Cultural Impact of Black Hawk Down

Some literature student should analyze the presence of Black Hawk Down (the movie vice the book) in culture. Based on the innumerable videos on Youtube.com setting the movie to various songs seems to fulfill some desire by many different people on different levels.

iPad Sales

Look we can all argue this way but we all also know that Apple will quite happily sell at least a million iPads this year; and a heckuva lot more next year. Personally I will buy one next year when the v2 comes out.

Wall Street: Apple Might Sell 1-5 Million iPads in the first year"

So Much Rain Last Night

We had a lot of rain Saturday night. Here is the stream that flows out of the lower pond where I live. I shot it with my iPhone using iVideoCamera.

Congressman And Their Many Constituencies

This story about a recent town hall by Congressman Allen Boyd (D-FL) illustrates how screwed up our political system is. It seems based on gifts of political largess. Boyd is being attacked for supporting Obama and the Democrats health reform efforts. He did vote against the House bill because it did not do enough to control costs but it is clear is constituents don't trust him on this issue.

At the same time he is getting support from Sallie Mae workers as he opposes another major reform proposed by President Obama. This is to transfer back to the Government the management of student loans with the idea it will save money and be better done.

This means Boyd is simultaneously for and against moving services currently conducted by private companies back into the public sector.

Effect of The Great War On The English Countryside

In the Thirties there came about the term "Thankful Villages" to describe those towns that lost no men in World War I. This list at HELLFIRE Corner is the most comprehensive identified to date.

There are less then fifty on the list from across the countries. Most contributed every few men to the war effort showing they were rather small but still it indicates that out of hundreds of towns then existing very few saw no loss when the British Empire lost almost one million men.

Form Follows Function In Air Defense Headquarters

These two articles show abandoned Cold War civil and air defense command posts. One in the Former Soviet Union and one in England. It is interesting to see that they are very similar in layout and capabilities.

First on English Russia is Abandoned Military Object which is of an air defense center where data is collected and filtered and defenses coordinated and activated.

Second is on Subterranea Britannica: Cold War and shows a Regional War Room at Cardiff, Wales where the Government would run operations during a nuclear attack. Much of these designs were based on British experience during World War II with building air defense and command posts.

These show how a like these kind of facilities are no matter where they are built or designed.

Firing Rather Then Divorcing Your Spouse

Frank McCourt is the owners of the Los Angeles Dodgers who were last seen losing to the Phillies in the National League Championship. His current wife, Jamie, was the CEO of the team. A few weeks ago it was announced that the two were getting divorced, but it has now come out that he is really firing her for being a poor employee not so much as divorcing her.

According to the Los Angeles Times "Frank McCourt charged his estranged wife with insubordination and inappropriate behavior in a letter firing her as the team's chief executive."

I guess if they were getting divorced he had to fire her but it is an interesting approach none-the-less.

Lefty Bloggers Need To Get Their Stories Straight On Stimulus

At this post Steven Benen is decrying the fact that $40 billion in state aid was cut out of the stimulus so states had to lay people off. In this article there is criticism of the states for using stimulus money to just keep the status quo.

So which is it? Was the stimulus just to keep bureaucrats employed at the cost of the U.S. taxpayer or to actually do something different? Here in AL the legislature used the stimulus money to just balance the budget. That will work out well next year.

The problem the states are facing is due to the collapse in the economy there has been a massive decline in tax revenue of all kinds. The state and local governments were pretty fat and now they have to trim down. That means people are losing their jobs. Maybe when the economy recovers and Americans get private jobs they can go back to subsidizing the government.

Perish The Thought, Huntsville City Council Being Short Sighted

Mayor Battle of Huntsville presented his budget to the City Council. As part of his plan he would like to recommend eliminating step and COLA raises for a couple of years for city employees. The Council does not like the idea. They want to continue them. Heck, the Federal Government intends to not give COLA's to Social Security recipients for the next two years.

