Category: Politics

Andrew Cuomo will use a $12.5 million Sikorsky S-76 to place a glass ceiling over Cynthia Nixon?

by philg

“Cuomo Often Takes Taxpayer-Funded Planes and Helicopters, Far More Than Other Big State Governors” (nytimes):

Much of the governor’s recent state-funded helicopter travel has been on a used Sikorsky 76-D, which cost New York taxpayers $12.5 million last year. The state comptroller initially rejected the request, which was made by the State Police through a noncompetitive bid.

The comptroller’s office cited the discrepancy between how Sikorsky described the helicopter’s configuration — “for a deluxe executive mission” — and how the police described its purpose.

(Note that Donald Trump also operated the Sikorsky S-76, but, prior to becoming president/dictator he flew in an older model that can do more or less the same mission at a capital cost of $750,000.)

It’s primary day in New York. If Mr. Cuomo prevails over Cynthia Nixon I wonder if the two will agree to a glass ceiling ceremony in which the incumbent governor, and champion of women, calls in the S-76 to place the ceiling over Ms. Nixon’s head. That would dominate YouTube!

Related:

Full post, including comments

Privatization of Air Traffic Control

by philg

Measured objectively, the government sector of the United States runs some of the developed world’s worst-performing schools and the best-performing aviation system.  Yet oddly enough it is the air traffic control system that politicians propose to privatize.


Privatization is currently underway for flight service stations.  These are FAA employees who don’t separate airplanes from each other but instead provide varied forms of assistance.  You can call Flight Service on the telephone to ask about the weather before departing.  You can call Flight Service on the radio to ask where the thunderstorms are along your route or what the closest airport with good weather is.  You can call Flight Service in an emergency.  These folks are incredibly resourceful and helpful by and large and often go far beyond their job description in an effort to help pilots.


The folks at www.naats.org are trying to save their jobs and they’ve put together a very interesting audio clip that is worth hearing whether or not you care about this issue:  http://www.naats.org/docs/flightassist.mp3 (you may decide not to fly with beginner private pilots after listening to these emergency calls).


Plan for today… fly to Republic Airport on Long Island and swim in Bob’s pool, then back to Bedford and over to the Weston Town Green for a 7 pm concert by Not the Beatles (the infamous Luke, of Harvard Square fame, is lead guitar).  The concert is free but bring your own blanket and picnic.  Alex will be there!

Full post, including comments

An armed society is a polite society… (Israel and guns)

by philg

Something I learned here in Israel…  it is virtually impossible for most Israelis to own a gun.  Aside from air rifles and .22 target guns you must be either an active duty soldier in the army or meet some very stringent requirements in order to pack heat.  The average Israeli household cannot own a shotgun or hunting rifle (there is nowhere to hunt in the maze of concrete high-rises that dominates the landscape of the Mediterranean’s most densely populated country).  A fully automatic weapon is completely out of the question for civilians.


[Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza can and do own weapons, of course, and in fact most of them were supplied by the Israeli government.  Yes, that’s right.  The Labor government supplied the Palestinians with thousands of rifles and pistols so that they could set up a police force.  These weapons have now found their way into the hands of Palestinian civilians.  Thus when a Palestinian shoots an Israeli civilian or soldier it is very likely done with a gun paid for by that Israeli’s taxes.]


I used to be amazed that Israelis showed such restraint.  They are crammed in like sardines.  They have world-class traffic jams and a disregard for traffic laws (more Israelis are killed in car accidents than by terrorism or war).  Just walking around on the street you hear a lot of people shouting at each other.  I figured “it is amazing that more people don’t pull the M-16 off the top of the fridge and fill the air with lead”.  It turns out that they don’t have M-16s or any of the other toys that give meaning to life as an American.


An Israeli asked me whether it was true that Americans could own serious guns privately and expressed amazement that this was indeed possible.  He said “We read about this in the newspaper but the Americans that I’ve met seem quiet and non-aggressive.”  My reply:  “An armed society is a polite society” 🙂

Full post, including comments

When $57 million of weapons isn’t enough protection….

by philg

Back around 1970, Monty Python did a skit in which a mafioso visits a British Army base to shake down the commander for protection money:  “Would be a shame if anything bad happened to all of these tanks.”  Eventually, apparently, life imitates art.


