Category Archives: Issues

The Obama Advisor Surge — Parallels to the Bush Surge?

The Washington Post editorial board sees parallels, HERE, between the “surge” ordered by President George W. Bush in Iraq to the dispatching of 300 advisors by President Obama.

I actually see more of a parallel to the MAG (Military Advisory Group) advisors sent to Vietnam by President John F. Kennedy during my three-year Army hitch in the early sixties.  The troops assigned to the MAG outfits were also supposed to advise only, but the scuttlebutt they spread in the NCO club upon rotation back to the States was that the typical South Vietnamese Army soldier couldn’t fight his way out of a wet paper bag, and if there were any real fighting to be done, the American Army was going to have to do it.  Taking that view to heart, Kennedy began the ramp-up that Johnson, his successor, took to it’s eventual conclusion.

In order to be effectual, the advisors will need to interact with local and regional Iraqi Army commanders on or near the battlefields.  However, my guess is that, in the absence of a new Status Of Forces agreement that protects them properly, they will be a new variety of FOBbit, spending all their time inside the protected Bagdahd Green Zone, or in regional equivalents, thereby insuring that they are nothing more than the token assistance that the President intends them to be.

So, Don’t Hear Much About “Peak Oil” These Days

The notion that there was a finite amount of oil reserves in the world, the vast majority of which mankind had already discovered, and a much smaller portion of which could ever be economically extracted, was known as the “Peak Oil” theory.  The theory was developed in 1956 by Marion Hubbert, a geologist who worked in the Texas research facilities of Shell Oil.  Hubbert died in 1989, but not before seeing the realization of his fundamental prediction, which was that worldwide petroleum production would “peak” in the late 1960s and steadily decline thereafter.

It recently occurred to me that there are some similarities between the liberal left’s attitude on Peak Oil in the 1970s and their attitude now on AGW/Climate-Change.  In the seventies and eighties, before AGW alarmism began to overshadow it, Peak Oil was the catastrophe that the left relied upon to panic the populace into thinking that, whatever the economic and/or inefficiency drawbacks of doing so, the nation must immediately launch into a monstrously expensive, government-coerced adoption of green energy.

I have a good friend who used to believe in the Peak Oil theory strongly, and he, along with his environmentalist friends, would use it as a justification for advocating vigorous governmental action to move the American citizenry away from the consumption of fossil fuels.  Nowadays, of course, they rely on Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW), or Anthropogenic Climate Change, or whatever the currently favored terminology happens to be.

But you don’t hear much these days about Peak Oil, because the discovery and exploitation of shale oil deposits since the late 1990s has made almost everyone understand how foolish the notion was to begin with.  And just this spring, another development in the Williston Basin (graphic at right, click to enlarge) along the Canadian border with Bakken_FormationMontana and North Dakota has reinforced that realization.

The basin, named for and surrounding the town of Williston, North Dakota, contains multiple layers of oil-bearing rock.  The top-most layers constitute the well-known Bakken formation, but recent discoveries are somewhat deeper.  These deeper layers are referred to on the U.S. side as the Three Forks formation, after Three Forks, Montana, and on the Canadian side as the Torquay Formation, after the seaside resort town of Torquay on England’s southern coast. 

The oil producers in the region are now “cracking the code” on the best drilling techniques and practices for the Three Forks and Torquay formations, and are coming up with incredible economic returns.  These wells cost, on average, less than four million dollars each including equipment and drilling expenditures for a one-mile horizontal well, but the yield is so great that the producers are recovering that investment in as little as one year, sometimes even less!

This kind of return on investment has re-invigorated the Canadian side, and on the US side, the production of the Three Forks wells is causing the industry to leap-frog estimates of the amount of recoverable oil available in the basin, by numbers ranging from 50% to 100%!  And this scenario, to one degree or another, is being repeated above the sites of shale oil deposits all over the world.

It is true, of course, that the earth is not growing any more dinosaurs, so the TOTAL reserves of petroleum are, indeed, finite.  However, for the immediate future, the proven reserves are growing at a rate that seemed incomprehensible a half-century ago when Marion Hubbert’s ideas were the prevailing wisdom.

For the WikiPedia page on “Peak Oil”, click HERE.  For the recent article in the industry journal Oil Voice, on which this post is partially based, go HERE.  And for the WikiPedia page on the Williston Basin, click THIS link.

General Assembly to Vote on the RIGHT Common Core bill Tomorrow

UPDATE:  This afternoon, in response to the e-mail I sent to my NC Senator (Sanderson), I received the following additional information from one of his staffers:

The NC House used a committee substitute to gut the Senate bill and replace it’s text with language identical to the House version.  It (meaning the replacement language) must be concurred upon when it comes back before the Senate.  However, it most likely will not be concurred upon and will therefore go to a conference committee to “hash out” the legislation.  I hope that helps explain what we believe may happen.

Earlier this afternoon, the leadership of the Coastal Carolina Taxpayers Association, our brethren up in the New Bern area, sent out the news of EndCommonCore_Logoan important development in the General Assembly regarding Common Core.

From the message sent by Raynor James, part of the CCTA leadership:

Michael Speciale and Larry Pittman have been working hard all day to get HB 1061 (to get rid of Common Core) approved for resubmission to the Senate.  They were successful.  The Senate bill was much weaker, and it looked like that version was going to pass, but now SB 812 and HB 1061 are identical and take the form of the stronger House bill.

We need to support Michael’s (and CCTA’s Common Core Committee’s) hard work by trying to get members of the NC Senate to vote in favor of the bill.  Will you please call all the NC Senators you can?  Ask them to vote for the bill tomorrow (Friday, 6-20-14).  They need to feel a ground swell of support.

This one is touch and go.  We don’t want the bill to die.

And he is so right, we don’t.  The house version of the Common Core legislation is far superior to the Senate version, so please, do your part.  Click HERE to look up the contact information for all the NC Senators in our area, then reach out to them.  As Hillary would say, we must do this for the itty bitty chur’en.

