But if Obama and his supporters are ruling out the obvious, so too are many of the president’s critics who hope that at some point — perhaps when he misses 500 out of 500 — that he’ll suddenly realize that he’s doing it wrong. They’re hoping for this because the common perception is that the world is stuck with him until 2016. But perhaps he won’t notice he’s missed the last 1,000 shots for the very same reason that caused the blunders already committed.
The one crisis that Peter Baker omits to mention is the inability of the American political system to diagnose and fix itself. It lies in the circumstance that Baker can realize the world is falling apart without being able to put his finger on why. It is exhibited in Alan Dershowitz’s perspicacious insight that Israel has been put in an impossible position while remaining a pillar of the Democratic cheering squad. They can enumerate the problems but they don’t know what it means.
The feedback loop is kaput. That is the key. But no one in Washington seems capable of divining where the smoke on the ceiling is coming from because it’s coming from them. The significance of the dog that did not bark in the night is that nobody in establishment DC is barking. It means things will only come to a head when the theater actually starts to burn.
National Security
American Spartan
Cross-posted from Zenpundit.com
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American Spartan: The Promise, the Mission, and the Betrayal of Special Forces Major Jim Gant
When I first posted that I had received a review copy of American Spartan from Callie, it stirred a vigorous debate in the comments section and also a flurry of email offline to me from various parties. Joseph Collins reviewed American Spartan for War on the Rocks , Don Vandergriff posted his review at LESC blog , Blackfive had theirs here,and there was an incisive one in the MSM by former Assistant Secretary of Defense and author Bing West, all of which stirred opinions in the various online forums to which I belong. Then there was the ABC Nightline special which featured Tyson and Gant as well as an appearance by former CIA Director, CENTCOM, Iraq and Afghanistan commander General David Petraeus:
Major Gant was also a topic here at ZP years ago when he released his widely read and sometimes fiercely debated paper “One Tribe at a Time“, at Steven Pressfield’s site, which launched all of the events chronicled by Tyson in American Spartan. To be candid, at the time and still today, I remain sympathetic to strategies that enlist “loyalist paramilitaries” to combat insurgencies and other adversarial irregular forces. It should only be done with eyes wide open as to the potential drawbacks (numerous) and it won’t always work but the militia option works often enough historically that it should be carefully considered. With that background in mind, on to the book.
America’s Impending Tuberculosis Epidemic
(NOTE — Update at the End of the Column)
One of the things that changes you, when you become a parent, is the body of knowledge you acquire to protect your spouse and children including things like knowledge of infectious diseases in public schools. In my case that meant looking at the NY Times saying the following: “…the administration has begun to send the expected 240,000 migrants and 52,000 unaccompanied minors who have crossed the border illegally in recent months in the Rio Grande Valley to cities around the county.” And at headlines for the open border crisis like this by Todd Starnes titled “Immigration crisis: Tuberculosis spreading at camps” which caused me to immediately free associate them with a pair of “Tuberculosis in Public School”, headlines, one local to North Texas in 2011 and the other very recently in California. See this 2011 Consumer Health Daily article from Denton Texas “TB Outbreaks in Texas Schools Show Disease Still a Threat – At least 100 people have tested positive for the respiratory ailment” and this 1 July 2014 article from the Sacramento Bee “Four more students test positive for tuberculosis at Grant High.”
As a Texas parent, this idea of TB positive illegal alien children released to illegal immigrant parents scares the heck out of me from the point of view of epidemiology. In the 1920s TB was the eighth leading cause of death for children 1-to-4 years old. Since then American public health has been so effective in preventing it that the USA no longer has any “herd immunity” to TB.
This “catch and release” illegal alien policy is horrible from the infectious disease point of view in that phlegm or aerosolized sputum that are contaminated with Mycobacterium tuberculosis are active biohazards that have long latent infection periods. This makes “exposure” very easy. The clinical definition of TB Exposure — which I found in a University of Vanderbilt student medical file PDF — is the following:
“A person is considered to be exposed if there is shared breathing space with someone with infectious pulmonary or laryngeal tuberculosis at a time when the infectious person is not wearing a mask and the other person is not wearing an N95 respirator. Usually a person has to be in close contact with someone with infectious tuberculosis for a long period of time to become infected; however, some people do become infected after short periods, especially if the contact is in a closed or poorly ventilated space.”
The Federal Government Hazmat protocol for dealing with suspected active TB cases is as follows:
1. Administrative controls
”¢ “Develop policies and protocols to ensure the rapid identification, isolation, diagnostic evaluation and treatment of persons likely to have TB.”
