For several years, President Barack Obama has operated under a set of assumptions about the Middle East: First, there could be no return of U.S. ground troops in sizable numbers to the region; and second, undergirding the first, the U.S. has no interests in the region great enough to justify such a renewed commitment. The crises in the Middle East could be kept localized. There might be bloodshed and violence—even mass killing, in Syria and Libya and elsewhere, and some instability in Iraq—but the fighting, and its consequences, could be contained. The core elements of the world order would not be affected, and America’s own interests would not be directly threatened so long as good intelligence and well-placed drone strikes prevented terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. Even Islamic State could be “degraded” and “contained” over time.
These assumptions could have been right—other conflicts in the Middle East have remained local—but they have proven to be wrong ... The multisided war in the Middle East has now ceased to be a strictly Middle Eastern problem. It has become a European problem as well ... The horrific attacks in Paris, likely organized and directed by Islamic State from its base in Syria, and the prospect of more such attacks, threaten the cohesion of Europe, and with it the cohesion of the trans-Atlantic community, or what used to be known as the West. The crisis on the periphery, in short, has now spilled over into the core.
. . .
Where does the U.S. fit into all this? The Europeans no longer know, any more than American allies in the Middle East do. Most Europeans still like Mr. Obama. After President George W. Bush and the Iraq war, Europeans have gotten the kind of American president they wanted. But in the current crisis, this new, more restrained and intensely cautious post-Iraq America has less to offer than the old superpower, with all its arrogance and belligerence.
. . .
Americans remain paralyzed by Iraq, Republicans almost as much as Democrats, and Mr. Obama is both the political beneficiary and the living symbol of this paralysis. Whether he has the desire or capacity to adjust to changing circumstances is an open question. Other presidents have—from Woodrow Wilson to Franklin Roosevelt to Bill Clinton—each of whom was forced to recalibrate what the loss or fracturing of Europe would mean to American interests. In Mr. Obama’s case, however, such a late-in-the-game recalculation seems less likely. He may be the first president since the end of World War II who simply doesn’t care what happens to Europe.
If so, it is, again, a great irony for Europe, and perhaps a tragic one. Having excoriated the U.S. for invading Iraq, Europeans played no small part in bringing on the crisis of confidence and conscience that today prevents Americans from doing what may be necessary to meet the Middle Eastern crisis that has Europe reeling.
The six worst violence hotspots on the planet at the moment (Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya, Somalia) seem hopeless and the search for solutions seems futile. But when you step back and take a closer look you find that all these countries have lots in common, aside from being “failed states.” All are largely Moslem and all have serious problems with governing themselves. This spotlights the fact that Moslems in general and Arabs in particular have developed a peculiar relationship with democracy in an attempt to cure these longstanding problems.
Not surprisingly, the Long-Range Strike Bomber protest is on. Boeing and Lockheed Martin claim the Air Force’s selection of Northrop Grumman for the development and early production work – worth $23.5 billion – was bungled. The service failed to conduct a proper assessment of the risk for both teams to execute the work and neglected to account for modern advances in manufacturing and life-cycle maintenance, all of which would reduce the cost of such a program, according to Loren Thompson, a Washington DC-based analyst. Thompson’s think-tank receives funding from both Boeing and Lockheed Martin, and the latter employs him as a consultant; he publicly endorsed the Boeing/Lockheed Martin bid despite the requirements and source-selection criteria being classified. Thompson receives no funding from Northrop Grumman.
The losers filed their protest with the Government Accountability Office Nov. 6 after receiving their debrief Oct. 30 from the Air Force.
And, not surprisingly, the other protest is on. You see, in Washington, there’s the protest – filed with GAO and subject to a 100-day audit – and there’s the Protest – the political campaign to disparage the agency that made the alleged flawed choice and its entire strategy. The latter is designed as an end run to whatever the GAO may rule. By undercutting the agency and its strategy at the knees in Congress, pressure can force an agency into submission regardless of a GAO ruling.
These are two parallel but separate avenues in any defense contractor’s red book for major programs; all the contractors keep war plans for protests alongside the process of bidding for programs these days. I’ll outline the two strategies below.
Hello Mythos fans, Duck enthusiasts and Indiegogoers! Dthulhu is a high quality vinyl sculpture that will look great in your bathroom and be hours of fun in the tub!
I made this project because I had a dream about it and I wanted one! Since there was none available, I decided to design Dthulhu.
A 34-year-old man was arrested in the weekend theft of 16 rifles and handguns from a U.S. Army Reserve Center in Massachusetts, federal law enforcement officials said on Thursday.
