Month: September 2014

Link to Carson’s comments on AP History classes.

“I am a little shocked quite frankly looking at the AP course in American history that’s being taught in high schools across out country right now,” Carson said. “There’s only two paragraphs in there about George Washington. George Washington! Little or nothing about Dr. Martin Luther King.”

Carson then lamented a few negative aspects of history included in the course framework like “a whole section on slavery and how evil we are,” Japanese internment camps, and “how we wiped out American Indians with no mercy.”

“I think most people when they finish that course, they’d be ready to go sign up for ISIS. I mean, this is what we’re doing to the young people in our nation,” he said. “We have got to stop crucifying ourselves.

No.  None of my students wish to sign up for ISIS.

By examining the mistakes we make as a country, we can examine perhaps the most American words in any of our foundational documents: “to make a more perfect Union.”

Today, for instance, we discussed the Articles of Confederation government.  We discussed its many flaws, but also what it did well – keeping the idea of republican government alive, settling the northwest territories dispute, and establishing the principle of a united nation.  But that was balanced by its lack of an executive authority or federal court system, its inability to regulate trade or levy taxes; its lack of being a real government rather than a loose confederation of independent states. It had to be scrapped – amendments were insufficient to create a true national government and thus cement the independence we fought so long and hard to obtain.

We discussed the particular American contribution to world political theory: the idea of a fundamental law that is inviolable and difficult to change to create a bedrock set of rules and norms for government.  The British have no written constitution, no fundamental law.  That’s us; we did that.  Almost every country in the world now has a fundamental law.  True, many ignore them, but the very preference for the rule of fundamental law is an American invention.

But we also talked about the problems in amending the Constitution and how that creates a stagnant government that only changes in times of crisis or in a spasm of reform.

In other words, we engaged in the process of historical analysis.

I wouldn’t presume to tell Dr. Carson how to operate on a patient.  I would kindly request he stay the fuck out of my classroom.

Some added comments: Carson either has not read the AP material and is relying on false information provided by others or he is flat out lying. My two children both took AP History and Washington and Dr. King were more than adequately covered. Then again maybe he is simply delusional. – Steven D

BBC Reports that UK GDP rose to 0.9% in the 2nd quarter.  Up from the more anemic 0.7% in the 1st quarter.  And up a whopping 3.2% from the 2nd quarter in 2013.

The recession in the UK now appears to be a thing of the past.  Maybe.

The methodology for calculating GDP has been slightly revised.  It now includes estimates of the sales of illegal drugs and prostitution.

These changes have added billions of pounds to the total amount produced by the economy. But because there have been revisions to the measures going back to the 1970s, the amount of growth from quarter to quarter has not changed a great deal.

Now if the UK government could only figure out a way to tax those illegal goods and services.  

Via Scrapple TV, here’s a little slice of Philadelphia. Proud to have been part of the team that created this.

White House exempts Syria airstrikes from tight standards on civilian deaths By Michael Isikoff

The White House has acknowledged for the first time that strict standards President Obama imposed last year to prevent civilian deaths from U.S. drone strikes will not apply to U.S. military operations in Syria and Iraq.

A White House statement to Yahoo News confirming the looser policy came in response to questions about reports that as many as a dozen civilians, including women and young children, were killed when a Tomahawk missile struck the village of Kafr Daryan in Syria’s Idlib province on the morning of Sept. 23.

The village has been described by Syrian rebel commanders as a reported stronghold of the al-Qaida-linked Nusra Front where U.S officials believed members of the so-called Khorasan group were plotting attacks against international aircraft.

But at a briefing for members and staffers of the House Foreign Affairs Committee late last week, Syrian rebel commanders described women and children being hauled from the rubble after an errant cruise missile destroyed a home for displaced civilians.

Aftermath of U.S. airstrikes in Idlib, Syria

Images of badly injured children also appeared on YouTube, helping to fuel anti-U.S. protests in a number of Syrian villages last week.

U.S. Military, Partner Nations Conduct Airstrikes in Syria | DoD |

U.S. military forces and partner nations, including Bahrain, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, undertook military action against ISIL terrorists in Syria overnight, according to a U.S. Central Command news release.

Warplanes and ship-launched Tomahawk cruise missiles struck “fighters, training compounds, headquarters and command and control facilities, storage facilities, a finance center, supply trucks and armed vehicles,” CentCom said.