Coke & Kamen: They’d Like To Give The World Some Water

To Dean Kamen, the college drop-out, entrepreneur, inventor, and designer/manufacturer of the Segway, nothing beats sunlight distillation for creating pure water from not-so-pure water.

In Kamen’s eyes, distillation was magical in its simplicity.  “The sun will evaporate the water out of an open latrine, and it will leave behind all of the bioburden, Cryptosporidium, and Giardia,” he says.  “It will even separate the water from the arsenic and hexavalent chromium in a chemical waste site.”

So, to lick a problem related to one of his medical inventions, he set about to use distillation as the basis for a small, compact, efficient mechanism for making pure water.

As the plan for his water purifier took shape, Kamen found himself thinking a lot about disaster relief.  Whenever an earthquake or tsunami struck, aid organizations would request clean water before anything else because local supplies were tainted with sewage or chemicals.  Kamen thought, “I’ve been trying to make a box small enough that you could carry it around for mobile dialysis, and it makes 250 gallons a day—that would be enough for a hundred people in a crisis.”  More to the point, why not use the machine to help entire villages, or even nations, with persistent water needs?

“There are nearly a billion people in the world that get up every morning and their primary goal is to find water,” Kamen says.  “Many travel great distances to find water that won’t kill them.  And sadly, hundreds of thousands of times a year it does kill, mostly kids.”  With Kamen’s purifier, people could just stick a hose in their dirty laundry water, a polluted river, or even their own toilet pit, and crystal-clear, microbe-free water would stream out of the machine.

But the catch to scaling the production up was to find an organization with the right infrastructure.  That’s when Kamen thought of Atlanta’s own Coca-Cola Company.

“You talk to people that travel a lot and they say, ‘If there’s one thing you can buy anywhere in the world, it’s a Coke.’  You know the joke: A guy takes three weeks climbing to the top of Mount Everest; he gets to the top and buys himself a Coke.  So I thought, Coke is something you drink, and they have coolers that are about the size of our machine, and they have bottling partnerships around the world.  I’m going to go and try to convince them to do this.”

And he did.  The result was the Ekocenter, and you can read Tom Foster’s fascinating account of it’s development at the Popular Science website, HERE.

Jax’s MCAS New River getting new CH-53K Support Facility

The CH-53K King Stallion heavy-lift helicopter manufactured by Sikorsky, pictured below-right, is designed to provide the U.S. Marines with the largest CH-53K_KingStallionand heaviest helicopter in the American military.  According to it’s WikiPedia entry, HERE, it “features three 7,500 shp (5,590 kW) engines, new composite rotor blades, and a wider cabin than previous CH-53 variants.”

And they will be coming to eastern North Carolina in 2017.  According to THIS article from the Jacksonville Daily News, MCAS-NR is getting a new $30-million dollar facility to:

… teach flight control repair, composite component repair …and everything necessary to keep a CH-53K operational,” said Doss Comer, the facility manager for New River.  “We can’t field the aircraft for the Marine Corps without this facility.  If we don’t build it, we can’t train to maintain it.  We must have a this new building to tend to the new aircraft.”

The training facility will provide classrooms, administrative space, general offices, hydraulic and mechanical rooms, tool rooms, training areas, avionics, wire repair and more.  Four CH-53K simulators will be on site at a cost of more than $60 million each.  The simulators will allow training for all Marines at the squadron level excluding pilots.

Good news, and welcome.

The Ongoing Iraqi Tragedy and the role of Obama

A great deal is being shown and written in recent days about the events in Iraq, with all concerned lamenting the wasted lives of not only the thousands of American soldiers, but also the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, both soldiers and civilians.  Most readers will remember the surge ordered by President George W. Bush, and that fact that the result was the passover to incoming President Obama in January 2009 of a largely pacified Iraq, with the foundations for a stable government.

The country was Obama’s to lose, and lose it he has.  Among the recent consequences of the ISIS surge is the takeover of Mosul, which netted the insurgents over $400 million in gold that was stored in the central bank there.  Many are apprehensive about the potential for ISIS acquisition of other assets of the Maliki government, including the 140 Abrams tanks that were sent to Iraq in late 2011, and the more recent transfer of two dozen Apache attack helicopters.

But the devil, as they say, is in the details, and back in late April, Pulitzer Prize winner Dexter Filkins wrote an expansive article for publication in The New Yorker magazine about the disintegration of Iraq, the origins of the present predicament, and the principle players.  Filkins has the cred to write on the subject, as he was a Middle-East reporter for the New York Times, and he was based in Iraq from 2003 through 2006.

The following is a lengthy excerpt from Filkins’ article, but it is important for the reader to understand that the piece was written in late April, just days before the May 2, 2014 Iraqi elections in which Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki won his third term.  In addition, some named persons should be further identified, as follows:  Sky refers to Emma Sky, a civilian advisor to the American military forces;  Suleimani refers to Qassem Suleimani, the head of the Iranian Quds Force;  and Sadr refers to Moqtada al-Sadr, the Iranian-backed guerrilla who made Basra his stronghold.

In this excerpt, Filkins writes that, in the Iraqi parliamentary elections of March, 2010, over a year after Obama’s inauguration:

Maliki’s Shiite Islamist alliance, the State of Law, had suffered an embarrassing loss.  The greatest share of votes went to a secular, pro-Western coalition called Iraqiya, led by Ayad Allawi, a persistent enemy of the Iranians.  “These were election results we could only have dreamed of,” a former American diplomat told me.  “The surge had worked.  The war was winding down.  And, for the first time in the history of the Arab world, a secular, Western-leaning alliance won a free and fair election.”

But even though Allawi’s group had won the most votes, it had not captured a majority, leaving both him and Maliki scrambling for coalition partners.  And despite the gratifying election results, American officials said, the Obama Administration concluded that backing Allawi would be too difficult if he was opposed by Shiites and by their supporters in Iran.  “There was no way that the Shia were not going to provide the next Prime Minister,” James Jeffrey, the American Ambassador at the time, told me.  “Iraq will not work if they don’t.  Allawi was a goner.”

