Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
James R. Rummel Interesting quote from this op-ed concerning North Korea.
For years, Kim Jong Il was rated (by using various rankings of national problems and achievement) the worst ruler on the planet. But this year, Kim Jong Il came in third place, behind Zimbabwe (Robert Mugabe) and Sudan (Omar al Bashir). Things haven’t gotten any better in North Korea, they’ve just gotten much worse in Zimbabwe and Sudan.
Some of the best read bloggers have been outraged by this news item. The headline reads…
“Fire kills child, 3, and parents as police prevent neighbours from trying to rescue them”
If anything is going to produce outrage, it would be an account of how young and innocent lives were lost when they could have been saved. And all through a pig-headed application of the rules, to boot.
But my buddy knirirr has pointed out one or two things that have been missed.
Firstly, the report says that the neighbours were “beaten back by flames” which suggests to me that the fire was so intense that they would not have been able to get in and save anyone anyway. If this was a fire at night and there were no alarms installed then it could well have been burning for some time before anyone noticed.
Secondly, if the police really did quote H&S then they might not necessarily have meant it in the bureaucratic jobsworth sense that the Samizdata article seems to imply. I wonder if they meant “it’s too late, you can’t save them, you’ll only get killed if you try” but stated that the rules said so out of some misplaced belief that people will be impressed by being told that It’s The Law and are more likely to obey. We cannot know, but if so it clearly failed to make an impression in this case.
I find it very difficult to believe that five British police officers would stand by and let young children burn if they thought there was a chance for unequipped and untrained hands to help. Oh, there might be one or two here or there who would not care to make an attempt if it might mean their job. But five??? It seems likely that at least one, and probably more, of the officers were a parent themselves. For some reason, I don’t think sociopaths alone choose the police as a career.
It seems to me that there are a fair number of areas where Great Britain might improve. It also seems fair to me when someone points them out. But I don’t think this news article is fair.
(Hat tip to Glenn.)
So called “gunmen” have attacked a police academy in Pakistan. Eleven innocent people, eight police and three civilians, have been killed.
Think this is India getting some revenge for the Mumbai attacks last year? That is too thriller-of-the-week for me to take seriously unless there is some evidence. Besides, there are enough Islamic terrorist groups wandering around inside Pakistan that you don’t need to go looking outside the country for someone pissed off enough to pull a stunt like this.
Strategypage has posted a pretty good essay concerning how the ISI, which is Pakistan’s intelligence services, has a very close working relationship with several terrorist groups. Seems the ISI political section was disbanded last year. It could be that this is some scheme put together by the spooks to prove to the new civilian government that they really need to give ISI a longer leash. But that is pretty thriller-of-the-week as well.
Some of the “gunmen” have been captured. I doubt they will keep any secrets for long.
(Cross posted at Hell in a Handbasket.)
Venturing out to sea on boats during the bad old days of Viking culture was tantamount to suicide.
Their longboats were marvels of engineering. Shallow draft so they could travel up rivers, yet also able to operate in the open ocean, they were the perfect craft for lightning commando raids. They were also fast enough that they could catch any ship the Vikings could see, using oars for propulsion while larger ships were at the mercy of the wind.
If a band of Vikings set their sights on taking a ship, there wasn’t anything the merchant skippers of the day could do to prevent a screaming group of northmen from swarming aboard.
But then some nameless genius, or more likely a group of geniuses, came up with a brilliant idea. If it was impossible to prevent the Vikings from boarding, why not build ships where the crew could fight them after the pirates were on deck?
This simple concept led to a ship known as the Cog, or cog-built ships.
Ironically, the general design was adapted from the Vikings own merchant vessels, but there were two changes that proved to make all the difference. The European ship builders constructed little wooden forts in the front and rear of the ship. They called these wooden castles the “stern castle” for the one in back, and the “forward castle”, or “fo’c’sle”. Quaint names that echo with past blood and terror.
The idea was to let the Vikings come aboard if they so chose, while the crew retreated to their forts. The pirates would be out in the open, vulnerable to any sort of attack, while the crew fought from relative safety.
A recent post at Strategypage.com tells a sordid tale of double dealing.
“Russian police caught a group of naval officers (including at least two admirals) trying to smuggle 30 anti-submarine missiles and 200 bombs to China.”
The idea was to mislabel currently used weapons as obsolete, and then sell them to China so Beijing could reverse-engineer the technology. This news article gives us some more details.
It would seem that the Russians have been uncovering various criminal plots in their military with astonishing regularity over the past few years. While they have always struggled with corruption and graft, it would appear that things have really taken off.
“Over 400 Russian military officers were convicted of criminal offenses in 2008, army prosecutor Sergei Fridinsky reports in an interview with the Rossiyskaya Gazeta newspaper (Rus). The offending officers included 76 base commanders, and around 300 were senior staff, including 20 generals.”
The Russian military took it on the chin after the fall of the USSR in the early 1990’s. The economy was in turmoil, and funding for the troops was pretty much non-existent. Stories of how the armed forces were crumbling, such as how army bases would go dark because the electric bill wasn’t paid, were legion.
But that was supposed to be all in the past, as Russian oil and natural gas sales to an energy starved Europe revitalized the ruble and brought the good times back. Those who think that the recent US economic turmoil is forcing Russian generals to turn to crime as a desperate measure to stave off starvation should consider that the internal investigations to root out corruption started well before our own recession. And, as this op-ed from the UK Telegraph explains, Russia certainly had so much cash as late as October of 2008 that they offered a huge bailout loan to Iceland. A recent post at Strategypage.com reinforces the impression that the Russian government is going to keep spending money on the military, no matter how bad the global economic downturn.
This is probably the barely visible signs of a massive bureaucratic conflict that is raging between entrenched officers in the military, and the government at large. This essay mentions in passing that Putin has been trying to forcibly retire officers who are left over from an antiquated mobilization system, but the generals are refusing to go.
“The Army officer corps has stalemated the massive Defense Ministry reforms. This has delayed the forced retirement of thousands of senior officers. The officer corps wants to retain the 19th century “mobilization army” system. This requires conscription of most of the male population, and maintaining those men in reserve units (which are commanded by thousands of well paid senior officers). Russian leader Vladimir Putin sees this system as unworkable. Too many young men evade the draft and the country cannot afford to equip up to a hundred reserve divisions. Moreover, Russian nuclear weapons protect the country from invasion, and what the country needs is a smaller armed forces manned by professionals. But the officer corps is having none of it, and are digging in their heels, and calling in political favors.”
It seems to me that this is a case of “Use it or lose it”. The officers facing forced retirement, looking at their remaining decades spent as poor pensioners clipping coupons for dog food, realize that they only have a limited time to use their positions to cash in. Sell military technology to the Chinese and become a traitor to The Motherland? As long as a big pile of cash is on the table, then sign them up!
(Cross posted at Hell in a Handbasket.)