.
Mr. Trump’s campaign and an outside group that backs him collected more than $73 million last year, according to Federal Election Commission filings and interviews with officials at America First, a part-super PAC, part-nonprofit group that routinely meets with Mr. Trump and top White House officials to discuss political strategy. The campaign’s $43 million haul is four times what President Barack Obama raised in his first two years in office, a period when he wasn’t actively fundraising.
Indeed, no president who has served under modern campaign finance laws that date back to President Jimmy Carter has held a re-election fundraiser before entering his third year in office, said Brendan Doherty, an associate professor of political science at the U.S. Naval Academy who has researched presidential campaigning. Mr. Trump had eight in his first year.
If Trump continues to deliver on jobs and wage increases to Rust Belt and Midwest Obama-to-Trump voters, that warchest will be overkill.
On the other hand, there’s nothing wrong with a little overkill.
FASTER, PLEASE: House sets vote to ease Obamacare rules on menu labels.
WE’RE NOT THE ONLY ONES WITH PROCUREMENT ISSUES: Auditors say Britain can’t afford its 10-year defense equipment plan.
“The Ministry of Defence is facing a minimum affordability gap of £4.9 billion. There is an additional affordability gap of £15.9 billion if all identified financial risks of cost growth materialise and the Department does not achieve any of the savings assumed in the [equipment] plan. Overall, the potential affordability gap is £20.8 billion,” the government spending watchdog said Jan. 31.
The NAO report on the affordability of the MoD’s rolling 10-year equipment procurement and support programs said it was assuming that the £6 billion of contingency funds set aside in the plan to supplement budgets will also be swallowed up by spending requirements in the 2017-2027 plan.
Optimistic project costs, exchange rate problems, failure to achieve efficiency cuts and the spiraling bill for nuclear submarine programs are some of the reasons identified by the NAO for the lack of affordability of the British equipment procurement and support programs over the next decade. The report confirms a risk previously noted by a parliamentary Public Accounts Committee investigation into the financial viability of the plan.
Even without needed reforms, a £16 billion shortfall over ten years isn’t all that much compared to £485 billion each year in social spending.