Shortly after the elections, an Iraqi judge, under pressure from the Prime Minister, awarded Maliki the first chance to form a government.  The ruling directly contradicted the Iraqi constitution, but American officials did not contest it.  “The intent of the constitution was clear, and we had the notes of the people who drafted it,” Sky, the civilian adviser, said.  “The Americans had already weighed in for Maliki.”

But it was the meeting with Suleimani that was ultimately decisive.  According to American officials, he broke the Iraqi deadlock by leaning on Sadr to support Maliki, in exchange for control of several government ministries.  Suleimani’s conditions for the new government were sweeping.  Maliki agreed to make Jalal Talabani, the pro-Iranian Kurdish leader, the new President, and to neutralize the Iraqi National Intelligence Service, which was backed by the C.I.A.  Most dramatic, he agreed to expel all American forces from the country by the end of 2011.

The U.S. obtained a transcript of the meeting, and knew the exact terms of the agreement.  Yet it decided not to contest Iran’s interference.  At a meeting of the National Security Council a month later, the White House signed off on the new regime.  Officials who had spent much of the previous decade trying to secure American interests in the country were outraged.  “We lost four thousand five hundred Americans only to let the Iranians dictate the outcome of the war?  To result in strategic defeat?” the former American diplomat told me.  “Fuck that.”  At least one U.S. diplomat in Baghdad resigned in protest.  And Ayad Allawi, the secular Iraqi leader who captured the most votes, was deeply embittered.  “I needed American support,” he told me last summer.  “But they wanted to leave, and they handed the country to the Iranians.  Iraq is a failed state now, an Iranian colony.”

American diplomats made one last effort to preserve their influence.  In a meeting, Jeffrey asked Maliki to commit to several goals in his second term: granting amnesty to thousands of Sunnis who had been detained without charges; dismantling prisons where American officials believed that Iraqis were being tortured; and signing an agreement that would allow American troops to stay in the country.  Later that year, the U.S. brokered a deal to bring Allawi and other members of his coalition into the government.  In time, Maliki either ignored or jettisoned every promise.  “He looked us straight in the eyes and lied,” the former diplomat told me.

The consequences became clear when negotiations began over the crucial question of withdrawing American troops after 2011.  The leaders of all the major Iraqi parties had privately told American commanders that they wanted several thousand military personnel to remain, to train Iraqi forces and to help track down insurgents.  The commanders told me that Maliki, too, said that he wanted to keep troops in Iraq.  But he argued that the long-standing agreement that gave American soldiers immunity from Iraqi courts was increasingly unpopular; parliament would forbid the troops to stay unless they were subject to local law.

President Obama, too, was ambivalent about retaining even a small force in Iraq.  For several months, American officials told me, they were unable to answer basic questions in meetings with Iraqis — like how many troops they wanted to leave behind — because the Administration had not decided.  “We got no guidance from the White House,” Jeffrey told me.  “We didn’t know where the President was.  Maliki kept saying, ‘I don’t know what I have to sell.’ ”  At one meeting, Maliki said that he was willing to sign an executive agreement granting the soldiers permission to stay, if he didn’t have to persuade the parliament to accept immunity.  The Obama Administration quickly rejected the idea.  “The American attitude was: Let’s get out of here as quickly as possible,” Sami al-Askari, the Iraqi member of parliament, said.

The last American combat troops departed Iraq on December 18, 2011.  Some U.S. officials believe that Maliki never intended to allow soldiers to remain; in a recent e-mail, he denied ever supporting such a plan, saying, “I am the owner of the idea of withdrawing the U.S. troops.”  Many Iraqi and American officials are convinced that even a modest force would have been able to prevent chaos — not by fighting but by providing training, signals intelligence, and a symbolic presence.  “If you had a few hundred here, not even a few thousand, they would be co-operating with you, and they would become your partners,” Askari told me.  “But, when they left, all of them left.  There’s no one to talk to about anything.”

I have always had doubts about the idea of nation-building, particularly if the conditions are not right.  They were right in Japan and Germany in the mid-1940s, because the military forces of both countries were in abject defeat.  In Iraq, the American Army fought their enemy to a standstill, but President Obama’s assurances to the contrary, Al-Qaeda and the other extreme Islamist factions were never soundly defeated and disarmed.  And even more telling, the U.S. government maintained occupational forces in both Japan and Germany for decades after the end of hostilities, a historical precedent that apparently suggested nothing to our Nobel Peace-Prize winning Commander In Chief.

The full article, HERE, is long but very informative.

Still not much hope for the A-10 Warthogs

The defense news site Military.com is reporting, HERE, that although they are not giving up, the supporters of the A-10 Warthog seem to be fighting a losing battle against the opposition led by Secretary of Defense Hagel.  An excerpt:

The Air Force has proposed retiring the entire fleet of nearly 300 A-10 “Warthogs” — including more than 80 at Davis-Monthan — by 2019 to save some $4 billion, but backers say there’s no ready substitute with the A-10’s unique close-air support capabilities.

I hope the A-10 supporters are successful, as the F-35 seems to be far less capable as a close air support aircraft.

A Comedic Take on the VA Scandal

Remy Munasifi is a name that would seem to be straight off the Al-Qaeda honor roll.  In reality, however, he was born in Washington, DC in 1980 of an Iraqi physician father and a Lebanese mother.  In 2002, he graduated with honors from Wheeling Jesuit University in West Virginia, a private Roman Catholic university.

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After college, Remy gravitated into a career in stand-up comedy, and in recent years has specialized in created web videos focused on political targets.  Many of them are very funny, as is this one in my opinion.  It is mainly about the Obama VA scandal, but Bowe Bergdahl comes in for dishonorable mention toward the end.

Allegations that Bob Bergdahl has stalked two Idaho sisters

The online edition of the British newspaper Daily Mail is reporting, HERE, that about three years ago Bob Bergdahl, the father of the recently released Bowe Bergdahl, seems to have become infatuated with one or both of the two Hillman twin sisters who lived near him in the area around Hailey, Idaho.  An excerpt from the article, with my editing for punctuation and brevity, is below.  It refers to the police report that resulted from the account of the two sisters:

Bergdahl, who then worked as a UPS delivery man ‘was always near or on’ the sisters’ property despite never having any packages to pick up or deliver, according to the report.  Allie contacted police in early October and officers promised to step up patrols in her area.  But soon after speaking to the police Allie related that a note written on UPS-headed note paper appeared on her front door which read, ‘I am sorry for whatever I did.’  The pretty blond threw the note away and told police she found it ‘creepy’.