Washington also said U.S. forces had acted alone to launch eight strikes in another area of Syria against the “Khorasan Group”, an al Qaeda unit U.S. officials have described in recent days as posing a threat similar to that from Islamic State.

Arab nations, including Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, took part in the second and third waves of attacks. The Arab countries’ actions ranged from combat air patrols to strikes on targets, but added that the majority of strikes were carried out by the U.S. military.

Promoted by Steven D.

You might not think it, but I do get embarrassed sometimes at how little I have to say that’s critical about President Obama. It’s partly because I’m so continually appalled at the attacks on him and their overtly racist character; as Melissa Harris-Perry was suggesting a few weeks ago, his presidency is in a lot of ways more important than he is himself. And then I’m not seeing a lot of practicable alternatives to his management, in the current situation in the United States, with a paralyzed legislature and a poisoned Supreme Court and a rotten and poorly informed political press and a rogue intelligence community that, I’m convinced, defies him; Obama is so much the least objectionable part of our establishment, and we ought to be trying to strengthen his hand against the rest of it.

Intellectually, though, he can be pretty ordinary or unimaginative (who can’t?), and this bit of analysis from Professor Cole on the situation in Iraq and Syria struck me as kind of important:

(Cont. reading below the fold)

At one point in the interview, Obama lays out what he thinks the underlying problems are:

“They have now created an environment in which young men are more concerned whether they’re Shiite or Sunni, rather than whether they are getting a good education or whether they are able to, you know, have a good job. Many of them are poor. Many of them are illiterate and are therefore more subject to these kinds of ideological appeals. And, you know, the beginning of the solution for the entire Middle East is going to be a transformation in how these countries teach their youth. What our military operations can do is to just check and roll back these networks as they appear and make sure that the time and space is provided for a new way of doing things to begin to take root.”

This point of view is just old-fashioned modernization theory, and I think it puts the cart before the horse. It depicts Iraqi and Syrian youth as putting sectarian considerations before ones of rational economic well-being. I don’t believe this is an accurate characterization of what has happened. That Obama sees these Arab young men as merely acting irrationally, and that he doesn’t seem to understand the profound crisis of joblessness behind the turmoil, helps explain why ISIL surprised him and his intelligence officials.

Obama seems guilty of some old-fashioned Orientalism here.

If he really believes (as I’m afraid Clinton did in his views on the South Slavic states) in illiterate young people giving in to “ancient hatreds” as the problem in the Middle East, he needs to stop reading Friedman and start reading Cole. The biggest problem in Iraq and Syria is the economic destruction together with the surfeit of armaments, both wrought by the 2003 invasion.

Cross-posted at The Rectification of Names

Of course Russia is a threat to the world!

○ Putin Is More Dangerous Than ISIS and 1,000 Al Qaedas

Obama and his NSC team have already exposed Russia as an agressor, violating present treaties – U.S. Raises Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) concerns with Russia

Testimony: The INF Treaty, Russian Compliance and the U.S. Policy Response

Russia has also tied INF Treaty compliance to other issues.  In 2007, Chief of the General Staff Yuri Baluyevsky said that Russia’s decision regarding withdrawal from the treaty would depend on U.S. actions regarding missile defense in Europe.  Recent Russian statements have been more moderate, with a focus on extending the treaty to other states.  In May 2012, Chief of the General Staff Nikolai Makarov ruled out withdrawal.

The issue of third-country INF missiles has clearly been a far greater concern for Russia than for the United States.  The reason is straightforward.  Ten countries deployed or were developing ballistic or cruise missiles with ranges between 500 and 5500 kilometers as of 2012:  China, Egypt, India, Iran, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, South Korea and Syria. None of these countries currently has an intermediate-range ballistic or cruise missile that could reach the United States.  Many of these countries, however, possess or are developing intermediate-range missiles that can reach Russian territory.

Russia Disputes U.S. Allegations of Arms-Control Pact Violation | July 30, 2014 |

(NTI) – Meanwhile, State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki sought to use the political furor kicked up over the INF treaty to urge the speedy confirmation of a longtime department official to a position where he would be overseeing treaty verification and compliance.