Last week we witnessed the spectacle of George W. Bush being afraid for his security while encased in $57 million of weaponry.  From http://www.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/05/01/bush.carrier.landing/ :



Bush wanted to swoop onto the deck of the Lincoln aboard an F-18 Hornet, but the Secret Service nixed the idea — they didn’t like leaving the president unguarded in a fighter jet that only has space for the president and a pilot.


(specs on the F-18: http://www.chinfo.navy.mil/navpalib/factfile/aircraft/air-fa18.html)


Thus there is apparently some common ground for George W. and the Iraqi people:  they are both afraid of F-18 pilots.


A deeper issue is when did U.S. voters become so tolerance of cowardice?  Western military leaders traditionally lead from the front and try to demonstrate that they are sharing the hazards of battle with the common soldiers.  Eastern commanders, such as Genghis Khan, thought that this was stupid.  Why put yourself at risk when you can send the rabble up to the front?


It would have been tough to imagine Winston Churchill slipping out of London during the Blitz and yet George W. spent September 11th “at a secure location”.  The risks of being in a big American city were apparently bearable for his subjects but not for his royal personage.  Americans have twice voted, or at least sort of, for men who escaped combat service (Bill Clinton famously dodging the draft, George W. in a slightly less obvious manner).


If present trends continue it would seem that whoever gets elected in 2012 will spend his or her Presidency in an MX Missile-style racetrack silo out in Wyoming (unless the winner is William Bennett, in which case perhaps he’ll command the U.S. Empire from a suite at the Bellagio).

Full post, including comments

Outlining and the presidential campaign

by philg

We’re about to roll into another U.S. Presidential campaign.  The mass media tends to cover such events in an “issue of the week” style.  Thus one can read a newspaper and learn a candidate’s position on the current hot issue but it is very difficult to form a comprehensive picture of what a politician has said and done on the campaign trail (note the avoidance of the phrase “what the politician stands for” because this presumably shifts with opinion poll results).


Could the Internet be usefully applied to the challenge of informing voters?


Idea 1 (not mine):  every resident of New Hampshire sets up a blog and, if he or she encounters a Presidential candidate, writes down what happened.  Aggregation tools enable those of us who don’t live in New Hampshire, and whose vote is not therefore worth personal attention, to get glimpses of the real men and women running for office (imagine if Gennifer Flowers and Paula Jones had been running blogs back when Bill Clinton was on the campaign trail; that would have been all-too-real :-)).


This idea, powerful though it might be, would not seem to help voters grapple with the challenge of forming a comprehensive picture of any one candidate.


Idea 2:  Build a dynamic outline of all the political issues that are on citizens’ minds in 2004.  Have people in New Hampshire and other campaign-heavy states augment this outline with real-time reports of personal interactions with politicians.  By November 2004 this outline should be filled with information, presented in a way that is useful for making decisions, all stuff that voters could never get from the mass media.


What would it take to make this happen?  A bit of database programming for a Web server and a small team of part-time editors whose job would be to remove/suppress duplicate reports and off-topic postings, i.e., ones that go beyond a factual report of “Jane Candidate said X on Date Y”.

Full post, including comments

Breaking Up Countries Where Citizens Hate Each Other

by philg

The only thing more shocking than the airplane engine control falling apart that happened during the trip south was reading an editorial in the Washington Post by Ralph Peters entitled “Must Iraq Stay Whole”.  This is the first time that I’ve seen any sign in the mass media that anyone else has the same thoughts that occurred to me last year regarding Afghanistan (see the Boston-Alaska-Baja-Boston trip report) and this year regarding countries such as Nigeria and the Sudan (see the Israel essay).


In the old days a good argument for being large would have been that a country could thereby defend itself against aggression by other large countries.  In today’s world, however, where even the most armed-to-the-teeth Third World government can be unseated in a few weeks by the U.S. military, it doesn’t make sense for people who hate each other to live together in one country.