Morales was linked to the crime by surveillance video, an electronic monitoring bracelet he had been ordered to wear by a court and blood at the scene.
At small liberal-arts colleges, big state schools and Ivies alike, protesters are defenestrating presidents and deans, occupying quads, and demanding wholesale social and academic change.
. . .
But the activists’ many critics, conservative and liberal, need a clearer sense of what these students are reacting against.
The protesters at Yale and Missouri and a longer list of schools stand accused of being spoiled, silly, self-dramatizing — and many of them are. But they’re also dealing with a university system that’s genuinely corrupt, and that’s long relied on rote appeals to the activists’ own left-wing pieties to cloak its utter lack of higher purpose.
. . .
The protesters may be obnoxious enemies of free debate ... but they aren’t wrong to smell the rot around them. And they’re vindicated every time they push and an administrator caves: It’s proof that they have a monopoly on moral spine, and that any small-l liberal alternative is simply hollow.
Beattyville sits at the northern tip of a belt of the most enduring rural poverty in America. The belt runs from eastern Kentucky through the Mississippi delta to the Texas border with Mexico, taking in two of the other towns – one overwhelmingly African American and the other exclusively Latino – at the bottom of the low income scale. The town at the very bottom of that census list is an outlier far to the west on an Indian reservation in Arizona.
The communities share common struggles in grappling with blighted histories and uncertain futures. People in Beattyville are not alone in wondering if their kind of rural town even has a future. To the young, such places can sometimes feel like traps in an age when social mobility in the US is diminishing and they face greater obstacles to a good education than other Americans.
At the same time, each of the towns is distinguished by problems not common to the rest. In Beattyville it is the drug epidemic, which has not only destroyed lives but has come to redefine a town whose fleeting embrace of prosperity a generation ago is still visible in some of its grander official buildings and homes near the heart of the town. Now they seem to accentuate the decline of a main street littered with ghost shops that haven’t seen business in years.
. . .
Ask where people get the money for drugs and just about everyone blames it on welfare in general and the trade in what is known locally as “pop” – soft drinks – in particular.
Close to 57% of Beattyville residents claim food stamps. They are paid by electronic transfer on the first of the month. That same day, cases of Pepsi and Coca-Cola are marked down sharply in supermarkets and disappear off the shelves, often paid for with food stamps.
They are then sold on to smaller stores at a lower price than they would pay a distributor, in effect turning several hundred dollars of food stamps into cash at about 50 cents on the dollar.
The “pop” scam has become shorthand in Beattyville among those who regard welfare as almost as big a blight as the drugs themselves.
We had a guest we ended up calling "Pie Guy" - he would come into the hotel without a reservation, pay in cash + the $100 cash deposit and the next day we would find his bathroom and bathtub full of the remains of several expensive pies. He never came to the desk for his deposit, as he knew he wouldn't be getting it back. We added his name to our "do not rent" list but he kept coming back and using different names. One time we found a torn up list in his room with the words "pie" and "pants" scribbled over and over again.
. . .
The wildest drunks were the folks in town for a sheep farmer convention.
. . .
Not really a guest, but we had hosted a reptile expo in one of our regency ballrooms over the weekend. The day after they left I stumbled across an almost paralyzed Crested Gecko. I started panicking because I knew nothing about reptiles but I figured it was so easy to catch because it was cold. I used the heat lamp we had in our kitchen to warm it up for a little bit and then just held it until we got a hold of the correct pet shop who was missing the gecko. But they said they weren't going to make a 5 hour trip for one gecko and said we could keep it. So that's the story of how my front desk manager got a free Crested Gecko.
. . .
We had to kick some burger convention attendees out when they dumped mayo and relish into the hot tub.
. . .
So late one night, I was walking with my friend the security guard on one of the top floors of the hotel. As we were talking, we rounded the corner when we see someone dart out from the ice machine alcove on the far end of the hall. My friend the security guard immediately runs after him and I follow close behind. As we approach the dead end of the hall, we notice someone hiding behind the recess of the wall into the last set of rooms on the floor. The man steps out and we see quite possibly the strangest get up I've ever seen on a man: he was wearing a short, see-through night gown, complete with fish net stockings and high heels. And makeup. He immediately apologizes and runs to his room three doors down.
How he was able to run so fast in high heels, I have no clue... Makes me wonder if he's had practice at that before.
. . .
We once had a couple check in at reception and they were given a park and display permit for their car. The hotel only had 3 car parking spaces which are usually reserved during booking. Others have to park on the streets around the hotel, displaying the permits which are provided at cost by the local council.