Just a week after leaving the note, Bergdahl drove his UPS truck to the sisters’ home, waited until Allie’s boyfriend left, then confronted the bewildered brunette and accused her of cheating on him, Allie reveals.  ‘Allie had opened the door when Robert knocked and he said (while laughing), “What, are you two-timing me b*tch?” the Hailey Police Department report said.  ‘Allie slammed the door shut as Robert grabbed the door handle.  ‘Allie said Robert just stood there as she yelled, “Bye, bye” and left Robert’s view.’

She was shocked as ‘she and Robert have never “really talked” or been in any kind of friendly or dating relationship,’ the report states.

The article also states that the elder Bergdahl was an Olympic aspirant whose athletic hopes were dashed when President Jimmy Carter cancelled U.S. participation in the 1980 Moscow games because of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

Nixon’s Secretary RoseMary Woods lost 18 minutes, Obama’s IRS loses two years.

In an iteration of the Friday afternoon news dump, CBS News reported yesterday, HERE, that the Obama adminstration is claiming that most of the Lois Lerner e-mail messages from 2011 and prior have been lost due to a crash of her IRS computer workstation.GangstaGuv

The e-mail messages would likely have been strong proof, perhaps even dispositive proof, that Lerner had a hand in the inappropriate scrutiny of many tea party groups’ applications for 501(c)(4) tax exempt status, and that some of her superiors in the Obama administration might have directed her actions.  This unfortunate development will, therefore, put an end to all those complaints.

Oh, wait …

Scott Johnson and John Hindraker of PowerLine demonstrate how ridiculous the claims are, first in THIS post and again in THIS one.  An excerpt from the second:

E-mails are collected on e-mail servers. Each user (e.g., Lois Lerner) has an account on an e-mail server, where that person’s e-mails are collected.  It is common for e-mails to be deleted from the user’s own desktop or laptop computer, but no one worries about that.  When it is time to collect e-mails – something I do all the time in my law practice – you go to the e-mail server and pull out the user’s entire account.  A crash of the user’s computer is irrelevant and will not cause e-mails to be “lost.”

Further, e-mails are universally backed up in some other medium, often electronic tape, for long-term storage.  Thus, even if an e-mail server is destroyed, or all e-mails are deleted from a server after a specified length of time, the e-mails are still recoverable from back-up storage media.

Next it will be that the dog ate the e-mail servers.

Although details are sketchy, the ABC News article from yesterday, HERE, had this interesting snippet:

But an untold number are gone.  Camp’s office said the missing e-mails are mainly ones to and from people outside the IRS, “such as the White House, Treasury, Department of Justice, FEC, or Democrat offices.”

If these messages had been sent via the IRS e-mail host, then they should indeed be recoverable.  However, if Lerner had used her internet access to log onto her personal e-mail account, say AOL, and sent them from there, then the messages would have been on the AOL servers, and not on the IRS servers.  Of course, this scenario begs the question of why Lerner would do such a thing when conducting official IRS business.

The Obama folks seem to be scrapping the bottom of the stalling tactics barrel.  If the Republicans gain control of the Senate next year, I look forward to a more vigorous investigation of this, so hold your nose and vote for Thom Tillis.

D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Seventieth Anniversary

During World War II, Samuel A. L. Marshall was a U.S. Army Colonel serving as a combat historian, and that continued to be his assignment until he retired as a Brigadier General in 1953.  By then, his research and focus on WW2, and on the Normandy invasion in particular, made him about as knowledgable about D-Day and the allied landings as anyone who has ever written about the events of that date.  For the November, 1960 issue of The Atlantic magazine, Marshall used his notes to write a riveting account of that horrific first day.

The account can be accessed via the Education / Historic Events menu, or simply by clicking HERE.

Where is the Dept. of Pre-Crime when we need it most?

The premise of the 2002 Tom Cruise movie “Minority Report” (HERE) was that future technology would enable law enforcement to gain advance GangstaGuvnotice of crimes that were soon to be committed, and that they would then rush to the locale in order to prevent their commission.

President Obama is scheduled to address the nation on television Monday, and it is widely anticipated that he will commit the following “crimes” against our country in the cause of environmentalism:

Obama will try anew to kill the coal mining industry with his announcement of new regulations that will further restrict carbon emissions via what amounts to a national energy tax, thereby increasing the costs of utilities for all Americans;

He will order the EPA to create more stringent fuel-efficiency standards for heavy trucks, thereby ensuring that the price of such trucks will increase, and that the increases will be passed on to consumers in the form of freight charges;

In conformance with his extension last month of the review period for the project, he will NOT announce any support for the measure with the most potential to alleviate our national energy costs, the immediate approval by Congress of the Keystone XL pipeline.

For a comprehensive article on these issues and the expected consequences of the President’s action, check out THIS from Vox.

Navy Stealth Before the Zumwalt Class

Back on April 20th I posted on the christening of USS Zumwalt (HERE), the Navy’s new stealth vessel, noting that the design of these ships would enable them to get close in to shore for the purpose of off-loading SEAL teams or other special forces for missions inland.

In case you’re wondering how this objective is being addressed presently, an article from the military blog FoxTrot-Alpha may provide the answer.  An excerpt:

For about a decade there have been sightings of some very peculiar high-speed watercraft patrolling up and down the Columbia River between Portland and Vancouver.  It just so happens that these phantom vessels are some of the US Navy SEALs newest toys.

Like the Zumwalt, these boats apparently have the ability to take on water ballast so as to lower them deeper into the water, thereby reducing their radar signature.