Peters makes the seemingly obvious points that (1) the Kurds hate their Arab conquerors, (2) the Kurds demonstrated during the 1990s that they can govern themselves quite nicely, (3) giving the Kurds their own country would really irritate the Turks, which is just what they deserve for not supporting the U.S. [Peters doesn’t say this but presumably it would be a powerful example to foreign governments if the Turks’ biggest nightmare came true as a consequence of their failure to obey U.S. instructions], and (4) the Sunnis and Shiites Muslims don’t seem to like each other.


Follow-Up (Responses to Comments)


To judge by the volume of comments that this posting elicited it is indeed an issue worthy of debate, which was my main point:  “Why doesn’t this question ever come up in the mass media when it seems so obviously debate-worthy?”


Most of the comments point out that the India -> India/Pakistan/Bangladesh split was a failure in their opinion.  From this we can conclude that splitting up a country into the smaller chunks advocated by anthropologists (the book A Pattern Language recommends that countries be no larger than 2 to 10 million inhabitants, and they are talking about developed countries with good road and communication networks) is not necessarily a complete solution to Islamic violence.  However, nobody mentions the successful splits throughout history:  Czech and Slovak from each other, the U.S. from Britain, the former Soviet republics and satellites from each other, Canada and Australia from Britain.  Nor does anyone mention that one can combine political independence with economic and monetary union, thus combining the efficiencies of a large market with the comfort of knowing that the supreme leader of your country is not supremely distant from your local concerns.  I’m not advocating splitting Afghanistan and Iraq before giving them independence, merely advocating a serious debate on the question.


Dimitri asks a good question: “if a country is punished for that (“a consequence of their failure to obey U.S. instructions”) what remains of the democratic ideals and liberty and rest of BS that U.S. tells us time and time again that it stands for?”  The answer to this would seem to be threefold:  (a) the U.S. must have some reason for maintaining the world’s largest military and the most obvious explanation is that we like to be able to push foreigners around whenever we feel like it, (b) the democratic ideals and liberty are for U.S. citizens only; if we cared about foreigners’ welfare we’d be feeding Africans, preventing malaria, getting medical care to the poor in India, removing generic dictators (e.g., nearly any head of government in Africa or the Arab Middle East) rather than only the ones who insist on thumbing their noses at the U.S. (e.g., Saddam), etc., and (c) our politicians like to lay on the syrup just as thick for foreign audiences as for domestic and the result is a perception of insincerity, i.e., the U.S. could have said “We’re removing Saddam because he doesn’t follow our instructions and because we can” but presumably W and Co. thought that it sounded better to paint Saddam as terrifyingly bad and heavily armed.

Full post, including comments

The Second Violinist

by philg

The Second Violinist is in a practice room at Symphony Hall.  The police knock on the door:  “We’ve got some bad news for you, sir.  Your house burned down and your children were injured.  They’ve been taken to the hospital.”


“That’s terrible!” exclaimed the Second Violinist.  “How did it happen?”


“I’m sorry to have to tell you this, sir,” continued the policeman, “but it seems that the Conductor has been having an affair with your wife.  They were in your bedroom, smoking cigarettes after having sex, and got careless.  The cigarettes lit the bedclothes on fire and then it spread to the rest of the house.”


The Second Violinist seemed stunned for a moment as a look of wonder spread over his face.  “The Conductor?  … Came to MY house?”


——————————


This story may explain how things spiraled into violence in Iraq.  George W. kept mentioning Saddam and Iraq in his speeches.  If Saddam had been watching CNN he’d have seen the most powerful man in the world focussed on him and the country that he owned.  It would have been a lot scarier for Saddam if W. had said, in response to a question about Iraq, “I delegated the issue to a one-star general, who has full authority to bomb Saddam if necessary, and he will be giving me a report six months from now.”


I recall seeing a headline “President delivers ultimatum to Saddam Hussein”.  How much more scared would Saddam have been if the headline had read “Administrative assistant to 3rd Undersecretary of State delivers ultimatum to Saddam”?

Full post, including comments