○ Pressuring Russia with missile defences is a strategic misfire
○ US test-fires Aegis missile defence system destined for Romania and Poland – May 2014
○ ‘Lies, hypocrisy, propaganda’: Russia slams US over claims of nuclear treaty violations |RT on Aug, 2, 2014 |
○ White House Accuses Russia of Violating Nuclear Weapons Pact | Sept. 2014 |

Russia’s Nuclear Revival and Its Challenges

Cont’d below the fold …

Russia’s Nuclear Revival and Its Challenges
By Richard Weitz | Center for Political-Military Analysis | Aug. 22, 2014 |

In determining their nuclear arsenal, Russian policy makers employ an expansive force-sizing principle, in which Russian nuclear forces must be able to counter the combined arsenal of all other nuclear weapons states.

…
The ICBMs of Russia’s Strategic Missile Forces (SMF) have historically represented the mainstay of the country’s strategic deterrent. Russia’s more than three hundred ICBMs can carry approximately 1,000 warheads. Since Russia’s operational ICBMs are on average 30-40 years old, many have reached the end of their service lives and are being decommissioned. Moscow is currently in the process of retiring all of its Soviet-era ICBMs (the SS-18, the SS-19, and the single warhead SS-25) and replacing them with systems built and increasingly designed in the years following the Cold War, such as the Topol-M (SS-27) and the multi-warhead RS-24 Yars.

At present, the SMF fleet is split roughly equally between the two generations, but in another decade all of Russia’s strategic missiles will be post-Soviet. Russia is expected to begin production soon of a new 100-ton ICBM, known as Sarmat, to replace the SS-18. Like the SS-18, the Sarmat will be a heavy ICBM using liquid fuel, based in hardened fixed silos, and capable of carrying ten MIRVs.

The future of Russia’s sea-based nuclear deterrent rests with the fourth-generation Project Mk 955 Borey II – class nuclear-powered SSBN and its new RSM-56 Bulava SLBM, a combination designed as the foundation of Russia’s maritime nuclear triad through at least the 2040s. The first two Borey-class SSBNs, the Yuri Dolgoruky and the Aleksandr Nevsky, joined the fleet last year. However, their entry, and those of the other six planned Bereys, has been repeatedly delayed due to problems with the Bulava missile.

○ The NATO Global Hub – 2012

Molly Redden at Mother Jones (via Kilgore) has the real scoop on why US local police forces are acquiring all that ridiculous heavy weaponry and those MRAPs. It’s a bureaucratic boondoggle!

According to interviews with state officials running point between the Pentagon and police, the Defense Department prefers to leave equipment in circulation whenever possible. “It’s a low-cost storage method for them,” says Robb Davis, the mayor pro tem of Davis. His town is trying to shake its MRAP. “They’re dumping these vehicles on us and saying, ‘Hey, these are still ours, but you have to maintain them for us.'”

Police departments, in most cases, bear the costs of shipping the equipment to its new home. Making things more difficult, as the Defense Department reevaluates the program this fall, the agency temporarily closed the portion of its website that allows police departments to request returns.

Despite our partisan divide, there are some thing the Obama administration and Congress can agree upon. The trouble is with what that something is, however.

Congress and the Department of Defense, together with New Mexico’s Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), are gearing up to dramatically increase production of nuclear weapons cores to numbers not seen since the cold war.

This plan to expand the production of nuclear bomb cores as already been approved by the armed services committees in both the House and Senate. It’s contained in the proposed 2015 Defense appropriations bill, and is expected to cost $355 billion over the next ten years. The effect will be to ramp up production of nuke cores by thirty times the production rate in 2013. Which is odd, since we already supposedly have 15,000 reserve cores on hand.

But the far greater concern is that we have a extremely serious radioactive waste disposal problem because the current primary waste disposal center is shut down thanks to this:

This month, the Department of Energy released its initial findings into one of the worst American nuclear accidents since the end of the cold war. On February 14, a 52-gallon drum containing radioactive waste from nuclear weapons production exploded at a storage facility near Carlsbad, New Mexico, exposing 22 workers to radioactivity and leading to the closure of the facility. In its preliminary briefing, the DOE recommended a 7,000-point checklist that must be met in order to reopen the facility and indicated that congressional support for the plan was strong, despite a price tag that would likely run into the billions of dollars.

