This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Author: NSOM

  • Armed Services Chair calls on Governors’ help

    Howard “Buck” McKeon (R) is calling on the Presidentially appointed, bipartisan Council of Governors to support his efforts at heading off the arbitrary sequestration cuts set to literally decimate the defense budget. McKeon has been a frequent and vocal advocate for vets, active and reserve service members and a robust, healthy defense apparatus in general. Previously the Council of Governors made a successful push to trim back cuts to the Air Force National Guard in their states. NIMBY politics, maybe, but effective and prudent. Now McKeon hopes that this organization of ten governors can act as a relief force for the rest of the military.

    Normally I’d say that outside of their local needs most of these politicans would happily throw the military to the wolves. After all, just as Tip O’Neill once said, “All politics is local.” The good news? These politics are local. Of the ten Governors on the Council all five of the Democrats, a group normally ambivalent to defense spending as it doesn’t yield demographic patronage for their party, are the Governors of states with large military communities and/or facilities. That means jobs and money.

    These states are Washington (PSNS/Naval Base Kitsap/JBLM/Naval Base Everett), Maryland (NSA/Aberdeen/Andrews/contractors galore), North Carolina (Bragg/Pope/Lejeune/Cherry Point), Oklahoma (Tinker/Sill), Hawai’i (MCB Hawaii/Pearl Harbor) and Missouri (Whitman/Leonard Wood). This may be the best chance yet for a bipartisan commission of the President’s own choosing to rebuke the pending cuts. If you live in any of these states you should be looking up the contact info of both your Governor and your State Rep and demanding they back Rep McKeon. With the election looming Obama must scramble to preserve jobs, even if they come from the “evil” military-industrial complex. This is exactly where we should be hitting him.

  • May Day riots unfolding in Seattle

    An organized riot started today as protesters stormed into Seattle Central Community College, the location of the now evicted Occupy Seattle camp. From the Community College the protesters joined with a mass of bicyclists who “swarmed” the roads to block traffic for the march down to Westlake Center. After regrouping there they moved down Denny and Pine Streets, attacking stores and cars as they clashed with police. Once Black Bloc and Marxist protesters reached the Federal Courthouse firebombs were thrown at the front of the building as rioters attacked windows and doors. Nobody is reporting it yet but a young man, possibly an adolescent, with Down’s Syndrome was waiving a red flag as he beat on windows and doors with a club of some kind. At least one car was trapped and destroyed as its occupants fled their attackers.

    The attacks were obviously very well coordinated. As police responded to one set of attacks another group of Black Bloc and red flag waiving rioters would immediately attack another. This is a coordinated attack by left-wing extremists on the city of Seattle and its citizens. I’m working on pictures now but I’m not sure of the quality as they’re being taken by a friend in the thick of it.

    UPDATE: Many police have been resisting making arrests, even on rioters they witnessed attacking property. One guy said he saw them stand aside as rioters moved past.

    UPDATE #2:

    Here’s the mentally handicapped Marxist facing down a vigilante dressed as a super hero. If that doesn’t just sum up how screwed we all are I don’t know what does. Credit to the Seattle Times.

  • Member of British government puts bounty on US Presidents

    In what has historically been seen as an act of war, a left-wing Labour Party member of the upper house of British Parliament has apparently put out a $16 million bounty on President Barack Obama and former President George W. Bush. The Baron Nazir Ahmed, a life peer of the House of Lords, placed the bounty in response to the US bounty on Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, the head of Islamist terror organization Lashkar-e-Taiba. HuffPo is reporting that Labour has since suspended his membership in the party. The Baron Ahmed is the first Muslim life peer in the House of Lords.

    It’ll be interesting to see the results of this investigation. Booting a life peer from the House of Lords is incredibly difficult and he’s a darling of the radical anti-war left. If it can be substantiated he said what he’s accused of saying and he really did place a unilateral bounty on the head of two US Presidents I’m even more interested to know what the Obama administration’s response will be. Being an election year we could even see the notoriously flexible Obama find some spine.

  • FBI analyst sues over gender specific standards

    Miss Bauer, FBI

    In a case that might have far reaching implications for the military an FBI analyst is suing the FBI for gender discrimination. Two years ago Jay Bauer was undergoing the Bureau’s Special Agent training curriculum when he was dropped from the pipeline after he failed his physical fitness test by a push up. Up to failing his PT test he was at the top of his class. He’s suing, correctly pointing out that a female applicant with his test scores would not have been dropped.

    An intelligence analyst for the FBI in Chicago who allegedly missed becoming a special agent by a single pushup has filed a gender-discrimination lawsuit alleging that the FBI’s fitness test is flawed and biased against men.

    Jay Bauer, a Northwestern University doctoral graduate, joined the FBI in 2009 after leaving the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee as an assistant professor in its communication sciences department, according to the lawsuit filed last week in federal court in Chicago.

    —

    His attorneys argued that a female trainee who scored near the bottom of the class in firearms proficiency was given another attempt at the fitness test, but Bauer wasn’t.