For the full article, go HERE.  Note, however, that the 16,000-watt figure that the article specifies for the vessel’s powerplant is in error, as the AuraGen G8500XM VIPER is a compact, high-tech, generator only.  Since one horsepower equals approximately 740-watts, that would convert to only about 21 horsepower.  I could find no information on the actual powerplant, but since the article says that the boat is capable of 40-mph it is most likely a set of diesels that power both the gensets and the propulsion gear.

Hope fades for retention of Fort Bragg’s 440th Airlift Wing

The Fayetteville Observer is reporting, HERE, that Fort Bragg Brigadier General James Scanlan, commander of the 440th Airlift Wing operating out of Pope Field, has sent an e-mail out to the troops that does not offer encouragement for believing that the unit will survive past the end of this year.

The 440th flies the C-130 cargo aircraft, and provides about one quarter of all airlifts flown out of Fort Bragg.

Fayetteville Observer Launching Series on Fracking in NC

As most know by now, testing has revealed the presence of shale gas deposits in the Sandhills region of North Carolina.  A map of the known NC_TriassicRiftBasins_ShaleGasand suspected deposits is at right (click to enlarge).

Since this is an issue that will occupy a portion of the General Assembly’s time this summer, and since it may well represent the beginnings of an “shale gas boom” for the Tar Heel state, the Fayetteville Observer, is initiating a six-part series on fracking.  The “master” page for the series is HERE, and the first in the series is HERE, but readers are cautioned that the Fayetteville Observer imposes a ten article per 30-day period limit against online viewers.

Iranian Nuke Talks — The Charade Resumes

Top-level staffers in both the Bush-43 and Obama administrations have said that both Presidents are in agreement that Iran cannot be allowed to possess nuclear weapons.  So, as diplomats assemble in Austria this week to continue going through the motions of negotiating an end to the Iranian effort to develop that capability, the underlying question looms larger with the passage of time.  After the negotiations fail, as they most certainly will fail, and there is consensus among the experts that Iranian success is inevitable, as there is already, what will President Obama do to stop them?

Matthew Kroenig is associate professor of government at Georgetown University, and a former advisor on middle eastern policy in the offices of the Secretary of Defense.  He is also the author of the just-released book A Time to Attack, which details the history of the Iranian nuclear program and explains why it’s termination is so vital to the west, and to the middle east as well.

To promote the release of his book, Kroenig has up an article at the online Spectator magazine, HERE, in which he states his belief that Obama will eventually bomb the Iranian nuclear facilities.  The article is well worth reading, but I have my doubts as to Kroenig’s conclusion.  I think that the end result of the negotiations will be, as another writer recently characterized it, that the Iranians will pretend to discontinue their nuclear weapons program, and Secretary of State John Kerry will pretend to believe them.  What seems certain is that President Obama will take no action, nor aid the Israelis in taking action, until after the fall elections.

For a full hour after the start of the Japanese air attack on Pearl Harbor in December, 1941, the Japanese diplomats in Washington continued the pretense to US Secretary of State Cordell Hull that they were still engaged in efforts to forestall an armed conflict between the two nations.  We can only hope that Israel does not experience a repeat of that scenario.

Benghazi: If this gun ain’t smokin’, it’s definitely getting hot.

In response to Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) requests from Judicial Watch, the Obama administration has, after nineteen months of hedging Hillary_2and stone-walling, released some new e-mails that shed light on how the White House went about damage control in the period between the attacks in Libya and the appearance of Susan Rice on the Sunday talk shows.  At the moment, I think the most informative of the several articles written today about the e-mails is one posted yesterday afternoon by John Hindraker on the PowerLine blog, HERE.  The article is informative, even containing screenshots of the incriminating messages.

UPDATE:  Sharyl Attkinson has a post up, HERE, that contains more information, including this bit:

Representative Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) told me today that the government apparently tried to keep the Rhodes email out of Congress and the public’s hands by classifying it after-the-fact.

“They retroactively changed the classification,” Chaffetz says.  “That was an unclassified document and they changed it to classified.” 

Ah, yes, the cover-up.

What Sasha Obama Does Not Have In Common

Rebecca Steinitz has a doctoral degree in English, and she knows about primary education.  She is a literacy consultant in the Massachusetts EndCommonCore_Logoschool system, and she happens to have a daughter who is the same age as Sasha, President Obama’s daughter.  In that connection, she recently put up a “Open Letter To President Obama” piece on the Huffington Post about her frustrations with Common Core, and with the fact that the Obama children are insulated from it.  Here are her opening words to the President:

We have something very important in common: daughters in the seventh grade.  Since your family walked onto the national stage in 2007, I’ve had a feeling that our younger daughters have a lot in common too.  Like my daughter Eva, Sasha appears to be a funny, smart, loving girl, who has no problem speaking her mind, showing her feelings, or tormenting her older sister.  There is, however, one important difference between them: Sasha attends private school, while Eva goes to public school … 

An interesting perspective on Common Core from an education professional, worth reading in total, HERE.

UNC Chancellor Carol Folt — The Dartmouth Connection

I have written several posts (HERE, HERE, and HERE) calling attention to the corrupt practices within the UNC system as regards the educational sham of college athletes, and particularly on the revelations by Mary Willingham, the academic advisor to the UNC Athletic Program.  Now, the scandal has drawn the attention of PowerLine co-blogger Paul Mirengoff, a Dartmouth College alumni, because of the fact that Willingham’s chief antagonist in all this is Carol Folt, the current UNC-CH Chancellor and former Provost at Dartmouth.  Mirengoff points to a telling quote from a UNC history professor that seems to summarize the situation nicely:

The aggressiveness and the tenor of the attacks on Willingham. . .betray an anxiety -– a kind of panic — that goes far beyond a disagreement over [literacy] numbers [for UNC athletes].  The all-out assault reflects a fundamentally cynical strategy to discredit and defame someone who has embarrassing facts to reveal.

For the entire post at PowerLine, click HERE.

In New York, Common Core Is Used To Sell Your Kid Stuff

Today’s article by Eric Owens, in the Daily Caller, in it’s entirety:

Across the state of New York, this year’s Common Core English tests have reportedly featured a slew of brand-name products including iPod, Barbie, Mug Root Beer and Life Savers.  For Nike, the tests even EndCommonCore_Logoconveniently included the shoe company’s ubiquitous slogan: “Just Do It.”