While raises are nice the other option is layoffs. This has happened in other parts of the U.S. due to the recession. Counties and states have recommended furloughs or not increasing pay and the unions have run to courts to not allow these. Then there are layoffs. Mayor Battle's proposal seems fairly reasonable. At least it could be done for one year. Maybe next year the economy will recover and raises could happen?

The other interesting thing about the article is that I thought the City bought the Rescue Mission to tear it down to build a new road. Now they are saying city offices are moving into it. Maybe the road won't take up the whole thing?

FDA Didn't Know Menthol Makes The Smoke Better

Effective today the Food & Drug Administration has banned clove and sweet flavored cigarettes. Due to industry pressure they did not do so with menthol flavored ones. Interestingly the article in USA Today quoted a researcher as stating "We all thought until quite recently that menthol was just a neutral flavor."

I guess they didn't do much research. Menthol to me was always minty and made smoking a cigarette much easier. They have also only been around for several dozens of years. I guess this is what passes for science now.

Libertarians and the Confederate States

I did not know that there was a group within Libertarianism that holds the Confederate States of America (CSA) up as a good example of limited government in North America. This is not necessarily considered a good or correct interpretation as Doug Mataconis explains at his blog, Below the Beltway.

One issue the CSA faced as it organized was a lack of cooperation among the states which made it harder to get armies set up. This led to the U.S.'s ability to seize important areas and resources. So it contributed somewhat to its defeat.

Who Knew Obama Controls All Funding For Liberal Groups?

Via Riehl World View we come to understand that Firedoglake the angry liberal site is claiming that President Obama is stabbing the left in the back.

The anger is caused by the Van Jones resignation. Some on the left are claiming that Obama should have supported Jones through thick-and-thin. Now Firedoglake is saying that if you do not support Obama you lose all of your "institutional funding". I am not sure what that is but assume it is Democratic party or non-profits that fund liberal groups.

Anyway I did not know that the President was so powerful that he could cut funding to a blog or group overnight. If only the Republicans could get so organized.

Banal Soviet Bureaucrats Mask Terror Of Soviet Communism

The Yale University Press has been publishing a series of books on Soviet Communist rule in Russia utilizing primary documents from archives that have come available since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

They have started to put some of their recent works actual documents on the internet. One of them is files from the KGB on Andrei Sakharov. This noted Soviet atomic scientist became a leading dissident in the late Sixties and Seventies causing no end of problems for the Brezhnev regime.

Many of the source documents are reports on Sakharov's activities sent under Yuri Andropov's signature to the Central Committee. Andropov was the head of the KGB and ended up being the last leader of Soviet Russia before Gorbachov.

Some of the highlights include reports like this: "Sakharov continues to produce and disseminate slanderous letters concerning Soviet reality. In conversations with his confederates, Sakharov assesses policies of the Party and government from a negative standpoint, and he also associates himself with demagogic assertions of nationalistically inclined individuals about the situation of Jews in the USSR."

Another work is about Stalin's persecution of the COMINTERN and the elimination of foriegn Communists. One particularly interesting document is a statement of Irena Kun the sister of Hungarian Communist Bela Kun. Bela Kun was able to establish a Communist regime in Hungary for a few years after World War I. In the Thirties many of the leaders fled to the Soviet Union and were eventually punished by Stalin. Irena Kun is trying to protect herself by claiming that Georg Benedek another Hungarian in Moscow made up stories about her being a Trotskyist and traitor.

Kun blames a bad recommendation from her brother for his denouncing her. "I have known Benedek for 3 years, we live in the same building. He studied at the VKU where I was working. I always knew that he was mentally unsound. But I would never have suspected him of being so mean until, according to his own words, c. Bela Kun refused to give him a recommendation to the KUNMZ graduate school in June-August 1935. After that, he started telling me and c. E. Nagy[iv] things that aroused my suspicions that Benedek was either crazy or an agent provocateur."