    They also argued that the FBI’s fitness standards — which before 2003 required men to do 25 pushups — are comparatively harder for males. Female trainees must complete at least 14 untimed pushups, an amount equal to 27 to 29 for men, the lawsuit says, citing a database maintained by a fitness consultant the FBI worked with in drafting the guidelines.

    Now I’m immediately torn. On one hand I’m inclined to tell him to man up and move on. He knew, with plenty of warning, exactly what the standards where for him to progress and he failed to adequately prepare for them. Barring physical handicap there is no reason a healthy man young enough for FBI Special Agent training can’t discipline himself to perform 40 push ups. I’m a fat, lazy civilian now and I can do 40 damn push ups.

    On the other hand standards are only standards if they’re, well…standard. The entire concept of differing standards of physical readiness based on gender in high risk professions, in which the safety and mission readiness of the personnel involved depends on physical fitness, is an absurd acquiescence to political degradation. This is to not even scratch the perverse and convoluted social structures created by treating people who identify with the gender norms of the opposite sex as a politically protected class of people. I can imagine it now, male troops having failed PT tests coming in to work and declaring themselves to now be transgendered and demanding they be evaluated as females.

    So, in the end, I hope Bauer does win. It would be a good start to tearing down the entire notion that the physical demands of combat or law enforcement cares about your gender identity or sex. On the other hand, seeing as how Mr Bauer is now the guy who couldn’t do the man push ups and is trying to sue his way into the Special Agent club, it might be best if he were to remain in a cubicle.

  • The military must overhaul its education

    There’s been a sea change in attitude of the US military when it comes to the education of its ranks. Not so long ago post secondary education was considered the exclusive realm of the officer corps. Today, not only is the military leadership encouraging its enlisted men and women to seek out higher education, they’re actively spending billions of dollars as a matter of deliberate policy in order to achieve that goal. Unfortunately for everyone involved, including the taxpayer, this policy has been pursued in fits and starts with half measures and aimless, profligate spending.

    As it stands now the military spends almost $8 billion a year more than service members have put in for the Post 9/11 GI Bill. That’s billions of dollars engorging a hopelessly broken, corrupt and often anti-military academic system in order to attempt to educate troops who have already left the service, to very mixed results. To put that number in perspective, that’s about 50% more than the 42,000 student, globally ranked Top 20 University of Washington spends in the same time frame , including it’s $1 billion research budget. Or, it’s the collective endowment of the entire University of California’s eleven campuses serving a quarter of a million undergraduate and postgraduate students. This is, largely, a consequence of The GI Bill being a law structured to garner political support by feeding the beast and institutional military support by attracting recruits during the hard years of 2005-2008. What it should be is designed to educate service members for the purpose of empowering the force, improving retention and setting up them for success when they transition out of the armed forces.

    Not to mention, do you really want your tax funded GI Bill paying the tenured salary of the likes of Bill Ayers, Ward Churchill and Noam Chomsky?

    All that’s not to say that the military is only spending money on vets. In 2011 the military spent $542 million on tuition assistance for active duty troops and some of their dependents. TA grew so quickly and to such heights that Congress moved to slash it by 25%. With this deluge of largely unaccountable money, online and distance learning schools have popped up on bases around the world. On nearly every base you can find a learning center with several different, often for-profit, schools offering all manner of courses. The for-profit American Public University System, which runs the popular American Military University, alone has over 100,000 students. Unfortunately there’s little to no coordination between the military and the school’s faculty when it comes to the individual service member’s needs or academic progress. Consequently, these money gobbling schools are often difficult for young troops to complete and most have graduation rates well below 50%. As for the actual course work? It’s not pretty.

    This sad state of affairs is even more astounding when one considers that the US military has successfully been in the business of higher education for over 200 years and is, today, the largest educational apparatus in the country. The Department of Defense and it’s various bureaucratic affiliates are directly responsible for, or directly pay for, the post secondary education of more people than any other entity in the country. The Department of Education can’t even come close to providing the educational impact for adults the DoD does and it most likely never will. This doesn’t even touch the almost 9,000 staff in 200 DoD schools who are responsible for the K-12 education of almost 90,000 military dependents.

    Fortunately, within that depressing realization is also the answer to, not only fixing the military’s broken education promises but, reforming the entire way higher education works in the United States. (more…)

  • AP: Navy pilots “sent” their plane into apartment building

    Now sometimes people are just neglectfully stupid. Sometimes they simply suffer from very human faults. And sometimes they print headlines like this:

    AP hates Navy FA-18 drivers

    If you write for a living as an editor or headline monkey and you put that out you’re either a.) grossly incompetent or b.) so filled with anti-military vitriol as to be incapable of doing your job.

    Those pilots didn’t eject and therefor “send” their plane into that apartment building. They suffered massive mechanical failure and only through their selfless acts of remaining in their doomed aircraft as long as possible and dumping all excess fuel did more people not die or suffer injury.