The brands – and apparently even some of their familiar trademark symbols – appeared in tests questions for students ranging from third to eighth grades, reports The Post-Standard of Syracuse.  Over one million students were required to take the tests.  Parents, teachers and school administrators have speculated that the kid-friendly brand names are a new form of product placement.

Education materials behemoth Pearson, which has a $32 million five-year contract to develop New York’s Common Core-related tests, has barred teachers and school officials from disclosing the contents of the tests.  Students and parents are not so barred, though, and many have complained.

“‘Why are they trying to sell me something during the test?’” Long Island mother Deborah Poppe quoted her son as saying, according to Fox News.  “He’s bright enough to realize that it was almost like a commercial.”  Poppe said her eighth-grade son was talking about a question about a busboy who didn’t clean up a root beer spill.  It wasn’t just any root beer, though.  No sir!  It was Mug Root Beer, a registered trademark of PepsiCo (current market cap: $129.7 billion).

Another question about the value of taking risks featured the now-hackneyed Nike slogan “Just Do It.”  “I’m sure they could have used a historical figure who took risks and invented things,” observed displeased dad Sam Pirozzolo, also of Staten Island, according to the Daily Mail.  “I’m sure they could have found something other than Nike to express their point.”  Pirozzolo has a child in fifth grade.

Nike, one of America’s best known and most heavily advertised companies, boasts a current market cap of $65.01 billion.

A number of baffled and angry New York teachers have anonymously complained about the branding and much else on blogs and websites.

Representatives from the New York State Education Department have flatly denied involvement in any novel marketing agreements.  “There are no product placement deals between us, Pearson or anyone else,” Tom Dunn, an Education Department spokesman, told Fox News.  “No deals.  No money.  We use authentic texts.  If the author chose to use a brand name in the original, we don’t edit.”

To the credit of Pearson and the named companies, it does seem like an unusually stupid move—even for greedy brand managers.  “If any brand did try to place there, what they would lose from the outrage would surely trump any exposure they got,” Michal Ann Strahilevitz, a marketing professor at Golden Gate University, told Fox.

At the same, some people are perfectly happy about idea of mixing for-profit merchandising and mandatory Common Core tests.  “Brands are part of our lives,” Allen Adamson, managing director of the New York brand consulting firm Landor Associates, told Fox.  “To say they don’t belong in academia is unrealistic.”

The Daily Caller article is HERE, and the original report from the Syracuse, New York Post Standard is HERE.

Mary Willingham Goes Under the UNC Athletics Bus

WRAL is reporting today (with no byline) that Mary Willingham, the academic advisor for the UNC football team players, will leave UNC-CH after her teaching assignments are wrapped up for the semester.  The report, HERE, also said that:

Willingham was the subject of national media attention after she questioned the literacy level of athletes who were admitted to the school.  She said that most of the 183 basketball and football players she reviewed from 2004 to 2012 read at an eighth-grade level or below.

In a separate article by Sara Ganim on CNN about ten days ago, these excerpts:

The University of North Carolina says that three independent experts in the field of adult literacy have finished a university-commissioned review of whistleblower Mary Willingham’s research and found flaws in her claims that some athletes were reading at elementary-school levels.

Willingham’s research, described to CNN in January, was based on a sampling of about 180 student-athletes who Willingham personally worked with over an eight-year period.

Each had taken a 25-question reading vocabulary test on the Scholastic Abilities Test for Adults (SATA) — an aptitude test used by many universities to gauge the learning level of incoming students.

Without actually naming her, UNC released a summary report that implied she incorrectly deduced that 60% of the sample were reading below a high school level, and that 8% were reading below a fourth-grade level.  “Outside experts found no evidence to support public claims about widespread low literacy levels,” UNC said in a statement.

Well, I dunno, there was this …

RosaParksStory

The CNN article, HERE, goes on to say that:

Willingham and her research were disavowed by the university almost immediately …

<snip>

On Friday, Willingham said she was “disappointed” by the report …  “The fact that they engaged in this exercise without ever seeking input from me or my research partner, and without the raw scores, or an examination of the full battery of tests … speaks volumes about the true motivations behind today’s press release,” she wrote in a statement.  “UNC personnel with the knowledge and expertise to verify my claims continue to remain and/or are being forced to remain silent.”

And on another matter involving student athletes in the UNC system:

Since the CNN report aired, UNC has asked for a new investigation into the yearslong “paper class” scandal, in which student-athletes allegedly were taking classes in which the only requirement was completing a single paper.

Attorney Kenneth Wainstein, who had worked at the U.S. Justice Department for 19 years, is reviewing whether it was widely known among staff in athletics that student-athletes were sent to no-show classes where little or no work was required.

CNN first reported this week that California Rep. Tony Cardenas is also demanding the NCAA answer questions on why UNC was never sanctioned for having paper classes.

Willingham told CNN that the paper classes were widely known and talked about in athletics, where she worked for seven years.  She also said the paper classes were used to keep eligible some of the student-athletes who were reading at low levels.

DDG-1000, the US Navy’s new destroyer USS Zumwalt

On Monday, April 12th, the US Navy christened the first of the three planned Zumwalt-class destroyers.  The vessel will be delivered to the Navy later this year, and should enter the Pacific fleet in another two years.  Then, and only then, will the Navy learn whether this new hull design is a triumph or a disaster.USS_Zumwalt

The Zumwalt class destroyers are meant to supplement, not replace, the Arleigh-Burke class.  At present, there are plans to build only three, and the home port for all three will be San Diego.  These are special-purpose ships, designed to be stealthy, with the capability of operating in littoral (shallow, roughly 60′ or less) waters.  Their focus will be on getting in close to shore undetected in order to support special forces operations and to conduct bombardment of targets along the coastline, as well as the traditional destroyer function of attacking enemy shipping.  After becoming fully operational, they are expected to spend a lot of time patrolling the East and South China Seas, the contested zone between mainland China and Japan, in order to monitor the growth of the Chinese Navy and their territorial ambitions in the region.

