March 14, 2010
— Dave in Texas Kinda phoning it in, which is a little disappointing.
They set the stage I suppose. It's hard to encapsulate the first six months of the war in an hour. Some character development, but I didn't feel the connections that you began to develop with Band of Brothers from the interviews with the veterans. You meet young men, mostly who enlisted after Pearl Harbor and are getting ready to head off to train. You don't really see any of the training though, I don't know if Spielberg and Hanks decided we've seen enough of that already, but you miss opportunities to build on your characters, tell more of their story.
There's one young man who wants to enlist, whose doctor dad says "no, you won't pass a physical with that heart murmur". He's already been billed as one of the three main characters, so we'll see that story play out later.
The racism we were warned about was certainly there. A couple of good, ugly slaps, what was more telling was the reaction of the Marines to the company CO (that "dude, what the hell?" look) seemed more contrived than the actual remarks.
Probably some spoilers follow, so they're below the joint; more...
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07:33 PM
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— Maetenloch Hey hey it's Sunday. So we might as well start the ONT early and make the weekend count for something. Oh and happy Pi Day.
Why it's Good to have a College Degree
And why it's a waste for some people.
Yeah having a college degree is in general a good thing. It gets you past the first easy filter for hiring, it gives you some credibility and implies that you have a certain minimal set of skills, and your average lifetime average income is higher. That said, I'm not sure college is all it's cracked up to be and I think it's probably not the best choice for a lot of people. In a past life I was a teacher and I saw quite a few kids in my classes who were really just passing time in the 13th through 16th grade until they could get out and start doing what they were really interested in. For them college wasn't all that interesting or useful or even the best investment.
There are some majors costs to college too: the cost of tuition and the opportunity cost of the time spent. Sure a lot of kids would've just wasted those 4 years (or really 5 years these days given recent averages), but that's also long enough to master a skill. 10,000 hours is often given as the minimum time it takes to become an expert in something. And at 8 hours a day with 2 weeks off a year, that comes out to exactly 5 years of full-time practice.
So if a kid a started an electrician's apprentice program at 18, he could get his full Electrician's license within 5 years. And if his parents had saved even half the money that would have gone for tuition, they would have enough to bankroll the kid setting up his own electrical business. For a lot of kids that's a much better start to life than getting a bachelors degree in sociology or art history and wondering what now. more...
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05:15 PM
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— Gabriel Malor Talking on Meet the Press this morning, House Majority Whip James Clyburn says Pelosi is full of shit, in so many words:
You just heard Mr. Axelrod say that he is confident, Congressman Clyburn, that the bill will be passed. As of this morning, do you have the votes that you need?REP. CLYBURN: No, we donÂ’t have them as of this morning. But weÂ’ve been working this thing all weekend, weÂ’ll be working it going into the week. I am also very confident that weÂ’ll get this done. I have been talking to members for a long time on this, and they have the will to do it. TheyÂ’ve been looking to us to create a way to do it. I think we have gotten to a place where we do have the way to do it, and I think the members are going to, to vote for this.
Uh huh.
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03:44 PM
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— Purple Avenger I don't get too emotional, but this one struck me. Pic is clickable for larger image
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01:27 PM
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— Dave in Texas Yeah. I ordered HBO again. Last time I did it was for Band of Brothers.
No story is without controversy, and this presentation certainly has it's share, as a result of Tom Hanks' comments in a recent Time Magazine interview with Douglas Brinkley which reek of moral equivalence and a remarkable ignorance of history, remarkable in the sense that this production required considerable study.
Victor Davis Hanson takes those on here, it's a short read and well worth your time. Among the many easily refuted points, the assertion that it was a war against a "religion and a race", stupid on its face given our past alliances with the nation of Japan, our partnership with China against the Japanese war machine, our rebuilding of Japan, our defense of Korea, Vietnam, etc.
Hanson can handle that without my feeble help.
Anyway I want to see what this thing will be, so I'll watch it and see.
A short trailer, and then couple of other thoughts about this, for whatever they're worth.
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12:48 PM
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— Dave in Texas So obviously we're not talking a holdout House Dem on Obamacare.