  • MSNBC: Cheney “too old” for life saving transplant

    MSNBC has commissioned bioethicist Arthur Caplan Ph.D. to write an opinion piece contending that, considering his politics age, it was unethical for former Vice President Dick Cheney to have received a heart transplant.

    Dick Cheney has just joined a list of high-profile people, including Steve Jobs, Mickey Mantle, Evil Knievel and David Crosby who, received a transplant and thereby created a controversy. Cheney received a heart on Friday from an anonymous donor at Inova Fairfax Hospital in Virginia after a 20-month wait. What is controversial about that? Cheney is 71 years old.

    He has been through numerous previous operations that indicate he has other serious medical problems. He has only been able to survive due to the implantation of a left-ventricular assist device (LVAD) — a partial artificial heart — that has kept him going long past the point where his own heart could have kept him alive.

    Dr. Arthur goes on to say that Cheney has exceeded the “informal” cut off observed by many surgeons…70.

    Lo and behold an actual physician writing for Fox News (gasp!) asserts the exact opposite:

    “I think this was the proper treatment for him,” said Dr. Manny Alvarez, senior managing health editor at FoxNews.com. “After a very long time of chronic health problems, ultimately, his heart needed to be replaced, and this was the only way to do it.”

    Alvarez said Cheney’s overall strong physical health made him a good candidate for a transplant, despite his age.

    “The treatments he had prior to the transplant allowed him to lead a full life,” Alvarez added.

    Of course there was no uproar among these people when it was revealed that Hollywood icon Robert “I’ll move to Paris if Bush wins” Altman both received a heart transplant at the age of 70 and never actually moved to Paris. I guess it’s because he made the “informal” cut off.

    It’s no real big surprise that MSNBC would push such a narrative, it’s red meat for their chronically indignant left-wing audience. It’s less surprising that they’d have their resident UPenn/NYU “bio-ethicist” disingenuously assert such garbage in the form of a rhetorical question (Are Republicans less informed about key issues? A new study by our on-staff left-wing academics offers surprising conclusions!). Of course the collection of motley fools and self-satisfied deconstructionists, collectively known as the field of bioethics, is more than a tad suspect itself. As the always excellent Andrew Ferguson noted in an article at The Weekly Standard last week:

    On the list of the world’s most unnecessary occupations—aromatherapist, golf pro, journalism professor, vice president of the United States?—?that of medical ethicist ranks very high. They are happily employed by pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, and other outposts of the vast medical-industrial combine, where their job is to advise the boss to go ahead and do what he was going to do anyway (“Put it on the market!” “Pull the plug on the geezer!”). They also attend conferences where they take turns sitting on panels talking with one another and then sitting in the audience watching panels of other medical ethicists talking with one another. Their professional specialty is the “thought experiment,” which is the best kind of experiment because you don’t have to buy test tubes or leave the office. And sometimes they get jobs at universities, teaching other people to become ethicists. It is a cozy, happy world they live in.

    This article was in reference to another claim uncontroversially floating around the world of bioethics: that infanticide is perfectly ethical. You see, it’s really no different than abortion since the newborn doesn’t have the cognitive capacity to realize it’s being denied anything, were you to kill it. As an added bonus, killing infants can spare the biological parents the lack of emotional closure often associated with adoption.

    EDIT:
    I previously misidentified Robert Altman as Arthur Caplan. Thanks, Ben.

  • Witness the unfolding campaign to strip your rights

    There’s a new angle in the campaign to strip you of your rights to defend your self with the Constitutional tools afforded to you. In the wake of the Martin shooting in Florida comes a recent op-ed piece by Tom Brown for Reuters masquerading as reporting the “case” being built for the deconstruction of so called “stand your ground” laws.

    On June 5, 2006, not long after Florida enacted the first “Stand Your Ground” law in the United States, unarmed Jason Rosenbloom was shot in the stomach and chest by his next-door neighbor after a shouting match over trash.

    Exactly what happened that day in Clearwater, Florida, is still open to dispute. Kenneth Allen, a retired police officer, said he shot Rosenbloom because he was trying to storm into his house.

    Rosenbloom told Reuters in a telephone interview this week he never tried to enter the house and was in Allen’s yard, about 10 feet (3 meters) from his front door, when he was shot moments after he put his hands up.

    Now living in Hawaii, Rosenbloom said he had been unaware of the growing outrage over last month’s shooting in Sanford, Florida, of an unarmed black teenager by a neighborhood watch captain.

    The language in the rest of the article only grows more grotesque. Then again this is the same agency which employs “journalists” to “embed” with insurgents in Iraq then has the audacity to complain when they’re caught in the cross fire.

    UPDATE:

    This morning the Christian Science Monitor ran an Op-Ed by NYU professor Jonathan Zimmerman, titled Where’s the Trayvon Martin petition about gun control?. It pretty clearly lays out, what I think will be, the strategy they’ll use going forward, race card and all.

    …we need to ask whether any private citizen should be carrying a concealed weapon, and whether “Stand Your Ground” measures make people trigger-happy. And most of all, we need to think about the most common victims of our lax gun laws: African Americans.