2. Engineering controls
Ӣ Isolation and
Ӣ Negative pressure room ventilation
3.Personal protective equipment controls
Ӣ N95 personal respirator protection
Questions people and reporters need to be asking their local, state and federal elected officials regards the so-called “unattended child immigration crisis” include:
1. How many Border Patrol Agents, health workers or other support staff at these immigration processing centers have worn N95 respirators in treating symptomatic TB sufferers?
2. How many TB sufferers were also wearing masks?
3. Have those Border Patrol Agents, health workers or other support staff followed a rigorous TB decontamination protocol?
Whether people ask those questions or not, we are going to find out the answers soon, and not just in Texas. Testable anti-bodies to TB infection appear in two to 12 weeks for skin and blood tests and the incubation period for full blown active TB is six months to two(+) years.
History Friday: Secrets of the Pacific Warfare Board — Block III TV in the Occupation of Japan, First of an Occasional Series
When I started writing my “History Friday” columns, one of my objectives was to explore the “military historical narratives” around General Douglas MacArthur, so I could write with a better understanding about the “cancelled by atomic bomb” November 1945 invasion of Japan. Today’s column is focusing on an almost unknown series of Documents called “The Reports of the Pacific Warfare Board,” and in specific reports No. 31 and 50. This professional lack of interest by the academic history community in these reports represents a huge methodological flaw in the current “narratives” about the end of World War 2 in the Pacific. These two reports amplify and expand an earlier column of mine hitting that “flawed narrative” point titled History Friday: Operation Olympic Something Forgotten & Something Familiar. A column that was about a WW2 “manned UAV” (unmanned air vehicle AKA a drone), an L-5 artillery spotter plane with an early vacuum tube technology broadcast TV camera, pictured below.
These Pacific Warfare Board (PWB) reports have been classified for decades and unlike their more well know, examined by many researchers, and posted on-line European Theater equivalents. Almost nothing from them has made it to the public since their mass declassification in the 1990’s. There are good reasons for that. The National Archive has a 98,000 file, 80 GB finding aide. One that isn’t on-line. Until recently, the only way you can get at archive files like the Pacific Warfare Board Reports is to learn that finding aide and make your own copies using National Archive equipment. This was usually time consuming and cost prohibitive to all but the most determined researchers or hired archivists.
Thanks to the cratering costs USB flash drives and increasing quality of digital cameras built into even moderately priced cell phones over the last few years, this is no longer true. And as a result, the academic history profession is about to have its key institutional research advantage outsourced to hobbyists and bloggers.
Saigon in Baghdad — Iraq’s Corruption-Based Collapse
While the media has made much of both the Iraqi government’s request for air strikes on the Al Qaeda aligned fighters from the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) and the Obama Administration’s refusal to do so, few people have bothered to look at what airpower was available to the Shia dominated government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. In fact, the Iraqi Air Force has had light gunships based on the Cessna C208 Caravan capable of firing Hellfire missiles since 2011 that should have been fully capable of dealing with the ISIS “technicals” — armed light trucks — seen in many photos recently.
See this link and text:
Alliant Techsystems has announced delivery of a third AC-208B “Combat Caravan” aircraft to the Iraq Training and Advisory Mission in Kirkuk, Iraq. To date, ATK has delivered 11 modified C-208 aircraft in support of U.S. Government contracts for rebuilding the Iraqi Air Force: three reconnaissance aircraft, five trainer aircraft and three AC-208B aircraft. The AC-208B Combat Caravan aircraft is a specially modified Cessna Grand Caravan that incorporates an electro-optical targeting system with integrated laser designator, Hellfire laser guided missiles, an air-to-ground and air-to-air data link and aircraft self-protection equipment.
See also this link and ATK press release photos:
http://defensetech.org/2011/10/26/atks-ac-208-combat-caravan-gunship/
Whether the current Iraqi government there has any left in operable condition is a very different question. I very strongly suspect that most of the 30,000 Iraqi Army troops that deserted in the face of the ISIS attack had not been paid in months, with most of their weapons, radios and vehicles either being sold or deadlined from issues of corruption.
What we are seeing with the Iraqi government is a collapse from corruption. If the CIA had any capable human agents on the ground outside the Green Zone — ones that were paid attention too — none of that would have been a surprise to the Obama Administration.
Now we have “Saigon in Baghdad,” with a President that has all the bad features of the Nixon Administration and is isolationist to boot.