The Zumwalt class is big.  At 610-feet, they are better than 100-feet longer than the current Arleigh-Burke class of destroyers, and about 50-feet longer than the older Spruance class.  They are even slightly larger than the Ticonderoga class of cruisers.  Although displacing 15,000 tons, the ship draws only 28-feet of water, two feet less than the Burke class.  And, despite it’s size, the crew will number only 142 officers and men, about half of what an Arleigh-Burke class destroyer needs.

The armaments of the Zumwalt and each of her two sister ships will eventually include two of the Navy’s 6″ Advanced Gun System, an electromagnetic rail gun that will fire rocket propelled warheads at 5,000-mph plus out to a range of over 60 miles, with a rate of fire of ten rounds per minute.  She will also be equipped with laser weapons.  A related feature incorporated into the Zumwalt class is the ability to take on water ballast, which can lower the ship deeper into the water in order to add vertical and lateral stability when the gun battery is being used.

Both of these weapons systems are still in the last stages of development and will not be installed for another two years or so.  When they become operational, however, they both will require a great deal of electricity.  On top of that, the Zumwalt class ships all employ electric propulsion.  To handle this mammoth electrical generation requirement, these vessels will be equipped with generators powered by two 40-megawatt gas turbines and two 78-megawatt gas turbines, which adds up to about 318,000-horsepower.  By comparison, the powerplants in the Arleigh-Burke class developed about 108,000-horsepower.  The combination of gas turbines driving electric motors is expected to produce a level of operational quietness that approaches that of modern nuclear submarines.  One of the measures that will be used to dissipate the heat from the gas turbines is “sleeting”, in which water is taken in from below the waterline and then pumped out onto the outer hull plates in a sort of continuously cascading “waterfall”, a technique made possible because of the tumblehome hull.

The Navy intends to be slow and cautious in bringing the Zumwalt into Tumblehomefront-line duty, partly because it is the first of a new class of ship, and partly because of it’s controversial hull design.  As can be seen in the photo above, the Zumwalt’s waterline to weatherdeck form is opposite of conventional ships.  It has a “tumblehome” stern, as well as what can be termed an overall tumblehome contour.  The difference is illustrated in the graphic at upper left.  While this design has been used before by the 19th century Russian and French navies, it was associated even then with instability problems.  Seven years ago, when news of the Zumwalt-class hull form first became public, the online Defense Industry Daily newspaper questioned it’s suitability, HERE, by writing this excerpt:

“At least eight current and former officers, naval engineers and architects and naval analysts interviewed for this article expressed concerns about the ship’s stability.  Ken Brower, a civilian naval architect with decades of naval experience was even more blunt: “It will capsize in a following sea at the wrong speed if a wave at an appropriate wavelength hits it at an appropriate angle”… “

“…Brower explained: “The trouble is that as a ship pitches and heaves at sea, if you have tumblehome instead of flare, you have no righting energy to make the ship come back up.  On the DDG 1000, with the waves coming at you from behind, when a ship pitches down, it can lose transverse stability as the stern comes out of the water – and basically roll over.”

So, triumph or disaster, only time will tell.

Today is the 72nd Anniversary of the Doolittle Raid

Way back in the previous millenium, when I was a mere babe in arms, “airmen of the US Army Air Forces, led by Lieutenant Colonel James H. (Jimmy) Doolittle, carried the Battle of the Pacific to the heart of the Japanese empire with a surprising and daring raid on military targets at Tokyo, Yokohama, Yokosuka, Nagoya, and Kobe.  This heroic attack against these major cities was the result of coordination between the Army Air Forces and the US Navy, which carried the sixteen North DoolittleRaidersAmerican B-25 medium bombers aboard the carrier USS Hornet to within take-off distance of the Japanese Islands.”

Most of the brave men that were involved in that long-ago operation are dead now, but they should be remembered along with the millions of others who served in that conflict.

For details on the entire operation, there is THIS article at the website for the National Museum of the US Air Force.  For still more, there is also THIS New York Times article, and the official Doolittle Raid website is HERE.

A New Slant on the Bundy Situation — the Hage Affair

As most who have followed this story know, Cliven Bundy’s forebears settled the area where his ranch is sited in the 1880’s.  He claims that, although he may owe money for grazing rights to the land upon which his cattle were grazing, any such monies would be owed to the sovereign state of Nevada rather than to the Federal government.

The Washington Examiner has up an article written by Ron Arnold, in which he explains why Bundy’s notion may not be so crazy after all.  A brief excerpt:

Private rights in federal lands were recognized in an 1866 water law. It says, “… whenever, by priority of possession, rights to the use of water have vested and accrued, and the same are recognized and acknowledged by the local customs, laws, and the decisions of courts, the possessors and owners of such vested rights shall be maintained and protected in the same.”

For the full article, click HERE.

Obama Administration Hides the ObamaCare Ball

Remember back in the first month or so of the Obama Administration, when the President had the Commerce Department’s Census Bureau functions moved to the White House, to be overseen by his henceman Rahm Emanuel?  If not, you can refresh your memory HERE.

At first, it was thought to be all about micro-managing the 2010 national census, but it now looks as if another shoe has dropped.  The recently announced changes to how the Obama Administration’s Census Bureau will henceforth determine a count of the nation’s uninsured has dismayed many, and roused at least two pundits to commentary, as it is a painfully obvious attempt on the part of President Obama to prevent fact-checking on one of his fundamental contentions about the merits of the ACA, to wit, the declaration that it would greatly reduce the number of Americans who lack health insurance.  Obama wants to avoid the embarrassment of having the routine Census health insurance numbers give the lie to his promise.

Here is an excerpt from THIS piece on Obama’s executive order, by well known economics writer Megan McArdle:

I’m speechless.  Shocked.  Stunned.  Horrified.  Befuddled.  Aghast, appalled, thunderstruck, perplexed, baffled, bewildered, and dumbfounded.  It’s not that I am opposed to the changes: Everyone understands that the census reports probably overstate the true number of the uninsured, because the number they report is supposed to be “people who lacked insurance for the entire previous year,” but people tend to answer with their insurance status right now.

