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.
Gosh, scientists are mystified as to why the military would suddenly classify data they have made public for years. [h/t Instapundit] Well, I have an idea and if the scientists and the journalists had bothered to think about it from the perspective of military intelligence, they could have figured it out as well.
The public data lets a potential enemy figure out the sensitivity of the satellites and how to create countermeasures.
When I was in London recently I went to the top of the monument to the Great London Fire of 1666 (the site is cool; it has history information as well as a view from the top of the monument, updated every 60 seconds). From the top of this tower I saw what I was looking for – a great place to get a photo of the HMS Belfast, a British cruiser from WW2. The wikipedia site for HMS Belfast is a good place to start for information about this hard-working vessel – I was going to classify her as a “light” cruiser (due to the fact that she carried 6 inch main guns, while heavy cruisers carried 8 inch guns) but I read that after repairs from 1939-42 (after she hit a mine) she had been rebuilt and was the heaviest cruiser by tonnage in the British navy at the time, so I will just call her a cruiser.
While I have been to many museums in the United States that feature large WW2 and Korean era warships, such as the carrier Midway in South Carolina and the carrier Intrepid in New York, among others, there are comparatively few large ships that have been preserved in Europe and Asia. I believe (and semi-confirmed from this site, which is interesting) that the HMS Belfast is the only big-gun ship that has been preserved from the world wars in all of Europe. I heard a rumor (can’t find the link) that there even have been calls from Germany to bring back the Prinz Eugen (currently upside down at Bikini atoll, where she was blasted after WW2 in atomic bomb tests) back to Germany as a museum (very highly unlikely, of course).
[Obama’s] concept of a nuclear-proof world is patently unattainable, potentially dangerous, and inherently wrong. “I’m not naïve,” the president said. “But we go forward with no illusions.”
But he is, and he has.
Read the whole thing.
This is a very timely slice of grown-up thinking. Not a minute too soon.
We’ve all seen the same plot line time and time again. Evil institution does something sinister, but the conscience of one person inside the institution drives the person to leak damning information to a plucky reporter, who bravely publicizes the information, which creates public pressure to investigate the evil institution. Hurray!
This narrative is ingrained into our intuitive understanding of scandals. We assume that any particular scandal unfolded just as the narrative said it should. Given this, it’s easy to see how Matt Welch defaulted to the narrative when reporting on the recent developments in Obama’s hypocrisy on national security.
Did the Abu Ghraib photos, which illustrated what had already been described in various reports, add to your understanding of the gravity/extent to what we were doing in the world? Yes, I believe it did. Images add value that words cannot convey. The “chilling effect,” too, is nonsensical. If anything, images increase public pressure on the government/military to conduct investigations in the first place (as in fact happened at Abu Ghraib).[emp added]
Except even a casually perusal of the time line of the Abu Ghraib scandal shows that the publication of the staged pictures came months after the military: had launched an investigation, reported the results to the media, pressed charges against both the principals and those in their chain of command, conducted preliminary courts martial against most of the defendants and initiated reforms in the entire detainment system, based on the investigation.
Leftists appear to believe that the only reason that criminals use guns is that the police set a bad example by doing so first. This seems to be the logic behind the Obama administration’s campaign to unilaterally disarm the U.S. of our nuclear deterrent. [h/t Instapundit]
Am I the only one who feels like our President has the foreign-policy sophistication of a romantic teenager?