No, it's Republican John Boehner on CNN talking about Obama's campaign promise to close Gitmo, which isn't any closer to happening now than it was when he took office.
"Obviously, there are a series of issues related to this, some of them legislative, that have to be dealt with," senior White House adviser David Axelrod said. "We have made good progress. You know, when we got there, the legal status of many of the people there was unclear. We had to go through a process of really sorting all of these cases out. We are beginning to work those cases."
Words which no doubt calm the nutroots. We're just sorting things out is all.
I wonder in the world of "what ifs" what things would be like if Obama wasn't the fumbling idealogue he is, but instead was as smart as Clinton was when it came "self-serving self-preservation"?
I'm kinda glad Capt. Bullshit makes it a little easier on us, in that regard.
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12:19 PM
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— DrewM Aside from its ridiculous headline ("At Afghan outpost, Marines gone rogue or leading the fight against counterinsurgency?") the Washington Post has an interesting article on the how Marines like to do things, well, their own way.
While General McChrystal wants to focus on population centers, the Marines have a somewhat different take on what that means.
Some senior officials at the White House, at the Pentagon and in McChrystal's headquarters would rather have many of the 20,000 Marines who will be in Afghanistan by summer deploy around Kandahar, the country's second-largest city, to assist in a U.S. campaign to wrest the area from Taliban control instead of concentrating in neighboring Helmand province and points west. According to an analysis conducted by the National Security Council, fewer than 1 percent of the country's population lives in the Marine area of operations.They question whether a large operation that began last month to flush the Taliban out of Marja, a poor farming community in central Helmand, is the best use of Marine resources. Although it has unfolded with fewer than expected casualties and helped to generate a perception of momentum in the U.S.-led military campaign, the mission probably will tie up two Marine battalions and hundreds of Afghan security forces until the summer.
,,,Marine commanders note that they did not choose to go to Helmand -- they were asked to go there by McChrystal's predecessor, Gen. David D. McKiernan, because British forces in the area were unable to contain the intensifying insurgency. But once they arrived, they became determined to show they could rescue the place, in much the same way they helped to turn around Anbar province in Iraq.
They also became believers in Helmand's strategic importance. "You cannot fix Kandahar without fixing Helmand," (The Marine commander in Afghanistan, Brig. Gen. Lawrence) Nicholson said. "The insurgency there draws support from the insurgency here."
As always, the Marines have a plan and are willing to experiment with new tactics such as female teams to interact with local women, operating their own police training academy and most interestingly reaching out to local mullahs.
The Marines haven't been ignoring populations, they just have a little different idea what that means.
In December, columns of Marine armored vehicles punched into the city of Now Zad in northern Helmand. Once the second-largest town in the province, it had been almost completely emptied of its residents over the past four years as insurgents mined the roads and buildings with hundreds of homemade bombs. Successive units of British and U.S. troops had been largely confined to a Fort Apache-like base in the town. Every time they ventured out, they'd be shot at or bombed.To Nicholson and his commanders, reclaiming the town, which the Marines accomplished within a few weeks, has been a crucial step in demonstrating to Helmand residents that U.S. forces are committed to getting rid of the Taliban. To other military officials in Afghanistan, however, the mission seemed contrary to McChrystal's counterinsurgency strategy.
"If our focus is supposed to be protecting the population, why are we focusing on a ghost town?" said a senior officer at the NATO regional headquarters in Kandahar.
Nicholson notes that Helmand's governor supported the operation, as did many local tribal leaders. Hundreds of residents have returned in recent weeks, and at least 65 shops have reopened, according to Marine officers stationed in Now Zad.
"Protecting the population means allowing people to return to their homes," he said. "We've taken a grim, tough place, a place where there was no hope, and we've given it a future."
It's a fairly lengthy article but well worth your time.
While unity of command and purpose are pretty basic concepts, there's something to be said for experimentation as well. Afghanistan is a big enough challenge that there's room for more than one way to deal with it.
The Marines may not be the team players a lot of the sources, who clearly have their own agendas, in the article would wish, it's not as if the Marines don't have a track record of success in these types of operations.
Gen, Nicholson seems to be a pretty realistic political analyst. He is quoted as saying they don't have a lot of time as the draw down in troops begins next year. The Marines know they are on the clock and if they are going to succeed, they are going to have to do it their way.