The closing of the facility, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), the nation’s only such repository, has caused a storage backup of radioactive materials …

[Critics of this plan] also point to safety risks at [Los Alamos Nuclear Laboratories] that are acknowledged in the CRS report, which suggests that the current plutonium pit production building should be retrofitted to withstand earthquakes, as the facility sits adjacent to a seismic fault line.

This strikes me as unnecessary and highly reckless, from several standpoints. We are committed, supposedly to reducing our nuclear weapons stockpile to around 1500 weapons by 2016. However, the current number on hand exceeds 4000 nukes. Tell me why we need to place people at risk of another nuclear waste accident to produce so many more nuclear weapons in all but name when we already have more than enough on hand, and plenty of spares? Not only that, but how do you think the other nuclear weapons superpowers, especially Russia and China, will react to this plan.

The justification being touted for this massive increase in nuclear weapons core production is our nuclear arsenal needs to be modernized. Yet one branch of the armed forces that deploys nuclear weapons, the US Navy, has looked at this issue and has concerns with the administration’s decision to proceed with this extraordinarily rapid and costly nuclear weapons core expansion program.

The Navy also expressed reservations about the plan, even before the administration formally introduced it this year. In a September 2012 memo to the U.S. Nuclear Weapons Council — an interagency organization of the Energy and Defense Departments — the Navy said it did not support entering into the next phase of study related to developing a combined W78/W88 life extension program “at this time.” It suggests “delaying this study effort until the mid 2020s.”

The General Accounting Office (GAO) also expressed concerns with this plan in a report to Congress back in September 2013, in which it said the administration’s proposal requires more study, and that going forward now with the proposal could lead to “further program delays and potentially costly modifications.”

In light of all the issues with this proposal, including the likelihood of cost overruns, mismanagement and unsafe waste disposal facilities, not to mention that there is no pressing need to rapidly modernize our nuclear arsenal, and that this plan may very well violate existing treaties on nuclear proliferation, the massive increase in the production of these weapon cores is, in my opinion, ill-considered and not in the best interests of our national security.

Not surprisingly, the Union of Concerned Scientists opposes these current efforts and proposals to expand our capacity to make more nuclear weapons cores.

The Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit science advocacy group, said on Thursday that the nuclear modernization plan is misguided and violates international agreements to reduce the number of nuclear weapons, according to Reuters. […]

The massive spending comes despite the Obama administration’s endorsement of a world without nuclear weapons and US negotiations with Russia over the “New START” treaty, which committed the former Cold War rivals to reducing deployed strategic nuclear weapons to 1,550 each by 2018.

The plan that the administration has proposed and that Congress may very well to pass into law next year should be put on full stop until further assessments can be made as to what “modernization” is actually needed, the legal and national security implications of the proposal, the potential cost of proceeding with that modernization and the environmental and safety risks to workers and our civilian population from our currently grossly inadequate waste storage capacity.

I’ll cut to the chase. I have some important family business to attend to this afternoon. And I am running on very little sleep. I will be looking to promote diaries from you guys. Keep writing, you are producing great pieces that stimulate great conversations. Also it looks like Booman will be out of action for an indefinite time. I should know more about that sometime next week. All the more reason to write, and also for people to check out the diaries section on the right hand margin.

Meanwhile for starters, I saw this story this morning, and said to myself, if this were Tim Tebow, the most famous Christian athlete in America (but a mediocre former pro football player), the NFL would never have done this to him:

When Kansas City Chiefs safety Husain Abdullah intercepted a Tom Brady pass and returned it for a touchdown Monday night, he did what so many other NFL players do to celebrate a big play: He paused to make a religious gesture of thanks.

But Abdullah, a devout Muslim, found that his religious display was met with less latitude than, say, Tim Tebow when he brought Tebowing into the NFL. Abdullah was penalized 15 yards for unsportsmanlike conduct because he slid to the ground, then knelt in in the end zone.

I guess it is unsportmanlike for Americans of other faiths to publicly pray to anyone at a sports event unless that prayer is to Jesus. What a country!

Eula Biss (author of On Immunity: An Inoculation) on NPR:

There’s a great blog, Science-Based Medicine — and one of the writers on that blog pointed out that when you split the difference between information and misinformation, you still end up with misinformation. So I think there are situations where a middle ground is not desirable. Though I’m the kind of thinker who’s very drawn to compromises and to nuances…

Cross-posted as The Rectification of Names