The documents illustrate the paranoia among the intellectuals of a movement where they spent decades eating each other and protecting themselves. They could trust no one or anyone. They also showed the dutiful bureaucrats of the KGB and Party routinely reporting on each other to higher ups explaining faults and problems by blaming poor commitment to the Soviet cause or foreign provocateurs.

In all it shows that large numbers of people spent all their time running around reporting on each other in lengthy memorandum. Certainly these people contributed little of meaning to society or the economy. It might explain all the problems the Soviet economy might have had.

Contractors Good For Something -- Being A Force Mulitplier In Afghanistan

For the last eight years one of the biggest complaints from the American left was that George Bush was in the sway of big government contractors. They did too much of the housekeeping services in Iraq and Afghanistan. Companies like KBR lined their pockets at the expense of the troops and taxpayers. They were doing jobs that green suiters or civil servants should be doing.

Unfortunately due to the small size of the military they had to use contractors for those jobs. This has been a trend going back thirty years. Use contractors to wash clothes, cook food and clean latrines. Then there would be more soldiers freed up to do the fighting. Despite a consistent philosophy on the use of support contractors Bush received holy hell about it. True the scale in Iraq was much larger then it ever had been before and the contracts were in some case let quickly and didn't have enough oversight but people were trying to get things done.

Now the word is that Obama wants to increase the number of foot soldiers in Afghanistan but without increasing the number of U.S. troops deployed to that country. One way to do this is to reduce the number of soldiers assigned to logistic support units, command headquarters, maintenance and so one and do a one-for-one swap with "trigger pullers". How do you do this and still provide the enormous tail that U.S. forces need? Use contractors.

It might be possible to assign U.S. civil servants to do this but there have been many issues in the past with getting them to serve in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is too dangerous or not career enhancing. Certainly there is a number of people assigned or who volunteer for these positions but to get the kind of capability that is needed it will have to be contractors. Contractors like KBR or other such companies experienced in logistics and maintenance.

This will not be an easy or quick switch. The ground troops will have to be designated from either those in Iraq or in the U.S. recovering from a recent deployment. Then they will have to be trained and equipped up. A plan will be figured out how to deploy a 1000 support troops and replace them with a battalion of infantry. The support infrastructure will probably have to switch first. Contractors taking over for the rear echelon folks.

Another challenge will be writing and awarding the contracts for this. Unless they plan on expanding existing contracts there will be a several month period of writing the RFP, putting it out and evaluating the proposals. Awards may be protested which could add to the delays. Once awarded the contractors will have to hire their people and get them into place. Expect the almost constant sniping from Congress and the Media about this. See the LOGCAP contract from Iraq for example.

The Obama administration really cannot do anything else. They have reached the fish-or-cut-bait point. Either abandon Afghanistan or pour resources in. At the same time he does not want to "surge" troops there as that will make him and many Democrats look like idiots for opposing the same in Iraq. So he does the next best thing: surge contractors to maximize his troop availability. Good luck to them and the soldiers.

Cross posted at Defense Procurement News

Parker Griffith Hits The Big Time

Our local Congressman is Democrat Parker Griffith. He won a squeaker of an election to fill the seat of a surprise retirement. Griffith is considered a "Bluedog" conservative Democrat who has spoken out against both the health care reform bill and the cap-and-trade act. Now in an interview with The Huntsville Times after a town hall on health care he has hit the big time.

One of the criticisms from this fairly conservative district is that while Griffith may be conservative himself he supports the Democratic agenda in Congress generally and voted for Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) to be speaker. In the interview Griffith now says that he "...would not vote for her. Someone that divisive and that polarizing cannot bring us together."

That statement has hit the blogosphere and is now all over Memeorandum as it got picked up by US News and World Report and various lefty and right blogs.

It would be good but it is hard to believe that if Griffith is re-elected which is not assured right now that he wouldn't go along with whomever the Democrats run for Speaker.