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Sunday, February 13, 2011

RANDOM THOUGHTS #27

Steve Cole muses: Just thinking to himself.

1. You may well have recommended against that decision that turned into a disaster, but it's still your fault because your recommendation was unconvincing.

2. The USA has the highest corporate tax rates in the world, which has got to be bad for getting businesses to grow, invest, and hire people.

3. Petrick's office chair can be adjusted to so many positions that it's almost guaranteed that he picked the wrong one, resulting in back pain, sleepless nights, and suboptimal performance.

4. Facts are for people who cannot create their own truth.--Bucky Kat

5. I really need to buy one of those phone things that allows me to send myself a note. I keep having great random thoughts (or thinking of something I was supposed to do and forgot, or thinking of a cool new something for one of the game systems) when driving or at home and forgetting them before I get back to the office. I could do the same thing with a notebook and pen (although perhaps not while driving), but I'd have to remember to carry it around (there is a notebook and pen in my car, but writing a note while driving gets exciting). Since my cell phone is always (when I'm at home) in a drawer where I cannot hear it ring, getting an Android/iPhone that will send myself an email may be a less than effective plan if I don't keep it by my recliner. But then, I do have a pad and pen there, which is full of cool notes, but I never remember to bring it to the office.

6. Tunisia has seen the violent overthrow of a long-term oligarchy, and there are riots demanding the same thing in Algeria, Egypt, Yemen, Jordan, and other places. Petrick and I fear that we could be seeing the "fall of the Warsaw Pact" all over again, as supposedly stable Arab countries fall like dominoes. We both fear that the "democrats" may take over and be quickly followed by the "radical Islamo-fascists" and we could, by year's end, be dealing with multiple "Iran-type Islamist republics". (A lot of post-communist democracies are in fact dictatorships since countries with no history of democracy have no idea how to make it work.) Most Arabs want competent government, less corruption, and more economic growth, but you don't get democracy by declaring it, and with no experience in how it works, they're going to vote in the Islamo-fascists, who will never give up power voluntarily. Now, one point here is that Tunisia had no oil, so there was no well-paid and loyal military and police organization to crush the rioters. Egypt has that, and so does Algeria. Egypt isn't using the military to keep power, while Algeria has used it for 17 years.

7. Jean mentioned the Battle Group article deadline on Facebook, and somebody there asked why he wasn't given more warning since he doesn't read the BBS. Well, it wasn't a deliberate thing; Jean just happened to think it was worth a mention (and had not happened to think of it earlier). It wasn't Steven Petrick or me saying "promote this on FB" (had it been that, we should have done a better job). Battle Group is a hard core development project and those are done on the BBS, and we have plenty of people there submitting them, so we didn't really need to go tell the FB guys in order to fill up the pages of Captain's Log #43. This did remind me of two things, however. One was that we ARE short of term papers, tactical notes, and command notes, and maybe FB would be a good place to go tell people to send those (and anything else we are short of). The other is that Jean has built a network of information distribution and we have yet to fully realize that we have it and should be using it. Two years of begging for term papers on the BBS and it never occurred to anyone to ask the "pool of new blood" on FB to send them? Really? We must be overloaded to have not had that penny drop.

8. I happened to catch a couple of old episodes of TUDORS on my Tivo when they were rerun on a non-premium channel (which eliminates what apparently was a lot of nudity and sex). I think that Henry VIII gets a bum rap all the time (not so much in this show). Yes, he wanted a son, but not because that was cool. He needed a son to prevent a civil war, since nobody else had any direct claim to the throne and his daughters could not inherit the crown as there had never been a queen regnant of England at that point. (A few years later, Henry VIII asked Parliament to change the law and allow Mary and Elizabeth to be considered in the line of succession because his sons had all died. This was part of a political deal with Mary's cousin, the Holy Roman Emperor, who was only too happy to have his cousin on the British throne.)

9. I recently got to see the complete Charlie Chaplin film "The Great Dictator" which was his spoof about Hitler and Nazi German. It was very funny. Liberals praise Chaplain for his "courage" in making this movie. I am not seeing what "courage" is involved here. Chaplain was in the US, not in Germany. Did he really think that a German spy was going to assassinate him?

10. I greatly enjoy with wit and wisdom of Walter E. Williams's editorials. He's one of the few conservative black leaders. His latest column deeply concerned me. Government reports indicate that over 70% of black children are born to unwed mothers, compared to 20% during the 1950s. That shift is entirely caused by welfare sending checks to mothers who just happened to not have a husband. If you reward bad behavior, you get more of it. His point, however, was not that, but that the average black youth in the US who graduates from high school reads only at an 8th-grade level because black youth are "alien and hostile to the education process." That's deeply disturbing and the nation needs to fix it.