But why, dear God, oh, why, would you change it in the one year in the entire history of the republic that it is most important for policy makers, researchers and voters to be able to compare the number of uninsured to those in prior years?  The answers would seem to range from “total incompetence on the part of every level of this administration” to something worse.

Robert Pear also wrote a piece in the New York Times on this subject, and the full article is HERE.

More 47% Folks In The Wagon Than Ever Before

From a post this morning by Terry Jeffrey at CNSNews.com on further analysis of the updated Census:

Of the 103,087,000 full-time, year-round workers, 16,606,000 worked for the government.  That included 12,597,000 who worked for state and local government and 4,009,000 who worked for the federal government.

The 86,429,000 Americans who worked full-time, year-round in the private sector, included 77,392,000 employed as wage and salary workers for private-sector enterprises and 9,037,000 who worked for themselves.

and

In the last quarter of 2011, according to the Census Bureau, approximately 82,457,000 people lived in households where one or more people were on Medicaid.  49,073,000 lived in households were someone got food stamps.  23,228,000 lived in households where one or more got WIC.  20,223,000 lived in households where one or more got SSI.  13,433,000 lived in public or government-subsidized housing.  [ NOTE:  Totals to 188,414,000. ]

Of course, it stands to reason that some people lived in households that received more than one welfare benefit at a time.  To account for this, the Census Bureau published a neat composite statistic:  There were 108,592,000 people in the fourth quarter of 2011 who lived in a household that included people on “one or more means-tested programs.”

Those 108,592,000 outnumbered the 86,429,000 full-time private-sector workers who inhabited the United States in 2012 by almost 1.3 to 1.

For all the gory details, go HERE.

More Volunteers Needed for the Carteret County VIP Effort

As some readers know, after the appearance at a recent CCTPP meeting by Jan Delancy, Director of the North Carolina Voter Integrity Project, I volunteered to head up an effort to do a preliminary analysis aimed at determining whether there was a significant voter fraud problem in Carteret County.  The first, automated, cut of the analysis is now done, and I need more volunteers to help apply human intelligence in order to complete the next step.

If you or anyone you know is interested in volunteering, send an e-mail to me at VMT@Salacia.com with the following information (“Me” is Verne Thompson, CCTPP Webmaster):

1]  Do you have a computer (desktop or laptop) that you can use for this effort?

2]  What is the computer’s Operating System (Windows-XP, Windows Vista, Windows-7, Windows-8)?  This is sometimes abbreviated to the term “OS Name”.

3]  Do you have an installed copy of Microsoft Excel?

4]  How much memory (RAM, or Random Access Memory) does your computer have?  This is also known by the term “Total Physical Memory”.

If you need help in answering questions #2 and #4, here is a convenient way to do so if you already have Microsoft Excel installed:

Begin by bringing up your Excel application.  Next, in the menu bar, click on “Help”.  Move down the selections shown in the drop-down box and click on “About Microsoft Office Excel”.  A dialogue box entitled “About Microsoft Excel” will come on-screen.  Then, in the lower right of the dialogue box, click the “System Info …” button, after which another dialogue box will appear, with “System Summary” as the default selection.

Within the “System Summary” panel, the information I will need is on your “OS Name” and “Total Physical Memory” lines.

Is This Why the Guvmint Needs All Those Guns & Ammo?

As regular readers will know, the graphic embedded in this post means that I consider it an example of the abuse of the government police power, either at the Federal, state, county, or municipal level of government.  If you read the material at the link, keep in mind that the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is most likely correct, and justified, in their view that the Endangered Species Act warrants measures to protect the desert tortoise.  And they are probably also correct in their contention that western ranchers must pay fees in order to graze their cattle on Federal land.CopsAbusePower

What I find to be abhorrent, however, is the extreme and militarized actions taken by the BLM in enforcing their position against Clark County, Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, a man whom his neighbors, and most other people, would consider a law abiding citizen, not to mention the fact that this is a civil dispute that dates back almost two decades.

Consider this excerpt from an Infowars post, HERE, by Paul Watson:

None of the family members were armed, but as soon as Dave Bundy began filming the cattle in the distance, eleven BLM vehicles each with two agents arrived and surrounded him.  “They also had four snipers on the hill above us all trained on us.  We were doing nothing besides filming the area,” said Ryan Bundy.

and

When Dave Bundy didn’t immediately heed the warning and return to his vehicle, a dog was set on him and he was subsequently arrested.  “He was filming and talking on the phone, I don’t know to whom,” Ryan Bundy said.  “It happened pretty fast.  They came down on him hard and had a German Shepherd on him.  And then they took him.”

When Dave Bundy’s father Cliven attempted to contact emergency response in both Mesquite and for Metro in an attempt to discover the whereabouts of his son, he was told to, “get off the phone or he would be arrested,” according to Ryan Bundy.

This episide has been the subject of much local media attention, so for more detail and background information, check out THIS local Nevada newspaper account, or THIS account from the newspaper in nearby St. George, Utah.

Affirmative Action in Higher Education: How Do We Stand?

The SCOTUS is currently considering the merits of last fall’s arguments before the court in Fisher versus University of Texas, a new case centered on the reverse discrimination that results from collegiate affirmative action policies.  Journalist Gail Heriot has written an informative article on the case and on the nation’s experience with the long-term effects of such policies.  According to Heriot, there is:

… mounting empirical evidence that race preferences are doing more harm than good — even for their supposed beneficiaries.  If this evidence is correct, we now have fewer African-American physicians, scientists, and engineers than we would have had using race-neutral admissions policies.  We have fewer college professors and lawyers, too. Put more bluntly, affirmative action has backfired.

Her article goes on to explore the reasons behind the reality of affirmative action failure, including the problem of “mis-match”.  Her entire National Affairs article, HERE, is lengthy but well worth reading.  And for more, consider THIS article (in PDF format) that Thomas Sowell wrote thirty-eight years ago, in which he came to essentially the same conclusion about the merits of affirmative action.