I've been pretty pessimistic about the ability of the military to transform Afghanistan to any great degree but I would never bet against the United States Marine Corps.
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10:42 AM
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— Purple Avenger Continuing with our recent theme of unbridled optimism and joy.
...A press report earlier this week about a possible new wrinkle in ObamaCare demonstrates that the Democratic Party’s alleged interest in job creation is feigned at best and hostile at worst. On Monday, the Associated Press reported that a new iteration of the bill pushed by House Democrats “would require businesses to count part-time workers when calculating penalties for failing to provide health coverage for employees. Smaller businesses would be exempt. The Senate bill would count only full-time workers in applying the penalties, but under the change, described by a Democratic aide, two part-time workers would count as one full-time worker.”High school Newtonian physics and Econ 101 tells us what the equal and opposite "reaction" to this "action" will be -- employers WILL indeed scale back part-time workers, in favor of a much SMALLER number of full time workers.Since the vast majority of companies do not make health coverage available to part-timers, this proposal is best seen as a direct payroll tax on companies who rely heavily on them. In the fantasy world of Washington, this appears to be an attempt to force companies to hire more people to work full-time or to extend coverage to part-timers on their own. If it ever arrives in the real world, what it will really do is raise prices, increase unemployment, impede economic growth, and put thousands of companies out of business. It will also virtually destroy the part-time employment market, shutting the door on students, homemakers, and others who can’t possibly commit to working full-time, and shouldn’t be required to...
When hiring part-timers is heavily penalized, Econ 101 tells us you will get less of them. It won't however be a 1-1 substitution. If some company is hiring say 4 part-timers at 30hr/week, they're NOT going to be replacing them with 4 full-timers. The more likely scenario is they hire 2 or 3 full timers to replace the 4 part-timers. In reality what will likely happen is the most compatible and productive part timers will be offered full time positions, and the remaining part-timers get laid off, resulting in a NET LOSS of already scarce jobs.
These fracking Democrat screwheads in congress see part-time employees as some sort of "dodge" by employers to paying avoid benefits, etc, etc - which may be a valid POV if it was happening during a period of full employment and booming good times. That "dodge" is what's keeping the unemployment rate from spiking into Great Depression ranges TODAY, but these short sighted imbecilic turd rolling[*] crapweasle economic suicide bombers don't see it that way.
In the past, I was willing to allow the [slight]possibility these out of touch cretins were screwing up the economy out of garden variety ineptness/incompetence, but its getting harder and harder every day to maintain the possibility their intentions were ever good in the first place. Either this is the hand of genuine malice at work, or these people are SO far out of touch with street reality they seriously belong in mental institutions.
Its said recessions are a cyclical part of all economies and they naturally heal themselves, but depressions are only caused as a result of policy failure. more...
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09:38 AM
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— Gabriel Malor Now, I gotta go out for a bit, so tawk amongst yaselves, in here aight? Don't ya'll be capering about in the other threads scarin' decent folk.
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08:58 AM
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— Gabriel Malor She just launched a nonprofit group for "citizen patriots" that I think is going to get a lot of attention:
As Virginia Thomas tells it in her soft-spoken, Midwestern cadence, the story of her involvement in the "tea party" movement is the tale of an average citizen in action."I am an ordinary citizen from Omaha, Neb., who just may have the chance to preserve liberty along with you and other people like you," she said at a recent panel discussion with tea party leaders in Washington. Thomas went on to count herself among those energized into action by President Obama's "hard-left agenda."
In January, Virginia Thomas created Liberty Central Inc., a nonprofit lobbying group whose website will organize activism around a set of conservative "core principles," she said.
The group plans to issue score cards for Congress members and be involved in the November election, although Thomas would not specify how. She said it would accept donations from various sources -- including corporations -- as allowed under campaign finance rules recently loosened by the Supreme Court.
"I adore all the new citizen patriots who are rising up across this country," Thomas, who goes by Ginni, said on the panel at the Conservative Political Action Conference. "I have felt called to the front lines with you, with my fellow citizens, to preserve what made America great."
A picture of Ginni and her husband is below the fold. more...
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08:49 AM
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