About 40 minutes later the husband comes to reception shouting and complaining that he's received a parking ticket and the permit he was given was obviously no good. We couldn't understand why, there was no way the permit wasn't valid. We asked, did he display it in the window as we had told him to do?
He said of course. He put it in the window as soon as got upstairs to the room. That's when we realised he'd put it in the bedroom window and not the car window.
The Russian intervention in Syria involves some 4,000 troops and about fifty warplanes and helicopters. The small size of this force exposes a sad fact of post-Cold War Russia; the military no longer has much in the way of combat capability and few post-Cold War weapons. Thus Russia has few smart bombs and is mostly relying on unguided bombs built in the 1980s ... The Russian air force and navy are now less than ten percent of their Cold War strength and the army has fewer combat brigades than it did armies during the Cold War.
But there is one important thing that Russia does have and that the Syrian armed forces desperately needs; support for maintaining and upgrading Syria’s largely Russian weapons and equipment. Russian maintenance and technical personnel are pouring into Syria, largely unnoticed, along with spare parts, upgrade kits and special maintenance equipment. Thousands of Syrian army weapons and vehicles that had become inoperable, or only partially functional are now being returned to usable condition ... This makes the Syrian forces more effective when fighting and is a big boost for Syrian morale in general.
Russia is using the experience in Syria to upgrade its own armed forces. The Russians have already found that they are not as good at keeping combat aircraft ready (the “readiness rate”) in a combat zone as Western air forces are. American military aircraft in the Middle East have a readiness rate of about 90 percent while the Russian rate is 70 percent. The Americans have a lot more experience, especially in the Middle East. The Russians are learning, especially from the Syrians who are showing them how to deal with the dust, sand and heat. Meanwhile Russia is hustling to build more satellite (GLONASS/ GPS) and laser guided bombs and missiles. Russia is now learning which of their smart bombs work best in combat and are modifying the designs even as they try to increase production.
The US Air Force had to scrap one of its brand-new Lockheed Martin AC-130J Ghostrider gunships following a training mishap earlier this year, the service has revealed.
While being operated at roughly 15,000ft, “the aircraft exceeded the targeted angle of sideslip until it departed controlled flight,” the report states. It “momentarily inverted, before being recovered after losing approximately 5,000ft of altitude.” The aircraft’s crew – who escaped injury – returned to base and landed safely, but the Ghostrider was rendered a total loss, having exceeded its operating g limits and design load.
Between 1989 and 2010, U.S. attorneys seized an estimated $12.6 billion in asset forfeiture cases. The growth rate during that time averaged +19.4% annually.
In 2010 alone, the value of assets seized grew by +52.8% from 2009 and was six times greater than the total for 1989.
Then by 2014, that number had ballooned to roughly $4.5 billion for the year, making this 35% of the entire number of assets collected from 1989 to 2010 in a single year.
Now, according to the FBI, the total amount of goods stolen by criminals in 2014 burglary offenses suffered an estimated $3.9 billion in property losses. This means that the police are now taking more assets than the criminals.
The police have been violating the laws to confiscate assets all over the country. A scathing report on California warns of pervasive abuse by police to rob the people without proving that any crime occurred. Even Eric Holder came out in January suggesting reform because of the widespread abuse of the civil asset forfeiture laws by police.
Bloomberg News has reported now that Stop-and-Seize authority is turning the Police Into Self-Funding Gangs. They are simply confiscating money all under the abuse of this civil asset forfeiture where they do not have to prove you did anything.
An error by race organisers has turned Bangkok into the home of the world’s longest half-marathon.
Instead of a 13-mile run through Thailand’s capital, the Standard Chartered Bangkok marathon on Sunday accidentally extended its annual half-marathon to almost 17 miles.
The bonus miles came as a surprise to runners, who unleashed a tirade of complaints on social media after the event.
. . .
The Athletic Association of Thailand, which oversees athletic events in the country, said it discussed the mistake with the organisers, who “admitted that a technical error happened during the half-marathon event”, said Surapong Ariyamongkol, AAT secretary general.
He said race officials responsible for pointing runners in the right direction inadvertently directed them to make a U-turn at the wrong place.
“It added more than 3km [1.8 miles] to each lap, therefore more than 6km were added to the whole half-marathon,” Surapong said. “We have rebuked the association but we could not do anything else.”
. . .
... as one Facebook comment noted, it could be seen as a byproduct of race inflation: “Hey, they increased the price this year, so you get more kilometres for your money.”
