Media Criticism, Political Commentary, War Commentary

Obama’s Competence

12 Comments

Americans are finally starting to figure out that he doesn’t have any.

Which is, of course, quite frustrating to those of us to whom this was obvious six years ago. And there was never any sensible reason to think otherwise.

[Update a few minutes later]

“Relentless incompetence: Americans are starting to give up on Obama.”

Unfortunately, at least two years too late. I’d like to see the latest “buyers’ remorse” polling of 2012 voters.

[Update a while later]

Obama’s failing foreign policy: Groping for a reset:

At this point, none of President Obama’s foreign policy problems can be solved by a teleprompter. The President doesn’t need more speechwriters or better ones. He needs something totally different: He needs some real-world wins. You don’t demonstrate your mastery of world events by making smart speeches about how intelligent your foreign policy is; you demonstrate your mastery of world events by having things go your way.

…The world is a big place, and there are lots of issues to choose from, but the President now urgently needs to put some points on the board. Otherwise, his authority will continue to erode.

As it is, the President appears to be second guessing himself, but in the worst possible way. He is stepping up support for the Syrian rebels, but not by enough to make a difference on the battlefield. He is proposing new military spending for Europe, but at such a low level that his proposal disappoints his allies and reassures his opponents. One can hope that some things are happening behind the scenes, but from what we can read in the press, President Obama is still splitting differences and splitting hairs when he could and should be making a stand. This is President Obama at his worst: months of agonizing and logic chopping ending in a strategy that fails.

The essence of strategy is to align your ends with your means: to match your goals and your resources. The core problem that has dogged this President from the beginning is a failure to do that. His goals have always been high and difficult, but he hasn’t wanted (or perhaps felt able) to invest the political, financial, or military resources that such large goals require. To heal the breach between the United States and the Arab world, for example, is a noble and a worthy goal, but it is extremely hard to do and would take much more money, political engagement, and policy change than President Obama has been willing to put on the table. Nuclear disarmament, a global climate change treaty, democracy in the Arab world, victory in Afghanistan, detente with Iran, the establishment of R2P as American doctrine, Israeli-Palestinian peace: This is less a foreign policy than a catalog of Holy Grails.

Based on a delusional view of the real world, and how it works. As he notes, the “reset” that is really needed is in the White House. And it won’t happen with its current inhabitant.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

The Bergdahl Backlash

112 Comments

Why Team Obama was blindsided:

This is a fundamental culture clash. Team Obama and its base cannot comprehend the values still cherished by those young Americans “so dumb” they joined the Army instead of going to prep school and then to Harvard. Values such as duty, honor, country, physical courage, and loyalty to your brothers and sisters in arms have no place in Obama World. (Military people don’t necessarily all like each other, but they know they can depend on each other in battle — the sacred trust Bergdahl violated.)

President Obama did this to himself (and to Bergdahl). This beautifully educated man, who never tires of letting us know how much smarter he is than the rest of us, never stopped to consider that our troops and their families might have been offended by their commander-in-chief staging a love-fest at the White House to celebrate trading five top terrorists for one deserter and featuring not the families of those soldiers (at least six of them) who died in the efforts to find and free Bergdahl, but, instead, giving a starring role on the international stage to Pa Taliban, parent of a deserter and a creature of dubious sympathies (that beard on pops ain’t a tribute to ZZ Top). How do you say “outrageous insult to our vets” in Pashto?

Nor, during the recent VA scandal, had the president troubled himself to host the families of survivors of those vets who died awaiting care. No, the warmest attention our president has ever paid to a “military family” was to Mr. and Mrs. Bergdahl.

He’s from a different country than many of us.

Business, Culinary, Health, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

Transfats

5 Comments

Hey, let’s come up with a new poison to replace them with:

“In icings, PHOs provide the air-holding capacity to achieve specific desired gravities, along with the melting and spreading characteristics that allow icings to be evenly spread on cakes,” said Tom Tiffany, senior technical manager, ADM Oils in Decatur, Ill. “The heat stability enables the icing to remain stable when exposed to a variety of transportation and storage conditions.”

Dr. McNeill said icings sold at retail may require a shelf life of up to 1.5 years. If shelf life fails to reach that duration, consumers may open a tub of icing and find it’s “like a piece of concrete,” Dr. McNeill said.

To replace PHOs and still keep the desired shelf life in icings, formulators may use palm oil along with a liquid vegetable oil such as canola oil or sunflower oil that may keep saturated fat as low as possible, he said.

Guys, there’s this thing called “butter.” And “lard.”

As Dr. Meade says:

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

The NRC Report On Human Spaceflight

6 Comments

Well, it’s out, and depressingly familiar. There seems to have been very little imagination, and its authors seems stuck in the sixties. It’s basically Apollo to Mars.

Joel Achenbach has the story. I’m glad that at least they’re pointing out the safety issues with flying SLS so rarely, but a bolder report would have discussed what a disaster the program will be cost wise. I’ll have to read the report to see if they addressed the real issue, which is launch costs, but since they seemed to get all their input from NASA, I suspect that it will be completely ignored.

[Update a few minutes later]

Here‘s Eric Berger’s take.

Space, Space History, Technology and Society

Peter Glaser, RIP

2 Comments

I don’t see any details, but apparently he died late last week. I hadn’t seen him in a couple decades, but I know that he’d been ill for quite some time. I imagine many younger people in the space movement haven’t heard of him, but he was one of the luminaries back in the seventies, creating the potential economic driver for O’Neill colonies. Anyway, John Mankins seems to have taken up the baton from him for space solar power.

History, Technology and Society

Grant And Lee

26 Comments

“These guys needed cell phones.”

All summer we’ll see the sequicentennials of that bloody summer of 1864, as Grant marched down toward Richmond, after (unlike his predecessors) not retreating after the bloody battle at The Wilderness, as Sherman was in turn moving down into the deep south. The two campaigns ended up saving Lincoln’s presidency in the fall election.

Cold Harbor was one of the bloodiest, complete with the beginnings of trench warfare that was ultimately a presage to the first world war. The European observers, used to Napoleonic tactics, were appalled at the butchery of rapid-fire weaponry, a technological advance (if one can call it back) to which took decades for tactics to adapt. The only major change in the half century afterward of carnage, really, was the tank.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!